On the plane, Franklin spoke to his assistant, Joey, while he was tuning his guitar.

“If you changed this and that you could stabilize the transfer and geo-sync your position.”

“Frank, what happens when you turn it on.”

“The initial event.”

“But what if it’s already been turned on?”

Franklin turned around to answer him and saw not one but five iterations of Joey, with a guitar, a small key board, a bass, bongos, and a tambourine. A smile spread across his face.

“Well I guess we have a one man band then.”

He thought he had won. He was a sad little garage inventor who worked for the us postal service. And I had tracked him to the time station somewhere in Antarctica. The station was filled with prototypical thinking machines, impossible motion generators, murder siphons, stuff deemed too dangerous for population areas. There were archetypes running through these designs, a sort of robotic shorthand from movies and popular culture, making them seem familiar. No less dangerous though. I found him in he main storage room with several decommissioned pieces of time equipment. He was fixing a differential box, the piece of equipment that makes sure you are geo-synced when you shift. All of this was extremely illegal. His Irish setter ran up to me with her tail wagging.

“Franklin. Stop. It’s over.” My credentials were in plain site. My fire arm covering him in case he attempted to resist.

He stopped and put down his wrench looking over his shoulder at me. He smiled warmly.

“Well Hello Jeremy-”

“It’s Officer Wayland.”

“-I mean Officer Wayland. Comeer Poppy! I think you can put away that heater.” Franklin was petting his dog.

“Franklin, you know I can’t do that. Please stand and come with me or I will be forced to use enhanced tactics.”

“Actually, you have to, if the subject shows no aggression, deadly force is not sanctioned. You have to take me in for processing and then they will have to let me go. That’s the procedure. I know. I wrote it.”

At this point the dog left the room.

“Hey, Where’s my dog going.”

“Please come with me now.”

“Seriously,” Franklin became noticeably agitated and he noticed that he could see his own breathe. The temperature was rapidly decreasing.
His eyes widened, “Did you leave the door open?”
“WHERE’S MY DOG?!?!!”

We got the vtol and searched the flats for the dog, poppy. Finally found her with the pads of her feet frozen to the ground, howling pathetically. He managed to free the dog but her feet were bleeding. Franklin was crying and apologizing. I took the dog from him.

“I’ll surrender, shit I’ll stay out here and freeze to death. Just make sure my dog is ok.”

She did not want to leave him, they both cried pathetically.

“At least it will be over.” I was trying to be comforting. This did not work. I was not trained to be comforting.

I sedated the dog and took off. Franklin Gano receded in my vision and then. Disappeared entirely. I looked down and the dog was gone too.

Dreams are a poor medium for transmitting print files. You would be much better off just using email or even better FTP. Dream transmitted files are always of poor resolution, not to mention full of strange speeling errors, stange characters, photos of naked final exams and, oh yeah, portals for the elder goods to reintroduce themselves to the earth and devour mankind.

Cocktails using fairy ice cubes are delicious. To make fairy ice cubes you take a standard ice cube tray and fill it with water and  place a fairy ( dried or fresh, whichever you can get) in each cube. The flavor is somewhere like lavender and elder flower and this is the real reason why you dont see faires any more.

The house your grandparents had is just out side of a town that is a retirement community/high security prison for ex military and intelligence community. It is also alive, sentient, bored, telepathic, and a possessed of a strange sense of humor. Like the plague of cuddly rats. I mean awesome, but gross. You can still see mister schmidt walking his cuddly rat snorkles down main street. He used to be an interrogator of the highest order. H e was magic with a pair of pliars and a blow torch. Now he runs the  hardware store “Schmidt & Son”. He doesnt have a son, never married. He actually gay. The son he’s refereing to is Snorkles. Damn he loves that rat.

The town, which has no name although in private it likes to refer to itself as wildemere, is a prototypical “Walking Prison”. Once listed as a citizen/incarcerated it is impossible to leave but in a very subtle way. Say if you need to go one town over for milk that will be allowed, but if you try to run away it knows and manipulates the topography and your perception and pull the old “go down main street one way and come in the other” trick. Or you just “go for walk” where you suddenly have the urge to go for a walk and do so until you are too tired to try an run away.

But hey, there are awesome food trucks. Like the burrito and ice cream  ( yes you heard right) truck run by the Egyptian girls. They are crazy and beautiful an make top notch vegan coconut cookies. They might be vampires. I am not sure their names, I just refer to them by the side of the truck they’re on. the one on the right claims to have fallen down a storm drain as a child and seen the inner workings of the wildemere. I guess it goes down about twenty miles and has a giant cuddly rat farm and water fall. It doesnt sound to farfetched ( all things considered) but that one, she likes to lie, for fun.

A  quiet seaside town is generally a nice place to find yourself. A religious cult, however, is always a bad place to find yourself. Worse when it’s run but an ex pro wrestler. Worse yet when its a squicky sex cult. Worse even yet when they worship the terrifying things that live in the bottom of the elevator shaft. The townspeople are in on it. Get out now.

Notes about living on Mars:

When a package arrives on your door step full of pictures of your roommate and earths premiere martian moon snowboarder and he tells you that they have her kidneys in a box in New York, Its a good rule of thumb that any kind of scavenger hunt they send you on will a) end in black mail b) end in tragedy.

Martian moons are shit places to live. Seriously, who wants to live in New Providence. This is why your roommates keep moving to New Baltimore on the martian surface. Near earth like gravity, water, m-type atmosphere, and prostitution is leagal.

On that note: martian whores are absolutely stunning, will tell you they love you, take your money, and move right back to Earth as soon as the fucking can.

And who could possibly blame them! There are things living under the sand that will strip you to bones in seconds. Thats why the company pays the miners so much.