"Iago Coakes woke from a most beautiful dream. In this hypnagogia, he and Doris Fray, a girl he’d known in high school, had been sailing. Coakes’ first thought on waking was that the fresh mist of salt, and by inference, his whole dream, had come from ferrous iron, the gingivitic seep which caked in sticky horizontal ridges on his teeth.

Coakes had dozens of such minor physical impairments. His eyes periodically leaked from chronic conjunctivitis. His wide mouth held the furred tongue of constipation, and panted halitotic reeks. He had flat feet, and atruamatic patellar instability. He had thinning hair, and a short, fat and sharply curved penis. Coakes’ body was a temple to chaotic Eris. A hefty yet weak, high machine, with angry fish-hook fingers. Coakes suspected, deep down, that the infirmity which afflicted his cock was related somehow, to a habit of frottage he had nurtured as an adolescent. This was one of eight secrets about himself that Coakes had never, and would never, tell anyone."

The afternoon began to creep across the city as Boyd, Reggie, and Smelts jogged down the sidewalks of Wan Chai, looking for a taxi to pick them up. Crowds on the street would part, panicked at the sight of the three of them, and this didn’t help with the taxi situation. More than one taxi had sped away in a panic as Reggie approached them, frightened by the sight of a yeti with his arms waving in the air to get them to slow down and pick them up. One cab driver, who was cornered at a stoplight, burst from his taxi and fled down the street, screaming, “Yeti! Yeti! Yeti!”
As the last of the taxis sped away from them, Reggie stopped, tired and out of breath, on the sidewalk in front of a Thai food restaurant. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “No taxi in this city is going to stop for the three of us. I, alone, look like their worst nightmares come true and that’s not even including Smelts.”
“Are you implying something about my looks, mate?” Smelts asked.
“No, no,” Reggie said. “The bottom line is that we need someone reliable.”
“Well, who could that be?” Boyd asked. “No taxi in this city will stop for us.”
“Yeah,” Smelts said. “And that stupid swordfish is gonna be comin’ along any minute now.”
“I have my connections,” Reggie said, pulling a phone from his pocket and tapping in a number. “Hello, Xiao? It’s Reggie…Yeah, it’s been way too long…Listen, we’re in a bit of a spot down here at Johnson’s Road and Queen’s Road East and we need a lift…Yeah…Yeah…Okay.” Reggie turned to them and said, “We’re in luck. He’s in the area.”
After a wait of around five minutes across from the prying eyes of a group of locals standing a safe distance across the street, Smelts said, “I think our ride is here.”
Up to the curb pulled a taxi cab that in weight, shape and size looked very much like the thousands of taxis that circulated throughout the arteries of the city, only there was something a bit peculiar about this one. The main difference between this taxi and the ones Boyd was used to seeing was the fact that this one looked as if someone had rolled it off the side of a cliff. There were scrapes and dents and scratches all over it, and it looked as if it might fall apart at any time. It also had the usual markings of a taxi all over it, including the little sign on the roof and white writing on the doors. But upon closer inspection, it was obvious that all the writing on the cab was backwards and the windows were smoky, making it impossible to see inside. “That’s our ride?” Smelts asked. “Why don’t we just hop in the back of a garbage truck?”
“Garbage trucks aren’t reliable,” Reggie said. “This guy is reliable.”
They ventured up to the cab and opened the back door, which was like opening the door to an ancient tomb as a major gust of white smoke burst forth from the cracks. It was as if the air inside the car had been trapped for centuries. Strange, creepy-crawly bugs began to make their way out from the inside, and Boyd saw several birds (although he was sure they were actually bats) flutter forth from the door to freedom.
“What kind of taxi is this?” Smelts asked.
“You’re just going to have to trust me,” Reggie said. “Get in.”
“I’m not gettin’ in there,” Smelts said. “You go first.”
“Fine,” Reggie said. “Chicken!”
Reggie climbed into the taxi first, followed by Smelts and then Boyd. Once inside, Boyd could see that all the lurking suspicions he’d had about the interior were confirmed as he settled into his seat. The backseat was rotting away. In some places, the inside cushioning was exposed. In others, the very same cushioning was disintegrating away into a pulpy mess. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling and an eerie haze hung in the air that contained a putrid odor that was much worse than smoke. From beneath the seat in front of him, Boyd caught a glimpse of two, yellow eyes watching him from the shadows.
“Cor!” Smelts said as he shut the door. “I put my foot in something slimy!”

I decide to go with the truth. “We don’t know that, but there is a possibility, yes. Just as there’s a possibility that something totally different happened to Holly. It’s our job to find out for certain what happened and get her back for you if we can.”

Stop there, and pause as I catch sight of the framed family photos on the mantel at the far side of the room. Holly, smiling at me from behind the glass. Preserved, like a butterfly in a case. Next to the pictures are a couple of sporting trophies from some school tennis competition. A tiny model of a clarinet. Maybe she was learning to play the instrument. Fragments of a life preserved in miniature. Part of me wants to warn her parents, to soften the inevitable blow. To tell them that in child kidnap cases of stranger abduction for sexual purposes where the child is not released after the initial offence, ninety percent are dead within twenty-four to thirty-six hours of the abduction.

Mrs Tynon opens her mouth and says in a quiet, clear voice, eyes blank and hollow, “Did you find out for certain what happened to the other girls, Agent Rourke?”

That seventy-five percent are killed within the first three hours.

“Did you make the same promises to their parents? In all those weeks, do you even know where those children are?”

That chances are, she’ll never see Holly alive again.

“My daughter is dead, isn’t she Agent Rourke?”

Somewhere in the desert, (it is whispered in red flowers that grow on the black-soiled banks of thick, dark-swollen rivers) there is a Tower which was once a Baobab tree, and in that tower there lived a little black prince-- or perhaps a princess, no one is quite sure-- who was born a vulture and was not very happy. In some versions of the story, it is not a human child at all, but a little doll of a baby, made by a mad toymaker who had some of the Pygmalion in him manifest in his insanity. What is Frankenstein but Pygmalion a little unbalanced, after all?

Felice the Writer wrote a horror story about it, for all that she knew what it was really about. In her story, some Taxidermist-man lost his wife giving birth to a still-born child, whom he snuck away from the hospital in a jar of formaldehyde and attar of roses. He went into his laboratory filled with stuffed animals: springing cats and cougars, bears with glass eyes and beloved pets and hunted prey of eccentrically morbid rich people; deer, horses, foxes, hawks, eagles, rabbits, (not Those kind of Rabbits) and the like.

He knew his doll-baby wasn't really dead, not in the way that they all mean. He could hear the little spirit-child hovering about his head, whispering and whimpering about the life it might have known, only there was this block that prevented it from entering the body to which it was supposed to belong. An invisible wall, which is really what you want if you are trying to confine the invisible, the ephemeral. He could hear it weeping, wanting to come to him and love its daddy. He could hear the beating of its wings, brushing against his face.

So he took the child into his studio and he got to work. He made it an angel baby, he called upon the spirit of things which feed on dead flesh and he married them to his little doll: that is, he took the wings from a baby vulture and sewed them onto the child's back, plastered feathers on to make it dream of flight. He prayed and sweated and loved, carefully preserving the creature he had almost created with the help of a woman who was dead, and whose reflection he could see in the tiny, blue-black glass eyes beneath little lids, held open with toothpicks. Once he had done that he found among his bits and pieces of trade-materials: a little glass eye, black as the ace of spades, black as the night in Assyria when there is no moon: a black glass eye that had no mate. He sewed this into the baby's forehead, making a little lid of skin, perfectly from the model of the baby's perfect little eyes, and complete with tiny black lashes. A third eye, to see through space and time. So that the baby could be half in this world, half in the next: with its mother and with its father both, the one dead and the other living.

And the baby cried, through its mouth and its cold nose, smelling of embalming fluid, and it began to grow. No breath did it take and perhaps it had no heart, but the thing grew: a Pinocchio golem of flesh and blood, a necromantic tribute to the miracle of creation. He did that, the mad taxidermist, who wanted more than anything in his heart to be a father. He listened to the black dog that curled up at his fireside, stuffed and dead with the glittering black eyes and the black top hat, dusty with age on his head. The piece was the thing that had got him into taxidermy in the first place: such an old, antique thing, its glittering glass eyes the very reality of life.

"Write on the back of the third eye with an etching tool the Hebrew word: Emeth, which is Truth, and you will see for yourself."

So there it was, this squalling black Pinocchio, this nightmare Galatea: the father's Heart's Desire, his pride and joy.

He loved it so, he kissed it and called it his own. He loved it in the way that one loves collections, built things, the work of one's own hands. How one loves children, I suppose.

And you already had a nickname, I told her. It didn't seem to matter at the time, she told me.
I wanted her to elaborate on which part didn't matter- the fact that her old friends had given her a nickname, or that they were her friends at all.

I live in LA-- the ironic-fashion-sense capital of the world. There are parts of town where you can't even go if the expression on your t-shirt is not polar opposites with the way you actually feel and think. So when I was in Florida this Christmas, and my grandfather offered up this baseball cap, I snatched it with greedy delight.

My brother and step-sister scoffed with confused disgust. Why would I want such a hideous hat? And why, now that I had it, should they give me a ride back from Delray Beach?
Because I am not a Hipster.

But I am the greatest one of them all.

Hipsters would see me on their excursions to the Sherman Oaks Galleria and hang their heads. For they'd pine, "Were he a Los Feliz-dwelling, horned-rimmed glasses wearing, tight-t-shirt besporting member of our kind, why, we'd bow down before him and follow his every intimation and declaration. We'd hoist him on our shoulders and cheer as he opened the old alpha-male's jugular with his jaws and be, thus anointed in his green-tinged hipster blood, our new leader."

"Our women would swoon and our men would nod our respect and tip our trucker-caps to him. In the old west, we would have named him the Sheriff of Silverlake."

But sorry, everyone. I am no Hipster. I will not be the one to lead you to take your place on the national arena. You will set no agenda, lead no debate.

You must find another messiah.

For I just came storming into your house, Hipsters. I just slam-dunked over you and tongue-kissed your mom. Feel violated? You should. Because you will never have a more hideous hat than this.

PS-- Does it burn you up inside that I actually like knishes? That's right. I'm not even wearing this hat ironically.

What a waste...

Luke Skywalker was just about to take a tumble into Jabba the Hutt’s Rancor pit when Theo got kicked in the balls.

“DORK!” Tommy Livingston screamed as his foot made contact with Theo’s groin. Tears welled in Theo’s eyes and he dropped to his knees, his hands immediately traveling downward to his crotch. He bent his head and fell onto his side.

Tommy was the top dog in fourth grade—not necessarily the most popular kid, and certainly nowhere near the smartest, but definitely the most feared. The lame, the dorky and the weak cowered in his presence—the mere whispered mention of his name was enough to send Danny Mandernach, the sickly albino kid whose mom walked him to school, into bawling hysterics. Decades later, all who were tortured by Tommy Livingston would be advised by their therapists that his bullying tactics were little more than an unfortunate response to his premature physical development—in other words, Tommy was shopping in the big boys’ section at J.C. Penney well before his contemporaries had left their Osh Kosh outfits behind. And running into him working the counter at the local Wendy’s was some consolation once they
had overcome the psychic scars brought on by his reign of terror.

But in 1984, the kid was just plain scary. Theo felt the full brunt of his fearful power as Tommy stood over his agonized form, grinning his half-toothless grin. Behind him, an ogling crew of his top cronies in the playground Gestapo snickered like cartoon vultures. One of them had planted his boot on top of Theo’s copy
of the Return of the Jedi novelization.

Dave often daydreamed about abducting the President of the United States of America and subjecting him to extensive anal probes. It wasn't a politically motivated fantasy. Dave just thought it would be funny. He never thought he would get the chance.
However, he was wrong.

Matthew Brady was transported at the age of twenty-two for murder.

He considered it a black piece of humour that he had been convicted for the death of one man since, at the age of sixteen, he had been part of the Shibtri Isles Army. For nearly six years, he had fought in campaigns across dry, burnt soil that lay beneath empty red skies. When not fighting on the land he had been born, he traveled, and fought on soggy, sodden, yellowed half grown fields beneath the same sun; or in the long tunnels of the Queen's Empire, where the only light was provided by phosphorescent stones and moss. In these campaigns, the dark, maroon uniform of Brady's native country remained the same no matter his antagonistic of defensive roll, though he questioned neither. The military was the only employment that he had ever known. He had joined, not through of a sense of patriotism or duty, but rather because the dangerous and violent nature of the work offered was attractive. He wasn't like his brother, Alex—Alexander—who had the natural gift of intelligence and interest in study and who was offered a morticians apprenticeship at the age of thirteen—the offering of which had allowed him to leave the orphanage and underfunded public school system that they were both stuck in. No, for Brady, life existed in the physical, the tangible, and the pleasures that were offered through these experiences, and so when the recruiters stood in their maroon uniforms in the middle of the broken cement quadrangle of the school he attended and told him that he could have a life with money, food, and travel in addition, he did not hesitate to sign up. That he was to be part of campaigns that resulted in the deaths of men and women with whom he had no personal connection with did not bother him. Likewise, he was similarly unconcerned by the destruction that was caused to towns and cities and countries that he visited. Why should he have been? The question of why he was there had been made before the army was sent into battle, and he never saw a reason to question them—until, that is, the day he killed William Morris.

Killing Morris was different to any death that Brady had been responsible for. When his knife slipped out of the other man's stomach, when the blood flowed over Brady's hand, when the strength seeped out of Morris' body with it, when his breath against Brady's neck stuttered and stopped...

When he was dead.

When he was dead, in short, Brady felt a pleasure that he had never felt before.

Which, of course, was the problem. When his lawyer arrived, the neat, non-tattooed (clean skinned was the slang) young man took it upon himself to explain to Brady that he could not kill the people he wanted to kill. He did not use those words, of course: the lawyer had the sentiments couched in long, twisting sentences, relating to morals, social standards, and other curiously frail arguments that, in the end, argued that it was fine—indeed, encouraged—for Brady to want to kill the men and women who were the enemies of the Shibtri Isles. That those enemies changed as the political climates did was not up for debate. They were the enemy. They were a danger to the prosperity and freedom of the country. You could not argue that their deaths did not serve a purpose. William Morris, on the other hand, was a citizen of the Shibtri Isles, and in additional, a valued member of the military. He had a wife and daughter, both of who were innocent, and both of who had to live with the tragic results of Brady's actions.

William Morris, it was explained to him carefully, slowly, as if he were a child, did not deserve to die.

Famine, Death, War, and Pestilence: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the harbingers of Armageddon — these are our guides through the Wastelands…

From the Book of Revelation to The Road Warrior; from A Canticle for Leibowitz to The Road, storytellers have long imagined the end of the world, weaving eschatological tales of catastrophe, chaos, and calamity. In doing so, these visionary authors have addressed one of the most challenging and enduring themes of imaginative fiction: the nature of life in the aftermath of total societal collapse.

Gathering together the best post-apocalyptic literature of the last two decades from many of today’s most renowned authors of speculative fiction — including George R.R. Martin, Gene Wolfe, Orson Scott Card, Carol Emshwiller, Jonathan Lethem, Octavia E. Butler, and Stephen King — Wastelands explores the scientific, psychological, and philosophical questions of what it means to remain human in the wake of Armageddon. Whether the end of the world comes through nuclear war, ecological disaster, or cosmological cataclysm, these are tales of survivors, in some cases struggling to rebuild the society that was, in others, merely surviving, scrounging for food in depopulated ruins and defending themselves against monsters, mutants, and marauders.

Complete with introductions and an indispensable appendix of recommendations for further reading, Wastelands delves into this bleak landscape, uncovering the raw human emotion and heart-pounding thrills at the genre’s core.

The first incursion came on like how one’s foot falls asleep. As sudden realization of the flesh, an explosion of tactile sense rising out of the static noise of sense, a car horn blaring out of the din of street traffic. The stark and jolting knowledge that something was moving in the ether.

It was while I was at Pearson airport, long after the rest of the city had fallen asleep and only a few short hours before it would be waking up again. But planes and flight schedules are creatures out of time, hopping and skipping across clocks like stones across the surface of a pond.

Leave Toronto at six in the morning; arrive in Vancouver by noon, the time spent aboard the plane in flight, five hours. Somewhere you loose an hour and I can’t help but wonder what I did with it.

Did I spend it well?

Or just waste it away, languishing over thoughts of missing time?

This is an escape. Akin to a prison break, the tickets nestled in my pocket are the false documents that will allow me to step out the front gates, like a craft criminal performing the smoothest of deceptions.
My reason for this trip is to put as much distance between this city and me as I can with out crossing international borders. Toronto holds nothing in the summer months for a boy of no means who is all too fallible to the pitfalls and snares he laid across town in the cruelty of his youth.

Once aboard the plane I will feel better, once aboard the plane I can begin to forget.

The flight itself will be uneventful, take off, turbulence, the mass clicking of belts being buckled and unbuckled in accordance to backlit diagrams and in-flight announcements. Would you like coffee or tea? Can I offer you headphones for the movie? They’re free, but the pillows aren’t, you have to pay for your dreams and god forbid you’ve stowed your wallet in the convenient overhead compartment. You wont be able to afford to sleep. Not that sleep comes easy in this beige plastic world. With it’s arid air that stings the eyes, along with the incessant drone that seems emanate from everything and nothing at once and the ever nagging irrational fear that the laws of physics will realize man’s trickery and deception and knock this multi-ton metal tube out of the skies. Every pilot knows this, man was never meant to fly and how he does what he does everyday is merely an illusion preformed on the universe. All smoke and mirrors, a magic trick played on the cosmos.
This is why pilots live such sultry lives, to keep one partner for to long would mean the odds of them being awoken in the night by the pilot’s screams as he dreamt another dream of plummeting. This is why astronauts also get absolutely obliterated on the cheapest of grain whiskeys before take off. You’d have to be drunk to strap yourself to an oversized firecracker that had the tendency to go sideways whenever a teacher was onboard...

The night after the funeral I had a dream of a desert landscape, blue-green in
hue, where the light came from nowhere because there was no sun. Where
nothing grew but the amount of dust in the air, and it snowed ash. A black river
fertilized nothing, and a cold wind cut between the spaces of a field, filled unto
the horizon with the crucified. Maggie was one of the faces, I could not see but I
could feel her there, crying for help, alone in a crowd of the tormented. Sylvia
pointed the way.
I called Mags when I woke up and we skipped school together, went to a
local coffee shop and laughed through watery eyes. So different from that
nightmare girl. So beautiful in the sun. A drizzle seasoned us, more mist than rain
really, not soaking through, but making clothes adhere just a little around the
curves. Her sundress hugged her form, the flowers on them touching her in a way
that made me ache as she bent to take a paper from its bin. For a moment the
flowers on her dress, daisies, became hyacinths, and Maggie’s eyes blue-green
eclipses that caught my soul and throttled it, tore it from my body, and with it,
every word and name I ever knew. The world was a void, a Technicolor mirage
dreamed up by an insane, lonely nothingness, in a hopelessly futile attempt to
exist. I was neither living nor dead, and I could not speak. So Maggie spoke for
me.

Moving on. Yes, moving. Pulling in fact. On a trigger. The trigger causes the action on my revolver to strike the bullet. The powder ignites and flings the lump of metal. The metal does a swan dive into the eye of one of the lagoony colored imps and digs until it reaches its brain.

I bet that really hurts. No. I know it hurts. My body remembers Trevor being shot. It DID definitely hurt.

The boy continues to scream. I wonder if he’s trying to heal the dead too. I pull the trigger again and give him something else to do.

The Wrecking Crew isn’t having fun either. They’re killing cousins and lots of them. For the first time ever, James is already out of knives. The heap of pincushions in front of me tells me where they went. He’s plucking the knives from the dead and throwing them as more and more imps clear the mound of dead in front of him.

They have to. If they don’t keep moving, Manfred and Whitfields’ presents will find them. The two are lobbing little packages the size of kiwi fruit into the room beyond. I keep hearing spray hitting the walls just like someone’s painting.

I wonder what color they chose for the kitchen.

Charles is nowhere to be seen. I’m too busy throwing lumps of lead at internal organs to really see where he is but I have a feeling. My feeling becomes a certainly when the horde of imps all start wailing at once. What was a packed house is starting to slow. The eyes that my metal is doing somersaults into has something new in it.

What was that thing again? It’s sitting in the back of my brain wanting to talk but my finger on the trigger doesn’t care enough to stop and listen.

It’s as I’m reloading that I remember that look.

It’s called fear.

I unzip my mouth. I speak with a guttural growl I never knew I had. “Turn yourselves into the authorities. They'll see to his wounds.”

“Fuck off, you GIMP!” shouts Sixteen as he supports Speed Freak out of the alley into the light.

I make sure they're gone. I'm glad I opened the zip, else my goggles would be steamed by my breath heaving out of me. I feel her breath behind me... impossible. The PVC would stop it, yet my skin starts to prickle with the sound of her breathing, imagining her chest heaving...

I turn on my heel like a dancer. I am inches from her. The steam from our breathing mixes in the cold rain.

I turn my voice to the growl again, “You need to see a doctor...”

“What?” She looks past me to the floor. “My fucking PHONE!”

She pushes past me and hurriedly limps to where Speed Freak had been. The blood spattered remains of a tiny mobile phone were crushed into the ground.

“Madame, you've been hurt...”

“You've broken my new phone, you've broken my foot, you can FUCK OFF!”

He laughed. “Sometimes I get embarrassed. And sometimes I get bored in shul. And sometimes I’d much rather be cosplaying. And also, you promised this month you’d get one.”
“I’m going to be Lois Lane, right?”
“No, Star Sapphire. We talked about this already.”
“Isn’t she the evil one?”
“Yes, but they’re boyfriend and girlfriend.”
“Oh right. She’s the Jewish one.”
“Well, we don’t know if she’s Jewish. Her name is Jillian Pearlman so, you know,” he shrugged. “I mean, I think she’s Jewish. With a name like that. But maybe it’s just her father whose Jewish.”
“I think, if they never specified otherwise…”
“They never did.”
I smiled at him. “Then let’s just pretend she’s Jewish.”
He went to put his arm around my shoulders, but then we saw an elderly Jewish couple crossing the street ahead of us. He was limping and she was standing beside him, defiantly. They were the older Orthodox generation, who lived here before the people who started our synagogue ever did. They probably had owned their apartment for fifty years and probably only paid a hundred bucks a month because of rent control. And they were very devout, and they were very observant, and they probably would’ve balked at the sight of a young Jewish couple touching in public. They probably would’ve said; Save that for the bedroom. And so instead he dropped his arm to the side. But I bumped into him – by accident on purpose – so he knew that I knew and so we both knew. And even if he couldn’t put his arm around me in public, we could both pretend he was.
And maybe I was just tolerating the costumes, and the power rings, and long white boxes in the back of our closet full of plastic-wrapped comics and all the names I wish I didn’t remember like Hal Jordan and Alan Scott and John Stewart and Guy Gardner and Kyle Rayner (who wasn’t as good, except when Morrison wrote him) and all the rest which were taking up real estate in my brain. But some things are worth the sacrifice. Like loving the guy you’re walking with on a Saturday morning to hear a shmooze from a Rabbi that was probably just as boring as the list of powers that the green power ring bestows on its wearers.

1: North

To the North came the first of the cold winds and it chased and corralled the snow before it. From the high places at the top of the world, it lifted itself and moved across the glaciers, above a river, and beneath the stars, with an icy speed and purpose. It travelled a day and a night before it came to a reef of cloud resting above a wide lake.

The first of the cold winds drove the cloud south and worked as it went, until, its strength diminishing, it came to rest and laid the cloud like a quilt half across the spine of a mountain range and half above a deep valley.

In the centre of the cloud, the first molecule of water-vapour froze and fell, six-winged and unique, to the dreaming world below. Before long, another froze and fell, and then another and another and another. The first of the cold winds, its business complete, rested and waited for reinforcements.

At first light, the men of the North who lived in the deep valley, stood at the foot of the mountains and looked at the faint dustings of snow. They sifted the cold air with their noses, then breathed deep, and knew that half-a-year of winter had come. They had seen the days dwindling, the rivers running more slowly, the birds moving in great arcs towards the south, and knew that even the weakest and briefest light would soon dissolve to blackness altogether.

The men of the North began to prepare, driving their stock from the mountains down into the great barns in the valley and selecting those animals to be used for food, for clothing, for fuel and for tallow.

The women of the North, too, were busy with preparations, darning last winter’s hides and filling larders with vegetables and cured meat. The edges of the windows were waxed, tarpaulins staked across vegetable gardens.

That night, the Big Snows came and the men and women of the North drew closer to their fireplaces, waiting for the land to change and the ritual of engulfment.

4: Marcus
In the time it takes him to slowly blink three times, Marcus has catalogued almost one hundred objects in the room which, should he need to, his dark and agile hands can later turn to weaponry.

The first blink and his mind measures the lobby’s dimensions, retrieves the opulent topography of its shapes and furnishings – the copper marbled floors and pillars, complex chandeliers, tall and verdant plants, low and wide waiting sofas, deep reception desk, piano - then rebuilds them into a faithful mental analogue. He has noted five exits, including the sliding glass entrance-doors he has just stepped through but excluding the four elevators, made unreliable through timing and potential for loss of power.

Marcus blinks again and populates this internal, visual lobby with the people he sees: the Night Manager, the desk clerk, the piano-player, the bellhop, the quietly waiting couple, the drunk and squabbling party of six business people, negotiating cab fares. Already he has assessed each for threat and weakness, timed how long it will take him to cross the room, and calculated the moments and movements required to close them down.

“The Giants who formed this world into its sensual existence and now seem to live in it in chains, are in truth the causes of its life & the sources of all activity...”

It is a television.

This stark truth is revealed to me in a way that is immense, yet counter-actively insignificant. I feel cynical, but then, who would feel otherwise in this place? Oh yes, I should probably tell you about it—my location, I mean. It’s probably important to you, since you're not here, and therefore, can't see it. As such, I will grace you with my own description: I am in a desert. This is my first time in a place that is not man-made, but I do not mind–well, that is a lie. In fact, it is a two-part lie. First, I doubt anywhere I have been is truly man-made, due to the fact that man came from nature, just like the rest of nature is, and therefore anything man-made is all natural. Second, I mind it terribly much. I do not like this place at all, and I find myself muttering many uncouth words that I would otherwise be shocked to hear myself speak. I suppose I am justified.

I said that this desert was not man-made, and I lied; this must be expounded upon. The desert seems man-made, almost artificial in nature–certainly not a real desert by any means. Of course, one reason it seems man-made is due to the fact that the desert is only about twenty feet long and twenty-feet deep. If I recall correctly, the average desert is a lot larger, and doesn't have cactuses painted on the walls. Cactuses? Cacti? Cactuses. You see, there are several rather nice cactuses painted on the three walls around me, and clouds are painted on the ceiling (though they manage only to remind me of real clouds, for true clouds flit about the skies with a finesse that these impostors can only dream of achieving).

(Do clouds dream?)

There is a nice, grand cactus in the middle of the desert, and slightly to the left—stage left, I mean. I have some experience in the stage, you know, for I spent a short stretch in London on one. I played the part of an extra in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I got to kill him, too, but nobody enjoys talking about that part of the play.

Anyways, the cactus. It is a nice cactus, as I said, and grand, too. I said this as well, I believe. Yes, I did. If I knew better, I would probably call it something else, but for now, I will proclaim that it is a saguaro cactus. I say as much, and no one corrects me, because I am right, although I might be wrong and nobody corrects me simply because I am all alone in this desert, this man-made desert.

The only downside to such a cactus is that it has to be made of paper mache. You see, when someone makes a desert, they—out of necessity, you must understand—must take shortcuts that the various deities who sculpt natural deserts (wind, rain, and all the others) try to avoid at all costs. One of these is the creation of cacti; man cannot make cacti unless said cacti are made from paper mache. Another shortcut, which I briefly mentioned earlier, are painted walls.

It turns out, much to my surprise, that when creating an artificial desert, man cannot place such a vista anywhere, or any other scenery of the kind: He has to put it on the walls. Oh, yes, he can make a rock, but anyone can make a rock if he tries hard enough. I made one once, you know—but that was out of paper mache. No, when it comes to real plants, real life, and real scenery, nature wins every time. The one thing where man beats nature is in the realm of air conditioning. Man cannot create distance, but only the illusion of it, just as he cannot create space, nor can he create nothing. Still, air conditioning is triumph enough.

You'd be a very amusing getaway driver. We could nickname you .. but I'll leave the nicknames to Spiral.

Britannia, Britannia, Britannia. We conquered half the planet (and we’ll never let you forget it), raised sexual repression to an art form and we still can’t spell “color” correctly. Successive waves of invasion, immigration and assimilation have left us with a one of the richest and most diverse cultures on the planet, but a GM who wishes to set a RPG in the United Kingdom of the present day will have few resources available to her. This book aims to rectify this.