Climbing the rusting metal staircase outside the warehouse, stepping as quietly as possible despite the cacophony of gunfire and explosions emanating from inside, Marty checked his rifle to make sure it was properly assembled and loaded. He’d grown to distrust his senses and his memory, as everything had come to seem dreamlike and fuzzy around the edges.
    The lasting waking effect of each yawn seemed to be diminishing. Every time, he’d feel tired again several minutes later. He was able to fall asleep for brief periods but would wake up feeling even worse. The inability to escape the torment of his own body was rapidly approaching critical levels of strenuousness. His nerves felt as though they would soon flare up and burn out forever.
    One of the stairs twisted a little and gave way under his weight. He fell forward, catching himself painfully with his elbow on the next stair.
    There was a doorway at the top of the stairs. Unlike the one he’d encountered halfway along his ascent, his one was missing its door. He crept up the remaining stairs, his back pressed hard against the corrugated metal wall, and peeked cautiously around the edge of the doorway.
    At one point there had been maybe a floor or a platform or a matching stairway on the other side of the wall, but it was now just a fifty-foot drop to the first level. Inside, there seemed to be a handful of scattered people all facing away from him, and a tank of some sort. He lowered himself to his belly on the platform at the top of the stairwell, cradled his gun against his shoulder, and looked through the scope.
    Before he could even locate his target, he fell abruptly asleep.

    *

    Ben watched as one of Anna’s small missile turrets spun and centered on him. He defensively raised his right arm, despite its uselessness, and acquainted himself with the grim prospect of his own imminent mortality. He’d accepted it years ago, but now that it was within moments of taking place, he shuffled quickly once more through the stages of grief.
    Denial was silly with an array of armed missiles pointed at you, and he’d been fruitlessly trying to bargain with her for almost a day. Anger was always a given for him, as was depression, so he could skip right past those. Normally he wasn’t big on regret, but now that it really mattered he realized there were a lot of things he felt guilty about. The way he devalued his own life, for instance, whiling away the time waiting to die, lamenting his helplessness while millions of insurgents with less training than he had fought and died defending families and strangers from oppression. Instead, he’d complied with the government that had forcibly relocated his family into a guarded colony to extort a loyal military career from him. He’d slaughtered hundreds he didn’t know because they’d threatened a few that he did. But there was nothing he could do to remedy any of that now, especially as the splattered pulp he was about to become. Which brought him back to acceptance.
    There was a quiet puff as a missile rocketed toward him and unexpectedly impacted something about thirty feet above his head. A cascade of debris fell behind him, composed mostly of the tops of old storage racks that had become separated from their bottoms in the explosion. He cringed and jogged forward, but was stopped when something struck him in the back — a burning sensation more painful than anything he’d ever experienced. It moved rapidly through him, seemingly burning every cell in his body from the bottoms of his shoulder blades to his feet.
    He had barely enough time to look down at himself before everything below his rib cage and most of his left arm disappeared into a fine haze. The rapidly-deteriorating particles hung in place for a moment like a poorly-focused photograph of his body, then swirled upward and away as his unsupported upper torso fell through the cloud.
    His abbreviated spine connected with the floor, the exposed bottommost vertebra cracking a little, and he toppled backward, the back of his skull knocking lightly into the cement floor.
    For a moment, he lay completely still, watching the red mist that had once been maybe his kidney or thigh drifting lazily to the floor, a bit of it landing like a sticky dust on his face. He tried sitting after a moment, but realized after several attempts that it wasn’t going to happen. Hesitantly, he lifted his head and examined the damage he’d taken. Everything below his chest was gone, and he was likely rapidly bleeding to death. He let his head fall again and closed his eyes.
    Anna ceased fire and retracted her various armaments, and the others throughout the warehouse stopped as well. It was then that they noticed, one at a time, the remaining chunk of Ben resting atop the segment of floor that had been painted with his disintegrated organs.
    Denise rushed over to him and knelt beside him, her blue waitress outfit and eventually her socks sopping up his blood. She started to ask him what happened, but couldn’t bring herself to continue speaking after getting the first few words out.
    ”My ears are ringing,” he said, opening his eyes. His lungs were still working, which wasn’t nearly as comforting a thought when he remembered he was still bleeding profusely and short a few crucial organs.
    Denise took his remaining hand and stroked his thumb with hers. “Yeah, me too.” She sobbed a couple times and wiped away a tear with her apron, leaving a streak of blood beneath her eye.
    ”That’s not ringing,” shouted one of the NCR border guards nearby, raising his gun and adopting a defensive stance.
    The buzzing increased until it became a roar. Through all the windows and the missing portions of the building’s walls and roof poured a swarm of hundreds of thousands of insects. Within seconds, the swarm had fully engulfed what was left of Ben.
    
    *

    By the time the gunfire inside had stopped, Marty was already at the bottom of the metal staircase and running for cover on the other side of a building nearby that resembled some kind of minimalist coffee machine. Whoever had been piloting the tank had spotted him up in the doorway as he’d been falling asleep on his rifle. He hadn’t even noticed the missile until it had exploded against something twenty feet in front of his face, startling him into spasmodically pulling the trigger.
    He’d hit the target, though, and that was all that mattered. It wasn’t a complete disintegration, but the shot guaranteed death. They could come by and identify the remains later if they needed verification. As he began puzzling over who the “they” were, a dense fog formed in his brain and the events of the last day began to disappear from his conscious mind like a hastily-awoken-from dream, each of them slipping like drops of oil from a wet stone.
    His body kept running, feet rhythmically splashing out a staccato of cascading slush as he carelessly stomped through half-frozen puddles in a straight line toward anywhere away from the place he’d come, wherever that had been. Somewhere behind him, a loud hum drowned out all sound, even his own footsteps. The sensation was transmitted from his eardrums, but discarded by his brain.
    He dropped whatever it was he’d been carrying, but lacked even the presence of mind to turn and see what it was. Something heavy and unwieldy anyway so fuck it.
    Cold air rushed in and out of his lungs, a sensation like tiny ice crystals puncturing microscopic lacerations into his bronchioles. His boots and pants were soaked and he could no longer feel his feet. There was a certain point of frigidity, it occurred to him somewhere in his head, beyond which one’s nerves became so numbed they could no longer sense an even greater drop in temperature.
    More than he wanted to find somewhere warm, even more than his body ached to sleep, he needed to find a television. There was one in his apartment, he remembered, but his apartment wasn’t anywhere nearby. Maybe it was; he was incapable of identifying his current location. This startled and unnerved him for a moment, but then he remembered he needed to find an TV, one with a feed he could control.
    Ahead was a fence with a sidewalk and a road on the other side. There were people and vehicles as well but he couldn’t really focus on them. Anything that moved when his eyes didn’t seemed beyond his ability to perceive, let alone process.
    He climbed the fence when he got to it, unaware there was a gate a little more than sixty feet to his right, and fell to the sidewalk on the other side. A voice somewhere said something to him but he forgot each word immediately after it arrived in his brain. As he rose from the pavement he grunted and shook his head in arbitrary response. There were more words and possibly other voices, but they diminished and eventually subsided as he continued running in the same direction he’d been going before jumping the fence. There had to be a TV somewhere.
    Seemingly weighing a hundred times more than usual, his head drooped and his eyelids dropped shut. He stumbled, tripping over some uneven pavement, and woke back up long enough to yawn.
    His entire field of vision was blurry, as though his eyeballs had been wrapped in a layer or two of plastic wrap and then shoved back into his head. Given the uncomfortable way they moved around in their sockets, he wondered for a moment if someone had actually done that but dismissed it as ridiculous. The thought was soon swept aside by a more pressing concern: How was he going to watch TV with his eyes this blurry?
    Panic engulfed him, followed by a feeling of abject helplessness. With no other response available from his sleep-deprived, thoroughly baffled brain, he began to sob like a child. There was a figure of some sort ahead that was probably a person, and he ran full-force toward it in hope that it actually was. After grasping at it with both his hands, clutching its clothing as tightly as he could muster with one hand while pawing wildly at it with the other, he confirmed that it was, in fact, another human when it punched him powerfully in the ribs. The sensation registered momentarily, but quickly receded.
    Without fully realizing it, he’d apparently begun shouting, his voice a high, terrified bleat. “TV?” he yelped. “Get me it! Put it on.”
    Understandably, the person trying desperately to free herself from his grasp asked him, repeatedly, “What the fuck?”
    Without really hearing her, he continued shouting, not really hearing himself either. “The show! The show, put it on, I have to.”
    As distracted as his brain was by the urgent need to locate a television, and, secondary to that, the persistent desire to sleep, he was unable to ignore the sensation and physical effect of several hundred kilovolts from the girl’s stun gun in his abdomen.

    *

    After roughly four minutes and forty seconds, the cab pulled to the side of the road several blocks from the bridge.
    ”I can’t take you over,” said the driver in a thick Midwestern accent. “They’ll let you walk or drive across for good, but I can’t drive the cab back and forth and I ain’t movin’ to Canada.”
    Ahead, a motorcycle came toward them from the bridge and pulled over. For a moment Marty was convinced its driver had spotted him and was about to run, but it eventually started moving again. Something exploded from the left side of the road, paused, and continued along its path, and the motorcycle followed it.
    ”It’s okay,” replied Marty. “Follow that guy.”
    ”What, that motorcycle?” asked the cab driver in disbelief. He considered the idea for a moment. “It’ll be an extra five hundred.”
    ”Yeah sure fine whatever. Go. Before you lose him.”
    Lurching the cab back onto the road and speeding ahead, the driver shouted back at him, “stick the money in the tray between the seats and slide it up or I’m takin’ us back in the opposite direction. That’s eight hundred and sixty four so far.”
    Marty sighed, dropped a packet of ten hundred-dollar bills into the metal tray and slid it up to the driver, suddenly finding a new appreciation for the AutoCabs back home.
    They followed the exploding and collapsing buildings along a road that ran parallel to the freeway, then south toward the water. Eventually the path of destruction abruptly stopped.
    ”Must’ve gotten caught up or something,” said the cab driver, creeping slowly along the street, waiting for an indication of which direction to go next.
    After about a minute of waiting, Marty slid another thousand dollars up to the driver through the tray. “Tell no one about any of this. Not even your wife. I will find out if you do. Pop the trunk.”
    He retrieved the long, slim package from the back of the vehicle, and the instant he closed the trunk, the driver squealed the fastest u-turn he could force the cab to make, sped up the street, and disappeared promptly around a corner.

    *

    Anna burst through a wall into an extremely large metal building — some kind of abandoned storage facility — and stopped, idling silently in the middle of the largely empty concrete floor.
    Ben and Denise, tightly following the trail of dust but not closely enough to actually be inhaling any of it, arrived shortly thereafter.
    ”Take this,” said Ben, handing Denise one of his two pistols as he got off the motorcycle.
    ”This.” Denise took the gun, her expression the epitome of apprehension. “Against that.”
    He looked thoughtfully at his own gun for a moment. “Yeah, pretty ridiculous isn’t it?”
    They crept cautiously toward the building, slowly circling around to find an entrance other than the one Anna had made for herself.
    Within minutes a handful of border patrols from both the United States and the New Canadian Republic had begun arriving, alarmed by the trail of explosions creeping through the city. Among them was the NCR border guard they’d dealt with at the Ambassador Bridge.
    Shouting as soon as he disembarked from one of the armored vehicles, inappropriately camouflaged for their urban surroundings, the highest-ranking of the New Liberty Army troops confronted his NCR analogs. “What in fuck are you canuck pricks trying to accomplish here?”
    ”We came out for a late evening picnic,” shouted one of the Canadians in response, matching intensity. “What the hell do you think we’re doing out here?”
    ”Blowing up half the goddamned city from the looks of it.”
    ”We sure as hell aren’t responsible. We thought maybe you guys might have something to do with it.”
    ”Now why the fuck would we attack one of our own cities?”
    ”Ah, right, ’cause that‘s never happened before.”
    ”What’re you implying?”
    ”Actually,” said Ben, stepping out from between the building and a stack of rusted shipping containers, intervening before anyone started drawing weapons, “this is technically our fault.” Denise stayed behind.
    ”Oh now who the hell is this assho–” barked the NLA soldier, cutting himself off abruptly when he recognized the various insignias on Ben’s uniform. “Sorry, Sergeant. What’s the situation, sir?”
    ”One of our tanks malfunctioned,” he replied, making his way between the two groups of soldiers. Unable to tell the complete truth due to the confidentiality of his tests with Anna, he quickly fabricated a cover explanation. “Running around on autopilot, randomly destroying everything in its path. I followed it here after it turned its guns on me.”
    ”This your fault, then?” whispered the NCR guard from the bridge, standing a couple feet away.
    Nodding, Ben made note this time of the surname stitched onto the guard’s front pocket: Foley. “Not a planned assault or anything, though. Promise.”
    ”Glad I didn’t let you across earlier,” mumbled Foley, loud enough for Ben to hear but not the NLA troops.
    ”She runs out of ammo eventually,” whispered Ben.
    ”How far you been following it, sir?” asked the obnoxious NLA soldier, PFC Brightman.
    ”Uh, Cincinnati,” Ben lied.
    ”Ohio?” asked one of the other NLA soldiers, too far away for Ben to get a good look at his name.
    ”No, Cincinnati, Alaska, moron,” replied Ben. “You can all keep asking me useless questions or we could actually maybe do something productive.”
    Brightman nodded. “I’ll lead a team ’round back to secure the tank’s entrance point, make sure it don’t leave again.”
    ”Which would be a great idea if the tank couldn’t just create any exit it wanted, or if it had any intention of not running you over. We’re not dealing with any kind of rational enemy, here, that you can force to take its own self-preservation into consideration.”
    In actuality, Anna’s priorities seemed to follow a loose approximation of Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, but considering her behavior since the previous morning, he felt he could confidently operate under the assumption that those constraints were no longer functional. Even if they were, nobody in the group seemed to be wielding any weapons that would’ve been in any way effective against her, so she’d have easily seen the hollowness of any threats made against her. Conventional military strategy was about as useful in this situation as a nest of angry hornets in an operating room.
    ”So what do we do?” asked Brightman, restrainedly irritated. “Just rush in through the front door and have the fuckin’ thing cut us all down?”
    ”If it was going to kill us, it would’ve charged out here and crushed us all as soon as we started talking.” So why didn’t she? he realized. “Doesn’t really even matter how we enter the building, since it can acquire dozens of simultaneous targets. Anyone have a fiber optic scope or something?”
    Nobody replied. A few shrugged.
    ”How about C4?”
    Within seconds, someone had shoved a small brick into his hand, followed by a radio frequency trigger for the detonator. Though the sun was beginning to disappear over the horizon and the streetlights had yet to turn on, he was able to make out the safety markings on its label.
    ”What’s your plan?” asked Foley, following Ben to the side of the building.
    ”It’d be pointless to describe it to you, because it’s not going to work.” Also rendering description pointless was the fact that Anna could clearly perceive every word of their conversation. Which was why as he spoke, he held the C4 under his arm, fished out a pen and a small notepad from one of his pockets, and began writing. “If I can somehow flip her, it might buy me enough time to, I dunno, try to find some kind of emergency access panel or something.”
    He showed Foley the note he’d been writing — fake plan – she can hear us, play along — and flipped the page, writing some more. Even if Anna may have been capable of somehow picking up the sounds of the pen scratching against the paper, which was unlikely given that he was grinding his boot into the gravel to interfere with her audio sensors, there was no way for her to tell what.
    ”You think that small a brick of C4′s gonna flip that thing?”
    ”No. But we can’t go inside, so this is our only option.” The next note he showed Foley read, close expl. will disrupt sensors. He wrote something more on the pad, underlined it several times, and showed Foley again. Temporarily.
    Foley gestured, indicating he wanted to write something. “How you gonna get it under it?” His note read, how long?
    ”No idea.” Pointing to the pad and shrugging, Ben indicated that his response answered both questions.
    ”Shit,” said Foley. It wasn’t necessary for him to make any indication he was replying to both written and verbal conversations.
    Something stirred for a moment within the building and everyone tensed. A few drew their sidearms.
    ”So’s she a pretty special girl, then?” Foley asked, whispering.
    ”Huh?” He glanced at Denise, then back at Foley.
    ”You keep calling it ‘she’. What the fuck?”
    ”Oh. It’s like what sailors call their ships I guess. My, uh, my dad was in the Navy when I was a kid. Anyway, better apprise everyone of the plan.” Gesturing significantly with the items to emphasize their importance, he handed Foley the pen and paper, then jogged toward the building’s nearest entrance.
    Surprisingly, the electricity was still functional in the building, though nearly all the lights were either burned out or broken. Given her myriad sensors it was silly to try to sneak in on her, and without night vision goggles of some sort, illumination would be more beneficial to him than to her.
    Discerning her location via glances through the office window, he then searched for somewhere to take cover within the warehouse. A pile of metal debris about twenty feet from the door was the best he could find.
    Using a small credit-card-sized mirror from his pocket, he looked around the corner to assess Anna’s line of potential fire, waited a moment, then dove out the doorway and rolled behind the heap of junk.
    Anna refrained from even attempting to fire at him while he was exposed. After a moment, she spoke, using one of the external speakers hidden somewhere within her various hull folds. “Why Ben, are those plastic explosives I smell? You know I much prefer flowers. There’s rosemary — that’s for remembrance; pray, love, remember. And there is pansies — that’s for thoughts.”
    Unable to remember the next line, he instead replied, still shouting over the wall of junk he was using as a shield, the first line that came to mind. “Though this be madness, yet there is a method in’t.”
    She made a loud disappointed sighing noise. “That’s two acts ago, Ben.”
    ”Sorry; your metal brain is obviously superior to my meat one.” Arming the detonator, Ben nervously caressed the triggering device with his other hand. “Anna, I really don’t want to have to do this. We can still talk about it. I’d prefer to.”
    ”Words, words, words. I pray you, pass with your best violence; I am afeared you make a wanton of me.” She sprayed a few shots in his general direction.
    ”Goddammit, would you stop with the fucking Hamlet already?” he muttered after her burst of gunfire, peeking extremely briefly over the random metal detritus that separated him from Anna. After estimating the throw’s trajectory, he wound up and launched the C4 across the warehouse at her.
    As the explosive sailed through the air, Anna repeated at increasing volume, “except my life, except my life, except my life, except my life, except my–”
    At the sound of impact, Ben thumbed the detonator and threw himself into an overturned metal crate nearby to shield himself from any unlikely shrapnel or debris. Some empty cardboard boxes rained down from somewhere, likely blown off the tops of nearby shelves by the shock wave.
    Spinning around frantically, clanging clumsily into her surroundings, Anna panicked over her sudden lack of sensation. She knocked a shelf of something onto herself, remaining unaware of its presence even after it scattered across and tumbled from her hull as she shook.
    The handful of soldiers waiting outside poured in through the door, firing uselessly on the bewildered tank. Denise cautiously followed, immediately taking cover near the office doorway and hooking her wrist around to fire sporadically through the adjacent wall.
    Lacking enough momentum to exit through the wall, Anna instead simply dented it outward, still unaware she’d even impacted with anything, and reversed direction, tumbling into a stairway and climbing back out again. Incoherent shouting blurted from her loudspeakers.
    Having no idea what the next part of his plan would entail, Ben rolled out of the metal crate and jogged toward her. As the others took up various positions throughout this side of the building, firing several ineffective rounds before moving into a better position, he waited for a safe moment to approach.
    During a lull in gunfire he charged at Anna, hoping to find some hidden vulnerability that might allow him access to her interior. He stopped abruptly after a few steps, the soles of his boots skidding in a crunchy stutter across the concrete floor, when Anna suddenly regained her composure and turned to face him.

    *

So I received a rejection letter from Tor[1], and since it was one of the shittiest in what seems to have been an almost nonstop string of rejections in nearly every element of my life over the last seven months, I took it kind of hard at first.

It’s not that I was naive enough not to expect it and it’s not that I can’t take rejection, but in the context in which it came, well… this was one of a dwindling few things I had left to really hope for. While everything else crumbled I retained the hope that maybe when I got word back on my manuscript it would be the thing to turn it all around. And I was wrong. I figured if nothing else, the statistical likelihood of all this general crappiness has been like flipping a quarter a hundred times and having it come up tails every single time.[2]

Anyway, I was depressed. Even more so than usual. But then I ended up coming up with an entire young adult book series, the first installment of which I hope to have written relatively soon. I won’t get into details, but it’s going to be “Twilight for boys”, basically. Only, y’know, well-written and -thought, with an actual plot.[3] I’ll keep you posted.

It’s weird though because it seems like the shittier my life gets, the more my brain generates these great ideas for books and things. I’m not sure how to feel about that.

Thanks to some guidance and inspiration from friends[4], I’ve decided to take the John Scalzi approach and release my book online in serialized installments as I make an editing pass through it. (Keep in mind that I still consider it a rough draft, so please leave suggestions (as some of you have already been doing — thanks!). It’s definitely helpful and I’ll be making another editing pass again when I’m done.) I may self-publish on Lulu when I’m done with the next edit but I’m not sure. The publishing market is really weird right now.

A part of me is hoping (though not naively enough that there’s any genuine expectation) that the right person might end up reading the book as I’m serializing it on the site and offer me a book deal. Mostly, though, I just want a lot of people to read it regardless of who they are. But there’s one thing that’s going to have to happen, here, in order to accomplish that: You are going to have to tell your friends.

Look, I’m not doing this for the money.[5] If I were, I wouldn’t even consider putting this up online. I mean, it’d be nice if I could make enough money from it that I could do it exclusively since I have so many ideas that I’m not sure I could really get them all out if they had to constantly compete for time with other activities, especially ones that can take up massive portions of a person’s daily life.

But I write — hell, even this website, which I’ve been maintaining with relative frequency since I started it back in 2002 — because I want to inspire people. I want you to like my ideas and roll them around in your heads and maybe even go on to write or draw or sing or sculpt things of your own, even if only tangentially inspired or related. I want to have an impact on people. And while I really appreciate all the readers I already have, I need more.

If you like my ideas and want me to be able to get even more of them out — all the ones I have in my head — you’re going to have to help me out a little. I figure it’s at least worth the few breaths required to prod your friends into checking out the book.[6] So please, if you like it, spread the word to everyone you know who you think might like it. Blog about it, link to it, Twitter about it, scratch the URL into a bathroom door — whatever you want to do. Just get the word out. (And I’m still working on those marketing opportunities I mentioned before.)

Thanks in advance, and I really do hope you’re enjoying (or will enjoy) reading Machination.

By the way:

(There are some interface issues on the site in Safari — it doesn’t like some of the Javascript for some reason so I’m going to have to figure out why, but I’ve been too busy to work on it. It’s been working flawlessly for me in Firefox. Also, you can read it on an iPhone but you can’t interact with the menus and the menu bar doesn’t stay at the bottom like it does in every other browser. Let me know if you have any major issues. There’ll be an FAQ page up soon.)

Footnotes:

[1] One of very few publishers who accept unsolicited manuscripts. The other of the relatively bigger names in scifi publishing with a similar policy is Baen.

[2] I’m starting to lose my faith in cliches like “it can’t rain all the time” and “it’s always darkest before the dawn”.

[3] And not about vampires. It’s really awesome though — promise. For those counting, this means I’m working on at least three books simultaneously (excluding Machination, which I’m just editing). The other two are also awesome, but in different ways. And then there’s this weird experimental project I’m working on that’s sort of House of Leaves meets American Psycho meets Infinite Jest with multi-level footnotes that eventually loop around to reference the original text, but that’s kind of a back-burner thing right now.

[4] One of whom reminded me that many publishing houses are firing massive amounts of staff and are therefore very probably unwilling to take chances on unknown authors right now. So diverting this into a typical EtJ politics rant, you may have that fuckoid Bush and his “hey, banks, do whatever you want!” policies to thank in part for my novel not getting released. Hooray!

[5] Though you’re welcome to donate if you’re so inclined — I’ll set up a PayPal button for it. No suggested amount and no obligation, just whatever you think you want to give. And I’ll remember you, and if the book does end up getting published formally at some point I’ll do something special for you.

[6] I mean, if you’re trapped in a sinking submarine or you have to blow out a candle before it lights the fuse on the TNT in the elaborate trap you’ve been placed in by some kind of spy villain, please use those breaths more wisely.

    As the plane bounced gently, settling on the runway, Marty grabbed his briefcase and prepared to deplane. The other parcel would be waiting for him on the luggage carousel. Or, rather, he’d have to be waiting for it , which was upsetting because there was somewhere he really needed to be.
    The several yawns he’d experienced during their approach had each been followed by an aggressive sensation of awakening. He was beginning to understand what they’d meant when they’d talked about a link to yawning.
    He couldn’t really remember at this point what he’d been watching on the TV. Currently, there was just a map of the airplane’s present location, with information about altitude and airspeed. He stared blankly at it until the plane arrived at the gate.
    His package was the first to slide down the chute inside. One of his co-passengers pawed at it curiously, but he quickly grabbed it from them and left. Shortly thereafter, he was in the back seat of a cab, instructing the driver to bring him to the nearest electronics store.
    His exhausted mind was finally beginning to lose its grasp on the passage of time, but in what seemed to be extremely short order they’d arrived in the parking lot of some enormous warehouse of a building. There was a brightly-lit logo on the front but he didn’t care enough to look at what it was.
    ”Can you wait?” he asked the driver, tossing him a rather generous amount of money.
    ”Yeah, sure.”
    Marty got out and jogged quickly into the store.
    Though it was at the very rear of the building, the stack of high-definition televisions on display were visible from anywhere in the store. He quickly navigated the carefully-arranged maze of aisles and product displays and found a smaller television away from where most of the salespeople were concentrated.
    Pawing around for a moment, he found the remote in a plastic cradle adhered to the side of the set and used the on-screen IPTV guide to call up the America First News feed. He wasn’t sure why he’d made a special trip to the store to watch, but he felt as though they were going to be telling him something really important.
    ”You know, the thirty-inch model is only four hundred dollars cheaper than the forty-two-inch one,” said an enthusiastic voice somewhere off to his right. “If you’re going to make a purchase this big, you might as well go just a little extra and get all you can out of it.”
    Marty glanced quickly at the red-shirted kid standing next to him, making sure not to divert his attention from the screen long enough to miss anything. “Uh, my apartment’s kinda small.”
    ”You can always find room. It’s twelve inches more diagonally, so it only expands the footprint by maybe another nine inches. I’m sure you’ve got nine more inches of space wherever you’d be putting something this big.”
    ”I, uh, look, I really don’t,” he replied, keeping his eyes fixed on the screen. “Sorry.”
    ”We also have lighter, flatter screens you can hang in front of things and move around when you need to. Or put it on the ceiling.”
    ”Uh, just looking, thanks.”
    ”Projectors are a little more expensive, but they take up a lot less room. All you need is some unobstructed wall space.” He continued speaking but Marty didn’t catch a word.
    A minute or two after the salesperson had eventually grown frustrated with Marty’s obvious lack of interest and left, the patterns of blocks popped onto the screen and disappeared in rapid succession. He felt as though he’d seen the effect somewhere before but he couldn’t quite place it.
    Possessing what he’d unwittingly come into the store to obtain, Marty briskly exited and returned to the cab. Before the driver even had a chance to ask, Marty leaned forward and spoke through the holes in the plexiglas, “I’ll give you an extra three hundred if you can get me to the Ambassador Bridge in five minutes.”

    *

    The young, towheaded border guard of the New Canadian Republic tried to glare at them with intimidating coldness, but his boyish, doughy features made the gesture humorously unsuccessful. Still, he had a gun so none of them dared laugh.
    ”They can cross,” he said to Ben. “You can’t.”
    ”How the hell do you expect them to get to Toronto? On foot?”
    The guard dropped his head, staring at him with mild exasperation, and sighed. “Ever hear of buses?”
    ”What do you think I’m going to do, take out an entire fucking military installation using a handgun and a motorcycle with a half-depleted turret on it?”
    ”You think we’re that good that we could stop you?” He smiled a little after a second. “That was a joke. Self-deprecating humor. Look, we’re more than willing to take in refugees and escapees and such, but unless you’re planning on defecting I can’t let you in. Mostly because there’s no way you’ll be coming back out again. Really, I’m doing you a favor — you think your guys are going to be any more lenient going the other way?”
    Ben sighed resignedly and turned to the Denises. “Well, you guys can either cross the bridge yourselves and take a bus, or we can string together some driftwood into a crude raft and float ourselves and the bike over to the other side of the river.”
    The Denise to Ben’s left said, “bus is a lot safer than that damned motorcycle.” Simultaneously the Denise to his right said, “I’m staying.” The former glared surprisedly at the latter.
    ”In Detroit?” asked Ben. “Why?”
    ”With you, dumbass,” she snapped defensively, mild embarrassment tangible in her body language.
    ”Still: Why?”
    She sighed and rolled her eyes.
    The other Denise, standing beside her, tried to get a better view of her duplicate’s expression. “Well?”
    ”I’m bored. Don’t take it the wrong way but I’ve grown kinda tired of you. I’m sick of seeing myself walking around all the time, constantly reminding me of how old I’m getting. It’s like I’ve got this walking, talking mirror around me all the time. And your voice — my voice — sounds like someone muting a trumpet with ground beef. It’s bad enough when it’s in my own head, but hearing it twice as much is torture.”
    ”Well, that’s a goddamned relief,” grumbled the other Denise. “I was going to try to ditch you when we got to Toronto. I feel the same way. Hell, you know that. You’re me. Go, have fun. Get yourself blown up.”
    After hugging her doppelgänger for a while, she started across the Ambassador Bridge into Windsor. Before leaving speaking distance, she stopped briefly and turned around. “I don’t get it, though: We were both cloned from the same person at the same time and lived about the same life since. Why didn’t I want to stay as well? ‘Cause I really don’t.”
    The staying Denise shrugged. “I killed more brain cells inhaling oven cleaner? Hell if I know.”
    Everyone was silent for a minute.
    ”Well,” said the leaving Denise, “have a nice life. Try not to die. Come visit if you don’t. Both of you.”
    They watched her walk away for a while.
    ”You should probably go, too,” advised the border guard. “Before someone sees.”
    Ben mounted the motorcycle and started it, checking the sparse instrument panels to be sure it was running. With an incredibly small nuclear reactor powering it, it was difficult to tell whether it had actually been turned on. Denise climbed on behind him. They rolled toward the bridge for a few feet, the border guard watching them closely, then u-turned back toward Interstate 75.

    Before reaching the highway onramp, Ben pulled over in front of some kind of vacant industrial building. “I’m taking you back. You can sneak across the bridge and take a different bus to Toronto. Or wherever else you want to go.”
    ”What? No. Keep driving.”
    ”I never said you could come with me, you know.”
    ”Should’ve said something earlier.”
    ”You mean I should’ve somehow preempted your deciding to stay with me before you even mentioned it?”
    ”Let’s just go, before your big metal girlfriend comes along and crushes us. We’ll talk about it later.”
    ”That’s exactly why I’m not letting you come along with me. I didn’t want to say anything on the bridge because you made it clear you wanted to get away from each other, but I have to drop you off somewhere else. Or leave you here. Your choice.”
    ”Always wanted to see California.”
    ”So, since that’s part of Canada now, I’ll drop you off at the bridge and you can find a train over. This isn’t ‘Make a Wish’, I’m just trying to get you somewhere safe where you can start a new life.”
    ”Hey, I know, how about we stay here arguing about it and get crushed by a tank.”
    He sighed exasperatedly. “Is there any way I’m going to convince you?”
    ”Nope.”
    Ben let his head drop forward and shook it slightly. “Fine. But I’m still going after Anna, so if you’re so afraid of getting crushed, anywhere around me is going to be a really bad place to be.” He started the bike toward the road. “At least you’re wearing comfortable shoes.”
    Shortly after continuing toward the highway, part of a building exploded onto the road about a hundred feet ahead of them, flaming debris raining through the subsequent dust cloud for a moment or two following.
    Ben immediately stopped the bike. “Here, for instance. Here is a very bad place to be.”
    After idling in the remains of the building she’d destroyed, taking in her surroundings, Anna launched herself into the building on the other side of the road, demolishing it as well.
    ”Well, you asked for it,” said Ben over his shoulder, riding toward the explosion.
    Denise screamed for a moment, but soon, realizing its futility, stopped.

    *

    There were high-definition televisions lining the ticketing areas of JFK Airport, courtesy of the news organization featured on every screen. As Marty entered, carrying the package and metal briefcase he’d retrieved from a storage locker he couldn’t recall having purchased in the basement of his building, he was distracted by the broadcast and located a seat within viewing range. He still had no idea where he was going, or why.
    The stories were all the same things he’d seen earlier in the day, focusing primarily on the contagious insomnia story with predictable implication that insurgents were responsible, and he couldn’t quite pinpoint what had drawn him to sit down and watch.
    After a few minutes, the exaggeratedly-emoting newscasters segued into a commercial break, and as the feed quickly faded to black for no longer than was absolutely necessary, the same digital artifacts he’d seen at his apartment appeared briefly on the screen. He wondered whether there were service problems throughout the city, but his thoughts were quickly redirected to an inexplicable compulsion to buy a ticket for the next available flight to Detroit Metropolitan Airport.
    He also realized there was a wallet in the briefcase containing a credit card he could use to make the purchase, along with some other InfoCard he could use to check the package aboard the plane as luggage without inspection. He tracked down the nearest available automated kiosk and purchased a one-way ticket for a flight boarding forty minutes later.

    Mounted to the back of the seat in front of him was a small high-definition television. It was IPTV, but with a limited feed selection. Marty flipped through the list of available live streams using controls embedded in his armrest, halfheartedly seeking something interesting but ultimately deciding on America First News. He wished he could figure out why he’d even taken this flight, but every time he tried his brain would forcibly divert its attention to something else. Eventually he just gave up.
    A set of cheap headphones wrapped in plastic fell into his lap and he turned just in time to catch a bored-looking flight attendant tossing them carelessly from a white garbage bag. They were uncomfortable, but he clipped them to his ears and plugged them in anyway.
    He still wasn’t sure what it was that kept drawing him to this particular newsfeed. The stories had been nearly the same all day with no interesting or unpredictable developments, but he was unable to assuage a nagging sensation that there was something very important he needed to be informed about.
    Halfway through the flight, after the same news items had been reiterated in ten-minute blocks about seven or eight times, the digital artifacts once again danced across the screen. Dismissing it as service problems or atmospheric disruption he continued staring at the screen, faintly mouthing the recurring news stories from memory in synchronization with the anchorwoman. He understood now, as though it was a concept that had been clear to him for years, that he was on his way to kill someone.

    *

    ”Greetings, Sal,” said an unexpectedly pleasant voice that permeated the whole of the cockpit. “I understand we’ll be working together.”
    The small compartment was by far the most comfortable and intuitive he’d ever encountered in a military vehicle. Upon entering, a marshmallowy seat closed in behind him to seal the hatchway, reinforced from behind by at least a dozen layers of shielding. Every control in the cockpit was within immediate reach in his lap, and the view from the front of the machine was displayed on a set of curved high-definition screens that nearly entirely encompassed the front interior wall of the compartment, stretching at least as far back as his range of peripheral vision.
    His legs were enveloped by conforming, spongy padding, and he could get the machine to walk by pressing his legs firmly in a given direction. For manual control of the external arms, he could slip his own arms into similar spongy pockets to his immediate right and left. When not in use, the arms would be under the control of the artificial intelligence.
    ”Uh, hi,” he responded. “They, uh, didn’t tell me what to call you.”
    ”Kate will do.”
    ”Hi, then, Kate. Sorry, it’s just — I was expecting something a little more, uh…”
    ”Rudimentary.”
    ”I guess so, yeah.”
    ”If it would make you feel more comfortable, I could modulate my voice, pretend to be completely oblivious, and you could address me as HAL.”
    Sal laughed. “That won’t be necessary. I’ll adapt.”
    ”I thought so. Though, I can sing a charming rendition of Daisy Bell, if you’re ever interested.”
    ”I’ll keep that in mind, thanks.”
    They sat in uneasy silence for a moment, the awkwardness of which would have been exacerbated had she been a real human woman sitting there with him.
    ”Orange scent in your body wash?” she asked.
    ”How did you–”
    ”The cockpit is lined with chemical sensors. It helps me regulate life support systems and compensate for your various biochemical shifts. It has the added advantage of providing me an extremely acute sense of smell. For instance, how were the eggs?”
    ”Oh. Uh, mediocre.”
    Another awkward silence.
    ”What are we doing again today?” he asked eventually. “Something about arms, I think.”
    ”Arm interaction and balance testing.”
    ”Wanna get started?”
    ”Sure.”

    *

    Every rumor they’d heard about the Lone Star Republic had proven true. The GPS device the guards at the border had attached employed some kind of tamper-resistant seal, so that if one tried to remove it from one’s vehicle without the appropriate tools it would explode, spraying the interior of the vehicle with blue paint and probably some other chemical agent they weren’t as explicit about. Though ensured that the mechanism was only sensitive to intrusion and not regular jostling, they all still flinched at every bump in the road.
    ”Good lord ,” said Tate, about a mile after they’d gone through the painstaking process of crossing the border. “Why would anyone want to actually stay here? Is it really that big a problem?”
    Jenna shushed him. “Quiet. That stupid thing might be bugged.”
    ”I’d try to scan it to see if it’s actually even transmitting any kind of signal, but I’m afraid I’d detonate it. Do we have anything we can put over it so it doesn’t spray up our goddamned faces if it goes off?”
    ”Maybe we could take it off completely if we wrapped it in a couple socks or something and gave it a good yank,” said Mitch, obeying the speed limits more cautiously than usual.
    ”I don’t think they’d be too thrilled when we hand them a couple blue-paint-encrusted socks on our way out when they ask for their tracker back.” Jenna passed Tate a baseball cap from the back seat. It belonged to the other engineer sleeping on some jackets on the floor at the very rear of the vehicle.
    Nearly two hours later they arrived in Groom, where hundreds of people were gathered around the heavily-pocked metal goliath of Christian symbolism, their cars lining both sides of the road about an eighth of a mile in either direction. Mitch found a place to park as close to the cross as possible.
    ”Getting anything back there?” asked Tate.
    Jenna had been carefully studying the screens for the last half an hour, but there’d been no change in the readings. “Nope.”
    ”Shit.” Tate sighed. “Well, maybe we can find one of the bugs laying around somewhere or something if one of these assholes didn’t already find it and declare it the new messiah.” He opened his door and looked at Mitch. “Stay here and guard the van. Oh, and try not to wake Rip van Wetdream back there.”
    As Tate and Jenna crossed the highway, a tall, skinny couple with a slightly pudgy son and a wafer-thin teenage daughter who looked like she’d puked herself into amenorrhoea exited their nearby station wagon and jogged to join them.
    ”Come to see the miracle?” asked the mother.
    ”Uh. Sure.” Tate wondered for a moment where robotic bugs descending from the sky and eating a bunch of aluminum siding ranked in terms of miraculousness compared to walking on water and making an appearance on a grilled cheese sandwich.
    ”We drove in from Amarillo first thing after hearing about it.” The father slicked back his hair with a comb from his shirt pocket.
    ”Yeah, well, we came all the way from New Mexico . Guess we win Christian of the Month or something.” He grabbed Jenna’s arm and started shoving through the crowd toward the t-shaped monolith jutting from the ground like a stubby robot claw. Along the way they were accosted by several volunteers bearing collection bins at the ends of outstretched arms.
    Eventually they found someone who seemed to be in charge. As the man smiled friendlily at visitors, he repeated the same greeting at nobody in particular. “Greetings, welcome. Glad you could come.”
    Tate nodded at the man as they approached him, indicating he was interested in more than just saying hello. “Any idea which direction they went when they left? Or what they seemed to be doing? Were you able to catch one or maybe find one laying around on the ground somewhere?”
    ”Why do you feel the need to know?” The man chuckled toothily, a condescending expression that remained on his face as he spoke, breathily pushing out his words through smugly clenched teeth. “Can you not accept the mysteries of the Holy Spirit for what they are?”
    ”Well, if you could actually, I don’t know, prove this was a sign from God, maybe I’d be a little more inclined,” replied Tate.
    ”But faith is just that: faith. It requires no proof, or else it wouldn’t be faith.”
    ”So the idea is to ignore evidence that might be present in case it interferes with our beliefs? Neat.”
    ”When God gives us a sign, why do we have to check his handwriting? Or figure out what ink he used to write his message?”
    ”I, uh, it might have some kind of spiritual significance,” interjected Jenna, crowbarring into the conversation before Tate could provide another brusque and non-conducive response. “Like, maybe God is saying ‘look to whatever direction for the next miracle’. Or warning us against some adversary somewhere.”
    ”Ah. Well.” The man eased a little. “I watched them the whole while. When they took to the skies, they went that way.” He pointed.
    ”Well, uh, thanks, then,” said Tate, eager to take his leave. He mumbled to Jenna, “perhaps you should be marketing director.”
    ”Would I get a raise?”
    ”We’ll be lucky if we still have a company next week.”
    Deeper into the crowd, it became apparent that even if a few bugs had fallen or deactivated, they’d almost certainly been pulverized under the shuffling feet of the awestruck.
    ”You know,” said Jenna, “this apparently isn’t even the western hemisphere’s largest cross. I looked it up before we left. I read there’s a place that makes them all to the exact same height, so that they can all claim the title as a tourist attraction. Not sure how true that is.”
    ”Crazy. I wonder how they even market that kind of thing.” Peering upward, shielding his eyes from the sun with a flier he couldn’t remember being given, Tate assessed the damage, which seemed to be focused mostly around the topmost portions of the structure. “Hey, what do you suppose they were doing? The bugs, I mean, not the people building monster crosses.”
    ”My first thought was that they were treating it like some kind of antenna, but that doesn’t explain why they attacked it.” She was whispering at this point, speaking directly into his ear to avoid further displeasured looks from the people around them who were all quietly praying.
    ”Maybe they stopped to continue the script? Like, they tried to continue the Statue of Liberty, but got confused when the structure they’d started was no longer there.”
    ”Or they needed parts for repairs.”
    ”Maybe. Or they could’ve seen it as some kind of enemy. Or, shit, I don’t know. Let’s just get back to the van and get ourselves the hell out of here before we’re covered in blue paint and burned as heretics.” There was another possible explanation, he’d realized, the implications of which troubled him immensely: They were reproducing.

    *

    Desi took the absolute minimum of comfort from the fact that she could work the rest of the day and probably the next without having to worry about the implant activating. They always spaced the days out with one or two between to ensure maximal semen saturation during the most fertile period of her cycle. She could take out the sperm worm, then, after a couple days, allowing enough time to flush out any of its already negligible traces before her monthly examination.
    They seemed to be increasingly suspicious about her persistent lack of conception. By all professional accounts she was supposed to be rabbit-level fecund — the most amusingly she’d heard it described was by a doctor who’d called her “explosively fertile”. She anticipated it wouldn’t be long before she was caught.
    Across the touch screen built into her desk were splayed the manufactured, strikingly realistic-sounding stories that were supposed to pass as news and nearly always succeeded at it. The generally unimportant reports were usually real news; anything that could possibly be construed as polemic or political or having to do with the ongoing war was always fabricated, or at least favorably edited to such an extent that it might as well have been. People usually cared the most about the news that directly pertained to their daily lives and activities. As long as that was verifiably real, the rest would seem so as well.
    The newest story was about the apparently contagious insomnia, a growing concern with predictable blame placed on what the government and its subsidiary news organizations liked to call “terrorist insurgents”, who were in actuality mostly just the opposition in the rather frosty but apparently ongoing civil war. With a swift swipe of her hand, she slid it over into a folder icon on the left side of the desk marked “Clear”, and the next story automatically replaced it in the center of the screen.
    She was supposed to file any stories that seemed potentially subversive into “Flag”, where they’d be sent to one of the editors’ incoming “Flag” folders. The editor would “correct” the article and send it back, then initiate an investigation into wherever the offender may have intervened in the article’s assembly process. Often, she suspected the editors sent out intentionally “defective” articles themselves, as a test of the target recipient’s loyalty. For this reason, she made sure to read every article carefully for any signs of anything that might question the greatness of America. Unless you were paying close attention, some witty bit of subtle satire — like adding an extra synonym or two for some patriotic words to a phrase that had already been modified in such a ridiculous way, e.g. “Free New Free Freedom York” — might slip through and actually be read on the air. Lack of “patriotic duty” wasn’t nearly as serious a crime as writing the article to begin with, but it was still a punishable offense. And once they began their inquiry into her life, they would uncover everything — the implant, the sperm worm, Nemo’s connections — so it was safest to err on the side of rampant paranoia.
    All of the bullshit displayed on her desk screen each day had been shoveled in from somewhere in Richard’s building deeper in D.C. She shuddered a little every time she remembered that some of it may have even been orchestrated directly by him. It made her want to wash her hands, even though the files she was in contact with were all digital.
    After combating the psychosomatic sliminess that seemed to accompany even the idea of Richard Packard, she moved on to the next story about an assassination attempt by terrorists, foiled thanks to the unrelenting patriotism of the American people. It was undoubtedly fabricated; she’d developed a knack for identifying all the earmarks of a fake report. The three suspects — likely random bearded men of Arabic descent photographed on a sound stage and paid for their time — were all supposedly being detained on one of the New Liberty Army’s battleships.
    There was an accompanying media resource snippet, which she was also required to screen for subversive content. One never knew when someone with, for instance, an unpatriotic t-shirt might wander through the background. The video was a brief interview with the everyday hero who’d provided the information leading to the arrest. Despite an excellent job with makeup and post-processing and the fact that the woman was a spectacular actress, Desi recognized her as a coworker from one of the upstairs floors.
    She closed the report’s package and dragged its folder into “Clear”, making way for the next one. As she was enlarging it for easier reading, she yawned and stretched a little. Shit , she thought, hope I’m not catching that contagious insomnia .
    ”WHEN MEN SEE SHAPES IN THE SHADOWS OF THE MOON, THEY’RE REALLY ONLY SEEING THEMSELVES,” read the next file. She slid it around on her desk with her fingertips, enlarging and shrinking it, turning it, looking for something more, but that was it.
    ”What?” she asked, aloud. Someone’s personal note must have gotten mixed up and included in the reports. As unusual and nonsensical as it was, it was hard to believe it was some kind of intentional attempt at sneaking a subversive message into the broadcast.
    She slid it over to the “Flag” icon, highlighting it, but paused before letting it go. Likely it was an innocent error — perhaps someone wasn’t paying attention to what they were doing and slid this stupid note in by mistake. The subsequent and undoubtedly inevitable investigation might ruin this person’s life, or at least his or her ability to ever urinate comfortably again.
    Of course, if this was actually a test of her loyalty, they’d accounted for all of the possible excuses she could give for not reporting the note. They’d likely have to “reeducate” her to ensure her future willingness to sacrifice individual for country.
    ”Oh goddamn it,” she grunted, nearly inaudibly. She hesitated a moment longer, then withdrew the file from the icon and tossed it up into a corner to deal with it later. She feigned a violent sneeze while doing it, moaning and sniffling afterward, in case they’d planted a bug in the room. If anyone asked, she could claim she sneezed with her hand on the screen, messing up all her files and losing the one in question.
    The next story popped up in its place — a saccharine “hero story” from the “front lines”, where troops were flushing out insurgents from disputed territories. She recognized the actor playing the soldier as a man named Jeremy, whose office had been a couple doors down from hers until he’d been promoted a few months ago.

    *

    Surprisingly exhausted after a completely unproductive day at work, Marty collapsed onto his couch, his eyes reflexively tracking the moving images on the television he’d apparently left on that morning. He was barely even aware of what was on.
    At first, the insomnia had proven somewhat beneficial. In his first week of early workdays at his thankless and unimportant office job, he’d managed to catch up with a backlog he’d had for months. It wasn’t as though it actually mattered, but it felt good to get ahead. Over the course of the last month, however, the lack of sleep had worn him into a zombie-like state where he could barely accomplish much more than feeding himself when the need arose. Even then, it was getting to the point where the hunger pains really needed to cramp his belly to get his attention.
    The TV provided the only illumination in the room; he’d stopped bothering with any of the other lights in the hope that a darker atmosphere would help contribute to his ability to sleep. This theory continually proved false.
    He glanced down at the precooked chicken pot pie he’d taken out of the microwave maybe ten minutes ago and had forgotten about, and his eyelids began to drop a little. As his head rolled back into the padded outcropping of couch behind it, he drew in a powerful yawn. After a moment, when his eyes had nearly completely closed, he shuddered a little and shot upright as though he’d never even been tired.
    ”Motherfucker,” he yelped. Tears pooled in the corners of his eyes, and he began to sob a little.
    He grabbed the pot pie from the table, nearly tossing it into his lap, and bitterly started shoveling it into his mouth. It was the same meal he’d had every night for the last two weeks, but it didn’t really matter since he could barely taste anything anymore anyway.
    The news cut to a commercial break, mostly composed of advertisements for mattresses and sleep aids, and he muted the TV wondering how much the ‘sleep industry’ would be benefitting from all of this.
    He reactivated the sound when the news came back on. Midway through the first story, digital artifacts appeared briefly on the screen, accompanied by a burst of noise similar to the sound of a fax machine. Panic filled him, blossoming from fears that the only source of distraction from the wide-awake nightmare he’d been experiencing might break, or that the signal might be cutting out.
    When it didn’t appear again after a few minutes of fiddling with the TV, he shrugged it off and lay down on the couch.
    It was over an hour later when he regained consciousness, but he wasn’t sure he’d actually slept. He arose from the couch with as profound a grogginess as any human had ever experienced, and his head felt like a group of kids had borrowed it for a game of kickball.
    Nearly reflexively, he grabbed the bottle of aspirin he kept on the table and washed it down with the remainder of his iced tea. Swarms of unfamiliar thoughts flittered through his brain but were moving too quickly for him to catch. It was like waking up from thousands of tiny dreams, only to have all memory of them immediately slip away back into his subconscious.
    He turned off the TV, shoved his feet into his boots and headed out the front door, wondering where the hell he was taking himself.

    *

    A grey utility van bearing the Tettix Robotix insignia rolled to a stop along a strip of Interstate 40, just east of Albuquerque. They’d embarked from the desert a couple hours after the bugs — and all their potential investors, for that matter — had departed, after finding a news report online from a small town called Groom in the Lone Star Republic about a swarm of bugs forming briefly around an enormous cross made of metal sheeting before ascending again into the skies. Eyewitnesses had interpreted the event as a message from God, an indication of the imminence of the end of the world or a sign of some coming plague. Tate had interpreted it as an indication of the flight path of the electronic insects he’d lost several hours earlier.
    He sat in the passenger seat, pulling up a map from the internet using one of the satellites mounted to the roof of the van. Despite absolutely abhorring dress clothes, especially in the desert, he was still wearing his suit from the presentation. He hadn’t had time to head back to his hotel room to change.
    ”Anyone mind if I turn up the air conditioner? This laptop is really baking my crotch.” There was a silence. He reached for the knob. “No one?”
    ”You should try putting it on a briefcase or something,” said Jenna Xun, the engineer who’d been running the presentation that morning. She was in the back of the van monitoring the tracking equipment.
    ”Ah, thanks. That suggestion probably would’ve been more helpful before I went completely sterile, but thanks all the same.”
    ”I’m… sorry? I was just–”
    Tate sighed loudly, interrupting her. “No, don’t apologize. I should. I’m just a little stressed about the prospect of hundreds of millions of dollars of prototypes deactivating and dropping into some kid’s yard for him to smash up in fights with his Transformers or whatever.”
    ”It’s okay,” she replied. It was obvious — to her, at least — that he blamed her for the disappearance of the insects. After all, she’d been the one who’d programmed and run the entire demo. She blamed herself as well, despite being almost positive it wasn’t her fault in a way she hadn’t quite figured out yet.
    ”You getting anything? On the sensors?” asked Tate, over his shoulder.
    Jenna checked the screen she’d been monitoring in case anything new had shown up over the last few seconds. “Nope. Nothing. Just noise.”
    ”Damn, just remembered to ask, but did everyone bring their passports?” asked Tate. “They’re going to check when we get to the border. And coming back out again will probably be worse.”
    The driver, a man named Mitch, pulled back onto the road after one of the other engineers returned through the rear doors of the van from a roadside bathroom break. “I hear they’ve been attaching GPS tracking devices to visitors’ cars, to make sure they’re actually only visiting. If you’re not out when you said you’d be out, it alerts the authorities in the area where the transmitter is located. They scan your InfoCards at the border when you go in, and use them to track you down if you don’t go out.”
    ”Are they really that fascist about it?” asked Jenna. “I mean, I’m sure those are the official rules and all, but are they that strictly enforced?”
    ”I think so, actually,” replied Mitch. “They’ve got this huge, creepy volunteer force that guards the borders. I heard they’re starting to build a fence around the entire perimeter, starting down on the Mexico side.”
    ”Well,” said Tate, “let’s be sure to get the hell out of there as soon as possible then.”

    *

I’ll be putting the first installment behind a cut, due in part to it being much larger than future installments will be. It’s longer because I’ve already released this portion as a preview in .rtf format, and the reason that was as long as it was is because I felt it a good length to introduce all the characters.

Future installments will be displayed in bigger chunks and cut after a couple weeks.

You’ll be able to view the complete book as it’s released at This Page, which is currently under construction but I’m working on it. The menu bar at the bottom will be better-looking and better-integrated, for one thing, with a few additional options, and there will be a title at the top and such.

I’ll explain my motivations for releasing it this way later but for now I just want to get this ball rolling.

Continue reading →

Hey, everyone. I know this is a long time coming, and I apologize for the delay, but here’s the first bit of the novel I wrote at the beginning of 2008. Keep in mind that this is rather a rough draft, and I’ll probably make another editing pass even if it never gets picked up by a publisher and I end up having to self-publish or something. There are a few bits I’m still not completely happy with.

If you like it, feel free to pass it on to any friends you know who might also enjoy it, but only if you keep the file fully intact and unaltered. If you really like it and you feel like doing an awesome favor for a desperate man, there will be opportunities coming up that I’ll inform you about to help me market this thing. I’ll keep you posted, as the materials/plan will be available soon.

And as an added bonus, here’s what I have so far for the first scene of the novel I’m currently working on:

P.S. – For those of you who e-mailed me, I’ll have you upgraded to contributor status soon. Sorry for the delay.