Faller and Bucker

Manor House put a lot of work into producing a short story I did for them, "Faller and Bucker."  They're doing good work over there.  Check out some of the other episodes if you're looking for more dark fiction, and smash those like buttons.  If you want to download the episode for later, here are some other links.  For your dose of blue collar terror in the deep woods, click the Youtube link above or the links beneath.

iTunes: Faller and Bucker
Project iRadio MP3

And if it's audio fiction in my weird style you're looking for, don't forget about Indrid Cold, Indrid Cold.  All links to free copies of my stuff are in the margins to your right.

Hands from the Sky - Bewildering Stories Issue 637

I've been meaning to post some of the publications I made it into in 2015.  This is the problem with always being focused on the next project.  I actually made some decent progress in 2015 but I need to do a little bit of self promotion or at least acknowledgment that this is where my stuff is.  Bewildering Stories let me print Hands from the Sky (previously titled The Cathedral) despite it being a reprint.  It even got selected for the quarterly review of Winter 2015 and got a third printing.  So far I think Hands from the Sky has seen the most reprints of the short horror stories, followed by "Properties" (Beyond Science Fiction July 2015 on Amazon, and Disturbed Digest Issue 11 - December 2015 in Print.)  There are a few others for 2015, but I want to focus on the one today and I don't want to take up a bunch of reading space.  I mostly share the free stuff on this blog, since it's mostly for free print and spoken word fiction.

Here's the link for Hands from the Sky.  I'll put a copy of it in the margins.
Hands From the Sky - Bewildering Stories

This post will be immediately followed with some different news.

Indrid Cold, Indrid Cold

Microfiction: Far-Sight Fred

BANX2017: You're the genius responsible for the braille on drive thru ATMs?
BUGLIFE2111: I told you this day would come.
BANX2017: You took a lot of flak for that, but... self-driving cars. Your foresight saved us a lot of money. We won't have to replace a single unit. My congratulations.
BUGLIFE2111: There's another thing we'll need.
BANX2017: Anything. What is it?
BUGLIFE2111: Downer's Grove Memorial Cemetery. From now on bury every coffin in those grounds with a large can of insecticide next to the body. Aluminum. It is imperative that the cans dissolve by around 2041.
BANX2017: I don't understand. How will that help our company?
BUGLIFE2111: Use the money you saved on those ATM units.

BUGLIFE2111 HAS LEFT THE CONVERSATION.

Massacre Issue 5 Out Now

The Cathedral is out now in Massacre's fifth issue.  Reviews have been good so far, with The Cathedral getting a special mention from one.  Right now I have two pending publications, one in the genre of SciFi and another in horror.

I've got still more to send out, but the thing I'm working on most is Calefactory right now.  I have a new one.  Plus I'll be sending out some new stories to publications, including one called "What Odds Are These?" and "God of Blood."

Below is a link to Massacre 5.

http://www.amazon.com/Massacre-Magazine-Issue-5-Various-ebook/dp/B00SCJPR7W/ref=sr_1_1?tag=geolinker-20&s=digital-text

     "Frank they're wasps." As soon as she said it I knew we were in trouble. I stood there watching morning shadows retreat across the porch, listening to my messages. And I heard those words again. She sounded distracted.

     "Frank. Frank, they're wasps."

     The list of things she could mean by that was pretty long. Clarissa had a habit of providing the most relevant information first. It was something I'd always liked about her, one of a hundred little talents that had earned her a raise last season. Clarissa liked efficiency, and clockwork schedules. And that made me like Clarissa. But this business with the wasps must have meant more to her than it did to me, because she didn't explain much more than that. She started talking to someone else, likely the hotel's night manager, David.

     The next message was time stamped 9:41 PM. This would have been about six minutes after I took my pills and laid in bed with the phone downstairs and on silent. I wouldn't have heard it over the bedroom's window unit anyway. It was Clarissa again.

     "Frank, David says he'll open up room 102, but he won't do it without your approval. He doesn't believe me. The couple next door to them had to be moved to a different room. They said the tv static was too loud, but 102 is the honeymoon suite. It doesn't have a tv. Call me."

     Four more unheard messages. Next message. 11:31 PM.

     "David went home. He said he quits. The static went quiet about fifteen minutes ago and I - - look, I listened at the door to see if I could figure out what he saw. They were talking, but I couldn't understand them because one of them was laughing, that exhausted breathless kind of laughing like someone was tickling them. And when one stopped, another picked up right away. And there was another sound, like a balloon with a hundred tiny squeaking holes in it that had formed without popping it. I don't know what that was. It was a constant rush, just air forced through a perforated surface, but with so many different tones. I know how all of this must sound, but please come down right away."

     Next message. 11:52 PM.

     It sounded like she might have accidentally dialed my phone. Two people were casually talking in the background. An unlikely sound was growing, thousands of buzzing wings, millions, and the needle click of something tapping across the phone's receiver. The message ended at the two minute mark. I could have sworn one of the voices talking belonged to Clarissa. But she sounded calm, talkative, like she was at some kind of party.

     Next message. 4:02 AM.

     "This is Ben Davis. Sorry to call you so late, but I just walked in and no one's at the front desk. I've got one of the maintenance guys behind the counter. He says he's been holding the fort since midnight. I don't know where Clarissa or David have gone. Give me a call as soon as you get this, and sorry again about calling so late."

     Next message. 8:09 AM.

     "Frank, this is detective Ed Palmer. Please call your hotel the moment you get this. Thank you."

     When I got to the hotel, the trench coat pointed at me. He was more the action figure of a detective than a person, complete with the styrofoam cup accessory kit and a badge hanging around his neck.

     “Detective Palmer?” I said.

     “Wrong,” the action figure in a tan coat said, “Palmer quit. I'm just watching the place 'til the CDC gets here. You sit over there.”

     He motioned for me to sit in the lobby's waiting area. It was typically empty in the early hours, but there was a man in a white business shirt looking at a newspaper. The classifieds section.

     Right when I sat down he nodded to himself, and said,

     “I've got an uncle in Ohio that runs a construction company. Do construction guys get health insurance?”

     “No,” I said, “Are you Palmer?”

     “Yeah,” he said, eyes still on the paper.

     “What happened?” I asked.

     He looked at me, his mouth open, making a visible effort to make eye contact. He was trying to share something, but he couldn't get it out. There was a wall somewhere in him. Finally,

     “You checked them in?”

     “Big hats?” I said, “Sure I did.”

     “Big hats,” he said folding the newspaper and putting it beside him, “Yeah. Those weren't hats, friend. We took one off, pulled it hard and it came apart – sang like a pumpkin ripping open.”

     “And?” I said.

     “And. Yeah and. And the sound lasted just a little bit too long. There were tunnels in those big hats. A whole city of tunnels. Like a hive. Just big holes in the meat of 'em, honeycombing all through like a-”

     The detective turned to look over at the table near us. On it was an arrangement of potpourri, with a large black lotus seed pod resting at the top. Inside the pod were holes and little seeds peeking out from its black recessed pits. The detective didn't compare the two out loud, but he then looked away from the seed pod, and said,

     “Fucking Christ. Twelve years from now I'll be able to forget. For me life starts again at 43.

     “They say you never forget the rough stuff,” I said, dispensing the wisdom of a middle aged hotel manager. I don't know what I was trying to say. I wasn't exactly comforting him, but he looked like he'd seen a thing or two in his life. He shook his head, surprised at what I had just said.

     “Oh no, you can. Just need time. Lots and lots of time. Enough time and you can forget anything.”

     He reached over to where the lotus pod was in the potpourri arrangement and he closed his hand around it as hard as he could, his fist shaking as he crushed it into a fine dust, methodically sprinkling it over the rest of the dried flowers. Afterward, he looked at his hand and rubbed it on his pant leg,

     “Smells nice,” he said, “Those holes ran pretty deep in them. I don't know how they weren't dead when they showed up. Bodies were ice cold, except in the holes. Those were hot. Was the guy with sunglasses there when they checked in?”

     “Yeah,” I said, “He's the one I talked to.”

     “Holes went to his eyes,” Palmer said. His tone had changed, like he was talking about an exhibit in a museum, “Had hundreds of em running out of the sockets. I think something tunneled in, or tunneled out.”

     “Tunneled out?” I said.

     “I had this idea,” he said, “It was weird. They had the wrong thoughts. That's how my brain explained it to me. Like it was a rule pulled from a dream. They thought the wrong thing and it made a body for itself in their heads. Abstract made concrete. A little wasp that grew and tunneled and bred until it didn't need them anymore. Don't know why they came here. Guess they wanted to talk. I kept thinking, 'we've all got little wasps in our heads.'      Sure.”

     There was a strange honesty in Palmer's voice. I may not be a detective, but I've met a lot of people. Something in his voice grabbed me – something I trusted.

     “Sex cult,” the action figure said from behind us. He must have been watching the other detective for a while now, listening in on our conversation. I was surprised to see him so candid with the sensitive details of an ongoing investigation – but I don't think for a second that he was doing it to satisfy my curiosity. It was more useful for me to believe what he was saying. Sex cult was what the newspapers were going to say, if they said anything at all.  I was sure of it.

     “What about their heads?” Palmer said.

     “CDC says sex cult. What about the heads? They had big hats with wasps in 'em and they glued those to their heads and died because – well, that's what happens.”

     “There were tunnels,” Palmer said, “Networks running down through to the one guy's eyes. He knew it looked weird. That's why the sunglasses.”

     “What do you want from me, Palmer?” the action figure said, “You just quit. Now button up or you're walking home.”

     I stood up and walked over to the counter, leaving the two men to argue. We weren't going to see much business today. And sex cult suicide was a good headline, so maybe we'd never see normal business again.

     “Dear god,” I said to myself as the phone rang for the first time that morning, “Don't be a reporter.”

     I picked up the phone, but before I could introduce myself or the hotel, I could hear a tired familiar breath speaking in sultry tones,

     “Beauty is long thin legs. Long thin legs tapping against glass like a whole family in a single body. Its eyes are lavender, seeing everything.”

     “Clarissa,” I said, lowering my voice and ducking my head down. It was conspicuous, more-so than I could have afforded in a room full of cops, “What happened?”

     “Frank,” she said, “You're not going to believe this. Listen carefully, hold it in your imagination as I describe it.”

     “There are a bunch of dead people in room 102,” I said, “And there's cops all over.”

     “Listen carefully, Frank,” I heard Clarissa say, “They're not people. They're wasps. Long thin legs. Long thin legs tapping against glass like a whole family in a single body. Its eyes are lavender, seeing-”

     I could feel it. Something about what she was saying, the notes of her voice, the breath of it – it was more seductive than any Clarissa I had ever met.

     “Clarissa,” I said, “I'm going to stop you right there. Did they tell you something?”

     “They told me everything.”

     “Are you trying to tell me everything?” I asked.

     “Yes.”

     “Buzz off.”

     I hung up.

     There's a sign next to the phone these days instructing employees to hang up the instant someone says the words 'Beauty is Long Thin Legs' on the line. Clarissa doesn't waste time, and she doesn't bother with introductions. She calls once a day at precisely 9:55 PM when the night shift staff is most likely to be by the phone. She's never visited, never called more than once per day. But wherever she goes, she's always by a phone at 9:55, calling us. Trying to tell us what beauty is. Trying to tell us what those wasps told her.

     Odd the newspapers never picked up on the story. A brief local spot ran of a single man committing suicide in room 102 of our hotel, but no one was really interested in who did it, where they came from, or why. It just faded from memory almost as quickly as it appeared.

     The CDC – or whoever they were - cleaned up really well, taking the carpet and everything else. Never heard from them again. Never talked to them at all, come to think of it.

     Detective Palmer and I are still in touch. He still calls from Ohio. Says he has dreams sometimes about the hole babies. Years later he would tell me he had heard words crying from those split open hats – a chorus deep in the hive, all shrieking the same thing. I never asked him what they said.

     I imagine it started with,

     “Beauty is...”

The End

Microfiction

Today a picture and a piece of microfiction :

Blood weeping from the walls, type O.  Six lives saved.

Talk from a Kindling Salesman

 Old Gepetto has one eye.  And only I knows how he lost the other.  You heard tell of that thing he had, a wooden toy that spoke truth and walked around without strings.  Whatever magic it had went bad.  Toy got him drunk one night and tripped him.  And it stared in that eye, nose pointed like a javelin as it said over and over,
   "I love you, papa.  I love you papa."
   Next day I came to deliver the firewood, same as ever.  Old Gepetto didn't buy.  He had a patch, bloody, over his eye.

Still Making Stuff

Posts are becoming more regular, but I'm still far from my goal of writing and dedicating a short story to the blog every week exclusively.  They take a while.  I've got four different stories I'm working on right now, two SciFi and two weird horror.

Nomina: A Train Story is about the terror of losing your anonymity in a crowd.  It's a SciFi story.

Lady Ergot is about a woman who can detect ergot poisoning in granaries.  That's an Ebon the Waste story.  Post apocalyptic SciFi.

Red Gelato is about a spooky ice cream man..nequin.

The Celfer is a weird one.  Definitely the riskiest in terms of complicated plot.  We'll see if I'm in a place where I can tell pull it off.

All the other stories I've been talking about are done.  I sent most of them off, and I have some news to share that will be good in the near future.  But I can't share it yet.  And yes I hate doing that.  I've been setting up some credits I'll be able to drop in the future.

Unrelated, check out the NovoPulp SciFi anthology for 2014 and keep an eye out for the 2015 volume.  The best short scifi G+ has to offer.

That Sun Never Set on Pine Falls

Matthew Wilcox is the one that made the bomb stop exploding.  And no one knew where it came from, or who dropped it.  We didn't even really know the payload, whether it was a full megaton or ten or a splinter from a cluster bomb.  All we knew, when everyone in Pine Falls woke up at three thirty-six and fifteen seconds, is that it was hanging in the sky just outside of the city limits, and that a man named Matt Wilcox had made it stop - just after it started to go off.

Everyone.  Every woman, every child knew that name.

It happened at three thirty-six and fifteen seconds, and the town meeting happened a little less than an hour later.  I say it that way for a reason.  The town meeting happened, it wasn't called.  People woke up, got out of their homes, and they started walking toward city hall to talk about it.  There was a thick orange glow in the sky, just bright enough to trip the sensors in the automatic street lamps, and make baby birds start crying from the nest for early worms.

Some denied what they knew, denied knowing it, claimed it was just the morning sun - and they ignored that the light was coming from up north, over by where the air field was.  A lot of the older folks, who had lived through the Cold War figured that's probably what the target was.  Lots of silos underground up by the airfield.   And Pine Falls was just a bullet hole's width from it on a map.

The mayor got on the phone, called up Califax where the O'nasses Dairy Plant was to see how they were doing.  The phones just whistled, like electric wind through an old house.  He set it down and chewed his cheek for a while, and then assembled a team to head out into the world to check on them.  Sixteen men we never heard from again.  Their trucks just stopped on the highway as soon as they reached the exit to town.  Six people working at the Farm 'n Fresh saw it.  They just stopped moving, like their truck had turned to Polaroid.

The first real question asked, when that strange meeting at the town hall started, wasn't about what had just happened.  It wasn't about the phones, and it certainly wasn't about the truck no one knew had already been sent.  The first question asked when the room finally got quiet, was from Jessica - who was sitting at the head of Pine Falls city counsel.  No one had asked her to go up, but Jessica was known for her initiative and, though young, the people in town tended to listen when she spoke.  Jessica had a good heart, the kind where you could tell just by listening.  It was an odd question she asked.

"Why do we all know it was Matt Wilcox that stopped it?"

And nobody really had an answer.  Matt wasn't much of a man to speak of.  He worked down at the autoshop, but he didn't know much about cars so he was low on the totem pole there.  He was married to a woman of his same forty years, name of Janet.  Janet McHiggens-Wilcox was a nice woman, hard of hearing.  Had no patience for drinkers.  She took the stage next, and Jessica let her.

"I woke up the same as everybody else.  And I knew Matt had done it.  Somehow I knew."  She paused then, shaking her head and pantomiming how her hand had reached over to where her husband should have been in bed, "He wasn't there, though.  I don't know where he went."

"He's up on the hill," Jerry Bivens' kid said.  Jerry Junior was seventeen, sitting at the town hall with his girl Tonny.  They didn't say much else.  Most folks were able to deduce which hill they meant.  The old quarry lip where high school kids liked to go.  You understand what I mean.

Half the town went up there then, to that man on the hill, drunk, stopping that spark from swallowing us all.  He had half a bottle of paint thinner whiskey in his hand, and a receipt for it from Sir Gas-A-Lot where he had made the purchase just a few days prior.  He was sitting on a stump with red eyes, staring as hard as he could into the burning face of a frozen nuclear holocaust with piss snaking his trouser legs.

Janet ordinarily would have started yelling then, finding out that Matt was drinking out in the world without telling her.  But she wasn't mad then.  She just sort of looked at him with a patient kind of love, then up at what he was looking at.  He was rocking a little and talking the words to an old Hank Williams song.  Car headlights were pulling around him, spilling on his back and then to the side as they parked behind him and whole families got out to look up at the sky.

It took the better part of an hour to talk him down off the hill.  Someone brought him a blanket, and others asked him a lot of questions.  Eventually, he agreed to stop staring at the thing in the sky.  He explained later that he had thought the thing would start moving again if he blinked too much, or looked away.  But he had been wrong.  And after everyone got him a fresh set of clothes and enough coffee to sober a little, he said he had the biggest headache of his life - and everyone let him sleep.

Hours passed.  Many hours.  The sun never rose.

More groups were assembling, thinking about leaving town to go out into the world to see if explanations could be found there.  The television channels showed single frozen images on every channel, constant streams of the same tone of sound.  The internet didn't work.  Phone reception all over was fine, but no information came in or went out.  The rest of the world, at least as far as Pine Falls was concerned, had simply stopped in mid stroke.  And so they could see that the world wasn't offering them anything in the way of answers.

Without facts, the townspeople shared words.  At the end of the first day, the mayor's office got wind that a second group, Robby Hicker and his boys had set out to leave town on foot with rifles in hand for anyone who tried to stop them.  They were found in a field, like scarecrows, standing still with their guns.  They stayed like that.  For them, time had stopped.

No one went near them.

Matthew got a lot of visits that week.  Work resumed in the farms, but that first month we mostly stuck to the fields well inside the perimeter of town.  No one knew for sure just how far existence went, how far you could go without getting stuck.  After the first month, the grass kept growing and we used that to indicate where we could and couldn't go.  Signs went up at the edge of town.  Don't go into the short grass.

Hard to say why the grass kept going, but Marge over at the florist shop noticed that all her sunflowers were pointing at that big orange thing in the sky, like it was a sun.  There was no day and no night, just that dull orange raining whatever light we could get down.  And the plants loved it.

That's how Dr. Mackel from the university guessed that time hadn't stopped exactly, as best he could tell.  There was still some kind of a transfer of energy happening, just at a rate slow enough that the nuclear explosion was not harmful, more like a sunrise.  When asked what might have caused something like this, he shrugged angry,

"I don't know, Judith.  Why don't you get a PhD in thermal engineering and tell me?"

The boys in town started up a hobby of sticking arrows in the sky.  After a month, most of the birds disappeared.  Well, they didn't disappear.  They were like a big black halo in a ring around the perimeter of town.  Funerals for the men who stopped in the field never happened.

Dalton Fuller, the greasy spoon line cook was the first one to ask to be taken to the edge of town after his heart attack.  With Pine Falls cut off from the hospital it wasn't looking good.  He asked to be taken to the park at the edge of town, and that's where we pushed his wheelchair - down the hill until it stopped in the short grass, him with his arms up like he was riding a roller coaster.  Dalton Fuller never died, way we see it.

A year passed like that.

Life in the town was simple, but in its own way we were still living through the end of the world - just not the one we had pictured.  We had to learn to live on our own, make what we needed.  Matt stopped working at the auto mechanic's after it closed, and he started working the soil on his property to grow food for him and Janet.  The Wilcox's never had any kids.  Never had the time for it.

Years started slipping past us, and bit by bit the old world faded from memory.  We never exactly forgot about it, but after a few years it came up a lot less in conversation.  Matt Wilcox got older, old enough that his eyes started turning yellow and his doctor told the rest of us that his liver was showing signs of giving up.  He'd been drinking this whole time, quietly, by himself.  He never bothered anybody, so we never really noticed.

And so the second meeting in the history of
Pine Falls was called to discuss Matt.  Janet didn't go to this one.

"Matt's dying," mayor Jessica said, older now, "The doctor says it could be next month, or a year from now.  Now ordinarily I wouldn't consider it our business, but there's that fire in the sky and I'd like to just talk to you and see what you all have to say about it."

"What's going to happen to us when he dies?" someone said.  It didn't matter who.   Anybody could have said it.  We were all thinking it.

"He doesn't have to die," another said.

The dying were like statues, immortal at the
edge of town where they stood in fields, caught mid-stride as they backed away, waving inward.  There was a circle of them all around us, all dressed in their sunday finest.

No one ever had to die.

But leave it to Matt to go off and find that hill while everyone in town figured out what to do with him.  He sat there yellow eyed, staring at that sun with a half bottle of fine scotch in his hand.  When the Sheriff found him, the first thing he did was feel the drunk's neck for a pulse.

Matt Wilcox was dead.  But the sun - our new old sun - never set, never grew and swallowed us up.  It just stood, burning over us in the cool forever morning.

Maybe some day time will start again, but I don't know.  And I don't know what will happen when it does.  I know the bomb will finish what started all those years ago, and whoever tries to find out what happened to Pine Falls will find a crater, same as you'd expect.  I'd say they'd find more bodies than usual buried in the cemetery, but no one's visited it in years.  And without new deaths, there's no need for head stones.

I still get a kick out of some politician somewhere talking to America, mourning our town publicly, saying every life in our town was snuffed out in an instant.  Maybe he's right.  Or maybe our town will just go on forever - in this doomed footprint.

The End

My drain sang a lullaby. I stayed up all night.

I've always held in my mind the definition of the third kind of terror Stephen King gave.  I don't remember the first two, but I remember the third one.

"...when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...”

That third kind is something I think most horror fans share.

The other night I heard "Things Are Looking Up" coming out of the drain in my bathroom.  It's a nice upbeat song by Billy Holiday.

Horror doesn't seem to be a problem in the wrong context, seen by the right people.  It's when the wrong people show up that things get interesting, the sweet song gets caught in the pipes at three o'clock in the morning, and something turns it bad.  Something starts looking up.

Coming Soon: The Cathedral

I've always liked writing weird fiction, so I knew eventually I'd come across one that was over the top on the weirdness scale.  The weirdest stories are always ones where everything seems to work the exact same way as before, except for one core thing - a small detail that changes everything.

Dave has a normal life living in the rural farmlands of southern Illinois, formerly Chickasaw tribe territory.  Every day is the same.  He wakes up, kisses his sweetheart, makes breakfast, and spends a few minutes training his rooster to crow if it ever sees a strange building floating in on a cloud.  He has a neighbor, an old farmer whose name has been in these parts for four generations.  They all know the cathedral is going to show up some day, with impossibly long pale arms dragging fingertips from sky to Earth.

The story starts with a rooster crowing.

No one knows what it is, where it came from, if its bizarrely familiar motifs have any link to the cosmic spectacle promised in dead men's books.  All they know is what it collects.

The Scent of Fire and Lemongrass

Two figures sat side by side atop a high cliff in the Sonoran desert, watching a small city walk on legs fifteen stories tall across the flat plain in front of them. Robby, the bigger of the two, let out a rattling cough as he leaned down and drew his eye near the scope of the sniper rifle that made up the third shape on the hill, itself hardly dwarfed by the shadow that coughed or the other that spoke.

"What do you see?" Pointer asked as he leaned against the wall and ran the tip of a hunting knife uselessly beneath his fingernails.

"Same as you," Robby said, "The city's alone out there."

"And you aim to keep it that way," Pointer said, his grin gapped and drawing tense, uncertain breaths.

"I aim to keep it that way," Robby repeated, missing the joke as it died in the air like a bird under blighted rain. Robby wasn't a man for puns. He was a man for shooting.

He knew to alternate between the scope and his naturally adept eyes, to watch movement, to breathe. Out there in the desert he might see a mangy rabbit clinging to the shadows as it leaped from rock to thirsty bush. If he saw it, he knew he'd be able to hit it. But the thing on his mind now wasn't anything out in the field, it was the man sitting with his back against the rock slowly sprinkling tobacco onto a sweat damped piece of cigarette paper.

"They say it'll happen today," Pointer said as he deftly rolled the paper into a thin tube and put it between his dry tacky lips, "They found a few of the rebels. They've been singing like gulls up there on the plate."

'He means torture. We've started torturing now,' Robby thought, trying to keep his upper lip from twitching up over his teeth in a reflexive snarl of disgust. He said,

"You believe the talk that the king's lost his mind?"

"We don't know they're being tortured," Pointer said, as if he could read Rob's thoughts. He paused as flame sprang from his lighter and started dancing embers on the end of his cigarette, "Maybe they suddenly found their loyalty."

"You believe it, though. You believe the king's crazy."

"Mm-hm," Pointer hummed around his cigarette, lilting his voice up at the end to signal the affirmative, "Oh yeah."

"We're lucky to be on his good side," Robby said as the crosshairs of the scope traced up to the blinding white tower where the king's window rested. It was high up, even higher than the rest of the city plate that sagged on that ancient whimpering carapace.

"That we are. Still, I've been hearing some nasty talk about the whole affair. Some say we should switch leaders, move away from the status quo into something a bit more democratic. Like the old days."

Robby made himself snort, hoping the sound his throat made was adequately derisive,

"Democratic."

"It would never work, though," Pointer said, "No one with the king's history would expose himself to the will of the people. Not everyone is as loyal as you or me. And you're no rebel, right my friend?"

Robby could feel muscles in his hands twanging, starting to shake. Was it possible Pointer had listened in on the wrong conversation? Had he and a host of the king's other men sniffed him out as a rebel sympathizer? Pointer was better with words, more adept at picking up subtext.

'Maybe,' thought Rob, 'I just thought the wrong thing at the wrong time. That alone might have alerted him.'

"Rob," Pointer said, his hand curling slow as a snake up his leg to where a knife rested in its sheathe, "I notice your rifle has traveled a bit high. Can you see the king through your crosshairs?"

"I was checking for assassins," Robby said as the scope plunged altogether too fast down at the ground once again, "Perhaps someone slipped by without our notice, started climbing the outside. Perhaps someone is in the window right now ready to strike at his back."

"Or maybe," Pointer said as the knife blade started pulling out soundlessly, gliding across well oiled leather and dripping slick globs along its serrated edge, "Maybe you were looking at the old man's back, thinking about the consequences, the possibilities."

"Pointer," Rob said, "Stop talking now. The king does alright by me. I've got three meals a day and a house and a wife to call my own. A man knows where his security lies. If he dies, I lose all of it."

"Still," Pointer said, "I know how you like to drink. And you like to talk."

"Name me a man who doesn't," Rob said, trying to hide behind a gust of laughter, but finding it just wasn't in him. This was it. This was how he was going to be found out. That bastard Pointer had been coming out with him on guard duty for years. And in all that time, Rob had been perhaps too generous with his complaints, his own hatred for the king's brutality. From day to day that wasn't dangerous. But on a morning like this, a morning when men were cloistered behind steel walls dropping every manner of name into paranoid ears...

"Your first wife. She was shot as a sympathizer, yes?"

Pointer's words lit a fire in Rob's chest, and it hungrily crawled outward, like the glowing tobacco spiders at the end of a cigarette. He turned his face away from the scope to stare Pointer down.

Two shadowed pairs of eyes met on that desert cliff to the tune of a cool breeze from the southeast. After a moment of searching Pointer's face, Rob found nothing. It was blank, possibly amused. Rob turned back to the rifle to hide the reflexive fog invading his eyes, nodding silently as he hid in the scope once again. He said,

"Yes."

"And you never even suspected her rebel sympathies," Pointer said, "Not even a little. That's bad luck for someone as suspicious as yourself."

Rob was in his own head now, safely locked away in the unchanging footsteps of history. He was standing over her in the town square, a gun weighing heavily in his hand as she tried to smile one last time.

"You were mad. I could see it on your face," Pointer said.

"Mad," Rob said. He was running over the dialogue from the event again, monitoring his own lips to ensure he didn't start mouthing what his wife had said.

He had caught the spectacle by chance, walking home with a bundle of freshly picked lemongrass in hand. She loved the smell of lemongrass. That's when the blur of white silks fleeing from men built like himself had stumbled out of his home. She stopped, standing in front of him with hard dignified breaths passing between her lips and it was clear. She had been discovered.

The town guard would schedule an impromptu trial to take place three days after her capture, after they had a chance to gain her compliance and give up the other sympathizers in the city. But Rob had taken the gun right then and there.

He had taken the gun and shot her in the street. No trial. No public hanging. No interrogation. He heard the word traitor, and his hand had done the rest without him.

"Such loyalty," Pointer said as he twisted the knife around and jabbed it deep under his own fingernail, trying to draw out the deep muck and grit that had lived there long enough to tattoo his cuticles a perpetual black, "I thought about that a long time."

"Think about it quietly," Robby said, "It's not an easy thing to do no matter. I don't think about it. The sun set that day like any other."

"Your honor restored, you were given a new wife and the king's commendation. But I wonder what we might have learned from her. It might have been even better to keep her alive."

The knife was pinging, tapping against Pointer's long fingernails.

"You know you can't trust a traitor," Rob said, "They will always lie. That you can count on."

"If traitors always lie," Pointer said, "then if I asked you if you were a traitor - and mind you, you were a traitor - what would you say?"

The king was pacing in front of his window now, looking over his shoulder uncertainly toward the hidden spot where his door stood. It didn't look like an event happening in real time through that scope. It looked like a picture, impossibly defined and rendered in full living detail.

Rob watched, listening to the silence, searching it for signs of movement. Pointer already had the knife out. And Rob's back was turned upward toward him, facing danger like a man who had nothing to fear, nothing to hide.

"Same as you in that situation," Rob said.

"What did you think of her?" Pointer asked, "Your wife."

"Don't ask me that," Rob said. Even now he knew the answer Pointer would be looking for. It was that final cynical proof his conscience would need to collect before deciding to kill Rob or let him live.

Say you hated her, curse her memory, and then there might still be some doubt.

Pointer was daring him to speak treason.

Those words were a gentle wind on the fire in Rob's heart. He watched through the scope, nodding imperceptibly long before he would answer. The king in the window walked away in his room, out of sight, out of Rob's crosshairs. There would be no execution today. Of that Rob was certain. No execution but his own.

Because he decided then that he had said enough.

"Pointer," Rob said, "It's none of your goddamn business."

The sun was starting to spill over the rim of the mountain above them, drawing their shadows backward slowly. And as Pointer moved, Rob could see it even from his prone position at the edge of the cliff. He cast his eyes right and saw a hand and a knife drawn in sunlight. Pointer was standing now, having moved out of sight while Rob was watching the king. And he had drawn the knife out, but not to clean his nails.

"My peace of mind, Rob. For our continued friendship. Please tell me."

There was an impossible smell on the morning breeze, overpowering the scent of men and weapons. It was familiar, but distant. And yet it was what Rob noticed as he lay prone on the cliff's edge, dropping his eye from the scope once again to look at the sunlight creeping across the ground.

"Pointer," Rob said. This was it. Die an honest man, or live.

His life had already started to flash before his eyes.

He had never joined the king. He had been born in the city. And when he had sworn his fealty day after day as a child, he hadn't understood the terrible cost.

Rob would be his own man now, if only for this last instant. In his mind he cut every bond tethering him to a lifetime of deception. It was natural, like a ship cutting its anchor. He was smelling lemon grass now. Drifting on unfamiliar water.

"Pointer," Rob said, "I'll tell you now. Men like you can't understand what love is. The answer is yes. I did care about her. And if you need so much to erase that to satisfy your king, then do it the only way you can. The truth is, I hate you all."

There was silence then. It lasted a long time as the two of them passed the moment. Pointer said,

"Something just dropped off the side of the city. A banner."

He was right. It was being held by a dozen specks of hands. Pots were being banged by heavy spoons as men in the background raised rifles overhead rhythmically in chant. Rob lowered the rifle down to read the words on the banner.

DO IT, POINTER.

But he wouldn't have needed the scope to read it. Not if he'd known ahead of time what it might say.

"What do they mean?" Rob asked.

"They mean do it. Kill you," Pointer said as he holstered his knife and leaned his hand on the pistol at his side, "They'll be expecting to hear my gunshot."

"But how could they know?"

"They don't," Pointer said, "They know who I am. They don't know who you are. Not yet. Look up at the tower again."

Once again through the scope, Rob looked up at the tower. The king was hanging out the window by his hands, purple silks blowing in the wind as he ran felt shoes raw on the tower's ivory exterior. He was trying to pull his own weight up, back into the window, past a man with a rifle.

"This changes things," Pointer said, "I would have slept easy if you'd said you hated your wife. As it stands, I might have to let you live."

A strange purple shape was diving to the ground from the tower. In the distance on the city's plate more gunfire was echoing. It wasn't the rattling exchange between two opposing forces. It was the ecstatic rumble of celebration. The king is dead. Long live the king. May we live forever.

There was a scent like fire and lemongrass.

Piss 'N Vinegar

(Image: Marek Okon)

Some people say it's still a colony ship, but I can remember the rainy streets of San Francisco. The rain is where I draw the line. When a ship is big enough to accidentally pick up weather patterns you're not on a ship anymore. And don't even get me started on the rats. We're on a boat full of rats and not a feline in sight. They tried to make machinecats out of metal, but it took mother nature sixty million years to cram enough piss and vinegar into the common felis catus. And the rats evolved to keep up.

Walking in rain without an umbrella is how I first saw Yvette. She had three shadows then, in addition to her own. They were men. Silent men.

"Hey there, blue eyes," I said. Ordinarily that would have been enough to tip a lady off that I wasn't a good man. But when you're living in the guts of a metal arrow flying between worlds, you learn to make compromise. You learn to live without umbrellas, find companionship in a mechanical cat, and take a compliment from a decent man when what you need is a good one. And if the prowlers that stalked away when she embraced me were any indicator, she was in need of some kind of decency. Her hands clasped around my neck and she whispered over the roar of steady falling condensation,

"You take me to a cafe and I'll buy you a drink. This isn't a good night to be alone."

Actually, that summed up the first few hours of our friendship pretty well. If we were ships passing in the night, we were blockade runners - heavy in an indifferent ocean, each one staying afloat despite a cargo hold full of bad decisions. I looked past her into the alley where I saw three shadows, maybe themselves bad decisions, lurch back into the night.

At the cafe we talked about everything but ourselves. That's when her eyes danced across the barcode on my hand, and she divined meaning from the irregular cage bars running from knuckle to wrist. In the past people had their fate on their palms in mystical signatures from the universe. They were interpreted by fortune tellers and gypsies. These days we do things differently. My hand had a signature from the colony ship's detention bloc. This guy did some hard time for some of his bad decisions.

But when she saw it, she breathed a sigh of relief. I know two kinds of men. Those that have crimes to hide and those who haven't had the chance yet - those that have been treated, made gentle.

She knew then that I could never hurt her.

"You folks want a cat?" the old man behind the bar said thumbing over his shoulder at a twitching metal creature grooming itself. The animation was a perfect facsimile of a feline, minus the fur. Minus the piss and vinegar.

"Got an umbrella?" I asked.

"Fresh out."

Always fresh out.

I did sixteen months for robbing this place three years back. When they let me out, the old man behind the counter and I became friends. He knew I couldn't do it again. I had the barcode to prove it. They changed me. When you don't have umbrellas you use a newspaper. When you don't have cats you make one out of metal. And when you don't have decent men...

"Thank you for the time, stranger," Yvette said, "Mind walking me home?"

When you don't have decent men, you work with what you've got. I carry a gun all the time now, but damned if I can pull the trigger. Something in me just won't let me do it. I'm in that cage on my hand that says I've been tamed.

When we file out the door for Yvette's apartment I think about her shadows. If they come out of the woodwork out there on the rainy street I wonder if I could do it to protect that pretty blue eyed girl. That's when my trigger finger twitches, and there's a sour taste on my tongue.

Tastes like vinegar.

Puppets on the Podcast

So I've been recording the first few episodes of a podcast supplement to the blog. It's called Puppets on the Podcast, and it's a sort of weird mix between a traditional fiction podcast and a weird adventure serial in itself.

If this works, it will work well. If it doesn't work, it will fail gloriously. Either way, I'm excited to get these uploaded and see what turns up. And before I come out with it, I want to get a couple episodes recorded because there's a lot I want to talk about. So the elevator pitch is this: It's a narrative that takes place inside an elevator that is descending endlessly with one sole occupant. Occasionally people will come in through the doors and talk to the occupant and promote work or offer opinions on things. If it sounds weird, that's because it is. I have theme music, sound effects, and topics/stories for the first three episodes. Episodes will likely be uploaded to soundcloud and then linked here, sort of like the Ebon timeline.

Our War With Molly Nayfack Free on Amazon

Countdown Clocks

The book Our War with Molly Nayfack is now FREE on Amazon to everyone who knows what this book is at this point in time.  For five days, every single person who knew about the book while it was being written and edited is going to get a free copy which they can keep forever.  The price will be free for five days, and then it will go for (a still pretty reasonable) $3.99.  If you get a free copy, and you like what you read, leave me a review and tell your friends.

I'm doing things this way for two reasons.  One, I don't like the idea of expecting my friends and family to buy something I made if I can just as easily give it to them for free.  I wrote this for a wider audience than just the people I know.  Give it to those folks for free.  Two, if you know what Molly Nayfack is at this stage then you probably helped in some way, and you've got my thanks.

http://www.amazon.com/Our-Molly-Nayfack-Chris-Capps-ebook/dp/B00JAJQ8XK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1395969933&sr=8-1&keywords=molly+nayfack

I don't plan on spending much time in the future telling people not to buy something I wrote, but I know I like free stuff and I hope you do as well.  From March 28 to April 1st this thing is free.

And though the end of the freebie does include April 1st, know that this is no April fool.

New Video Coming Soon.

I like the timeline I posted a couple days back, so I'm now working to convert it into a video.  So far I've got the audio about 70% edited and completed.  What I need to do next is compile a video slide show.  Since this video is likely to be half an hour long, that could take a while.

But here are a couple of slides I have.

A lot of these are going to be compiled from public domain and open source archives, but a few of them are going to require a lot of editing.  I'm experimenting with a few things, so by the end of this hopefully we'll have something interesting.

I should mention that the main thing here is it will be a vehicle for a story, so visually this is likely to be more like a low budget slideshow documentary from the history channel - except narrated by a robot and about the end of the world. 

But it's a sort of alternate history experimental documentary about the world of Ebon the Waste.  And from the perspective it's told from, it could very well exist in the world it's about as well.  Listen to what I have of the audio to understand what I mean there.

Here's the audio.

Timeline of the End of the World 1867 - 2431

1867 - Alfred Nobel obtains patent for dynamite in England.  Nobel hails the invention as the end of war due to the (then unnamed) principle of Mutually Assured Destruction.

June 28, 1914 - An assassin named Gavrillo Princip assassinates Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand after a failed attempt earlier that morning.  His chance meeting of the Archduke in front of a coffee shop after the failed first attempt is widely considered to be one of the largest coincidences in history, as well as one of the most world changing moments of the next several centuries.

July 28, 1914 - The First World War begins.

September 1, 1939 - The Second World War begins, ending in September of 1945 with a world that the now deceased Archduke could never have conceived of.

1960's - Over the next ten years a device known as the "Johns Hopkins Beast" will be constructed.  The simple machine is one of the first robots capable of wandering through an environment and seeking the resources it requires to survive.

October 1962 - International nuclear war narrowly avoided during 13 day confrontation between the US and the USSR regarding Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba.

1972 - United States signs Antiballistic Missile treaty with Russia, effectively limiting strategic defense capabilities in the event of a nuclear war.

1991 - Declaration 142-H of the Soviet of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union dissolves the aggregate entity formerly known as the Soviet Union and breaks its constituent territories into twelve independent states. 

September 11, 2001 - What would become eventually known as "the September 11 attacks" occurs in New York and the Washington D.C. Metro area.  The event acts as a catalyzing force to shape US domestic and foreign policies over the following years, and is a key motivating factor in justifying wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

2010 - First fully synthetic micro-organism is crafted in a laboratory.

2016 - First successful assembly of a 3d printer from components printed from other 3d printers.

2017 - Records of John F. Kennedy assassination are disclosed to the public in an environment of domestic polarization and mistrust in the United States.

2019 - Construction of the Kingdom Tower in Saudi Arabia concludes, making it the tallest building in the world.

2020 - The ITER nuclear fusion project is once again delayed due to budgetary restrictions.

2021 - Masdar City in Abu Dabi is declared the first successful ultra-low carbon emission city and a blueprint for the future.  Controversies arise, however, as to the availability of housing for lower income families.  NY Times reports that eco-friendly cities of the future will be "a citadel available to the rich."  Of particular note to internet news outlets are massive walls surrounding the city's perimeter.

2027 - Plexis Technologies corporation founded.

2028 - ITER becomes operational, demonstrating the first nuclear fusion experiment to output more power than is used.  Expectations for commercial application are expected within the next five to eight years.

2029 - Plexis Technologies unveils a two-year treatment array capable of slowly reversing the process of cellular aging, calling the process "antisenescence."  The process is considered risky, however, and carries with it a 50% fatality rate.

2030 - Explored Alaskan oil resources are depleted.  Nuclear fission is the primary means of power for 75% of the world despite mass ecological protest.

2031 - Antibiotic resistant pneumonic plague is discovered in Liberia possessing the gene NDM-1, making it resistant to virtually all known antibiotics.  With domestic production at an all time high, many countries hastily close their ports to African imports.  One exception is China, which makes the decision to strengthen ties with Somalian petrochemical interests as other investors flee.

Turing 0.8 is demonstrated in a lab, but the hardware required is too cost prohibitive to release commercially.

2032 - Mass labor protests in China hike up the cost of domestic goods significantly.  Many families begin distribution of "home crafters" for printing a wide array of consumer goods.  US economy undergoes a quiet intellectual property revolution as the number of printable goods increases significantly and need for superior designs emerge.

2033 - Pneumonic plague is discovered in Mexico.  Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California close their southern borders entirely.  Border drones are dispatched along a 4 km "dead zone" with orders to shoot on sight anyone attempting to cross the border.  Similar drones are dispatched off the coast of Florida as the plague reaches Cuba.

2036 - Highly anticipated space based mining operations become cost prohibitive with the scarcity of necessary petrochemicals for creating rocket fuel.

Nuclear fusion generators are completed in seven nations including the United States, Russia, China, Great Britain, France, India, and Japan.

2037 - Pneumonic Plague is replaced by a strain that lays dormant in the lungs for extended, often random periods of time.  An outbreak occurs in parts of Kansas, resulting in the quarantine of the small city of Sun Glenn.  One year later that city's population has been reduced by 96%.  The bacteria is later determined to have infected local cattle populations, leading to the destruction of some 800,000 cattle.  It is this event that will lead to funding and successful experimentation of flora-meats.  Somehow the plague manages to get beyond the quarantine zone, and is spotted in Nebraska, South Dakota, and then North Dakota.

2038 - First Turing 1 machine fools investors into believing they are communicating with a human via phone for thirty minutes.  Turing 1 machines grow in popularity in personal computers and telecommunications.

2040 - Complex biovital scanning makes complex identification of all registered humans in the United States possible.  Advertising algorithm generators know the names and purchasing habits of every person within all metropolitan cities and most rural districts.  Consumer confidence expected to increase 4% more than expected over the next two years as a result.  Violent crime drops 48% during the same period.

2041 - Antisenescence technologies begin to gain consumer traction as the fatality rate is reduced below 2% thanks to cancer breakthroughs by Plexis Technologies.  Additionally, the minimum decline is down to 20 years of age.  The treatment is still, however, extremely cost prohibitive.

2041 - 2061 - Not much is known of this period.  Most computer systems from the period are lost due to a solar storm similar to the Carrington event of 1859.  The lack of police infrastructure and production capability does result in a rise in crime by an estimated 700%.  Order is restored slowly over the course of ten years.  Some historians refer to this event as it happened as the first global civil war or the "Dark Decade" between 2038 and 2048.  A similar event, however, occurs in 2058 resetting infrastructure again, but order is restored much more quickly.

2041 - Cure for Pneumonic Plague is finally discovered in the United Kingdom in the form of HLD-1110, a virus that breeds exclusively inside the bacteria and then ruptures out of the cell membrane.  The virus has a short lifespan and cannot breed, except inside the plague.  Inoculations are widely dispersed with great success, but the global population has been reduced significantly.

2061 - The city of New Burhakaba dìjíshì, Somalia is in a state of extreme civil unrest increasing strain on oil supplies and increasing prices in some countries to $109/gallon.  Young general Ghedi Josef is assassinated by drone strike.  Identity of the drone's country of origin is unknown.

2063 - First Anquan (Mandarin for "Security") city is constructed in Beijing.  The 30 storey tall superstructure is thought to be one of a kind, but its applications are limitless, making demand for future structures quite high.  Plexis technologies buys the design and promises to craft 100 Anquan by the year 2095.

2070 - State of Emergency is declared in the city of Miami, Florida as police drones begin the systematic extermination of its citizenry without explanation.  The action is traced to a Cuban terrorist plot, and 103 members of a local domestic militia are arrested.  During the subsequent reaction, all acts of malicious cyberterrorism are given a mandatory minimum sentence of life in prison.

2078 - Nobel Prize for Fissile engineering goes to Alfred Von Herzig for his working model of a small high-yield FNF model radioisotope generator.  News channels around the world feature a cover story of the prominent role nuclear fission will play in reversing tension over peak oil.  FNF reactors will make possible several technologies once thought unfeasible.  Herzig is quoted as saying the invention will hopefully bring about an end to the constant threat of war.

2079 - A Danish petrochemical exploration team goes missing in the Arctic, leading to widespread rumors that an illegal extraction operation may have been deployed there.  Subsequent investigation is bogged down in international red tape, and the case remains unsolved.

2080 - Anquan city real estate is in high demand with 1 out of every 75 people pledging to commit $1,500,000 for the right to live in the security and comfort of the massive mobile platforms.  Plexis Technologies promises a solution to the housing crisis soon.

2081 - With its power system simplified, Plexis corporation completes its construction of 100 Anquan cities more than ten years ahead of schedule.  In a landmark moment for then CEO Harriet Tanhauser, she announces another 100 such cities will be built in five years to meet with growing demand.

2086 - 100 additional Anquan cities are produced and sold in shares to the populace.  Another 500 will be built over the course of the next ten years at inflated prices.

2089 - United States announces the building of a "wall" around its coast, which if activated will effectively shield the eastern and western coasts from invasion by sea or air.  When pressed for details, the White House releases a video showing the destruction of several remote controlled planes by unknown means.  The project is named "Star Wars 4" in the official letterhead leading to speculation that there have been multiple top secret missile shield programs since the Reagan era.

2091 - First Plexis module self-replicating drone is dispatched to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to gather the materials necessary to build copies of itself and meet increased demands for raw materials.

2092 - Los Angeles vanishes from history.  Alaska has by this point seceded from the United States alongside Hawaii with little explanation.  Records indicate these are non-violent responses to growing autonomy and happen some time around 2092.

2093 - A nuclear submarine operating outside of the Russian Confederation goes AWOL.  After a brief search, the submarine makes contact with port authorities, threatening strikes against military targets if the national government continues its abuse of coastal labor protesters in Vladivostok.

"Vladivostok Incident" occurs, and a small 500 kiloton missile is detonated near an unmanned missile silo.  There are no immediate casualties, but refugees from the port city create a crisis at the Ukrainian border.  Donets'k is inundated with refugees seeking help.  Russian government officials are paralyzed to respond as national attitudes toward the refugees turns cold rapidly.  Over the following six months, Donets'k will struggle to keep up with the throngs of refugees.

2094 - The United Nations effectively dissolves as several delegates remove themselves from chambers.  Those remaining include Russia, China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgystan, Vietnam, Lithuania, Romania, Serbia, Turkey, Syria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria.  Many versions of this story suggest the reason is an escalation in violent rhetoric following the embarrassment of the Vladivostok Incident.

The United States, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Canada meet in July to discuss global financial reform.  The meeting is clandestinely recorded and broadcast on television.

Shipments of food to several major cities is disrupted by drone strikes piloted by persons unknown, resulting in famine in several major US metropolitan areas and a subsequent mass exodus.

Construction Unions in the United States launch a protest over increasingly draconian labor practices by destroying key bottlenecks of US highways and then going on strike.

Temperature increase of 5 degrees globally since 2000.

2095 - An estimated 0.001% of Americans are now living atop the Anquan plates.  This percentage will increase over the following years, primarily due to die-offs related to disease and domestic skirmishes throughout the midwest during the exodus of urban centers.  A marked social animosity has developed between the those on the plates and those on the ground.  Transportation becomes more unreliable as lithium for batteries in electric cars grows scarce.  Some vehicle operators resort to retrofitting their trucks with biodiesel grown in algae vats, but the roads themselves are still in a state of disrepair.  The national highway is estimated to have one 'prohibitive' obstruction per six miles.  Reclamation of back roads in many municipalities by wild growth is a major problem.  Anquan cities as well as railroad lines serve to transport goods across the continental United States in response to the "decline of the automobile."

2096 - Trade lines have returned to metropolitan areas, but the population has declined significantly.  A survey reveals 82% of people intend to leave cities to pursue lives in areas where food is more reliable.  Among the casualties are many workers producing plate cities, meaning production will slow to a crawl.

2097 - Populations have become more dispersed and regional, with only 4% living in urban arrangements.  Urban sprawl is actively mined for its material components as infrastructure begins to decay.  This does not, however, mean the United States has become agrarian in nature.  Instead, industrial hubs are separated throughout the United States.  The same craft and resource based economies are still in place, but Anquan cities claim the areas where resources are most concentrated.

2098 - Workers from Anquans 030 and 031 disembark to fight over rights to exploit a lumber operation in Northern New Hampshire territory.  The incident is considered uncharacteristic and bloody, and local police from ground districts are called in to quell the fighting.  Fire is exchanged from one plate to the next via high powered rifles in a tense standoff for 41 days.

2099 - Fighting between Anquan cities increases as prices over land rights increase.  This will devolve into factional open warfare, often fought with the assistance of mercenary bands of the local citizenry and offers of trade shares of the fallen city.  Warfare often occurs in territory over ground level habitations.  Collateral damage is often significant.

2100 - Plexis Technologies announces via DC TV that it has already finished constructing a vast intercontinental subterranean rail system that connects every major inhabited area, and this rail system can operate easily "without fuel."  It is believed the rail system operates off of a centralized power grid attached to an underground fusion reactor, but this is not confirmed.

2104 - First Plexis Drone completes building an exact duplicate of itself.  The two drones separate after running a four minute test on one another, and begin gathering resources and crafting duplicates of themselves.

2108 - In an effort to quell fighting between the cities, Anquan 041 reveals a recently acquired stockpile of small nuclear warheads and distributes them to the other cities at "10 per," hoping to both secure the supremacy of their fleet, and encourage cooperation.  The addition of nuclear range cannons to the city turrets goes unnoticed by Washington, which is growing increasingly isolated.  Fighting among Anquan declines significantly over the course of that year.

2109 - First Drafting of the Anquan Accord.

2115 - Washington, still claiming national sovereignty, discovers the new alliance of the Anquan and their nuclear weapons, resulting in the third Civil War - with this one lasting seventeen years.

Armies march, and bombs of every sort are dropped all over until the blasts do nothing but bounce rubble and scatter long dead bones.

In the later days of the war, tactical ICBMs are used to disrupt the now unified Anquan fleet - dispersing vast clouds of radiation and firestorms.  Creatures are designed in Washington's underground labs to withstand the harsh terrain, including the melthorse.

What remains of the immobile cities is bombed to dust.  This does not, however, explain the massive amounts of radiation flowing in from the west coast.  The war reduces what remains of civilization in the west to a withered husk.  The Anquan fleet trods the Earth, immune to this new harsh reality, intent only on keeping the ground and its fearful inhabitants subjugated and servile.

The destruction of the civil war is nearly complete, with what remains of the Anquan now reigning over what can only be described as a wasteland.

Deserts and badlands expand outward from the southwest as temperatures rise to record highs throughout the United States.  Storms laden with radioactive isotopes drawn up along the Westerlies draw radiation from the now mysterious "other world" - Old Asia.

During this time the two Plexis drones have crafted two exact copies of themselves, making four in total.  They each run tests for 4 minutes and commence work to construct new copies of themselves.

2131 - "Simplification" begins in the heartland and moves to the extreme coasts.  Crops are burned when scarcity cannot be otherwise enforced.  Food is traded to the now simple and desperate locals for knowledge and "old things."  Libraries are turned out, mounded up with books and machines to be traded for food and small arms.

An agricultural commune in Oklahoma rebels against Anquan 730 "Vicinity."  The rebellion is quashed by informing rebels that the deal stands "no matter who brings it."  This is the first known use of the term "entourage" to describe followers of the cities.

Plexis drones 1-4 bring their duplicates, drones 5-8 to the arranged meeting point and perform tests to ensure they are operating at peak efficiency.  All tests are successful, and all eight set off to harvest materials and build duplicates of themselves.

2200 - By this point the United States has been reduced technologically on the ground to a pre-industrial state - and in many regions a level lower than that is enforced.  The Anquan exercise their dominance through prolonged campaigns of terror.  It is believed the fall of the United States may be playing out in similar scenarios around the world, but intercontinental communication is extremely limited and unreliable.

2212 - Plexis drones 1 through 512 meet at the arranged spot in the asteroid belt to test their sensors and capabilities.  They determine that they are all operating at peak efficiency and set out to build perfect replicas of themselves.

2281 - Ongoing campaigns in the western state of Mississippi result in the meeting of Anquans 389 Grenada and 390 Jackson.  During a battle over unknown circumstance, short range nuclear ordinance is deployed, resulting in the immediate destruction of both cities.

2283 - Speculation that Anquan 973 Salem has fallen due to a rebellion results in the "year of perdition" visited on various villages by Anquan 974 Eugene in both sectors.

2290 - Rustbaby witnesses events outlined in Timestamp #8000001 as Helio the Human Fire Eater inquires, "What is that thing?" and activates the AI for the first time in its recorded memory.

Plexis drones 1 through 32,768 meet at the arranged spot in the asteroid belt to test their sensors and capabilities.  They determine that one of them is not operating at peak efficiency, and that one is immediately destroyed by the others.  When the deed is done, three seconds pass as they scan its component parts, searching for a defect.  The surviving 32,767 drones return to the asteroid belt to craft duplicates of themselves and meet up every 13 years.

2371 - Ebon the Waste is born.

2379 - Ebon the Waste discovers Crassus as a young child.

2381 - Plexis drones 1 through 4,194,176 meet and determine that they have reached the necessary critical mass to begin construction of the Plexis Objects.  Construction of the Plexis Factory Shopping Center takes approximately six years.

2387 - Plexis shopping center is completed, filled with the necessary software and plant matter, and set on a course back to Earth.  During its four year journey, six drones will attend to the algae and flora and perfect the interior of the center as the object falls back to Earth.  The Drones that remain behind determine the object to be a success, exchanging information of the materials in the cloud of asteroids nearby, and then commence crafting duplicates of themselves from the raw material of the asteroid belt in celebration as per their programming. 

2388 - Ebon the Waste and Crassus come across the ruins of Anquan 629 destroyed and abandoned.

2390 - Drones 1 through 8,388,340 begin construction of the next two Plexis Objects on their collective agenda over the following ten years.

2391 - Year of Forgiving Rains according to regional shamans and farmers operating within the former midwestern United States.  Plexis object one arrives on Earth.

2400 - Drones conclude the construction of two objects in space and send them back to Earth to remain in a holding pattern in orbit until a designated time and place to land is received via radio transmission.  They begin construction of the next generation of drones.

2413 - 16,776,680 Drones begin construction of the next four Plexis objects to be sent to Earth in ten years at the designated time and place.

2431 - An unidentified object falls from the sky, destroying Anquan 741 Tulsa.  One survivor from the city is recorded later.

The entity which will become known as "The Rustbaby" records the events around the Wonderland on which it presides.  Actual death toll remains unknown.