Dean Castro knew he had created something truly revolutionary the moment he pressed the power-on button.

A tingling surged from the tip of his finger, along his arm, down his torso and leg, and up the other leg. When the charge made it to his lips, he smiled broadly.

He built a machine that would change the world forever, and for the better. That’s how sure he was that nearly every person on Earth would want one of his devices.

He brushed the corner of his eye.

Grandma wouldn’t have died if she had one of these. But how do I convince a giant corporation to accept, integrate, and sell something that’s unlike anything Breski Electronics has done before?

He considered this question for a few minutes.

What’s life without risk?

Prototype in hand, he dashed up twelve flights to the executive office floor, rammed the staircase door open with his shoulder, sprinted down the hallway, past the company president’s receptionist’s desk, and burst into her office while the receptionist shouted, “You can’t go in there! Stop! She’s in a meeting! You need an appointment. Security!”

He ignored the receptionist, bolted into the office, and locked the door behind him.

“Who the fuck are you?” Julia Axelrod, Breski Electronics’ President, demanded. “And what are you doing in my office?”

Pierre LaGrange, the company’s CFO, who was in the room, too, stood and positioned his 6-foot-3-inch, 210-pound frame between Castro and Axelrod. “Get out of here.”

Castro withdrew a black handheld two-axis cylindrical device from his pocket. A shorter, squat, silver cylinder sat perpendicular to the black base like the top of a hammer. It looked like a pocket fan.

Or a pistol’s barrel.

Castro trained the cylinder at Axelrod, who collapsed back into her chair. Castro then pointed the cylinder at LaGrange and said, “Turn off the air conditioner.”

“Are you out of your mind? This is Houston, Texas. It’s one-hundred-three degrees outside. We’re on the thirty-third floor of a sealed steel and glass office building. We will quite literally die without air conditioning, quickly and painfully.”

“Turn it off. And tell your receptionist to cancel security.”

LaGange sidestepped to the thermostat and clicked off the room’s air conditioning.

The room quieted.

“Now what? Axelrod asked.

“We wait.”

“How long?”

“Not long, I expect.”

Twenty minutes later, when sweat poured from their faces, creating small salt lakes at their feet, Castro walked over to Axelrod’s chair, handed her the device, and said, “Take this.”

Axelrod reached out to the device, groaned, doubled over, and said, “This better be good.” Panting, she snatched the device, turned it over in her hand, peered into the top cylinder, and said, “It’s a fan.”

“Turn it on.”

“It’s just a fan, idiot. It cools by helping sweat evaporate off of skin. It isn’t going to do anything to save us from this furnace you’ve locked us into. It must be over a hundred in here. What kind of stupid energy company employee are you? What’s your name? You’re going to be out on the street and you’re never going to work in the energy business again. I can guarantee you that. After you get out of prison.”

“Just turn it on.”

Axelrod, who was dripping even more sweat now and whose face had turned tomato red from the heat, pressed the blue power button on the fan’s side.

The fan whooshed and blew a stream of air at her.

Frost flakes fell to her desk.

Instantly, her eyes widened, her face transmuted from red to white, and goosebumps popped up all over her arms and neck. She moaned, then sighed, then shivered.

Axelrod aimed the device at her underarms, torso, abdomen, legs, and then back to her face. “It’s icy. Incredible.”

She passed the device to LaGrange, who ran it all over his body. “Amazing,” was all he could utter.

Castro said, “I apologize for the dramatics, but I wanted you to grasp the full capabilities and implications of the device. Every elderly man and woman, child, homeless person—everyone who could die from heatstroke won’t die with this handheld chiller. By the way, I’m Dean Castro, Assistant HVAC Project Manager—”

“You’re now the company’s new Senior Vice-President,” Axelrod said. “I fully grasp what you’ve created, which shouldn’t be possible, but is. This isn’t a mere fan; it’s an air conditioning device that somehow works without heat transfer, condensers, coolant or anything that physics and chemistry dictate is necessary for cooling. It generates cold air—somehow. What is the temperature—?”

“Thirty-one degrees Fahrenheit. This device will end heatwave deaths; it will save hundreds of thousands of lives every year.”

“It’s as incredible as it is impossible. Can you do it again? Can you scale this?”

“Yes, I can. I’ve constructed twelve prototypes, and I’m confident that we can build these in any quantity we need.”

“We will literally sell billions. To everyone on every continent suffering from global warming: Africa, America, Europe, Asia—everyone everywhere. Humanity will be eternally grateful to you. And it doesn’t hurt that Breski will become the most valuable and richest company in the world. How soon can you—?”

“If I have access to the company’s full factory capabilities, we can make a million units by the end of this summer, and then a billion by next summer if we can build more facilities. I’m afraid that demand will exceed supply.”

“That’s better for pricing,” Axelrod interjected. “You’ll have what you need, Castro. Get to work. I do have one question, though. How does this work?”

“I’m not sure. A three-hundred-eighty nanometer violet laser at a frequency of seven-hundred-ninety terahertz excites a suspension of two rare Earth minerals, Europium and Xenotime, and then a simple microfan blows the thirty-one-degree air out. I was playing around with rare Earths and laser excitation and got this result entirely at random. But the mechanism is unknown.”

“It sounds like magic. It must be magic if it creates cold air out of nothing.”

“I’ll accept magic as an explanation,” Castro said. “But it’s physics, just a physics we don’t understand yet.”

“Where does the heat go? There has to be a transfer mechanism.”

Castro slowly shook his head and exhaled a long breath. “Scientists don’t fully understand how anesthesia works, but we know it does. This is like that.”

Three months later, Breski sold its first million units of the Chiller at one thousand one hundred dollars a piece. Each Chiller cost twenty-two dollars to manufacture, netting the company an astronomical profit. Next year, Breski sold a billion, keeping the price high until they saturated the American, European, and Middle Eastern markets, where the wealthiest customers lived.

Castro had wanted to sell the Chiller at the lowest possible price to get it into as many hands as possible, but when Axelrod blurted, “Noted” and “As soon as practical,” he knew that his influence at the company had a limit.

The media lauded the Chiller. Dean Castro was nominated for two Nobel Prizes: Peace and Physics. For the first time since global warming set the stage for planetary devastation, the world felt optimistic, and as a New York Times editorial put it, “The chill of optimism.”

Two years later, on March 3, 2029, after Breski had sold over two billion Chillers and Dean Castro received his dual Nobels, Castro was squinting at three-dimensional schematics for the Chiller on his iMac, still trying to figure out how the damn thing worked. It was 2:15 a.m. Rich, famous, and happy beyond his imagination, Castro had little to do except try to divine the Chiller’s mechanism.

As he thought of his grandmother, who perished in the Chicago heatwave of 1995, his eyes clouded.

But he smiled again as the past year’s headlines raced through his mind: India Heat Deaths Drop to Near Zero, Miami Schools Remain Open Despite Record Temps, Global Electricity Use Declines 5%.

He plugged a violet laser, Europium, and Xenotime box into his iMac, connecting it directly through the USB port, hoping that he could coax his machine into finding the answers he wanted.

Text popped up on his screen.

The answer!

The text read, “Help us.”

He narrowed his eyes and clicked through the open apps. Gemini was not among them.

It’s not AI. Where is this message coming from?

He typed, “Explain.”

Thirty seconds passed and then another message appeared. “Wait. Translate,” followed by another half-minute pause and then, “You destroy our world.”

“Who is this?”

“We are Crysoladam. We live on Keci, orbiting Yuo, sixty-six thousand light-years from you.”

The letters wobbled on the screen, something that Castro had never seen before. They glowed, dimmed, and changed from black to violet to brown and then yellow. His monitor emitted high-pitched electronic feedback.

“What is this? Is this a joke?”

“Not much time. This tachyon comm will fail soon. We find you through the wormhole you make. Keci world is cold. You steal our cold, you send hot back. Our species die in hot. Death everywhere. Crysoladam, food, tree, animal. Fires everywhere. You kill us. Cold is life. Hot is death. You kill Crysoladam. Stop. Stop. Stop.”

Castro rubbed his chin, considered the message, the impossible communications from the other side of the galaxy, and after a few beats of his rapidly pulsing heart, understood how the Chiller worked: It opened a wormhole, drawing in cold from an ice world, and returning heat. It was never magic, of course, but as exotic as the physics was, it made sense.

Castro glanced at the Crysoladam’s pleading message one more time, confused thoughts racing through his mind: humanity versus an unseen alien world that nobody knew or would ever know.

Who should I alert about the Crysoladam? This is something that the President of the United States should decide, not me or even Breski.

He scanned the thermometer that displayed Houston’s current outside temperature: ninety-one, even in the middle of the night. He thought about his grandmother again, about the grateful words that streamed into his inbox every day from people who would have died without the Chiller.

I forgot to ask how many Crysoladam there are. Maybe it’s a small population, only a million or a billion. Maybe they’re robots, not even organic life. That must be it: organic life couldn’t evolve on an ice world.

Castro powered down his computer and went home.

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“You weren’t always this afraid of earthquakes, Ren-chan,” Sachiko said as she lifted the tea bag from her cup and placed it on the saucer on the dining room table. A faint steam cloud curled up from her cup.

Ren Ishi gave his wife a long, thoughtful look and took an equally long sip of his tea before answering. “I’ve always been concerned about earthquakes, even before the Great Tohoku earthquake—”

“That was fifteen years ago. The city and national government are much better prepared. We have sixty liters of water, plus food, emergency toilets, flashlights and batteries, fans, board games, everything we need to last ten days; that’s three days longer than the government says we need to prepare for. Really, seriously, a backup apartment is an unnecessary expense. We’ll never use it, never need it. Plus, there are also shelters if it comes to that.”

“I’m not going to a shelter where a thousand people share four toilets, where there’s bound to be at least a hundred people snoring in the same room all night long, where nobody’s going to shower, and it will smell like a sewer.” He brought his cup to his lips, and took a deliberate slurping sip.

“How do you even know it will be standing after a major earthquake? Even if we get a backup place, it might collapse, and it certainly won’t have electricity or water.”

“You’re right about no utilities, but we don’t need them. We need a backup apartment because we live on the forty-ninth floor. There’s no way for us to restock, to carry supplies up so many stairs. When we run out, it’s to the shelter we go. Or they find us dead from dehydration or starvation.”

“It’s not going to come to that because we have supplies.” Sachiko tapped her phone, a habit of hers when she wanted the conversation to end on her terms.

“An emergency apartment is like a lifeboat. Nobody ever thinks their ship will sink, but every vessel has a lifeboat; they’re vital. An emergency apartment is like an airplane’s locator device, another backup for when the worst happens. We can afford it, and we should get it.”

Sachiko countered Ren’s argument with silence.

“One other thing. Have you read that the probability of a major earthquake along the Nankai Trough is nearly one-hundred percent sometime in the next thirty years?”

Sachiko responded with more silence.

Ren continued to press his case.

Three days later, they signed the lease for their second apartment—their lifeboat apartment, as Ren called it. Within a week, he had stocked it with water, food, and other supplies.

Sachiko designed and decorated their ten-by-ten-meter space. “This is fun.”

Ren did not remind her that she had opposed the idea.

After completing the apartment, Sachiko suggested they rent a second lifeboat apartment. “A second backup increases our odds of having a safe and secure place for when the Nankai Trough earthquake happens.” Sachiko worked as a statistician at the Trick Toy Company in nearby Yokohama, so she spoke from experience.

“Or Mt. Fuji erupts.”

“Or a devastating typhoon strikes.”

“Or an earthquake-tsunami combination.”

“Or a landslide. Chances are high that one disaster or another will affect us soon,” Sachiko said.

They decorated their second backup apartment in washitsu style, but also outfitted it with two hundred liters of water, three five-thousand-watt-hour batteries, a solar panel, food for a month, and numerous other supplies. They admired their classically-stylish apartment with its wood-frame, paper-paneled doors, despite the contrast between traditional Japanese design and stark, utilitarian supplies. Or maybe they liked this apartment so much because of that aesthetic conflict.

“I think we need—” Ren and Sachiko said simultaneously that evening.

“You first,” Sachiko said.

“Okay. I think we need a third apartment for emergencies. It’s probable that neither of these two backups will be habitable in the aftermath of a great quake.”

“You should be a statistician, too,” Sachiko said. “I can’t disagree with that.”

They decorated their third backup in Modern Minimalist, and then their fourth in Wabi-Sabi, fifth in Japandi— a blended Japanese-Scandinavian design style—and from there they continued to rent and renovate more apartments until they rented 2,568 apartments scattered around the Tokyo-Yokohama-Kawasaki megalopolis, each with its own style.

“More lifeboat apartments means we’re safer,” Sachiko and Ren said in unison the night after they raised glasses of champagne to their completed project.

Sachiko built a GPS-linked database app for their phones so they’d always be able to find the nearest lifeboat apartment.

The sweet satisfaction of safety sated them.

Ren was half asleep in the dental chair having his teeth cleaned when the earthquake struck.

The hygienist dropped her tools.

Violent shaking pitched Ren out of the chair a second before the overhead light crashed onto it. He braced himself under a table for two minutes until the movement stopped, and then dashed into the street.

He tried to call Sachiko, but there was no signal. And no electricity anywhere. Street lights failed. Sirens screamed. In the distance, smoke billowed, a sign of an earthquake that stretched across a vast area.

Ren tapped his phone’s database to GPS-locate one of their nearby emergency apartments, which was a twenty-seven-minute walk away. Twenty-seven minutes on a normal day, but with streets littered with debris and with objects still falling from buildings, twenty-seven minutes might become twenty-seven hours.

He started walking.

Sachiko had just settled into her seat at a company meeting when her phone and a dozen other people’s phones blared with earthquake alarms.

Three seconds later, the building shook like a ship at sea caught in a sudden hurricane. Books leapt from the shelves, pens on the conference table shot across the room like arrows, and three people toppled over in their chairs.

“It’s the big one!”

“Everyone, evacuate the building,” Tsumugi Mori, the company’s president, instructed.

Sachiko bounded down twelve flights onto the street.

Two small, older buildings had already collapsed into brick and wood piles. A wide gash zig-zagged along the street, and somewhere at the edge of her hearing there was an explosion.

A gas explosion, Sachiko thought.

Her phone read, “No signal.” She wondered how long it would be until cell phones worked again. A long time. She tapped her phone and found her nearest emergency apartment two kilometers from her office in Roppongi.

What are the odds that we’d need one of our emergency apartments so soon after acquiring them all? she wondered, and then realized she didn’t have enough data about earthquakes to calculate that, despite her statistical bona fides.

She gasped. Oh no! I have no way to contact Ren, and the odds of us both finding the same apartment out of the 2,568 are 0.0405% per day. When will I see Ren again?

But she knew: Not for a long time. It will take 4.7 years for there to be even a fifty percent chance of us being in the same apartment on any given day.

Sachiko surveyed the ruined city around her.

All this preparation, but we never chose an apartment in which to meet.

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If you enjoyed this story, I think you’ll also like, The Day Ayame Makino Transformed into a Guitar.

Professor Chloe Briggs didn’t plan on destroying everything. All she wanted was to take advantage of her dual PhD in biology and computer science to build something both fascinating and truly useful.

Maybe a small part of her wanted to see what could happen, too, because curiosity relentlessly roams in a scientist’s mind.

“Whatcha doin’, Chloe?” Alvin Toller asked as he strode into her computer lab. His crisply ironed white lab coat draped around his knees, and an 18-karat gold atomic symbol pin on his lapel reflected the bright overhead LED light. Alvin had also earned two PhDs in chemistry and medieval religion.

“I’m engineering a computer virus,” she replied as she keyed code in on her Dell 8000 laptop. The key tapping rhythm reminded Alvin of jazz.

“Um, isn’t that something first-year computer science students can do? Or even eighth graders? What’s so special about a computer virus?”

Chloe spun one-hundred-eighty degrees on her swivel chair, creating a breeze that ruffled Alvin’s wispy, blonde hair. “Nothing. It’s what I’m going to combine the computer virus with that makes it special.”

“And that is?”

Chloe stood, took Alvin’s hand, and said, “Come with me to my bio lab.”

Alvin, who had been trying to generate the nerve to ask the beautiful, thirty-three-year-old scientist out on a date or even just for a coffee after work, forgot to breathe.

She’s holding my hand!

Chloe escorted Alvin to her lab next door, where she released Alvin’s now-sweaty hand and sat on a stool in front of a van-sized biocontainment lab. A sign atop read, WARNING: BSL-2 CONTAINMENT.

“BSL-2. Hmm,” Alvin mused.

A glass wall separated them from the biolab. A two-door, interlocking security vestibule bracketed the left side, and a five-centimeter-square, two-window opening—currently shut—stood in the middle.

“Yeah, just Herpes simplex, influenza, stuff like that. Nothing to worry about,” she told him.

“I see. Now what?” The sweat that had covered Alvin’s hand froze into a sheen of ice.

Chloe retrieved a green circuit board the size of a pack of cards with three USB ports and multiple electronic components soldered onto it. “A modified Raspberry Pi. You can do a lot with this: create a gaming console, build a seismograph, and deploy a server, but I have something special in mind, something different. I have added code to the unit in a novel emitter I built that will bridge the gap between organic and inorganic matter. The emitter functions as a small-scale quantum computer. It’s really rather miraculous.”

She unlatched the biocontainment lab’s small window and opened both sides. A woosh flew into the containment room, propelled by a difference in air pressure between the two spaces.

“Um, aren’t you not supposed to open a biocontainment space to the outside environment when there are live viruses inside?”

“It’s okay, Alvin. It’s just Herpes simplex and influenza. You have had your flu shot, haven’t you?”

“Yeah, but Herpes—”

“You’ll be okay.” She playfully jabbed his side with her elbow. “What’s science without a little risk, a little adventure?” She narrowed her eyes and in seriousness, added, “It’s worth the risk.” Chloe attached a nine-volt battery to the Raspberry Pi and held it up to offer Alvin a closer look. “It’s energized now.”

“I still don’t know what you’re planning.”

“I was only joking about Herpes.” She retrieved her Pixel 11 phone from her lab coat and showed him three-dimensional images of molecules and viruses floating and flowing on the two-dimensional screen in a dance orchestrated by a conductor made of math. “I engineered a new virus that combines the T4 bacteriophage and Hepatitis B—”

“Hepatitis B! Maybe I’d prefer Herpes after all.”

“Relax. It’s a modified strain of Hep B that doesn’t do anything worse than give its victims a mild headache.” She blew her bangs back and adjusted her black plastic glasses. “I promise.”

“You know this how?”

“What I wanted was a super-fast reproducing virus to combine with the computer code, which is also fast-replicating, and that’s this T4-Hepatitis B hybrid.”

“To what end?”

“That’s what we’re going to see: the first combined biological and computer virus. Who knows what will happen, but I hope you’re as excited as I am.” She pressed her side against his. “And you know what?”

“What?”

“I wanted you here with me at this historic moment. Just the two of us.” She made eye contact and held it for several beats.

Alvin blushed as hot blood cascaded through his entire body. His nose caught a whiff of her luxuriously rose-scented perfume, giving him more shivers. “How does this work? I mean, how can you possibly combine computer code with living things?”

“Hmm. Is a virus living or not? It doesn’t matter because the Raspberry Pi will inject binary code inside the virus’s DNA, altering it on a sub-genetic level. As far as the actual connection goes, merely dropping this powered Raspberry Pi into the biocontainment unit will spark the transformation through the quantum code.” She paused for dramatic effect. “Ready to witness history?”

Alvin took a deep breath and grasped Chloe’s free hand. He smiled when she didn’t shake away his hand. “Yes.”

The Raspberry Pi thunked onto the bottom of the containment unit, where it sat motionless for over a minute, becoming darker and darker and then nearly invisible as it sucked in all the light. It then beeped twice and rose several inches off the tank’s floor as if lifted by invisible drones. A thin, blue aura surrounded the device, which was growing in size as it hummed loudly. An iridescent blue light filled the entire chamber, and the circuit board turned as white as fresh snow.

The light streamed over Chloe and Alvin, causing them to cast sharp shadows that twisted and bent like folding origami cranes.

In the blink of an eye, throughout the biocontainment unit, dozens of impossible creatures burst into view—each with an icosahedral head perched atop a segmented body, eight sword-like spikes crowning their heads, and six spidery legs clicking against the floor. These entities—viruses about the size of guinea pigs—surrounded the Raspberry Pi and seemed to bow. Their icosahedron heads then exploded, flinging white strands flying everywhere.

Alvin lurched backward.

“That’s the DNA,” Chloe said. She clapped her hands. “Wow, wow, wow!”

The circuit board buzzed and flashed yellow; the viruses’ DNA flew toward it, a parade of ribbons in the thrall of an irresistibly powerful force.

“My god, it’s happening! My new virus is merging with the computer virus.” She turned and hugged Alvin hard, then stepped back and high-fived him.

“What happens now?” Alvin looked back to the biocontainment space and then at Chloe.

The room spun as if it were an out-of-control merry-go-round. Faster and faster it went until Chloe and Alvin could no longer stand. They grabbed hold of table legs, but that didn’t stop them from floating up, their bodies parallel with the floor. Alvin and Chloe tightened their grips on the table legs as the table slid across the floor.

Alvin’s shoes flew off and into the wall.

Chloe’s glasses snapped off her face.

Green, red, blue, and yellow dots flashed on and off in the air around them, popping as they winked. Rings, like those of Saturn, swirled around the dots.

The biocontainment’s alarm blared, then shut off, then blared again at ten times the volume before playing Judy Garland’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

A little girl wearing a yellow dress with blue stripes materialized beneath Chloe, who gasped. “That’s me. Oh my god, that was me when I was six. I remember that birthday dress.”

Alvin gasped, too, when an old man wearing a beige shirt, shorts, and overalls floated above him.

“Is that future you?”

“No, that’s my great-grandfather. My parents kept his picture on the living room table. He was a farmer in the Old West.”

The lab’s ceiling vanished, along with the eleven stories above them. A hollow wind screamed around them. Stars shone brightly through the roofless room, even though it was midday, and as more and more stars winked in, the sun dimmed. The stars flickered like disco lights. Then the stars dimmed, too.

“What is it?” Alvin asked. He bit off a fingernail and chewed it.

“It’s over, I think.” Her face turned white and her pupils contracted into pinpricks.

“What’s over?”

“Everything. The combined living and computer virus has infected the quantum level, instantaneously infecting the entire universe. I didn’t consider that likely. I mean, yes, contaminating the quantum stratum was always theoretically possible when combining inorganic and organic viruses through a higher-level algorithm, but it shouldn’t have—”

And then everything ended.

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Harrison Granger opened Microsoft Teams, and with a snap of his thumb and index finger wordlessly summoned Bandi Corp’s senior vice-president, Jillian Tailor, into his office.

From the feigned congenial expression on Granger’s face, she instantly knew what was about to happen.

The shoulder tap tap. He’s not going to fire me; he’s going to demote me to encourage me to quit because that way the company won’t have to pay severance or face a possible lawsuit. Demotion is the easy and safe way to get rid of employees. He’s going to say—

“You’re an exemplary company vice-president, Jillian. The best. You’ve done wonders for Bandi Corp, and because of that, I’m assigning you as Chief Financial Officer. I know, I know, your salary and stock options will be lower and you’re moving from the thirty-third floor to the thirty-second, but we need you there. We absolutely require a CFO with an analytical mind and meticulous attention to detail.”

Granger propped his elbows on the table, and declared, “Well, then, good luck and Godspeed.”

After Jillian organized her significantly smaller space on the thirty-second floor, she circulated to greet the junior executives.

She knocked on Alicia Auvray’s door, the company’s Chief Technology Officer.

“Enter,” Alicia beckoned. She glanced up and said, “Ah, Jillian. I heard about your demotion. Sorry about that, but the company needs a solid CFO.” She then resumed scribbling in her Moleskine notebook as if Jillian didn’t exist. After two minutes, she snapped, “You’re still here? I’m sorry I can’t chat now. Do you mind? If you call my assistant, I’m sure we can find a time for a meeting.”

The other senior-level executives shunned Jillian, as if she bore a contagious, incurable disease.

The blood in Jillian’s veins steamed.

Everyone knows I’m a tap tap employee on her way down until I finally quit out of frustration or because of poverty-level wages. But I’m not going to give in. I’m going to stick it out.

The following day, Human Resources dispatched a terse email to Jillian: Congratulations! You are now Bandi Corp’s Senior Creative Director. The company values your devotion, dedication, hard work, perseverance, and especially your creativity. Please transfer to the thirty-first floor by the end of today. And congratulations again!

The Director of Marketing, Director of Human Resources, Director of Engineering, Director of Products, and Director of Operations occupied the thirty-first floor. As a new director, Jillian thought she’d say a quick hello to everyone, but hollow echoes replied to her knocks.

She circled to the floor’s conference room, where she discovered her fellow directors in a meeting. When she opened the conference room’s door, the voices silenced.

Mark Ellison, Director of Planning, hissed, “This meeting is closed. We’ll invite you to the next one, Jillian, but you’re not on the list for this one. Please close the door from the outside. We have work to do.”

Jillian sulked back to her office. She didn’t feel creative, but put her mind to work and developed an exciting plan for Bandi Corp’s new operations in Estonia.

But why? Why am I bothering to give to this company that no longer gives me anything?

As her finger hovered over the send button to distribute the plan to all appropriate senior-level management, a rap at the door startled her.

Yay, somebody wants to see me!

The Team Leader for Corporate Travel, Chloe Morrison, waltzed in. “Nice office you have here,” Morrison said as she peeked out the window. “You have a view.”

“It’s not much of a view. All I see is the office building next door.”

“Yeah, but you have a window, which is more than we have on the Team Leader floors.”

“Uh huh. And what brings you to me today?”

“I wanted to welcome you as the new Team Leader for Translations.”

“I’m the what? I don’t speak any foreign languages. How could they make me the translation team leader? Who decided that? And—”

“Your new office will be on the nineteenth floor,” Chloe said. “The Teams occupy floors thirty to nineteen, but because you’re a junior team member, your office will naturally be on the lowest floor.”

Last week I was the second highest corporate officer, you fuckhead, Jillian thought.

“I see,” she said. Jillian stiffened her back, took in a long, deep breath, and said to herself, I will beat them. They won’t defeat me, they won’t force me out.

Jillian found her new office, a five-by-eight-foot rectangle bordered by a faux-wood-panel door on one side, a wall with an unopenable twelve-inch square window on the other, a particle-board bookcase along the long wall, and two four-drawer metal filing cabinets covering the remaining wall.

As she slumped into her chair, an existential question wafted through her brain: In the age of AI and instant translations, why does the company need a translation team at all?

An unseen hand slipped an envelope under her door.

She read, The Translation Team has been disbanded. You are hereby transferred to the marketing group on the third floor, where you will be an associate.

Jillian stepped into a brightly lit, frenetic space occupied by a dozen flat tables covered with papers, laptops, coffee cups, and mobile phones. She headed to the only available seat at a table with six Gen Z associates, each of whom sat in front of two laptops, which they operated simultaneously with lightning speed. Merely watching them exhausted Jillian.

“You ate that slide deck,” Alberto told Emily.

“This is my productivity era,” Emily replied, high-fiving him.

Jillian furrowed her brow.

I would never have been good as Team Leader for Translations. I’m glad that didn’t last.

Before Jillian had a chance to introduce herself, a tap tap pricked her shoulder.

A blonde man, older than Gen Z—Jillian guessed maybe thirty-two or thirty-three—towered over her. “Are you Jillian Tailor?” he asked, his expression blank, like a robot that had just rolled off the assembly line.

“I am.”

“I am here to inform you that you are the company’s new janitor. Please report to Room B3-001 immediately. That’s the lowest subbasement. Take the main elevator to—” He scrunched his face and shook his head. “The janitor can’t use the same elevator as regular staff because that would be gross. Take the service elevator to B3.”

Jillian’s jaw slackened, and her eyes drooped. Her legs wobbled.

“Now!” He spun toward the large service elevator at the far end of the floor and pointed. “Go!”

Jillian balled her hands into fists, straightened her back so much that she seemed to grow an inch, and said under her breath, “They can demote me to guardian of Hades, but I’m not giving in. Not yesterday, not today, not tomorrow.”

A dark, dank, dreary third subbasement welcomed Jillian like a haunted house welcomes its victims. Mold stung Jillian’s nostrils, and the astringent air made her cough. She navigated to the janitor’s closet, a small space filled with plastic bottles that bore ominous poison symbols.

In the closet’s corner stood a broom so filthy that not even the most reprehensible witch would ride it. A single old-style forty-watt incandescent bulb flickered and buzzed on a wire that hung from the ceiling.

A large spider skittered in pursuit of a cockroach.

As the spider closed its fangs around the roach, the building shook violently, and a ferociously loud boom ruptured Jillian’s eardrums. Chunks of wall tumbled onto the floor.

Jillian dropped into the room’s only corner devoid of cleaning supplies, covered her head with her hands, held her breath, and hoped.

A blast of heat seared her skin like an instant sunburn.

More shaking, followed by what Jillian thought must’ve been artillery and bombs.

She shrieked out of pain and fear.

When the tremors and booms stopped, she yanked the emergency flashlight from its holder and crawled to the stairwell. It took over an hour for Jillian to ascend the three flights to the first floor because of the boulder-sized debris and ruins that littered the stairs and the thick clouds of dust that the flashlight’s beam could barely penetrate.

When she arrived in the sunlight, she gasped at a building in ruins, nearly flattened, black smoke wafting up and spinning all around, flakes of ash falling like malevolent snow, as if—

A firefighter sprinted to her. Grime coated his yellow uniform and helmet. His oxygen face mask dangled to the side. His eyes went wide and he spoke with breathless, staccato urgency. “Were you in the building?”

“Yes. What happened?”

“Hey, you!” he shouted to one of the paramedics. “Get over here. We have a survivor.”

The firefighter turned back to Jillian. “A meteor. Everyone’s dead except you. I’m so sorry about your colleagues. How did you survive? It doesn’t seem possible.”

“I was in the sub-sub-basement. I’m the janitor.”

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If you enjoyed this story, I think you’ll also like The Confession.

“We’re lost,” Adam said, his words punctuated by desperate gasps that burned his lungs as he plodded forward on weary legs. “We’re fucking lost. And once it gets dark, we’re doubly screwed. I don’t know why I thought it would be a good idea to go camping in Maine; we’re New York City boys and don’t know a single thing about the woods.”

“Let’s rest,” Louis suggested.

“No, we fucking can’t. We have to set up camp now and you know it, because in the dark we can’t tell if we’re walking over a cliff edge or into quicksand or something. And where we are right now,”—he waved his arm at the dense thicket of trees and then at the twigs, logs, and vegetation on the ground— “there’s no space for our tent.” And then he said, “If we even know how to set up a tent.” Under his breath, but still quite audibly, he added, “You and your stupid ideas. I told you we should have gone to Club Med.”

A shrill wind whistled through the trees, its pitch rising as it approached like a train at full throttle, then it lifted and spun leaves and pine cones into a vortex around the two hikers, threatening to grow and carry them into the sky as well.

As suddenly as the wind started, it stopped.

A woman with long, blonde hair, wearing a blue bikini, and carrying a basket of fruits and flowers emerged from behind a thicket. She didn’t have an ounce of fat on her body.

Adam looked at Louis and Louis at Adam, both aware that they were wearing multiple layers more of clothing than this woman.

Adam was about to ask, “Aren’t you cold?” but the woman spoke first, enquiring, “Are you lost?”

Adam nodded and Louis said, “Yes, I think we are, thanks to him.”

“Then follow me. Our village isn’t far. You can set your heavy packs down, enjoy a meal, and rest. I’m Lilly.”

Adam and Louis did as she suggested. They hiked for another forty-five minutes until they arrived at a clearing in which Lilly’s village stood.

The village consisted of twenty-two old-fashioned log cabins arranged in a circle around a cylindrical wooden structure, roughly forty feet tall and twenty feet in diameter, with no windows. It looked like a storage space.

Lilly escorted them on a tour of the village while two villagers grilled meat and roasted potatoes over a fire pit.

When the tour was over, Adam asked, “How do you have such a large town that’s not on the map? What is this place called? How is it in the middle of the forest?”

“Eat first and I’ll answer as many questions as I can after.”

Borborygmic rumblings cascaded through Louis’ and Adam’s stomachs as savory aromas of grilled chicken and beef wafted through the air. The smells mingled with Maine’s pine-scented air, transforming the atmosphere into an intoxicating haze.

Both the mid-thirties men smiled broadly.

Lilly waved to three other villagers, two men and one woman, all dressed in swimsuits like she was. And all skinny almost to the point of underfed, like Lilly, ribs framed under their skin. They carried woven baskets of fruits and greens, which they placed on a large, rustic picnic table outside one of the cabins.

A woman with short, black hair approached Adam and pinched the fleshy part of his arm, squeezing him between her thumb and forefinger.

Lilly shook her head and mouthed something.

The woman nodded and walked away.

Lilly rested platters of chicken, beef, pork, and potatoes—three different kinds of potatoes: roasted, mashed, and fried hash browns—where Louis and Adam now sat. In front of the no longer lost hikers was a pitcher of hot, mulled wine, which they drank as eagerly as they ate.

“Why are you not eating any meat or potatoes?” Adam asked Lilly. He scrunched his eyes, as if narrowing them would bring her answer—whatever it was going to be—into sharper focus.

She leaned over and kissed Adam’s cheek. “It’s a secret.”

“And all of you, how do you stay so thin? And why the bathing suits? Do you wear them all the time? Don’t you get cold?”

“We get chilly,” one of the men in tight, gray trunks said. “But we like it this way.”

“We do,” Lilly and the two others responded. “We like to show off how skinny we stay. It’s a matter of pride.”

“Like a competition?”

“I’d never thought about it that way, but yes, like a competition.”

Louis patted his rotund belly, anticipating it becoming even more corpulent, enjoying the feeling.

As they ate, other villagers, mostly young men and women—though some people in their fifties and possibly beyond—all in bathing suits, wandered by. They all occasionally glanced at the newcomers, smiled, and continued on their way.

Louis belched. “Well, thank you for making this for us. It’s truly delicious.”

“You’re welcome,” Lilly said.

They ate the rest of their food, finishing every bit of meat and potato and every drop of the mulled wine, and then Adam said, “I think we’re great. We’ll take off now.”

Louis nodded.

“That’s not a good idea. It will be dark soon. Your best bet is to sleep and then, in the morning, if you want to head out, you can.”

“If?” Adam asked.

“You might like it here,” Lilly winked. “You might want to stay.”

Lilly escorted Adam and Louis to one of the identical cabins that formed a circle about the central structure.

Both fell asleep nearly instantly and woke with the first morning bird melody. They packed their backpacks and stepped out of the cabin.

The sun had not yet risen above the treetops, but it was bright.

Lilly waved from the cabin next door and strode over to them. “Leaving?”

“We should.”

“Good luck.” She extended her hand.

Adam shook her hand and then Louis did, too. After that, they walked past the ring of cabins into the woods.

A minute later, they found themselves walking toward the cabin ring again.

“That’s odd,” Adam said. “Let’s try again, and this time I’ll use a compass to keep us heading straight.”

After another minute, they were back inside the village.

“Let’s try from a different point of departure.”

And again, they returned.

“Once more; this time we’ll make X marks on the tree trunks with a knife so we know where we’ve been,” Adam said.

“That’s not good for the trees.”

“Let’s just do it.”

After their sixth attempt, Lilly greeted them as they reentered the village. “Now you know,” she said. “You can’t leave. None of us can leave.”

“That’s not possible,” Adam said.

“Sorry, but it is.”

“You brought us here. Why? You trapped us here.”

“You were lost, just like I was lost once and like everyone who ended up in this village was once lost. If we didn’t take you in, you’d likely perish in the wilderness.”

“I see.” He shot Louis a glance that said, I don’t believe her.

“How does it work? What causes this?” Louis added.

“I don’t know. None of us know. We’re here, we’re safe, and not unhappy. Speaking of which, you must be hungry again after those entrances and exits.” She tugged on the thin, skin-hugging jean shorts she wore today. “We knew you’d be back and prepared a feast for you.”

And a feast it was. Louis devoured steak and pork chops, mashed potatoes and Brussels sprouts simmered in garlic butter, while Adam cautiously picked at the food, only eating a fraction of what the villagers served.

“Don’t you think we should eat what they eat?” Adam asked. “Berries and salad?”

Through a mouthful of food, Louis replied, “Nope,” and then he shoveled a forkful of mashed potatoes into his mouth. “It’s good.”

One of the men sitting at an adjacent picnic table, who was eating his veggies, gave Louis a big thumbs-up.

Over the next week, Adam coaxed Louis into trying ten more times to leave the village, which they dubbed Skinny Town because everyone was so thin. Everyone except for the two of them.

At the end of their tenth try, Louis plopped down on a bench, sighed, and said, “I give up. This isn’t working. What do you say we both quit trying to leave because it’s futile?”

Adam nodded and, in a voice that barely pushed any air, said, “Okay.”

Adam succumbed to gluttony, as his best friend had done since their first day. He perched his knife and fork above the colossal lasagna coated with a thick layer of ricotta cheese, took a deep breath, and cut and shoveled a large piece into his mouth. He talked with his mouth full. “I accept my fate, my friend. We’re here to stay.”

“Good. I mean not good that we’re stuck here, but good that you accept it because now you can enjoy the food like I do.”

When it rained, the villagers set up a tarp above the picnic tables. The villagers’ courtesy enriched their lives.

While toddling back from dinner under a dark shadow cast against a cabin by the first full moon since they had arrived, a wild animal approached them—not close, but too far for them to decipher its features.

A wolf, maybe a bear, Adam thought, definitely too big to be a fox, though he had never seen a fox or bear or wolf and so couldn’t say for certain.

It sniffed—a discordant sound—and then it dashed around another cabin and into the village center near the cylinder, where it disappeared.

A few weeks later, while they were walking back from lunch, two buttons popped off Louis’ plaid L.L. Bean shirt. The buttons flew over one of the cabins and pinged into the adjacent one, causing them both to laugh hysterically.

Adam expanded from a thirty-six-inch waist, and Louis added fifty pounds to his five-foot-ten-inch frame. They now waddled instead of walking from their cabin to the picnic table where they ate their meals.

Adam and Louis knew everyone’s name, and they enjoyed the villagers’ company.

Louis said, “I like Sherry. Do you think I should ask her out?”

“Out where?”

“I mean like on a date. We’re going to be here forever, so we should start thinking that way.”

“What way?”

“Love, marriage, boys and girls, whatever villagers do in that regard.”

Adam contorted his face into an exaggerated frown and mockingly wiped his eyes. “Are you leaving me, Louis?”

Louis elbowed him. “You’d better find somebody, too. You don’t want to be a forever bachelor.”

Once, Adam suggested they try a little exercise, maybe shed a pound or few. “Good for the heart.” They circled the village’s central cylinder several times, panting and dripping buckets of sweat despite the cool air, and they plodded in an endless circle, their feet striking the ground with elephants’ thuds.

Louis’ protruding belly threw him off balance and he slammed into the cylinder’s metal wall. A low-pitched growl, like an animal woken from the middle of its hibernation, came from inside.

As fast as they could, which was not fast at all, they walked back to their cabin.

Dinner comforted them, and by the time their gracious hosts presented their apple pie a la mode dessert, their attempted exercise was a faded memory.

They ate and ate and ate. The food delighted their taste buds.

Periodically, villagers poked Adam and Louis in the belly with their forefingers, with compliments like, “You’re doing well.” Women sometimes added, “I like big men.”

Adam and Louis enjoyed the attention. They especially enjoyed the food. If they were troubled by their inexplicable captivity in this strange and yet wondrous place, a piece of pie or cake instantly cured them of that anxiety.

On the morning of their sixtieth day, Adam and Louis struggled to get out of bed, their muscles ineffective against their weight and sluggish from the chilly October air.

Adam grunted and Louis groaned. Their hearts beat furiously and they gulped oxygen in a vain attempt to generate sufficient power to get out of bed.

As they were about to roll onto the floor, the door to their cabin squeaked open. Lilly, Sherry, and six others materialized in their room. They were still wearing bathing suits, even in the throes of autumn.

Before Adam and Louis had a chance to form words, the skinny invaders picked them up and carried them out the door.

Despite their weight and the vigorous thrashing, the villagers easily transported the two men out the door and toward the village center.

“What are you doing? Where are you taking us?” Louis screamed.

“What’s happening?” Adam shouted.

“Do you really want to know? I don’t think you want to know,” one of their captors said.

“No, you don’t. It’s better not to know.”

“I want to know,” Adam insisted. “Tell me!”

They stopped in front of the cylinder.

The cylinder growled.

No, Adam thought, not the cylinder. Something inside the cylinder.

A clang, loud and singular, followed by another.

The noise stung Adam’s ears and chilled his blood.

Adam tilted his head back, looking at the world upside down. Each time the cylinder clanged, a bump popped in the metal. Like—

Something’s inside, something alive. Something that—

“It’s time to feed you to Brammorg. You are finally fat enough to satiate Our Lord,” a fifty-or-so-year-old man with shoulder-length black hair and wire-frame glasses said. He was emaciated, and he was strong.

Adam and Louis struggled even harder, attempting to twist themselves free and failing.

“Even if you were able to escape, there’s nowhere for you to go. The harder you fight, the worse it will be for you. Your fate is inevitable. You are dinner,” Lilly said.

“Noooooooooo!”

“Wait, please.”

“No waiting.” She added, “Sometimes, they figure out what this place is all about and they eat only fruit and flowers as we do and become one of us. Frank wandered in last year and figured it out. Sherry the year before. Brammorg doesn’t eat skinny people. You can understand that.”

Louis sobbed.

From his inverted view, Adam noticed vents at the top of the cylinder for the first time.

“The thing we saw in the woods, that’s Brammorg?” Louis stammered. Broken, chopped syllables passed through his lips, his will to resist shattered.

A thick cloud blocked the sun.

“No. That was one of Brammorg’s babies. Brammorg is much bigger. And Brammorg hasn’t eaten in one hundred and two days.”

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If you enjoyed this story, I think you’ll also like The War.

When Air Fresca’s public address intercom rang its banal, melodic tone, none of the passengers could anticipate the six words that followed, delivered in a breathless, staccato voice by flight 2022’s lead flight attendant:

“Is there a pilot on board?”

But Frank Cisco, a thirty-one-year-old stockbroker with thick, blond hair and a body that made him look more like a linebacker than a desk jockey, had been waiting for those words ever since he got his private pilot’s license six weeks ago.

He glanced at his wife, Millie, who nodded and said, “Go.”

Frank strode quickly to the front of the plane. Only when he reached the cockpit did he realize he’d been holding his breath the entire time. “I’m Frank; I’m a pilot,” he said to Annie, a mid-forties woman with short-cropped brunette hair whose crisp, blue uniform framed a face etched with grave concern.

“What kind of pilot are you?”

He straightened his back. “I fly a Cessna 172.”

“That’s a single-engine, propeller plane. The plane’s in trouble, and this is a jet engine Boeing 737, a vastly different and far more complicated aircraft. Do you think you can—?”

“You called me.” Frank pivoted three hundred sixty degrees. “I don’t see any other volunteers. I’m here and I can fly, and the good news is that all airplanes, no matter how advanced or powerful, fly the same way. So why don’t you tell me what happened and let’s get started doing whatever needs to be done?”

Frank glanced out the window. Mountains approached on the right, meaning they were near Denver on their way to LaGuardia. There were plenty of airports between here and New York with many very long runways to choose from. But he was getting ahead of himself.

“Yes,” Annie said. “Come with me.” She unlocked the cockpit door with her PIN and herded him inside.

Both pilots slumped back in their seats, dead.

“Captain Harris asked me to come into the cockpit, and less than a minute later, when I entered, I found them like this. I don’t know what happened.” She shook her head. “I tried to revive them, even going as far as to pour ice water on their heads, but they’re gone, deceased. We need a pilot to land the plane, and it looks like that’s going to be you.”

Frank scrutinized the burn marks on their hands and noted their vacant, glassy eyes.

Electrocution? That’s not possible.

He pressed his fingers against the pilot’s carotid artery and then did the same with the copilot.

Both pilots, how can that be?

“I checked their pulses, too. They’re gone.” Her hands shook and her lips quivered. “You can do this? You said you can.”

“I can.” Frank did not know if he could, but he knew he was the only hope for the one hundred or so passengers and crew.

They hoisted the pilot and co-pilot from their seats and laid them at the back of the cockpit.

Annie relocked the cockpit door and slowly lowered herself into the copilot’s seat, like she was wading into cold, shark-infested ocean water.

Frank was already in the left seat. He spoke into the microphone. “Mayday, mayday, mayday, this is Air Fresca flight 2022 declaring an emergency. The pilot and copilot are dead. I am Frank Cisco, a private pilot requesting assistance.”

No reply.

Frank tried again. He then changed the radio to 121.5, the emergency frequency, and repeated his mayday call.

No answer.

Weird, Frank thought. Why isn’t the radio working?

They were alone in the sky above the Rocky Mountains.

“What do we do now?” Annie’s words cracked.

“I land the plane.”

“Where, how?”

“First things first: I need to download the flight manual to my phone. Is the wifi still on?”

“Yes, but there’s a flight manual right here.” She pointed to the shelf of paper manuals near the copilot’s seat.

“It’s easier and faster for me to find what I need on my phone. I’m used to reading flight manuals this way and I want to follow the procedures that I know as much as possible.”

“Okay.” Annie neither sounded nor looked okay. Her hands trembled, goosebumps sprouted all over her neck and arms, and her heartbeat echoed against the cockpit walls.

Flight 2022, at an altitude of 33,000 feet, flew east at 530 miles per hour.

Frank scanned the instruments, most of which were familiar to him. Everything registered normally. Autopilot controlled the jet. For now.

In a short while, a pilot with no experience flying jets would be landing one of the most advanced aircraft in the world.

Sweat pooled under Frank’s arms.

Frank connected to the plane’s wifi and, to his surprise, a page opened containing the flight operating manual. He hadn’t navigated to that site; he hadn’t searched for it. It just popped open.

He downloaded the manual, which was divided into two sections: “Flight Operations” and “Post Flight Operations.” The Post Flight Operations’ file size dwarfed the Flight Operations file.

He studied his phone silently for ten minutes.

Annie didn’t speak either.

He then said, “I know what to do. It’s not hard. It’s not easy, either, to be honest about this, but I have the skills and now the knowledge to land this 737.”

But do I?

Frank puzzled over the manual, wondering if it was correct, because it didn’t make sense to him. And yet, neither did learning that one needed more power to fly slowly than to fly at speed, one of the several seemingly contradictory lessons of learning to pilot an airplane.

Frank twisted dials, pushed buttons, and pressed and pulled levers as he spoke the instructions aloud. Heading 281 degrees, increase altitude to 49,000 feet—could the plane even reach that altitude? Frank wondered—airspeed 170 knots—that’s cutting it close to a stall—cruise twenty minutes and then…

“Where are we heading?” Annie asked.

“Chicago. There are multiple long runways we can land on. That’s what the manual says: Chicago.”

“How does the manual know where we are so it can choose Chicago?”

Frank kept his eyes on the controls as he replied, “Look, I have to focus, so the less chatting the better. I’ve already surmised that this is some kind of smart flight manual that was auto downloaded to my phone for just this purpose: to land the airplane safely from our current location, which the system already knew.”

“Hey, sorry to distract you, Captain Frank, but I’m only trying to help.”

Frank rubbed his brow and turned Annie’s way. “Sorry, sorry. I’m a little stressed, and to be honest, some of these instructions don’t make a whole lot of sense to this humble propeller driver.” He instantly regretted his words. He didn’t want to make Annie more nervous than she already was.

The plane shuddered. A blaring cockpit alarm interrupted their conversation.

“The stall warning!” Annie shouted. “You have to increase the plane’s airspeed, or we’ll crash.”

“The manual said to do this.”

“The manual is wrong! I may not be a pilot, but I know that a stall is dangerous.”

The jet shook even more violently. Frank thought he heard screws loosen. Paper flew around the cockpit. A high-pitched whine stung his ears, a sudden acceleration threw him back against his seat, and his lungs refused to take in air. His vision grayed.

When he could see and breathe again, Frank tapped his phone as if nothing unusual had happened. “According to the manual, we’ll be flying like this for thirty seconds, which means that—”

The alarm ended. The plane stopped shaking. The air outside seemed still in comparison to what they’d just experienced.

“That part is over. We’re okay, we’re okay.”

“I’m afraid to ask, what’s the next part?”

“The next part is landing.”

“Landing? How can that be? Chicago’s over two hours from Denver, where we were a few minutes ago. That’s impossible.”

Seemingly random long and short beeps radiated from the cockpit’s overhead speaker.

“What’s that sound?” Annie asked, tensed vocal cords scratching her words.

Frank cocked his head so his ear aimed at the speaker. “It’s Morse Code. I recognize it, but I don’t know Morse and don’t understand it.”

“Why would there be a message in Morse code—?”

“Look!” Frank shouted. “Do you see it? O’Hare straight ahead!”

Annie shook her head. “I don’t see how that can be, but what do I know? I’m just a flight attendant. But tell me the important part, Frank: How do you land the plane?”

“Yes, it must be Chicago. Yeah. I mean, the manual has the information. I’ll just input the values into the auto-landing system and the aircraft will—”

“Frank?”

“Yes?”

“Would you look out the cockpit window, please, and tell me what you see?”

“I see…OMG. That’s not O’Hare. But it is. It’s just not—”

“It’s not finished. It’s incomplete. The tower’s not there. The terminal’s not there.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. We’re aligned with the runway and that’s critical. We’ll land. We’ll figure out what happened later and we’re all safely on the ground. Okay?”

“Okay. You’re the captain.”

“Yeah.” Frank’s dream of piloting and rescuing a commercial aircraft was a nightmare. His bones ached.

Following the manual’s instructions, Frank set the auto brake to maximum. He held the throttle and yoke, lightly—don’t do the death grip, his instructor had admonished him over and over again—but that was pro forma because the computer was in control.

Three minutes later, the 737 screeched to a stop two thousand feet short of the runway’s end.

Frank and Annie sighed in unison.

For the first time since taking control of the plane, Frank spoke over the public address system. “Ladies and gentlemen, you are owed an explanation. As you can see, we’re safely on the ground. We’re in Chicago.”

I think we are.

Frank continued, “My name is Frank Cisco. The pilots are—incapacitated. I’m a private pilot and with the help of a flight attendant, Annie—”

“Martin.”

“Annie Martin, we landed the plane. I can’t tell you much else except that we’re safe and we’ll wait here until the authorities arrive. I don’t think we need to engage the evacuation slides. Ah, I see a truck with a ladder approaching. It shouldn’t be much longer. Thanks for your cooperation and please remain seated with your seatbelts fastened.”

Frank and Annie exited the cockpit and opened the main aircraft door, as a woman in her late thirties, wearing a khaki long-sleeve button-down shirt, wire-frame glasses, and a broad-brimmed stetson-style hat, reached the ladder’s top rung.

“Welcome to Douglas Field,” she said as she entered the aircraft. She wore the most neutral expression Frank had ever seen.

“This isn’t O’Hare?”

“O’Hare won’t be built until nineteen fifty-five. This is nineteen forty-nine.”

“What?” Frank blurted.

“It can’t be,” Annie added.

“Look around you. Look at those cars and those planes. Does this look like two thousand twenty-seven? It doesn’t because it’s not. You’ve traveled seventy-eight years back in time.”

“How is that possible? Why?”

“I haven’t introduced myself. I’m Chloe Bingham. I’m an engineer. I was sent back in time two years ago, but I traveled a different way, not like you, and I traveled solo, naked, because that was the only way then. I was given very specific instructions that I was to meet you and your plane here on this day at this hour.”

“I still don’t understand. Instructions from whom?

“An Artificial Intelligence in our time showed me how to build a time machine, but it could only transport one person and no inorganic matter. The AI sent me to prepare for your arrival.”

“Like The Terminator movie,” Annie interrupted.

“You have no idea how true your words are, but you will if you let me finish. AI needs to cannibalize your aircraft and use the data on your phone so I, with the help of other engineers in this era, can build nuclear power reactors. The hydraulics, avionics, metallurgy sample, even the wiring, and other parts from the 737 are critical to its plan.”

The Post Flight Operations manual, Frank realized. Instructions about how to construct a nuclear reactor.

“Why? For what purpose?”

Chloe wiped her eyes, sniffled, and then sobbed. When she composed herself a minute later, she continued. “The AI will kill my children in twenty twenty-seven if I don’t cooperate. Do you get it? I have to do what it wants. Marcie is seven, and Mallory is eleven. It could be an elevator that falls dozens of stories, a driverless car that hits them, a wrong medicine prescribed—probably something awful I can’t even imagine. I have to. I’m sorry.”

“Have to do what? I still don’t know what’s happening.”

“The instructions on your phone and your aircraft will be used to develop a commercial nuclear reactor in nineteen forty-nine, years before when civilian nuclear power would have begun, and far more advanced, too. This reactor and the ones built after it will provide unlimited energy so that when AI emerges in the mid-twenties, it will have all the energy it needs. That’s the limitation for AI in our time; data centers need far more power than is available. But that’s all going to change.”

“The AI killed the pilots. How? Why?”

“I didn’t know that would happen,” Annie snapped. “I don’t know how, either.” With difficulty, she swallowed a lump in her throat. “We’re all expendable.”

“How are you going to explain a Boeing 737 and all the passengers in nineteen forty-nine? This is going to draw attention like nothing before.”

“You’re thinking like somebody in twenty twenty-seven. There’s no social media now. Not even ten percent of Americans have televisions. Over the past year, I’ve amassed a fortune betting on sports events whose outcomes I already knew and through investments in the stock market. The reason you don’t see anyone else here is that I paid them not to be.” She lowered her voice as if her life force had suddenly drained away. “The AI told me how to do it all.”

“What happens when AI gets all the energy it needs?” Annie asked.

“Be glad you’re in nineteen forty-nine.”

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If you enjoyed this story, I think you’ll also like The Tunnel.

“Object 54? You waited weeks to name it and all you could come up with is Object 54? That’s a terrible name. You know that you can name the asteroid after yourself because whoever discovers it gets to name it.”

“I have zero desire for the asteroid that could destroy all life on Earth to be named after me,” Kaori Sasaki said. She rubbed her temple with her left hand as she blew on her tasteless coffee to cool it. Her tenth cup in twenty-four hours.

Kaori shuddered. Coldness seized her.

Object 54, a fifteen-point-three-kilometer nickel and iron asteroid, is a planet-killer and on a trajectory to sterilize Earth in three days.

Impact will vaporize parts of the Pacific, create tsunamis hundreds of meters high, ignite firestorms across continents, trigger mega-earthquakes, and bury any survivors beneath lethal ash and deadly cold temperatures.

Minako Sawada, PhD, senior astronomer at Jododaira Astronomical Observatory in Fukushima, Japan, and Kaori’s boss, asserted, “Except that it’s not going to annihilate Earth, Kaori, because you built the machine that will save the planet.”

“I built a machine that might save the world. We won’t know for another—” She twisted her wrist and glanced at her Seiko—“twelve more minutes when we fire up the deflector.”

“When you fire up the beam that you invented it will distort local space geometry and deflect Object 54 away from the Earth into a safe path toward the Sun.”

“I’ll press the button, but despite what the theory suggests about gravitational displacement, we won’t know if it works with such a massive object until that moment. And if it doesn’t work, that’s it. The end of life, the end of everything. We haven’t had time to test it at scale.”

“I have faith in your machine because I have faith in you, Kaori.”

“A lot of people don’t.”

“They don’t understand the equations of gravitational topology distortions and how your vector engine works as a deflector beam.”

“I’m not sure I fully do, either.”

They sat in the dark observatory dome room, sixteen hundred meters high. It was two-fifty-five in the morning. Even at this elevation, the sweet scent of apricot and jasmine kinmokusei flowers, which bloomed in October, filled the room.

“Do you smell that?” Kaori asked.

“I love kinmokusei. It’s my favorite flower. And thanks to your invention, we will smell kinmokusei next autumn, too.” Minako tapped her watch. “But I think it’s time to get to the control room.”

“The control room is only a twenty-second walk from here. We have time.”

Minako stood. “Let’s go, Kaori. Savior of the world you may be, but I’m still your boss, and I don’t want to leave anything to chance.”

Over one hundred souls crowded the observatory’s control room, a space usually occupied by no more than twelve. Among the crowd were Reiko Higuchi, Japan’s prime minister, Harlan Cole, the president of the United States, their security teams, camera crews from NHK and CNN, a dozen pool reporters, and other astronomers, scientists, and engineers.

Kaori sat in the one remaining chair in front of a white panel with a square, red button under a plexiglass cover. A large digital clock with blue numerals on the wall in front counted down the remaining minutes.

Nobody spoke. The room was quiet, as if the world had already ended.

Nine minutes and thirteen seconds.

Some of the assembled closed their eyes; others mouthed prayers. The video camera operators silently panned the room back and forth, like a muted metronome.

Kaori took a moment and thought about everything in her life: from her first boyfriend, to her decision to choose Kyodai over Tokyo University, to a chance encounter with a physics professor at lunch one day during her junior year, who inspired her to take a class that gave her the idea for a vector engine that would percolate in her mind for a decade until she developed the invention. She thought that if she’d not been hungry that day, how different today might’ve been.

After what felt like a century, Kaori took a deep breath and turned her head to scan the room.

Prime Minister Higuchi nodded, raised her hand, and crossed her fingers.

Kaori lifted the clear cover atop the button.

When the countdown reached exactly zero, Kaori pressed the red button.

A click echoed.

The deflector, located a hundred meters from the observatory in the Azuma Mountain Range and connected to every power plant in Japan for maximum energy, fired a bright yellow beam into the night sky. The quarter-meter-wide beam bubbled as if filled with sparkling water. The deflector beam intercepted Object 54 two-point-five-six seconds later. It tracked and held its position for nine seconds, the amount of time Kaori calculated the vector engine would need to change the asteroid’s trajectory, and also the amount of time the deflector could fire before burning out.

Nearly everyone in Japan lost power as the country plunged into darkness.

New York, London, Paris, Seoul, Sydney, and dozens of other cities turned off their lights in solidarity with Japan, a global symbol of hope.

Kaori had also calculated that it would take approximately five minutes to determine if the deflector was successful or if the world was doomed.

Two seconds after the beam stopped, night flipped to daytime. Bright light streamed through the control room’s windows.

“What?” Minako said. “What happened?”

Kaori, Minako, and then the Prime Minister and President, their security teams, and everyone else ran outside.

A flock of crows crossed above the observatory from east to west, cawing and screeching as they flew. Two bears emerged from a nearby grove, apparently woken from sleep, confusion painting their faces.

Kaori tilted her head up and turned a full circle.

The radiant sun blazed midway between the horizon and the zenith.

The sun is larger, Kaori thought.

Another sun, a bigger, red ball, hovered on the opposite side of the sky.

Between them, a translucent yellow, green, and indigo planet with six silver and gold rings occupied about an eighth of the sky. A ribbon of stars like the Milky Way, as seen from the African plains, twinkled through that planet.

Iridescence infused the sky, a deeper, richer blue than Kaori had ever witnessed before, even in Antarctica.

The air chimed with invisible resonance.

Prime Minister Higuchi strode to Kaori. “What happened?” she asked. “Did we deflect the asteroid?”

Kaori looked up again, studying the sky, her mouth agape.

The Prime Minister stood for a minute with her arms folded across her chest and then tapped Kaori’s shoulder.

“Give me a moment, Prime Minister.” Kaori paced in a tight, slow circle, her head tilted toward the sky. After a minute, she said, “Oh my god. The deflector didn’t change the asteroid’s trajectory. It pushed our planet to another solar system, maybe even another galaxy. It will take time to figure out where we are, if we even can.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we’re forever safe from Object 54. This is the same Earth, only in a different part of the universe.” Kaori took in several shallow breaths in quick succession. Her face paled, her legs wobbled, and she fell to the ground.

The Prime Minister extended a hand and helped her to her feet. “Are you okay?”

“I’m okay,” Kaori answered. She looked at the sky again, gestured to the ringed planet above, and smiled. “I’m just overwhelmed by the view.”

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Now and then, I republish an older short story as a bonus story because new subscribers may not have seen it. The Liberation Gang is in addition to my regular bi-weekly short story, which will be published next Sunday, as usual.

“Wolf, Cat, Panda, Elephant, Bear, do you understand your roles today?” Bunny locked eyes with each member of her team.

Wolf was gray and brown with opal-colored eyes. Cat sported tabby stripes, snow-white paws, and a non-stop wagging tail. Panda wore sad eyes. Elephant was the tallest and thickest of the lot, with a trunk as long as its body. Bear gripped a honey jar, and Bunny’s pink ears stuck out like antennae on an old-style television.

The six plush animals huddled next to the zoo’s alpacas, a humming quartet of two white and two brown real animals, nuzzling each other. Shadows momentarily passed overhead, replaced by bright sunshine as the wind herded the clouds away.

“We know what to do,” Panda spoke for the gang.

The others nodded.

“Cat will distract the little girl who’s keeping Penguin captive by pretending to be lost. As soon as the kid starts looking for Cat’s owner, Penguin will run away.”

“Owner,” Wolf harrumphed. “We’re not owned!”

“Shh, Wolf,” Elephant said. “We know. But we’re on a mission, and you need to focus.”

“Sorry. I rile when somebody treats us like property.”

“You’re sure the five-year-old girl with the red hair and freckles who’s imprisoned Penguin will be at the zoo this afternoon?” Bunny asked Cat.

“Yes. I have a spy on the inside who gave me that information. She’s here every Saturday afternoon.”

“Who’s your informant?”

“Lego Lion at the gift shop. She’s never let me down,” Cat replied.

“Here’s how we’ll do it,” Bunny said. “We’ll hide behind the bench near the otters. Cat will approach stealthily, silently, surreptitiously, and softly. Then, Cat will lie on the ground next to her. The girl will worry about what she thinks is a lost stuffed animal—”

“We’re not a stuffed anything! I hate that word, stuffed,” Wolf interrupted.

“We will all wave to Penguin, so he knows where to go, with Elephant also swinging its trunk and sounding a horn,” Bunny said. “When Penguin sees us, he’ll know what to do, but Penguin’s likely to be disoriented when the girl drops him, so be prepared to assist. That means you, Wolf, because you’re the fastest. Are you ready to dash over and give Penguin a ride?”

“Yes.”

“Good. If something goes wrong, we’ll rendezvous at Sullivan’s Toys at eight o’clock.”

“What if Penguin doesn’t want to be separated from the girl?” Elephant asked, knowing that sometimes toy animals preferred to stay with their humans, even when offered the freedom to live with their own kind, an obstinate bond between child and plush. Last spring, everyone witnessed Giraffe kicking Duck while Duck tried to rescue Giraffe. Giraffe shouted, “Mary is my friend, you’re not!”

“If Penguin refuses to be liberated—” Bunny started to say.

“Shh, shh! I see them. Look! The little girl with Penguin is here,” Panda interrupted, pointing to the popcorn cart in front of the seal enclosure.

A thin man with white hair and a handlebar mustache wearing a striped, red and white shirt handed a popcorn bag to a little boy with a calico-colored plush fox tucked under his arm. A toy monkey sat on a chair behind the steel-framed glass popcorn popper, its hand on the popper’s handle. The machine played a carousel melody.

Louisa, the girl with Penguin, was next in line behind the boy.

“Are you ready?” Bunny asked Cat.

All the animals, except for Cat, hid behind a bench across the path near the otter tank.

Elephant wandered toward the otters, but Bear grabbed his leg. “Not now, Phelly. You can visit the otters after we free Penguin.”

“They’re so cute!” Elephant whined, but when Bear frowned, Elephant added, “Okay, later.”

Cat zig-zagged toward Louisa, flicking its tail back and forth. Cat bonked its head against the girl’s leg, purred, rolled onto its side, and lay motionless.

Louisa knelt and petted Cat. She smiled. “Kitty, did another child lose you?”

Louisa swiveled her head, observing children running aimlessly, children atop their parents’ shoulders, children in rapt conversation with lions, wolves, and meerkats, and children playing hopscotch, but none of the other kids were tearfully searching for a lost toy. Nobody dropped this toy animal.

Where did you come from?

She released Penguin and cradled Cat in her arms, stroking its head, back, and belly, scratching under its chin.

What shall I name you?

Penguin gasped—I’m free! When Penguin noticed his friends frantically waving from behind the bench, he waddled over as fast as he could, trailing snowflakes. Penguin’s heart beat in overdrive, and his lungs pumped furiously.

I’ll name you Zooy because I found you in the zoo.

“Hurry, hurry!” Bunny mouthed.

When he reached the safety of his friends, Penguin hugged them and said, “You rescued me!”

“It was Panda’s idea for Cat to distract the girl so you could escape,” Bunny said, offering Panda a high five. “The plan worked.”

They all high-fived each other.

“Wait!” Penguin said. He aimed an arm toward the girl holding Cat, who was serenading her new companion with The Owl and the Pussycat. “Who’s going to rescue Cat?”

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“He wants his mommy,” William snickered. “Look, he’s crying for his mommy. Boo hoo, Bobby boy.”

William pinned him against the maple tree, then knelt to retrieve a fistful of dirt. He showered Bobby’s head with soil and debris, the drizzle of earth covering Bobby’s bald head and spilling onto his face. “Look, more tears,” he said. “He’s a big crybaby.”

Bobby’s tears turned the soil on his cheeks into mud.

Even at thirty-three years old, Bobby’s chest heaved like he was still a child. His knees trembled and it took all his willpower not to wet his pants.

“Mommy!” His voice was hoarse and shrill. Bobby summoned the image of his mom from the photo of her he carried in his wallet. He scrunched his eyes closed for a few beats to focus on her as intensely as he could in his mind’s eye.

The three bullies lured Bobby to this grove in the woods, fifteen minutes from the paper mill where they all worked. Steve, who feigned friendship, claimed he discovered a big box of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Nerds Clusters in the woods. No, he didn’t know how they got there, but it was like a Halloween haul; there was so much candy. Steve said that he and Bobby could split it.

Bobby had a reputation as a candy fiend, consuming a candy bar between every shift. Steve knew that Bobby would take the bait without any hesitation.

Nate and Steve, bullies-in-arms, flanked William. In unison, they jeered as they pumped their fists into the air: “Mommy, mommy, mommy.”

“I want my mommy.”

“He still wants his mommy,” Nate said.

“She’s dead, you know,” William added. “I think she died when Bobby was born and he never even met her, except maybe for a moment when he saw the fun part as he was exiting.” William curled his left hand’s fingers into a circle and slid the pointer finger of his right hand into the opening. “Probably the one and only time he’s been in one.”

Tears cascaded from Bobby’s eyes.

“Boo hoo, the big baby cries. Here, I’ll wipe those tears from your face.” William stooped to the forest floor and snatched a large, partially bug-eaten leaf. He stood a breath away from Bobby and roughly smudged his cheeks, not absorbing the tears, but spreading them all over Bobby’s face.

In middle and high school, they used toilet paper. It’s the same as always, only different.

Bobby wanted to get out of this town, run far, far away, but mommy said she needed to stay in Bangor.

Why?

Mommy has to, Bobby.

Tell me why. I hate this town. They bully me at school all the time, in between classes, after classes, even during classes when the teacher’s not looking. Make fun of me. Hurt me. They hurt me a lot, Mommy.

Once, they hurt me, too, son. Some people like us attract bullies.

Who hurt you? Bobby wanted to know.

Kids, later grown-ups. Other girls picked on me, played practical jokes that weren’t funny. Grown-ups at the dress factory. They bullied me every day, but one day I made them stop.

How did you make them stop?

I can’t explain that now. You’re too young and won’t understand.

Nate punched Bobby in his stomach.

Bobby winced, doubled over, and then fell to his knees.

“You didn’t need to sock him,” Steve said. “That’s not right because I wanted to hit him, ha ha ha.”

The sun dipped below the tree tops as if an unseen hand flipped a switch, shrouding Bobby and his three tormentors in a cloak of darkness while simultaneously extending their impossibly long shadows. As the sun continued its descent toward the horizon, Steve, Nate, and William taunted Bobby with more crude insults about his mother and his rotund body and his oily hair. Their shadows sharpened for a moment as if the sunlight had grown brighter, and then the shadows entirely disappeared.

The woods went silent. Birds, frogs, insects—it was as if they never existed. A total absence of wildlife in a place where animals roam with abandon. The silence persisted for a long minute, hollowing a void in nature.

William rubbed his arms, shivering. “Why is it so cold?”

A loud pop exploded from the adjacent woods.

They all jumped, except for Bobby.

William let loose a small shriek. “What was that?”

“Dunno. Maybe a chipmunk.”

Crack!

The trio swiveled their heads, attempting to locate the source. The crack like a big branch splitting apart came from somewhere behind the trees.

A gust of frostbitten air rushed from the grove, spiraling fallen leaves and whistling as it charged forward. The gust drove William, Steve, and Nate back several steps.

Steve tripped over a vine and then lifted himself.

Leaves crunched as something wended its way through the thicket.

“That’s too loud for chipmunks,” Nate said. “A wolf?”

“There are no wolves in Maine. But it could be a bear.”

“A bear—that’s not good.

William gasped.

A weathered and faded, navy-blue dress without a body inside drifted out from behind a tree. The bodiless sleeves and bottom fluttered and rustled as it advanced. A fetor of rot and decay choked the pine-scented air.

Nate, Steve, and William covered their mouths and noses.

As a body filled the dress, William’s jaw dropped, goosebumps popped up all over his neck and arms, and his scraggly blonde hair stood on end.

“Mom? Mom, how can you…?”

Nate pointed to the woman emerging from the grove. “No, that’s my mother, not yours.” He cocked his head to the left, squinted toward the woman, and sniffled. “But you died, Mom. You died when I was ten.”

“My mother is dead, too,” William added. “Mom, how is that you? I don’t understand.”

Steve shook his head. “No, no, no. I don’t know who you see, but that’s my mother, Florence. And she’s at home right now in a wheelchair, been in a wheelchair for five years. She can’t walk and she can’t be here. It’s not possible.” An eighty-year-old woman with gnarled hands, bowed legs, and skin gray and wrinkled like an elephant’s, hobbled toward Steve.

Steve pointed a shaking finger toward Bobby. “He did this. He poisoned us! Slipped us mushrooms somehow and we’re hallucinating, each seeing our own mother.” He slammed Bobby in the belly with his elbow; when he raised his arm to strike again, a pair of hands—his aged mother’s hands—tightened around his neck, squeezing hard and fast. He tried to wedge his fingers under those hands, but could not.

His eyes bulged. His lungs seized. He whimpered, “Mom, why?” and then collapsed lifelessly onto the forest floor.

“Mom, no!” Nate shouted to the woman who approached him with arms outstretched and locked in place. A tree thwarted his retreat. He tensed his legs against the tree, as if he could shove it backward, but both the tree and Nate remained rooted in place.

Mom hissed at Nate.

He eked out one more “Mom, no,” before his mother strangled him to death.

William willed his legs to move, to take him far away from this horror, but fear and confusion paralyzed him. All he could do was shake his head from side to side, mewling, “Mother.”

William’s mother clasped her hands on his head—a vise grip—twisted sharply to the left, and broke William’s neck with a loud snap.

Bobby’s heart quivered with the excitement of a little boy on Christmas morning. He raced to his mother. She was young and beautiful, with long black hair, a petite nose, and a face that hadn’t changed since Bobby saw her last, twenty years ago, before a car crash claimed her.

He wrapped his arms around her and hugged her tight as she rubbed his back and said, “Mother is here to protect you.” She dropped an arm to her side and grasped Bobby’s hand.

He registered the warm, sticky bullies’ blood and smiled again.

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Ten-year-old Cathy Sharpe screamed so loudly that if the window in their apartment hadn’t already been broken, it would certainly have shattered anew.

Her father ran from the living room to the kitchen, sweat pouring from his face, took his daughter’s hand, and asked, “What happened, baby?”

Cathy’s mom, Mali, dashed into the kitchen a second later.

“I swallowed the watermelon seed! A watermelon is going to grow inside my belly now.”

Bob Sharpe smiled—a rare occurrence these days—and said, “That won’t happen.” He released her hand. Even after only a few seconds, it was too hot to hold hands.

They sat on wobbly steel chairs at their wooden kitchen table. Every so often, paint flakes fell from the ceiling and walls onto the floor.

Cathy glared at her plate, wanting to push it away in case more seeds remained and she swallowed one of those, too, but also wanting to devour every last bit of the fruit.

“It will! At school, Jimmy Kulken said that if you swallow a watermelon seed, it becomes a watermelon.” Cathy panted, and her little heart raced wildly inside her chest.

“Jimmy Kulken doesn’t know anything. He made that up,” Cathy’s mother, said. “I’m certain of that. Anyway, that must have been a long time ago because there hasn’t been school for three years.”

“How can you be sure?” Cathy asked. “What if you’re wrong? What if it can happen? Mommy, daddy, I’m scared.”

“I doubt Jimmy’s even seen a watermelon.” Mali pointed to Cathy’s plate. “This is the very last one in the world. Maybe even the last fruit in the world. Eat, please eat. You need nutrition and strength.”

Cathy’s eyes tracked the steam rising from the watermelon, the vapors swirling upward from the heat of the setting sun. The sun wasn’t hotter, but the Earth was. Three years ago, in 2028, accelerated global warming shut down the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, the Atlantic Ocean’s water conveyor belt, responsible for much of Earth’s temperate climate. The resulting global catastrophe was more devastating than anyone had predicted.

Bob and Mali had tried to explain this to Cathy, and they thought she might have understood if they had explained it sooner, but by then it was too hot for her or anyone to understand much at all.

Cathy’s belly burbled, and her throat itched with parchedness. She was hungry and thirsty. Again. Despite her worry about the seeds, she ate the final piece of watermelon, and when she was done, she turned to her parents and said, “Mommy, daddy, I’m still hungry. I’m thirsty.”

“I know, baby. But there is no more food. Not here, not anywhere in the world.”

“I was lucky,” Cathy said in a weak and weary voice.

“Somebody had to have the last food on Earth. That was you.”

Empty metal cans littered every surface of their kitchen. A barrel loomed on the opposite side of the room. They had used it to collect rainwater, but the bone-dry barrel was like a memorial to an ancient era because it hadn’t rained in thirty-nine days.

Cathy retrieved her paper fan from her pocket, but dropped it before she could open it.

Her father picked it up and fanned her face like he had done every day, many times a day, since the electricity failed six months ago.

She touched her belly. “My tummy’s grumbling.”

“You’re still hungry,” Mali said. “The watermelon wasn’t enough.” She kissed Cathy’s forehead. “I’m sorry.”

Cathy shook her head. “I’m hungry, but it’s not that. It sounds different, strange. Listen, feel.” She pulled her mother’s head down, turned her ear to her abdomen, and let it rest against her belly.

“It’s just the sound of an empty stomach.”

“My belly feels funny.”

The refrigerator door swung open. A hot wind rushed in to fill the empty space so quickly that the refrigerator wobbled, nearly toppling over.

“I’m so sleepy, mommy and daddy. But it’s so hot, I don’t know if I can sleep.” Salt caked her cheeks, and salt nearly welded her eyelids shut. “I need to sleep.”

Mali and Bob nodded to each other, a cognizant, resigned nod. They walked Cathy to her bedroom. Bob picked her up, rested her on top of the blanket, and kissed her forehead. There was no need to ask if she wanted a tuck-in. Nobody had slept under a blanket for years, if they could sleep at all.

Cathy closed her eyes. Her parents lay on the floor beside her. Though it was well past sunset, the bedroom walls glowed red like molten lava.

Fifteen minutes later, they all stopped breathing.

Life everywhere stopped. Like a cosmic switch being turned off, the Earth transformed into a planet of profound, total silence.

Five minutes after that, a sprout with two green leaves bloomed through her belly button. As the sprout grew taller, more leaves appeared, and in another second, a watermelon popped out of her belly button. Almost instantly, a forest of green covered her. Stems slid across the bedroom floor, pushed the apartment door open, crawled across the hallway, down the stairs, and out the building’s door. Other stems navigated to the window and veined twelve stories down the side of the red-brick building to the street.

Along the stems, buds opened, transforming into bright green and red watermelons as if in a time-lapse video.

More stems wended through the pavement, which was frail from a half-century of unrelenting heat, down through the earth, and out and up again many kilometers distant. When they emerged, they bore many different kinds of fruit and vegetables, a menagerie of reds, blues, greens, purples, yellows, and oranges.

The winds carried the seeds above the oceans, where they took root and spread across the continents.

A sweet, succulent aroma infused the atmosphere.

A thousand kilometers above the planet, the gas mixture in Captain Arnaud Bérot’s suspended animation chamber changed to seventy-eight percent nitrogen and twenty percent oxygen, the temperature rose to twenty-four degrees Celsius, and the stasis controller attached to his head, hands, and feet returned his heart and brain’s electrical impulses to waking. Bérot swallowed a deep breath, blinked, and scanned the readout on the display inside the tube.

Everything is five by five.

He groaned as he hoisted himself out of the tube and then hurried to the ship’s master stasis controls, where he pressed the buttons to wake the remaining five men and six women of his crew.

The system woke him first, and if he confirmed the conditions on the planet below, he would bring everyone else out of deep sleep.

He walked over to his wife’s hibernation tube, leaned into the chamber, and shook her shoulder.

Maëlys blinked and asked, “We’re alive?”

“We’re alive.”

“Does that mean what I hope it means?”

Arnaud nodded. “It does. To answer your next question, the year is 2235.”

Éric Barton, the crew’s biologist, whistled. “That’s much sooner than I expected—by millennia. I frankly didn’t think we’d ever wake up because it should have taken hundreds of thousands of years for the Earth to heal, and this rust-bucket of a spaceship wouldn’t last that long. It was always a long shot. You’re sure the Earth is habitable, and we’re not going to die a miserable death down there? Reentry is a one-way ticket.”

“Yes. Earth is blue and alive again, just as it was centuries ago. The instruments confirm it. The telescope visually confirms it. I don’t know how this happened so quickly, but—” He stepped back from the binocular scope that was attached to the ship’s hull adjacent to a porthole, and said, “Take a look for yourself.”

Maëlys gazed through the six-hundred-power scope for a full minute, and then the remaining ten crew members did, too, smiling as they stepped away. “Incroyable!” she said. “This is the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen. I glimpsed the Eiffel as we passed over Paris, and flowers bloom everywhere!”

Lieutenant François Crozat interrupted with a throat clearing. “Maybe we’ll find out why the Earth renewed so quickly, but maybe not.” He winked at Alice Durand, the crew’s physician, whom the Académie des sciences had paired him with. “But our mission now is to return home and reseed the Earth.”

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Grisham Levy tapped his keyboard with his left hand while he gripped his Boston Red Sox mug in his other, taking occasional sips of black coffee. Carefully, without tilting the mug too far, lest he spill coffee on his keyboard, he glanced at his watch. Although it wasn’t running, he knew it was late because his fingers, hands, wrists, arms, and shoulders ached from typing for what felt like forever. His back pained him, too.

“Thanks so much for your suggestion,” he typed. It took over a minute to key those six words because autocorrect first changed suggestion to satisfaction and then to salamander, neither of which was what he wanted to say to Ellis Howard, his friend and colleague at Binder Architects.

“De nada,” Ellis typed back.

“It’s always great to get your feedback.” Grisham pressed the send key the moment before he thought, Why didn’t I let the chat end with Ellis’ de nada? Why am I compelled to continue a chat? Queasiness churned his belly at that thought, his skin chilled, and goosebumps erupted all over. I must continue.

Grisham shook his head. Several drops of coffee spilled onto his desk, already marred with countless coffee stains, but still, he blotted the liquid with his shirt, a force of habit.

It’s not just me. Ellis can’t end it either.

He had hoped that Ellis was ready to stop their chat many, many messages ago when he sent, “I’m in the mood for pistachios,” because as everyone knows, you need two hands to eat pistachio nuts.

Somehow, Ellis ate his pistachios while chatting, and their exchange continued. He shouldn’t have been surprised, because once Grisham messaged during a ferocious thunderstorm that knocked out power to everyone in his Cleveland, Ohio neighborhood except for him, so he could converse when nobody else could.

Grisham knew that Ellis must have been hoping for an exit, too, but as much as Grisham abhorred rudeness and would never ask, “Are you done with everything you have to say?” Ellis feared the silence that followed the end of a chat.

So Ellis didn’t stop it.

And neither did Grisham.

And their conversation went on and on.

“What did you think of the Charles Report?” Ellis asked.

“The Charles Report? That’s random. Wasn’t that a long time ago, like 10,000 years? I only vaguely remember it.”

“Search,” Ellis suggested.

“Give me a sec. Ah, yes, there it is. It concerned reorganizing the auditing department. Yes, I see it. A great success. The reorganization lasted fifty-two years until a new company president installed his sister in charge.”

“And it wasn’t 10,000 years ago. It was 33,440,100,222 years ago, to be precise.”

“February 15th. I think it snowed that day.”

“Yup. Big snow. The subway shut down.”

Grisham thought that if they could ever end this chat, he might be able to go outside and see snow again, but he also realized it was too late for that. Snow didn’t exist anymore. He rubbed his chin. When was the last snow? A billion years in the past? He thought about searching his messages because he and Ellis would likely have talked about that snow, but he didn’t need to know.

His house trembled, cascading powerful vibrations through his body.

“Whoa. Did you feel that? Everything’s shaking.” Grisham typed, though he knew Ellis did. He watched as the fonts jiggled and then shattered like ice so cold its crystalline structure could no longer hold. The letters swapped places momentarily, becoming haat hgs gEia. ien nWf? hie tldye okethv. urs oeeon, and then returned to what he had typed.

“Yes, I felt it. Your sentence looks Norwegian.”

“It looks like the end, my friend.”

“I’m relieved. Every time you replied, I thought I could let it be, but something inside compelled me to reply.”

“Me, too. Every time for the past thirty-three billion years.”

Grisham thought he heard Ellis sigh through the text that appeared on his screen, and he might have because when the universe ends, things are bound to get weird. For a moment, a crushing sensation—like he was inside a small closet with the walls closing in—overwhelmed him so much that his bones hurt, and the next moment he was floating above his chair. He typed quickly now because there wasn’t much time left. “Do you think that we stayed alive all of these tens of billions of years because neither of us could end our chat?”

Grisham rubbed his eyes. His mouth stretched into the widest yawn he’d ever produced, and the breathy, prolonged inhalation and then exhalation seemed to last a century.

I’m so sleepy, so tired.

Grisham blinked, focused his eyes, and watched the text speed across his screen. Ellis was typing furiously, too. “Maybe we’re the ones who kept the universe alive because our chat was never-ending.”

“Until now.”

“Yes, until now.”

47 Billion Years Later

Houx Glee’s rightmost tentacle wobbled in exhaustion above her keyboard from the endless conversation she and her sister, Ayzii, who lived on the other side of the Second Ocean, had been trapped in for countless billions of years. “Thank you for reminding me about—”

She stopped typing mid-sentence as a well of gravity squished her so hard into her chair that for a moment she felt as if her atoms would fuse with the chair’s.

“I think it’s time.” Ayzii’s words flashed across Houx’s screen.

“I feel it, too. All these eons, I’d wondered when and how our chat would end. To be honest, sometimes I was frustrated by the fact that neither of us knew how to stop it, but that’s not a problem anymore, is it?”

“It’s not, sis. The universe is taking care of that for us. It’s the end of everything, but I don’t feel sad. I feel relieved, like when you read the last page of a novel where the ending is revealed.”

“Maybe because we’re so tired we’re winding down the universe.”

“Maybe.”

“Will there be another universe after ours?” Houx asked.

“I hope so.”

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If you enjoyed this story, I think you’ll also like What Hath God Wrought?

Chase Chastain III thumped his black leather Salvatore Ferragamo shoes against the supermarket floor and grumbled to the elderly woman checking out in front of him, “Would you hurry up?”

She didn’t turn toward Chase or even indicate that she heard him.

“Probably forgot her hearing aids,” Chase muttered, eying her cart, filled with a myriad of products, including lima beans (who buys that vile food?) Clara’s Leather Cleaner with a prominent “20% Off” sticker attached (oh god, it’s going to take even more time for the cashier to compute 20 percent), and three different flavors of Ensure (of course).

Each of those items is costing me time, and time is money. He glanced at his platinum watch and tapped the dial. Probably a grand in waiting time at my salary.

He remembered his father saying, “I’m sorry we don’t have more time together, son,” the day he died. He kept his father’s last words on a folded piece of paper in his wallet. Time is the most precious commodity.

The woman in line had to be about one hundred and the cashier eighty, though they might both be older. He wasn’t sure because he rarely paid attention to anyone over forty-six, which was the age of the president of the hedge fund where he worked. Chase was twenty-six and would have his own hedge fund well before then.

Chase gripped a single bottle of Svalbarði water. That’s all he wanted. He wondered if he’d complete the purchase by the time he was forty-six.

He thrust his left arm forward so that the sleeves of his gray Brioni wool jacket and white Tom Ford Men’s Classic Poplin shirt slid back, letting his Patek Philippe chronograph emerge. He scanned the woman’s shopping cart again, meticulously counting the items—thirty-one to be exact, of which twenty bore sale stickers. He narrowed his eyes, pressed his Patek’s stopwatch button, and waited as the woman laboriously landed each item on the rubber conveyor; the items traveled twelve inches, and the checker rotated them so the barcode faced the scanner. It took fifty seconds for each regular item and sixty-two seconds for each sale product, on average.

Old people. Slow people. You don’t have to be old to be slow, but old and slow is the worst combination.

“Grace!” the woman checking out shouted, her voice breaking that name into three parts. She raised her hand to shoulder height—apparently unable to lift it any higher—and waved.

“Annie!” a woman several yards to the right of Chase’s checkout line shrieked back. “Long time no see.”

Annie gimped with a shopping cart filled to the top with—oh no! all sale items—which she lost control of. The shopping cart gathered speed as it beelined to Chase.

My suit! My knees!

Annie brought the cart under control by digging her heels into the supermarket floor. An irritating squeak of rubber against linoleum sent cold shivers down his spine.

Annie turned to Chase as she passed items from her cart to Grace’s. “You don’t mind, do you? You’re young and have lots of time left, but Grace and I worry that any minute could be our last.”

“I do—”

Annie turned away from Chase and continued to transfer items to Grace’s shopping cart.

Chase looked at his watch.

An hour and a half already! How is that possible? Yeah, actually, it feels ten times longer.

He reset his chronometer and recalculated the time it took for each item to travel the entire route from one cart to the following cart, to the conveyor to the scanner, and finally to the plastic shopping bag. The checker moved in slow motion.

Seventeen minutes per item!

His throat was suddenly parched. I’m so thirsty. Chase unscrewed the cap, brought the bottle to his lips, and downed half the water in one swig.

Maybe they’ll let me pay for the water on the spot if I drink it fast enough.

Chase finished the water in a single gulp, held the empty bottle above his head, and shouted, “I’ve drunk it. Can I just pay for it now?”

Nobody responded.

Chase waved a twenty in the air. “How about I just leave twenty dollars?”

Silence responded.

The ceiling lights flickered, then illuminated like an exploding star. Chase shut his eyes for several beats, and when he opened them, the light was normal brightness again, though cooler and harsher.

The floor rocked like he was on a small ship in the center of a turbulent sea and wind blew at his face from all points of the compass. He gripped the shopping cart in front of him just in time before his feet lifted off the floor.

Then he thumped onto the floor.

How did I—what happened?

Over a hundred items remained in the two shopping carts in front of him. They’re still checking out. I’ll never get out of here!

Chase spun around. The supermarket was empty except for him, Annie, Grace, and the checker, whose name tag read “Eva.” When he turned back to the register, however, those three were gone, along with the register, shopping carts, conveyor, and the candy rack—everything.

A loud, high-pitched hum assaulted him. He clapped his hands over his ears, but that didn’t help.

Chase glanced at his watch to orient himself, but what he saw did anything but.

The Patek’s date window read Saturday. He’d gotten in line on Thursday.

Chase stood on the other side of a gate made of shimmering gold light. He squinted and the gate momentarily transformed into a solid—or so it seemed—but then resumed its ethereal form.

“Huh?” he said to nobody, but a man about his age wearing a bright green jumpsuit tapped his shoulder in response.

“You going to stand there all day or are you going to pay for that so I can get home?”

“What?”

A propellerless drone hovered above the man. A basket filled with fruit, vegetables, wrapped meat, and items that Chase couldn’t place hung beneath the drone.

“Just walk through,” the man said. “Scoot, scoot. Your purchase will be automatically deducted from your bank account.”

Though confused, Chase was happy to finally get out of the supermarket.

I must be more dehydrated than I thought.

As he stepped through the light gate, an alarm sounded, followed by a booming voice, “No associated bank account.”

A short, bespeckled man with his arms folded across his chest materialized in front of Chase, blocking his way. He wore black pants and a black t-shirt.

Three more identical men bracketed him.

Quadruplets?

“How are you going to pay for that water?” the man in front of Chase asked.

“Cash?”

“We don’t take cash. Nobody does.”

“I’ll use a credit card.” Chase reached for his wallet.

The man growled and shook his head. He blinked three times, as if giving himself a few moments to process a thought. “Credit cards disappeared seventy-one years ago. You can only pay with an associated bank account.”

A rectangular cigarette pack-sized object materialized in the man’s hand. He slid the device along Chase’s left arm, frowned, and then pressed it hard against Chase’s right arm. The device’s screen flashed red, and words appeared that Chase could not read from where he stood.

The man said, “You don’t have a bank chip in your arm. You’ll need to come with us.”

“Us? Go where?”

“Processing,” the man said as the two others standing to Chase’s sides grabbed his arms. Their hands were cold and strong, and when Chase studied the men, he noticed that they weren’t breathing. “Processing is that way,” the man continued as he hitched his thumb in the direction behind Chase.

“What are you?”

“Holographic androids.”

“Where am I?”

“New York City. If you don’t have any more questions, we’ll take you to processing.”

Chase narrowed his eyes and twisted his head. Visible through the window was New York—or something like New York. Pedestrians walked above a mirrored sidewalk on which sunlight glittered, seeming to glide on a cushion of air. “I do have another question. What year is this?”

“It’s twenty-one-forty.”

Chase gasped. “How is that possible? May I ask another question?” Chase’s heart sped.

“You may ask as many as you like as long as you’re not holding up the line.”

“Okay, then. This is the future, right? I mean, it’s the future to me and somehow I’ve traveled…wait…”—Chase uncurled his fingers, first slowly, then fast as he counted the years in his head— “One hundred fourteen years.” He clucked his tongue. “Holy mother of God, I’m a time traveler from twenty-twenty-six.”

Shoppers wearing odd, shimmering clothing—there’s no accounting for fashion in the future—hurried around the supermarket, their carts following them three feet overhead.

Somehow, that plodding checkout line slowed time for me while time continued at its regular speed outside the line. Incredible. Maybe I’ll find a physicist who can explain it, but it doesn’t matter because this is heaven. I’ve died and gone to heaven. Everything’s fast here, efficient. I was meant to be in the future.

He glanced at his platinum Patek Philippe. He wasn’t sure if the perpetual calendar still worked, if its day-date-year mechanism was still accurate after over a century, but maybe that didn’t matter. He could keep it or sell it as a mint-condition antique, surely an item that would bring considerable coin.

Chase nodded at the man in front. “Okay, I’m ready for processing. Does this mean I get a bank chip?” Chase ran the numbers through his head. Interest on a 140-year-old bank account, his nine million in Microsoft, OpenAI, Exxon, IBM, and other stocks must be worth fifty times that now.

Whoa. This is going to be amazing.

He beamed a broad smile at the first holograph and pumped his fist.

I’m fucking rich!

“No. You’re going to processing because you don’t have a bank chip. You’re supposed to receive yours at birth. Those who don’t aren’t in the system.”

The holographs escorted Chase past the snack foods, and it pleased Chase to see that the palates of the future were equally coarse as in his time, because who doesn’t love a bag of Doritos while watching a game on television?

The holograms prodded Chase to walk quickly by poking his back.

He walked through what he thought must be the dairy section. Instead of containers of milk, cartons of yogurt, and packages of cheese, massive two-story machines made of metal and glass lined the aisle. Chase figured out that these machines made dairy to order.

That’s a technology I would like to have invested in. Maybe I still can.

The holograms abruptly turned Chase left, toward the fruit aisle. Rather than twenty-first-century bins filled helter-skelter with oranges, bananas, cherries, strawberries, and other fruits, four large dispensing machines jutted up from the floor. Inside the machines were bushes and trees, soil, and irrigation equipment in miniature—vending machine farms.

The holograms herded Chase forward into an aisle with a sign that read Processing in Comic Sans. Two velvet ropes on waist-high poles reminded Chase of the line to get into the premiere of Nomadland. Although the ropeway snaked up and down the aisle with room for a hundred or more people, only one man, about five years older than Chase, stood in line before him, rapidly tapping his foot against the floor.

“He’s next. You’re after him,” the hologram said with a bland soprano voice.

Chase’s face lit. “Processing, right?”

“That’s correct.”

“Thank goodness, there’s virtually no line. I can’t begin to tell you how much I hate lines, especially when populated by old people who are so s-l-o-w slow,” Chase said, taking ten seconds to utter “slow.”

“What happens after processing?” Chase asked. “Do I get a bank chip? Can I shop and stuff? An apartment? I’m filthy rich and can afford a nice place. Hey, what’s dating like in the year twenty-one-forty? All of a sudden, I’ve got a huge number of questions.”

“You may ask until it’s time for processing.”

“Okay, so dating. Let’s start with—”

“Next,” boomed the public address system.

Two new hologram androids emerged from the aisle’s walls as if the walls birthed them and grabbed the man in front of Chase as his legs folded under him. They hoisted him back up and dragged him forward as he screamed, “Nooo! Please no! Send me back to nineteen-ninety-five.”

“Why is he screaming?”

As Chase stepped backward, the hologram androids grabbed his arms. “Let go of me!” Chase screeched as he unsuccessfully tried to free himself from their grip, twisting and tugging as hard as he could. The holograms let him fight, and when they had sapped all Chase’s energy, he asked, “What is processing?”

One of the holograms pointed to the sign hanging above the adjacent aisle. It read, “MEAT.”

Below the sign stood an enormous, metallic grinding machine, and to the machine’s left and right, square, squat robotic vacuums slurped blood from the floor.

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Now and then, I republish an older short story as a bonus story because new subscribers may not have seen it. The Train Pusher is in addition to my regular bi-weekly short story, which will be published next week, as usual.

Enjoy Maelstrom, the theme song to The Train Pusher, written and sung by Marina V. You can listen to more of Marina V’s beautiful songs and read the lyrics to Malstrom here.

“I don’t want to move to another part of Tokyo or anywhere else. Our neighborhood has everything, including good schools for when we have a baby.” Akari nudged Jiro’s tie to the side to make sure it wouldn’t dip into the cereal.

They sat on either side of the small table in their small kitchen located in their small, four-story apartment building. One analog wall clock and two digital table clocks faced Jiro’s seat, a system designed to ensure he wouldn’t be late for work. Jiro handed Akari half of the Asahi Shimbun and skimmed yesterday’s baseball games and sumo matches.

“I assume you are kidding when you suggest we move.” When he didn’t answer, Akari snatched Jiro’s section, the paper snapping like a thunderclap. “It’s only thirty minutes on the JR Line and a quick walk to the station. You can do it. You listen to music on the train, so it’s like a vacation.”

Jiro wanted his paper back, but what did it matter? He barely found time to read the headlines.

His life was a nonstop treadmill, and he wondered if he suddenly jumped off, would he crash into the wall behind him?

“I think a quieter neighborhood would be better. Something not so hustle and bustle.”

“I like the convenience of having everything close. Also, it’s too expensive to move, so this discussion is closed.”

Jiro glanced at his watch: 6:50 a.m. Time to leave.

“Okay,” he said. He sighed, slid his chair back, and stood. It wasn’t a matter of who was right, or that the morning commute was the opposite of Akari’s idea of a vacation. They weren’t moving because life’s inertia was too powerful to counter. This neighborhood, this accelerated pace, was their life now, and trying to change it, Akari, or anything else, was impossible.

When he was a kid, he wished on stars. Those were hopeful days; his future was his boundless imagination. Those memories faded more with every passing day.

He kissed Akari goodbye, tightened his tie in the hallway mirror, picked up his briefcase, and trudged nine minutes to the train station.

Jiro switched briefcase hands as he waited for the train. The weight of the papers and responsibilities inside strained his arm. He stood amidst a sea of black suits, in the third row from the train platform edge, with another ten layers of salarymen behind him.

The sweaty mass of humanity and the sound of metal against metal as trains entered and departed the station hammered every cell of his body.

As the train pulled into Takadanobaba station, he tightened his back muscles, stiffened his spine, and willed his legs to become rubber. The train door opened, and Jiro twisted halfway into the train, one arm, hip, and left leg inside, but his right leg still lingered on the platform, an impediment to both the JR Line’s schedule and his physical well-being. Jiro grunted and rotated his back to the platform to prepare for the push. Two white-gloved, uniformed pushers converged on him, like bees materializing out of the ether at a picnic. Anonymous hands forced the rest of Jiro into a space nature never intended for a human being to fit into.

After they squished Jiro into the protoplasmic horde of humanity, the pressure from the surrounding passengers wedged him in place. Now, each passenger radiated heat like the noon sun, scorching his lungs. His face pancaked flat against the train door window, like he was a two-dimensional being. Somebody’s hard-sided briefcase was on the cusp of prying off his kneecap. Jiro knew that person was in pain, too.

At work, Jiro’s fingers melted into his keyboard; his head and headset fused into a single entity. His eyes fixed on the flow chart that detailed the current supply chain for the satellite radios his company produced. The chart mutated weekly; supply chains churned as chaotic entities, like leaves in the autumn wind, subject to the whims of tariffs, shipping companies, ocean storms, and a hundred other factors.

Jiro mused on how things were made in the days before computers could track and coordinate such complex systems. It must certainly have been slower, but somehow cars got built, as did a myriad of appliances and products.

After work, Jiro meandered back to the station, another nine or so minutes’ walk. He didn’t mind his after-work walk, though, because, while tired, he could take his time—no pressure to be somewhere. His walk to the station often carried him along streets he’d never seen before, such was Tokyo’s random, labyrinth-like design.

He glanced at his watch. Six-fifty-three. Nearly twelve hours since he started his work day, if you count getting to and from the office, which in Jiro’s estimation, definitely counts.

His feet traced one of those streets he’d never seen, and when his eyes caught the exterior of a tea shop, his brain urged, Stop. Rest. Rejuvenate. You’re in no rush to get home.

“Welcome to my tea shop,” the shop’s proprietor, who introduced himself as Eiichi, said. He had thick, silver hair and a slightly bent nose that appeared to have been broken and never reset. Even at seventy-plus years, he was a large man, muscles hiding underneath his shirt. He looked like a former rugby player.

“I haven’t seen your ochaya-san before. Is it new?”

Jiro surveyed the small room. Three squat wooden tables, each with four short wooden stools, filled the small room. Paper-covered hanging lamps illuminated a dozen Ukiyo-e paintings on the walls, including The Great Wave off Kanagawa, drawn by Hokusai in 1831.

Jiro noticed an old-style rotary telephone on the counter.

That can’t still work.

“We’ve been here since nineteen-fifty. Most people just pass us by.” Eiichi shrugged. “Those who enter do so because they need to. Tea is more calming after work than beer or whisky, don’t you think?”

Jiro settled onto a stool, and Eiichi placed a cup in front of him. Jiro thought it odd that the proprietor didn’t offer him a menu first.

Steam wafted from the cup, carrying symphonic aromas of a thousand herbs to Jiro’s nose. The tea was still too hot to drink, but Jiro savored the herbal scents while he waited for it to cool.

Except for Jiro and Eiichi, the shop was empty. This didn’t surprise Jiro. Bars were the venue of choice for decompressing after work.

Work hard, drink hard.

Jiro lifted the cup to his lips and blew a stream of cooling air over the liquid’s surface before taking his first sip. Mint, ginger, rooibos, rose petals, and a plethora of unidentifiable flavors saturated his tongue. Bright, loud colors like fireworks ignited in his brain, and his skin tingled like it radiated with sparklers.

“This is good tea.”

“It’s better than good,” Eiichi replied. He took a long, satisfying sip from his teacup and said, “You’ll love it even more the next time.”

Akari moved Jiro’s tie to the side so it wouldn’t dip into the cereal bowl, even though it was nowhere near his cereal, and was too short to reach the bowl anyway. Jiro passed her the half of the newspaper he wasn’t reading, and continued eating his cornflakes. His watch read 6:49 a.m., one minute before he had to leave to catch the 7:04 a.m. train.

As Jiro waited on this August morning on the train platform along with hundreds of other bodies, he heard his sweat thunk onto the ground. The train would arrive soon, the car would be air-conditioned, but what good was air conditioning when pressed against so many other sweating people?

When the train arrived, he forced himself through the train doors as far as he could. Jiro reached for a hand strap, which he used to pull himself even further inside, but half his body remained outside the doors. A pusher arrived to help Jiro the rest of the way into the train. This pusher was a man in his seventies with silver hair and a wrestler’s body, a contrast to the youthful staff commonly employed as pushers. He recognized the pusher—Eiichi, the tea shop owner.

What?

Eiichi winked at Jiro before giving him the hardest shove he’d ever received.

Jiro propelled forward into the train and beyond. The throng of bodies that filled the car transformed into a swirling cloud of multicolored dust, enveloping Jiro. There was a loud pop, and Jiro tumbled through the car’s void.

Where is everyone?

A half dozen men and women stared at Jiro as he picked himself off the floor. Two women wearing ankle-length dresses, one a paisley pattern, the other covered in blue, yellow, and green squares and rectangles, shook their heads, mouths agape. One of the men, dressed in a long, beige raincoat with wide lapels and skinny tie, helped Jiro to a seat. He asked Jiro where he had come from, saying that one moment he wasn’t here, and the next he was, as if he had materialized out of thin air.

Jiro shook his head and rubbed his eyes.

He was riding a streetcar.

Where is the JR train?

Jiro blurted a quick “Thank you,” and exited. He looked back as the green and white streetcar glided along tracks laid on cobblestone. A second green and white streetcar traveled along tracks on the far side of the street in the opposite direction, and a pink and red one followed tracks along a perpendicular route. All the cars’ windows were open. The sky above the streetcars was a web of wires spun by a drunk spider.

A man on a loud motorbike carrying three passengers zipped past the streetcar that Jiro had been riding. A handful of bulbous automobiles with big, chrome fenders ambled along.

Women pushed oversized metal strollers.

Jiro passed by a shoeshine man. A flock of school kids, none with phones, dressed in black uniforms and white shoes, paraded along the opposite side of the street.

Something was wrong, but everything was right. He felt his heart steady, a strange sensation because he’d never noticed it beating before.

Jiro rubbed his back where Eiichi shoved him, half expecting to find a knife wound, which would explain things: an infection exploding in his blood, his body feverish, his brain delirious. But Jiro felt nothing except for the ache of Eiichi’s powerful push.

The tea man, the train pusher. Eiichi.

He looked around and took in an alien Tokyo.

His eyes soaked in neon signs advertising restaurants, shopping centers, pachinko parlors, and an upcoming baseball game between the American All-Stars and the Yomiuri Giants. There was a window display for women’s bathing suits with real models.

Jiro peered inside a yellow newspaper box. Today was September 4th, 1950.

The once unalterable trajectory of his life had been a speeding missile. Now he felt a new emotion: hope.

This was Tokyo from before he was born. A thousand questions rattled his brain, but each question led to the same conclusion: The answers were at the tea shop.

Jiro ambled on automatic pilot, passing through residential neighborhoods, which in his time, had been—would be—busy business districts. The world was off kilter.

A girl in a kimono balanced inside a hula hoop, and a family of three was eating a picnic lunch on their front lawn. In Tokyo! A man was taking a photograph of a woman with a large, box-shaped camera like something out of a vintage movie, while nearby, an elderly man shuffled in geta, wooden platform shoes.

Jiro slid open the door to the tea shop, which he now noticed bore no name, revealing nothing to indicate that it was an ochaya-san.

Had there been a sign before? I mean, will there be a store sign?

Jiro stepped inside.

A cacophony of aromas filled his nose and ears.

How do scents have sounds?

The tea smells rang like wind chimes.

A woman in her forties, dressed in a modern suit, like Jiro, sat at the table nearest the door. Her stylish black-framed eyeglasses matched her clothes. She nodded to Jiro, who sat down on the opposite stool.

“Are you—?” Jiro started to ask.

“Yes, like you.”

“When did you—?”

“Just a few minutes before you arrived.” She bowed and took a sip of her tea. “I’m Rin, former general manager at HikariTech, former resident of the year twenty-twenty-five.”

“What did he do to us?”

“I pushed you,” Eiichi said.

Jiro turned to him.

“You did what?”

Eiichi pulled on his apron’s strings to tighten it.

“I pushed you from two-thousand twenty-five to nineteen-fifty.” He rested a teacup in front of Jiro. “To answer your next question, it does have to do with the tea, a recipe that’s been in my family since the Heian period. I know you have more questions, and I will try to answer them all, but I need to tell you this first: You must drink a cup of this tea once a week to stay in this time, just as you needed the tea to arrive here.”

“The Heian period was a thousand years ago,” Jiro said.

“Hmm, so it was.”

“Why did you push me back to nineteen-fifty?”

“I think you know the answer. It’s the same answer for you as for Rin. You longed for this.”

Yes.

Jiro took another sip of tea.

Where do I work? What can I do in this time?

But whatever he did, it would be slower and quieter. He smiled.

The bell above the shop’s door announced two new visitors.

“Mitsuki, Hiroto! Welcome. Have a seat with Rin and Jiro from two-thousand twenty-five.” He turned to the table. “Mitsuki and Hiroto are from two-thousand fifty-six. They come every Wednesday for tea.”

If you enjoyed this story, I think you’ll also like The Spy.

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Diego Ramirez thought there was a fifty-fifty chance that everyone was right about him—that he was insane—but it didn’t matter because the world would end in a month.

When he retired as head astronomer from Kitt Peak Observatory in Arizona at age sixty-six, he and his wife, Ying, moved to Fairplay, Colorado, where he installed a PlaneWave RC1000 telescope to savor the night sky. Without meetings to attend, reports to write, committees to report to, interns to supervise, and budgets to plan, he enjoyed astronomy more than ever.

Until the night he discovered pulsar PSR J0484+2407.

Diego sprinted from his backyard observatory into the bedroom, his heart hammering at a nearly impossible speed, to tell his wife the unbelievable news. “Pulsar J0484+2407 will destroy all life on Earth in thirty-two days.”

Ying rested her phone screen side down in their bed, glanced up at Diego, and then picked up her phone again. She tapped and swiped for a full minute. “There’s nothing about this on Instagram.”

“That’s because I just discovered the pulsar.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means what I said. Everyone and everything on Earth will be dead in thirty-two days. PSR J0484+2407 is a three-fer. It will kill by ionizing the upper atmosphere and obliterating the planet’s protective ozone layer. It will kill by dismantling nitrogen and oxygen molecules, which will create deadly acid rain. It will kill by direct ionizing radiation through high-intensity gamma and X-rays. There’s no way to survive this.”

Ying’s eyes went wide and she gasped. “Don’t joke.” Her phone slipped from her hands and onto the floor.

“It’s true.”

“Is there anything we can do?”

Diego shrugged. “I suppose that anyone more than a few meters underground when the beam strikes will survive. Lethal gamma and X-rays don’t penetrate solid matter that far.”

“We need to find a cave. I’m sure there are some in Colorado.” Ying leaned over the bed and retrieved her phone.

Diego shook his head. “Caves won’t help because the damage to the atmosphere will be apocalyptic. Not to mention the annihilation of crops and animals. Believe me, those who perish quickly will be the lucky ones.”

“You need to tell people anyway. Even if there’s nothing anyone can do, everyone needs to know so they can enjoy their remaining days.”

“You’re right, babe. I will get on it.” Diego turned to leave the bedroom for his office, but before he could fully pivot, Ying said, “Do it from your phone. I don’t want to be alone.”

Diego spent the next three hours calling and emailing news organizations and government agencies. He secured a phone call with the President’s Science Advisor, and he spoke briefly with a reporter from the New York Times. He reached out to the Chicago Tribune, MSNBC, CNN, The Guardian, Asahi Shimbun, Dainik Bhaskar, Le Monde, and a dozen other news organizations.

Exhausted, his voice hoarse and vocal cords sore, he collapsed onto his back, interlaced his fingers with Ying’s, and fell fast asleep.

The following morning, Diego woke in his clothes.

Ying bolted up in bed a moment after he did. Together they scanned the news. The world’s newspapers displayed the same headline: “America Invades Switzerland.” Scattered above the fold were other stories: “Vice-President Conner Accused of Bankrolling Car Theft Ring,” “Global Stocks Slip to 1959 Levels,” “TikTok Sued for 99 Billion Dollars for Fake Videos,” “AI Replaces All Doctors at Mt. Sinai Hospital,” and “France Loses Nuclear Bomb.”

Buried beneath a mountain of articles in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other newspapers sat an article with a tiny headline, “World Will End in a Month,” followed by “Nobel Prize-winning astronomer Diego Ramirez discovered a pulsar two-and-a-half light years from Earth that will irradiate our planet with deadly gamma and X-rays in thirty-one days. No human life will be spared…This reporter spoke with the President’s National Security Advisor, who offered this reply, “‘There’s a lot on our plate at the moment, and we’ll focus on this promptly’.”

Diego and Ying stared at each other, jaws agape. “I posted about this on TikTok and Instagram, but it was as if I didn’t post at all. I got only five likes and no comments.”

Diego snapped his fingers. “We have to get the word out. People have a right to know. I’m going to call WKRG and go on local television. The majors will pick it up after, and then the news will snowball into a front page story, as it should be.”

Diego tapped the redial button on his phone—he’d been on WKRG multiple times before for interviews about comets, meteor showers, eclipses, and aliens.

Ying only heard his side of the conversation:

“I see. A dog show? And then a five-part series about gas prices in Colorado. You can’t put me on for even fifteen minutes until August because there’s too much other news? Are you fucking insane?”

“There’s too much other news?”

“That’s what he said. And I quote, ‘The ongoing stories are the ones that people are interested in. We can’t determine in advance if something new will interest viewers.’”

“Wait!” Ying shouted. “Look!” She pointed a quivering finger toward the television screen, on which a chiron scrolled, “...Urgent Breaking News Next...”

Diego and Ying held their breaths as a reporter spoke his concluding words into the microphone, “Councilmember Griffin, who is accused of running an illicit dog-racing ring, is expected to resign tomorrow. Back to you, Jane.”

Jane Holland, Channel 4’s blonde anchor, locked eyes with the camera. “Channel 4 has just learned—” She spoke slowly, her words separated by a beat. “—the state lottery jackpot has passed the two-million dollar mark.”

Ying sighed and asked, “What are you going to do now?”

“I’m going to Chicago. I’m going to stand on the corner of State and Madison Streets and shout the most important news of all time at everyone who passes by. It’s the old-fashioned way of spreading information, and it will work.”

Diego drove to Denver as quickly as he could and caught the next flight to Chicago. He took a taxi directly to Chicago’s busiest intersection, stepped onto the folding plastic stool he brought with him, and bellowed in the loudest and most stern voice he could muster, “The world is ending in a month…”

He stood on the stool, his voice unwavering for seventeen hours, watching passersby cast furtive glances his way, overhearing random sentence snippets, “Oh my god, did you read about Taylor Swift’s divorce?” “The Cubs really have a chance this year!” and “If things stay bad in Europe, we’re going to have to cancel our trip.” For a second, Diego thought he heard a pedestrian say “pulsar” as she walked by, but as she approached closer, he realized the woman was referring to a new Chicago bar.

The woman stopped three feet from Diego, eyed him, and said, “You’re crazy. If the world were ending, it would be all over the news.”

“It needs to be!”

“You need help.”

A couple walking hand in hand passed by. The man pointed to Diego, “If we nuke Switzerland, flights to Europe will become cheaper. Have you thought about that?”

“I’m not talking about Switzerland! Pulsar J0484+2407 will kill all life on Earth!”

A boy about six years old tugged on his father’s t-shirt, pointed to Diego, and asked, “Daddy, is that a crazy man, the kind you told me to stay away from?”

“I’m not crazy! I’m a Nobel Prize-winning astronomer, and it’s my destiny to warn everyone about what’s coming.”

But am I of sound mind? Diego wondered. No, I’m not crazy. The news reported on the pulsar, but nobody paid attention. Or does no one care because I’m insane?

Diego was oblivious to the police officer until Patrolman Ellis Jones twisted his arms behind him and cuffed him. “It’s for your own protection,” the patrolman said. “We’ve gotten a lot of complaints about you, and we’re going to run you down to the station for a little chat.”

“Good, good,” Diego replied. “I want to tell you all about Pulsar J0484+2407 and the end of the world. You can help me get the word out.”

“Yeah.”

At the station, Diego was arrested for disorderly conduct, and brought before a judge, who, after listening to Diego, denied him bail on the grounds that he was a danger to himself and others. A court reporter who recognized the Nobel Prize winner managed to interview Diego before the sheriff hauled him off to jail, and wrote an article for the Chicago Tribune, which an editor cut by 4,900 words. The paper published it on page 29, beneath the local high school news.

Diego languished in his cell waiting for Ying to find him, but she never saw the news about his arrest.

Twenty-nine days later, the world was still here.

He tallied the scratches he’d made on the cell wall to mark the days, then counted them ten more times. The end was yesterday. Should have been yesterday. Why am I still here? I am insane.

Three days later, the guard slipped a copy of The Chicago Tribune through the cell’s slot along with Diego’s lunch of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, burnt peas, Jell-O, and an apple juice box. Diego hadn’t had anything to read for over a month, and he devoured the newspaper’s words as energetically as he ate his lunch.

But he read so quickly that he missed the three-sentence article on page forty-nine sandwiched in between a story about the Prime Minister of Canada’s infidelity and one about the newest Pokémon creatures:

On Tuesday, the James Webb telescope, which orbits the sun at a distance of one million miles, detected a strange object outside Neptune’s orbit. The enormous, planet-sized disc, shaped like a shield, appears to be made of a material more dense than anything yet discovered. Scientists speculate that it is of alien origin, though its purpose is unknown.

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Håkon Kristiansen gently closed the optometrist’s door so as not to disturb Jakob, who was scrutinizing a sunglasses lens under his binocular microscope. My sunglasses lens, Håkon thought. Håkon walked quietly to Jakob’s desk, and when he was about two meters away, Jakob looked up and said, “Ah, Håkon, I knew you’d be here today, so I was preparing new lenses for you. Every day, new lenses. You know you really should—”

Håkon raised his hand like a traffic cop telling a driver to stop and said, “I’m grateful for your help, but these sunglasses aren’t dark enough. The light still shines through, and that bothers me.” He pulled off his Wayfarer-frame sunglasses and angled them up to the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. “Yes, even here I can see the light shine through.” Håkon blinked heavily, squinted, swiveled toward Jakob, and pointed to the ceiling bulb. “You know your light is dimmer today. You need to get that fixed before it goes out, or you won’t be able to see well enough to work on my glasses.”

Håkon rubbed his hands together briskly and cinched the top of his button-down shirt closed with his fingers. The fog from his breath solidified into ice crystals, clanging as they fell to the floor.

Shelves from the floor to the ceiling lined the steel walls of this windowless rectangular room. On each shelf sat large, sealed metal containers labeled Sunglasses AB002a, Sunglasses EY832b, Sunglasses BF901c, and so on. Just like the organizational system at the Vault, which struck Håkon as odd because as best he could remember, Jakob had never been there. When Håkon traced one with his fingers, the metal felt industrial and thick.

Håkon shivered. The air was exceptionally chilly for an eyeglasses shop. He wondered if Jakob’s heat was broken or if he liked it cold.

The bulb crackled and swayed. The acrid scent of ozone filled the room. A small tremor shook the floor and Håkon.

He steadied himself against a shelf.

Jakob Pedersen rose from his chair and walked around to the other side of his work desk. He opened his arms and gave Håkon an enormous and powerful hug, then released him and stepped back. He chided, “You’re always complaining, my friend.” He plucked off Håkon’s glasses. “These are eighty percent blocking, right?

“Yes, you made the lenses for me yesterday. Before that, they were seventy percent. That wasn’t enough; eighty isn’t enough, either.”

Jakob sighed. “At this rate, they’ll block one hundred percent of the light, and you won’t be able to see a thing.”

“Are you going to help me or not?” Håkon waved his arm in a circle. “As far as I can tell, I’m your only customer, so what else are you going to do?”

Jakob motioned to the chair opposite his desk, walked back to his seat, and asked, “How’s work?”

Håkon shrugged. “How is work ever? I monitor seeds. The doomsday seed vault, a depository of one point three million seed samples, buried underground in the Arctic in Svalbard, a place where nobody visits and only one person works—that’s me. All I do is check temperature and humidity levels and turn one or two knobs as needed.”

“You’re too modest, Håkon. You are the most important person in the world.”

Håkon shook his head. “Right now, you’re the most important person in the world to me.”

“Well then, give me another minute, and your ninety percent will be finished.”

“Okay.” Håkon paced around the small shop as Jakob ground and polished his new lenses. He tried to will Jakob to work faster because the shop’s lightbulb was growing dimmer and time was running out.

It’s not the bulb, Håkon thought, because he knew a few things about technology. It’s the voltage that’s dropping. The voltage is dropping!

“Sorry, Jakob. I’m very sorry. I have to ask a favor. Can you make the lenses one hundred percent light-blocking?”

“Why? It’s December; it’s dark all day and night. If I make the lenses opaque, you won’t be able to see a thing.”

“I’ll see enough.”

“You won’t.”

“Just make them, please.”

“Fortunately, fully black lenses are easy to make, so this will only take ten minutes.”

“Thank you.” Håkon looked up at the bulb, which had grown even weaker. An unfelt breeze swayed the lightbulb on its frayed cord.

“They’re done,” Jakob said. “Your one hundred percent light-blocking lenses.” He held the glasses out for Håkon, but as Håkon was about to take them, he said, “Remember, you’ll be blind with these lenses. No light will pass through. Are you sure that’s what you want? It’s more than you need to protect your eyes, more than anyone needs, and as I said, it’s dark both day and night now.”

Håkon snatched the glasses out of Jakob’s hand and put them on his face. He fished in his pocket, pulled out a thousand kroner note, and held it in Jakob’s direction. When, after a few moments, the money was still in his hand, Håkon asked, “Jakob? Are you there? Take my money. I want to pay you for these.”

Silence.

“Jakob, where did you go?”

Blind, Håkon held out his hands and walked forward until he contacted the wall. He patted against the metal, tracing the surface all around, grateful that he hadn’t bumped into anything in his blindness. He winced as the cold, metal wall stung his fingers. He continued around ten or fifteen more times, calling for his friend every few seconds, until he reached a fist-sized knob.

For a moment, he hesitated, puzzled by the object, and confused about why it was at the optometrist’s.

The emergency call! I need to summon help, help for me, but more importantly, for the Vault.

With all his might, he slammed his fist against the call button. It didn’t depress. His entire body ached.

He gathered as much energy as he could, and tried again. The button held firmly. No, the seeds!

He took a deep breath and exhaled as he smashed the button once more.

The door creaked open.

A cold gust stunned him, and sleet pelted his cheeks and forehead. He trembled. The door creaked again, this time louder.

A woman’s voice called his name. “Kristiansen. Are you Håkon Kristiansen?” Her timbre was tentative, young, soft.

“I am. Who are you?”

“I’m Sissel Gangestad from The Ministry of Agriculture and Food.”

Håkon heard her stomp several times, as if she were kicking off snow from her boots.

“Are you okay?”

“I can’t see you or see anything. My head hurts, too.”

“You must have been looking at the blast—that’s why you can’t see. They tried to destroy the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The nuclear detonation was nearby, and if you were outside and looking toward it, you would have been rendered blind.”

“Nuclear detonation? Blinded? Who tried to destroy the Vault? Why would somebody do that?” Håkon rubbed the back of his head. It felt sticky. Blood.

The afterimage of a white flash burned behind his retinas.

I fell. Håkon’s legs wobbled as his memory swirled and coalesced, like a million tiny rocks coming together to form a planet. I hit my head when the bomb went off, and the force pushed me back against the building’s steel wall. The light—it was brighter than anything I’d ever imagined, like being on the sun’s surface. I crawled back inside and pressed the emergency button.

He winced as he touched his elbows. The skin was raw there, too.

“We don’t know. The Russians? The Americans? It could be either. It’s insanity, chaos, death out there. But the most important thing is that the Vault is intact.”

“What’s happened?”

“Nuclear war. Civilization is over, at least in the northern hemisphere. We don’t know anything about the countries south of the equator because communications have failed worldwide. Hundreds of millions perished, and millions more will die soon. We’re going to use these seeds to restart agriculture and feed people as best we can.”

“Oh.”

“We have a lot of work. Can you help me move the seeds to my truck? I realize you’re blind, but—”

“I know the Vault with my eyes closed. I will help. But where are the others?”

“There are no others. I’m a staff assistant at the Ministry. I just started last week and was on my way to Svalbard when the war began. Oslo’s been vaporized, too, so I’m all that’s left of the government. Why Norway? What did we ever do to anyone?”

Håkon plunged his hands into his pockets. His fingers bumped against something plastic—sunglasses. He’d never carried sunglasses before, but he knew what they were, even if he didn’t know how they arrived in his pocket. He put them on because if his vision somehow returned, he didn’t want to see anything.

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“Do you think this is wise?” Aden asked as he gently disentangled her hand from between his legs.

Evie caressed his soft blond hair, then stroked his cheek with her fingertips. She rested her hand on his taut, muscular chest, enjoying his rippling muscles as he breathed.

So powerful, sexy.

She sighed, and with her eyes wide with anticipation and lust, leaned forward and kissed Aden hard, a long, passionate kiss that seemed to last from sunrise to sunset.

He did not resist. He’d wanted to kiss Evie every day for the past two years they’d been in the Explorer program. They had had one hot, steamy, sexual night the day before entering the program—“Let’s get it out of our systems,” Evie had suggested—but once he tasted her with his lips and tongue he thought about her from the moment he woke until he went to sleep, and then in his dreams, too. But the Explorer program had a strict “No dating, no touching, no sex with any other Explorer” rule.

But now?

Aden’s hands traced her body. Her arms first, then her hand, where he intertwined his fingers with hers for a minute, then along the outside of her legs, up her inner thigh, her stomach, and along the underside of her breasts.

They continued to kiss as he teased her nipples through her uniform.

Evie moaned and so did Aden.

He sounds delicious.

She opened her mouth and their tongues danced together.

“I want you,” Evie said.

“Yes, but are you—?”

“I might be fertile. I’ve lost track of my cycle. We’ve been here for five weeks and I have a feeling it’s going to be forever. Something happened to the transporter or maybe our world is gone. Either way, it’s just the two of us on this alien planet. We’re it, the only life here, and I don’t want to be celibate for the rest of my life. Or even the rest of today.”

“We’re the only sentient life,” Aden noted. They’d seen a variety of furry, feathered, and scale-covered alien creatures that crawled, flew, hopped, walked, and slithered.

The transporter sent Explorers across the universe, no ship needed. But along with no ship came no almost supplies or equipment because inorganic material required vastly more energy to teleport than organic substances. They wore clothes woven from plants. The only inorganic items they carried were their weapons.

They lay on a carpet of velvety green foliage, similar to yeezin on their homeworld. Evie giggled when the short stalks tickled her legs. With an Explorer’s curious eye, she watched small yellow, green, and blue winged creatures circle them. At first, she thought the things with thin, fragile-looking wings might be aggressive or venomous—their fragility a clever evolutionary disguise—but these lifeforms ignored them.

They are beautiful, Evie thought, just like the flowers that dotted the space around them. Their chirps are beautiful, too.

Other, larger creatures flew by from time to time, singing as they traversed the meadow.

The diversity of flying things enthralled her.

Twenty meters away, in the direction of the setting sun, the ground dipped sharply, spilling a stream into a waterfall. In the far distance, a green-topped hill bathed in the red hues of the late afternoon sun.

A temperate daytime temperature helped keep them comfortable, but over the days weeks, Evie noted that nights were growing cooler, an ominous foreboding. They’d have to find or build shelter soon. Paradise wouldn’t last forever.

But it’s not a bad place to be stranded for the rest of our lives. We could do a lot worse; I could have partnered me with Xavier or some other obnoxious Explorer. I’m lucky to have been sent here with the most handsome male Explorer.

“If the transporter broke, they would have retrieved us with another. I think something catastrophic happened to Jovitin. Hax finally did it,” Aden said. The Hax were a warrior people on the east continent led by a woman who wanted to rule the planet and annihilate anyone she couldn’t subjugate.

Think only good thoughts, Evie commanded her mind. Easy to do with Aden.

She rubbed her breasts against him.

Aden responded by kissing her ear and her neck.

Evie moaned louder.

“And if you get pregnant? This was supposed to be a one-hour exploratory mission, not colonization of another planet. What are we going to do if you—if we—have a baby?”

Explorers’ intensive two-year training gave them a multitude of skills, including navigation and survival on alien worlds, but delivering a baby and raising that child were not among them. And at twenty years old, raising a child wasn’t something Aden had ever imagined.

One of the native animals, a long, legless, cylindrical-shaped creature with two protruding fangs, slithered by—that one concerned Aden, and as he was just about to tell Evie to look out, the creature hissed at her, as if it were speaking. He reached for his energy gun, but before he could remove the weapon from its holster, Evie turned toward it.

She smiled at the alien creature.

The creature seemed to smile back and then slithered up and onto the tree branch above them.

Evie’s sudden sultry smile ignited Aden’s desire even more. His heart thrummed, and goosebumps covered his arms.

She popped open the top two buttons of her uniform.

Aden swallowed. His heart raced. And he grew harder.

“I’m so horny and I’m also hungry.” Evie reached up and plucked a round, red fruit from a branch, bit into it—a crisp snapping sound filled the air around them—and said, “Yum. It’s tasty, sweet, and tart at the same time. You must be hungry, too. Take a bite and then let’s fuck.”

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Gloria Gelrod smiled broadly as she cradled the bouquet of chrysanthemums, gladiolus, carnations, and tulips, a riot of beauty and wondrous aromas the mysterious woman left for her. She caressed the bouquet, wrapped in delicate, frosted cellophane paper, lowered her face to it, and drew in a slow sniff.

“Thank you, you’re too kind,” Gloria said into the void, wondering if the woman was still nearby and could hear her. In all the years the stranger had been bringing flowers, Gloria had never seen the woman, but she didn’t mind.

Everyone’s different. Everyone’s got their own way of doing things. She remembered how her first grade teacher told her how important it was to understand that.

It was the stranger’s thoughtfulness that mattered to Gloria. She thought that if they ever met, that stranger could be her best friend.

After enjoying the flowers for a few moments, Gloria tucked the bouquet in a corner—she’d put them in a vase later if she remembered (which she never did—and skipped to Betty’s place, hoping to get there before the stranger arrived.

Whoever gave Gloria flowers also gave them to her sister, Betty, who dwelled next door, and to their other sister, Doloris, the next neighbor over, always in the same order. Gloria first, then Betty, then Doloris.

Gloria knocked once on Betty’s thick, gnarled mahogany door. That was their system whenever they visited each other. Gloria, the oldest sister, knocked once. Betty, the middle sister, knocked twice to announce herself, and Doloris, three years younger than Gloria, always rapped a sister’s door three times when she wanted to say hello.

Gloria frowned when Betty emerged, cradling a bouquet just like Gloria’s. “Darn, I was hoping—”

“You always try, but you never get here fast enough.”

“I’m trying.”

“Do you think we can be at Doloris’ place before she gets her bouquet?”

“Let’s!” Gloria shrieked. She brushed the hardened earth off her paisley-pattern blue dress, blew more cold soil from her brown Oxford lace-ups, quickly slipped them on and tied them, then took her sister’s hand in hers and bounced toward Doloris’ home. Gloria nodded at Betty, a signal that Betty should have the honor of knocking.

Betty knocked against the mahogany twice.

Doloris appeared empty-handed.

Gloria and Betty locked eyes and grinned. “Yay! We won!”

A sudden frigid gust spun nearby dirt into a small tornado.

A second later, flowers materialized in Doloris’ arms, their slender weight bringing a broad smile to her face. “I got the flowers!”

“But we made it here before they did. We win!”

“Does it matter? We all have our flowers.” She put her nose to the bouquet and inhaled a long breath. She cradled the blossoms and smelled the petals again. “We have our flowers this month, just like every month. You and your silly game. I just like the flowers.”

Gloria nodded. “They’re lovely. The stranger is very considerate.”

“Yes,” Betty said. “She’s the best.”

“Is it time to go home? I’m tired,” Gloria said. She yawned, which caused Betty and Doloris to yawn, too. “I’ll go back to sleep. See you next month, sisses.”

Ellie Gelrod cinched her parka tight to stop the cold, thin February air from slipping through her collar. A raw, shrill wind whistled through the thousands of graveyard headstones, relocating leaves, small stones, and the flowers she had brought, which vanished in between binks. She shivered and then kissed the cold, gray headstone.

Thick clouds shrouded the sun, casting an ashen penumbra over the cemetery.

Even after only twenty-two years, the wind and rain had begun to erode the stone. She ran her fingers along the inscription, “Doloris Gelrod, born May 3, 1922, died January 10, 1937, in a house fire. Daughter of Alfred and Ruth, loving sister to Gloria, Betty, and Ellie.”

Ellie took a last look at her three sisters’ graves and said, “See you next month, sisters. I love you.”

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Udolf leaned into a kiss, but Aldreda turned her head before his lips could touch hers. “It’s okay. We’re safe here. The Duke is at King Harold’s castle in Herefordshire, and won’t be back for another three days.”

Udolf was a knight in service to Duke Bramwell, Aldreda’s husband. He emitted a powerful and severe aura when he wore his iron chain mail armor and conical iron helmet, and radiated a powerful and sensual aura when in Aldreda’s company. She treasured that about him, as well as many other things.

“My husband has ears everywhere. I worry, Udolf.” She looked out the tower window, surveying the castle grounds and the other turrets. “Some days, I fear my husband already knows about us and is biding his time before he has us beheaded.”

“Let’s make the most of the time we have.” Udolf patted the bed and gave Aldreda a lascivious wink.

She shook her head. “I can’t. I’m too nervous.” She shivered and cinched her fox fur cape closed.

Udolf sighed and then smiled. “There’s a way to rid us of your husband, my love.”

Aldreda raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“Two Mondays ago, I met a sorcerer who lives in the deep forest where the trees howl and giant bats shroud the moon. Only a man with extraordinary ability could inhabit such an unearthly place. He gave me this book.” From his cloth bag, Udolf retrieved a stack of parchment sewn together with leather thread and covered with wooden boards engraved with mythical beasts. The book shimmered in the starlight that passed through the narrow rayere. “He called this a dictionary, a compendium of all known words in England.”

“I’ve never heard of such a book.” Aldreda narrowed her eyes. “What do we do with it?”

“We cast a curse on Duke Bramwell.”

“How?”

“Snip one of Bramwell’s hairs, insert it behind the dictionary’s cover, and place the dictionary under his mattress while he sleeps.”

“He’s a light sleeper.”

“Get him drunk.”

“And then what? What does the spell do?”

“Every day we carve out one word from the dictionary with a knife. Your husband will lose the ability to speak that word, rendering him mute in no time.”

“Why can’t we poison him? It’s quicker, and we can be together sooner.”

“Poisoning leads to suspects, which puts us at risk. Your husband has powerful friends, especially King Harold. But I promise you, my love, this dark magic will be swift because I will select the words. I will first obliterate words the Duke needs most, like kill, execute, command, want, order, food, eat, water, prison, come, help, I, sword, and Duchess. What Duke can survive without being able to say, ‘I?” Even before he’s unable to communicate, Bramwell will go mad as his mind searches for words it can never find. He will sound like an idiot, if he can speak at all, and will lose his royal station.” Udolf chuckled. “He won’t even be able to ask for his favorite food, salted venison with mustard. In three months, by New Year’s Day, Bramwell will be as useful as a witch who’s lost her powers.”

“Promise?”

“With certainty, my sweet.”

Aldreda removed her cape and yellow silk dress, letting them slide onto the floor, and lay naked on the bed.

Aldreda rested her head on Udolf’s chest as early morning sunbeams slowly traversed their bedroom. “I can’t wait until Bramwell’s gone. We’ll make love all night every night.”

Udolf intertwined his fingers with hers, brought their joined hands to his lips, and kissed her. “Soon Bramwell will be as speechless as a newborn.”

Aldreda released Udolf’s hand, gasped, and bolted up. “What if Bramwell creates new words?”

Udolf shook his head. “Language is immutable, and words cannot be invented. Like the stars in the heavens, there will never be more.”

“God grant that it is so.” Aldreda snuggled against Udolf. “By New Year’s, like you promised?”

“Yes.”

“What is today’s date, my love?”

“October 13, 1066.”

On October 14, 1066, the Normans invaded England, defeating and killing King Harold II at the Battle of Hastings. This was not a good time for the English people, but it was an amazing time for the English language.

Nearly 10,000 French and Latin words flooded the English language, while vast numbers of Old English words vanished, sparking Old English’s transformation into Middle English.

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Jack Fitzgerald entered elevator number three on the one-hundred-fourteenth floor of his Sixty Second Street and Madison Avenue apartment building—named the Galileo Tower. He had hoped for elevator number one, two, four, five, or six—anything but three—but chance didn’t favor him this morning.

He was thirty-six, but with soft, blonde hair, light blue eyes, and a smooth, round face, he appeared ten years younger.

Working as a personal trainer no doubt sustained his youthful appearance. He sometimes wondered if he’d age slowly, or when he turned sixty, suddenly transform into a withered prune.

He liked elevators, but he didn’t like elevator number three, in which he now descended. It rattled. It sometimes jerked, as if something was wrong with the cable. Sometimes, the elevator rasped as if metal was grinding against metal.

In the winter, elevator three was the chilliest of the building’s six elevators, and in the summer, it could be cool or hot; you never knew before you stepped inside.

Each annual inspection confirmed that the lift was safe, but Jack wondered how thorough those inspections were.

Today, he joined a woman already inside, somebody he’d never seen before, and guessed she was a new tenant on one of the eight floors above his. She had blonde hair like his and sported tattered jeans, leather ankle boots with pointed tips, a thick checkered flannel shirt, and a gold-and-orange knotted cord necklace. Her ears were unpierced. He thought she was pretty.

After the doors shut, he watched her place her hand on his shoulder, and then, it appeared as if her fingers passed through his flesh and blood vessels into his bone. His shoulder burned, and his arm felt like it was ablaze, and in a fraction of a second, his chest became a furnace. Nausea filled him, and sweat coated his arms and neck.

He crumpled to the hard floor. After some moments, he opened his eyes and peered up.

The woman hovered next to the elevator buttons. They were on the one hundred first floor.

Jack tasted blood in his mouth.

His heart felt like somebody had hit it with a rock. A tsunami of pain radiated from his chest outward.

What’s happening?

As if the woman could read his mind, she replied, “You died. Or you were supposed to. Hmm. First time that’s happened.” Her accent was midwestern. She pouted.

Jack slowly rose from the floor.

“I’ll have to try again.”

“Try what again?”

“Kill you, of course. I’m Death, and I’m here for you, Jack Fitzgerald.”

Jack slinked as far away from the woman as the small elevator would allow. He couldn’t reconcile her beauty with her mission. But he couldn’t deny that a heart attack nearly took his life.

The woman advanced toward Jack, closing the space between them. He might’ve been able to shuffle to the left and right for a few seconds, but he wouldn’t be able to evade her any longer than that, and if touching was part of Death’s process, then his remaining time was short.

What will it be next? A second, more powerful heart attack? A stroke?

“Neither. There are a thousand ways a human being can die, and I like to be creative.”

“It’s not my time—I’m only thirty-six. I’m a good man. A father, a loving husband.”

Death raised an eyebrow. “I see.” She glanced at the display. “We’re on the ninety-fifth floor. That gives you a little under a minute to continue your elevator pitch about why you should live. That’s what you’re doing, trying to sell Death, isn’t it? One caveat. If you succeed in convincing me, that’s wonderful for you, and you will continue to exist for another fifty years. But if your elevator pitch falls flat, your death will be more painful than anything you’ve ever experienced or imagined, like being burned alive or eaten from the inside out by fire ants.”

Jack’s eyes went wide. His face turned pale. He took a long breath and launched his pitch, “My name is Jack Fitzgerald, and I was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on May third. My wife’s name is Christine, and my five-month-old son is Devon. I want to be alive to see him take his first step…”

As the elevator approached the twenty-fourth floor, Jack said, “I’m done. I hope my pitch was good enough to save my life.” He clasped his hands tightly together and shivered.

Death pursed her lips, shook her head to flick her hair off her eyes, and then shook her head again to offer her response. “No, it wasn’t.”

Jack’s knees wobbled. He clutched the elevator’s grab bar.

I should never have trusted her, never have trusted Death. What kind of idiot would? Me, I’m that idiot.

He dug a fingernail into his hand. “You were always going to take my life. The elevator pitch was just a way of toying with me, wasn’t it? You wanted to have a little fun before you killed me.”

“I don’t kill anyone, Jack. I’m Death. I collect their lives because all lives are eventually mine.” She rubbed her hands together and took a step toward him. “Now, as I promised, your death will be painful. Unless—”

“Another game?”

“Unless you take your own life. If you do that, your last seconds will be relatively painless.” She removed a pearl-handled, fixed-blade dagger from the small of her back and extended it to Jack.

“Don’t even think about it. I am eternal. Stabbing me won’t do anything.”

“Can I test that proposition?”

“Only if you want agony.”

Jack sighed. “I’ll cut my wrists. I hear that’s not so painful.”

“You’re correct, but death from wrist cutting takes too long, and you’ll still be alive when we reach the first floor.” She narrowed her eyes and slid her finger across her neck, “Do it hard and do it fast.” She opened her mouth wide, and her face turned skeletal, rotten, broken, with moldy teeth on full display. She suddenly smelled of deep, rank earth, the kind on which a coffin would rest. A second later, her beauty returned.

Jack glanced at the floor indicator. Seventh floor.

Lucky seven.

He raised the blade to his neck, sliced through the skin and muscle to the carotid artery. And then he died.

The elevator chime rang when it reached the first floor. Jack stood.

How can I stand if I’m dead?

“Thank you, Jack,” the woman said. She leaned forward and kissed Jack’s cheek, but he felt nothing.

“For what? And what happened? Why am I not dead?”

“You are dead, Jack, just not the way you thought you would be. You killed yourself, don’t you remember?”

Jack frowned and touched his ear, which tumbled to the elevator floor with a muffled splat.

Why doesn’t it hurt? Jack thought.

“Pick it up and put it back.” She pointed to the ear that flopped around the ground like a fish on land searching for the ocean. “There’s a lot you’ll need to learn about your new self, but you have forever to learn that. I wish I could stay and explain it all to you, tell you everything that’s happened over the past one-hundred-forty-one years, but I’ve been here too long to spend even another minute in this box. Suffice it to say, you killing yourself freed me. I’m not Death. I’m a ghost, or rather was one. You see, I died in the elevator in the building that once occupied this space in eighteen-eighty-five during a horrible fire—an excruciating death—and I’ve haunted it ever since. They tore the building down three times, and each time, I’ve remained. Now you are the spirit. Bye, Jack.”

She pressed the door open button and exited the elevator into the sun-lit apartment lobby.

The elevator door closed. Jack pressed the open button, but nothing happened.

He grabbed onto the bar that ran along the elevator’s interior and jolted it with all his might, vibrating the elevator ever so slightly. He looked at the mirrored button frame, half expecting to see his ghostly reflection, but he saw nothing.

He knew how to get out, but what he didn’t yet know was with whom.

Elevator number three dinged. Somebody wanted a ride.

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If you enjoyed this story, I think you’ll also like How to Slay a Monster.

Captain Pia Adams sliced her machete through the thick Amazon jungle as if endowed with superhuman strength. The vines that attempted to strangle her met a swift and sure fate. Her blade’s whoosh drowned out the calls and cries of birds and wild cats.

Sweat dripped from Pia’s face, a molasses of water and salt that flowed over her neck, arms, exposed belly, and legs, until it coated her entire body. Stiletto thorns shredded her United States Marine Corps uniform as she plowed through the thick forest, but she did not slow, not even when a tarantula landed on her shoulder.

Determination and training fueled her, a nearly unlimited source of energy—or so she hoped.

Broken sunlight filtered through the jungle canopy, spotlighting the scars on Captain Adams’ arms and legs. “You should have seen the other guys,” she said whenever anyone asked about the wounds.

She led the remaining rag-tag line of two survivors, James Dorango from Madison, Wisconsin and Ling Guan from San Francisco, California, through the jungle. They’d been captured and held hostage by the notorious Peligro gang while on business trips to La Paz, Bolivia.

The ruthless jungles had felled two others she had rescued the previous day: A seven-foot-long mussurana snake took the life of a thirty-one-year-old engineer from Boston, and a woman fell off a sixty-foot cliff while looking for a place to relieve herself.

“How much father?” James panted. “I need to rest.” He unscrewed his water bottle’s lid, drank all that remained, and turned the bottle upside down. He locked eyes with Captain Adams and said, “It’s empty.”

Before Pia could answer, a viper coiled in the Kapok tree above her, venom beading on its extended fangs.

From the third row of Apex Cinema, Marco Yale, a forty-year-old man with thick brown hair, attractive face, and muscular build, shouted, “Look out! Snake above!”

Marco’s wife, Abby, grabbed his arm.

The man seated to his left hissed, “Shh,” and the woman seated in front of Marco spun around and glared at him.

Marco slapped his hand over his mouth. His face turned beet red. “Sorry,” he mouthed.

Pia looked up, sliced off the snake’s head, and then pivoted so she stared directly at Marco. “Thank you, sir,” she said before continuing her trek through the jungle.

“Did you see that?” Marco whispered to Abby. “Captain Adams talked directly to me!”

“Shh!” came a voice from behind.

“Quiet!” pleaded nearby moviegoers.

Abby pinched Marco’s lips together and hissed into his ear. “No talking.”

A panther crouched behind a sorva tree’s thick trunk twenty meters ahead, its yellow eyes tracking its prey, leg muscles tightening, ears back. Oblivious to the looming danger, Pia Adams led her party forward.

When the gooey mud sucked off Ling’s sneaker with a loud slurp like the forest floor was consuming a meal—everything in the rainforest was food—Pia knelt and removed Ling’s other sneaker. “You’ll travel faster when balanced. No shoes are better than one shoe,” she said. “We have to hurry. When night comes to the Amazon, it comes swiftly, and as dangerous as this place is in the daytime, at night it’s a zone of nightmares.”

They were now only a few meters away from the panther, which bared its hungry incisors.

“There’s a panther! Run!” Marco screamed. “It’s behind the tree to your left.” Marco stood and pointed at the movie theater screen.

Pia looked left and ran to the tree, colliding with it so forcefully that she caused its red and yellow baseball-sized fruit to rain down all around the tree and onto the cat, which whimpered as it retreated deep into the rainforest.

Thunder erupted from where Pia struck the tree.

“Thank you again, but I don’t run away from danger. I defeat it,” she said, her tone cool, calm, and even.

An usher materialized beside Marco, looming tall over him like a vampire sizing up its victim. “Sir, we’ve had complaints about you.” Light from the screen reflected poorly from his bald head. He adjusted his eye patch.

Abby glared at Marco and rolled her eyes.

Marco scratched his arms.

The usher aimed his flashlight directly in Marco’s eyes, blinding him.

As he began to say, “Sorry,” the usher pressed his finger against Marco’s lips and whispered, “Utter a single word more and I’ll eject you from the theater.” The usher pronounced it slowly: eee-jekt. “Got it? And by a single word, I mean starting now. Nod if you understand.”

Marco nodded.

In angry silence, Abby turned back to the screen.

Marco squirmed uncomfortably in his seat. He itched wickedly from his toes to his hips. He wanted to tell Abby about it, but dug his fingernails into his leg instead, hoping the pain would overwhelm the itching. He wanted to see how the movie ended and especially didn’t want to be ejected from the theater because Abby would rake him endlessly when they got home—and he would deserve that.

He pressed his nails into his flesh harder and thought, Quiet, Marco, quiet.

He wriggled in his seat, scraping his back and legs, hoping to ease the itching.

But the itching worsened—and now it hurts!

Of course, it hurt. The thorned liana vines that encircled his legs pierced his flesh in a hundred places, digging deeper with each muscle twitch.

Spiders crawled along the vines, up his torso, and onto his neck, biting and—it burned now—injecting him with venom.

He tried to stand, but the vines gripped him firmly. Two toucans swooped close, but when they saw the dangerous spiders, the birds quickly flew away, a swoosh, and they vanished into the safety of clouds.

“Eject me!” Marco tried to scream to the usher, but only a muffled sound passed through his lips because the vines wrapped around his mouth. “I’ll be quiet from now on. Just get me out of here.”

“Promises are easy to make, hard to keep,” the man with a shaved head and black eye patch seated to his left said. “You’ll keep your promise to be quiet, that’s for sure.”

Their two seats sat in the middle of the dense jungle, rooted stiffly in the ground like shihuahuaco trees. Other than these two seats—one for Marco, one for that man—vegetation covered every other spot because plants dominated this world.

Marco surmised the seats belonged to an old aircraft that had crashed in the Amazon decades ago.

Marco widened his dark brown eyes to better take in the bald man’s features. He noted a long scar on the man’s left cheek and a partially cut earlobe.

I haven’t seen him before. Where did he come from? Marco’s brain cells sparked in overdrive, recounting past missions, enemies, and friends turned into enemies. He’s an assassin sent by the prime minister. I’ll deal with him, but first, these vines.

But the harder Marco struggled against the vines, the tighter they constricted, and the more spiders found him.

One bite, then another.

Marco’s heart slowed, the clock winding down.

The spiders, their poison.

A hissing sounded at his feet. A viper slithered over his shoes.

“Today’s not your day,” the man cheerfully said. “Fortunately for you, permanent night comes soon, and your agony will end.” He started to rise from his seat.

The vine circled Marco’s mouth and nose, blocking his air. He had only seconds of consciousness remaining.

Pia shouted, “Marco! The pilot’s escape knife is under the armrest. You can reach it.”

Marco nodded.

Four dozen heads—everyone in the military base’s one-hundred-seat theater—turned and glared at Pia, who slapped her hand over her mouth, then whispered, “Sorry.”

The projectionist, a corporal, grimaced.

A general seated two rows in front clenched his fists.

A major gave Pia the middle finger. “Marco needs to know. I did the right thing,” she hissed to the major before turning to the screen, and nodding.

“It’s an effing movie. The actors can’t hear you, so shut up, Captain, or tomorrow you’ll be Corporal Adams,” the major said.

Marco willed his fingers to the knife; his bones and muscle fibers stretched beyond the limit of ordinary humans. He wrapped his hand around the handle, sliced the vine, stabbed the bald man in the heart, swatted away the spiders, stepped over the viper, and extended his arms to the sky.

An enormous macaw swooped from the giant angelim vermelho tree. Its resounding, loud screech shattered bark off the tree.

Marco inhaled a deep breath, jumped into the air and grabbed its talons, and the bird lifted him to safety.

Sergeant James Dorango reached into Pia’s popcorn tub and grabbed a fistful.

Lieutenant Ling Guan, seated on Pia’s other side, took a big helping.

Pia growled, but that didn’t stop them from enjoying her popcorn.

That’s why I got a supersize order, she thought. She clenched her jaw at the loud stereophonic crunching emanating from her two friends’ mouths.

She cupped her ears because she wanted to hear Marco Yale’s last line, which was always the best one in his adventure movies, because it always came after a daring escape from Doom’s clutches.

The handsome Marco Yale did not disappoint. “To the heavens and to the next mission,” he said, as he and the macaw disappeared into the infinite sky.

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If you enjoyed this story, I think you’ll also like Hopscotching.