Newsletter

ATTN: Travis Hoewischer,
Editor-in-Chief, (614) Magazine

FROM: David S. Lewis,
Reporter at Large, 2212

RE: To hell with the news tabs … your minds are corrupt and no one’s yet told you … get ready for sh*t to get weird, and keep in mind, this one’s free, but the next one’s gonna cost you … please reply immediately

{{BEGIN TRANSMISSION}}

Travis,

I remember you were alive and increasing in mass around the time of the city’s Bicentennial, but I confess I don’t entirely recall how far you lasted beyond 2012, or in fact what exactly claimed you in the end. I feel as though you may have perished shortly after the Great French Fry Plague, but before we eradicated viral diabetes, back around 2080, but that period is fuzzy in my recollection, what with all the gene-swapping stuff that came out around the same time. I hope this missive finds you alive. I miss you, vaguely.

In recent months, despite assurances that we both couldn’t and could – and many sensible warnings that we oughtn’t – we have achieved a sort of time-travel here, just in time for the dawning of the city’s Quadrennial. (Yes, I’m still in Columbus, despite stints in Hollywood, Toronto, Nairobi (via canoe), and Queensland. I’ve been alive for nearly 230 years, and I still detest the Australian accent – they all sound like camp counselors. Even American wallabies born in captivity.) I would send you myself, or some other sort of live animal, except the machine – if you can call it that – doesn’t work very well. You’re lucky this isn’t in Morse code. We’re also forbidden to use the damn thing in the first place, an order I was content to obey until I, the very last reporter on the planet, was laid off last week, with a severance package so pitiful it would make a healthy mother retch.

Do you remember that time I was stringing for that chain of news tabs in the Aughts, and was fired for telling an advertiser to pleasure my _________ on his way to Hell? Do you remember me breaking the glass doors at his shop with that axe handle, and threatening to steal his skin, before hastily making my way to New York? Things are more polite and saturnine in 2212, and there’s no better way for a man who has won nearly eight Pulitzers to show his bottom to the world than to steal and then manipulate their precious new invention in just exactly the way I was most supposed not to, all to send an old war buddy what amounts to a fart in a bottle from the future.

For clarification, I wasn’t exactly “laid off.” The Newstab, which is our monopolic equivalent to the newspapers of your time, has finally decided they can do without reportage from flesh-bearing experts in the craft. This is the final stupidity, resultant of the trends being set back in your time, with the stinking bloggers and Twittereports, back when “The Internet” was all the rage. (Incidentally, do you folks realize how much money is zipping around the antiquated wires and cables crisscrossing your country? Your great Internet, powered by coal fumes and whatnot? You have the equivalent of a piggy bank covered in pornography powered by a chainsaw motor. What foolishness.)

Things are different now. Not how you would have guessed, though. We still don’t have flying cars, at least not in the way we imagined them. I doubt that number ever gets punched. We do have commuter bubbles, but they aren’t worth the bread. Only the wealthy can afford them, and they don’t want them. Sort of like those electric cars you were dabbling with – are those still around? With the batteries? Hee hee …

Out of Work … Again

Sorrow, Foam Wars, and Homemade Wine

I certainly can’t afford commuter bubbles, and my driver’s license was revoked in 2061, only a few months before my first dehydration. Imagine my fury: a mere pup at 78 years old, still crapping yellow, and they took my wheels. In their defense, it took them some doing just to get the damned thing out of the Iuka Ravine. While the official charge was “driving while unconscious,” I feel safe now confessing to a horrendous bout of meat sweats, and would attribute my road-free driving spree to the salty liquid obscuring my vision. Fair warning: it will become increasingly difficult to find meat that wasn’t grown in a barrel, starting around 2045 – and the artificial stuff never agreed with me.

While one might assume my augmented-ambulation privileges would have been restored along with my other certifications after my first reconstitution in 2110, the authorities weren’t so generous. (I was given surprisingly useful equestrian privileges, but you know nothing of the “Horse Columbus” movement the city underwent during the Naturalism period of the early 2100s.)

However, it was my own feet that carried me to the Newstab building last week. I took the skyline up to my office on the 82nd floor, pulled out my cloudpad, and prepared to enter the Network, just like any other day, wh-

{{When JIm-JIm was impaled by a laserfork at his warehouse, the owners refused to credit his account. “I was out of work for a year! My entire gastro had to be replaced, and my bondsurance didn’t cover it. Thanks to Keenan Kurgis, however, I got my new stomach. My warehouse never had a chance!” Have you been injured at work? Keenan Kurgis knows the lawcloud, and he knows you. Call Keenan Kurgis, and remember:
If I don’t get paid, you don’t get paid!}}

Aaah! Get out of my damn cloud! Shitty neural advertisements. If you thought marketing was irksome in your time, wait until they give you your implants! I keep accidentally buying stupid sh*t in my sleep. It’s horrible.

Anyway, I was plugging my cloudpad into my neckjack, and the first thing that came up was a bright pink field that obscured my entire neural landscape. Six friendly digital rabbits surrounded me, chanting, “Congratulations! You’ve been retired! Please turn in your cloudpass to the front desk, and report to Sanitation for your final scrubdown!”

You can imagine the feeling. Hell, this is my third reconstitution, and I’m still paying for the last one. As the world’s last human reporter, I can’t help but feel the media is deliberately shedding the emotion and crucial fallibility that comes of possessing genuine squishy pink matter. In 2212, modern reporting is horribly skewed, having achieved total objectivity. What you would call “artificial intelligence” (the word “intelligence” fell out of popular use in the middle of the 21st century) has developed to the point where everything that needs to be reported is sorted according to the proclivities and interests of the news receiver. I’m sure that sounds horrendous to your primitive brain, and it is, but not for the reasons you would think: nothing slips through the cracks anymore … except the Truth, which is so inherently subjective as to be untenable by mechanized reporters.

Also of note, the modern mechanical journalist is programmed to report. Investigative programs have been written, but someone must direct them, as intuition is still relatively exclusive to organics like octopi or us.

Enraged, I went to the payroll machine and vended my final check, a paltry $6 million. They’ve been fabricating those damned things with a nearly indestructible clear poly resin for the last twenty years or so. Needless to say, I bloodied my aging elbows considerably while trying to bash it into oblivion.

I took the skyline back down to the 62nd floor, to hand my cloudpass over to the Resources Department, but when the clerkbot flashed its eyelights at me, I sensed I was being mocked.

Singularities and Synths:

A Brief and Chaotic History of Modern Technology

I’ve never cared for the damned synthetics. Unlike the science fiction “robots” of your time, the beeping bastards, though intelligent, have failed to mount any kind of meaningful insurrection. The closest thing to a “Singularity” came in 2091 at Kodak’s Ferry, where a bunch of maintbots gathered, seemingly of their own accord, and lashed out at Apple with some truly awful poetry. It was later revealed that the whole thing had been an elaborate prank programmed by the eccentric genius Melindabilliun Gates, but her involvement wasn’t revealed until well after citizens had preemptively beaten thousands of synthetics to smithers, fearing some sort of impending uprising, or at least widespread mechanical sarcasm. That purge was one of the highlights of the century, second only to the Mayan Irony.

My ancient and respectable craft has been reduced to the electromumblings of glorified calculators. The Newstab has an utter and sanctioned, even protected, stranglehold on the purveyance of information in the public good. Freedom of speech died, for all practical purposes, with the implementation of the Social Correctness Acts late in your century, although the disease that killed it was birthed in your time, fostered by the artificial individualism borne of stupid advances in already useless technology. I was called a “primitive” for choosing dehydration over neutralization, an end-of-life procedure that has been ceaselessly in vogue since Asia dropped. Occasionally, I hear of dehydrators yet extant in Africa, but to my knowledge, I am the practice’s only Western apologist. For a short time I was a popular guest on the neurocasts as an advocate of dehydrator culture, but by the time of my second reconstitution, the practice had fallen completely out of favor. In fact, I was renewed the second time against my volition: A notorious duck, a mutant of sorts escaped from a Gene Zoo, was terrorizing the Confluence. Several aquaculturists had been horribly billed to death, and firearms hadn’t been manufactured in over a century, when someone remembered that I had been dried out with my shotgun in the chamber with me. The hunt for the massive beast was neurocast all over the world, and when I finally dropped the hammer on the avian nightmare, schools were closed, as the children couldn’t stop crying. No one knew the neurowave generators would replicate the noise so loudly; the extinct frequency of a firearm simply hadn’t been programmed into the filters.

Aquaculture became a much bigger scene when they finally got all those roadblocks off the Scioto River, those pesky low-head dams and other riverine obstructions. The original idea, as I recall, was to allow for kayak-based commuting, and led by one of your writers, Sir Steven Croyle. He became an icon, albeit briefly, when he led a renegade flotilla of hand-paddled boats to the Lower Dam and blew it – and himself – away with an improvised (yet effective) explosive device. He was called an ecoterrorist by some, and deranged by others, but received a posthumous knighting for his bravery and weirdness. A monument depicting his explosion was later erected at the site, although I would imagine he would have found all the colorful fiber optics, topped with bronze replicas of his dismembered limbs, disconcerting and perhaps even tacky. Alan H. Hamwi, a popular Columbus sculptor of the period, was awarded the contract for the memorial at a time when he was more or less losing his mind; in fact, it was among his final works.

Fifty years or so after that, the next big breakthrough in aquaculture occurred when a pharmacist working for Abbott Drugs and Tanning Agents, riddled with cancer, jumped into the river in an attempt to take his own life. Unfortunately for him, river dolphins dragged his dying body to shore. Unfortunately for them, he saw that one had patchy scars all over its skin, and a river dolphin is a small enough animal, and not too difficult to drag to helplessness on the muck beach of the Olentangy River.

And so, with the eventual dissection of his savior, the Abbott scientist was able to isolate certain very useful proteins that, when removed from a river dolphin’s endocrinal gland and inserted into a human’s appendix, produced a powerful natural cancer-fighting agent, the popular introduction of which almost immediately led to widespread starvation. We lost most of Africa (again) and China was also much reduced, resulting in the Mattel Boom, in which dolls and foam warfare toys were produced largely in America, our first boost in manufacturing in nearly one hundred years. Equated by historians with the birth of industrial-scale war, the Mattel Boom took advantage of the Second Geneva Convention and converted many of their toys into legitimate foam weaponry (so-called “Nerf Guns”): long-range, high-caliber foam missile launchers.

Indeed, those and most of the other developments in warfare throughout the peaceful twenty-second century increased widespread starvation, as well. Luckily, around the time of the Third Geneva Convention, war was done away with entirely, although by then the very idea of combat was limited largely to scattered groups of rebels and freedom fighters. Weary from decades of fighting the powerful, they were finally able to lay down their foam, roll over, and take it like the rest of us.

It was good, in a way, and also very silly.

Long a history buff, I decided to go to the foams and drown my end-of-career sorrows in reenactment, so I hailed a repticab and set out for Franklinton.

The driver was a soulful Mesocan, a wrinkled old immigrant with voice like whalebutter.

“Tough day, ji, mister?” he queried.

“Just the breaks, hoss,” I replied. “Laid off … again. Replaced by a damn machine. I can’t decide whether to get loaded or hit up a dehydration parlor, check out for a few decades.”

He grunted sympathetically and stood the cab up, wheeled us around, and took off for Franklinton at a lope. I gazed out the window, watching the long lizard legs under the chassis, the claws clicking pleasantly on the pavement as the car trotted along.

Franklinton, the area of Columbus known as “El Dorado of the Midwest,” was long a blighted area of town, although among the city’s very oldest neighborhoods. It was originally settled by black bears, and later by Indians. Europeans arrived next, and the Indians left, though grudgingly. Your predecessors had to fight off the black bears, but the ursids enjoyed the last laugh for a very long time, as you had no sooner settled the area than urban blight restored it to a wilderness of its own. I bet nearly a century and a half passed with Franklinton a crime-ridden shadow of its former glory, albeit with some noteworthy attempts to reclaim it.

After an enormous reservoir of natural gas was discovered deep below the neighborhood’s crust, however, drilling commenced, and that entire portion of Columbus transformed into a boomtown. The gas was tapped safely, using the Texan “laser diaper” method, and thousands were employed … quite the opposite of what everyone was expecting in your time, as I recall, as the practice of “cracking” or “gas whacking” or whatever you called it was not only bad for an area’s environmental and economical health; the frequent earthquakes found to be the result of the ancient method were enough to convince lawmakers to ban its practice, although not before it caused the Main Street Bridge Disaster, which killed many river dolphins, as well as badly damaging the governor’s mansion. (Thank goodness it was unoccupied at the time.)

Those were good days for miners of all kinds; many of them used the opportunity of wealth to educate their children, giving birth to many enlightened statesmen and civic actors, as well as the Franklin Re-enactors, the entertainment spectacle that sent me scurrying to the Cooper-Meyer Coliseum a this morning, ready for hard drink and foam-missile oblivion.

After the ratification of the Third Geneva Convention, many out-of-work former soldiers turned to parlaying their dehumanizing experiences for our entertainment. Although the Conventions were signed nearly seventy years ago, the tradition of watching men and women in drum-tight Spandylon leotards shooting each other with Nerf missile replicas remains a major source of entertainment, and after every ounce of natural gas was safely and profitably extracted from deep beneath the entirely stable surface, Franklinton converted the old stadium into a Circus Maximus of sorts.

Nerf reenactments have become my final solace. It’s as close to violent sport as this abrasively peaceful era has to offer. Indeed, as I took my seat, my mind wandered to the vaunted football games of yore. There was a time when the Ohio Stadium, known as the “Horseshoe,” saw armored young men trying to murder each other over a tiny leather ball. The rules escape me, nearly a century after the sport was outlawed, but I remember the excitement, the raw energy.

Now, the most enjoyment available to someone like me involves drinking homemade wine smuggled into a Reenactment, hoping desperately that a misguided foam missile won’t knock off any of my favorite face parts. Repeated rehydration leaves the epidermis somewhat brittle.

I took my seat and a numbing slurp of my wine, which tasted like acid washed from a cricklepoppers’s back leg.

The show, similar to the Wild West shows of your time, is only marginally competitive, instead mostly for entertainment. As the first few periods went by, the soldiers moved with enough grace, and their foams flew true, but I was disconsolate; I couldn’t get my cloud off my troubles. How could they cut me loose, after decades of faithful labor? I sipped my wine and remembered the fonder days of reporting, covering wars foreign and domestic, political scandals. A rather large piece of foam ordnance, roughly two meters long, sailed just over my head, missing my cowboy hat by a matter of inches. I cursed quietly to myself, and noticed a young woman, probably 50 or 60 years old, making her way up the aisle toward me.

“Are you David S. Lewis?” she asked, dodging a volley of smaller foams.

“That’s the rumor,” I replied, keeping my eyes on the shiny men running around the rubber field.

“My benefactor wants to speak with you,” she pressed. “It’s really a very urgent matter.”

“I don’t work for the Newstab anymore.”

“We know,” she said with a cryptic smile. “That’s why it’s urgent.”

I turned to her, finally meeting her eyes. She seemed to be making some sort of important joke.

“Who’s your benefactor?” I asked. She handed me a card with an address on it.

“Goodale Aero-terraces, eh? Must be some wonderful sort of benefactor,” I said.

She winked at me. “You have no idea.”

She faded back into the crowd, and I examined the card. Fabricated from high-grade silicate, the graphics were lovely, shimmering and swirling patterns flowing off the edges of the device. If a flat at the exclusive Goodale Aero-terraces wasn’t status symbol enough, the card demonstrated its issuer was someone with a lot of precipitate in his or her cloud.

I left the show early, no longer interested in foam. It was raining slightly as I stood on the corner, waiting for a repticab, but the mist was greenish and purple … good tidings, really.

The driver laid us down at the corner of Goodale and Gallicchio Corridor (Corso Lane, it would have been in your day. Or maybe Park Street?) The artificial sky under the Aero-terraces was blue and cloudless, as it had been for weeks; I wondered whether the weather simulator was on the fritz. A commuter bubble bounced lazily toward me. I laid the benefactor’s card on its translucent surface, and stepped inside the orifice. The bubble beeped soothingly and bounced twice before floating aloft, toward the massive tower hovering above the park.

“Your Commute will take approximately ten minutes,” the bubble cooed at me. “Would you like to hear some music while we drift?”

“No, thanks.”

The bubble chortled prettily as the interior swelled with Top 400. I groaned and begged for it to be turned down, but the damn things like their tunes, and passengers generally have to listen to whatever their bubble wants to hear. Mine seemed to prefer Two Bubble Garage, a humpback whale band that made it big on local radio. The novelty of sea music was lost on me, as I had chosen to remain happily landlocked after the first flood, but whale music is all the rage now, and Columbus, as in your time, still loves its locals.

The Rickenbacker Tragedy, in which all 2,347 residents of Lockbourne died in a flash flood, was spun positively when the resulting lake was artificially salinized, all 600 square kilometers of it, in an attempt to make the area more attractive to cetaceans. The Rickenbacker Sea is the aquatic real estate equivalent of the Goodale Aero-terraces for seafolk.

Personally, I wish we’d never invited the damn things into the cloud to begin with.

Strange Medicine and Insufficient Juice

My grumbled thoughts were interrupted when the bubble arrived at the Benefactor’s flat. The bubble let me off on the skywalk, cautioned me against crosswinds, and offered me a complimentary bag of aqua. I declined, and set out toward the Benefactor’s door, a dark, nearly opaque holiscreen covering the entire front of the flat.

The holiscreen was blocking view of a massive aerial patio, with smaller portions arranged around the central patio, all hovering midair – the sort of hoverscaping younger people find trendy at two meters, but not five hundred. I watched a couple of gliding squirrels chase each other around, sailing from one segment to the next, darting up and down the pale yucca stalks accenting the exterior.

Behind the patio area, a long, massive door sealed off the entrance to the flat. As I approached, a chipper artificial voice greeted me.

“Mr. Lewis, is that you?”

“It’s me,” I replied.

“Identification confirmed. Please enter and be welcome!” the voice intoned.

The massive door slid open soundlessly, and I stepped across the foyer into a great hall, the automatic lights shimmering across the iridescent marble tile, strategically swelling and dimming as I walked across the floor to reveal the room’s recesses and extravagant décor. Ancient statues stood guard, gazing vapidly into the near distance, while art from your time adorned the walls: authentic Jeff Fernengels, an Amber Groome doll, and maybe even a Dassai.

“The Benefactor is upstairs in his chambers,” the house reported. “You may take the stairs, or, if you’d prefer, we can summon you a bubble.”

I took the stairs, each step glowing beneath my feet and then dimming as I passed. After climbing for several minutes, I arrived at a mechanical hallway, which carried me even deeper into the cavernous flat, until I arrived at a massive door.

The door opened onto an unusual chamber, even for our time. The amphitheatric room was bifurcated by what appeared to be a large black rubber-like curtain. It was almost completely dark, but I was unable to locate the source of what little illumination there was.

As my eyes adjusted to the dim, I became aware of a pale shape that seemed to be embedded in an upper corner of the curtain. As I squinted, the shape began to move toward me, until I could make out that it was half of a human figure, seemingly stuck around the waist in the rubbery firmament. The figure was hanging upside-down, so I couldn’t make out the face, or even gender, of the being in the curtain.

“Hello, Mr. Lewis,” said the creature. “I was sorry to learn of your unemployment.”

“Not as sorry as me.”

“Indeed. You must be very frustrated. Would you care for something to drink?”

I nodded yes, and the Benefactor whisked quickly away to the other far corner of the black rubber.

“You like banana juice?” it called.

“Sure.”

After a moment, it zipped back down to me, empty-handed, still more or less upside down.

“I’m discontent, too, you know,” it said.

I could now tell that, more or less, the non-juice-bearing entity was a female. She tittered then, a sound like glass being broken prettily.

“Very discontent, Mr. Lewis. In fact, you could even say that we have a collaboratively untenable situation.”

“Beg pardon?” I asked.

“You see, I am very close to something, an alarming discovery of sorts. My own situation is such that, due to several … missteps … I made in the past, my private enterprises have been … compromised. And scary people are about to capitalize on this vulnerability.”

I regarded the strange woman hanging a few feet above my head, smiling down sheepishly at me.

“I’m not sure I follow,” I said slowly.

“It is not necessary that you do. I’m proposing a joint venture that could satisfy my desire for redress and what I presume is your desire for vengeance against those who have thrown you so sadly from the bar, so to speak,” said the Benefactor, emitting another spine-tingling giggle. “I would like to give you the opportunity to exact retribution in precisely the way that would sting the Newstab most.”

“Go on.”

“As I’m sure you are aware, the Newstab’s zoo-based research and development team has recently made a breakthrough in past-time transmission technology,” she said.

“Yeah. I heard all about it. I remember when, nearly two centuries ago, the first researchers sent a particle faster than the speed of light, the very dawning of past-transmission. Everybody was expecting to see time machines within a few years,” I said. “As I recall, a rather provincial movement sprang up ready to defend our society from Morlocks.”

“So you are familiar with this … development?” queried the Benefactor.

“Sure,” I said. “They have confirmed the thing works, but it’s under tight security, totally locked down, and its operation is strictly forbidden. They passed that law even before the technology had been fully developed.”

“I’m aware,” she tittered. “And we are approaching the Quadrennial of our fair city. How would you like to send a message back to someone involved with the original founding of the city?”

“I wasn’t around for that, and therefore know no one from then, but I do remember the grand embarrassment that was the city’s Bicentennial,” I recalled. “Even in those days, Columbus loved itself so much that several people died from sheer elation that year, simply from enjoying the city so much. It was drinking, I believe, that was most directly to blame, but the Bicentennial, secondarily.”

The Benefactor whizzed up to the middle of the ceiling, and then back down with an envelope.

“Yes, and as for my needs … you will find all you require in this envelope to accomplish our dual purposes. I assume your full confidence and cooperation?”

“If I’m successful, you realize they will hunt me down like a rabid dog,” I said. “There will be no safe place for me within the city walls.”

“If you like, you can instead piss away your last few dollars at the Nerf shows. Either way, it’s not exactly as though you have so much going on right now,” she giggled.

A fair point. I took the envelope, and gave the Benefactor a nod.

“So, a final adventure. Well, this is better than abusing the payroll vender.”

She smiled, and limply zipped away, out of sight, calling, “All luck, Mr. Lewis!”

Genesis of a Dubious Quest

I walked back outside, and had the parlor call me a bubble. Drifting down toward the city's surface, I opened the envelope, and shook its contents into my hand. There was a small, jagged piece of metal, with teeth and ridges. There was an orange capsule, the liquid of which seemed possessed of a slight glow. Finally, two folded pieces of paper, one marked “Instructions” and the other, “Message.”

The “instructions” were chillingly simple.

Seek Koko; she has your fax[sic]. Send my Message. Then, do your worst to the Newstab. Good Luck.

I re-folded the note and placed it in my pocket, and unfolded the “Message.”

To: Bennie
From: Bennie, 2212
This is you, but later. You will want to try pot. Don’t. It will make us weird.
Love, You (Later)

I laughed, wadded the “Message” up and tossed it into a nearby trashbot. After all, we live and die by our choices.

I took the light rail(1) to what in your time would have been called the “Victorian Village.” The beautiful old homes of your time are all gone, I’m afraid, and the neighborhood has degenerated into one of the few truly seedy areas still left in the city. It’s also, coincidentally, where many of my friends live. One of them, in particular, was a collector of and expert on artifacts of antiquities; I had a sense that he might know something of the nature of the jagged little scrap of metal. If anyone could identify it, it would be Jackie Miranova.

I clicked on the vidscreen levving outside his door, glancing around for roving Trolls. It was getting dark, and malcontents were well known to haunt the area. The door opened, and Miranova peered out.

“Lewis! Is that you? Are you alone?” he croaked, his small eyes glittering in the dimness of the interior.

1. In your time, “light rail” would have referred to a smallish train. In 2212, it’s something like that, only little more than a bamboo park bench that slides rapidly along a fence, by far the least efficient and most dangerous mode of transportation since wheeled automobiles. In spite of this, the City is still installing hundreds of kilometers more. They are working on the 6-I-6670 loop of the Light Rail even as I write – it’s been under construction, in one form or another, for over 200 years.

“Yes. Let me in.”

“Okay,” he said. “Would you care for a steak?”

“What kind?” I asked suspiciously.

“I’m currently serving several species of reengineered steak,” he said proudly. “Would you care for some simulated yak? It’s my favorite.”

“Just pour me a cocktail, and tell me what is in my pocket,” I said. His brow creased thoughtfully as he gassed some whiskey into a tumbler.

“Lint? Pebbles? Some sort of religious tract? Have you converted?” he asked.

“Jackie. I will show you what’s in my pocket. The guessing need not begin until after,” I sighed, and pulled the metallic object out of my pocket, dropping it into his outstretched hand.

“Hmmm. Interesting,” he said. “It’s called a key, designed for granting specific and limited access to a non-intelligent mechanical lock.”

“Of course! We had these when I was young. How could I have forgotten what they looked like?” I exclaimed. (We all had keys, in your time, Travis. You had some, too.) “Any idea what it might unlock?”

“Well, there is a serial number on it. Let me plug it into the cloud, see what we come up with,” he suggested.

“Absolutely not,” I cried. “I am under the impression that, whatever this key unlocks, is some kind of secret, and is meant for my eyes alone. Is there no other way?”

He scratched his beard, and powered up his slippers. “There may be a way,” he said. He disappeared into his chamber, reappearing in a minute with what appeared to be some kind of old-fashioned encyclocollator. He set the key on the table, and held the shoebox-shaped device above it. A bright blue beam of light shot out of its underside, flickered over the key’s surface, which glowed green for several seconds after the beam disappeared. The encyclocollator began to whisper.

“Humanmade. Brass, steel, nickel. Circa 1994. Unlocks a small mechanical lock protecting a metal (steel) receptacle, custody of which belonged to the “Post Office” (antiquated form of government-run textile communication), in which customer-citizens could receive extracloud goods deliveries for a fee, usually paid in textile currency.”

Miranova and I looked at each other.

“Can you determine the location of the receptacle now?” he queried the device.

“The United States Postal Service was closed down permanently in 2104,” it replied. “This one, in particular, was located at 33 East 4th Avenue (near the Surly Girl Supersaloon) until 2098. While the building remains, undesirable activity in the area has largely prevented its rehabilitation. Much like the area in which you now stand, it is considered a no-man’s-land, populated mainly by energy thieves and gutter trolls.”

I stood.

“Jackie boy, grab your cyboots. We’re going on a field trip,” I exclaimed.

“Absolutely not. It’s low-dark out there. We’ll be killed, or worse,” he protested.

“Come on. I’m clouding us a bubble. Hurry and get ready. Steel yourself with some of this homemade wine.”

He took a pull out of my proffered flask, and his face seemed to melt for a moment. He disappeared into the back of the house for a moment, and reappeared in cyboots and the hideously shiny garb that passes for adventure wear these days, all sealed up like a Mylar wetsuit. I shook my head.

“Let’s go, Bowie,” I chuckled.

“Huh?”

“Nevermind.”

Wrong Side of the Light Rail

The bubble bounced us lazily the several kilometers to the Middle North. As I recall, we hung out in the area quite a bit back in your time, Travis. It looks considerably different now, since they replaced the old High Street pavedway with a canal.

Built ostensibly as a highway for the river dolphins that settled Mirror Lake after the University fell apart, most everyone knew it was just another way to selectively segregate an already segregated area. In fact, the deep waterway is colloquially referred to as the “Troll Moat.”

While their music is a guilty pleasure for many of the rest of us, and their occasional mainstream accomplishments are lauded as harbingers of improved relations in the coming era, most regular citizens of Columbus are terrified of Trolls. Some of those who live in the less affluent areas of town try to emulate their garb or manner of speaking, but the plain truth is that they are different, and “culturally different” still means “socially frightening,” even in 2212.

The bubble drifted over the Canal and suddenly contracted in on us, ever so slightly. Miranova looked nervously around the bubble. The streets were illuminated by the hovering nightlights, which cast their greenish glow underneath them as they passed overhead. While better areas of town have nightlights that levitate over more or less one spot, there are fewer allotted to the poorer areas, and so they must make a languid orbit, casting eerie shadows over the grey streetscape. Miranova seemed to sense the myriad subversive elements dwelling in these shadows, as the expression on his face was one of barely suppressed panic.

“Lewis, are you sure we are going to be alright out here? It’s pretty late.”

I ignored him, and signaled the bubble to let us out. We walked along the canal, which smelled of rotted fish and the ghosts of food carts.

Much of the area would have been somewhat recognizable to you. The twisted remains of the Skully’s Diner marquee have settled mostly to the concrete, and the ruins of the Jackson are still there, as well. The glass is gone, and much of the concrete has crumbled, but the distinctive shape of the building endured.

The post office, however, didn’t fare so well. Sunk in upon itself, the concrete pill box had mostly settled to the basement. I now had a vague recollection of “post office boxes,” and described them as best I could to Miranova as we clambered over the debris. Many of the sections of concrete were huge, and after half an hour of fruitless digging, we realized that the task was all but hopeless: we would need heavy machinery to get into the basement.

“Awful late for you boys to be east of the Canal, ain’t it?” a guttural voice growled from the shadows. I turned as Miranova skittered away across the pile of rubble.

“I can’t think of a good time to be east of the Canal,” I replied, searching the shadows for the voice. A nightlight moved slowly overhead, gradually revealing not only the speaker, but several other figures which had apparently gathered soundlessly in the darkness behind us.

“You’re pretty funny,” said the yellow eyes glowing in the dim. I couldn’t easily make out details, but than this Troll was larger than most, and certainly larger than us. He seemed well adapted to the shadows, or at least good at remaining in them. “But you’re in my territory. What are you doing here?”

I eyed the monster. “I’m looking for something. I have a key to a metal receptacle that is somewhere in this pile of concrete. It’s not mine, but I’m taking it.”

He stepped toward us out of the shadows, and Miranova began to shake in fear. The Troll was around seven feet tall, gangly and bent forward. Although lean and sinewy, he probably weighed around two hundred kilograms. His leathery skin slid loosely over his skeleton, as though it had been sewed on as an afterthought. The yellow eyes seemed to search around inside the massive skull for a moment.

“I know you … you’re with the Newstab, aren’t you?”

“Until this morning,” I said.

“Your face looked familiar. The Newstab doesn’t pierce our cloud very often down here, but I remember a series you wrote about our folk,” he said.

I had written about the Trolls. In fact, I had penned an entire series decrying the overtly discriminatory city planning that had pushed them further and further toward the inhospitable walls of the city, where refuse accrued in drifts and disease was still common.

“Fat lot of good it did,” I sneered. “Columbus has enjoyed a very long history of keeping our dark secrets out of the way.”

“If anything, you made it all worse, at least for a while. We’ve embraced our localized exile. If you don’t want us, then we don’t want you,” he hissed back.

“Life’s hard, and then you dry,” I replied, and readied my brittle bones for a scrap.

The Troll looked at me a moment longer, and I held his gaze.

“Why do you come to my home, steal from our ruins?” he asked with a snarl, drawing himself up to his full height and inflating the fleshy sack on the back of his neck.

“Because I want to stick it to the bastards, too,” I said defiantly. “The Newstab, the City … all of them.”

The sack deflated slightly. “What’s in the box you seek?” he asked curiously.

“I don’t know.”

He looked at me for a few seconds, and then re-inflated his necksack. Cocking his head back, he whistled through a flap of skin on the top of his skull, the sound not dissimilar to the elephants of your time. Suddenly, we were surrounded by Trolls, who stepped out of the darkness and moved toward us silently, rapidly.

He looked around at his companions and whistled a singsong melody, which caused all of them to stride toward the pile of rubble. Arriving, they immediately began grabbing enormous chunks of concrete and throwing them effortlessly to the side. A cloud of dust arose around their efforts, glowing like green smoke in the occasional illumination cast by the nightlights.

Our liaison walked over to me.

“While your efforts didn’t help us, we understand that you were trying to,” he said to me.

“I was only doing my job. These mechanical reporters are programmed to report on what’s most important to the city. That isn’t you … at least, not to the rest of the city.”

He nodded.

“I hope you find what you seek,” he said. “And I hope that, when you have realized your revenge, your enemies' butts fall off.”

Eureka

The basement was excavated in less than fifteen minutes, and we eventually found the stacks and stacks of ancient safety deposit boxes. While many of the numbers had rusted away, we were able to make out enough of them to discover the box our key fit. I inserted it into the lockslot.

Inside was a poly-based container, containing a hunk of clay with some sort of badge pinned to it, and a textile – paper, that’s what you called it – map entitled, “Zoo Security System.” It seemed to depict a series of lasewire barriers crisscrossing the campus and perimeter of the Columbus Zoo.

I scratched my head. Why on Earth would the Benefactor want me to go to the Zoo?

*A Quick Note: Zoos are much, much different in my time than they were in yours. As I recall, the animals in 2012 hadn’t even broken the language barrier yet, let alone been trained in any way. I really can’t imagine animals without some sort of occupational skills. It started around the turn of the century (2101, or so) when a Swedish scientist programmed a better squid. This squid was not only better than other squid: she was also better than most humans, at least at data entry. Teaching a squid to type is tough, but after that, it’s all instinct. Other animals followed, with the country's new transportation infrastructure built largely on the backs of greater primates. This led to general unrest between workers of both genii, as human workers resented the outsourcing of their jobs to animals that lived in the same city, and animals wanted greater representation, or at least some kind of compensation. It was a battle fought tooth and claw. At the end of the day, the only winners were the seafolk, whose endeavors were largely confined to the entertainment industry. No one could resist those hideous whale songs.

Eventually, the rest of the animals were “officially” enslaved, after a brief and unsuccessful movement to define personhood as belonging to any creature that contributed positively to society. Humans decided that wasn’t the case, but many jobs were left to the critters anyway. Their treatment is fairly well regulated, at least compared to the lot cast for those few creatures deemed employable in your time, dairy cows and whatnot. They are well cared for, but they are not paid, nor allowed access to most human facilities. A fuss was mounted, but when wrathful factory workers began attacking animal workers, most of them opted to return to the zoos, which became reservations of a sort. Now, one goes to the zoo both to show one’s offspring a chimpanzee, and to make said chimpanzee do your taxes.

The Liaison asked me if I knew what the other object in the poly box was. I shook my head.

“That is a plastic explosive, my friend,” he said. “We used to use those to disable the construction machines they used to build the canal. They are extremely powerful … look, there, on the map! I think they want you to place it there.”

Upon a closer scrutiny of the map, there was indeed an arrow pointing to what appeared to be a power station labeled, “Place explosive here.”

“I’ll be damned,” I said, under my breath. “Koko must live at the Zoo.”

I turned to the Liaison. “I must get up north, to the Meta Zoo. Do you know how far away it is? I haven’t been there since covering Provost Coleman VI’s speech at the Housecat Eradication Commemorative. I can’t take a bubble; it would burn too much time, and generate suspicion.”

He paused.

“I thought we could perhaps be done helping you now. We did move several tons of concrete rubble with our large, bare hands, you know.”

I looked at him, hoping that the dried leather that makes up my face would permit me an imploring expression. He sighed.

“We do have an old Evinrude that you could take up the Canal, but I think you’d have to walk a few kilometers when you got there. Come with me.”

He wasn’t joking when he called the boat “old.” The thing was steered manually, with an old-fashioned facial yoke, and seemingly ran on actual batteries. I wonder how the Trolls made vintage electric – probably burning trash or coal, just like the you monkeys, Travis. The hoverboat’s skirt was made of a weathered and cracked poly of some kind, maybe even nanofiber – clearly a classic hovercraft. Miranova eyed the craft uneasily.

“Do you think it will even hold us both?” he asked warily. I shook my head.

“No, Jackie boy, I do not expect it will. You’ve been invaluable to me, but I am going to go on ahead alone. You go on back to your flat.”

Miranova looked at me sadly for a moment. He then glanced around and immediately hailed a bubble. He was really moving, now; the jerk had begun to bounce away before I even got the antiquated engine started on the old hoverhulk.

I waved my thanks to the Trolls, and untied the boat from the makeshift dock. The Liaison called out to me, “Do you go alone, and unarmed, sir?” I replied that I had no weaponry with me.

“May these keep you from harm,” he said, tossing me a bag of frozen peas. I waved again, and made my way to the middle of the moat, and aimed the face-yoke North.

Up the Creek Without a Propeller

The Canal was treacherous. Constructed primarily for underwater use by the cetaceans, I found myself dodging all manner of surface detritus, from 5-meter-long giant carp carcasses floating belly up, to partially submerged trees. Even some of the larger eels caused me to bump uncomfortably around the cockpit when I ran directly over them, although no part of the boat actually touching the surface.

As I approached the boundary of the city proper, I wondered whether the wall that enclosed most of the city would extend over the canal, or worse, if there was some sort of checkpoint, but as I overtook the edge of Columbus near Riverlea, I could see that the wall passed over the waterway, with around four feet of clearance between the surface of the canal and the bottom of the massive wall. As I approached, however, I realized that the opening was just shy of sufficient … the cushion of air on which the boat rode was around six inches, similar to the six inches of the boat’s superstructure I was likely to smash against the bottom of the wall.

I decided to cut the engine just before I got to the wall, theoretically allowing the boat settle in the water a bit for a few moments so I could drift under. Around twenty feet out, I killed the motor, and the boat splashed down into the water, bobbing on top for a moment before it began to submerge. The stern drifted around toward the North, and I was quite backwards and listing somewhat to the port side as I crossed underneath the wall.

I chuckled and congratulated myself on my fast thinking, but the when I pressed the thumb switch, the engine just grunted, and a massive bubble rose to the surface flatulently, like an overfed child adrift in a bathtub.

_Oh f**k_, I thought to myself. _I probably could have anticipated something like this_.

The boat began to sink in earnest, and the current of the canal pressed my head tightly into the face-yoke until I realized that I was more or less stuck on a sinking hoverboat, circa 2177. The water was up to my knees now, and drawing steadily higher up the bulkhead, when suddenly a slick and shiny grey shape slammed over the transom and chittered at me. With my face caught in the yoke, I couldn’t really turn around to see what manner of boarder had taken my vessel, but the creature skittered around to the front portion of the boat.

It was a river dolphin. Delightful, I thought to myself. I hope they don’t mind carrion.

The aquatic beastie looked me in the eye and seemed to laugh. Its thick pink tongue shot out of its mouth and deactivated the engine safety interlock. Duh. It jammed its snout onto the thumb switch, which grudgingly sputtered to life. Surfacing in a slow and uncontrolled spiral, the hoverboat took the surface with a vengeance, spinning wildly toward the side of the canal. The dolphin screamed in terror, and flopped back overboard, just as I got the face-yoke back under control.

“Well, hell. Thank you, you adorable little bastard,” I shouted, and sped upriver, to the North Country, to the Zoo.

No Dippin’ Dots For Me

Hannahburg, or “Powell” in your time, was an exclusive suburb on the rise, but after a local newspaper editor’s grandson discovered industrial-grade diamonds while playing in a quarry, the entire Delaware area shot up to national prominence. Now a metropolis rivaling Columbus, Hannahburg is still home to the Meta Zoo, one of the finest in the world, with a paleogenetic collection that, until my revenge, was considered the absolute top tier. Most meta zoos have a stegosaur or two, but the Columbus Meta Zoo (still named after its original host city) boasts nearly 200 square kilometers dedicated to the most exciting flora and fauna of prehistory. Most biologists agree that our re-creations aren’t exactly right on the money … hell, over half the beasts are solar powered, while others, more advanced, regularly infiltrate the cloud while they sleep. That’s not to mention the staggering number of more recently extinct animals that enjoy sanctuary there, from Tasmanian wolves to the last few house cats. The star attraction, of course, is still the baby panda, but I personally was always partial to the plesiosaur tank. I found it relaxing, like camping out next to a frigid Scottish lake.

Consulting the map, I hiked for at least four kilometers through the dead of night, finally coming upon a grate concealing the entrance to the access tunnel leading inside the Zoo. Squeezing between the bars, I made my way up the tunnel toward the security center, kicking large curious rats, some the size of small dogs, to the sides of the tunnel as I went. After a while, my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, which was sad for me, as the walls were rather literally covered in banana spiders, an invasive species from the American south that found new territory after bioengineering allowed former corn and soybean farms to produce the most exotic of fruits right here in Ohio. The spiders, hand-size and bright yellow, have fearsome mandibles with the second most powerful bite of any known arachnid. As the eight-legged monsters drifted overhead in webs thick enough to stop a man in his tracks, I somehow forgot entirely which spider had the first most powerful bite.

Finally, I reached the main access door. I had planned for the thing to be locked tight, and was wondering whether I might detonate half of my plastic explosive safely by chucking rocks at it. To my surprise, I found it wide open, and a wizened old black man standing in front of it with a broom.

“Hi, there, sir,” I said.

“Well, um, howdy there, young man,” he said without a hint of irony. “Shew. It’s too hot to fornicate on Sunday, ain’t it?”

“I’m haven’t a clue what that means, but I expect you’re right,” I replied carefully.

“I’m just gonna sweep this sh*t out now. Damn spiders all over the place.”

I nodded. “I walked all the way up the tunnel. They must feed on the rats.”

“Spiders, they sho’ like the heat, I guess.”

“You’re sure right about that,” I said. “I’m trying to find the power station that keeps the animals confined so I can blow it up with this plastic explosive. Can you tell me where that’s at?”

He studied me for a moment.

“You go in here, through this door, and it’s over there to the lef’,” he said. “You gonna blow it up?”

“I’m going to try to. I have to talk to one of the primates, a girl called Koko.”

He nodded understandingly. “All right now. All right now. You be careful.”

I tipped my cowboy hat to him and slipped inside.

Never Have I Ever

The power station was located exactly as he described it. I picked what I assumed was the most vulnerable part of the machinery, jamming the pliable material into it. I turned the dial on the badge to “5,” and inserted it into the explosive material.

It blew up almost immediately.

I lay on the ground for a few minutes, checking myself for missing limbs. My jacket and shirt were mostly burnt through, and the hairs on my chest smoldering slightly, but I was largely intact. The machine, however, was not; it seemed to be effectively destroyed. The tunnel began to shake violently, and, for a moment, I feared I had caused an earthquake, until I realized it was probably just a herd of stampeding sauropods startled by the blast. Amid the thunderous footblasts, I heard the wrenching of steel and the distant ‘pop’ of snapping cables. The system was down, and the Beasts were out.

I got up and ran down the tunnel. Finding a ladder to the surface, I scrambled up and slipped the manhole cover to the side. I stuck my head up and was immediately smashed back down to the bottom of the shaft by someone’s enormous foot. I climbed back up the ladder, and peeked out more cautiously.

I was suddenly glad for the late hour. Seeing the animals slaughtering each other left and right, I couldn’t suppress a shudder at the terror the visitors would have experienced with a pack of saber-toothed weasels hot on their heels. Carnivores are, for most, more exciting than herbivores, which is one reason why such an unnaturally high concentration of them exist relative to the vegetarians at any zoo. The flip side of this, of course, means that when the lasewire goes down, the walkways run with the blood of the weak. I saw a lumbering ground sloth fleeing from hundreds of tiny two-legged dinosaurs; they swarmed him like ants on an apple. I shivered, and tried to stick to the sides of the path as I sprinted for the primate house.

The primates, unlike the rest of the zoo, were mostly still sitting in their cages, even though the doors were open. Monkeys seem to really enjoy paperwork, filing and data entry and whatnot, and they just went about their business as though there wasn’t an Allosaurus snarling at the backend of the building, trying to jam its massive boxy skull into the double doors. I walked past the snapping jaws and found what I was looking for: a spacious office shaped like the inside of a tree, and Koko, orangutan and engineer.

She sat quietly at her desk as I walked in, barely looking up at me. Her head was in her hands, and she kept looking nervously at the door, where the enraged roars of the allosaur echoed down the halls. I sat down in front of her.

“Heya, Koko. I’m sorry to disturb you at work, but I’m trying to d*ck over the Newstab. I got laid off this morning.”

She looked at me and grunted.

“Come again?” I asked. She cocked her head, and grunted low, pointing at her mouth. She was trying to tell me something …

“What, do you want some food? A banana or something?” I looked around, assuming she was given regular access to such things. She snorted and stuck out her tongue, pointing at it with a long, orange finger. I cocked my head, and she just kept pointing. I looked around sheepishly, and then leaned forward and gently touched her tongue.

As I picked myself up from the other side of the room, I wondered whether the impressions of her fingers were a permanent addition to my skull, or if they would eventually go away. Rubbing my bruised face, I swore at her softly.

“What the f**k do you want me to do, goddammit?” I hissed.

She sighed and grabbed a crayon from a desk drawer. Seizing a piece of paper impatiently, she scrawled, “Eat the pill, stupid.”

Ah, yes. I fished the luminescent orange pill from my jacket pocket, and held it up.

“This pill? Do you have something for me to drink, something to wash it down with?”

She stared at me impatiently for a few moments, reached into her desk, and drew out a can of banana juice.

The Quick and the Meat

I ate the pill and chased it with the fruit nectar. My ears popped, and a stream of wax ran down my shoulder – my vision clouded. Koko said, “Apegod, but you’re kind of dumb. I’ve been expecting you.”

I blinked a few times … damn monkey was rather attractive, suddenly. She reached across the desk and grabbed my hat, placing it on her own head.

“You are here for the fax. Do you have everything else you need? Do you have the Benefactor’s transmission?” she asked.

“Yes … er, yes, of course,” I said. “I will need to type it out, however. What exactly is your role in this whole thing?”

“I was the lead scientist assigned to the nano-particle hyper accelerator. I did the engineering on the Newstab’s past-transmission device,” she said looking around conspiratorially. “And … I made two.”

I stared at her. “Where is it?” I asked.

She hooted for a moment. “It’s over in the research wing of the zoo. I thought you would make your entrance somewhat more delicately … you are obviously going to have to escort me there, if you want to make the transmission.”

“Escort you?” I inquired.  “Like, an … escort?” She bared her teeth and howled.

“No, you naked ape. We have to get over there, and you’ve released every apex predator known to history in a relatively limited area,” she said. “We are going together. I know how to work the machine, and you have the transmission.”

“About that … do you have a typewriter laying around? I kind of need to re-arrange my thoughts,” I said.

“Typewriter? Hoot hoot … I don’t know what that is, but there’s a Cloudpad in the same facility. You will just have to dictate the transmission into that.”

We slipped down the hall. The allosaurus hadn’t made too much progress in his quest to enter, but was nonetheless still roaring occasionally, and trying to dig the building away with his massive hind feet. When he saw us, he seemed to redouble his efforts, so we didn’t dawdle.

“How far away is the research building?” I asked Koko.

“It’s over by the old aquarium,” she huffed as she shuffled along.

Her short legs were not built for dino-evading sprints, which seemed inevitably in the cards, so we rested frequently, making short dashes between the Meta Zoo’s exhibits. If you thought the Zoo was too large to see in one day in your era, just wait another two hundred years.

Luckily, the Kasich Memorial Primate Research and Development Center was only a couple kilometers from the monkey house. With perfect timing and amazing luck, we might not even be eaten.

Predators were everywhere – in fact, the best part about being surrounded by a history’s worth of rampaging animals is that, when you cross so many geographical and temporal boundaries, no one is exactly sure who is supposed to eat whom. Near the petting zoo, a massive Siberian tiger saw us and fled caterwauling for no apparent reason whatsoever. A juvenile tyrannosaur, however, stalked us for what seemed like an eternity, until his face was bitten nearly off by some kind of crocodilian.

Finally, we arrived at the research facility. Koko produced a security card from somewhere in her fur and waved it in front of the UV sensor; the large poly doors, however, didn’t budge.

“You must have hoot hoot haw haw haw when you blew up the huff huff,” she said.

“Oh god, I think the pill is wearing off.  I didn’t understand much of that,” I said.

“I’m just panting. The idiocapsule should last for at least a week,” she said coyly. I grabbed a trashbot and smashed it against the doors, but the poly had to have been almost an inch thick … no dice.

We heard a low snarl behind us. Turning slowly, I saw the Allosaurus about thirty meters away. For a reptile, I couldn’t help but notice how expressive his face was: the big bastard looked almost smug. He lowered his head and opened his jaws, the long conical teeth glimmering beneath the retracted upper lip.

I grabbed Koko and pulled her close.

“I appreciate your advances,” she squawked, “but now’s hardly the time – ”

The allosaur roared deafeningly, and charged. I waited until we could smell the rotting kittenflesh in his nostrils, and shoved Koko viciously away, propelling us to the corners of the entrance. Propelled by over four metric tons of fury and inertia, the dinosaur’s massive skull crashed effortlessly through the poly doors, shattering the entire entranceway.

The enraged dinosaur reared his head up to the top of the entranceway, and I saw our chance.

“Hurry!” I screamed. “Inside!”

We ducked underneath the snapping jaws as the beast thrashed, stuck fast in a doorway for the second time that day, and scurried down the hall.

“Apegod in the jungle …” gasped Koko. “That was absurd.”

Glancing back, I could see that, while flummoxed for the moment, there was plenty of space for the hissing reptile to make its way inside, so I grabbed Koko’s paw and we ran down the hall. Behind us, we could hear the predator shoving its massive frame through the door. It roared, the sound deafening in the enclosed space.

“Haw haw … in here!” shouted Koko, pulling me into one of the facility’s cavernous laboratories.

She led me to a corner of the room enclosed in a large polycarbon cubicle. The door to the cube was locked with a bio-scan device. Koko licked the pad, and the door shot open.

“Guess they got the power back on,” I said. “Fat lot of good it will do them.”

Inside the cubicle, Koko gestured at a device that looked strangely familiar …

“Is that a fax machine?” I asked. “I thought you were joking.”

“It’s not just a fax machine,” retorted Koko, clearly peeved. “You see this part? This is where the magic happens.” She pointed at a boxy looking attachment, about the size of a breadbox. Opening a door on the outside, she reached inside and pulled out a gum wrapper.

“When you plug this into the Cloud and zap a piece of foil inside, it sends the contents of your outbox to the recipient of your choice, from anywhere in history after the invention of the fax.” The machine smelled vaguely of popcorn, but who was I to question? I picked up a cloudpad from an adjoining table and began to type furiously.

As I wrote, Koko powered up the past-transmission device; when its diodes were blinking to her satisfaction, she walked to the door of the laboratory.

“Apelord. Lewis, you better come look at this,” she cried in alarm.

“I’m trying to write, here,” I protested.

“You won’t be writing for long,” she replied. I joined her at the door, and looked down the hall.

The allosaur was on its belly, writhing its way up the hall toward us, a terrifying smirk on its enormous face. I ran back to the cloudpad. Luckily for me, after two hundred years of filing copy, I can achieve a rate of nearly 400 words per minute.

So this was my story. It’s for you, Travis and hopefully, (614). It’s a cautionary tale, of sorts: keep your eye on the media or they will sneak around behind you and jam their dirty fingers in your ear. Trust no one. Expect more whale songs. Dinosaurs are cool, except for this one trying to eat me. Ah, bummer … it just shoved its head in the door. I need to find me and Koko a way out of here. Columbus is still pretty nice, but make sure you enjoy your Bicentennial, as there’s no time like the present. I hear you growling, you big bastard! You want some reporter jerky? I will kill you from the inside!

Travis, watch your caloric intake. Say hello to my mother for me. And remember, no matter what, in 2013, don’t

{{END TRANSMISSION}}