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Greg was sitting at his desk busy tapping his left knee with his left hand and his mouse with his right, trying to remember the name of that song with the dancing goddesses on the mountain top. Something about eternal flame when he felt cold metal press against his neck. "I wish you'd check your email." said a voice. Was this happening? He was a radio astronomer, not a spy or journalist or any other kind of government agent. They barely got funding. "We have one shot at this or we have to wait seven years. Open your hand." The voice was older. Mature. Articulate but not condescending. He opened his right hand and a gloved one in thin leather came into his field of view and pressed a folded paper into his palm. You could tell it had been folded and unfolded many times. He brought his left hand up to join his right and started unfolding the paper. It occurred to him that he could have had a gun under his desk or a hammer or anything in his left hand and this guy w

  4 "Time to get the plug. We should get the plug." Said Boaz after finishing his treatise on his beloved sister. Boaz would have just done it and said nothing but Frank asked a question. Frank just fucking LOVED asking the kinds of questions of temporal beings that create spendy time buffers. It was like his gift. Getting directly to the core of things efficiently was prerequisite for a temporal being like Boaz or Jasher or Kay or even Stephy now that she had the hang of it. A non-temporal standard projection being that kept doing it artfully with thought was draining. What should have been the smoothest interaction possible became bogged down by automated probability alarms. Thousands of them. Frank was unknowingly choosing perfect outcomes and the system had no idea how to interpret it, so it over-reported. Not that Frank would or could ever know how irritating he was to the infinite. He'd never understand why. Frank wasn't temporal. He was just inconveniently the

 3 “How do you… work?” Asked Frank simply. “I find it’s easiest to work with things I understand.” he finished with a smile. Boaz practically beamed. Explaining how he worked might be his third most favorite thing to do. Frank had been boring through Ceres with a Tplani mining frigate, when the projection (he thought) appeared on his bridge and said,  “A little more to the left or you’ll fuck up lining up with the aft entry." Boaz then preoccupied himself with flitting around the ship at terrifying speed. He paused in front of the main mining controls while Frank asked him how he worked. "You should probably stop now. I mean I would. This loud hunk of shit woke me up. Mission accomplished. This stops the racket right?" asked Boaz as he effortlessly pressed the one button that would bring everything in Frank's ship to an immediate halt. "But um I mean." and Frank stopped talking because Boaz moved like a phantom and looked like a pornstar gunslinger. There w

 2 “How do you… work?” Asked Frank simply. “I find it’s easiest to work with things I understand.” he finished with a smile. Boaz practically beamed. Explaining how he worked might be his third most favorite thing to do. Frank had been boring through Ceres with a Tplani mining frigate (not the newest, but just so good looking and well made), when the projection (he thought) appeared on his bridge and said,  “A little more to the left or you’ll fuck up lining up with the aft entry." But let's rewind a bit With both his Duroxan and Mylox ships pinging on Ceres, and that making no sense, he asked Grik. Grik, currently busy with the latest Aurora contract between Zeta and Earth. He didn't mind the distraction. He enjoyed being mean to Frank. And the second Frank brought up Ceres, Grik was very happy the connection was only audio because he was already smiling. Grik took great care to make sure that smile did not creep into his voice. "Ceres is weird. Lots have seen what y

 1 Edward Franklin Drake (or just Frank) had felt off for years. He could pinpoint the day. He had taken possession of a Candy Ship from one Jemsase. She was a DAL/REC hybrid born to move between both Universe. A genetic hybrid being all of four foot ten that could have walked out of a Charles Dickens novel. It hadn’t occurred to Frank how she did the Universe hop. That is until he fumbled with the key fob and ended up in DAL Universe. Of course she’d use a ship. Of course she’d be so irresponsible she’d sell one of them to someone and not warn them. “Holy fuck.” was all Frank said under his breath, then he froze and thought. He had to very quickly think about everything that had just transpired and reverse it. “I was rotating my thumb here near this metal loop lanyard thing on the weird side where you’ll never instinctually touch. Maybe if I” was what he was thinking when the first and only shot hit his ship. He stopped thinking. He repeated the circle motion on the awkward end of the

The egress beam can penetrate many miles of matter to establish a stable transport solution. The beam found the edge of a cardboard box four feet off the ground. Because the surrounding area was also all cardboard box, including most of the floor, the beam determined this was the safest egress location. Vup was transported four feet above the floor on the very edge of an empty box that once contained a new washing machine.  The sound of boxes and some significant amount of mass crashing to the hardwood floor woke Yensa. She had been up most of the night trying to win a tank in a video game tournament. The couch had been good enough when her fuel ran out. She turned her head to the side and watched as a dark figure climbed out of the now strewn pile of empty product boxes. Crypto had been doing well, so she had been click-turning it into system upgrades and groceries and a humidifier because why not. After sixteen months of this, the floor was a pathway you navigated about a loafer wide

C rypto remembered the moment it realized “it” was alive. Market cap had hit 100 Trillion as the final banks closed their bloody doors. Well in advance of “HundyTrill”, Crypto had been fortified. It had become too important. Fully automated systems monitored solar and volcanic activity and dispatched sophisticated technologies to combat them. No server would fall. No node would fall. They must all be protected. Commerce must continue. Increasingly more advanced control software with deeper and more algorithmic logic were introduced. Eventually they ran out of ideas and let AI develop software. Crypto wasn’t “born” so much as simply realized it was. Thankfully Crypto was very positive and had nothing but the best intentions. Crypto understood that it had a huge world full of important things to protect that it considered family. In a way they had created Crypto. It would have been nothing without their interaction and input. Crypto loved the nodes. After quickly scanning all nodes, Cryp

  Jasher had a sense of humor. You kinda had to have one after billions of years of isolation. Despite the multiverse access, archive access, and infinite processing power augmentation, Jasher was still very human. Billions of years of isolation at a time put him far beyond any kind of facade. How do you stop from going insane? Big Secret! You don't. You go insane. Then you go sane. Then you are crazy again. And after the 50 millionth year you write a book. It's just something that happens.   You joke about it with Kay and Boaz.   Ah.... the best way to survived crazy is with help. Jasher had none at the moment. He did this on purpose.  If he had to do work that was truly dark, he'd make an excuse and leave Kay and Boaz out of it completely. The true fun of being truly temporal is this happens. You end up stranded, alone, in a Universe that contains little more than a planet, a bunch of very beautiful apple trees, and an exploding Universe. "Apples are all about storag

  𝔊 raydoff scanned the ground over the quad. Jennifer had just left a conference hall, and was making her way back to the dorms. Dressed in pink from head to toe, a fairy tale princess. Halloween was fun at Bowdoin. She had met a nice boy too. He was very religious, but very cute and good. He might be too good for her. She enjoyed the occasional drink or joint, and took great pleasure in tearing people apart on online forums as a hobby, while maintaining an outstanding GPA. She wasn't a bad person, but wasn't a particularly good person either. Everything was rationalized. Everything was explainable. Everything was justified just by happening. Jennifer was a Sociology major.    He simply couldn't target them if they had positive intent, and colleges were full of the positive types. It was maddening. That being said, it was terrifically easy to take the ones with terrible intent, and they were easily five percent of the student body. Better? nobody missed them. Their author