[Estimated reading time: 17 minutes]

The dream, when it comes, is as alien as always. I'm at the Kenyan Floyd concert, they're going through The Wall highlights, playing familiar songs with their own flair and unique rendition. A huge inflated balloon in the shape of a zebra floats through the stadium. The crowd hums and thrums, sings along to the decades-old songs as if this was opening night.

There's an aquarium on stage. A fish about twenty feet long swims upwards through a torrent of air bubbles. Two men stand at the bottom of the aquarium, their hair moves back and forth with the currents, as they describe their account of the grizzly murder scene to a single blue-hatted police officer. The victim lies at their feet, its robotic body mangled and torn at random spots, its right arm hangs by a single power cable.

Six green laser paths hang in the air over the audience and vibrate whenever the Gilmore-masked band-member strums his guitar.

Dog-headed Anubis stands on a cliff high over the crowd and holds a fishing rod, trying his best to catch the more out-of-it members of the audience.

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[Estimated reading time: 4 minutes]

This is a work in progress.

Anna and her husband Tom watch helplessly as their friend Walter slips on the wet rocks and goes head-over-heels into the airy void. They're at the top of American Falls some four hundred feet above the gushing river. Walter's falling form disappears into the mist and after a second the scene goes back to its idyllic state, unblemished by the temporary tragedy.

Anna lunges for the edge, her right arm stretched out to grab at the receding form. Tom holds her back from the treacherous edge, "Careful, don't slip!"

"We have to get down there!" Anna is frantically looking around, searching for a safe path down.

Tom pulls her close and holds her, strokes Anna's hair. "We will. I'm going to call this in, first."

Anna buries her head in Tom's vest and cries. She knows they're not going to find Walter.

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[Estimated reading time: 8 minutes]

Billy leaves his hotel after breakfast and walks the few dozen blocks to the museum.

The streets of DC look strange, uncluttered by the automobiles of Billy's youth, a ubiquitous sight that was already on its way out when Billy was born. Here in DC, much like most other US cities, the last of the Auto Century roads have been repurposed and transformed into wide and infinite-seeming parks that cut across each other in strange orientations.

Even a decade or two back, Billy would have needed to make a number of breather stops. Benches line the miles of park, but Billy walks past these. It's the best he's felt in a long time, and the sole reason he arranged a hotel so far away from his one and only destination here in DC. He wants to enjoy walking in the city of his birth, just this one last time.

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[Estimated reading time: 4 minutes]

Don't you want somebody to love
Don't you need somebody to love
Wouldn't you love somebody to love
You better find somebody to love

I hang on to a lamp post and cough, and it feels like I hack up half a lung. I spit and the red blood mixes with the brackish water in the gutter a few feet away. I analyze the spit for a moment, see that there are no large chunks in it, and continue walking.

The rain is relentless as it pelts me, but I barely notice. It's been hours, days, weeks like this, and I'm tired of caring. I turn up the collar of my jacket, pull my hat down tighter, and just try to concentrate on walking.

A street sign says I'm passing 480th. I look down and continue to put one foot in front of another, another shambling mess out on the city streets. The perpetual gray of the city is an oppressive blanket, and I'm wallowing in it.

I walk past a neon travesty, a pachinko parlor that's hoping to provide their clientele with the skin cancer they're missing out on by staying here below the clouds. I stare a bit too long and a pink neon elephant sign is permanently burned into my retina.

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[Estimated reading time: 18 minutes]

We reach the coast just an hour before sunset. I look back and note our path, a long swath of dust rising slowly in the calm windless air, illuminated a dazzling gold by the setting sun. The dust twists for miles, then disappears behind a small hill. With a little light remaining, we set up our camp.

I pull my pop-up tent from my hover-bike, unravel it on the ground and check it for holes, tears, scorpions. I then straighten and connect its carbon-fiber ribs and plug the tent's power into my bike. While the tent inflates on its own, I go through the bike's maintenance menu and start a cleaning and fine-tuning process. I send up a dozen fly-sized drones to watch over us. I can check what they are seeing around us, but I don't feel like it and just leave them to their task.

Pops dumps his sleeping bag by the ring of rocks that's going to serve as the campfire. He pulls out some kindling from the bike's side bag, small twigs and branches that he gathered every time we stopped, and starts building a small well-ventilated structure. He adds larger branches and pieces of wood, then gets the fire started with some flint.

He's in charge of the common camp space today, while I'm cooking. I've been enjoying these moments for their pure simplicity.

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[Estimated reading time: 23 minutes]

Previous chapter

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"First thing first, what's your name?" I'm struggling with anger and grief, interspersed with curiosity.

"My name is Alonzo."

"What happened? Are you my sister?"

"I was. Guess I'm your brother now."

"You survived the Hermosa. What happened to the ship? Is mom alive?" I'm confused and on the verge of panic, but excited at the same time.

"Yeah, she made it. Some didn't. A lot didn't."

I'm holding onto a railing, and I'm grateful for it, as my head is now spinning. "Pearl, give us gravity. And let's starting heading toward that storm." I'm not sure if I should trust Alonzo, but I think catching up to the storm is not unreasonable, under the circumstances.

The ship slowly accelerates. Both I and Alonzo gently fall toward the floor, feet impacting first, and we cautiously stand up against the artificial gravity.

Alonzo looks into my eyes. "I didn't kill our father."

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[Estimated reading time: 13 minutes]

The ANN Greer began its life as a Stream mega-transport. This was in the early days of Stream exploration, before the tech shrank and became reliable, so the transport had multiple overpowered reactors and vast spaces for all manner of cargo.

The Stream tech kept improving and quickly it became much too expensive to power the Greer, and so much cheaper to jury rig a Stream reactor to a smaller craft, a shipping container, an ATV, or even a tractor. After a bit less than a century of ferrying mega-tons around the Solar System, Greer was repurposed as a travelling research lab and long-term transport.

At the moment, she's sailing across Saturn's face in strange non-orbits, orbits that can only be attained (cheaply) with the Stream tech.

Kieran watches the muddy yellows of the gas giant being stirred up by a storm that cuts across the planet from east to west. It will soon reach its tail, the earliest disturbances the storm caused in the atmosphere as it circles the planet.

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[Estimated reading time: 32 minutes]

Previous chapter

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30 years after the mysterious disappearance of the ANN Hermosa

It's my last day at work, for a while at least, and it's as hectic as usual. My lead, Magda, is running around as if her head was on fire, but this is her MO. She just enjoys being overwhelmed, double-booked, and pushed up against a hard deadline.

From Jaz To @WorkSocialGroup Congrats on the great job! I'll miss you all. Lukewarm Spiders Meme See you at the club!

I hand off the last touch-ups of my set of holos, the last updates we'd discussed just an hour earlier, send them on to my lead. Magda notices and shouts, from the other side of the large space we occupy, a thanks and a "have fun", and she's gone again, diving back into some work-fire.

From Minear to @WorkSocialGroup: Dragoons! Dragoons #19 meme

The rest of the group echoes back, memes start flying through my vision, great big hulking sumo wrestlers are toppling buildings over and over again.

Through the carnage I notice that Gabe is walking with determination to some point in front of me, between myself and the exit. There's a holo in his hand, but it looks strange, its colors have gone neon. Gabe is creating a Vatican art exhibit, so this is probably a "Gabe problem" that he's making a "Jaz problem". Gotta love the interns, their moves are so predictable.

I side-step just in time to avoid colliding with Gabe, then watch with mild amusement as he gets tangled in the furniture. "Looks like your colors are all off. Talk to Minear, he had a similar issue when...", I pause and dredge up the memory from a few months back, "he worked on the Caravaggio sets."

The team is all ragged smiles. We've delivered on the promised courses, even with the last-minute changes, and everyone's feeling nice and accomplished, but dead tired. We pushed ourselves for this one. I continue making my way out through the blizzard of farewells and memes and wave my goodbyes. Gabe beams and waves from the floor, then gets back to his struggle.

From Pearl to Jaz: Break a leg!

From Jaz To Pearl: Policeman flipping the crux at the photographer

I run for the closest outer shuttle, slump into an open seat by the window and wonder if I forgot to do anything. I'm sure I did, but it's not like I'm going into hibernation. I queue up something from my high-tempo collection and techno floods my head, the subdermal speakers thrum my skull. My heart-rate increases and I smile.

Playing: "Call me Ishmael" by Lukewarm Spiders

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