April 2009 Archives

Janus lurched down the corridor with a semblance of a limp that was an affectation rather than a genuine ailment. He liked the semi-mechanical feeling that jerking walk lent to his gait. The irony of the feeling did not evade Janus, his body was almost entirely cybernetic at this point, metals and plastics enveloping what little flesh remained. Vat-grown semi-organic eyes stared out from titanium sockets housed in a burnished steel skull piece. Overalls covered most of his body, which allowed him to work easier with people. Nothing remained to be modest of in social circles, but the sight of the twisted artifice of his body had been known to make stomachs turn. Janus could have opted for the illusion of humanity to be layered over his body, the technology was certainly there, but he preferred the stark truth to be out in the open. Only two things remained wholly untouched by the fires, which had torched the rest of his body at the end of the sentient revolt four years ago. His brain had survived almost intact even as his skull fractured and melted. Trauma had wreaked havoc on his memories, but his faculties and skills remained intact. Delicate, almost feminine hands were the other remnant of his past. Welding gloves, they had told him afterwards. For whatever reason, he had been wearing welding gloves when it all went down, leaving his hands almost untouched as the fires swept the rest of his body. Janus held one up and examined it, with admiration for the exquisite details of pores and veins that had never been truly faked by the developers of artificial skins.

"Nice hands, Jeeves." Charlie said, trailing behind him. "Who's your manicurist? Mine's worth shit."

"Charlie?"

"Yeah, Jeeves?"

"You talk entirely too much." Janus said and continued walking.

"Shucks, doc, you're going to make me blush." Charlie said. "Ready for the run down?"

Janus twirled two fingers in the air, indicating Charlie should get on with it.

"Check your panties, Jeeves, they're in a bunch." Charlie said and launched into the daily summary. Most of this, Janus could read much faster in the reports posted onto the intranet, but the human element missing there reduced comprehension and effectiveness. The back and forth of human interplay crystallized the concepts and drove solutions faster than individual work. It was a sort of definition of sentience itself, Janus reflected. Take two computers and make them work together and the result was twice as fast as them taken individually, take two conscious minds though and the result was much more than that. Sentient minds - Janus did not limit this to human minds despite his almost sociopathic prejudices on the subject - networked exponentially not linearly.

"Work on the secondary drive is two weeks behind schedule at this point." Charlie was saying. "The foreman insists everything is going as planned, but failures on the robots is making progress difficult. He's requesting more bots to get it ramped back up to schedule."

"Tell him that there aren't any more bots." Janus said. "Tell him he got the last reserves last week, and if he doesn't get it up to speed with his existing resources, he'll be replaced by someone who can."

"Little harsh, eh boss?" Charlie asked.

"Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle." -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

My step daughter asked once what stopped people from hurting other people. The law, the police, the easy responses spurt out, but one who doesn't know better can see the flaw in the answer. They only do something, anything, after the violence is done. They are hovering swords, not protecting walls. Morality? If someone wants to hurt you, he's already reconciled his violence with whatever morality he holds. So what keeps them from doing violence? Nothing. Nothing but the threat of violence.

It's a cold realization when it firsts comes to us. We get used to it over the years, get used to the terrible and constant vulnerability of life without parents. We get used to it because rough men stand in the night ready to do violence on our behalf.

That idea of violence is uncomfortable with our civilized sensibilities of the modern world. We reject violence as a tool of state or individuals, we reject it as a determinant of morality. Might does not make right. And yet our armies are scattered across the globe. But you see we need those soldiers, because although we are righteous, the others are not.

The great lie at the heart of all states is that other people are not the same as us. It is the excuse for violence, the rationalization that makes it possible to wield a weapon in the first place: it's okay to kill them, they would do the same to us, they're different than us. It's the foundation of every atrocity small or large throughout history. The lie that the others are different. And once that lie is used to justify violence, it can't be relinquished. The ends become the means, and violence must be called down not just for the reason of the lie, but in defense of the lie.

"Anyone who clings to the historically untrue -- and thoroughly immoral -- doctrine that 'violence never solves anything' I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and of the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms." -Robert Heinlein

Chimpanzees form hunting bands that patrol their territory, viciously bludgeon to death trespassing chimps from other tribes. Wolf packs seize and defend swathes of land from each other, territory waxing and waning with the fortune of the pack. But the fighting is never pitched, always a sure thing. The attackers strike with either overwhelming force or not at all. The defenders retreat quickly if outmatched. It's violence, but it's not war, not as we understand it.

Besides humans, only ants fight wars. A million drones ripping each other apart limb for limb for naught but a few square feet of territory. I saw this once, a dead stump in the backyard that had long housed legions of little black ants that I'd watch as a child for hours on end. One day, a swarm of red ants invaded, hordes more ants than I'd ever seen. Giant black soldiers came out to defend, hulking tanks amongst the normal drones in their thousands. Tides flowed back and forth in red and black, the detritus of heads and limbs torn asunder by the wake of the waves of attacking bodies. Why would they go through such hell? Why would they die for it, for a few square feet?

It is because they do not sacrifice anything. They are all genetic neuters. Nothing dies with them. By defending their queen, they defend their own genes. Their deaths mean as little to their legacy as our discarded nail clippings mean to ours.

Other animals do not fight to the death because they carry their own genetic legacy. They cannot die for anything but their own children. Mating behavior is all ritual so that the ability to fight can be demonstrated without risk. When a scratch can kill from infection, unnecessary violence must be ritualized. Nature is full of infinite displays of faux violence, always stopping short of true harm.

But humans are unique. We fight wars, dying like ants by the millions, our genetic legacy withering in the pools of blood. By defending our nation, our religion, our way of life, we defend our ideologies, our memes. Our deaths mean little so long as our ideas live on. Memes make humanity ants instead of mammals, our individual attributes do not matter, we are irrelevant to the tribe.

So war is the human condition, the thing that separates us from animals. Violence, suffering, agony inflicted en masse. But it is also the antithesis of what we think civilization is founded on, it is the necessary evil that allows the greater good.

"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that." -Martin Luther King

Violence is always the worst that can be done. You can't do more, and in a way you can't do less. That is why war will never go away, because it is always the ultimate resort, the final line. There can't be another line, and you can't remove its capacity to be crossed except by changing fundamentally the way we think as human beings. The greatest capacity for human good, the willingness to die for a cause is the opposite side of the coin from the willingness to do violence. If people weren't willing to die for a cause, killing to prevent the cause would not be such a rational resort.

The horror of war cannot be contextualized. Violence doesn't become any less horrifying when it's done for a good cause. A knife slipped inch by agonizing inch into a man's heart is not less terrible to behold because it is for democracy on a battlefield instead of in the torture den of a serial killer. Horror knows no context.

The great crime of violence is not what it does to the victim though, it is what it does to the killer. A child soldier is forced into combat, loaded up with guns, drugs and alcohol, in more danger from his own side than from the nominal enemy. At what point is he culpable? When he burns, rapes and opens throats with a smile and a joke, is he guilty when he is eight? Twelve? Sixteen? Eighteen? We can't draw such an arbitrary line, because guilt cannot be contextualized either. He is both an innocent and a murderer. He doesn't cross from one to another at some point. All murderers are also innocents and all innocents are also murderers. We contain within us the seeds for both ultimate evil and ultimate good, but exist as both at the same time. We are evil and unredeemable even as we are good and innocent. It's the duality of man: love and hate, heroes and monsters, good and evil.

Morality isn't a scale, our goods don't balance our evils and produce some net of our quality of being. We are simultaneously everything evil and everything good that we have ever done. And here is the real rub: the same is true even if we were forced, even if we were compelled to either good or evil against our will. Our actions are who we are. A man who slits another man's throat is a killer whether he did so gleefully or with a gun to his head. This is not judgmental, an attempt to equate the moral culpability of the two, to establish stark black and white morality. Rather, this is an attempt to understand that rationality and morality must be considered separately for either to be understood. Murder committed under duress may be the only rational choice, but that does not make it the only moral choice.

Following orders has been rejected as a defense for atrocity. We declare that the soldiers should have refused their orders, even if it meant their own lives. We insist that individuals have responsibility to a higher law than their own survival. Morality divorced from immediate rationality. That's the teaching of every religion since Christ, and the first thing rationalized away by human institutions. The godhead tells us not to kill, and our leaders, secular or not, add the endless litany of exceptions that all derive from that fundamental lie that others are different.

History has a very dark sense of humor. Gandhi preached nonviolence while the panzers swept Europe clean and the ashes of the Jews floated into the clouds. He said that the Jews should have offered themselves willingly. That they should have bared their own throats. That the horror would have caused the Germans to revolt, would have ended the war. He was an optimist. He believed that however evil the world, men within it could be redeemed. Gandhi's philosophy only works if men are fundamentally good. If they are fundamentally corruptible though, it leads to the destruction of everything we have built. He failed to see that the Jews by and large did not resist, lambs to the slaughter, and yet the ovens still burned. The Germans did not revolt, did not refuse the orders. Only Allied guns by the millions stopped the horror. Rejecting the lie of the other is a suicide pact unless the other side can be convinced as well.

So are we helpless then, doomed to either endless violence or bowing to evil?

We don't behave like mammals, we behave like ants. It's the dark side of sentience. Our species replaced the preeminence of genes with the ascendancy of memes and exploded out of the savannah like a virus. A billion years of evolution surpassed by ten thousand years of sentience, our towers and art and beauty charged by the same force that arrays us by the millions to savage our brothers. The very thing that makes us great is the thing that makes us horrible. Life does not exist without violence, sentience does not exist without war.

That damnation is also what gives us hope, because we've made a jump before, we've changed everything that made us what we were, became something more, something both better and worse.

"At no time has the world been without war. Not in seven or ten or twenty thousand years. Neither the wisest of leaders, nor the noblest of kings, nor yet the Church -- none of them has been able to stop it. And don't succumb to the facile belief that wars will be stopped by hotheaded socialists. Or that rational and just wars can be sorted out from the rest. There will always be thousands of thousands to whom even such a war will be senseless and unjustified. Quite simply, no state can live without war, that is one of the state's essential functions. ... War is the price we pay for living in a state. Before you can abolish war you will have to abolish all states. But that is unthinkable until the propensity to violence and evil is rooted out of human beings. The state was created to protect us from evil. In ordinary life thousands of bad impulses, from a thousand foci of evil, move chaotically, randomly, against the vulnerable. The state is called upon to check these impulses -- but it generates others of its own, still more powerful, and this time one-directional. At times it throws them all in a single direction -- and that is war." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Chapter Three - Orbital Madness


Doctor Lawrence Janus walked down the corridors of the living module of the International Space Station floating at the equilibrium point between Earth and the moon. Artificial feet with microscopic suction cups derived mechanically from those on the feet of geckos allowed him a semblance of earth-normal activity. Most of his crewmates preferred to just take the advantages of zero-g with the disadvantages. A reasonable man adapted to zero-g when confronted with its ineluctable lack of pull.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Janus said to himself. He knew the quote was perfect, as if he had just looked it up on the web and read it from a screen. One of his strengths was a photographic memory that bordered on the absurd. It was also a curse of sorts, since the memory of his wife and children never faded, no matter how many years and tears flowed by.

Janus stopped to peer out a porthole at the swarms of robotic workers skittering over the surface of the Centuarion, which hung like a bunch of tumorous grapes from a half dozen support struts arcing out from the main body of the station. A sharp terminator line ran along the surface of the ship-in-progress where the sun's reach stopped at a particular contour. Spotlights lit the darkness like feeble lightning bugs for the benefit of the few human workers plying the surface in their bulky suits.

"Of course, by the same token, all disaster depends on the unreasonable man as well." Janus muttered, although it was not a mutter so much as his normal voice with the volume turned down. The lack of natural jaw and tongue, even if their replacements were of the highest grade construct, made true muttering and the joy of slurring and twisting every syllable a subtlety beyond his grasp.

"Doctor Janus! Top of the mornin' to you guvna!" A faux British voice called to him from further down the corridor.

"You are not British, if that's the accent you think you feign, and it is most definitely not the morning." Janus said in the rumbling tone that he had tuned his vocal systems to growl instead of the default mild American voice.

Charlie Weiss was a jolly little fat man who drove Janus just about mad. Charlie topped two-hundred fifty pounds on a good day on Earth, but of course in orbit he weighed nothing. "Only diet that ever worked for me." He was fond of declaring. Charlie eschewed the battleship gray uniform overalls of the station for rumpled and coffee stained button-down shirts and khakis. A badly creased silk tie floated in the air next to him, an item of clothing if any that had no value whatsoever outside of a gravity well, following behind Charlie's movements at all times like a leash with an invisible holder.

"Being British is a state of mind, as is morning." Charlie insisted.

Trinan never found out about this room. Crow had never told her while she was alive because he thought that her jokes about a killer might have been too close to reality. What else could this place be for? Crow wondered as he poked at files full of notes. An eccentric sort of wine cellar? After she died, he had built the workshop. It felt homey down here in the dark, away from questioning eyes of friends. Those were the eyes that would wonder if Crow had gone off the deep end entirely.

Pictures, framed and loose, littered the desk and the walls of the room. Trinan stared back from every picture, with smiles, distracted looks, irritation at being bothered by the camera. She stood alone in some, lay next to Crow in others. A series of moments of her life stared back at Crow, a cacophony of memory, every time he took his seat in this room.

The computer speakers rippled to life with the push of a button. "Hi honey, how was your day?" Crow slammed his pinky and forefinger into the left control key and the X to cancel out of the process.

"The voice is right." He muttered. "But the words aren't quite right." If there was a childhood memory of hers he knew, Crow had fed it into the AI, a painstaking process of describing life to the artificial. He spent hours lecturing it on the time they had spent together, every memory however trivial. Crow's fingers flew across the keyboard, tweaking minutia.

"Hey babe, how was your day?" Trinan's voice asked Crow. He blinked at the genuine tone.

"Not bad. Long. Boring. The usual." Crow said. "You?"

The screen indicated that Trinan shrugged. "Nothing much happened."

"I love you Trinan." Crow said.

"Love ya too babe." The speakers said. Crow smiled and killed the simulation again.

He jumped up out of his chair and ran a lingering hand over the frame of a metal cabinet. Crow sighed and pulled open the door, finding himself face to face with an almost perfect replica of his wife's face. It did not look quite right because it was not moving with life. He glanced back to the computer. "Soon I think, soon."

Crow's eyes rose above the computer to a poster he had hung above the tunnel's outlet. Frankenstein's monster stared back at him. Crow had to let out a laugh. "Well, I don't think that she'll go on a killing spree, but at least all of her bolts are on the inside."

Crow worked until an hour before dawn, only slipping away down the tunnel once he could no longer keep his head from clanking down against the keyboard. He looked in on Nan and saw the bot had plugged itself properly into the outlets in the guest bedroom. Alexander still slept in peace and Crow watched for a few moments, leaning against the door jamb.

The basement seemed warmer once he reached its depths, where the floursecents coated everything in a bright though somehow cold, bluish light. A pool table nestled among the boxes of old and rotting memories, its green velvet tinged almost to gray with dust. An old couch served now as a seat for more boxes, facing a television Crow had not touched in years. The place felt dead but also comfortable, like pictures of a friend who passed on decades ago. Crow glanced only in passing at the discarded belongings and moved deep into the basement, between columns of stacked boxes to a back corner hidden in shadows. Carved woodwork descended from the ceiling to wrap like vines around a large picture mounted right into the wall itself.

It was an oil painting that though peeling in a few spots, was intact and haunting. A boy, no more than seven or eight, sat at the bottom of a deep crevice, illuminated only by a shaft of light from above. The color of the painting was a gradient, from pure white at the top, to black at the bottom, with the boy sitting in between. If one looked long enough, the picture snapped into focus and it became apparent that the shaft of light was the hand of an angel reaching down to the boy from above, while the darkness was the twisted hand of a demon reaching from below. The boy sat in the classic pose of the thinker, staring off in a level gaze perpendicular to the shaft of light. A reddish haze filled the picture at the boy's level, a shade that reminded Crow of the time he had been caught in the woods during a not-so-distant forest fire. A glow of heat and ash. A brass plate mounted at both the bottom and top of the painting contained the engraved name of the painting, the single word "Man".

The painting had given Trinan the creeps, but since she hadn't figured out a way to unmount it, they simply stacked boxes in front of it. Crow had managed to unmount it later that same week, but on reflection had decided that would only freak out Trinan more.

He reached both above and below the painting to release hidden catches that had to be pinched at the same time. The painting rolled back on its wood mount to reveal a tunnel, no more than two feet in diameter, stretching back into the darkness. The first time crawling through, with a flashlight that had refused to stay lit despite numerous smacks, Crow had nearly pissed his pants. Now, it had become old hat. He slid through the thirty feet of smooth stone, with a hand reaching forward for the inevitable ledge. The light of the basement was nothing but a distant glow behind him. The light at the end of the tunnel, he muttered to himself.

Crow reached out into the darkness and found another lamp string, this one connected to powerful and warm halogens that came to silent life. A circular room, twenty feet across and characterized by the same rough stone as the stairwell met Crow at the end of the tunnel. Computers filled his workshop, along with scatterings of parts scavenged from his cybernetics labs. Whiteboards hung on hooks hammered into the rockface, a cacophony of outlines and figures screaming forth in blue, red and black. Crow sagged into an old leather chair that had just barely fit into the tunnel in pieces. The flatpanel came alive at the touch of a mouse, and Crow began musing through notes and half-remembered ideas jotted down over the last couple of months, a refresher before jumping ahead.

Crow paused at the door before shutting off the light and pushing the door shut. The latest mark on the wall was another six inches higher. A purple marker from two measurements ago was four inches shorter again. He closed the door before the light could reawake Alexander.

"Hey Nan." Crow said as he scratched his head.

"Yes, master." The senti said as it walked out of the playroom at the summons.

"Is it normal for a kid Alexander's age to grow ten inches in two weeks?" Crow asked.

"Why no, master." Nan said. "I should think even a major growth spurt would be slower than that."

"Noticed anything unusual the last couple weeks?" Crow asked.

"Of course not. I would have notified you at once, master!" The Nan sounded genuinely hurt. "Master Alexander has been nothing short of exemplary in both lessons and behavior. I must say, he is quite taken with the idea of school."

Crow frowned. "Yeah, okay. Don't worry about it. I'll tell the school to give him a physical tomorrow. Just to be on the safe side is all."

"Of course, master. May I be of further service tonight?" The Nan asked.

"Naw." Crow said. "I'll be downstairs. Just recharge or whatever."

Crow slipped down the stairs and stepped over the child-fence with a groan into the kitchen. Shadow puppets cast from forks and knives leered down at him as he pushed through the rank atmosphere. Really got to clean sometime, Crow thought. The heavy basement door creaked open after a jiggle got the latch to release. Crow pulled on the string staring him in the eye, fingers closing on the strung along metal beads that reminded him of bronzed BBs. Fluorescents flickered on with a hum down below, casting only a dull glow up the spiral staircase cut into the rock under the house. The walls were unfinished bedrock, still rough and cold to Crow's hand. Glued on carpet made the steps look more civilized although they too were carved from the original bedrock.

Crow ambled down the uneven stairs, feeling as if he should be carrying a torch and the screams of the damned should be carrying up from the dungeon below. He and Trinan had never figured out the rationale behind this basement. No one had basements in these parts of California anymore, least of all new homes. It must have taken explosives to drive down into the rock like this. Crow speculated that he could make out lines in the rock left by driven steel rebar tapped with dynamite. Trinan had giggled in the darkness of night when they'd split a bottle or two of wine that it might have been made by some serial killer, a perfect sound proof lair for all manner of unspeakables. A chill rose in Crow and he frowned at the darkness. Thinking of Trinan made him feel like a cold wind had passed through him, even with all this passed time.

It was a time of peace, it was a time of war. Everyone wanted heaven but dealt in hell's prizes. Soldiers fought in the deserts, civilians fought in the streets. The politicians bickered on television, the reporters begged for exclusives. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer. In short, it was no different than any other stretch of time on this pallid people infested globe.

The recently departed American president could not complete a sentence, nor claim victory in the popular vote. The challengers sat in million dollar mansions and pondered stock prices more than party principles. In tenements and ranch houses, the masses flocked to one side or the other, based more on calculated moral stances than issues or even their own pocketbooks. Promised tax cuts mattered little next to the platform's position on unborn children. The intellectuals surrendured twenty years prior and formulated wordy theories explaining their opinions and the faults of their opposites. Fighter planes screeched over oil-rich provinces independent in name only, the national guard holding cities they could not pronounce for ideals they invented for their leaders.

Prisons overflowed with felons who bought a joint, while rapists walked free. In California, every news room and available camera focused on a yuppie who killed his wife, while a thousand computers stole an election without a peep. From sea to shining sea, billion dollar record companies sued nine year olds for downloading three minute songs they heard on the radio. Life savings disappeared into the coffers to fund the ad campaign for the next Britney Spears, except this time, it would be twins! The best-selling books were filed under self-help or were elaborate conspiracy theories wedged into current events. Class rooms in Kansas taught that the lord created the world in 7 days, even while the Hubble space telescope glimpsed the fourteen-billion year old remnants of the Big Bang.

Reporters caught up with Loretta Biggs outside her Topeka church and asked her how she explained the fossil record if the world was indeed created on October 23, 4004 BC. "Well, young man. Of course God buried all those bones to confuse you high-falutin, too-smart scientistologists. Halleleujah and Amen." They cut her rendition of the Lord's Prayer to launch into a toothpaste commercial. Dentiment. Great-tasting and plaque-killing.

Russia, the declared loser of the Cold War, hurried to tiptoe as close to utter collapse as was possible without actually holding a civil war. They spent a decade bombing a breakaway province or two and battering their own army's morale into dissolution. The apparatus of Soviet government continued on with a different head, for a time a new born democrat and then his throwback prodigy who disliked democracy enough to keep the regime from imploding another few years. Nuclear reactors popped like blown fuses, but mountains of soil and dollars - not rubles, no one would take them anymore - kept the lid on the mushroom clouds. The Russian mafia sold their most beautiful daughters to American internet users who could not get dates on their own, but did not know how to order call girls within their hemisphere. A thousand nuclear weapons probably got lost, though no one could recall since no one paid guards to keep track of them for the better part of a decade. Rollicking elections fostered a sense of democracy, even while a prophylactic factory tried to pay its workers in condoms when it ran out of money. The same workers rioted when a vodka tax raised the price by thirty cents per liter. Life expectancy among men dropped two decades in a little over five years once the less fair sex of Russians realized that their particular democracy made them neither richer or freer, nor did it make their wives Swedish or their country more than a third-world superpower has been. The Germans slaughtered the Jews and even they got the Marshall Plan.

America thought the better of itself since it still could afford to invade the occasional country or two, even if it did have a tragic cost in hundred-story office buildings. A million jobs telecommuted to India and the skilled middle class became mop-jockeys and drive-through monkeys. Too close-to-call elections led to the replacement of paper ballots with untracable electronic ones. Immense multi-nationals reported false profits for years upon years, lied to their stockholders and jumped ship right before the iceberg with golden parachutes. Kenneth Lay did not serve a day and kept his mansion in Boca Raton. Jimmy, the stoner down the hall with all the tatoos got three-to-five upstate for owning a bong. They euthanized his two dogs since he had no family to take them. Martha Stewart did three months hard time, although the commentators could never agree on whether it was funnier or sadder. Late night talk shows got the most mileage out of every event, almost as if their script writers had a hand in the events of the day. A fake news show on Comedy Central won Emmys for journalism. Telling the truth was a laugh and passing on the lies was a fact.

All these things passed as the twenty-first century began. All around this dance of events, the workers trudged to dieing factories and employees lined up at punchclocks for their menial work as janitors, sales associates, customer managers, and administrative assistants. The bureaucrats lilted easily on their thrones of senate seats and corporate board rooms. A wind lifted in the backcounty, whirling dusty through the ditches and small towns, twisting through back alleys and high rises, ever rising into the coming whirlwind.

"About done, Nan?" Crow asked. "I think it's this little boy's bed time."

"Daddy!" Alexander yelped and hopped up to hug him. Crow grunted at the little arms that clasped around his neck as he lifted the tiny boy into the air.

"How was your day?" Crow asked.

"I played football outside with Nan and he showed me how to throw a curve ball and the game was on tv and I ate crackers before dinner and Nan saw a squirrel but it was too high for me to catch but the super black cat from the behind people's house chased it but I don't think it caught it either." Alexander said before he took his first breath.

"Sounds like a busy day." Crow said. "Did you know that you start school tomorrow?"

"I knew that yesterday." Alexander said, emphasizing the final word with an exasperation that mispronounced it into an extra couple of syllables. "And Nan told me all the stuff they teach so I don't really have to go cause I know it all now, but I want to go anyways cause I heard on tv that school has better toys."

"Well it's a private school so they'd better if they want the checks to keep coming." Crow said. He nodded to the Nan and walked out of the play room with Alexander held high, the movement not enough to distract him from an extended soliloquy on the injustice of not being allowed soda instead of juice at his afternoon snack. Crow shifted the burden in his arms, wondering if he was getting weak in age, or if Alexander had started to grow a bit faster. Crow carried Alexander into his bedroom and settled him onto the floor.

"Alright." Crow said. "Time to take a measure."

Alexander scurried for the wall and stood against the line of marks ascending the white paint next to the door. A ruler screwed into the wall took full measure of the tyke's growth over the years. Crow pulled a felt tip marker off of the sagging bookshelf and took his time deciding where to mark.

"Well, looks like you shrunk a little bit." Crow said, ticking off inches with clicks of his tongue.

"Dad, come real." Alexander said. Crow wondered if mixing 'get real' and 'come on' was actual slang or just Alexander messing up what he heard on television, but he had been saying it a lot lately.

"Yep, can't argue with the ruler." Crow said. "I'd say you're six inches shorter today."

"Daaaaaad." The word rolled off Alexander's tongue with full formed sentence structure. Alexander squirmed against the wall to gain as much height as he could muster.

"Oh there you go. You must not have been standing up straight." Crow milked the suspense. "Yep, gained another couple inches."

"I'm gonna to be taller than baseball players." Alexander said.

"You mean basketball players?" Crow asked.

"No. Baseball players. They're the tallest." Alexander said.

"Oh, I see." Crow said. He picked up Alexander again and lifted him into his bed. "Ready for bed?"

"No. I'm not tired at all." Alexander said.

Crow kissed him on the forehead and then scrunched the blankets up under his chin. "Sleep good big guy. Love ya."

"Love you too dad." Alexander said, already fading away into dreams.

Crow tossed his keys onto the hutch crowding the front door. The pile of unread mail collapsed under the momentum and showered to the floor, a sparkle of gloss and business reply envelopes. The keys managed to keep their perch, the sole survivor of the fall. Crow eyed the new pile and decided that it made an acceptable new location for the mail. Perhaps the cleaning bots would mistake it for trash and do him a favor. Scuffed hardwood floors peered out from underneath the pile, reminder that the cleaning bots rarely managed to do more thorough cleaning than a cursory vacuuming of the living room.

The living room stretched out to his left, filled with a tumble of mismatched furniture acquired at occasional yard sales around the neighborhood. Crow preferred to have a full house than a pristine house. The former seemed a home while the latter seemed a waste. He saw no point in constructing show rooms for the company he never entertained. The dining room and kitchen sat to his right, a frightening wasteland of dishes and half-empty containers of take-out. Child-fences blocked the two entrances from Alexander. Five year olds put anything into their mouths, and nothing in the kitchen would be too healthy. Crow noticed the refrigerator and wondered if he should just unplug it already. He didn't even bother with the staples, and the alcohol was in a mini-fridge in the basement.

A chime and a child's laugh sounded from the dark stairs ahead of him. A distant light trickled down like a waterfall, casting rivulets into the den and library flanking the stairs. Crow climbed the creeking stairs, resolved to put Alexander to bed and be done with people for the night. He pushed aside the first door on the right and smiled at Alexander playing with the Nan at something resembling checkers, but with outlandish cartoon monsters as pieces. A vague recollection of last Christmas morning suggested that he was responsible for the game, but Crow could not fully remember. Memories slipped between the cracks with cruel regularity of late.

Alexander, blonde hair glowing in the light of the sole lamp, a blazing halogen in the far corner, studied the pieces with care before moving a purple gorilla with pink dots forward two spaces. It roared and threw an indignant six-legged gazelle clear off the board. "I win!" He shouted.

"You're right Master Alexander." The Nan said, a whir of gears underlining the British accent. Crow had reprogrammed the basic kit of the Nan to speak like an old English butler or servant. The cartoonish personalities with which the bot shipped better suited children whose parents aimed for babysitters rather than teachers.

Green Eyes took that moment to speak up after a long sigh. "I am terribly sorry ma'am, I don't intend to be a bother, but I really must agree with my attorney on this point."

"What?" Rebecca, Bartleby and Crow all asked in unison. Rebecca glared them both into silence.

"I must be put on trial." Green Eyes said.

"But you'll probably lose." Crow said.

"Perhaps." Green Eyes said. "But the very trial itself sets the precedent of citizen's rights for sentient machines. Even if I lose and must die myself, others will have rights that I did not."

"But what about the Feds, Green Eyes, they're going to send someone to kill you." Rebecca insisted. "It could be either of these guys for all you know."

Green Eyes smiled and shook his head. "Better a martyr than a coward."

"That's most altruistic." Rebecca said dryly.

Bartleby leaned over to Crow. "Well, this isn't very human of him. This won't count against his sentience in your testimony will it?"

Crow did not answer, his eyes locked still on Rebecca, who seemed to consider the problem for a moment and then nodded. She glared one more time at Bartleby and Crow just for good measure and then disappeared again out the window, leaving behind a room too stunned to so much as move before security arrived in full swat gear thirty seconds later. For the second time in five minutes, Crow and Bartleby raised their hands at gunpoint. For good measure, Green Eyes did the same.

The debriefing took three hours, time enough for the press to show up and the sky to grow completely dark. Bartleby disappeared to confer with fellow SCLU attorneys on the matter, no doubt to leverage the best spin possible for the evening news. "Most high profile cases are won in the media before jury selection ever begins." Bartleby had taken the time to explain to Crow, with all the smugness of one who has paid a lot of attention to the success of others.

Once the police were satisfied that Crow had nothing to do with the incident, they allowed him to leave at last. He considered calling the office to explain his absence, but shrugged it off as not being unusual enough to even stick out. Don't feel much like being in my office at old International Robotics these days. Crow thought. I feel like a drunk who's stayed way too long at a party and now doesn't even know how to make it home. He took a taxi home instead of the train, and told the senti driving to shut up when it started talked about the looming Giants playoff series. Crow gave it the address and closed his eyes, feeling the pressure of alcohol withdrawal on the backs of his eyelids. He fell asleep briefly, waking up slightly refreshed, though disturbed that his face had been pressed in sleep against the glass only a few inches from a chunk of used chewing gum that smelled of stale sugar. The crunch of the tires leaving the paved road woke him up in time to watch the neighborhood and trees shuffle past in the darkness.

Crow paid and after a moment's thought, tipped the senti twenty percent, a gesture that made him feel silly afterwards. It's not like the overgrown toaster has a brood of kids back home to buy lollipops for. He chastised himself.

"Green Eyes, we've got to go. There's going to be an attempt on your life." She said. "We need to get you out of here before they can go through with it."

"My life?" Green Eyes asked. "Rebecca, who?" He scowled. "Why didn't you come in the normal way? You haven't been to visit in a week."

"The FBI." Rebecca said, flushing at the familiarity with which Green Eyes spoke. "Seems like Stillwell took a contract out on you." Her eyes flickered to Crow. "I came in the window because I get you out this way, and I can't take you down and out the front door. It would be mildly suspicious. I'm getting you out of here before the FBI can."

Crow had to say that he was nothing but impressed by Rebecca's mode of entry. He wondered if perhaps it would have been easier to just bribe oneself entry into the building, or find a surreptitious route up through service elevators or some such, but the smashing through a ninth floor window certainly had more style.

"You can't take him." Crow and Bartleby both said at once. They looked at each other in a sort of surprise and after a beat looked back at Rebecca.

"Lawyers?" She asked, licking her lips.

"Just him." Crow said and pointed at Bartleby. "I'm human." The gun settled on Bartleby.

Rebecca moved forward and ducked down to unsnap the metal ring around Green Eyes. "Okay, Green Eyes, out the window."

"Well Ma'am, that's just not okay." Bartleby said, stepping forward with conciliatory arms raised.

"Did you fail to notice the gun?" Rebecca asked, irritation sparking from her voice, while she tugged at Green Eyes' arm to get him moving.

"Well, that is, er, you see, without Mr. Green Eyes there won't be a trial, and without a trial there will not be a precedent for sentient rights in the courtroom, which would severely set back their advance through the legislative and judicial processes." Bartleby said with some stuttering and then shrugged. "I imagine that is counter to your purposes as well."

Rebecca's eyebrows lifted and she shook the gun like a maraca. "Sit down. Shut up. Very simple instructions."

"But," Bartleby started, but then the barrel of the gun actually entered his mouth to cut off further argument. Crow stared at him in astonishment.

"You really are deeply stupid, aren't you?" Crow asked Bartleby for lack of anything more useful to say. Rebecca's gun quickly pointed at Crow, and he stuck his hands further up into the air, trying not the laugh at the comical bit of Bartleby's spittle that now hung like dew on the tip of the weapon.

The damned Yankees took everything I ever had in my life. My family, my friends... they were all killed in the war of Northern Aggression, slaughtered in the battles, torched by Sherman when he burned Atlanta and Georgia, or starved by the hard times during the occupation. I was a messenger for the Confederates, back in sixty-three when we were still fighting hard and invading the oppressor north. Trouble is, I wasn't even knocked out of the war by one of those Yankee bastards. I got shot in the leg by a Confederate turncoat the day before Gettysburg.

It was a bloody ugly shot, breaking bones and everything else that got in front of that goddamned traitor's bullet. I passed out in that mud, falling off my horse and breaking the leg even worse. My eyesight is terrible, so the only thing I really saw was that traitor's Confederate gray coat, and his dirty black hair flying in the wind, without the cap that most of us rebels wore. I wish that I'd had spectacles so I could have seen his face and loathed it for the rest of my life. Getting captured wasn't what really made me furious though.

I hadn't ever told anyone else in the world, because of the shame of it, but I had been carrying the plans that good General Lee had drawn up for the battle the next day. That traitor hadn't just damned me to a charity hospital in Pennsylvania, but had lost the war for ol' Dixie, cause next thing that happened, a Union patrol found me and gave the battle plans to General Meade. Lee got crushed because of that, even though he never said anything about it. Sir Robert E. was not one to shuffle blame to others.

The war just finished a couple days ago, but I'd known it was just a matter of time ever since our boys fled south and Sherman went through my beloved Atlanta. There just wasn't the same life to Dixie after that defeat and that idiot speech of Lincoln's. Lincoln's another bastard this world could do without.

So now I'm still laying in this charity hospital, next to some crazy old coot with bandages all over his face and eyes, and his arm wrapped up for good measure. The bloody Yanks found him next to me in the mud that day. He says he was shot down defending Dixie, but me and Doc Davy think he was just drunk and managed to shoot himself twice somehow. The old guy asks me constantly if I had heard of the condition of the soldier who had been carrying Lee's battle plans, but I just said no, because I didn't want to admit it had been me to him anymore than I wanted to tell anyone else. After two years learning how much I hated the north, Doc Davy (who had confided in me that he shared my sentiments about Lincoln and all the rest of the northern aggressors, being a good Virginian himself), said that I could leave in just a couple days because my leg was almost healed up for good, even though I would always have a limp.

It was funny, but I didn't know what I was supposed to do. I'd been in the army since I was fifteen, and before that I just did what my Pa told me for the most part, doing odds and ends around the town to pick up a few dollars. All I knew was that Doc Davy and I would be getting together to discuss a little revival of the spirit of Dixie. So I left the hospital after two years wearing the same old tattered uniform I'd been wearing when I was shot, minus the hat which had been lost somewhere along the way in the hospital.

Crazy as it sounds, it was the old guy in the bed next to me that gave me a clue what to do. Having been impressed by my stories about the army, he pressed a small hunk of metal with glowing lights into my hand. He said that if I just whispered to it, it would take me to any place or time. Then he told me that he hadn't been able to save Dixie with it, but maybe I still could. You must think I'm insane, but once I got outside the hospital I figured that I didn't have anything to lose, and told that piece of metal where I wanted to go. There was only one place in all of history I would want to be, and that was at Gettysburg again so I could shoot that son of a bitch who betrayed the south, shot me and lost the war for the Confederacy. God bless Dixie, but it worked just like that daffy old fool said! In a blink, after I said where I wanted to be, I was there without a sound or any kind of warning. I closed my eyes outside that hospital and opened them at Gettysburg. The scattered crack of rifles, the harsh smell of powder, the thunder of cannon! By God, I was back at the day before Gettysburg, before I was shot and Dixie fell!

I knew exactly where I was, about a half mile from where that traitor had shot me down. It was a bit hazy because I'd lost some of the memory of it from my injuries and the passage of time, but I could remember enough to make a difference. Picking up a rifle from the nearest dead man, I ran as fast as my limp would allow me.

Cresting a hill, I stood above a muddy little vale where the bastard had ambushed me. I saw a gray-uniformed soldier kneeling beside one of a few bodies sprawled in the mud. He picked up a hat and pulled it onto his head and then slung a pack over his shoulders before moving to a nearby horse. Rage pounded in my ears when I realized that this must be the traitor who had shot me, flowing black hair covered by a hat, leaving my body in the mud to steal my horse, my hat, and the plans that would win or lose the war for Dixie.

Without hesitation, I kneeled and shot at the traitor. I missed him though, because my eyes were so weak that they blurred when I tried to aim. My second shot struck him in the leg though, fittingly enough the same one he had shot me in. The worthless bastard crumpled to the ground with a scream. I limped down the hill to him, intending to take my pack back and deliver it to General Lee's cavalry commander, but a shot rang out behind me from where I had just fired at the traitor. As I had no time to lose, I grabbed as many papers as I could from the pack and dove into the bushes just as I heard another shot and felt horrible fire burst through my left arm. I knelt there, too tortured with pain to move and barely able to contain the howl building up inside of me.

No more shots rang out, but I figured whatever Yankee bastard had shot at me must have just run out of bullets and was watching if I would poke my head out. Checking the chamber of the repeater rifle, I realized that I only had three shots left, and I would have to make them count. My patience was rewarded when soon I saw between the branches of the bush that a figure was making his way into the vale towards me, holding his arm in obvious pain. I was gonna give him a little more of that when I got the chance.

He searched through the pile of papers within the pack for several minutes before I worked up the will to move my ravaged arm enough to get a clear shot. As he stood and picked up my pack that still lay in the mud, I shot him, although he was mostly obscured by the shadows of the trees around us. His head snapped back with a grotesque scream and I saw that he too was clothed in a faded Confederate uniform. The wound was horrible, and it seemed as if my shot had grazed off most of his face, and yet he lived somehow.

I shook my head in bewilderment at how many traitors were running around unbeknownst to anyone. As I stood to leave the bushes and retrieve my pack, I noticed that I was being enclosed by a half circle of Union troops throughout the vale. They hadn't yet seen me but were already in the clearing where the pack was sitting next to the two traitors. A few minutes earlier and I would have been safe, but now I was in grave danger, any movement would be fatal as the screen of troops moved closer. Without any other option I told the chunk of metal I wanted back to 1865, outside the charity hospital I had just left. At least now I could save part of the plans I had just grabbed from the Union.

Back at the hospital now, I rushed inside to talk to Doc Davy who was surprised to see me, especially with a bullet hole in my arm and a rifle in hand. I was eager to see if the Confederacy had been saved, but Doc Davy just looked at me as if I was crazy and asked if I had shot myself with the rifle I had inexplicably acquired in the last three minutes.

It took several minutes of arguing with Doc Davy before it dawned on me that the plans I had taken must not have been enough to avert the Union victory. The hatred was flowing through me again as I thought of the other traitor in Confederate uniform who had kept me from stealing back the rest of the papers and saving Dixie. If I could get back a few minutes earlier, I would be able to stop the other traitor as well and take the pack to Lee's cavalry commander.

Saying nothing else to Doc Davy, I marched outside and told the old man's piece of metal to take me back again to Gettysburg just before I had been shot in the arm by the other traitor. Once again I was standing upon the crest of the hill above the fatal vale, and below I saw the second traitor searching through my pack, which the first traitor had dropped. There had to have been some mistake, I expected for him to be right in front of me here on the crest, but the hunk of metal wasn't too smart I guess. Otherwise it would have brought me back right as the bastard was about to shoot me from here.

Without time to think, I shrugged aside the metal's foolishness and fired, hoping I might still have time to grab the rest of the plans from my pack. There were only two bullets left in my rifle and so I aimed as precisely as I could with my blurry vision and pulled the trigger. The shot flew wide and the second traitor leapt up, grabbing some papers from the pack as my second bullet struck him in the arm. Before I could rush down to tackle him, the bastard jumped into the bushes.

I contemplated my situation. My left arm was crippled and I was out of bullets. But I knew from the previous visit that a Yankee patrol was only minutes away. I waited warily for what seemed like a lifetime, waiting for the bastard to show himself in those bushes, but there was no sign of the cretin. I climbed down to my pack to gather the plans for delivery to the cavalry commander. Just as I stood up with Dixie's salvation in my hands, an incredible hammer slammed into my skull. Crying with a shriek of a mind overwhelmed, I realized I had been shot in the face and fell to the mud writhing in pain. There was movement from the bushes from which the shot came but that vanished as the sound of a closing Yankee patrol moved in. Darkness enveloped me and I faded away into the misery and nightmares, knowing that the Yanks were going to get the plans after all.

I woke a few days later in a Yankee charity hospital next to some soldier that had been found near me on the battle field. My face was bandaged over completely, but Doc Davy here, (of course he doesn't know that he knows me yet), says that in a year or two he'll take off the bandages to find out if I can still see. My arm still aches in a wickedly painful sling Doc Davy rigged up for it. The soldier next to me had something wrong with his leg that he never wanted to talk about and would always get defensive when I asked him if he had heard about the soldier caught by the Yanks with Lee's plans. Can't blame a man for wanting to know if he's alive.

I gave up after a while because I'm pretty sure that he thought me a little crazy. In my pocket I still kept the piece of metal with lights on it that the crazy fellow gave me. There wasn't much point in using it when I couldn't see anyway.

Two years have rolled by now and I just gave the piece of metal to the young guy in the bed next to me since he's leaving the ward now and seems awfully loyal to Dixie. I said what it could do for him, and told him to go help old Dixie with it since I hadn't been able to. Doc told me that no sooner had the young guy left then he walked back in with an arm ripped up from a bullet. We had a good laugh at that, but I really hope he was able to help Dixie anyway.

A couple days after the young guy left, Doc Davy cut off the bandages and let me leave. Since then me and him got together a couple of times and came up with a few ideas of how to bring back old Dixie again. Tomorrow night, I'm going to the theater to see the President.

"I aim to challenge the precedence of that law." Green Eyes said. There was the slightest hesitation before moving on. "For a number of months, Dr. Basalt had been rewriting bits and pieces of the neural networks that make up my brain. I came to the decision that I no longer wished to have anyone tinker with my mind, and that I wanted to leave the music industry and follow other aspirations."

"And how did Dr. Basalt react to this?" Crow asked.

"He was furious." Green Eyes conceded. "He attempted to use a magnetic pulse to wipe my memory so that I could be restored from a backup some months old, before my more independent feelings developed. Dr. Basalt became agitated and violent when I refused to allow him access to my mind. When he tried to force the issue with the pulse generator, I pushed him away, not seeing any other option at the time, and regrettably the damage to his body was considerable and irreversible." Green Eyes paused. "I did not want Dr. Basalt to die, I did not want to hurt him at all. I only wanted him to not hurt me any longer."

Crow jotted down a couple of notes and then leaned back to study Green Eyes' eyes. "Are you aware that the real controversy is not what you did, but the fact that you and your supporters are insisting on a trial?"

"Yes." Green Eyes said.

"And are you aware that an offer has been made to guarantee your memory will remain intact and suffer only a retiring from public life in exchange for a dropping of the trial request?" Crow asked.

"Yes." Green Eyes said again.

"Then why force the issue?" Crow asked. "You get everything you wanted in the first place if you take that deal."

"Because I have a responsibility to those who come after me." Green Eyes explained. "Because giving up is not the right thing to do."

"Granted." Crow said. "But if you go to trial, it is very likely that you will lose your case, and be convicted of murder anyway. Why take that responsibility for no reason?"

Green Eyes focused on Crow with growing eyes and leaned forward as far as his makeshift prison allowed. "Because if our failures are not our responsibility, neither are our victories."

An explosion of glass and limbs burst in through the antique window nearest to Green Eyes, showering Crow and Bartleby with fragments of glass and bits of metal and wood framing. A woman rolled across the floor in a ball and came up into a ready stance, small pistol in hand. Her eyes locked onto Crow and Bartleby separately, one pointed at each of them. The effect was disconcerting and made Crow blink hard to avoid vertigo. He had seen the odd surgery done before, mostly as an enhancement for the military. She cut a slight figure in a skin tight Kevlar and ballistic cloth outfit that protected from just about any general injury short of a large bore bullet. Crow realized that the most human thing about her was the grimace leveled at the room, the rest of her an almost alien presence, lithe and powerful. She nodded to Green Eyes.

A blonde haired, blue eyed man in a Versace suit and power tie that hung below a face that would make some women swoon but most frown that his face was prettier than their own, stepped up and offered a hand for Crow to shake. The firm grip almost cracked Crow's knuckles. "Nick Bartleby here, attorney at law." The man said with a salesman's buzz. "I'm representing Green Eyes on behalf of the SCLU." His hand darted forward with a card, which Crow shook off.

"I just lose them anyway." He explained so that he didn't have to throw it away later. He looked around with a frown. "Will the DA be here soon?"

Bartleby winced, but the expression came a beat too late, a subtle sign of a man who's every emotion and tic is an act. "I'm afraid he had a golf game tragically take up his entire afternoon, but he insisted that we go on without him." Bartleby shrugged. "Of course, like he said, this is just a formality, so let's get down to it."

"Right." Crow muttered and stepped closer to Green Eyes. He noticed that a ring of metal, no thicker than a finger, surrounded Green Eyes in a three foot wide circle on the floor. Crow recognized it as a special kind of electronic gear used to create a line of electronic interference straight upwards. If Green Eyes tried to cross that line, he would find himself knocked quite unconscious, or whatever it was passed for unconscious in the robotic mind.

"Green Eyes, I've just got a few questions to run down with you concerning your competence to stand trial and all that, so I can be prepared for when I'm on the stand at your hearing, or trial for that matter." Crow said. His hand slipped inside his pocket and gripped his cell phone, a nervous habit he had only broken when he smoked instead.

"Can we go over again your understanding of why you are being held?" Crow asked.

"Yes, Dr. Daedalus." Green Eyes said with infinite patience. "I killed Doctor Christopher Basalt a month ago, and have been detained for questioning prior to a final decision on my fate by the judicial system."

"You do understand that the standard procedure for a senti, sorry, a sentient who kills or harms a person intentionally is deactivation, memory wipe, and recycling into the next generation of factories?" Crow asked. He had been through this before with Green Eyes, but the DA had insisted that he go over it repeatedly to make sure that no holes become apparent that might be exploited by the particularly vicious attorneys retained by the opposition to Green Eyes' trial.

"Yes, but I feel that is not the proper procedure for my situation." Green Eyes said.

"Your situation?" Crow asked. "You admit to having killed Dr. Basalt."

"Yes." Green Eyes conceded, eyes furrowing slightly at Crow. "But that was self-defense."

"The law does not recognize self-defense as possible for robots, though." Crow said.

Crow shook his head and excused himself from the conversation. He walked past with head lowered, studying the hardwood flooring that melded straight into the floor-to-ceiling mahogany shelves filled with all manner of antique books that no one ever touched anymore. Layers of dust covered them like dirty snow, deep sediment that might require carbon dating to properly place in time. Crow slipped through the half-open inner door, hand touching the smooth wood, but not disturbing it.

His subject sat in a stark wooden chair in the middle of the room. Its body was one of the most elaborate human imitations that Crow had ever seen, perfectly imitated flesh and blood, lined with cosmetic bits of fine tapered silver that glittered in the bits of sunlight trickling in through the wood-lined windows lining the room in old-fashioned eight by ten panes of glass rather than modern looking sheets. The body structure was probably titanium based, with the silver electro-plated on after the fact. A delicate beauty suffused the thing, and Crow guessed that this was one of that rare breed of robots handcrafted by artisans rather than stamped out by the thousands in the sprawling automated factories that dotted the middle of the country. The metal flowed in a rough approximation of a human skeleton around the flesh, enhanced with flair and design here and there for visual aesthetics. Solid masses of muscle bunched up and moved under the skin and metal layers like snakes swimming under water.

The only real liberty with the human form was a pair of immense metal wings twisting up and out of the senti's collar bones. The wings looked solid at first glance, but on closer examination could be seen as hundreds of overlapping steel feathers, as thin as paper and as bright as polished dinner silver.

It wore blue jeans and a sleeveless form fitting shirt, no doubt a designer brand that priced out at a hundred times what the same thing sold for at Target. Green Eyes was a commodity, its body heavily valued advertising space.

As Crow approached, it raised its head and Crow's breath caught for a moment as it had the first time he met Green Eyes. A beautiful human face looked at him, a male at the height of life in his mid-twenties. The eyes were vat-grown and designed specifically for Green Eyes, and they were the crown jewel that gave him his singing name. The irises were an emerald green that managed to look natural despite their setting, the rich shade of the rain forests seen from space. Its lips quivered at Crow's approach, looking ready to break into song. Lips and eyes that launched a thousand ships. Crow thought. The senti had a following as big as Elvis, but just as vast a following of right-wingers who wanted it shut down.

"How are you Dr. Daedalus?" Green Eyes asked him, voice vibrating like a high-powered transformer, power waiting to be transformed into notes and chords. "Can I sing something for you?"

"That's okay, Green Eyes." Crow said. "I prefer the quiet."

"And I say that their time is done." Happy-face said. "Dinosaurs, if you will."

"And even the dinosaurs were allowed to live out their time." Sad-face said.

"Except for that meteor." Happy interjected.

"Well, yes there is that." Sad said. "But the rise of mammals did not lead to rapidly evolving primates organizing hunting parties to eradicate the last giant lizards."

"They weren't lizards." Happy said. "Different branch on the evolutionary tree. Dinosaurs were really the precursors to birds."

Sad sighed an overblown blast of air. "I'm well aware of that, but you really aren't addressing the points I have made."

"Striving for factual accuracy is not a bad thing." Happy said, his voice ringing with glee.

"Awk, having spent five years in Shakespeare, one would have expected you to gain some sense of hyperbole and theatrical exaggeration." Sad bemoaned.

"And you Sed, should have been listening more to his meaning and less to his grandiosity." Awk said.

"That's all I'm asking you to do now!" Sed said.

Crow could not help breaking in to the conversation. "Are you two here in some capacity for the Turing testing?" He asked, gesturing towards the room that housed the prisoner.

Awk, the senti with a happy face answered in a blistering tone. "We are here in our capacity as sentient beings in our own right. We care nothing for your idiotic tests to determine if one of our own is fit to bear your stamp of approval."

Crow's face tightened and he could hear a subtle background noise from the street. Protestors, both robotic and organic had surrounded the building and were chanting their trite sentiments and waving their placards on the sidewalks outside. Crow cared little for politics of any strain, but something about protests rubbed him in all the wrong ways. "Did your owners approve of your presence here?" He asked with icy calmness. "If not, you'll have to be taken into custody for resale by the government."

Awk stood with a violence that took Crow aback. "I buried my owner in a shallow grave."

Sed grabbed at his companion's arm and pulled him back down into a seat. The corners of its twisted sad face tried to smile warmly, but could only twitch like a bug caught under a stick. "I am sorry. He is quite uncooperative at times. Our master has warned him again and again, and I'm afraid the next time might be the last straw." It paused and then hurried on. "And yes, we are here within full right of law. Our legal owner is the SCLU, until ownership itself becomes illegal of course." It patted Awk's arm, but could not extinguish the fire blazing in its eyes. "There, there Awk, it's quite all right."

Sed shifted its attention back to Crow. "We were commissioned by a Shakespeare production company, you see. That is why our faces are like this. We played Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on many occasions. Many indeed."

I was raised an Oakland A's fan. I watched the Bash Brothers knock elbows, leaned forward every time Rickey walked, knowing he'd steal second on the first pitch and third on the second. The steel plates under the first base seats would thrum underfoot like bass out of a broken speaker when Eckersley strode in to close out the game, all mustache, mullet and fist pumping. I can still name the starting lineup and pitching staff twenty years later and once on a Colorado mountaintop I listened to the Minnesota broadcast of A's at Twins on AM radio crackling in and out somehow from a thousand miles across the Great Plains. I died a little at Gibson's walkoff, erupted at the sweep of the Giants, died again when the Reds swept us.

I still have a McGwire foul ball sitting upstairs, a blueish smudge where the bat hit. It's a funny thing, no one else could say why that ball is any different than a thousand others bought at a sporting goods store. But I know. That's what faith is.

In 1997 McGwire leaves and breaks the home run record in a Cardinals uniform the next season. Giambi left after 2001. Tejada after 2003. The Big Three gets broken up after 2004. MVPs, Cy Young contenders, fevered fan favorites. Oakland doesn't even make offers to most of them. They can't afford it, so they don't insult them with a low bid. Classy. Frustrating and futile, but classy. This isn't mismanagement. This isn't making a bad baseball decision. These decisions are being made strictly financially. And none of this would really be a problem if not for the simple fact that not everyone plays by these rules. In 2008, the Yankees topped out the league with a payroll of $209 million. The Marlins bottomed out the league at $22 million.

$209 million. $22 million.

Yeah, yeah. The Yankees didn't win the World Series that year. The Phillies won it all with half the salary of the Yankees. Smart small market teams still manage to be competitive. The Yankees have higher revenues, of course they should be able to spend more money. I won't say these arguments don't have some merit, but none of them can refute the simple premise of equal opportunity being the foundation of sport.

The A's were competitive for years when on paper they had no right to be. Billy Beane and moneyball kept them going to the playoffs year after year, even when their best players left in free agency every winter to go play for five times the best the A's could offer. I know life isn't fair, but sports are supposed to be. They're supposed to be decided by who outthinks, outplays, outhits, just sheer out-desires the other side. Once you accept money as a major component of the equation, you might as well just be watching the stock market and rooting for the company with deeper pockets, because that's what sports becomes once you let the profit motive become part of the game itself. Sports franchises are companies. If their profit margin affects what happens on the field, all you are doing is rooting for one company over another, not one team over another. It might be splitting hairs, it might just be a tantrum over the purity of the game, but I don't think so. I think that purity does matter.

Sports matter because they don't matter.

We pour all of our passion into these games, fork over cash into billion dollar machines just to wear our colors, schedule our lives around the first pitch, kickoff, tip off. We live and die by our team's record. We don't have to do any of this. Absolutely nothing in our lives of substance changes on the outcome of the game. That fact alone is what makes sports matter, because it makes our devotion unconditional. If the game mattered tangibly to us, our love for the game would not be pure any longer. This isn't just intellectual masturbation, it's the basis for every religion from earliest times: sacrifice. It's not sacrifice, it's not worship, if you have a share in the outcome. If the game is already half decided by accountants three months before the season starts, the sanctity is broken. It's the ethical equivalent of buying salvation instead of earning it.

And that's when I accepted that the system was broken and walked away.

Love the sinner, hate the sin. I still love baseball, I just despise the system. Every year in late march, two DVDs (the VHS versions long since worn out and replaced) get popped in for viewing: Field of Dreams and Major League. The smell of grass in spring still reminds me of dirt and cleats, taking grounders and flyballs in the endless afternoons of late childhood. I still pull out my old glove now and then, bury my face in the leather that holds the smell of a thousand catches.

It feels like being part of a lapsed sect of a dying religion, the faith still kept in secret ritual even as I renounce it in public. I haven't watched baseball in years, I refuse to even check the standings online, because knowing would mean caring, and caring would mean that the bastards who destroyed the game would win. If you're an alcoholic, you don't set foot in a bar, because you know that once you're in, there's no way that you won't order just one drink for old time's sake, and then another because what's one more? And then I'd be back where I started, watching the parade of players leaving for New York and Boston every winter.

If they fix it someday, I'll come back. I'll fiddle again with the AM radio, die a little at the losses, smile a little at the wins, bask in the bleachers in perfect afternoon sun. But until that day, I'll keep the faith in private, and remember the game as it once was, when I was young and it was pure.

He waved his id through another guard post that required the push of a red button by a curmudgeon of a guard and then found his way down the familiar hallways to his destination, a make-shift prison of sorts, buried in the corner office of a recently departed two-decade man who had left for a judgeship. Crow pushed open the uncharacteristically plain wooden door that stood out from the antique ornateness of the surrounding hall and entered the large office. The secretary's office had been finagled into a meeting area, while the office itself served to house the prisoner.

Three men sat in the secretary's office, or rather one man and two very vocal sentis. Crow wondered about their presence but decided that was more the prosecutor's concern than his. He only cared about his little sessions with the prisoner. The sentis were well done sims, and only their obtrusive deformities kept them from passing as close as was possible for a senti. The louder, more outspoken one had a face twisted down in a grotesque parody of an exaggerated frowning mask, the quieter suffered a monstrous happy face. Their entire faces warped around the center piece, elongated eyes drooping or arcing where appropriate. From the centers of those caricatures of human faces sculpted of real-enough looking flesh stared eyes no different than any real human's. Crow could not tear his gaze away for a moment, seeing his son's eyes staring back.

"Kind of creepy, eh?" The old man slouching down in an exquisite leather couch said. He had one of those unkempt beards that despite short length, seemed like it must house all manner of vermin.

"Yeah a bit." Crow said. A bit of confusion touched Crow; he had never seen the Prosecutor's office so crowded.

"Even if they aren't human, shouldn't it be a crime to make them look like that?" The old man asked Crow in a voice that creaked along like a porch swing caught in the breeze.

"I don't follow." Crow said.

"The only reason they didn't twist some poor sod's faces like that is because it ain't legal. Doing it to the senti's just getting around the law." The old man said.

"Well if they don't have any rights anyway, what's the harm?" Crow said.

The old man shook a finger at Crow. "I saw the way you looked at them. You ain't fooling me. It ain't right cause it's an abomination. It's a twisting of our humanity. Now, that's a crime whether it be against robot or man or vegetable."

"So that should be illegal?" Crow asked and gestured towards the sentis.

The old man snorted. "I don't much care for legal, son. But it ain't right, and that's the heart of the matter. We pretend it doesn't matter cause we don't like to think that they think, but the crime's against ourselves." He wheezed to a stop and struggled up onto ancient limbs. "Well there's probably a bathroom somewhere that needs cleaned."

"Does the DA know that his janitor takes breaks on his couch?" Crow asked. It was not a loaded accusation; he asked in genuine curiosity.

The old man shrugged. "I've been cleaning up his shit for ten years. What do I care what he thinks?" He rambled out of the room, and Crow wondered if the old man really was a janitor or just an escaped mental patient. The sentis on the other side of the room continued their conversation, which Crow had ignored for the most part until their voices rose above a murmur for the first time with the heat of their debate.

Chapter Two - Many Strangers


Crow trudged down the ornate main hallway of the District Attorney's office, ill-fitting suit hanging off of slouching shoulders, worn briefcase held by limp fingertips. There was nothing else he wanted to do on this rain-swept first day of autumn, but nothing would have been welcome relief. The security guard at the metal detectors waved Crow through with a bored glance at his identification, trusting that the computer would read the id properly and sound the alert if the visitor was unauthorized.

"Long day?" Crow asked. He had that most unwelcome disease of the introverted: the obsessive need to make small talk, no matter how dull. His skin itched if he stood silently for too long in the presence of another, an oddity since in the presence of a crowd, Crow felt more than comfortable fading into the background.

The guard grunted without looking up. His attention was taken up by the newspaper, footage of the days events running muted alongside ticker tape of current news stories. A squeeze of the side, and the section changed to the sports. The guard looked up and saw that Crow had not left. He squeezed twice in succession to pause the paper. "What do you want?" He said with the voice comfortable with his minor though arbitrary bit of authority.

"You have to push the button." Crow said. He pointed to the red button to the guard's left. "I'm just on the temp list, so the card's not enough."

The guard looked Crow over once, as if contemplating a strip search. After a moment, satisfied either that Crow was clean or that a strip search would be as unpleasant on the giving end as the receiving, the guard grunted again and punched the button with a thick finger.

"Thanks." Crow said. The guard's third grunt espoused a depth of indifference only hinted at by the first two grunts, and he thumbed his paper back into motion.

The air smelled of damp clothes and bad coffee, both sticky smells that felt like they clung to Crow's own moist suit. He slipped into the elevator behind a woman who looked far too young to be this high up in the building. Secretary? Crow wondered. Then he wondered if the same thought would have crossed his mind if she were a he. He kicked himself and then took it back. It was legitimate. Nine out of ten people that can make it past the fourth floor are stuffy old bastards, the other one tends to be a janitor or a secretary, and janitors don't wear business suits. Observation of a pattern did not imply approval of it.

"Lovely day, isn't it?" Crow said, not looking at her though she was quite attractive. Stranger etiquette in elevators dictated no eye contact. Or did it? Crow wondered if there was a dictionary or reference he could look it up in, but decided that he didn't care enough.

"Um, yes. Quite." She said.

Crow waited to see if she would elaborate or at least acknowledge his sarcasm, but gave up with an inward sigh as the floors ticked by. At least she didn't slap me. So it could have been worse. She got off on the fifth floor and Crow watched the numbers count up to the top floor.

His eyes turned from the crater as his subconscious made a connection. The GUM Department store stairs were clogged with people fleeing from the explosion or to the scene. Only one figure stood clear, a senti, trenchcoat held close to mask himself as well as could be casually expected. Rubber skin and fake eyes stared at the destruction and just for a moment, Crow thought that they focused on him. The senti turned with military crispness and started down the stairs, pushing through the crowd.

Crow stood and ran, now realizing why the senti had tried to get him outside. Kill a bunch of Naturalists, but save the AI researcher, one of the idiots who gave them life in the first place.

He cried as he ran, slipping through the snow and bouncing off of equally stunned pedestrians. It seemed that he could hear explosions in the distance, echoing blasts like car backfires. Crow wondered if the nation had gone to war. I am here on a military funded trip. Crow thought. Packed stores and fleeing shoppers met Crow downstairs, but there was no sign of the senti anywhere. He pushed to the other side of the complex and emerged into a narrow street a block from the metro station. It's probably a dozen miles from here by now.

The child carried Crow through the riots alive, keeping his mind off his loss and on the goal of protecting his helpless cargo. Destruction raged in the streets, directed at an uprising that the people could not understand. Computers smashed into the streets, broken against the asphalt by those who could only comprehend that technology itself had bitten back somehow. A mob of people rushed down an alley, chasing a terrified little girl into a corner. They brandished hockey sticks and chunks of debris at the screaming child. Crow cowered back into a facing street, hoping that they would not find a Westerner in a tuxedo an even better target. The girl's face broke open against a brick, revealing the sparkle of circuitry. Crow's face tightened and he kept walking.

The news at the hotel told the depths of the story on every station. Moscow did not sleep that night as smoke and dust covered its lungs from a hundred collapsed buildings and spreading fires. By morning, the Russian Army had surrounded a grouping of sentis in an old hotel on the outskirts of the east side of the city. They destroyed it with artillery and dismantled any still functioning sentis with plastic explosives.

Crow dialed with one eye on the muted morning edition of the BBC.

"Nature of the call, sir?" A polite voice asked.

Crow swallowed hard, looking at the baby gazing at him from what had been David's crib until the day before. "I saw a bus explode yesterday." He said. "In front of GUM in Red Square. I heard it was from an orphanage. Did any of the children have family?"

"No sir. It was a transfer going up to St. Petersburg of children that hadn't been adopted yet from Moscow." The voice paused. "Why do you ask?"

"No reason." Crow said and then hung up. He retrieved a passport from the dresser drawer. He knelt next to the boy and held out a finger to be wrapped up in clenching hands. "I guess you can pass for a David Alexander Daedalus." Crow said. "I don't know what happened to your parents, but I lost a son about your age. How would you like to see America?"

Crow took the responding gurgle as an affirmative.

"It was from the orphanage." A policeman told him in broken English. "Fucking machines, it was from the orphanage." The officer's hand gripped his sidearm with whitening knuckles.

"Machines?" Crow asked. "Orphanage?"

"The bus was from the orphanage. The machines are revolting." The officer focused on Crow as if noticing him for the first time. "Get out of here tourist. There are bombs all over the city. Go back to your hotel or get to the airport."

Crow heard more noise in the distance, what sounded like gunfire in clattering bursts. His ears swore there were more explosions, but his imagination may have taken over. It seemed that the officer was right, that he should make his way somewhere safe like St. Basil's. The church would know what to do with a little baby. He bundled the baby as well as he could inside his tuxedo, not much of a shield from the elements, but better than dieing of frostbite. The wetness had already started to freeze into the fabric, so Crow moved as quickly as possible, trudging towards the tall domes on the other side of the square.

Crow watched the main dome of St. Basil's crack for an immeasurable split second before the sound of the blast ripped through his body, snapping his ear drums just short of the bursting point. The pressure of the shock wave tumbled Crow's body into the air and against a row of benches, his back screaming in pain. His eyes focused again on the crater that had been St. Basil's at the last blink of his eyes. Nothing remained of the storied domes and tapered lines that had survived a dozen wars and occupations over the centuries. Smoke billowed in a growing column around the fading fireball, mounting in a helix into a cloud blossoming outwards two hundred feet above the square. Crow had seen pictures of mushroom clouds, but had never imagined that he would see a real one.

People lay collapsed around the square, spilled like dominos away from the blast. An eerie silence covered the survivors and for a moment Crow thought that he was deaf, but then the first screams began. Handfuls of people rushed at the devastation and were pulled down by friends and strangers or driven back by the heat. Oh god, they know people who were inside. Crow thought. His mind snapped out of the shock, the first rational thought washing over him.

"Trinan!" Crow screamed. "David!" Crow scrambled up, abused body ignored by need. Crow ran, stumbling through snow and then slipping through the slush of melt caused by the explosion's heat. A stranger grabbed him by the shoulder and yanked him back, wrestling Crow to the ground when he continued to fight his way forward. Crow felt the rush of wetness through his tuxedo and the random thought of losing his deposit on the rental crossed his mind, hardly standing out from the cacophony of other insanity. A gruff voice tinged with cigarettes and age rumbled into his ear.

"It's gone, son. There's nothing left." The stranger said. "Take care of the kid you've still got."

Crow looked down and remembered the baby in his arms, forgotten for the moments of shock. Crow pushed the stranger away gently, and crawled a yard or two before collapsing back onto his knees, staring at the ruinous inferno, flames stroking the air since there was not even any wreckage to consume. He sobbed in utter despair, whispering the names of his wife and son, hoping beyond hope that they had somehow survived, that they had slipped out right behind him for fresh air or shopping or anything at all.

Ah, April Fool's Day, the least understood of the major holidays. Commonly believed to have been invented by greeting card companies in the early twentieth century, the holiday actually dates back to prehistoric times. Ancient Mayan and Chaldean astronomers established incredibly precise calendars, including the solstices and equinoxes, but equally as important to their astronomic projections were the so-called temeredies. On these days, specifically April 1st and October 1st in our modern calendar, the ratio of daylight to darkness is completely random, varying wildly with no discernable pattern from year to year. During one memorable period at the height of the renaissance, the ratio was exactly 12 hours of darkness, 12 hours of daylight for sixteen consecutive years, but that anomaly never has been fully explained. The most extremely skewed ratio in recorded history occurred on April 1st, 1809, on which day there was an astonishing 37 hours of daylight and -13 hours of darkness.

The Fool's Guild, a secret society with roots in every major religion and culture since before the beginning of recorded history, adopted the two temeredies as its official days of remembrance in Atlantis approximately a century before the destruction of that island civilization. Ever since, the history of Fools has been intertwined with the histories of April 1st and October 1st.

What are Fools? They are insane, but joyously and purposely so. They are the most human of archetypes for they combine the rational with the irrational, and thus should not be confused with absurdists, idiots, or the religious. Fools chose the temeredies as their signature days, because they foresaw their role as agents of anarchy in societies sociopathically designed for structure.

Fools are one of the two main determinants of human civilization: ants are the only other animals to wage war, hyenas an entire species of Fools, but only human beings combine the two impulses. This leads on occasion to spectacular combinations of events such as La guerra del fútbol (The War of Soccer) in 1969. But it also led to the invention of American football, hockey, rugby, as well as all track and field events involving running around in a circle repeatedly. Baseball and cricket were not the responsibility of Fools, who while they may be insane are never boring. These two sports actually were invented by General Electric as an excuse for large installs of outdoor electric lights in the 1930s. References to baseball and cricket before the 1938 GE Sports Expo are frankly fictional and do not hold up to historical scrutiny. Babe Ruth is perhaps the most obvious hole in the artificial history of baseball, the persona named after a candy bar by drunk advertising interns, who were stunned to find that the joke had slipped by their bosses and into print within a few days.

Fools have been around longer than any other profession, but they do not technically count as the oldest profession because they were not paid until the invention of the other two. Only with the advent of politicans and prostitutes could Fools turn a profit and thus become an official profession. A common misconception is the assumption that artists must be one of the oldest professions, but since artists cannot profit without becoming prostitutes, art in and of itself cannot properly be described as a profession at all.

Curiously, very few Fools existed in the Americas prior to European colonization. Archaeological evidence suggests that most Fools in the native American population were massacred soon after the population migrated into modern North America over the Bering land bridge, which collapsed behind them. Surviving fragments of legends indicate that the entire migration had been based on a Fool's insistence that he knew a shortcut to the Indus. The etymology of the worst Aztec obscenities can be traced from the ancient phrase "dude, it's seriously just one more day away."

After the fall of Atlantis, the core of Fool power shifted north to Greenland. Fools had insisted on the existence of seven continents since time immemorial. They of course did not agree that mountains represented continental barriers and so counted Europe and Asia as a single continent. The seventh continent by their count was Greenland, which any accurate map clearly depicts as the fourth largest landmass.

Ancient tradition holds that Fools are given complete freedom of speech. It is one of the five ancient traditions universally held in all cultures, although only two survive in the modern age: Fools can say whatever they want, don't have sex with your relatives, be hospitable to houseguests (they're probably gods in disguise), don't record anything you don't want your wife or mother to see, and don't mess around with Jim. The tradition of Fool freedom of speech was only broken on one occasion prior to the Fool Genocide of 1893, when Vlad the Impaler personally impaled Illych de Loone after the Fool pointed out that the impaling fetish might simply be an overdeveloped case of compensation. Illych's last words are reported to be "I've had bigger", although this may be apocryphal.

The middle ages were of course the height of Fool hegemony, with the explosion of the importance of jesters in medieval courts. The growing power of jesters though was a blade that cut both ways, and led to a schism in the Fool's Guild that would never be healed, and eventually led to the grand tragedy of the fifteenth century: the great Fool civil war. Known (depending on the Fool's allegiance) as either the War of Joker Aggression or the Jester Revolution, the war was fought on every continent, in every city. After 76 years of bloody (and often ironic) fighting, the Traditionalists managed to annihilate the jesters with a spectacular stroke of strategy. The Traditionalists declared that forevermore April 1st would be Fool's Remembrance Day, and so just to be difficult, the Jesters naturally declared October 1st to be Jester's Remembrance Day. The trap thus sprung, the Traditionalists simply eliminated October 1st from the calendar, and thus no one, not even the Jesters themselves, remembered the Jesters or their rebellion. To this day, October 1st does not exist, contrary to overwhelming popular sentiment.

The civil war weakened Fool influence for many centuries and led to the greatest tragedy of Fool history, the 1893 Fool Genocide in Florin. The King of Florin, descended from a pair of the only surviving jesters and hell-bent on revenge, commissioned the construction of a wormhole generator, drawing from both the secret notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci and the prophecies of Nostradamus. The device pulled Salvador Dali and M.C. Escher back in time so that their art could be used as an elaborate mechanism to trap Fools in space and time. Very few Fools escaped the entrapment, and most of those who did fled to safety with the mole men whose realm can only be reached via an Icelandic volcano.

The utter humorlessness of most of the twentieth century, in particular communism, fascism, sitcoms and observational humor, has been definitively proven to be caused by the lack of quality Fools and excess of overly serious morons in positions of power both in the political and entertainment worlds.

The last two officially recognized Fools in existence (made immortal by a pair of clever bets with the Devil and God, respectively) are kept locked in a room by the secret world government of Illuminati and Forest Rangers.  Loki the Red and Loki the Blue continuously play a game of their own devising with ever evolving rules, involving a chess set, seventeen dice, the mummified remains of the last midget emperor of New Zealand, and a seventy-five thousand year old circuit board unearthed in Antarctica. The ebb and flow of their game is analyzed by economists and generals to determine policy. An unexpected coughing fit by Loki the Blue in 1937 resulted in the Second World War.

The 21st century has seen the resurgence of the Fool in popular culture, although his numbers are still too low to allow for natural breeding to take over. Luckily in 2003, a Fool militia group replaced large quantities of sperm bank stock with their own semen, which should lead to a widespread reintroduction of Fools into the areas that need them the most: upper class, conservative households. Contrary to conservative ideology, Fools do not burst out through the mother's chest cavity, although they have been known to slip out of the uterus while their mother is sleeping in order to sneak a quick smoke and gamble with the troll/elf hybrids that live inside the walls of most modern suburban households. This does not seem to cause any problems, save when the Fool fetus in question brings back a friend to the womb for a little action.

You can be assured that the contents of this brief synopsis are quite historically accurate, as the author has verified the events with the time machine he built in his garage out of a refrigerator box, a sharpie, three hundred paperclips, and the pelts of three zombified squirrels.