The Reality Master And Travel Beyond

THE REALITY MASTER AND TRAVEL BEYOND A NOVEL

BY PM PILLON VOLUME THREE OF THE REALITY MASTER SERIES Volume One: The Reality Master Volume Two: The Reality Master A Threat To The World Volume Four: The Reality Master And Missions Through Time The Reality Master And Travel Beyond the continued and further adventures of joey, kurt & natalie This is a work of fiction and any resemblance between the characters and persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

The Reality Master And Travel Beyond, Copyright © 20010 by PM Pillon.

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CONTENTS PART I Joey Arrives In The Future 1: Waking Up In A New World 2: Reuniting With Jorge and Chris 3: Rejection Of Paul’s Surrender 4: Joey Tours His New World PART II Radder Lands After Joey 5: Klaus Radder’s Escape From Senegal 6: Rough Landing In Madrid 7: Roger Finnegan 8: Radder Re-Connects With Kaufmann 9: The Evil Scientist Falls Ill 10: Tanabie 11: Launching A New Warpath 12: Final Showdown 1: WAKING UP IN A NEW WORLD

It was before sunrise on George Finnegan’s birthday, December 11, 2089 that he woke up in

his Minneapolis bed with a start; he had just suffered his first nightmare in a few weeks, and like many past ones it was about losing his air vehicle, either by his own misplacement or by theft.

Momentarily panicked immediately after waking up, he looked to his right and was thankfully reassured to see that his lifepartner, University of Minnesota child psychologist Ruth Finnegan was still sleeping soundly next to him; she always seemed to him to be unaware of his bad dreams while they were happening, because if he woke up in the middle of one she always appeared to be fully immersed in sleep – a clear indication that he didn’t shout during nightmares and perhaps didn’t even mutter; though it was possible that she sometimes heard telltale sounds from him but never mentioned them to him, preferring to defer to his decision to broach that subject to her if and when he deemed it appropriate or necessary to do so; and finally he did, precisely two weeks before this night of faux terror. They both knew that bad dreams aren’t obliged to conform to fact and often contradict it – they dredge up any fear or anxiety and use it to persecute its sleeping victim, so he tried to dismiss their significance.

Nightmares were rare and usually curable in this enlightened age, and particularly unusual among children; Ruth hadn’t encountered any patients who had nightmares and so was relatively unfamiliar with the phenomenon apart from what she read about it during her academic studies prior to her graduation from the same college at which she now researched and taught. George had thus far decided to ride the bad dreams out and only seek help if they seriously impacted his daily routine and therefore became a clinical problem, which thus far hadn’t occurred. He agreed with Ruth after they discussed his bad dreams, that the artificiality of having problematic memories identified and removed was something to be avoided if possible; and that not all bad experiences needed to be cured. Though none of the dreams had previously showed him a harbinger of his own death as the one did during this night, he forgot the doom sequence right after waking up, so it caused him no aftereffects as far less drastic dream events had done so many times. After waking up he usually felt anxious and disturbed, but this usually dissipated within seconds and from then on he went on to have routinely satisfying experiences during his waking hours.

George started out this particular dream by loaning his All-Purpose Disk, universally referred to as an APD, to a rascal next door who he feared might have made copies of it before returning it to him; he worried that the neighbor might decide to run off with it later, so unless he changed his APD settings this would weigh on him indefinitely into the future, and he fretted about this prospect. In real, waking life, he had no unethical neighbors and only read about such people in the news every once in a while; nor were APDs copiable, so no settings change was ever necessary. He was beset in almost all of his bad dreams with multiple afflictions of anxiety, all of them derived from these same inexplicable fears of losing his vehicles, which in the modern age never happened at all in real life; for one thing, encryption of vehicles was so advanced it was unbreakable by the few thieves that still victimized Americans with thefts or burglaries.

In the dream he looked out his window early in the morning and saw that his air vehicle, which was a type of transport that normally was referred to by the acronym A-V, was parked in front of his house, so he was relieved that at least the neighbor hadn’t left town with it. As if that wasn’t bad enough, his ground vehicle was broadcasting to him via his APD that he hadn’t moved it in a month, so it was subject to confiscation by the local municipality at any time; and

adding insult to injury, he couldn’t remember where it was parked, so he might lose it as he had lost many others for various reasons in past dreams, mostly because of this recurring and frustrating misplacement caused by his failure to be cognizant of his location when he parked it.

In reality, ground vehicles were universally regarded as a pathetic anachronism and he hadn’t owned one in over twenty years; less than 1% of every hundred personal vehicles in Minneapolis and most of the modern world were of this type, almost everybody having graduated from vehicles to the A-Vs that floated or flew at high speeds without risk of collisions; and besides that any vehicle including the ground variety was easily located with global positioning; a fact that the dream presumably delighted in disregarding, all the better for disconcerting him in the middle of the night. There was a disturbing new event at the end of this newest dream that hadn’t occurred in any previous one, in which he found himself trapped inside his A-V, surrounded by overwhelming heat and light; and suddenly he was incinerated by a massive and blinding yellow flash blasted from near his location to outer space, surging into the galactic distance as part of what he at that moment cognized as an event that heralded his ultimate demise in real life.

However, as the flash zoomed outward he experienced a saving grace when he sensed that Ruth was sitting in the A-V behind him and then heard her beautiful voice reassuring him, “Don’t worry George, always remember that I am Tanabie.”

The recurring fear of being stripped of his vehicles regularly occurred in his dreams even though he wasn’t a bit materialistic; during his waking hours he didn’t prize them or any physical object that was his property and in this world only prized his lifepartner Ruth – the love of his life. Few couples bothered with marriage these days, in fact so few that municipalities had discontinued issuing licenses for it; but he and Ruth were devout Christians, so they had undertaken a church ceremony that included an old-fashioned wedding. When he prayed George never failed to thank God for bringing her to him and fulfilling his life. Their marriage ceremony attracted a large number of their friends and relatives, running into the hundreds and overflowing out onto the street; it was a joyous event that had become so anachronistic it occurred only half a dozen times a month in their Minnesota megalopolis with twenty million in habitants named Minneapolis-St. Paul and known by many in the modern era as MinnePaul. It was a small city compared to those with over a hundred million around the world, including five in the U.S. and three dozen in Southeast Asia and South America.

Usually, when people declared themselves lifepartnered, one of them adopted the surname of the other, though in many cases both retained the same name as before; there were no legal ramifications from this decision as the legality of names no longer affected anyone’s legal status.

Often the man changed his surname, unlike the old days when only the woman did so. There was no previous discussion between them about a surname change because it wasn’t considered an issue between couples, and he became George Finnegan; it was Ruth whose surname was Finnegan whereas his had been Trapp. Ruth researched all the way back to Carl Jung and other past and current experts on the subject of dreams, but modern psychology hadn’t made much progress in understanding dreams almost two centuries after Jung practiced psychiatry. Ruth’s conclusion after researching the problem for George was that dreams didn’t occur on a rational plane and therefore couldn’t be investigated with the otherwise powerful faculty of reason. Brain research had come a long way and could erase bad memories but couldn’t yet identify the causes of nightmares. Thanks for nothing, thought George in bitter frustration after she effectively

informed him that for the time being he would have to live with irresolvable ambiguity and even severe angst. But he didn’t say this to her face because he knew to do so would be an irrational reaction; in reality, he trusted her and had full confidence in her professional skills that included a variety of psychiatric diagnoses.

This being his first bad dream in weeks, he conjectured that it might have been brought on by the planned genbirth – a birth generated from a combination of their DNA – he would undergo with Ruth later in the morning, even though it was a procedure that had a near-perfect track record with almost no side effects or complaints since it was introduced more than two decades in the past. At 11 AM, George, a head cook, also at the University of Minnesota cafeteria where he met Ruth, was scheduled to arrive with her at a genbirth office and expected within the following hour to walk out with a brand spanking new ten-year-old son whom they had already named Roger, but with some differences built in for variegation. A complete set of memories was going to be installed in George, his wife, and their new son to simulate bringing him up from birth. Until the procedure was commenced, Roger would be a blank slate with no thinking capacity, in fact no cognitive functioning ability whatsoever. Genbirthing was one of many scientific advances in the last fifty years that had had made life more tolerable for couples – in the case of genbirthing primarily by its significant facilitation and enhancement of the careers of one or both parents.

Although there were some American careerist couples who still went through the process of the natural birth of a child, most urbanites elected instead to delay parenting for a few years after lifepartnering and then give birth to a gen who had been accelerated to five or ten years of age.

Modern lifespans were designed to exceed three hundred years because of a substance colloquially referred to as the Juve based on its rejuvenating power, so there was plenty of time to raise a gen child naturally and live a full life after the child reached maturity. It wasn’t the time of raising a child that was problematic for bringing one or more up naturally, but rather the intensity of the early childhood years: The baby waking up and crying in the middle of the night, needing diaper changes and constant attention, remained part of almost every infant's life even as humanity approached the 22nd century; and later in his or her life, the redundant explanation to the child of the most mundane topics; the terrible twos that often resulted in intense aggravation and tension between lifepartners; and the danger of the child ignorantly grasping a sharp object and injuring himself or others, burning him or herself due to inexperience with heat. In sum, a small child faced many of the same hazards and difficulties as he or she faced throughout the first 20 centuries of calendared society. But a child who was artificially born five or more years old had traversed most or all of the typical hazardous defects of early childhood and was therefore almost purely an inspiration of fun without danger for his or her parents.

Because the lengthening of life beyond the previous hundred years was recent, nobody had any experience or confidence as to how the projections of a three hundred year life span was going to work out, but most Americans accepted them and the longer life as better than the earlier death. Fortunately, the drastic reduction violent crime during the last half century had caused an concomitant near-disappearance of personal weapons in America and other modern nations, so children no longer shot themselves or others while playing with them as occurred often in the old days before what pundits dubbed the current New Modernity of the APD-Wall and many other major advances, most of them deriving from the work of Klaus Radder. But it

only took a few horror stories of children skewering themselves or being impaled by picket fences or other objects to consign natural child birth and rearing from scratch to become largely a thing of the past. The travails of very early childhood were regarded as too much of a burden and cause of stress for most modern Americans, who tended more towards a libertine or hedonist preference than did their great grandfathers during their youth and their establishment of their first families at the beginning of the 21st Century.

It was impossible to determine if the elaborate and massive compendium of memories that were created in and extracted from the parents were accurately dovetailed into the child’s memory and then successfully rappelled back to the parents to simulate the child’s presence in their lives during those missing formative years, though some data was culled from examining brain patterns, but this test wasn’t considered definitive except in the cases of significant match failures that seldom occurred. Published reports about genbirth parents who were surveyed and anecdotes that the Finnegans heard from friends who had undergone the process were glowing in praise of its efficacy within their actual lives, which was the crucial test. Their friends who had children this way had expressed no concern about the artificiality of these memories, which seemed to function as smoothly as real ones would; and with few exceptions, the children thus far had grown up emotionally close to their parents, with almost every child thankfully bypassing the rebellious stages as they approached and entered their teens that many natural parents were forced to endure. Over the years, studies showed that gen children were at least as well adjusted and happy as those who were born naturally. Even the rare cases of brain pattern mismatch had resulted in some minor problems but no major ones.

In the old days before genbirth was invented, many couples who early in their relationship were torridly in love had broken up and wanted nothing to do with each other less than five years later, after suffering through the mutually destructive tribulations of a brief period raising a demanding natural child, and that was somewhat of a tendency during the modern age; statistically, studies showed that genbirth families were still functioning well for 97% of couples after ten years, whereas 40% of the natural ones had broken up by that time – though not rancorously with accusations back and forth of child molestation that used to occur what was becoming a distant and gratefully abandoned past.

As with genbirth versus natural, statistically couples who didn’t marry stayed together significantly longer than couples who did marry, which some suspected was because traditional marriage was almost always accompanied by problematic natural childbirth. However, in the case of the Finnegans, they chose a rare combination of traditional marriage followed by a genbirth, so they had a traditional marriage followed by a decision favoring a gen child. This was fairly unusual as most couples went all the way with marriage and natural birth or non-marriage and gen birth. The Finnegans discounted the high number of break-ups among married couples as being cases that were surely completely unlike their strongly committed relationship; their impression and also research studies indicated that a true commitment was the real key to success in a lifepartnership whether within or without marriage, but commitment wasn’t yet a quantifiable aspect of marriage, so the final words hadn’t yet been spoken about it; not was there any current expectation that such aspects as this one and love and familiarity would be scientifically measured soon, if ever. In fact, the general consensus of scientists was they should be left alone to provide at lest a modicum of mystery to human existence.

Unlike George who most mornings exited to appear at his U of M job, Ruth worked from their home apart from teaching three classes a week at the university, which she did in a regular classroom equipped with an APD-Wall replacement for a chalk board; but like George she was very busy after hours with her church work such as leading choir practice and teaching Sunday school; she was a rare example of an active church member, as most Americans were now totally secular; in fact, her church was the biggest one of only a dozen still existing in Minneapolis but had only thirty enrolled members. She never felt discouraged by dwindling church memberships and steadfastly maintained her devotion to a Godly mission in her life that she felt would one day be revealed to her in a dramatic way. George was likewise significantly involved with their church, where he was a deacon.

She was less enthusiastic about a non-natural birth than George, but she wasn’t totally opposed to it so she ultimately deferred to his estimation of their possible inability to weather the natural path. The Finnegans, who were deeply in love, after much heartfelt discussion decided on a genbirth early in their coupling, fearing that the drain on their time and energy caused by raising a child from birth could severely strain their otherwise idyllic relationship. From George’s point of view, there were severe downside hazards with natural parenthood and almost nothing but upsides with an artificial one. Their uncertainty about which way to go caused them to delay their decision about starting a family by an extra year during which they not only asked around and research with their APD-Wall, they also prayed. George’s university work schedule only lasted from eight to noon, but he was very active after his work hours running a cooking show twice a week on an independent APD channel and also as a cooking traveler, visiting nations around the world to teach others how to cook for a healthy life; so he reckoned himself susceptible to succumbing to the stress of raising a baby. Indeed, he and Ruth were both cognizant of his nearly frantic schedule during the previous several months, and there was little or no prospect for him to relax any time soon.

He and Ruth also tutored English to immigrants from Laos, Somalia and other countries; although technology existed for simply implanting the English language in immigrants, many of them hailed from countries that were firmly traditional and therefore rejected this method of learning a language as cold and artificial, preferring to do it as they did just about everything else, the natural way, which of course was also the slower way. Most of these students eschewed any kind of modern learning, always insisting on standard classrooms with desks that went back hundreds of years for their studies. George was actually charmed by their intransigence and oldfashioned spirit. American and European modernists call this trad living; there was still a Third World of sorts where most of the populations were trad and few or no A-Vs were seen flying around, being restricted to only government agencies; but the grinding poverty and lack of nutrition of the early 21st century was long gone from even the most backward nations because of their importation of cheap food from modern countries, all of which via modern technology produced a huge surfeit that was easily sufficient to feed the twenty billion humans currently on the globe and even supplemented the needs of occupants of the moon, Mars and other celestial bodies, thus far all of them within the solar system. Because no Americans were contracting diseases of any type from exogenous sources due to advancements in health science, couples based their relationships exclusively on the emotional connection between them rather than on fidelity and its accompanying jealousy that was often so destructive; both of these phenomena

were widely regarded as obsolete concepts: Although not fully eradicated, fidelity and jealousy were infrequently cited as the causes of breakups; in most cases the couples simply drifted apart.

Consequently, their workplaces, which were also dwindling in numbers but still existed invariably had a fun room where people got together without worrying about how their mates would react upon learning of these extracurricular sessions, and many loving couples in fact openly regaled each other after work about their enjoyment of amorous adventurous earlier that day.

It was 9 AM when George and Ruth headed for Dr. Robert Livingston’s office where he had already reported for work and was examining at his calendar that was digitally displayed on his wall; he saw that the Finnegans were on it at today’s date, which if he hadn’t been so busy lately he would have noticed in advance, as they were his friends. He checked his APD-Wall but found no indication that they had tried to contact him in advance of the procedure, but that wasn’t unusual as it was normally a very routine experience for everyone involved. He couldn’t remember any other doctor running into a problem with gen transference, though he had come across mention of some minor glitches during his general reading about the topic many years in the past. In rare cases, a child had grown to the stipulated age only to regress nearly to baby size in as little as twelve hours before growing again to the targeted age in the same amount of time; the reason for this was unknown, but thus far had been followed by normal growth and without subsequent defects or parenting problems. There had never been a legal basis for disposing of a regressed child: To do so would be prosecuted as murder, a crime so rare there were less than a thousand prisoners serving a term for it in the entire nation.

He didn’t expect any complications, so the fact that they were personally close to him didn’t cause him any circumspection about today’s event. He had looked forward to this day with his friends until he became extremely busy recently and lost track of it. Although he had arrived in Minneapolis only four years earlier to prepare to take over his father’s practice, he had met the Finnegans early on through professional contact with Ruth and had become one of their many friends. They had exchanged visits to each other’s homes a couple of times and attended the same parties on occasion. He checked the incubation chamber and saw that the Finnegan son was fully formed and sleeping, a process that generally took less than three weeks and was complete in this case after two. This was the first time he had checked on the child since it was raised from a zygote to age ten. He didn’t personally engage the zygote production, which was done in a separate lab at the same university that employed the Finnegans and then sent to him. He could do it himself if it was necessary, but the campus had the best equipment for it and charged nothing for the service so he stayed with their program that his father had relied on for the work over many years.

All that remained to do now was the automated memory development and transference, so to prepare for it Dr. Livingston routinely inspected his equipment. The psychetransferum checked out as normal; but even if it failed he had two others that he could put into service within a few minutes, including the ones he inherited from his father who had gone overseas. When it was invented, almost no doctor could afford to buy one without a government subsidy, but nowadays everyone had multiples as backups. He did notice that one of the lights took about five minutes longer than normal to change from red to green, but when he ran a debugger on it nothing turned up that would explain the delay, so he discounted the significance of the oddity. When he

rebooted it, the odd light discrepancy didn’t recur. This psychetransferum had served him well for more than eight years, half of those in Toledo before he moved here, extracting psyche from adults, inculcating new ones in them simply by adding the new child to the same physical scenes that the adults had in their genuine memories, then smoothly distributing the new memories into all three parties. All of this had been accomplished without a hitch up to today and became almost boring in its reliability, to the point where he considered handing off the work and doing something completely different for a year, perhaps by volunteering for medical work in Africa or Asia, or joining his father when his travels became extraterrestrial. Never during more than two hundred procedures had Dr. Livingston run into any problems with them, nor had his father before him when he performed the same process for fifteen years before retiring at age 130 to spend at least ten years traveling. Dr. Livingston perceived no hint of a difference between the Finnegan son’s condition and the genbirth offspring of his previous clients, who weren’t even called patients because the procedure was so reliable and routine; in fact all of his clients always called him Bob, not Dr. Livingston. But unknown to him, today was in fact going to be different, and radically so.

The Finnegans arrived on schedule and they and the doctor went through the paces of a friendly greeting and a discussion of preliminaries and then the couple sat down in firmly floating chairs, which meant they were suspended above the floor but as immovably in place as if they were affixed to it with steel bolts. When they looked at their new son Roger, whom the doctor had minutes earlier lifted from the closing chamber and gingerly reposed on a firmly floating bed, they were surprised that he didn’t look a lot like either of them and exchanged knowing glances that communicated that they had both noticed the discrepancy, but they said nothing to the doctor about it on the assumption that he knew what he was doing, and they were of a mind to fully accept Roger as their legitimate son regardless of what he looked like. Dr. Livingston, however, was so focused on the step-by-step process that he failed to notice the discrepancy of appearance between the child and his parents.

After some more normal chitchat about events in their lives since they last saw each other, the doctor lowered transparent enclosures over their heads and another one over their new son’s face. There would be no need to physically connect them to anything, the enclosures alone did it all without touching them, both extracting and implanting memories using a modicum of electricity; and in fact they were so undemanding that they were powered by tiny batteries designed to last a century or more. Nor was it even necessary for Roger to be in the same room with the Finnegans, but normally the offspring was in the same room to normalize the emotional atmosphere for the parents, and the doctor had up to now always followed that protocol. The Finnegans placidly listened to Pink Floyd, Linkin Park and Beatles music, and by the end of the third song, blinking blue lights circling the three enclosures signaled that the procedure was complete. Suddenly, however, the lights stopped blinking and turned red, then orange, then alternated between them until finally returning to blue and staying that way; this was the second time the lights seemed to go haywire in this two-chair device during its many years of use; the first time having occurred only half an hour earlier.

When Dr. Livingston turned and looked at Roger, he was surprised to see that the nude son, who had short, jet black hair and looked rather unlike the two Finnegans in the first place, had been replaced by a fully-clothed – but wearing pants and shirt that looked like something out of

an old movie – blond, long-haired boy who woke up while the doctor was staring at him dumbfounded. In no previous case had any child suddenly acquired clothing during this process, and the doctor hadn’t been so distracted that he hadn’t noticed that the boy’s hair color and length had changed. However, he didn’t suspect at this moment that anything had gone awry because the data on the APD-Wall signaled a successful transfer. Still, just to be overcautious rather than not enough, he ran the transfer again because he knew that if it worked the first time it wouldn’t replace the transfer that had already been consummated. The doctor was surprised when the boy prematurely opened his eyes, looked around, sat up and spoke to the three people in the room, all of whom appeared to him to be teenagers and asked, “Where am I? Who are you? Are my parents here?”

Dr. Livingston, his face reflecting continuing befuddlement, haltingly replied, “I’m Dr. Robert Livingston. Your name is Roger, and congratulations because you’re the new son of George and Ruth Finnegan. But your clothes …”

“What are you talking about? My name is Joey, not Roger, and my parents are Wilfred and Maureen Blake. Why aren’t they here? What is this place?”

Joey was bewildered, not any less by seeing the strange, garish clothing the three adults in the room were wearing that looked like polyester and the strange, floating balloon chairs two of them were sitting on.

Dr. Livingston asked Joey, “I’m sorry, it appears there’s been some kind of mistake. Your name isn’t Roger Finnegan?”

“Of course not, I already told you my name. And you’re not old enough to be a doctor and you’re not even dressed like one. What’s going on here, what is all this. Did you people kidnap me?”

“Son, I assure you, I am indeed a medical doctor. I perform legitimate and legal procedures that have nothing to do with kidnapping or any other criminal activity. I don’t know what happened, but please believe me when I say that you haven’t been kidnapped.”

Dr. Livingston barked out an oral order that raised the enclosures that covered the heads of the Finnegans and then began an attempt to explain this unexpected development to them.

“George, Ruth, there’s been some kind of mistake. Either this boy isn’t your son or there’s been an error in the transference. Do you remember this boy, do you remember raising him?”

The Finnegans looked at each other with perplexity in their expressions and both slowly nodded their heads sideways to aver a negative response; at this point, they should have ten years of memories about this boy, but neither of them had the slightest memory of knowing him in the past or present. Perplexed, Dr. Robert Livingston returned his attention to the boy who was still sitting on the bed and said to them, “Either he isn’t your son or there’s been an error in the transference, but that wouldn’t explain his radical change in appearance. You said your name is Joey? Joey, I’m so sorry, there’s been some kind of mistake. You’re supposed to be the son of this couple, but you’re not, or at least it appears that you’re not. Do you recognize them? Try to think, it’s possible there’s some kind of delayed effect.”

“No, I’ve never seen them before. You still haven’t told me what’s going on. Why is the furniture in here so strange? I never saw anything like this. Where am I? You still haven’t answered that.”

“I don’t know what went wrong. I’ll drive you home right now if you want, but make sure

first that you don’t know this couple. Where do you live?”

Fully conscious now after initially waking up feeling slightly groggy, Joey began crying out, “This doesn’t look like Senegal. Am I in Senegal? I live in Palo Alto. Where am I? Is this Palo Alto? What is this place? What’s going on here?”

Dr. Livingston looked at the Finnegans but they looked back at him without commenting, before he replied to Joey; they considered this phenomenon to be under his expertise, purview and jurisdiction, so they preferred to leave him out on the limb to see if he could resolve it without the.

He asked, “You don’t mean Palo Alto, the old Palo Alto south of San Francisco?”

“Of course I mean that Palo Alto, how many Palo Altos are there? I only know one, and it’s not old, it’s been around a long time but it’s still a clean and modern suburb. I need to find a cell phone to call my parents, and you still haven’t told me where this place is.”

“Joey, we’re in the Midwest, in Minneapolis, two thousand miles east of where Palo Alto used to be. But it’s not there any more, your parents must be living somewhere else. Try to remember where you live.”

“What do you mean where it used to be, somebody moved it? That’s ridiculous! Please give me a phone, I need to call my mom and dad.”

“Son, your parents aren’t in Palo Alto, nobody is in Palo Alto.”

“I’m telling you, my parents live there, but they were in West Africa with me right before I woke up here. I need a phone that can call that far, please give me a phone.”

“Joey – if that’s your name – I know you’re sincere, please understand that I’m not doubting your word, but I just saw Roger Finnegan exactly where you’re sitting now only a couple of minutes ago, and the door and windows aren’t near this bed, so you didn’t make a surreptitious entry. You couldn’t have sneaked in here and replaced him, so this isn’t some kind of strange practical joke. Something has gone wrong with this procedure. You need to tell us something about yourself so we can try to figure out what happened. Why do you think you’re from Palo Alto, did you live there before The Vanishing? If you did, you wouldn’t be so young, nowhere near your age even if you took the Juve.”

“I was born and raised there. What joove, what are you talking about? I need a phone to call my dad. You’re scaring me, if you’re really a doctor, please give me a phone and stop talking about me being from a place that doesn’t exist. I’m telling you, I do live in Palo Alto!” shouted Joey, now becoming nearly apoplectic.

Dr. Livingston looked at George and Ruth Finnegan almost beseechfully, but they had no advice to offer. This was their first such procedure, and they had never heard of one resulting in a mismatch. But finally, Ruth Finnegan gathered her senses and scrunched herself down a bit to get out from under the enclosure, which in his haste the doctor hadn’t ordered upward enough to completely clear her head. She stood up and spoke to Joey as she walked over to the wall and pushed on it. A screen appeared on the wall as soon as she pressed on it as she explained, “We don’t really use phones any more, Joey, but we’ll help you contact your family right now. Please don’t be afraid, you’re among friends here, we’re on your side. We’re no kind of threat to you and you’re not under any control from us, you’re absolutely free to leave and to do whatever you want to do even if you can’t contact your parents.”

Joey felt a momentary measure of confusion when he saw no familiar Google or Bing on the

screen, instead he saw what looked like blank search fields, presumably to be filled with keywords. Ruth pushed the center of the screen and gave Joey the go-ahead with what was to Joey an inscrutable nod of the head. Ruth actually didn’t need to touch the screen because she had her APD to do this remotely, but she sensed that this added touch might be somewhat more reassuring for the boy than doing it by brandishing a disk would be.

The doctor said, “Okay Joey, you can call your family now.”

“I can’t, there’s no numbers or keyboard.”

Ruth said, “Nobody uses keyboards, Joey, just say the number. You don’t need to see numbers to dial your family. You don’t even need numbers, but if that’s how you want to do it, it will work.”

Joey mentally stumbled, flustered by his excitement and at first couldn’t remember his home landline number or the cell numbers of his parents. Due to his emotional state he was momentarily stymied, sitting there staring at the wall without a clue what to do next. The threesome of adults said not a word, preferring to convey to Joey a message of infinite patience; and anyway, none of them had any other pressing matter to attend to during the rest of the entire day compared to resolving this utter crisis. Finally, he remembered his landline number and enunciated it while looking at the wall, but it turned out to belong to someone living in Boise, Idaho, a location that was shown at the bottom in a caption. He saw and spoke to the man who appeared on the wall and informed Joey that he had never heard of the Blakes. He apologized to Joey about the mix-up even though it wasn’t his fault, then signed off without further ado and the screen first turned blue and then went blank.

Joey said, “I don’t understand, our number has been moved to Idaho, the guy said he’s in Idaho. I’m sure I got it right. I don’t understand. I’m scared. I need to find my parents!”

Dr. Livingston said, “All the Palo Alto numbers were reassigned further east after The Vanishing. You do remember The Vanishing, don’t you?”

“No, I never heard about that. What are you talking about?”

“Evidently, your inadvertent transfer to this physical location on this bed, however it happened, has diminished your memory. The Vanishing occurred early in the century when an evil scientist threatened the world with dangerous black holes, and because his demands weren’t met he destroyed several American cities. It was horrible, we lost millions of Americans.

These black holes that he called accretion anomalies absorbed material into them laterally, leaving nothing except rubble from the tops of skyscrapers that crashed to the ground. Even the land was vanished to a depth of fifty feet, and the ocean swept over many vanishing points on the West Coast. Palo Alto along with the rest of the Bay Area and several other cities has been gone and the land under it has been under ocean water since that day. It’s strange that you don’t remember any of this from your studies, you must have partial amnesia. But I’m sure it’s temporary and you’ll be all right as soon as you find your parents. Hopefully, they’re still in Africa. Try to stay calm and remember where they are.”

Up to now Joey had been in the dark about everything he was seeing and hearing, but suddenly what may be going on dawned on him and he wrinkled his forehead and asked, “Wait a minute. Did this Vanishing happen in New York also?”

“Apparently it did, but it was reversed by the boy who previously performed the San Francisco Stadium Miracle. In fact, his name was the same as yours, Joey Blake.”

“What do you mean the same as mine! It’s not the same as mine, it is mine. I am Joey Blake.

I’m that Joey Blake, the Stadium Miracle Joey Blake! I don’t understand what you’re talking about. Lucky stopped all of that, I saw him stop it! At least I saw him stop New York … I mean, he fixed it, I don’t know how to explain it. I want to talk to my parents, they’ll tell you all about it. They know I’m telling the truth.”

At that moment, through the still heavy cloud of sudden awakening, Joey remembered his indomitable partner Lucky, but when reached into his pocket he found he wasn’t there, and frantically looking around him on the bed he saw no trace of him. Lucky, who had implicitly promised to protect Joey, had evidently failed him, if the doctor was correct; Palo Alto and other cities on the West Coast were gone. But his parents weren’t in Palo Alto when it happened, they were with him in West Africa when Lucky reversed the destruction of New York City, so he knew they weren’t lost in The Vanishing. Joey’s mind whirled, but because of the strange clothing, the youthfulness of these three people and the floating chairs, it finally occurred to him to ask the fateful question.

“What’s the date today?”

Dr. Livingston replied, “It’s December 11th. Is this the last date you remember?”

“I mean what’s the complete date? What year are we in?”

“It’s December 11th, 2089. What’s the last date you remember?”

“December 2089? How can it be 2089? Can you show me a calendar? No, don’t bother, I see now, you’re in with those goons who tried to kidnap my friend Kurt McCarty and then tried to wreck New York. You’re playing a trick on me, and you have Lucky but you can’t get him to do anything for you, so you’re trying to confuse me and get me to fall into some kind of trap where I’ll use him for something and you’ll pounce and try to get him to do something different like give you complete power over the world. If you’re not kidnappers, I want to walk out of here and find my parents. Show me I’m a free person like you said and not kidnapped by letting me walk out of here.”

This was a bold challenge by Joey, but he was far less certain than he sounded. He actually had no idea what was happening and was afraid of what he might encounter if he walked out; but neither the doctor nor the Finnegans made any move to stop him as he headed towards the door.

He saw no knob on it, but the translucent door fractured when he got close to it like it was safety glass that had been struck with a huge object from the other side, and disappeared, seemingly into thin air. This was another unnerving experience for him, causing him to stop for a moment and look back at the three adults, almost hopeful that they would beg him not to leave; but they made no move or comment, so he walked through a waiting room where several clients were seated who were dressed in the same strange bright-colored clothes as the three teenagers he had just met; and the furniture they were sitting on was the same as what was in the room with the doctor in it – floating and even furrier.

When the office door from the waiting room to the hallway fractured open on his approach, he continued uncertainly out of the office and down the hallway to the building’s front exit door, but he stopped in his tracks when he saw the snow piled high outside because he was in his shirt sleeves, without even a light jacket; the helmet and bulletproof vest he was wearing before he woke up were gone, left in a pile on the sandy beach in Senegal when he disappeared from there.

There was no street or sidewalks, only what looked like plain ordinary dirt in every

direction, and less than ten meters from him were transparent balls in a variety of solid colors, the bottom section of which were flat; most of the balls had a circumference of about twenty feet but some of them were three times that size, and all of them suspended were in the air a couple of feet above the street; by all appearances not touching the ground and stacked as many as four high. Other balls were flying over and around nearby office buildings, and he could see what looked like people sitting in them, though he couldn’t be sure they weren’t human-like robots or maybe some sort of artificial life. A swirl of leaves rushed across his path at high speed, causing him to wonder why people were walking around with their arms and legs exposed in skimpy clothes, totally disregarding strong gusts and what looked like freezing, snow-covered pedestrian conditions. He realized that he must be on a different planet where anything may be possible and feared that seeing this outside view wouldn’t be his last unpleasant surprise. There were singlefamily homes made of standard lumber on his side of the street, but he couldn’t see them, only the modern office buildings across from the one he was in. They appeared to be constructed with standard cement and plaster and a large one had a floating sign in front that said Abbott Northwestern Hospital. He stepped closer to the door and it fractured open, ushering in a gust of cold air, and when he stepped through it and was outside he was driven back in by a blast of freezing wind. The door appeared again by unfracturing, and he reentered and stood there after the door closed, looking out at the buildings of the bizarre scene and repeating over and over, “Lucky, where are you?” as tears ran down his cheeks. He heard Ruth Finnegan’s voice behind him and felt her hands on his shoulders.

Dr. Livingston was present also, but he stood behind Ruth, letting her, as a child psychologist, handle the matter. George Finnegan had remained in the transfer room and was still there, having conjectured for lack of an alternative, that his duty might be to hold down the fort. While he waited he used the APD wall feature to talk to his sister about what looked to him like a failure of the genbirth.

Ruth said, “I guess you can believe now that we’re in Minneapolis, Joey, not California.

You’re free to go, but I want to help you, we all want to help you. Please don’t think that we are part of any plot against you or your family. This is just some kind of mistake.”

Joey turned and faced Ruth, tears lightly running down his face, and blurted out a protest, but she wasn’t the one he directed it to.

“Lucky, what have you done? Where are you, why don’t you fix this? Please Lucky, where are you?” He burst into tears, and Ruth embraced him.

“Don’t worry Joey, we’re going to help you. If there’s any way we can fix this, you can count on us doing it. Don’t worry.”

But in fact, she was very worried. Her own lost child Roger wasn’t of prime concern to her because she knew they could regenerate him; what concerned her now was this boy who apparently wasn’t her son and seemed bereft of solace or family to turn to. Joey took her hand and they walked back down the hallway, returning to the doctor’s office, tears streaming down his face all the while. Dr. Livingston apologized to his four clients in the waiting room and informed them that something urgent had come up and he would have to APD them for a new appointment. None of them protested the cancellation of their imminent procedures, as they were there for minor health issues that were less significant than a genbirth and therefore readily postponed. All of them smiled pleasantly and filed out of the office without complaining.

The enclosures weren’t removable from the psychetransferum chairs, so the only standard furniture in the transfer room was a floating chair for the doctor and the bed that Joey – and previously Roger – was lying on when he woke up. Dr. Livingston brought a couple of the waiting room chairs – which glided through the air like they were on invisible wheels – from the waiting room into the transfer room. George and the doctor sat down on two of the chairs and Ruth sat on the bed; they instinctively strove to convince Joey that these were calm circumstances and that they could just sit down and discuss this problem in a relaxed manner.

Joey hesitated, then decided to also sit on the bed next to Ruth in the hope that Lucky would locate him there and reverse this time travel or whatever this predicament was that he was in.

Sitting down, he resigned himself to cooperating with the adults, though he was guarded and not yet totally convinced of their sincerity.

“Okay, so if I’m in the year 2089, that means my brother and sister are older than my grandfather was when I was in Senegal in 2014 my parents are way past old age and probably not even alive any more. Their phone numbers are no good any more, so I need to get online somewhere to find my brother and sister. No matter how old they are, they’re still my brother and sister, so I need to talk to them. I don’t see a computer here. Do you have one, or should I use that weird wall projection again to find them?”

George Finnegan replied, “We don’t use computers, but yes, the wall can help you locate your family. But communications and search technology aren’t just there, they’re actually everywhere.” George didn’t initially walk to the wall like Ruth did earlier, instead taking a small, round, flat disk out of his shirt pocket and pushing on it with his thumb; the screen appeared again on the wall. Then he walked to the wall as Ruth did previously, pushed the center of the screen and told Joey, “Okay, say the names of your family members.”

Joey did this, and very quickly, after a couple of false calls of people he didn’t recognize nor recognized him, his family popped up, with his sister Natalie conveniently living in Minneapolis and his parents and his brother Paul living in Wisconsin, four hundred miles away; the caption below his mom and dad’s address said Contact family. Joey then spoke the name of the McCartys and learned that they were also in Wisconsin. Because Natalie was his sister and evidently lived within several miles of where he was still sitting on the bed, he decided to call her first so they could get together quickly and start trying to figure out what to do; if that didn’t work he would try his parents, then Paul and finally his friends. Joey first braced himself for the possibility of receiving news that she just died of old age or of seeing her looking like the 100 years of age that she would be now, and then following George’s instructions, he simply said, “Call Natalie.”

There was no ringing sound before Natalie appeared on the screen, immediately recognizable to Joey because she looked barely older than she was the last time he saw her and far younger than he anticipated after the passage of more than half a century. His eyes widened but he said nothing as Natalie basically shrieked the first sentences she said to him, in her tumultuous excitement.

“Oh my God, Joey! You’re Joey!”

“Yes I am, Natalie. I’m your brother Joey.”

“Oh my God, Joey! I can’t believe it! Joey! You’re back! You’re home! But you’re still a boy? What’s going on? Where have you been and where are you now?”

“I don’t know where I’ve been Natalie, the last thing I remember is Lucky smashing that cliff right onto the beach, and then I woke up here in this office. And where I am now is right here in Minneapolis, that’s where you are, aren’t you? Where’s mom and dad and Paul, in Wisconsin?”

“Oh, you don’t know. I’m sorry Joey, mom and dad had an accident, but we think they’re eventually going to be all right. Paul is okay, he’s in the process of moving in with me now and he’ll come with me to pick you up or meet us at home. Are you okay? Do you feel okay? How did you get to Minneapolis and where did you come from? You don’t remember anything after that beach event where the evil scientist died right after you disappeared?”

“No, nothing. West Africa when I was with everybody including you is the last thing I remember. After that I woke up here in this office.”

“I don’t understand. Are you saying that after you disappeared back then in West Africa, you were somehow preserved at the same age until 2089? But where were you all that time?”

“I don’t know anything about disappearing in West Africa, but 2089 is what these folks are telling me and now you too, so I have to believe it until I find out something different. What about mom and dad’s accident, are they okay?”

“No, I’m sorry, Joey, but we’re hoping they will be later. I’ll tell you all the details when we’re together. I’ll leave right away to pick you up.”

“Tell me now, I want to see mom and dad. What happened to them? Were you or Paul in the accident with them?”

“No we weren’t, Paul’s perfectly okay and in good health. I’ll contact him right away.

Listen, I’ll come to where you are, I have your exact location, you’re across the street from Abbott Medical … I can get there in minutes, and I see Ruth Finnegan is there. Hi, Ruth, I know you must have a lot to say about this, but I can’t wait for that, I have to come and get Joey immediately. I still can’t believe this, Joey, Joey, Joey! My little brother, thank you Dear God of the Heavens or Whoever brought Joey back to us! Was it Lucky? Do you think it was Lucky who brought you back, Joey?”

Ruth smiled weakly but nodded reassuringly in response to Natalie, undesirous of interrupting the flow of conversation between the long-separated siblings. Joey glanced at the adults in the room with him, as if looking at them could change or clarify something, but they maintained silence. Finally, he returned his attention to Natalie saying, “I don’t know where Lucky is, Natalie. He’s hiding again, maybe in some cliff face somewhere. And I’m not going anywhere by myself, Natalie, it’s too cold outside and I’m not dressed for it, I’m just wearing the summer clothes I had on in Senegal where it was eighty degrees. I’ve never been in this city before and it’s snowing and I don’t even have a jacket. Please come and get me, I don’t know anybody here, just these folks who were in this office where I woke up. One of them says he’s a doctor, but I don’t know about that, he’s just a teenager. Please come right away and bring me a warm coat and boots or something. It’s like below zero or something out there, but you know that since you’re here too.”

Natalie replied, “Don’t worry about that, you’ll find out you’ll be perfectly okay without warm clothes. I’ll be there in about seven minutes. Don’t worry, I’ll come in my A-V and get there in a flash. I love you Joey, nothing’s changed, we’re still the same family, we all love you and we missed you like you wouldn’t believe! Wait for me and don’t even think about going

anywhere, okay?”

“I love you too, Natalie. Please come right away, I want to go home, I want to be with you and Paul, not just talking to you on a crazy wall!”

Ruth told Natalie, “I’ll give Joey my APD, so he’ll be okay.”

Natalie replied, “Thanks, Ruth, see you soon.”

She disappeared from the wall screen and within minutes she came swooping into the office and hugged Joey, who again burst into tears, as did she. After a long period of unabashed embracing, Joey inquired about their parents, while continuing to weep.

“What happened to mom and dad, you gotta tell me!”

Natalie continued to embrace him while also sobbing.

“I will, they’re in a sort of suspended animation, waiting for a cure for their injuries in a car accident. Mom and dad are going to be okay, I’ll tell you on our way to my house. Oh Joey, my dearly beloved brother Joey, we missed you so much! I can’t believe I’m with you again. Oh thank you, God, thank you God!” Natalie finally calmed down enough to greet Ruth, whom she knew from the university where she took psychology classes from her.

Ruth continued to maintain her silence, again nodding to Natalie while walking towards the door, indicating her impending departure; George and the doctor followed Ruth out of the room so Joey could have privacy with his sister. Because the doctor had closed the office for the day, the three of them went out and sat in the waiting room until the siblings were done and had decided what to do next, which they had no doubt would be to go to Natalie’s home.

“Joey, let’s get out of here and go to home, if you’re done here. Do you feel healthy? Is there anything wrong, do you feel dizzy or anything?”

“I don’t feel sick or dizzy, I guess I’m all right. I feel more sick in the head than anything else. I still can’t believe I went from one year to another one half a century later from one moment to the next. I’m still thinking there must be some kind of mistake and I’m still in 2014.”

“Do you think this office is like, some kind of chakra point, and if you leave it you won’t be able to get back to West Africa and rejoin us there? But maybe you’ve been around here somewhere all this time and you have amnesia, and you didn’t just shoot forward in time.

There’s no known incident of anybody traveling in time up to now, but maybe you’re the first case. Where’s Lucky, is he the one who did this? Because if he is, then maybe he can undo it and bring you back to us in that earlier time, even if you’ve been wandering around all these years not remembering who you are or where you’re from. But if he did that, wouldn’t I remember it right now as I’m talking to you?”

“I don’t know … I don’t know. I don’t have Lucky, I don’t know where he is. Take me to your place, you can always bring me back here if I need to be here for Lucky. I want to be in your home with you, not in this office. Can we leave?”

“Yes, we’ll leave right now.”

They went out to the waiting room and apologized to the doctor and the Finnegans for inconveniencing them. Ruth didn’t bother to ask if Joey had the coin-shaped disk that served almost any purpose because she knew he didn’t have one, so she took hers out of her pocket and shoved it into Joey’s shirt pocket. Joey and Natalie then went out of the office and the building.

She and the three other three didn’t exchange contact information for future reference because the office was already registered on her APD from the conversation that occurred earlier, and she

and the Finnegans knew each other personally. Due to her excitement, it hadn’t occurred to Natalie to bring boots for Joey, so he had to walk in a gingerly fashion on the snow and ice wearing his totally inadequate, worn out sneakers; but he noticed right away when they went outside that he didn’t feel the subzero temperature in spite of his thin California socks; and he felt the force of the strong breeze but it likewise didn’t feel cold to him. They walked half a block and stepped between two stacks of balls. Natalie took a disk out of her pocket that Joey now was seeing for the third time, and one of the balls moved laterally and then descended in front of them. A door slid open, curving upwards around the exterior of the ball. The ball had no front or back because it was capable of traveling in any direction and flew automatically without a driver; the seat inside was a circular sofa with a gap only at the door. Natalie stepped into the ball and slid onto the seat on one side, and Joey followed her lead and asked, “Natalie, I don’t feel cold, something’s wrong. I think maybe I’m dying.”

“No, Joey, it’s normal, Ruth gave you her disk, which is a weather module, so it protects you from cold way below zero and even up to two hundred degrees of heat. This is an air vehicle we’re going to get into, we call it an A-V. We’re going to go straight up and then we’ll fly to my house. Don’t worry about the safety of doing this, there’s never an accident with A-Vs because of Fail-Safe technology. There used to be, when they were first invented, but the last accident was many years ago even though millions of people use them every day. I just wish we had these Fail-Safe vehicles when mom and dad were traveling in Wisconsin. Are you okay, can we leave in this or do you want me to find a ground vehicle? We don’t have to go in this thing if you prefer to roll on the surface of the street.”

“No, I guess if you say it’s safe, let’s go right now.”

“Okay, here we go!”

The A-V rose straight up fifty feet and then moved over and around buildings, accelerating at a rapid pace that seemed to Joey to quickly exceed fifty miles an hour. Natalie didn’t want to frighten Joey, so she traveled at a speed that she normally would consider a virtual crawl. On the way, they both spoke to Paul, who had rushed to Natalie’s house to greet them after she called him before she left to pick Joey up; he was viewable on a round table between them; a single video image that simultaneously oriented itself for upright viewing by both Joey and Natalie even though it should have looked upside down to one or the other of them because they were sitting across from each other. The A-V had no steering wheel because it was programmed in advance to travel to specific addresses without further user input, so after Natalie pressed on her disk to specify her home as the destination, she participated fully in the conversation with Paul without paying the slightest attention to what was occurring around them outside of the vehicle as it sped towards her house.Nobody had addresses any more, their locations were instead described as points, and A-Vs traveled from one point to another using a modern-day version of GPS; thus, if someone asked during a telecom conversation, “Where is your point?” they would see a readout of the point location in a caption at the bottom of the screen.

Within minutes, they were above a house, and as they descended Joey saw Paul standing on the flat roof, jubilantly waiving up at them. There was another tearful reunion, this time for Joey and Paul, when they landed floating sternly a few feet above the roof, and then the three of them rode an escalator into the house to the first floor; but it wasn’t like the escalators Joey was familiar with because instead of being a single piece it was in sections, and when he stepped on it

the part that was under his feet rose to form a level surface and moved down while the rest of the escalator remained in place. Natalie officially announced to Joey that he was home at last and to just relax with Paul on the sofa while she made them protein smoothies or solid food if they wanted it; they both said a smoothie was okay; Joey wasn’t yet hungry even though in calendar time he hadn’t eaten in many decades. The entire first floor was a single large room comprising the kitchen, the dining room and the living room, so they were able to continue their conversation uninterrupted while she prepared the smoothies.

The sofa and stuffed chairs in the living room were suspended in the air, like the furniture Joey saw in the doctor’s office and the A-Vs on the street including the one currently firmly floating above their roof; this was the first time he was actually aware of sitting on floating furniture. He got down on his hands and knees and looked under the sofa because he couldn’t believe it had no supports. He reached under it and ran his arm back and forth, trying to detect whatever was holding it up; maybe something that was super transparent. Finding nothing under it, Joey tentatively sat on it, and noted that it didn’t budge a bit when he did so, as though it were bolted to the floor with heavy gauge steel legs even though he had just confirmed that it wasn’t attached to anything at all. Paul was amused by Joey’s reaction to the suspended furniture, but he was too concerned about Joey’s situation to crack a smile. Paul gushed with excitement as he talked to Joey for the first time in decades.

“Oh Joey, how much mom and dad would love to see you now, we all missed you so much, we were crying every day for a year. I have to hug you again, I don’t ever want to let you go.”

Joey at first didn’t respond with words, but rather with more tears as they embraced again.

Finally, he quizzed Paul about their parents.

“Did mom and dad die? Tell me the truth about what happened to them. I can’t get any information out of Natalie, she beats around the bush every time I ask her.”

“Joey, I know you’ve already been through a lot, so I don’t want to tell you this now, but I don’t know how to avoid it. They were in a terrible car accident back in 2035. They were driving one of those ground vehicles you still see around, but that was before Fail-Safe, and they went off an embankment. I’m sorry, Joey, I’m so sorry to have to tell you this. They’re in vivocryogenic care. Their bodies are completely intact, but due to traumatic torso impact that irreparably injured their internal organs, there was nothing that current medicine could do for them, and we were told they weren’t going to survive, so Natalie and I decided to have them put into a sort of deep freeze called living cryonics that will preserve them for a future breakthrough.

In fact, replacement of every internal organ is possible now with re-generation, but they say there are still other problems they have to solve before reviving mom and dad. They even replace all four lost appendages, but the brain is still irreplaceable and they haven’t perfected the technique of replacing the heart plus other internal organs simultaneously while unerringly maintaining the life force in the patient. Considering how far re-generation has come this seems surprising, but anyway we’re patient, we’ll all stay young for hundreds of years, including mom and dad, so we’re optimistic they’ll be back with us fairly soon. There have already been unbelievable medical breakthroughs you probably don’t know about. For instance, no disease is transferable any more. People still develop internal or endogenous diseases like cancer, but nobody gets any disease from somebody else whether human or animal. This means you can’t catch a cold, and in fact most people in the modern world haven’t caught one in many years, it’s almost eradicated

along with a lot of other diseases that depended on contagion.

“Wow, You have floating furniture and all look like teenagers but you still get cancer?”

“Yeah, but it’s no big deal. Let me see if I can remember back then when we last saw you, we still got colds then, right? Well a cold was worse than cancer is now. As soon as it’s detected it’s easily cured. Nowadays you can’t get malaria, measles, chicken pox or any of that stuff. You should think about staying here if Lucky shows up and asks if you want to go back. Mom and dad will be okay fairly soon and we’ll all be together again and in a time that’s not so primitive.”

“Primitive? I guess compared to this it might be considered primitive.”

“But it’s not like this in some traditional countries, they still get colds and TB and everything because they don’t trust medical science or object to it on moral grounds. And now we have these A-Vs and other inventions that we weren’t even imagining when we last saw you in West Africa. Vehicles don’t crash any more, they all have Fail-Safe; the A-Vs are all shaped like balls, but the ground cars aren’t, they still look old fashioned, like the old days when you disappeared. Did you see one on your way here?”

“No, I was too busy talking to you and Natalie, I hardly looked down and I think I would have been spooked if I did.”

“Did we have communications everywhere like on the walls in those days in West Africa? I can’t even remember.”

“No, there was nothing like that unless you had a huge computer monitor and inlaid it into the wall.”

“Communication and all data processing is done with APD-Wall technology. It’s not restricted to a wall, but that’s what we call it.”

“But if this is really 2089, why do you and Natalie look so young after all this time?”

“We both took a medicine called the Juve. It keeps us looking young and lengthens our lifespans.”

“I can’t believe that cars have been replaced. How could everything change so fast? There were flying cars in existence in 2014 but they had wings, they weren’t round balls.”

“Some of the technological advancement since we last saw you was actually from the guy everybody now calls evil scientist that you and Lucky destroyed. They were able to salvage his data hardware and retrieved almost everything he was working on. They studied his theories and made a lot of breakthroughs just from that. No trace of his body was found in the cliff rubble except fingerprints that were never identified, so they never found out who he was. They think he may have used some kind of identity-erasing software or techniques because his name wasn’t anywhere in his work. The guy was the greatest genius in history, but his notes said he had actually been ignored and even ridiculed by all kinds of academic societies for many years. He made tons of submicroscopic black holes, including a bunch of them all around us when we were in that village that we couldn’t see because they were so small and transparent, but the French military showed up right after you disappeared and was able to detect them with a special device after the cliff was destroyed, so we avoided them and they didn’t wind up destroying anything.

Come to think of it, maybe one of them got you, but we don’t know if that’s what happened, or if Lucky did it, or what.”

“I don’t know, I didn’t see anything like that but I guess they were too small for me to see them. The last thing I remember seeing is Lucky floating in front of me.”

“A couple of Senegalese soldiers who were north of the cliffs also disappeared, and witnesses saw one of them vanish into thin air like you did, so we know he didn’t just run away or anything. In fact, now that we know where you went, maybe the Senegalese soldiers are around here somewhere, and maybe that evil scientist Reffner or whatever his name was, is around here too and didn’t die under the collapsed cliff. They found a dead guy in the burnt rubble but they said he was a guard or something, not a scientist. The entire Senegalese coastline was quarantined for weeks because of the black holes, but finally scientists said all they had dissipated and were gone so they let the locals come back to their homes around there. They determined this with the special detection device that was found in the rubble. We stayed in Senegal for more than six months looking for you and hoping that you would turn up, but you didn’t, so we finally came back to U.S., but not to Palo Alto because it was gone. But anyway, the scientific advancement from the life you knew to what nowadays we cal our New Modernity isn’t real y that radical a change when you look at historical precedent. For instance, George Washington wouldn’t have believed machines with a thousand people in them would be flying at six hundred miles an hour eight miles above the ground less than two hundred years after he was elected President.”

“Well, my teacher Mr. Sheridan told us there’s always progress in technology.”

“That goes without saying, but advancement is at a quicker pace now than the halcyon days of the early 21st Century because science has been accelerating its discoveries, especially after the work of the scientist that you killed was analyzed. I’m sorry to say that so bluntly, we’re used to saying you killed him. If you don’t like killing even evil guys, you could figure that it was Lucky who really killed him, not you. I say it like this because Lucky’s existence was never publicly divulged, so all the stories you’ll see about what happened will say that you used special kinetic powers to save New York City and that you killed the scientist. And anyway, like I said, maybe he wasn’t killed after all, he might have just moved through time, and for all we know, he could be right next door as we speak. Even though science owes a debt to him for many of the advances that we’ve enjoyed since then, of course none of it was worth the destruction of entire cities in the United States.”

Natalie poured the smoothies into glasses and brought them to Joey and Paul and then sat down on an upholstered floating chair across from them. But first she embraced Joey yet again, this time for almost five minutes, and they both wept again. Joey was running out of tears; his eyes felt dry and his face flushed red. He was relieved to see that Natalie used normal glasses for the smoothies, but when she handed one to him, it didn’t seem to weigh enough to be made out of normal glass, and it didn’t feel like plastic. Joey continued to express dismay about his present circumstances to her.

“What are we gonna do, Natalie? I don’t belong here in 2089 or whatever this is, I belong back there with all of you in West Africa when you were a kid like me. We need Lucky to send me back, but we don’t even know if we’ll ever even see him again. He never showed us anything like this on any of his screens. The only time he showed us something that hadn’t happened yet was that Senegal village with the purple flowers. I want to go back, I miss our parents. I need Lucky, I can’t take this.”

“I hate to say this, but we won’t do you any favors by avoiding reality. You might be right, you could blow a gasket or something, this could become too much for you. But it’s more likely

you’ll slowly adjust to it. Life is better in a lot of ways than when we last saw you, Joey. You’ll understand that as time goes by and you get used to the differences. Because of Advanced Electroencephalography it long ago became possible to identify and mitigate what we used to call evil in modern countries, so there’s very little crime and almost none that’s violent, compared to the hundreds of thousands of homicides that were going on every year when we last saw you. It’s still a big shock for you now because you just got here, but time heals all wounds, and you have plenty of time to get accustomed to life as it is now. For instance, if our house caught on fire, which almost never happens any more, a huge ball full of fire suppressant would be over our heads in one minute and dump so much on it that even if it was fully engulfed in flames it would immediately extinguish it. But we don’t have to give up on getting you back there, we have to start by trying to backtrack to find out if there’s any clue for getting you back to Senegal. Tell me every detail of how you woke up in that office.”

“There’s nothing to tell, I already told you everything. Lucky fixed New York, then I woke up in that doctor’s office and that’s it, that’s everything. What about Kurt and Karen and everybody? Oh my God, I just realized that Frank and Freddie and everybody else from my school must have been in Palo Alto when it was destroyed! And Uncle Jack. What about Grandpa Karl?”

“Uncle Jack was in Palo Alto, so we lost him, I’m sorry, and Frank also, but Freddie was in Sacramento so he survived. But Grandpa Karl is okay, the destruction went south only as far as Monterey. He’s a young guy too now, you wouldn’t even recognize him. But it was nip and tuck, the Juve just became available when he was on his death bed.”

“I love you, Natalie and Paul, but it’s not the same like this, it’s horrible. I need to go back and save all those cities and our people if Lucky will let me.”

Natalie commiserated, “I’m sorry, Joey. You don’t know how many tears we shed after losing so many friends and relatives like that. I don’t know what to do. Nobody knows anything about how Lucky worked, you’re still the biggest expert on his magic, and we don’t even know if he did this, sent you here to 2089, maybe it was an accretion anomaly that did it like the ones that destroyed the cities. I haven’t spoken to Jorge Donovan – you remember him, right? – for like a year or so. He’s a clinical psychologist and a really smart man, and he was working with the best academic experts, but he never heard any theory from any of them about who or what Lucky was, how he worked, or why you disappeared after he brought down the scientist in Senegal. Jorge and Chris Dorman became lifepartners after that cliff destruction – that’s what we used to call marriage in the old days, although there are still some real marriages going on. I’m sure they would have let me know if any new information about this was discovered. We can call them, but we can’t expect them to know anything because the last time I spoke to them they told me Lucky was still a mystery to everybody in the government and they were never able to reproduce the so-called anomalies that the evil scientist used for The Vanishing, or at least they claimed they couldn’t – maybe they did but they didn’t tell the public about it.”

“Yeah, Chris and Jorge said you can’t trust the government, and they should know because they worked for it.”

“They’re still around, you’ll be talking to them soon. Anyway, investigators said that a crucial part of the destructive technology the evil scientist invented was built into the special satellite dish that crashed down with him and was reduced to useless twisted metal. No design

for the dish was found on the hard drives, and no online storage that he maintained was located either. They thought he may have had a connection with an aerospace businesses in Europe, but after raiding a bunch of locations and poring over data that was seized in all of them, they never found the design for the dish, which I guess is just as well because who knows if the stupid government might have decided to add this horrible weapon to their arsenal that was insanely destructive already, and they might have even made it more lethal so they could destroy an entire continent. You can’t trust any government with such a weapon, including our own, even now when there is universal peace outside of an occasional skirmish between backward countries.

And by the way, those arsenals aren’t as big as they were before, for instance there isn’t a single nuclear weapon in the entire world any more, thank God for that. Anyway, if they had been able to decrypt the dish, they might have been able to locate the people the evil scientist was communicating with and the online storage he was using, but they never were able to figure any of that out as far as we know.”

Paul interrupted Natalie, saying, “Anyway, when we couldn’t find you, we thought Lucky took you away to wherever he’s from, maybe even to another planet or dimension; and maybe that’s where you’ve been, but you just can’t remember it and the memory of it might still come to you later, or Lucky or his pals could have deliberately erased it from you for reasons unknown.

But maybe if you go through deep memory retrieval you can manage to remember where you were all this time? But anyway, maybe what happened to you has nothing to do with Lucky.”

“If Lucky didn’t cause it, what did?”

“Maybe it was one of those anomalies or whatever they were, coming out of that cliff, and maybe you got caught up in one of them and transported through time instead of being destroyed. And if that’s true, maybe those cities weren’t actually destroyed but instead were made intangibly invisible or transported into the future like you, and if we can get you back to when we last saw you, the same thing could maybe be done with those cities. If they can send people through time, maybe they sent those cities through time and didn’t destroy them after all, but not this era because obviously we would know about it right away – you can’t miss entire cities mysteriously popping up in the world. And where would the cities land, would they land in the same place they disappeared from and push out all the sea water, maybe some time in the future, so it hasn’t happened yet? But you didn’t land in the same place, you landed thousands of miles away. I know I’m rambling, but I don’t know what else to do, I’m trying to fill you in on what’s been happening since we last saw you and trying to figure out what might have happened.

Let’s call Jorge. He and Chris are living in Milwaukee, that’s only half an hour from here by standard A-V.” “He left Arizona? I thought he loved living there.”

“Arizona left him. The Vanishing didn’t just hit the West Coast, it also hit Phoenix and a large part of the state around it.”

“Oh my God. How many places disappeared?”

Paul placed his thumb on his APD and pressed on it ostentatiously for Joey’s edification, since he needed to start learning about its functions, and a map showed on the wal with the areas denoted in bright red that were wiped out during The Vanishing. While Joey was looking at this, Natalie touched her disk and immediately on a side wall a huge blue screen appeared. Jorge Donovan) was displayed on it. He looked at least ten years younger than he was when Joey last

saw him, and about the same age as Natalie and Paul; effectively another teenager like everybody else Joey had met so far. Joey gathered that there were few if any people in this modern world who looked older than a teenager, but that some who were born only a dozen or less years in the past must look younger; he hadn’t laid eyes on a child yet during his brief time in this strange new world, but that didn’t mean there weren’t some around.

His imagination fantastically speculated, Maybe they’re all in a nightmare Matrix room, hooked up to machines and keeping all of these adults alive for hundreds of years?

“Joey! You’re Joey Blake! You’re back!”

“Hi, Jorge. Yeah, I’m back, but I want to go back to where I was before I came back. My mom and dad were perfectly okay then and now they’re like, sick unto death or something.”

“Where were you before you came back?”

“In West Africa, in Senegal. Natalie says I disappeared.”

“You sure did. We scoured half of Senegal looking for you. Are you okay?”

“Yeah, everybody keeps asking me that, but I feel completely normal.”

“Tell me what happened. Never mind, I’m on my way to see you right this minute. Is that okay, Natalie?”

“Sure, come on over. Lunch will be waiting for you, so don’t be late. And bring Chris if you can.”

“You can bet on that!”

The screen turned blue and then went blank. Paul began theorizing again about Joey’s excessive youth. “Joey, do you think you used the Juve to make you that young, but now you don’t remember using it?”

Natalie said, “Paul, are you saying Joey took the Juve and then suffered amnesia and he’s been somewhere around here lost or invisible all this time?”

“No, I’m not really saying that, but where else could he have been? That theory doesn’t explain how he vanished right in front of our eyes and was flat-out solid gone. He didn’t just fall into a hole or anything, dozens of feds searched all around the area for days. But we don’t really know that he jumped through time straight to 2089. Maybe he has been around here somewhere – like you said, invisible – and he’s that young because he took the Juve. Like you said about those cities, maybe he was still around but he became intangible so we couldn’t find him, especially if he was in Minneapolis instead of Senegal.”

“I don’t know anything about any Juve. Like I said, I only remember Senegal before I woke up in that doctor’s office.”

Natalie explained to Joey, “The Juve is a liquid that people started taking a few years ago.

Believe it or not, it was developed from one of the discoveries of the evil scientist. It turns you back to the age of a juvenile even if you’re old, and it rejuvenates your body to the condition you were in at that younger age, so they named it the Juve. That’s why Paul and I look so much younger than we should look decades after you disappeared. Everybody that takes it can live close to four hundred years, though of course nobody has yet, and we have no idea what we’ll do for that long. The limit is expected to increase substantially as the science is perfected. They already found a way to lengthen the lifespan even further to nine hundred years but they haven’t applied it yet because experts are debating whether living longer than that could be more of a boring curse than a wonderful blessing.”

“But doesn’t that mean overcrowding for the planet?”

“The population will grow at an enormous rate because of the Juve, but there is still plenty of empty land around and we have plenty of room on Mars and other celestial bodies where we can put more and more people all the time because its habitability is being steadily improved.

And agriculture is producing far more on earth than when we last saw you because if the seeds are vaccinated, crops are also immune to cross-traveling diseases the same way humans are.

Mom and dad also look as young as we do, which I know would confuse you, but we’re used to it because everybody looks young except people we call trads, which means they’re traditional and don’t use the Juve or vaccination for communicable disease immunity.”

“Trads? What are trads? There are people living on Mars?”

“There are thousands of people living on the moon, tens of thousands on Mars and even a few hundred on smaller bodies, we’ll show you all that today, you can watch a livestream of them walking around in real time. And trads are what we call members of traditional societies, and there’s only a few of them in the entire world. We don’t call them trads as a pejorative because we respect their decision to preserve their old way of life. They also do other trad activities like marrying and furniture in their homes that have legs on them instead of floating, and all that is okay with us, we respect it but most Americans prefer the modern life. A lot of it is like it was in your previous time just before you showed up here because they only drive ground vehicles that crash into each other and kill each other and pedestrians. Here we haven’t had any kind of vehicle crash or pedestrian killing in over thirty years, and you can be sure we don’t want to go back to that kind of perilous everyday existence and prefer being able to walk around everywhere without fear of being mowed down by anybody. Anyway, I guess Paul is thinking that maybe you took the Juve and just forgot that you took it because of the trauma of becoming invisible or something, and maybe you finally became visible in that doctor’s office.”

“I’m pretty confused by all this. I sure don’t remember any Juve.”

“How about if I call Ruth, the lady who was in the doctor’s office with you? She’s a psychologist, so this could be right down her alley. Is it okay with you if we cal her? Did she have any ideas about what happened to you when she talked to you in that office?”

“No, she didn’t say anything about that, just that she was sorry about what happened. She really didn’t have time to say anything about it, she seemed as surprised to see me as I was to see her and so was everybody else in that office. Go ahead and call her, she seemed like a nice lady, maybe she can help us.”

Paul suddenly lit up with an idea, saying, “Hey Joey, I remembered something that I forgot about until now. We discussed this way back when, and decided that Lucky must have known about the evil scientist, otherwise what’s the probability that Lucky alighted by chance on the face of a cliff that was a stone’s throw from where the evil scientist had his doomsday machine in the middle of nowhere on the West Africa coast, thousands of miles from your home in the back in California?”

“I didn’t think of that, I guess because I didn’t find out about it until just before I vanished myself from that time and landed here.”

“There’s really no chance that it was a coincidence, let’s face it – or at best a chance that’s so astronomical it’s not even worth considering. Freddie ran the numbers and came up with a low probability with a huge exponent like 1014. But we shouldn’t start thinking that Lucky set the

evil scientist up with the ability or facility to commit his crimes, and that’s why he knew where the scientist was.”

“No, I’m not thinking that at all.”

“That’s what skeptics will insinuate if you talk to them about this, but we know better, so we can absolutely reject that scenario. I’m just mentioning it because that’s what people are going to tell you if they don’t know Lucky like we do. We know that Lucky is good, so we know that Lucky isn’t carrying out a series of bizarre experiments by alien creatures to see how we’ll react, either. Karen, Chris, Jorge and everybody else who knows Lucky feels the same way we do about him and his goodness. We can’t start doubting him.”

“Don’t worry about me doing that, Paul, that’s off the table.”

“That’s what skeptics will insinuate if you talk to them about this, but we know better, so we can absolutely reject that scenario. I know Lucky is good and didn’t help the evil scientist that was almost like the equivalent of the probability that humans just like us were living on Mars – now we are living there, but there was zero probability for it then. We shouldn’t start thinking that Lucky set the evil scientist up with the ability or facility to commit his crimes, and that’s why he knew where he was hiding in that cliff.”

“I told you, I’m not thinking that.”

“I’m just mentioning it because that’s what people are going to tell you if they don’t know Lucky like we do. People are a lot nicer and more trusting now than they were back then, but this is an unusual case that spark some sharp questioning from people who aren’t in the know about what’s really going on with Lucky. Not everybody is totally enlightened, especially in the traditional countries that are still a round.”

“We know that he’s is good, so there’s no point in us playing the devil’s advocate and saying that Lucky was in on the doomsday racket and helped or made it happen. We also know that Lucky isn’t carrying out a series of bizarre experiments by alien creatures to see how we’ll react to all these weird disasters. He’s just not like that.”

“Kurt, Karen, Chris, Jorge and everybody else who really knows Lucky feels the same way we do about him and his goodness, but Karen went off to an isolated life because she’s depressed about losing her loved ones. She became desolate and eventually banished herself to a remote Nepalese mountain village. Please don’t waver in your confidence in Lucky, Joey, we need him as our friend, so we can’t start doubting him in any way whatsoever. He brought you to him in Senegal even though he could have shown us everything with his screen no matter where we were in the world, but I don’t care why he steered us right next to him as long as he sincerely helps us.”

“He has his reasons, and I just hope he also has his reasons for why I’m here and not still back in Senegal preventing those cities from being Vanished. We’ll have to wait and see, but I won’t doubt Lucky, so don’t worry about that.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that, even though I already knew you felt that way. We have to keep our heads clear and our eyes wide open at all times. We have to be strong or people even in this time of great harmony will beat us down emotionally.”

Natalie called Ruth Finnegan and they compared notes to try to figure out alternatives to Joey having shot forward through time from Senegal in 2014 directly to Minneapolis in 2089 but were unable to come up with any new theories beyond the conjecture that they already had rather

haphazardly discussed. Ruth had done some research that appeared to confirm Joey’s description of the events in Senegal, but after much discussion with the doctor and her husband, Ruth had arrived at no ideas that sounded like good prospects to Natalie for explaining where he was for three-quarters of a century. Although The Vanishing was the worst catastrophe ever in recorded world history and occurred in their own country, it had begun to recede towards becoming a historical footnote for much of the world including for Ruth – though not for those who lost loved ones in that unspeakable conflagration, most of whom were still alive because of the Juve.

Some tourists who came to the U.S. went on trips to view the areas that were devastated by The Vanishing, which rankled many Americans; as though viewing the locations of this tragedy were the same as visiting the Grand Canyon, an American treasure that was barely spared destruction by a margin of only a few miles. The sight around the edges of some of the areas that were hit but not inundated by the sea was in fact remarkable, the destruction had occurred in a perfect circle, with a clear boundary and leaving half of some houses and trees still standing after their other half perished, and roads and hills were a similar mind-boggling sight to behold on the edge of a fifty-foot drop. Although Americans were much more enlightened than they were at the beginning of the century, they still had a tendency to rubber-neck and were still fascinated by catastrophic events as long as they and their own people weren’t victims of them. One perfidious character had turned a half building into a tourist trap complete with museum and restaurant, with buses pulling into its parking lot daily full of gawkers who failed to appreciate the solemnity of these locales. He installed a transparent superplastic platform protruding from it into the yawning gap so people could step out over the artificial canyon that shortly before had been the location of skyscrapers and other vibrant urbanity.

Time travel, disappearance into a black hole, becoming invisible or Lucky’s magic were still the only ideas that Ruth and company could think of as possible explanations for Joey’s experience. And an unconscious invisibility during all those decades only seemed viable if it was of a ghostly variety and if he remained for years in the same place after he disappeared because he would surely have bumped into somebody among the huge crew that was looking everywhere for him on that beach, as well as various objects that were all around him for all those missing years. Even a place right in the area of the fairly remote Senegalese village was populated enough for someone to probably have stumbled across him. Ruth agreed to have some sessions with Joey to discuss his experience, try to help him remember what happened to him, and maybe help him adjust to his new life in case he was stuck in it and couldn’t go back to his Senegal days.

She thought she might be able to help ameliorate his feelings of alienation and anxiety by reminding him of some positive aspects, such as the prospect of Lucky at some point returning and fixing everything again, and also being able to visit his parents in vivocryonics and being able to look forward to their resuscitation and reunion with him as soon as medical science was able to repair their injuries. Joey would be her most unique patient, but ultimately he was a child and all children were unique in their own way, so she would just exercise her usual unconditional positive regard and hopefully be able to help him through the most difficult part of these changes in his new and currently inescapable life. This was a challenge far beyond any previous in her long career, but she was relatively confident that she would be able to help him. During the following week, Joey met with her daily for two hours, and with each passing day she noted his

resilience and his willingness to meet his new experiences head on rather than becoming morose or fatalistic about his status in what he continued to regard as the future rather than as the time he no longer inhabited.

It seemed likely that his ultimate adjustment would come, but perhaps very slowly.

2: REUNITING WITH JORGE AND CHRIS Chris and Jorge were still working at the same jobs as when they last saw Joey in Senegal, but their work was humdrum and routine compared to the excitement of Chris fighting spies and Jorge investigating psychic phenomena and UFOs during the Stadium Miracle days, but was also free of the ominous government secrecy that prevailed when they last saw him. If they had a choice in the matter they wouldn’t choose to return to the earlier days of excitement with Joey and the kids and live without the wonderful human advances that had gradually become accustomed to as the vital environment of their lives since that time. The NSA no longer existed, nor did DHS or the CIA in this brave new world of global harmony that had finally upended all attempts at global hegemony; these agencies had long since been reconfigured into a relatively innocuous entity that did mostly research and intelligence gathering, and had been folded into a department that was simply named the United States Service, which was a very low key, even languid agency by comparison to the beginning of the century and now had only two hundred active agents.

Chris and Jorge reported Joey’s reappearance to their D.C. office and received what appeared to be a ho-hum, routine confirmation of receipt thereof and a request that they keep the office informed – and that was it: After decades without significant threats from foreign or domestic enemies, complacency had set in and Joey’s reappearance failed to cause a stir.

Consequently, his reappearance that should have provoked a world-wide sensation instead received scant attention from the government and only a subsequent blurb of a report in news sources all over the globe. They were very surprised that no tumult resulted from the news that Joey had turned up after half a century without knowing how he got to where he was, a drastic contrast to the year 2014 when multiple governments furiously sought an explanation of the miracles he wrought before he disappeared.

They were a bit dismayed by this at first because they felt that their bosses clearly should be more interested instead of assuming it was basically a nothing story. They knew that if they contacted the scientific community directly they should find a more receptive response, but they became concerned that stirring up a furor about Joey might disrupt what was already going to be an extremely difficult adjustment for him without him being the topic of a publicity hullabaloo.

Their previous, protective relationship towards him didn’t skip a beat, as they continued to regard his welfare as being of the topmost priority for them rather than even the benefit society could gain from studying his experience because it could potentially turn him into a glorious guinea pig; they were less concerned about his siblings or Kurt, all of whom had become settled long ago in humdrum lives unconnected to any disasters.

They both still worked in the field and at home and very occasionally in an office, as they were already doing when Joey disappeared over half a century earlier; but now almost all Americans and Europeans did the same. The ubiquitous home commuting in New

Modernity nations that employed A-V, Fail-Safe, the Juve, anti-gravity, unbreakable encryption, contagion immunity, APDs, etc., substantially mitigated the anticipated population increase from the recently and drastically lengthened lifespan, as former work buildings were converted into residences; there was widespread conversion of commercial properties, underway, including financial buildings such as banks, insurance and investment offices, because the invention of APDs had eliminated the need for clearing houses of financial and other information. The ADPs handled personal finances and communications, had a capability of recording and displaying videos, provided body protection of various types including normally lethal heat and cold, , and took care of just about everything else needed for modern life, including constraining pets to keep them from running or wandering off, so they were always walked without leashes; and the near-disappearance of crime resulted in ferocity being engineered out of canines, except for in rural or wooded areas where bears or wolves remained a danger to humans. These disks worked everywhere and displayed communication screens on any object, such as walls and floors, thereby needing no projection capability; even adjusting to roughness such as that of tree bark to display a perfect picture. These were among the many advancements that had been either dug up and applied directly or based on data from the hard drives found in the cliff rubble that had been Klaus Radder’s personal and professional workplace.

The less developed trad nations were decades behind the U.S. and Europe in the development and application of technology, many of them rejecting favorable advances including the Juve, which was illegal to distribute in a third of the world’s nations, carrying in some cases punishment with a death penalty, which had been abolished by all but a dozen of the world’s two hundred nations. Much of the world remained predominantly traditional, picking and choosing from even the most beneficial discoveries; for instance some of them rejecting the medical breakthrough that eliminated the transfer of diseases from one organism to another; which was applied in a vaccine form to human fetuses in advanced countries but hadn’t been enacted globally because of traditionalist resistance to its universal application. A method of building this immunity into DNA hadn’t yet been achieved but was in the works. Similarly, after geneticists had successfully differentiated anger from rage and developed the ability to palliate the latter, advanced countries turned into near-clones of Sweden and Norway, with mildmannered populations and drastically reduced crime rates.

The advanced countries made no attempt to proselytize their technological marvels, preferring to let the old fashioned nations stew in their juices and come around to the superiority of the New Modernity of their own accord – or never, if that was their preference. The advanced countries were undisturbed by this rejection of the substance because they were accustomed to traditional intransigence, and anyway, not every modern person was convinced that their life was better than even Neanderthal existence almost a hundred thousand years earlier. Due to the severe ban of the Juve there was no illegal market for it in trad countries as nobody wanted to be executed for being found with it or spend hundreds of years in prison if they were discovered to have taken it, so almost all of those who wanted to apply it to themselves first immigrated to modern countries or quickly sought refuge in them after ingesting it because the few who elected to remain in their trad countries would eventually be found out if they took it as teens and remained that way for years thereafter, but those who took it later in life would be found out immediately because they instantly lost years and even decades. New Modernity human rights

organizations were lackadaisical and therefore didn’t keep tabs on how many trad prisoners there were due to their illicit availment of the Juve; torture, political imprisonment and other such abuses hadn’t been reported anywhere for many years, so there was no longer a major human rights movement.

The Juve had an additional, unexpected and unexplained effect of curing most ailments and diseases – though oddly not those that were inherited – but scientists and geneticists were unable to assure the public with confidence that New Modernity advances would remain beneficial in the long run, so for traditional societies the jury was still out on that score if nothing else. Partly due to this lack of assurance, many traditionalist countries rejected all modern technology including rage abatement and retained their bickering ways, even continuing to engage in wars with each other, though this was reduced by the role model and persuasive example set by the countries that had reduced rage in their societies – the days of terrorist hotbeds and nations that were tinder boxes were long gone. Unfortunately, their wars were just as real as in bygone days, with hundreds or thousands killed before some kind of peace settlement or armistice was finally arranged. However, this was far superior to early 21st Century wars that killed untold millions.

Their boss was no longer Vernon Preston, but he remained their loyal friend, which had been noted by higher officials who regarded this relationship with dissatisfaction due to their strong suspicion that they had been less than forthcoming in their reports about the events surrounding the home invasion of the McCarty residence; Chris and Jorge feigned ignorance about Lucky’s existence and capabilities to protect Joey and his friends and left Lucky out of their reports altogether, for instance attributing the Stadium Miracle to psychic phenomena. Vernon stood up for them during squabbles about the suspicion that they prevaricated in their reports and were behaving more like the children’s praetorian guard than like government officials; banging his desk during meetings, vociferously defending them as career agents of exceptional probity and character. He conceded that they may not be revealing everything but insisted that if they weren’t they must have a good reason for it and insisted that the judgment of agents in the field historically had a better track record than that of their bosses.

Eventually, primarily to a helplessness towards the unprecedented nature of what Joey seemed to be able to produce, Vernon was able to wear down his bosses and obtain their acquiescence to his benign approach towards Dorman and Donovan. His behavior was a fundamental violation of the command line exigency of his agency bordering on insurrection, but because he was otherwise highly regarded he weathered the storm; essentially. His bosses were afraid to officially lower the hammer on any of the parties in this matter, not just Chris and Jorge but everybody including Joey and Kurt. They dismissed the fact that Joey was the one shown in a video as looking at his hand just as the foot race was concluded as some kind of prescient or otherwise anticipatory ruse by the two boys and mistakenly concluded that Kurt rather than Joey was the boy with the exceptional powers and hatched a plot to sequester him for safekeeping if nothing else,.

Chris and Jorge were called to D.C. for debriefing and passed polygraph examinations during which they falsely denied that they were withholding information. Passing them was easier than it might seem. During his work as a clinical psychologist, Jorge had studied polygraph technology and was able to train Chris in how to make false statements that fooled the polygraph. The President, feeling burned that Kurt had been abducted by the NSA during the

investigation without his approval, issued an executive order prohibiting their detainment or coercive techniques being used during their questioning, so the polygraph was all that was applied, and they beat the system. He had become fed up with the shenanigans going on in his own spy agency and eventually sacked most of its officers, replacing them with recent university graduates who were vetted to make sure they had the common sense and common decency that he had found sorely lacking in the personnel that he fired. Ultimately, barring new evidence that their denials were false, the decision came down that there were no grounds for disciplining the Dynamic Duo, known within the agency by the moniker D&D that was sardonically meant to have both that meaning and Dorman and Donovan; but Vernon’s bosses decided to send him out of Washington to South America, vaguely aiming to reduce in the long run the close geographic connection between him and these two underlings to something far less than it was during the Stadium Miracle days.

At any rate, in the short run they valued Vernon’s rapport with them as potentially accruing a future benefit for the agency in the ongoing national security investigation of The Vanishing. In fact, because Jorge spoke Spanish and Vernon didn’t, their short term proximity was concluded to be useful, so Jorge was assigned to accompany Vernon to Colombia to spend two weeks helping orient him to his new assignment. They hoped this would be far enough away from the children to obviate personal contact from them and perhaps further mischief in their collusion, and meantime they monitored them to see if they could discover what it was that they were obfuscating – as it turned out, without success. While in Colombia together, they traveled to Venezuela to see the city and the mountain next to it that were destroyed and then undestroyed

by Lucky; a double event that was largely undisputed due to witnesses who were outside the city and had testified that they saw both disappear and soon after reappear, as well as even more incontrovertible videos that confirmed the double event. The Venezuelan government, which at the time was highly suspicious of the U.S. and had therefore refused to cooperate with American investigators, eventually relented and participated with them due to their fear that another disaster could befall them that could perhaps been avoided if the source of the strange occurrences wasn’t ferreted out.

After receiving full Venezuelan cooperation to investigate the phenomenon on site, CIA analysts concluded that since most of these witnesses had been interviewed and appeared to know little or nothing about similar bizarre sightings suspected to be connected to the phenomena that included the Stadium Miracle in which collapsing bleachers and the bodies of people who had been crushed by them were reconstituted, the Venezuelans were credible; the logic being that if they had heard of these previous events, they could have been influenced by them. But as Jorge and Vernon expected, when they arrived at Valencia they found that it looked like a typical urban area; because in the inexplicable misreality had been forced on an uncomprehending world, no catastrophe had actually occurred there, nor there was there a forecast of a repetition or other recurrence of the event.

Monitoring Vernon and Donovan turned out to be futile for the NSA because Donovan continued to keep his friend, boss and colleague in the dark about Lucky, only hinting that there was more he could tell him than he had thus far. During the one night that they stayed together in a Valencia hotel room, at one point Vernon broached the topic of what really happened in California, but Donovan just looked at him, smiled and then changed the subject; moreover,

Vernon was tired of all the NSA infighting about this issue and didn’t press him for details and didn’t even so much as mention to him the ferocious battle he undertook to defend him in NSA offices. The NSA didn’t really expect to learn anything from two of their own agents who were very well versed in surreptitious snooping, but they deemed it worth a try. After Jorge returned to the U.S. from Senegal, he and Chris were ordered to route all future contacts with Vernon through the agency; his supervisory status over them was ended and never restored, but their friendship was indestructible.

Jorge and Chris arrived at Natalie’s house and were greeted warmly by her family, including Joey. Although Joey had already seen Jorge on the wall screen, he was nevertheless taken aback to see them standing before him looking like teenagers because they had both been around thirty years old when he last saw them in real life; this experience did precious little to help Joey begin to adjust to his newfound environment, but it something he would have to get used to unless Lucky showed up and returned him to his rightful time. Because so many decades had suddenly flown past him, he knew that he may be in for many other difficult adjustments in the very near future. After the mutual expressions of joy that Joey had returned to their lives, they all sat down to discuss what to make of his sudden reappearance. Jorge began the discussion.

“Joey, do you remember seeing a big Lucky screen that he showed us after the cliff was destroyed in Senegal?”

“No, I only saw his small one when he showed me the guy who was causing all the trouble inside the cliff. This time I didn’t see a big Lucky screen like the one we saw at Kurt’s house before he flew off into outer space or whatever. A man I talked to in the car on the way up the Senegal coast pointed at the cliff and said the troublemaker was in it or on it or something, and when I looked at Lucky I saw that he was right, but I never found out who the man was or how he knew this.”

“Oh, that was an American named John Dayton. I haven’t talked to him in years, but he’s still around, going back and forth between Paris and Connecticut most of the time. He knew someone was in that cliff because for some reason he sneaked up to it and discovered the basement, or maybe he sent someone else there who discovered it, I don’t remember how that played out, so much time has gone by. No connection was ever made between and Lucky showing up in the purple flowers just a few yards from the evil scientist and Dayton finding his cliff hideout, but nobody believes it was a coincidence.”

“Actually, I didn’t ask Lucky to show me the troublemaker, I only asked him to show me if there was something in the cliff like Mr. Dayton suggested that I do, and Lucky showed me on his small screen the guy with targets on a map and one of them looked like it was right where New York City was, so I assumed he was the one who the convoy commander said had just attacked it. Anyway, after I asked Lucky to stop him, he went blank for a few seconds and I wasn’t sure anything was going to happen. But then he suddenly smashed the whole cliff, and that’s the last thing I remember before I woke up in the doctor’s office here in Minneapolis.

There was a helicopter right above it when it happened, so maybe it bombed the cliff and it wasn’t even Lucky who did it. Is that what happened?”

“So you didn’t see the big screen, we’ve always wondered about that. When we saw it, we stared at it, so we didn’t notice if it appeared before or after you vanished into thin air. If we had any inkling that anything like that could happen to you we would have stared at you, but we had

no clue about that so we just looked at the cliff and Lucky’s screen. No, the helicopter didn’t destroy the cliff, we know that. The pilot said the only weapons on the chopper were automatic rifles and that nobody fired them, and the forensic tests confirmed that and turned up no explosives residue in the cliff ruins. Besides that, none of the dozens of personnel standing right there saw anything come out of that chopper and nothing like that showed on videos made from multiple angles.”

“I figured Lucky did it, I just didn’t know for sure.”

“Nobody but you and John Dayton who was standing next to you saw the small screen on Lucky with the man sitting looking at computer monitors, and Dayton also said it went blank for a few seconds before the cliff came down, but he wasn’t sure how many, maybe twenty or thirty.

And now we finally know for sure that what he said, which is that you were gone by the time Lucky went blank or just after Lucky went blank and before the big screen appeared, was accurate. He said that you and Lucky’s screen disappeared simultaneously” “So he told you what happened, otherwise you wouldn’t have found out until now.”

“He underwent hypnosis to try to recall the exact sequence of events, but he gave two versions, one of you disappearing before the big screen in the sky and one after. Apparently, his subconscious didn’t firmly register the sequence of these two events. I never considered that knowing this would really help, but I was trying to piece every minor detail together just in case something turned out to illuminate what happened. Only Chris and Natalie and I saw the big screen, nobody else, not even Kurt, and none of the dozens of soldiers who were right there all around us. We talked to everybody, so we know that. Not even Paul saw it, right Paul?”

“No, I didn’t see it. I was right there with Joey and I could see him looking at Lucky in his hand and talking to John Dayton about what they saw, but I didn’t find out what that was until John told me afterwards. Lucky always had that strange pattern, where some people could see him and others couldn’t. Even the same person who previously saw him couldn’t the next time, or vice versa, but Joey always saw him. This includes Kurt, so maybe it was a way of Lucky telling us that ultimately he only answered to Joey.”

Natalie said, “The big screen looked just like the one we saw that night after you saved Kurt, and by the way, he’s on his way over here, but he’s further away in Austin so it’ll be at least an hour or so by the time he gets here. Paul called him while we were on my way here from the doctor’s office, but we didn’t show him to you because he’s your best friend and we thought you might be shocked to see him looking almost twenty years old instead of the same age as he was when you last saw him. But at least you won’t have the shock of seeing how old he would be if he hadn’t taken the Juve, he would be a senior citizen. You can talk to him right now while he’s en route if you want to.”

“I’ll talk to him when he gets here, if I’m still around and Lucky hasn’t carried me off to some other time or place. Is Karen Hansen okay? She wouldn’t look all that much different if she took that Juve because she was sixteen the last time I saw her. Are you sure this Juve doesn’t hurt you, like give you cancer or something? You said you can still get internal diseases, and maybe it will cause one.”

Karen had bitterly withdrawn from the world after she lost her family in The Vanishing and was living in an isolated mountain hut in Nepal the last they heard about her. They hadn’t heard from her in years, so Paul quickly changed the subject by saying, “Yes, she’s okay and living a

peaceful life in the Himalayas. Joey, you were never a negative kid before, but hearing your concerns about the Juve is a joy because you’re being negative for the first time since you were mad at Lucky at Kurt’s house. I’ll take you any way I can get you, after all this time away from you!”

“That sounds good, Paul, but really I’d rather you went poof with your hand and I disappeared again and went back to where I was with you before all these flying balls were buzzing around everywhere. When can we see mom and dad?”

Natalie said, “Tomorrow, we’ll go first thing in the morning. Today you have a full schedule for rekindling old friendships.”

Jorge asked, “So you don’t have any idea where Lucky is? When he destroyed that cliff, was that the last time you saw him? John said Lucky disappeared at the exact moment you did when you were holding him in your hand.”

“That was the last time. I looked in my pockets as soon as I woke up in that doctor’s office and he wasn’t in any of them. I don’t have any idea where he went or if he’s coming back. I hope he comes back soon and takes me back to where I belong. I’m sure he will, he wouldn’t do this to me, leave me stuck here for no reason.”

Jorge said, “Chris and I still work for the old National Security Agency, but it’s not called that any more. There haven’t really been any enemy threats for decades, so there’s not much skullduggery going on compared to when we last saw you. But maybe you didn’t come straight to 2089, you could have been around somewhere and forgotten about it. I know you already said that Senegal is your last memory, but try remember any events at all after the cliff destruction.”

“No, in my last memory cars were all on rubber wheels and had fenders and bumpers and rolled on the ground. Do those balls have headlights and tail lights? I didn’t even notice.”

“Actually, there are still a few cars around with rubber wheels for ground travel, but they don’t have fenders and bumpers because they’re all powered by Fail-Safe, so crashes just don’t happen at all. And the A-Vs don’t have headlights and tail lights because nobody drives by looking, everything is automated. You must have noticed that when you came here with Natalie, but all the features in these vehicles are difficult to describe to you, it’s better to do that the next time you’re in one. So are you ready to talk to Kurt now or do you want to wait ‘til later when you’re more accustomed and focused?”

“From what you’re all telling me, he might not even remember me, and anyway he’s another teenager like you guys.”

Natalie said, “I’m sorry Joey, I can’t even imagine how difficult it must be for you. If you can go back, we’re all for you doing that, but if it’s any consolation at all, life is much better now, people are much saner and healthier, they live way longer, and I’m sure you’ll get used to it, but I hope you won’t have to. And just because Kurt looks older that doesn’t affect your friendship. You still have that, and lots of memories, including the one both you and Kurt have of you saving his life.”

“That’s not the way I remember it. I remember that I almost got his whole family killed. In fact, I did get them killed, but then Lucky reversed it and they survived after all.”

“No, it wasn’t like that. As I remember it, you got Forrest Jenkins to broadcast a warning, so the home invader was forced to run out of your house without getting Lucky. He was looking for Lucky, and who knows what would have happened if you had lost him to this criminal? We don’t

know who would have survived and who wouldn’t have. As it is now, everybody survived because you rushed over to Kurt’s house, so you should be proud of what you did.”

Jorge said, “Anyway, after all this back and forth, we still haven’t gotten around to telling you what we saw on Lucky’s big screen after you disappeared. Here’s how I remember it, and Natalie confirmed this is what she saw also. A flash streaked across it in maybe one second. It happened fast and didn’t repeat, so nobody had a chance to take a video or photo of it or anything and only two of us even saw it. Lucky’s history has been to show us something that will occur in the future, but this didn’t look like anything that would affect anybody because there were no people in the flash picture, not you or Kurt or Natalie or anybody, just the word Entity.”

“I didn’t notice any words, but maybe I just wasn’t looking at it. I was all focused on what was going to happen to Kurt, if he was going to be all right. H” “None of us had any idea what it meant, if anything, and now that we know you didn’t see it, the most rational explanation is that it meant nothing, it was just a glitch or a message that maybe we’ll never be able to fathom. After showing this to us, Lucky went blank and then up into the clouds and disappeared like he did that night at Kurt’s. And there haven’t been any recent reports of orange or yellow lights that I’ve heard of that might mean Lucky is making another appearance. You remember that there were lights like that above Big Sur right before you found Lucky there, don’t you?”

“Yeah, but we don’t really know if that’s where Lucky came from. We saw him merge with something like that in the sky, but maybe it was just a coincidence, and we don’t know where he went after that … or maybe Lucky is always around here somewhere for all we know.”

“He might be around now, even though we haven’t seen any evidence of his presence since you disappeared. And we don’t know that you’ll find him in a cliff face like you did twice before. He could show up in Manhattan for all we know. When you saw him in that dream about a valley the first time when you were fighting warriors, where did you find him then?”

“I didn’t find him, I just saw him as a big screen, I never had him in my pocket then or saw him as a small rock like I did later in Big Sur. What about you, Natalie? You were there in that valley scene with all the fighting that was going on.”

“Same thing, I only saw the big screen in that valley.”

Just then, Kurt appeared on a wall because he had been delayed and became anxious to talk to Joey, and Joey spoke to him and his family, including his parents and Teresa, who was barely more than a baby when Joey last saw her but now looked like another typical New Modernity teenager. Kurt said he was about to come to Natalie’s, and an hour later he arrived. After another emotional reunion and much rehashing of old memories, they sat down for dinner like a big happy family – Joey, Natalie, Paul, Kurt, Chris and Jorge, together again for the first time since Senegal. The first thing Kurt reminded Joey about was the fact that after months of Kurt’s own sequestration by the government, he only saw Joey for a few minutes in the Senegal village before Joey himself disappeared, so they hadn’t really compared notes in almost a year of what they gave the appellation realtime – they needed terminology that distinguished calendar years from the time that they considered to be their veritable experience.

They had a lot to remember and to discuss, but they made no headway towards figuring out how or why Joey had apparently traveled forward through time or even if he had. Kurt reaffirmed his belief that Lucky would pull Joey through this experience, one way or the other.

They could have shown Joey the results on the wall of The Vanishing, which took out four major cities in the West and Southwest, but it was an unpleasant topic; he didn’t ask to see it and nobody was anxious to look at it or show it to him unless they thought it would help solve his current mystery. He had lost almost all of his friends and family, so it wasn’t a top priority to show to him, at least until he was more acclimated to his new life. Kurt, Jorge and Chris had work to do at home in the morning, so they left before midnight, followed by Kurt, who said he would be back the next day after taking care of some matters in Austin; and eventually Joey, Paul and Natalie went to bed. When Chris and Jorge arrived home they entered their room that was dedicated to their APD work; focused now on Joey’s predicament, they both began an online search for peculiar events, especially orange lights appearing anywhere in the world. Although sitting in the same room, they looked at different walls as they researched.

“Chris, I don’t find anything. What about you?”

“Same here, no orange lights anywhere, but maybe some occurred that didn’t get into the news. We just have to keep our eyes and ears open for anything that could indicate a return by Lucky. I don’t understand why he left Joey in a lurch like this.”

“It might mean that Joey’s wrong about Lucky’s affection for him. If Lucky doesn’t really care about him, after performing all of his assigned tasks he could have just lost interest in Joey’s fate and gone off forever.”

“That may be the logical conclusion, but it doesn’t sit well with me, I just don’t buy it. I think there’s another explanation, such as Lucky’s inability to move forward this far, or that he’s biding his time for another crisis for him to solve. And is it really a coincidence that Joey landed in the same city as his siblings, who decades later were living two thousand miles away from their home when Joey was in Senegal, or did Lucky set him down there intentionally?”

“Lucky landed a stones’ throw from the evil scientist's cliff hideout in Senegal, and I don’t think that was a coincidence either – in fact, I’m sure it wasn’t one. Kurt’s buddy Frank the math whiz who got his Ph. D at Stanford told me the odds of that being a mere happenstance were more than astronomically high. These proximities could be a subtle message from Lucky to us, if we’re alert enough to notice and evaluate them. What do you think of Paul’s theory that Joey was around all this time and has amnesia?”

“You make an excellent point about the location of Joe’s reappearance, it might provide a clue about Lucky’s intentions, but I’ll need a bigger brain than I have to figure out what that clue is. And yes, Joey could have been around all this time somewhere and be suffering from retrograde amnesia, though I’m not familiar with a case in which a large past of the past is remembered. Normally with that type of amnesia all or almost all of the past is forgotten. On the other hand, we can’t compare his case to any other or even say with confidence that there’s ever been a case like his. Anything’s possible where Lucky’s concerned.”

Having found nothing of note in their research after several hours of strenuous study, they eventually retired to their bedroom to relax and enjoy, and wait to see what the morrow would bring.

3: REJECTION OF PAUL’S SURRENDER Natalie and Paul offered to let Joey sleep with them in their huge semi-circular bed, but he

declined, preferring the small one in one of their extra bedrooms that was more like what he was accustomed to in back where and when he had come from, but he asked Natalie to stay up with him in his room until he fell asleep, and she had no problem agreeing to it because they still had so much to discuss. He was perplexed that a brother and sister were evidently sleeping together in the same bed, but he didn’t ask them to explain it, preferring to treat it as a private issue that a little kid like him wasn’t up to understanding even if it was fully explicated for him. His smaller bed was also a circular floater which although it seemed rigid as if it were being held fast by standard legs when he jumped on it he wasn’t totally convinced by their assurances of its stability and knew he would have trouble getting to sleep. He finally did, but first they watched a Johnny Depp movie that she taught him how to request on his APD-Wall, explaining to him that Depp was still the number one box office star and had made over seventeen thousand films, either directing, acting, or both. The garish clothing everyone he had seen in real life and in the movie looked ridiculous to him and was almost too much, making him feel homesick for what were becoming for him the good old days. Joey was emotionally exhausted and fell asleep quickly. Seeing that he was sleeping, Natalie took off her clothes and covered both of them with a blanket. She caressed his hair while soaking it with her tears of love and joy for a long time before finally falling sleeping herself.

Joey woke up the next morning just after daylight, and while he was still in bed Natalie left the room for a few minutes and then returned, announcing that she had a surprise for him, and seconds later he saw his sixth grade teacher, the inimitable Mr. Sheridan on the wall directly across from his bed and like everyone else looking like a teenager, about half the age he was when Joey last saw him. Mr. Sheridan said, “Hi Joey, welcome home. We’re discussing hispanic culture and language. I look forward to conversing with you about your sudden return to us later when we have a chance for it.”

Then Mr. Sheridan addressed his class with, “As I was saying yesterday, there is a truism that caucasians have brains, blacks have soul and hispanics have heart. Of course, that’s a wild exaggeration because many caucasians have plenty soul and heart, plenty of blacks have brains and heart, etc. However, it’s mostly in Spanish songs that it’s said a recording artist “sings with tears in her voice”, and today we will discuss possibly the greatest example of this phenomenon – and with the most validity because it’s not only a heart-wrenching song, it can wrench a listener’s entire being as it did to me the first time I heard it after reading the lyrics for the first time. Leonard Cohen sometimes mentions at his concerts a line he happened upon by the Spaniard Garcia Lorca while browsing in a bookstore, Your thighs swam away from me like silver minnows, and Cohen goes on to explain humorously that the poet ruined his life. The first time I heard Cohen the audience laughed, but I laughed for a different reason. I didn’t even know Lorca was a poet, but I thought he ruined my life when I read his searing and stunning play, Bodas De Sangre. I was wrong because later it was a song that really ruined me.”

Mr. Sheridan said this with a smile, then stopped, turned and pointed his APD at the wall behind him where the names Frederico Garcia Lorca and Juan Gabriel appeared. Then he resumed his lecture, “Yesterday we studied the great and strikingly dramatic romantic Mexican love song Sombras, and today we’re going to examine another great Mexican bolero song Asi Fue. The main words I want to initially point out in the lyrics are me propuse and aferres. Me propuse is reflexive and literally means in this context, I proposed (an idea) to myself”,

whereupon Mr. Sheridan gestured a pair of parentheses bracketing the words an idea with his index fingers, “to myself. Or, more succinctly, I considered. Aferrerse is likewise reflexive and means to cling to. I’ll get back to the lyrics after explaining the song itself, which wasn’t written by a hetesexal but was most famously recorded by one, Isabel Pantoja. For your information Joey, we used to use the word heterosexual for this meaning, which I remembered and in anticipation of your participation in this class I researched and found was the case in 2014 when we last saw you, but we’ve long since shortened and adjusted such terminology to genderal or sexal identity, to distinguish the concept from the act of sex that really has nothing to do with identity. So now let’s get back to the ideas behind the song. It’s addressed by the singer to a former lover who had become a sudden, heart-breaking abandoner, and whom the person singing the song avers having completely replaced with a new and wonderful lover. The song posits the abandoned lover as – in spite of still painfully recalling the pain of the heart break – being so incredibly munificent and gentle as to apologize to the abandoner for causing him (or her) the pain of learning that the previous love is now gone and now totally transferred to another, and the singer even offers to remain friends with the abandoner to help him or her forget the past – olvidar el pasado. Such magnanimity within an troubled heart is arguably beyond description and epistemologically inscrutable.”

Suddenly, Mr. Sheridan was replaced on the wall a display of an opulent and extravagant breakfast laid out on a table by Paul, who smiled as he announced, “Joey, come and get it! We have a big day ahead of us and you can talk to Mr. Sheridan or watch his lecture again later.”

Natalie was still sitting on the bed and turned to ask Joey, “Is that okay, Joey? We can keep watching Mr. Sheridan’s lecture if you want to.”

“No thanks, I’d rather talk to him outside of class. I don’t even understand the big words he’s using. Is he teaching college now?”

“No, actually it’s kindergarten, these kids won’t be in college for two more years.”

“They’re already in college when they’re seven? I sure can’t go back to school if kids are in college at half my age!”

“Don’t worry about that, Joey. You can take up right where you left off in the sixth grade just like before, we’ll work it out for you.”

It looked like these video displays covering entire walls were one of the major modernities that he would have to get used to, especially people looking as big as life; he would have to find out how to reduce these sizes, at least until he got more used to them. He had thought that the fantastic power of computers were amazing, but evidently they had been replaced by some kind of APD phenomenon about which he had no clue, and since he didn’t really understand computing he didn’t expect he would ever understand APD either. An escalator took a person up to his or her bedroom in short order, and he learned early on that he was able to run up and down it as easily as he could a normal staircase by turning it off with a simple oral command. He was intrepidly determined to try to find out how to use everything in Natalie’s house without first calling for her or Paul’s assistance if possible. Only if he was totally stumped would he finally call for a rescue from them. The first thing he had to do when he got out of bed was to figure it out how to use the waterless air shower, and after some examination and experimentation he cleaned his body with it. He was modest, even around his brother, so he didn’t want anybody to help him with his personal bathing if it could be avoided. He had learned the previous day that

there were no separate bathrooms, as plumbing needs were built into every room and soaked up odors, and people were no longer bashful about anybody seeing them doing their private business; it was unnerving for him to see his brother and sister continuing their conversations with him and each other while emptying their bodies right in front of him, and if they had remembered this didn’t occur in his previous life they wouldn’t have done it, but they were so used to it they didn’t think twice about it and he was too bashful to complain; he would just have to soldier on and just do as the Romans do. He saw this behavior in the Depp movie also, so he knew it wasn’t a peculiarity of his siblings, and he assumed until he found out different that this was also true of their sleeping together in the same bed. When his siblings did this he discreetly averted his eyes while hoping they wouldn’t notice he was doing it, and now because of it he found himself struggling to find out how to empty his body, but he couldn’t bring himself to wish that he had studied how they performed this task; eventually, he did master it and was ready to shower, if he could figure out how to do it.

He was too modest to ask for assistance as he stood around wearing no clothes in his bedroom and wasn’t ready to display himself unclothed even to his own siblings yet, so he was glad that he was able to figure out the bathing process without their assistance, after a few minutes of fumbling with the apparatus that emitted a barely visible beam onto his body; he knew it was cleaning him because he could instantly feel his newfound cleanliness; but he worried that a beam could thoroughly clean a human body could also cause long-term injury. It wasn’t an altogether unpleasant sensation, partly because it was over in a jiff and in this particular case he wouldn’t arrive so late to breakfast and maybe miss out on something important.

His tentative impression was that he would prefer to feel water streaming over his body, but he assumed that he would get used to this way of cleaning his body, and he was able to appreciate the advantage of and have a wet feeling all over his body and therefore not having to towel himself down. From what he saw on a wall and the Depp movie, he knew that many people in this era walked around wearing nothing at all, and when he asked Natalie about it she explained that the APD protected them from the elements. She told him that she and Paul often wore nothing at at home and sometimes she walked all the way downtown, shopped and returned home without wearing a stitch and asked him if that’s how it was in his previous time because she couldn’t remember dressing habits that far back; and he told her everyone always wore clothes in public; he refrained from reminding her about the far different bathroom habits people had in those days.

After completing his basic duties, he put on a fresh change of Natalie’s clothes that were in the closet and were only slightly baggy on him because although she was only some kind of lateteen adult; however, Paul looked about as big as when Joey last saw him, still over six feet tall and weighing two hundred pounds. He knew the larger clothes that were also in the closet were likely Paul’s and would therefore be far baggier on him, so he didn’t even consider trying them on; and anyway in the cases that he had seen up to now, men and women wore very similar clothes, so in terms of style, Natalie’s clothes were just as appropriate for Joey as Paul’s. They had told him that there was a way for him to clean any clothes in a few seconds electronically, but they never got around to showing him how to do that, so he had no choice but to change into something that was already clean.

At any rate, fashion consciousness was the last thing on his mind at the moment as he ran down the escalator for breakfast. He sat down with Natalie and Paul for their first breakfast together since Senegal the greater part of a century earlier. They had been watching the wall for news developments – including Joey’s sudden appearance, while they waited for him. The news was out, but there was scant mention of it for some reason they didn’t understand. They had expected that either there would be no mention yet or that it would be huge headlines, even conceivably the biggest headlines in half a century or more. They felt relieved that he wasn’t a sudden cause celebre before he could handle it; he felt the same way, merely shrugging when they told him he wasn’t big news. When Joey sat down, Natalie served up an obviously concocted version of ham and eggs for her and Paul, but they remembered that Joey preferred cereal with milk, so it was sitting on the table for him, and he found it be delicious and crunchier than the crunchiest granola he had ever encountered; in flavor it was unfamiliar, like the plumbing upstairs; but in this case, unlike his use of the plumbing the cereal and milk experience was delightful. But this wasn’t a topmost concern for him, he had other fish to fry before inquiring about something as mundane as the food he was eating or how bodies were cleaned in this so-called New Modernity.

Natalie said, “Welcome to our home and yours, Joey. And our parents are right across town and will join us as soon as there’s a breakthrough that will enable us to bring them out of their suspended condition. This house is easily expandable to accommodate twenty people easily.”

“I’m glad it looks like a normal house and not some kind of weird aluminum spaceship or something. Are mom and dad deep in a vault some place where visits are difficult?”

“No, you can see them without any problem, they’re in Golden Valley, only a few minutes from here. They look very peaceful, and you could even say healthy, so you’ll be glad to see them even though you’ll be frustrated that you can’t communicate with them. Paul and I visited them last week, we never go more than a month without visiting them. But you’ll have to be ready to see them looking as young as Paul and I look because they took the Juve several weeks before the accident, and it achieves its full effect within a few hours.”

“So they’re like, comatose, they can’t talk to us?”

“Evidently they can’t hear us, but we always talk to them because we both feel like they can sense our presence. Even if we’re wrong about that, we don’t lose anything by being there with them for a half hour a week and telling them how much we miss them and how much we look forward to their recovery and being with us again. After we go and see them today if you prefer you can spend the day with us getting familiar with the modern life around here.”

“What else do I have to do in this world? I can’t imagine going to school anywhere, the teachers and students would be so far beyond me it wouldn’t even be funny. They would laugh me out of the school room.”

Paul answered, “School is like work, almost everybody does it without going to a physical location. There are some l buildings still around, but not in Minnesota. I think Wisconsin has a couple, but you might not like to commute back and forth for that until you get used to flying around in these balls. Do you want to try it?”

“I don’t remember much about the Midwest, but I think on that wall screen it showed that Wisconsin is close to here.”

“Yes, it borders this state. If you want to attend a Wisconsin semi-trad school I could get you

to one every morning in less than half an hour in my A-V.” “I can attend school there even though I don’t live in that state?”

“Sure, it’s not like the schools are a big drain on taxpayers, there’s hardly any of them left, so you could attend one in California if you wanted to, like Los Angeles or Sacramento if you don’t like the weather here, but it wouldn’t be a practical commute with the type of A-V that I have.”

“And I suppose your A-V can go, like, a million miles an hour, right?”

“No, mine tops out at eight hundred, which means California is several hours away, but HiSpeeds can travel three times faster. That’s why if you attended a California school I don’t have an A-V that’s fast enough to get there in a commute time, we’d have to leave every morning before 6 am. We don’t get affected by the Hi-Speed G force in case you’re worried about that, because of the built-in APDs, which protect someone from just about anything, not just weather … like even a small explosion right next to you, but a big one will still get you.”

“Don’t you miss California?”

“Not so much, we’re used to the weather in Minneapolis and we love the community here.”

“An explosion, like a bomb? I have to take your word for it, I don’t want something like that shielding me, I’d rather have a couple of feet of steel.”

“We don’t use steel any more, we have superpolymers that do everything steel used to do and a lot better. In fact, my bike has no metal parts in it at all. Anyway, I don’t have enough credits for one of those Hi-Speeds, but I’m saving up for one, they’re better for long distance travel, like to China or India. I went to Indonesia twice in my A-V and it took all day. The whole airplane industry went out of business a long time ago because there’s no need for it. Anybody can get a normal, ordinary A-V and travel almost anywhere in the world in a few hours. The only commercial flight operations now are to the moon and Mars. And by the way, if you want to buy a ticket to those places, money is all in credits now, I think we were still using paper the last time we last saw you.”

Joey pulled paper out of his pocket and asked, “I have five bucks right here. It’s not worth anything?”

Paul answered, “Sure, it’s worth a lot, too bad it’s in bad shape. Can you go back and get a newer one? Sorry to joke about that, I’m being insensitive, I know you really want to go back there.”

“No, that’s okay, sooner or later you have to be able to joke about anything that happens to you – that is, if you survive it in one piece.”

Natalie said “Wow, that’s a lot of wisdom for someone as young as you are. Maybe we should appoint you President of the United States.”

“That’s silly, I’m too young to run for political office.”

“Not actually, the President is in fact appointed by someone chosen randomly and our current President is younger than you. How young are you anyway, I can’t even remember after all this time went by.”

“I think I’m eleven. How old is the President?”

“He’s seven, but the job is a lot easier than it was way back when.”

Paul said, “I wonder, if you Juved your way to our age, if it might be easier to adjust to this new life if you did that.”

Natalie protested, “That’s ridiculous, Paul. Nobody ever does that. Why lose ten years when the Juve was invented to gain hundreds? He should Juve when he’s past his teenage years like everybody else does. And how do you know it would work going forward, I’ve never heard of anybody doing that. We should research before he even tries it.”

“Yeah, nobody does that, but how many cases are there like Joey? Probably none, I’ve never heard of any. I don’t even know if you can go forward with it, I was just speculating. We have to keep coming up with different ideas no matter how ridiculous they may seem because we could suddenly and unexpectedly hit pay dirt with one of them. We’re way beyond where we were when we last saw you, Joey. Except for you if that’s what you did, we can’t travel through time yet, though there’s talk about experiments going on with that as we speak. In fact, I don’t understand why the government shrugged it off when Jorge and Chris reported you reappeared, it should be all over the global news. You saved New York City, for krissakes. It’s the greatest city in the world and is still there and in one piece only because of you and Lucky. You’re the only case of one person saving a major city in all of history!”

Natalie asked, “What do you think about that, the lack of excitement about Joey showing up here decades later?”

Paul replied, “Don’t look at me, Natalie, I don’t run the government and I don’t know how the government thinks about anything. I just run a motorcycle shop.”

Joey asked, “A motorcycle shop? Do motorcycles fly through the air too?”

Paul answered, “No, they don’t, somebody started making motorcycles that flew with antigravity, but they didn’t catch on, so all of them made nowadays are still trads. Trad means they’re traditional ground vehicles with wheels on them, but they still have Fail-Safe like all other vehicles, so they don’t crash and because of this no state requires helmets any more. They ride a lot faster than the ones you last saw – I took one up to four hundred miles per hour last week. The problem is that the government is discontinuing roads between cities because almost everybody has A-Vs, so they’re not really needed. Something like ninety percent of the vehicles in the U.S. now are A-Vs, and that percentage is increasing every year. In a big city like this one it’s more like 99%. In a few years you’ll only be able to ride a bike within municipalities and not between cities. Hey, maybe you can get Lucky to cancel that plan so we can keep riding our bikes on the open roads.”

Joey smiled, “I don’t think I can convince Lucky to do something that ordinary – fix your bike business. He’s more into stuff like saving millions of lives.”

They were both smiling because they were amused by the prospect of Lucky swooping down like Mighty Mouse to save the day for Paul by restoring interstate highways to their former glory so that bikers could roll along them with their hair flying in the breeze. It was a great feeling, the three of them together, joking around like the old days, the ones before Paul turned surly and started hanging with bikers who almost murdered Kurt’s entire family – actually they did murder them, but Lucky propitiously stepped in and unmurdered them; Kurt’s family was wiped out by a hand grenade, but Lucky reversed that event, so technically it never happened; though the terrifying home invasion before the explosion remained a reality.

Paul’s mood suddenly turned sober as he realized that he was faced with the reality of his unforgotten betrayal of Joey, and that he couldn’t postpone telling him about it. After Joey disappeared, Paul had disclosed his complicity in this violent invasion of Kurt’s home to Natalie

and their parents, who then informed Kurt’s family about Paul’s involvement in the crime. After much soul searching, both families agreed to dispense with their public duty to provide the names of the conspirators to the police and asked Paul to keep quiet about it for the time being.

They felt that Paul’s arrest would be too damaging a trauma for them to go through until they could find out what Joey thought about it, and he had vanished, so he wasn’t available to either agree or disagree.

Kurt was emphatic that he didn’t want Paul arrested even if this meant that all the criminals in the conspiracy got away scot-free. Kurt knew Paul’s co-conspirators Monkey and Spidey personally, though not the grenade thrower himself, who Kurt dismissed as a rogue and psycho.

He didn’t consider Monkey and Spidey to have had any violence in mind when they cooked up this fiasco. As the years passed and Joey never appeared, they had pushed Paul’s involvement further and further back into their memories and never again discussed whether he should turn himself in; none of them could really comprehend an unintended reversed murder and preferred to put it out of their minds as long as possible.

Finally one day, Paul couldn’t take his feelings of guilt any more. He confronted Monkey and Spidey about turning themselves in, and they reluctantly agreed, as their consciences were also afflicted. They decided that all three of them had to face the music, even though they expected it would probably mean many years in prison for all of them; they made an appointment with Chris to divulge their criminal conspiracy; choosing her rather than Jorge because they knew she also functioned as a police detective whereas he was strictly a psychologist; but they requested that he be present at the appointment also. Three days before the appointment, Monkey and Spidey visited Genghis to inform him of their plan to turn themselves in, and he refused to participate in the surrender, shouting at them that they were crazy. Monkey had recruited Genghis for the attempt to steal Lucky from Kurt at his bar in Oakland that city had perished along with San Francisco; however, Genghis was out of town at the time so he survived and was resettled at another bar he owned in Sacramento, where they visited him to tell him about their plan to surrender. As they turned away from Genghis and walked out of his bar, they felt severe apprehension that he might shoot them in the back, but as it turned out, he did nothing.

None of them had breathed a word about their complicity to anyone outside of their families, and they continued their silence as the appointment time approached – Paul didn’t have the heart to tell even his own family about this plan, deciding that he would just let Jorge and Chris inform them about their arrest. Paul, Monkey and Spidey saw as their best hope the fact that they were accessories before the fact and not actual participants in the invasion to try to earn them some leniency, but they knew that they could face decades of time in prison for the home invasion, unlawful detention, kidnapping for ransom, attempted murder and other serious offenses in which they were implicated. The police had found Kurt’s parents handcuffed to chairs with gasoline all over the floor around them, and were unaware that their plight had been even worse because a grenade had exploded in their midst and immolated them because Lucky had reversed the event. Because all of the victims survived Paul thought they could hope for a sentence of under fifteen years; in his case, perhaps even less because of his heroic rescue of Kurt by kicking away a grenade and throwing his body on top of him to shield him from the blast.

At the appointment, Chris was caught by surprise to learn about Paul’s involvement and

utterly dismayed by it, as she and Jorge had come to regard him as one of their best friends; she turned on a video camera and officially questioned them for two hours about the crime. In violation of the protocols of her work, she took no immediate action such as arresting them or calling in federal marshals or police to do it, instead sending the three of them home with an admonishment not to leave Palo Alto without informing while their involvement in the crime was investigated. She then informed her boss Vernon Preston in the National Security Agency about this development, but his verbal instructions to her included none about arrest, only a terse order to send him a full report within a week.

In her report she emphasized the fact that Paul was still a teenager, that he was extremely remorseful about his involvement in the crime, and that neither he nor Monkey nor Spidey in any way anticipated any violence being perpetrated against anyone – with the decision to choose Genghis for the invasion being solely Monkey’s foolish decision and responsibility; finally, she pointed out that Paul had saved Kurt from near-certain death. Hearing nothing from Vernon for two weeks, Chris finally called him and asked what the decision was on prosecution, and Preston told her the President had pardoned Paul, Monkey and Spidey even though after watching the video of them being interviewed by her the FBI was sure they were withholding the names of not only the grenade thrower but also other accomplices; but he couldn’t tell her the reasons for the pardon and that Paul and his family should just count their blessings and leave it at that; he added that the case was considered closed, so they shouldn’t mention this matter to him again. Before even recovering from her shock of disbelief she communicated this liberating news to Paul.

Genghis was subsequently arrested and convicted for an unrelated arson that had resulted in a death and was sentenced to life in prison.

After the Juve was invented, nobody with a life sentence was permitted to use it to extend their lives and evidently none was smuggled into the prison that Genghis was able to get his hands on because the word was that he was looking every bit his chronological age of 157; as far as Paul knew, Genghis was still incarcerated in a California prison, but Joey didn’t feel any curiosity about his fate, so Paul did nothing to find out how he was. In the era of the New Modernity, criminologists and the judiciary were grappling with the question of whether a convict who was Juved should be kept imprisoned for hundreds of years, since life sentences normally didn’t mean imprisonment for the rest of a convict’s life even before the Juve was discovered; there was no question of paroling vicious murderers, but most lifers were considered capable of being rehabilitated. Genghis had been additionally convicted of homicide with two victims who were found murdered execution-style while already serving the arson sentence, so he was a borderline case who might or might not be eventually released. Because Paul was so focused on trying to find Joey for many months, eventually he basically forgot about his old biker buddies, so he didn’t keep track of what Genghis was doing or his ultimate fate, and only found out about his arrest because Chris Dorman told him about it years later.

Paul blurted out the story of his complicity to Joey, weeping at the end of his description of his collusion with the men who sent a psychotic killer into Kurt’s home. Joey immediately hugged him, also shedding tears and telling him he loved him and not to worry because they were true brothers forever and nothing in the past when Paul was a troubled teenager could change their love for each other. Finally, after so many decades had gone by, Paul had divulged his criminality to everyone in his family, and although his feelings of guilt weren’t erased, at

least it was no longer a painful secret that he kept from his loved ones.

After this revelation, Paul’s shoulders shook as he and Joey and Natalie all hugged each other and wept with abandon for a long time.

4: JOEY TOURS HIS NEW WORLD Because work schedules were flexible and based on an honor system, Paul and Natalie had no trouble finding time to spend with Joey, both to renew their relationships and to orient him to a vastly different world than the one to which he was accustomed. They fixed Joey up with his own APD and started out right after breakfast flying in Natalie’s A-V, which had remained suspended a few feet above her roof since they debarked from it the day before, to view their parents at the living cryonics site in the nearby suburb of Golden Valley; and then they returned directly home after returning Ruth’s APD her, though she had others she could put into service.

Due to the APD Joey didn’t need to bundle up with even a light jacket before going out; they had adequate all-weather protection from their APDs even though it was colder than normal for Minnesota in December. Minnesota was still one of the coldest places in the nation and on this morning remained below freezing after plunging near zero the night before. Joey told them he preferred to wear a warm coat on his first outing even if he didn’t need it, but they didn’t have one for him or even jackets; the APDs were so effective everyone in major cities was down to shirt sleeves and jeans in their wardrobes no matter what weather they experienced. Rather than wear multiple layers of shirts, Joey finally decided quite reluctantly to just go with the APD function and see how it worked for him; they could always turn back if he felt uncomfortable.

Cities that suffered stultifying heat were likewise no problem for their residents because of the APDs, and they provided similar protection on other non-terrestrial celestial bodies in our solar system that humans lived on as well. Joey’s siblings decided to give him a major walking tour of the city during his first time outside since he stepped out of the doctor’s building momentarily, if he was up to it. Otherwise they were prepared to do anything he wanted to do after being without him for decades, including just staying home and playing Monopoly or Scrabble, but he was quite willing to set out on his first outside adventure. Anyway, he figured even those games would be played on a wall, and he was in no mood to sit around staring at silly video walls. They cautioned him in advance of their pedestrian sojourn he would see people walking around with nothing on because the APDs kept them warm, but Joey replied, “I saw people like that walking around in San Francisco, so it ‘s no big deal to me. I think it’s stupid to worry about what people wear or don’t wear and I really don’t care about it.”

Although APDs were capable of providing artificial gravity foot traction, most people never bothered with this and instead donned boots in spite of the distinct danger of slipping on ice that an APD would obviate, so that aspect of Joey’s past life remained preserved; at any rate, the superpolymer of the soles in boots these days were very effective and led to very few slip falls.

Fortunately, Natalie’s extra boots fit Joey almost perfectly, so he was quickly geared up for the stroll around town.

First, they traveled in Natalie’s ball to see their parents. Even though Joey had been notified in advance about his parents’ youthful appearance, seeing them looking so different from when he last saw them not even 48 realtime hours earlier in his memory was difficult for him, but he

was heartened by the positive prognosis that the medical officials running the site reiterated.

Although Paul and Natalie strove to keep abreast of medical advancements that might lead to a cure for their parents, they regularly found that the personnel at the site were better informed than they were about the newest developments. As it turned out, there was encouraging news for them during this visit about the prospects of being able to revive their parents. A device based on one of Karl Radder’s theories had been designed with the capacity to restore recently defunct humans to a perpetual moribund state from which scientists hoped to revive the patients, though none of the tens of thousands in that state had yet been revived. According the research they had personally done, the crux seemed to be how to fully restore brain functions in people who had suffered blunt trauma, which was expected to be attained within a few years.

After visiting their parents they returned to Natalie’s home and from there walked downtown so that Joey could get a ground look at the changes that a typical major city had undergone since his prior experience. He could understand that there was no pavement anywhere because without vehicles driving on them the streets wouldn’t get torn up, but he asked his siblings what happened when everything turned to mud and everybody who was on foot slid around, and they explained to him and A/V roboballs dried mud and reflattened surfaces adding dirt to them where needed, so rain and mud though a still a bit messy and the cause of occasional falls weren’t a serious issue for pedestrians. The first major adjustment for him was right in front of Natalie’s house, because what used to be a street had become strictly a pedestrian walkway, with trees and lawns planted all over it, which surely made it difficult though not impossible to maneuver a ground vehicle on, it if it was small enough. There was no grass actually visible anywhere because it had snowed the last three days, so all of it was covered over with white powder. The side streets crossing Nicolet Avenue, which was a block from their home and one of the main arteries in Minneapolis, were bedecked with lawns, trees and brush, with a street for ground vehicles only about every three miles as they walked along it towards downtown. All in all, it seemed to Joey even at first glance like a major improvement in aesthetics compared to what he was accustomed to from his earlier life when there were parked cars everywhere blowing out deadly carbon dioxide. Now cars were floating balls that were barely visible parked above homes, but they were an annoying sight for Joey as they were buzzed around in the air all around him.

Natalie explained to Joey that because almost everyone used A-Vs, only a few streets were configured for the few ground vehicles that remained; consequently, people who used them often had to walk several blocks from where they parked to get to their homes, a disincentive that was turning even the most diehard big city tradder toward the more convenient A-Vs, in a vicious cycle that was diminishing ground vehicles to what had become little more than a collector’s item or even a toy. Ground vehicles still predominated in rural areas, but they were dying out in all of the major cities in the modern world. For Joey, however, as they walked along he realized that this improvement of landscape that had replaced paved streets fell far short of providing an idyllic pedestrian experience for him because all around them A-Vs were rising from parkways and flying around every which way at breakneck speed. Though they were relatively quiet, certainly more quiet individually than the ground vehicles, they unnerved him no end and quickly made him feel homesick for the old street designs with cars that simply rolled around, even if they were a deadly hazard for pedestrians, unlike the balls. He impulsively asked Natalie

to show him his old world, and she quickly displayed photos and videos of Palo Alto in 2014 on the wall of a local shop. It looked like paradise to him compared to this strange new world.

And yet, everybody was assuring him that young people invariably adjusted to radically new experiences, so his youth would pull him through; whereas if this had occurred to him much later in life it would have been much more problematic. That certainly remained to be seen because right now on his first full day he was negatively impressed about adjusting; and anyway, he had heard this song and dance about youthful resilience in the past and knew that not only didn’t it always hold water in all cases, it had never includes culture and time shock anywhere near the order of magnitude that he was experiencing. Joey wondered if he was too steeped in his old ways to ever adjust to the hectic visual scene of flying balls nearly filling the sky in every direction; knowing they had an invisibility was no solace to him if nobody used it, and they weren’t going to start using it just to place one child. Natalie noticed the disgruntled look on his face as they walked along and tried to cheer him up by pointing out that if he stayed in this calendar year instead of going back to realtime, he would never have to worry about getting hit by a car whether while walking or as a pedestrian.

It was a sunny day, so they enjoyed diverging from Nicolet Avenue to walk around Lake Of The Isles, and again to tour a fascinating exhibit of holographic art at the Walker Art Center; and finally after about three hours they arrived downtown, where they shopped in the city’s department store, the staid Dayton’s, which had reverted to its old name after many years as Macy’s. Paul showed Joey the astronomy department that had digital telescopes so advanced that peering through them he could see planets outside of our solar system, while Natalie went by herself to look at clothes, not only for herself but also for Joey because he didn’t care about clothes shopping and she was the one who had chosen all his clothes in realtime, and he had no problem then with her choices then so there was no reason to doubt them now. Paul showed Joey the sports department and mentioned that the Topeka Fielders had won the World Series the previous year, besting their beloved Giants in seven games. Because Joey had never visited Minneapolis before, he had no firm idea about how different its appearance was from when he was in Palo Alto; but he had visited a couple of big cemented, concrete jungle cities such as New York and Chicago, and was glad to contemplate them being essentially covered with parks. They had a late lunch and then went to Ruth’s downtown office, where her staff gave Joey magnetic cognitive testing, lasting only a few minutes and which she told him afterwards appeared to come out completely normal.

After Joe’s testing was done, an M.D. in the same office gave him a full medical examination with a scanning device, also a brief affair and also with a normal result. Joey was pleased that the examination didn’t necessitate the doctor touching him even once. After that appointment, they headed all the way home, covering altogether more than ten miles during more than half a day of walking. Not only did they did they not feel tired after all that, if anything they felt more exuberant and dynamic than when they set out because of the energy inhalant they applied as they walked that also contained small quantities of several active ingredients derived from cannabis. However, when Joey asked if hippies used it, Natalie said she no longer heard of anyone who called themselves hippies and only remembered the term from the distant past that had dissipated and eventually disappeared along with all culture and counterculture wars when so-called “drugs” were illegal. And yet, some of the most popular musical groups were still so-

called hippies such as The Talking Heads, U2 and Led Zeppelin, all of which still retained their original members. There were new banks around that they thought Joey would like and they still played similar instruments such as powered guitars that were no longer called “electric”. There was no longer any public transportation, so anybody who walked a long distance had to go home the same way unless someone picked them up and took them there, which any stranger was willing to do in this age of everyone being friendly, essentially a society of Norwegians from Joey’s earlier era.

On their way home they came across a visual image of Kurt on a tree waiting to speak to Joey, “Hi Joey, am I ever glad to see you! How’s life for you in this modern world?”

“Pretty shaky, Kurt. I’m glad to see you too, but I can’t get used to all those things flying around everywhere. It’s nice that the streets have been turned into parks, but all that buzzing around kinda ruins it for me. It’s not that it’s loud, ‘cause it isn’t, but it’s – I don’t know, I guess somebody would call it something like visual clutter or eye pollution or something. I think I’ll just go back to Palo Alto or maybe to Senegal, if that’s the best I can do. I don’t think I can make it here in 2089, it’s too different for me and everybody is too smart. I already found out I’m a total dummy compared to kindergarten kids.”

“It’s hard, I know. I cried for weeks when I found out we lost so many friends and relatives in the Bay Area. And even if we hadn’t lost any of them, we lost great cities, millions of people.

Sometimes I still think about the San Francisco skyline that I’ll never see again. It’s really hard even after all these years. Those balls have invisibility, but people got used to them and I don’t know if anyone even bothers to use invisibility any more.”

“Anyway. I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t fit in and there’s really no schools any more, and I’m sure I couldn’t understand the stuff kids are studying now anyway.”

“I’ve got something you can do that’s really cool. We have bases on Mars now, and life up there is pretty much as normal as it is here, nobody has to wear weird space suits, just a filter that draws the little bit of oxygen out of the atmosphere, something I don’t understand because there’s almost none there to draw from. We also have a couple of thousand people living on moon bases, but there you can’t just walk around protected by your Fail-Safe APD outside like you can on Mars, you have to wear a bulky space suit.”

“Wow! How many people live up there?”

“The moon has a relatively small population compared to Mars, which has several cities with tens of thousands of people living in them full time. The moon is fun for a while as you jump around in the low gravity and look at the famous craters and mountains, but if you get tired of that you’re basically indoors on the base most of the time. It’s fun, don’t get me wrong, but it just wasn’t as much fun for me as Mars, which also has low gravity compared to Earth. I spent two weeks on the moon and three weeks on Mars a couple of years ago, it was really fun. Some kids older than you have never been on earth, they’ve lived their entire lives on the moon or Mars. After you settle down a bit, I can look into us spending thirty days or more up there if you like. You can watch a live feed from there right now if you want to. I have to run somewhere now, but I’ll talk to you when you get to Natalie’s, okay?”

“Sure, see you soon, dufus!” said Joey, and they both laughed just before Kurt’s image disappeared.

The three siblings proceeded home, and while Paul was sitting on the sofa with Joey he

touched his APD and a scene of people walking around the red surface of Mars appeared on the wall, wearing normal earth clothes and fairly small filter packs on their backs.

Paul said, “Behold a live feed of humans walking around on Mars.”

“Wow, this is live, it’s not a recorded video?”

“It’s not a video, what you’re seeing is what’s happening right this minute on Mars. If you hear people here on the stream talking to Mars people, there’s no lag like there used to be when communications went back and forth between Houston and the Apollo astronauts a century ago.

This is one of the few dramatic technologies that wasn’t invented by the so-called evil scientist.”

“I guess all this makes sense, even when I was in Senegal they were talking about going to Mars, but I never imagined being able to just walk around like that without space suits.”

“You know the old saying, You’ve come a long way, baby.”

“Okay, I’m ready to go to both places, sign me up whenever you want. I seem to be on an extended vacation right now anyway.”

“I’ll get us tickets for next month. Anyway. Getting back to Lucky, what do you think, was there some kind of glitch that caused him to vault you forward in time? We don’t know that he meant to do this, maybe it was an accident, like his version of tripping on a tree root or something.”

“I don’t know. Even though for me it was a couple of days ago in realtime, it was actually long ago on the calendar, so there was plenty of time for Lucky to fix this mistake, if that’s what it was. In other words, if he could fix it, why am I still here?”

“Okay Joey, I’ll come over there again for a few days tomorrow. I’m so happy to see you, wow, I don’t have words for it. But I gotta go now because I can see that Chris and Jorge want to talk to you. See you soon, very soon!”

“Okay, see you tomorrow, I’m glad to see you too, Kurt. You’ve always been my best friend.” No sooner had the wall screen gone blue than Chris appeared on it.

“Hi Joey, how are you feeling today, okay I hope.”

“Not really, to tell you the truth. I feel like I’m kind of in limbo.”

“This has never happened to anybody before, so we have nothing to go on, no previous similar experience so we could apply the lessons that someone learned along the way when it happened to him or her and help you out. But we’re always here to give you support. You know you can count on Jorge and me.”

“Yeah, that’s the good thing, I’m still around my closest friends and family, except that my mom and dad aren’t really available.”

“Count your blessings, and I’m sure they’ll be with you again soon. Anyway, I’m calling to talk to you about that evil scientist that you blew up in Senegal. You know, his body was never found, and I was thinking that maybe you weren’t the only person who was moved through time or space during those couple of minutes when everything happened more or less at once. He could have been destroyed, or sent to another part of the world, or back fifty years instead of forward like you. But either he was never identified or his name was kept a secret, because I haven’t found any information about him. Have your tests come up with any irregularities in your chemical balance or something that could shed light on what you went through when you came forward in time?”

“No, at least I haven’t been told about anything. As far as I know, I checked out completely

normal. But they could have found out something and not told me about it, I guess.”

“Jorge and I are researching for answers, we have access to classified information that you probably can’t get to. We’ll let you know as soon as we find out anything at all. We’re on your side Joey, and you should always remember that and count on it.”

“I know you are, Chris, you both proved that over and over, thanks for everything. I always feel like we never thank you enough.”

Joey needed no special substances to sleep well that night, which was like a miracle for him after what could arguably be called the two strangest days of his life.

PART II RADDER LANDS AFTER JOEY 5: KLAUS RADDER’S ESCAPE FROM SENEGAL German industrialist Rudolf Kaufmann’s conglomerate Anstedt Technologies had a successful track record with research for the development of advanced weapons and propulsion systems, but this didn’t satisfy him because he hungered for direct political power; and because of this he sent agents to Palo Alto to try to kidnap Kurt McCarty, someone an incorrect report told him was most likely the author of the Stadium Miracle that had saved thousands of lives in what the world now knew as the Stadium Miracle. He thought that Kurt might have a protean power that could effectively turn Kaufmann into a kingmaker. However, his plan fell through when the U.S. government got wind of the kidnap plot and abducted Kurt themselves, putting him out of Kaufmann’s reach on an Indian Ocean atoll that was at one time notorious as a transition point for human rights abuses, where Kurt was protected by a military base. Although Joey was allowed the free run of the island as putatively a free American citizen, he was carefully monitored by drones and dozens of strategically placed cameras, none of which he discovered during his months of confinement there.

Soon after Kaufmann finally resigned himself to the failure of his abduction plan, he had an official discussion of company finances with Klaus Radder, who was working for him as an accountant using the pseudonym Knut Reffner; followed by the brief and less formal conversation that was Kaufmann’s normal practice in order to assess his personnel from a more tangential standpoint. During that morning Kaufmann had routinely interviewed several midlevel executives and began to call in financial advisers, starting with the acquired company’s reputedly top accountant Knut Reffner. In this case, however, Kaufmann quickly discerned that Reffner had a prodigious intellect, which caught him by surprise because the stereotype of accountants lacking an interesting perspective outside of their profession had been confirmed thus far by his experience. Upon astutely noting Reffner’s crisp elocution, and language command, Kaufmann interrupted Reffner’s boring and rote recitation of his accounting methods and inquired about his education.

Reffner had no problem shifting gears from his rote day work to his life’s true devotion, so Kaufmann was quickly surprised to learn that he had a physics background and that he had on his own time working at home, adumbrated a black hole concept that could potentially produce

either propulsion or devastating destruction in a form Radder labeled accretion anomalies.

Reffner spoke at length about his theories, but he left Kaufmann behind after his first couple of sentences as Kaufmann had no background in advanced physics or mathematics. His university accounting degree left him woefully inadequate for comprehending Reffner’s exposition.

Kaufmann readily and perhaps impulsively – due to his continuing hankering for global influence – agreed on the spot to finance Radder’s lab for the research. Kaufmann never learned Radder’s real name, nor did he care about it when he agreed to finance his project; but had he known about Radder’s background that included a history of psychotic seizures and work site clashes with his superiors, he might have thought twice about involving his company with his strictly theoretical and unproven project. Although Kaufmann himself in his efficiency, he was stubbornly unaware that his impulsiveness ran contrary to that self-image and in fact paradoxically deluded himself into thinking that it enhanced his acuity. Ironically, this could be considered one of the reasons that Hitler, who Kaufmann thought was vastly inferior to hi, had failed in his time. One major difference that redounded to Kaufmann’s benefit was the fact that unlike Hitler, Kaufmann hadn’t deluded himself into thinking that his own personal will had a special power that could conquer the world by itself.

He first set Radder up in a Heidelberg lab and spent the bare minimum to seed his work, but after Kaufmann’s research sites were raided all over Germany and Switzerland in connection with Kaufmann’s aborted plan to abduct Kurt, Kaufmann transferred Radder and his lab to a relatively remote beach side clifftop in Senegal. Radder first experimented locally, blasting an unpopulated area east of his lab with his new weapon, after which his security chief Heinrich Oestmann confirmed with before-and-after video images that he had accurately targeted and evaporated a large hill about a hundred miles east of his lab. Although this was the first actual and practical application of anything Radder had theorized, it was a sensational success. Several days later, Radder and vanished an entire village a hundred miles north, including its several dozen inhabitants. This was, of course, a capital offense in a country that frowned on them as much as any other in the world, but Radder felt impunity based on his assumption that even if his lab was seized by authorities, nobody would be able to understand the science underlying his weapon; so nothing could even be suspected, what to speak of proving that he had committed this ghastly crime.

Radder was only really interested in the pure science of his work, and the fact that his ideas became weapons was a mere happenstance to him than anything else, without any moral implications from his thoroughly cynical perspective; he felt the same way about any loss of life caused by them. Weeks went by before the government acted on the reports of an obliterated village and Radder learned that soldiers had stopped by a town forty miles north of his lab and asked around, but they never came as far south of the village where his lab was located, nor did he expect that they would. Nor did this surprise him because he knew that the disappearance of poor villagers was of little consequence to a government that was at that time suffering casualties from rebel attacks on its military bases around the country.

For him, all morality had been rendered moot by the intolerable loss of his parents in a Chicago fire when he was a young boy; after that tragedy he bitterly evolved into an unabashed, self-described querulous misanthrope; and when anyone mentioned ethics or morality to him, he rancorously scoffed at the very notion of it. Whether his future accomplishments wound up

benefiting humanity of destroying it was of no consequence to him. The death of dozens of villagers meant nothing to him even if several of them may have shopped in what was essentially his Potemkin village store. He merely proferred, without genuinely feeling, a true connection to his village, its inhabitants or its shoppers.

Obviously, in the long run it would have been more convenient for him if his work had led to strictly peaceful devices; and apparently some had, but he wasn’t appreciated for it for reasons he could comprehend; but generally speaking, he had no love for humans and except for their intellectual capacity he considered them to be less than other animals. During a brief exposure to sociology, he had run across a comparison of humans to animals, and learned that there were animals that acted like pirates, lying, acting vengefully and engaging in all sorts of what he previously assumed were exclusively human proclivities. But no animal could destroy an entire world or even a part of it, whereas humans had the capacity to wipe out his whole planet; however, he was unbothered by the fact that he had done the worst of this himself. In fact, Radder had whimsically imagined assisting space aliens who attacked the earth if he decided they were superior to the one that was constantly annoying him and interfering with his work. He never read novels or watched movies, but he was aware from conversations with colleagues that there were such personalities in the world of fiction, and he knew that fiction was sometimes less strange than fact, so he kept in mind the possibility that through his experiments he might unexpectedly break through and contact some other-world characters, other celestial ones or from parallel dimensions.

After learning that Radder had actualized his weapons, and having been assured by him that they would remain perpetually harmless unless he sent Radder the signal to activate them, Kaufmann conceived a scheme to threaten the annihilation of cities in various countries unless they surrendered part of their sovereignty to his group, which in his demands he identified with the misnomer World Caucus For Peace in a declaration he arranged to have delivered to them covertly. Although Kaufmann’s group consisted of power hungry Germans, it was incorrectly portrayed by American officials as possibly Nazis or neo-Nazis. In fact, Kaufmann had no ideological bent at all, and hadn’t even contemplated any actual destruction beyond incidents that would demonstrate the fantastic power he had in his grasp; his plan had been one of far lesser scale, to force numerous developed countries to surrender some of their sovereignty to him, agreeing to concessions that he hadn’t yet devised; he planned to cross that bridge when he got to it, i.e. after the governments agreed to negotiations; he never had any intention of carrying out any of his doomsday threats.

After several of his facilities were raided during an investigation of his Kurt McCarty abduction scheme, he soured on Radder’s weapons project and repeatedly pinged him on a secure network trying to reach him to terminate it because he was unable to call him via satellite not known to him, being unaware that Radder had deliberately sabotaged this option; Radder had ended all communications with Kaufmann and shifted his research to creating time-thrust anomalies. After that, it was essentially Radder against the world. Upon receiving several messages from Kaufmann expressing anxiety about the project and judging from what Radder’s security specialist Heinrich Oestmann was telling him based on long distance conversations he was having with Kaufmann, Radder disconnected their satellite dish from the outside world; at this point his interest in the miserable weapons that had gained him Kaufmann’s investment was

waning.

Kaufmann’s entire plot appeared to Radder to have degenerated into a shambles; Radder regarded the destructive anomalies as having little utility value now he had removed Kaufmann from the picture for trying to squelch the project. Radder thereafter ignored Kaufmann’s ping missives because he had all the equipment he needed to carry on without further help and couldn’t care less about Kaufmann’s apprehensions; just as he had never cared a whit about Kaufmann’s world domination ambitions. He was perfectly content to now be his own; he had plenty of cash and the shop in the village near his clifftop hideaway, where he had built a solid reputation by ingratiating himself with the locals and where he could obtain all of his mundane necessities. Though much of his cash on hand had been provided by Kaufmann, he considered it his now due to Kaufmann’s breach of contract by trying to cancel the project. If he needed technical help with something that failed such as his electricity, he would send Oestmann out to find someone in Dakar or elsewhere, such as Mauritania a short distance north, who could do the necessary repairs.

Radder had only one interest, and that was to carry out his scientific experiments, wherever they led him. Kaufmann didn’t know Radder personally and thus hadn’t reckoned with his irrational penchant for revenge; when Radder cut off all communications with him, Kaufmann began to suspect – as it turned out, justifiably – that he might be contemplating the wholesale elimination of cities rather than settling for bullying nations into submission. Realizing that Radder had gone rogue on him, he desperately resorted to sending hit men to kill him and destroy his lab, but they arrived in Senegal too late and informed Kaufmann that they had no hope of penetrating the American-Senegalese military presence that at that very moment was surrounding Radder and his clifftop lab. Seeing himself in dire threat of attack by the American troops, Radder preemptively retaliated by evaporating U.S. cities and then escaped death by leaping into the future, employing the time-thrust anomaly he had just consummated in the final days before the invasion of his environs.

Kaufmann recognized that this was a final blow to his geo-political ambitions; he knew that a genius like Radder came around once in a century if that often, so as far as he was concerned, after Radder vengefully perpetrated The Vanishing his hopes of a global power profile were thoroughly and permanently squelched. Realizing that Interpol or German law enforcement were likely to close in on him very quickly after this cataclysmic disaster, he sent out his agents to burn down the Heidelberg house belonging to his company, where Radder lived before moving his lab to Senegal and currently vacant. Kaufmann hoped that the fire would eliminate all vestiges of Radder’s presence in the house, including his fingerprints and any hidden items that might identify him. Kaufmann likewise undertook emergency measures to eradicate as much evidence as possible of Radder’s presence in every other location connected to Kaufmann in which he had worked, which was principally in Berlin and Heidelberg.

Kaufmann was aware that it was ill-advised to try to erase all traces of the Knut Reffner employee records as an Anstedt accountant because such an attempt would fail and furthermore, be discovered by prying officials, thereby raising a red flag for investigators; but he harbored a slim hope that Reffner’s later weapons work, which wasn’t officially registered anywhere, would remain cloaked. Indeed, as he anticipated, the suspicion of the authorities about who committed the conflagration rapidly concentrated on him and his group, largely because it was already being

investigated as possibly being behind the plot to kidnap Kurt, but the dual investigation proved futile or was successful and kept in abeyance for reasons that were never revealed.

From Kaufmann’s employees that they interviewed, the authorities got wind of a thorough cleansing of certain offices by his crews; but when Kaufmann, the crew leader and its members were interviewed they falsely and unwaveringly insisted that the wipe-down work was intended for hygienic sterilization. Investigators posted a board with the names of all of the employees who had worked at the offices that were “hygienically” cleansed, but this didn’t cause them to zero in on Knut Reffner because his name was among dozens; however, investigators did note that he was the only employee on the list who was unavailable and whose whereabouts were at that time unknown. Kaufmann and his security staff were repeatedly brought in for questioning by investigators, but he and his men stuck to their stories, steadfastly claiming total ignorance about both the kidnap plot and the destruction of cities. Fortunately for him – he realized with not a little irony – his staff proved to be as loyal, unswerving and disciplined as Hitler’s SS, revealing nothing even during their casual cell phone conversations that were recorded by German police in the course of the massive investigation.

Calls back and forth between Kaufmann and his agents in the U.S. and Senegal ultimately wound up as a dead end for investigators because they were routed through servers anonymously installed in the Caribbean. Ultimately, Kaufmann was never definitively linked to either The Vanishing or to the kidnapping plot that occurred several months earlier. Kaufmann had been careful from the start not to leave a trail of evidence of his collusion with Radder’s project, and this appeared to pan out for him, as he remained a free man years after the destruction of American cities and the ensuing raids of all of his Anstedt facilities. He had been certain that the authorities would at some point fixate on Knut Reffner, but this never occurred as far as he knew; rather a mystery to him, as this was the greatest crime in the history of civilization and should have led to Reffner’s truncated career at Anstedt becoming a focal point. Not being privy to the classified investigation, Kaufmann was unaware that the authorities had in fact looked closely at Reffner but were unable to determine what happened to him after he suddenly left Anstedt without giving notice, and they were suspicious about the fire that destroyed the Heidelberg house, but garnered no actionable evidence from it. They knew that the Reffner employee listing as an accountant rather than a scientist in the Anstedt records could be a ruse, but they couldn’t prove otherwise and eventually dropped their search for him.

Although fingerprints were recovered from the Senegal rubble of his lab, they were never matched with any found at Anstedt, nor was his real name Radder ever determined – he had never been fingerprinted under either name. Altogether, thought Kaufmann, he thought that if he were in charge of the investigation instead of being a target of it, he would have been able to obtain prosecutable evidence. From his point of view it was a surprisingly amateurish investigation about far and away the worst criminal offense in human history, even dwarfing the Holocaust; but he was grateful for the inefficiency. In the end, after spending an enormous sum on attorneys to stave off prosecution, Kaufmann was able to put the Radder fiasco behind him and salvage his company to continue his previous, benign technological pursuits; albeit on a smaller scale, as his companies had been attrited into bankruptcy – a consequence of the scandal of Anstedt being implicated in the most horrific crime in history. He nevertheless retained great wealth due to his diversified portfolio of investments, most of which weren’t tied up in Anstedt.

The failure by the authorities to identify Radder remained supremely and perpetually illogical to Kaufmann, such that he always felt like he was less than a step ahead of the police; and eventually the stress of knowing this drove up his blood pressure, and corresponding heart problems forced him to retire from his career far earlier than most German CEOs. Five years after retiring, he quietly moved to South America where he sensed another Nazi irony; in this case he followed in the footsteps of an infamous Dr. Josef Mengele; like Mengele he lived using a pseudonym and would never be able to relax or feel safe. But as the years went of obscurity and ennui, he egocentrically lamented his lost opportunity for global power more than he felt relief for escaping prosecution; or guilt for his complicity in the deaths of millions. In his clifftop lab, early on Radder made multiple discoveries unrelated to his weapons project, using the supercomputer that Kaufmann installed in his hideaway.

While taking a break from his main work, he concluded that he could invent a mechanism that would radiate significant protection from extreme heat and cold throughout a ten foot circumference in any direction; or perhaps more precisely cloistering a discrete, invisible containment close to the body; it would create an weather shield that would deter the elements without a need of any clothing whatsoever. He wasn’t normally much to appreciate humor, but he smiled as he realized what a boon this would be for nudists. He also discovered during a brief examination of DNA molecule research during another break, that the transference of disease from one organism to another was preventable. Delving further into the subject, he discovered that the human lifespan was extensible far beyond the hundred years that was its usual limit.

After he put many hours into developing tentative models for a disease contagion vaccine and another to rejuvenate and elongate lifespans, he set them aside for some later time, while doubting that he would get back to them because his principal research interest was matter and physics rather than life and biology.

During another break he examined wave lengths and calculated a way of transmitting visual images and sound onto any object via what he labeled reverse technocraft osmosis; whereby according to his theory, high resolution, streaming images could be clearly seen on a bale of hay, a body of water or any other object without being projected from the source; and sound could be transmitted and received by the same process. He also devised what he called his Fail-Safe Theorem that would prevent all but an infinitesimal and negligible misvariation in a calculation by any computer; this concept already existed, but nowhere near his astronomical degree of accuracy. As a spinoff from his anomaly research, he designed what he regarded as only a heuristic version of anti-gravity that he planned to get back to if and when he was done with his time-thrust project. He thought that if he could go beyond his sketchy and likely unworkable version of it, when the anti-gravity was applied to objects they would stay afloat rigidly and could be propel ed in any direction without being initially constrained by inertia.

This was work that his boss could normally cash in on, but the weapons project had taken precedence by this time, so Radder didn’t inform him of it or pursue it to fruition. After developing all of these disparate ideas to the point of being able to move them beyond the drawing board he put them on a back burner to work on if and when he had spare time in the future. Now, for the first time since his debacle on the cliff in 2014 he was able to spend some time on one the ideas that had interested him greatly, but which he had been forced to neglect.

Returning to his main project, Radder propagated multiples of microscopic, benign black

holes and transmitted them locally, using a satellite dish that he modified; he provided Oestmann with a device with which he confirmed their precise placement. Later, Radder came to regard these, in spite of no scientists before him ever having been produced them, as a puny and primitive accomplishment when compared to his later accretion anomalies. Unlike the success he had with local placement, he had both hits and misses aiming his first targeting outside of Senegal; he inadvertently placed his first distant one in a mountain in Venezuela instead of in the city next to it. He spent hours looking for the defect in his calculations that caused him to mistarget, and he decided to place benign, invisible holes in various locations around the globe before placing one that he was confident would do the ultimate job for him and his boss Rudolf Kaufmann, whom he didn’t really resent because he knew that Kaufmann was far more expert at managing and financing than he was himself.

Kaufmann’s security employees smuggled an anomaly detector into Venezuela and used it to locate the one that Radder misdirected into a mountain next to the city he targeted. This miss forced Radder to repeat the process, and the second time he successfully placed one in a downtown building. The second event, located by French scientists with one of the detectors Kaufmann anonymously sent to several governments in mysterious package deliveries, was kept under wraps by the Venezuelans and the building was quarantined by officials, but it was easily within the detector’s twenty-mile range, so Kaufmann’s men were able to confirm a direct hit.

Radder subsequently placed the destructive anomalies in several American cities, but due to heightened security by the American authorities after they learned about the Venezuela event, Kaufmann couldn’t get detection devices into the U.S. to confirm the placements; it was relatively easy and safe to leave packages outside of doorways in European cities but extremely difficult to smuggle them past American customs officials, which was something none of Kaufmann’s agents were willing to attempt.

Consequently, after Kaufmann warned the Americans that they had been targeted he didn’t send them a detector; and after confirmation of the Venezuela event, European governments declined to lend them their detectors to the Americans, securing them firmly in case their own cities became endangered. There were stories flying around in the usual news sources such as the New York Times about a rumored doomsday weapon that was being brandished as a threat against Western nations, but none of the stories were attributed, so there wasn’t panic in the public; the governments without exception denied the stories but confirmed that they were investigating a security threat.

Some news pundits noted the remarkable similarity of the denials, several of them employing identical phrasing as if they had coordinated their response to the rumors. Two weeks before the military invasion of his Senegal lair, Radder saw through half-closed blinds American John Dayton’s face through the window peering in at him as he sat in his clifftop shack. But Radder was physically restrained, in the throes of one of his daily psychotic seizures, so he was unable to sound the alarm. Because his security specialist Heinrich Oestmann knew these episodes lasted an hour or more and this one had just started, five minutes before Dayton appeared on the scene he had adjourned to the other shack to make cal s to Germany. By the time Radder was free again Dayton was long gone, so Radder sketched Dayton’s face for Oestmann to use to try to find and eliminate him. Responding to the unexpected infiltration of his cliffside locale, Radder also had Oestmann install video cameras on the cliff and on Radder’s hut in the

village, where he had for months maintained a pretense of being a simple shopkeeper.

The attempt to track down and silence Dayton was botched, and as a result, Radder’s fear heightened that his lab would be discovered. A few days after Radder saw Dayton through his window, Oestmann informed Radder that he had received a warning from one of his paid informants in Dakar that a convoy of American and Senegalese military was driving up the coast from the capital. Radder had by this time increased his work to a fever pitch because he feared Dayton would inform the Senegalese authorities about what he saw and Radder would find himself raided.

He discounted the possibility that his fear of a raid arose from paranoia, since raids were a reality that had already happened to Kaufmann in Europe. Radder’s new, virtually non-stop schedule placed him under extreme stress, so his work became less efficient than it otherwise would be. When Joey Blake, Dayton and their military escort arrived at the village near Radder’s clifftop shack, he hadn’t slept in two days. Radder’s reaction to the news of the approaching convoy was indignation at the continuing interference of governments with his work: They had driven him out of Europe and the American security alert had prevented confirmation of his anomaly placements; the fact that all of this was really caused by his own aggression towards those governments carried no weight with him. His enmity towards the Americans as they marched towards his lab, exacerbated by his lack of sleep, magnified into rage.

Although it wasn’t certain that these troops were coming for him, he decided that if they became an imminent threat to his work he would punish them by activating the anomalies in their cities, mercilessly destroying them. Before doing this, he decided to finalize his newest and most uncertain theory, according to which he would be able to become bodily subsumed into a time-thrust anomaly and emerge a century or more in the future or past. He knew he could unleash his destructive power on the cities over a span of just a few seconds, so upon learning of the approaching convoy, he decided to shift his focus completely to the details of the time-thrust because it could eventuate as his only avenue of escape. Unfortunately, time was clearly running out and his faculties were diminished by exhaustion, so he knew it was possible and even probable that he would not be able to test the time-thrust before being forced to resort to it. He wasn’t yet able to reliably configure the time-thrust calendar distance or direction, which meant that he could find himself millions of years in the past or future and quickly or even immediately perish in an environment that was not yet habitable for humans, or in one that had long since rendered them extinct.

He preferred to go backward a short distance in time because if he went in that direction he would be dominate the world with the science he would reproduce; moreover, if he went forward he could expect to find himself in a time when he was a fugitive wanted for the murder of millions. He was also aware that he could be doomed by a space-thrust aspect that he wasn’t even close to resolving; and thus he could reappear in solid rock or at the bottom of a sea. In fact, he might not move through time at all but instead find himself in a nearby location where he might be captured; or on the other hand, in a distant one such as Bangladesh or Alaska. He was dismayed at the prospect of perhaps entering time-thrust without having calibrated or even tested it, and knew that instead of being transported elsewhere or elsetime he may well be disintegrated.

He was confident that if he had more time he could solve these distance and direction problems, but the report of approaching troops was ominous and appeared to be cutting his work short.

He had calculated that one of these anomalies would instantly absorb him if any part of him traversed it, and although it was tinier than the tip of a hair, he had invented a handheld device that could pinpoint the location of any of the half dozen of these anomalies he had generated in his basement while he was experimenting, in case he need to precipitously avail himself of it.

Radder took a moment to tuck his passport and a package of crisp, new euro notes into his lab coat in case he had to make an sudden getaway; he knew it was unlikely but theoretically possible that he would never be personally identified, so if he escaped capture by these troops he might be able to find refuge and remain a free man somewhere with his current and thoroughly legitimate passport; a fake one was at any rate something he had no way of obtaining without Kaufmann’s underground connections. Of course, if his cliffside hideaway was completely surrounded and the time-thrust anomaly failed him, securing his passport and cash to finance him after his escape could turn out to be an exercise in futility. He decided not to rely on his guard Oestmann to shout down to him through the trap door that someone was on the cliff top because for all he knew, Oestmann could be picked off by a sniper and thus fail to warn him; or he could be treacherously in league with the Americans and facilitate his death or capture.

Radder kept a 9 mm hand gun on his desk in case Oestmann, who was armed with an automatic rifle, entered the basement with the obvious intent to kill or detain him; he had gone out with Oestmann could only hope that Oestmann wouldn’t drop a grenade into his basement lab through the trap door, short defeating his strategy for self defense.

As weary as he was, he maintained himself alert for sounds that indicated an attack or an impending one. Via three of his cameras, Radder had only seen one unusual event before this day, a Senegalese man who was staggering around apparently drunk outside of his village shop; but now he saw on one of four computer screens sitting on his large desktop, the troops with Joey and his family arriving at the village near his cliff. He fell into an old and rancorous ideation that Americans had wiped out his parents, even though he knew objectively that the Chicago fire they died in an was accidental; he even fantasized details for how the assassination had been carried out. He decided to preemptively retaliate for this rude invasion by destroying the U.S. cities that he had already targeted; having no detectors in the field, he had to rely on his satellite readings to bounce back data to him about where the anomalies were distributed.

One seemed to have missed the intended target, though by just ten miles, so it was still close enough to do its work; but the others, judging by the readings from his satellite dish, appeared to be within city limits of Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago and Phoenix.

First, he activated the one in New York City, but he had no way, such as a news report, to confirm that he had actually vanished the city because the only satellite function he had kept functioning apart from the bounce-back was the signal for the destructive activation; he had deliberately shut down his connections to all international networks hours earlier to avoid being traced and to make sure Oestmann couldn’t conspire with Kaufmann against him.

Radder was effectively cut off from the outside world apart from the destructive force that he was able to wreak on it. After he activated the New York City anomaly, on the screen that was displaying input from the security cameras he saw a familiar face on a man standing next to a boy on the village beach, pointing straight at the cliff he was in; and by zooming in on him, Radder recognized him as the man he had seen lurking on the cliff top and realized that he must be the man who had brought these troops to his doorstep. Radder’s weapons were useless against

a man standing nearby because he would destroy himself along with him, so he had nothing he could aim at him except one of his time-thrust anomalies; with a shaky hand on his computer mouse, Radder furiously directed the nearest of them that he had strewn along the coastline at the man, but he missed him and instead it was the boy who disappeared. But he had no time to retarget because he heard a helicopter directly overhead and sensed he was about to be blown to bits by a gunship; not realizing that the pilot in the machine above him wasn’t even aware of his presence. Panicking, without a moment of hesitation, Radder activated all of the destructive anomalies in the United States and then lunged to his right from his computer chair at the timespace anomaly next to him, one of many he had haphazardly strewn about the cliff and village during the previous half hour of his exhausted confusion. He knew that even though he was risking his own annihilation, he was about to be killed anyway, so he had nothing to lose and everything to gain, and therefore no reason to pause to reconsider.

A split second after his dive into the time-thrust, the cliff in which he had long been ensconced crumbled into rocks and dust, an event that he was no longer around to experience or witness.

PLEASE PURCHASE BOOK FOR CHAPTERS 6-12