I knew why.

He was going to change my life forever. He stood up, muscles rippling with a particular hunger beneath his tight shirt. He swirled a long black jacket over his shoulders, but not before the door opened, and the last rays of light fell upon him. His skin was radiant. His arms and face glittered with destiny, sparkled with promise.

I knew him for what he was by that skin. He ducked his face and tried to move past me, but I rose, face rose as I stood in his way.

“Wait,” I said.

He looked away, “I’m late for an engagement. And you smell.”

“I know you want me,” I told him. “I know what you are. You can’t read my thoughts.”

“I can,” he spat. “What do you take me for, a Mormon hero? Get out of my way, you dependent twit.”

I tried to grab onto his coat, to hold his perfection with me, but he pushed me against a table, and strode to the door, with powerful steps.

“If you’ll excuse me, I have a drag ball to get to.”

She does exercises in style, to pin down each aspect of fiction, isolate, and perfect. Each a different approach, each a worthless scrap when not combined into a larger idea. Finger muscle building. Plot arc diagrams. Character sketch. She sits in the coffee shop and writes, and they push her up onto the Open Mic. She politely obliges, reads two pages with arc and narrative.

As she talks she hears the hum of conversation. She knows, as she reads her words, that no one is listening. She stops reading, takes the mic from the stand. She steps onto the chair, and starts yelling.

Attention

Attention Please.

I could tell you a secret,

what mirrors elucidate of the future.

Print is dying.

What, expound?

Print the word, explicate–

No! Knowledge is failing,

and when it’s dripped out,

will you have a story?

Attention.

Attention please.

Print is dead.

Will you die well-read?

I have heard the heartbeat of art,

but you missed it.

Now you’re a writer. You want your readers to cry. You know what to do. The ultimate tearjerker in three concise parts. Page one: our sweet young protagonists’ receives word her beloved grandfather has died. She, herself, is dying of cancer, and you hint that her vitals have been dropping. As she cries over her dear grandpappy, she asks the boyfriend to walk the dog, but he gets loose, and the dog bolts into traffic. The boyfriend tries to save him from the oncoming truck, but they are both flattened by the semi. It takes the family a while to notice he never returned, but by the fifth page, they see cars rubbernecking outside. They tell their poor cancer-ridden daughter, and she overdoses on her medication. The parents are tragically killed when driving to her funeral.

Good elements, all. You obviously know your conventions. Unfortunately, amalgamation is not the answer. If you try to cram in too much into too few pages, your great American Tragedy will somehow become a farce. You can’t come across as a checklist of crying points. The death of the faithful dog is a tragedy that must be visited upon that young, lonely country-kid who has got no one and nothin else in the world. This poor suburbanite, will barely notice amid the rapid human deaths. The starcrossed lovers only work, themselves, if they are each others’ whole world. Mix styles with caution. The reader may suspend disbelief and emotionally invest into one tragedy, but they don’t stack well.

Note also, that the order is all wrong. If you begin by explaining the girl’s incurable disease, the reader will not get attached to the character. Her death becomes an expected plot point—if you reveal the illness later, however, you had better have used foreshadowing.

As for the grandfather’s death on page one, it comes across as an obituary. Token regret, no real emotion, with the possible exception of the reader being reminded of their own grandfather. The other characters can be as sad as you make them, but the reader never had the chance to know grandpappy, so any sadness surrounding his death would be sympathy for the other character’s emotional suffering. Remember that beginning with a death will set a low bar for the emotional tenor of the piece. It’s dangerous, and you must remember to follow it up with uplifting moods and events for the living characters, or else their upcoming tragedies will not be as far a fall.

You, as a writer, may develop feelings for your characters and keep alive those you like, killing those who are less appealing, less developed. That is a mistake. If you didn’t care about the character you killed, why would the reader? The death of a cardboard cutout becomes plot, not character.

In our excellent example story, the vital role of grief is left out. In a functional story, the girl should have time for the event to sink in before she expires. The boyfriend should have been around to cry over the tragedy of the plucky young girl’s losing battle against the wasting disease. If they both lay dead, you can’t see the human impact. If no one is left alive to be sad (which is typically the most relatable to your reader, since few of them have previously experienced death), why should the reader waste her time? Even Hamlet left a witness, to soldier on with the burden of suffering.

Death made vivid in art can be a powerful device. It is a preemptive universal experience, and reminds the reader of her own mortality, and all past associations with the event. It’s uncomfortable. Don’t make a mockery of the event with flat characters and melodrama. I promise they will roll their eyes at you.

Avatar, the best moneymaking scheme since The Titanic, hit theaters several weeks ago and is still at the top of the box office. (This may be in part because 3d and Imax tickets cost more. I viewed the 3d version, and everyone in line in front of me complained of the price to the ticket seller (which he greatly enjoyed). Raising the price for escapism in a down economy is a dangerous move, yet somehow, it just might pay off for James Cameron.)

From some quarters, the storyline is drawing heat as anti-imperial, unfairly villainizing the middle-aged white-man enemy. And indeed the whole human race, who are portrayed in gray and gunmetal, a much less interesting palette than the blue and green alien flora and fauna. This movie further insults the white man by making a hero of a “noble-hearted” traitor (which is essentially the norm for everything post-Heart of Darkness, including cinema as offensive as Pocahontas, Dances with Wolves, The Last Samurai, Hidalgo, Fern Gully, etc). At the same time, the white-man-hero who must save the natives is criticized as a condescending avatar of white liberalism who must benevolently lead the uncultured populace to success and civilization. Never mind that Jake Sully has extensive knowledge of the humans’ military capabilities and equipment.

The film has received other complaints, because the aliens have dreadlocks, Masai jewelry, feathers, war-paint, and cultural markings of a variety of strangely Earth-like cultures and tribes. It is not a direct parallel for any particular group, but a mix of all that have suffered the steamrolling Imperial Machine. But there is also a disturbing anthropomorphic aspect to these aliens. Not only is their blue skin striped, but they sport pointy ears, sharp teeth, feline noses, and tails.

This is not the most seized upon flaw, but it should be. The Na’vi are essentially human and cats morphed together into a very tall alien, with a Matrix-like back-of-the-head link into the planet and other creatures. They strongly emphasize very human values of ‘community’, ‘connection’, ‘harmony’, and ‘tradition’. This portrayal blatantly ignores the strongly individualist leanings of the housecat. Neytiri, the female Na’vi protagonist, expresses regret at the unnecessary loss of animal life. Anyone who has received the considerate doormat offerings of chewed birds, mice, and voles, is aware that her views are human words placed betwixt the cat’s fangs, as it is an unpopular minority view within feline hunter culture. Portraying a cat-alien without a sense of entitlement, and, indeed, to celebrate the idea of working together for the common good, is a fundamental flaw of the film. Cats are individualists. They are selfish. The harmony agenda imposed onto the Na’vi ignore the feline aspects of the alien creatures.

My nails dig into the hardwood floor. My feet slip, but I keep scrambling. Splinters in my paws. A nose, a nose! If I could get a nose closer, I could taste the moist chunks of meat. I can taste it, juicy salty filling the gnawing hurt.  I can taste it in my mind, and I snap, I snap at the meat.

But my neck hurts. If I pull too hard against the chain it hurts more. I stretch, I stretch. I know I can get my neck closer by a nose. I stretch, my neck is choking and pain. And then my nose hits a smooth cold barrier. My breath whuffs out, and frosty fog blocks out the meat.

I fall back. Neck hurts less. Legs are trembling. I sit. I spend too much time standing and pacing. Sitting is easier. Floor is cold on my legs. Used to be cold on my belly. Fog fades, and I see food again. I stare.

Buzzing perks my ears. A pack of men are staring at me. They are pointing. Their fingers are too far away to eat. They don’t look as juicy as the meat, but I would take them from their hands, with my sharp teeth. I look up at them and try to curl my paws in the air.

They used to throw me food sometimes, when they sat at tables outside, eating starchy bits and meat wrapped in bread. I need food. A bite? Forget the meat behind the fog, I would take the bits of bread. If they chewed it but didn’t like the taste and spit it out, I would take it. My paws are too heavy for begging, and I flop down again. I whine. I had the energy to bark a little yesterday. Today I whine. Long and low. I can feel their discomfort rolling off them in waves. Pity. Feed me?

A little human holds hands with a bigger one, and chews on a dark brown rectangle. I can smell it from here. I stare and smell the sweet salty food. My stomach is pain and hurt. I whimper. They don’t want to look at me anymore or listen. The legs move on, buzzing to each other. They move farther away to look at a flat square on the wall.

They pay too much attention to the square. The little human slips her paw from her dam’s. She pads toward me, and the rest don’t notice. She stares and takes the rectangle away from her mouth, sucking on a finger instead. Food is smeared on her face. I would lick it off, bite. She puts the rectangle on the floor. I lunge for it, but it too is out of reach. She jumps back. I start whimpering, sit. Trust me, feed me. Please. Move it closer please come closer yourself I could eat so well. She kicks the rectangle, and I am on it, biting tasting salty sweet silky rich. I’m eating the skin on the food. Paper. Not tasty. But the food hits my stomach so fast and good and my blood starts pounding and I’m sweating. The pain is back but different, my belly, o my belly—

The brown food is at my feet again, mixed with bits of paper. The little two-legs starts crying and runs back to her pack. I whimper, and I stare at the puddle. It is a mess, thicker than afterbirth. But I have not had pups in my belly for a while. If I had them now, my body would eat them. My belly is full of teeth, and they are worrying me, gnawing and shaking me inside out.

…

Perhaps you remember this 2007 controversy?

1. All things fiction.

2. Character sketches, exercises, and short short stories.

3. What psychology is useful to character and situation.

4. Reviews of various forms of fiction, provided in an unhelpful and untimely manner.

5. A bimonthly artistic update.

6. Responses: email all your fiction questions to fictician@gmail.com and the Fictician will blog you an answer.

7. Special requests?

I am a writer of fictions as well. I am also an avid reader. I read, of Thomas Hardy, that “Hardy manages to merge the various factors of his tale–character, incident, and setting–into close co-ordination, thereby achieving a high degree of unity.” How important do you think merging elements into a united whole is? I rather like books with subplots that are not singular, blunt objects.

Sincerely,

Hardly Hardy

*

Dear Hardly,

It depends on the point of the work of fiction. If it is a stand-alone book why the hell would you include an irrelevant tangent that connects to nothing? Co-ordination and cohesion are vital for a single volume. If the book is a part of a larger series any lingering  subplots must relate to the larger whole. If character, incident, and setting do not work together, you must ask yourself why. If you cannot find an answer within yourself, you need to ask character, incident, setting, and indeed every other element of fiction, because they all must work together to function. To discover how closely aligned the factors are, you should put important elements of your story into dialogue.

Take this example:

Floor: hey, you’re stepping on me! Protagonist, get out!

(Protagonist steps more lightly)

Walls: I hear you approaching. Stop bitching, floor.

Floor: Bite me.

Walls: If I collapse you’ll find yourself right up close and personal with ceiling.

Ceiling: Leave me out of this.

Floor: But walls, you’d be crumbled. And all over me. I know it’s what you want.

Protagonist: I can suddenly see why authors limit this dialogue to the metaphorical sense. I’m the pro at talking. None of the rest of this shit should get an opinion.

Character arc: Now this is what we call a moment of revelation.

Protagonist: I guess it’s ok if it’s all about me.

Plot arc: Hurry it up. you always drag your feet and wallow in the moment. I want to get on with it. Bored with this scene.

Cliff Hanger: Little did you know that I’ve got some twists ahead.

Formatting: I recommend you actually look at some screenplays before you try to write like one.

Author: Nobody cares what you think. (Slight deleted.)

Action: Where am I? Do you know? Did you give me one minute of consideration?

Protagonist: Clearly I’m schizophrenic so I’m about to kill some people, right?

Research: Most schizophrenics have auditory hallucinations. You may be one of them. They often end up in mental institutions or as hobos.

Syntax: I heard a rumor that the word “hobo” went out in the 50’s. Tramp.

Political Correctness: Actually, I believe the only acceptable term to write would be “differently mentaled,” for the loonies, and “economically disinclined” for the poor saps.

Cliff Hanger: Little did she know that she would be soaked in hobo blood by the end of the day.

Target Audience: What the hell! Children are reading this right now and you’re exposing them to what kind of violence? Watch your topics!

Author: Ah, this is the internet. It is not a polite place. What kind of parent would allow their children here?

Quote: On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog.

Digression: It is difficult to compose a cohesive dialogue with this many voices.

Allusion: He do the police in different voices.

Protagonist: Police? Where?

Plot: Ah, knocking on your door with a search warrant?

Protagonist: Oh shit. Where’d I hide my gun?

Continuity: They wouldn’t be knocking on her door yet if she hasn’t killed the hobos.

Political Correctness: The city’s finest could well stop her before she has killed one of the financially disabled.

Walls: I don’t hear any police.

Floor: Good, they better not step in here with their dirty boots.

Syntax: Remember, dirty has two meanings. Double entendres are sometimes humorous but sometimes inappropriate.

Plot: They are distracting. You should be focusing on me.

Character arc: Like hell they should. If they are not thinking of me, and how charming I am, they will be focusing on you, and you’re full of holes. Always.

Plot: I guarantee they’ll get filled.

Syntax: Remember: too many entendres per page are indeed unnecessary and distracting.

Protagonist: (returning from the kitchen with a  butcher knife and an apple. She proceeds to cut and consume it at the dining room table, sending nervous eyes at the door.)

Foreshadowing: Hey, not an apple, make it a blood orange.

Allusion: There’s a blood orange in the opener for Dexter.

Editor: You can’t allude to pop culture. It will make your work seemed dated in 2-3 years.

Style: Technically, you should write out those numbers.

Protagonist: Maybe I should learn how to write something that’s not dialogue. How about description? The Pro’s flowing hair swirled around her face in the sudden breeze. A talent scout, who had been walking fast down the street in a snappy suit, started staring, but kept walking. He fell hard. Into an open sewer grate. When he resurfaced he told her everything he owned was ruined but for his business card, and he would be honored if she would take the fast track to fame.

Author: You’re dead by chapter two.

*

If the forces are this much at odds, you may want to more tightly focus your narrative.

What is happening in this picture?

Is this

a. A sunset

b. A gold jar

c. A sunrise

d. The Rapture

“You’re as bad as my goddamn husband.” She slammed the case shut. “Worse. Let them have their faith.”

“Don’t you want to know if it was actually schizophrenia?” Samuel smiled as he held out her coat.

“Looking through those damn bug eyes won’t prove that god didn’t talk to her.” Her chair screeched against the kitchen tiles as she pushed it away. “Or are you after the ratings? Do you think they’ll flock to leer at that sensationalist burning at the end? You pig! Some stories shouldn’t be debunked. And no one should go through that kind of snuff film.”

At the door she paused, flashing him a glare, and yelled that she was going bird watching, despite the rain. She slammed the door. But this had happened a dozen times. Samuel fully expected to make up in the living room, the kitchen, and the stairwell before dawn.

Samuel swore, seeing the clock, and ran for his car, coffee in hand. The leather was cold, but the vehicle warmed in seconds, and he told the console to play a reading of Othello as he drove through town. The third act was just beginning when the security gates blocked off his car. He waved the recording off before flashing his Chroncast ID, which saved him from pulling out a lifetime of paperwork.

In his office, he hung up his jacket and booted up his work station. As the machines buzzed to life, he analyzed the readout sent from the microscopic tracer chip that he had set on the manuscript and plugged in the coordinates that had taken him weeks to specify. He glanced at the bug inside the glass cylinder and switched on the power field. The tiny robot stood on six titanium footpads, and its wings slowly unfolded from lying flat against its back. With a glance at the bluish stripes and deflated form, Samuel entered the data confirming the classification of the Anopheles-42. He opened the linking software, and his notebook’s screen went black for a moment. The multifaceted eyes glowed slightly, staring at him, and his screen filled with an image of his office, warped through the glass cylinder of the robot’s housing.

He sent the charge through the device, and the Anopheles vanished.

On Samuel’s screen, William Shakespeare sat hunched over his desk, crafting the wording of Puck’s parting apology. A mosquito circled his face, stared over his shoulder at the document, and alighted on the back of his neck. The silver-gray proboscis sliced through his skin, and the abdomen swelled with blood. The insect sprang back into the air, dodging the absentminded hand slapping the neck and the video blurred as the mosquito spun on disturbing air currents.

A slight smell of ozone gathered in the Elizabethan air and the bug vanished as Samuel Trader pushed the keystroke for recall. The Anopheles-42 popped back into the vacuum-lock in front of his desk. His monitor reflected his office back at him, and he shut off the video link. He had the forms filled out and initialed before the technician arrived. The man in the white coat extracted the Anopheles robot, and Samuel initialed the hours of the timeline accessed.

Samuel typed a code into his notebook, and opened an audio-line to his agent.

“Bob, good news. The tracer on the manuscript worked. No more conspiracy theories on this one. I got visual confirmation and DNA evidence of Mr. Stratford-upon-Avon scripting A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

“Good. You are a week ahead of schedule. And you’ll get some cred for the confirmation.” His agent spoke with the slow cadence of the multitasking, and Samuel could hear a steady stream of typing in the background.

“Unfortunately,” Bob continued, “I have a hunch George Delmark will dominate the Acrons this year, too. He’s been working on his Nazi documentary for months. Apparently he traced good coordinates to get good footage of weapons labs. Nerve gas. You should see them make Tabun. It’s some crazy stuff. The panel will love it. I hear he destroyed ten mosquitoes trying to get one shot. You have to wonder where the funding comes from. I haven’t heard that he’s done any government work getting DNA samples.”

Samuel massaged his forehead. “Bob, I don’t know what direction I should go in my next project. I’m thinking of taking on Joan of Arc. But most of the fascinating periods of history are less interesting than rumor once you go back to them.”

“Well,” Bob slowed his typing, “I know you love accuracy in your history vids. But you’re right, you have to work to make them interesting. And you need to expand your audience. If you can’t find any interesting untold stories, you could create some. Try the hinge event angle – change something subtle and see what follows from it.”

“Helluvan agent you are. Do you realize how much power we have to generate to send back an Anopheles? We can’t move back anything big enough to effect a change.” Samuel was quiet for a moment, picturing an anachronistic note warning Cesar of treachery. “Anyway, it’s unethical – and Joan of Arc is hardly the assignment to try it.”

“Unethical? Sam, while you’re navigating that little bug around in the past, I’m doing late nights with the latest research. Everyone is interested in the implications of this technology. Homeland Security is shoveling money trying to get a future-surveillance system worked out, but they have to make the process more efficient to be worthwhile. And the legislature is hammering them, of course. The have qualms about privacy, due to some crackpot lobbyists. But Samuel, the research is proving it. For past-observation, there isn’t a damn thing you can do to change the timeline.”

“What about the theory that alternate timestreams arise from the changes?”

“Bogus. No one serious in the field believes that. Remember that. I’d hate for you to utter some embarrassing remarks at a banquet again. I hate dealing with your bad publicity. Last time – shit!” The sound of typing stopped. “Sam, turn on the Newsfeed.”

Samuel, surprised at the excitement in his agent’s tone, brought up a link to the feed. A picture-in-picture reporter stood twenty feet from the broken glass and twisted shards that surrounded the blue sedan impacted into the nose of a tractor trailer. Brief footage of a medical response team wheeling off body bags. On the sidebar, the national correspondent’s mouth was moving, but Samuel heard nothing. His eyes were fixed on the photo of Julia.

“Sam. Sam?”

He realized his agent was talking. “She looks familiar,” he managed.

“She should. This is – was – the wife of the George Delmark. I think this will be your year to sweep the awards for Retro Flicks.”

“You think the only way I’ll win Acrons or Oscars is with Delmark’s stops filming to mourn?” Samuel almost managed to keep the disgust from his tone.

“Hardly. Apparently the two were about to divorce. Read the story. This newscaster just started this segment on the crash. Pick another channel. Any other channel. God, this is great.”

Samuel switched the channel to hear a newscaster reading the story with barely-contained excitement. “Mrs. Delmark, perhaps fearing for her life, had an anonymous source in reserve in the event of her death. The source sent us her tell-all article. The text accuses George Delmark, three-time Acron winning director of selling DNA samples of dead celebrities to unlicensed cloning labs that feed into prostitution rings…”

“Sam,” his agent’s voice nearly squeaked. “Her expose is online. Read it! Apparently his wife was one hell of a writer. Are you listening to this? Breeding people for prostitution rings? This is fantastic! Not a damn soul would vote up his movie while he’s in jail.”

If Samuel had not been in a state of shock, he might have felt more than a twinge of schadenfreude. “I guess there’s a lot of money in that.” The car crash was back on the screen, and he stared hard at the black bodybags.

He remembered Julia showing up at his door in hiking clothes, a laptop case slung across her chest. He could tell she was vexed by her jerky motions, the way she flipped her hair out of her face, but she never explained what George Delmark had done to piss her off. She requested, from Samuel Trader, an interview on ethics. It was never published, despite a long conversation that they decided to continue on a weekly basis, and recently with increased frequency.

“Money? Damn, Sam. His license is gone. He’ll be in jail as soon as they catch him. If they can’t prove anything right away, they’ll hound him until he dies. This violates the past-vision legislation on so many levels.”

Samuel stared at his computer and focused on the solid metal case. He blocked out thoughts of her crushed sedan and wondered what Delmark would do without access to the past. “Bob, to take an operator’s job is cutting an entire dimension out of his life, one that most people don’t have. What will he do with his spare time – watch other people’s movies? I would do anything to keep my job. This is –” He was silent for a long moment. “Do you think that crash was an accident?”

“You think he knew about her article? This publicity is worse than anything she could have blackmailed out of him. His sponsors are going to be rolling in lawsuits from the celebrity’s heirs. And what are they going to do with all the clones? Maybe they can make some retro miniseries unless they were lobotomized.”

Julia’s picture flashed back on the screen, and Samuel clenched his teeth over his lip. “Bob, I told you I just located a Shakespeare sample. I have to process it. You know how much documentation the company wants with each past-access. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Alright. Just wait for the Acrons, Samuel! It will be incredible.”

Samuel dropped the call and pressed the flesh of his palms against his eyes to block the bodybag out. Behind his eyes she was slamming that door with fiery eyes. He mouthed “Julia,” and thought of the plain box holding the multifaceted emerald ring, which was still sandwiched between legal sheets and a folder of objectives in his drawer. He wished he had brought the box home a week ago.

“Delmark.” Samuel suspected that people with that much motive were seldom innocent. Assuming that he would not need a blood sample, he punched the sequence to request use of an Anopheles-42V. Samuel worked quickly, knowing he would need to acquire all footage now in case investigators or Chroncast discovered that there was a connection between him and Julia.

Samuel ran an analysis and tweaked the geography and time coordinates for an hour, but stopped, angry as he again found himself staring off into space and wondering what their life would have been like together. He got up from his chair to lock the door. He waved the window of calculations down and punched the code to open an encrypted file.

The screen filled with Julia’s smile, then panned out. She was standing in front of Samuel, who was seated on the living room carpet. She kissed him as she tied a blindfold around his eyes.

“This is the game, Sam,” she said, tracing his jaw line with her fingertips. “I’ll tell you a story, and you won’t know if I’m telling the truth. That uncertainty is the beauty.” Julia stepped away from him, moving her arms with a rustle of fabric. “I have to take off my shirt.”

“I’m not sure I can morally keep this blindfold on,” he said, grinning.

“Be patient.” She kissed him again, and after she stepped away, she described, in detail, a series of erotic postures.

Samuel, from his desk, watched Julia bounce around the room, still in her bulky sweater and jeans. He watched the play of emotions across her face. Only she could pull off such a deadpan while describing her state of undress, and only she could have sad eyes in the middle of such a game. But a second later he could see that half-smile curling her lips as the blindfolded Samuel grew more desperate about what he was missing. Though his grin dropped when she pulled off his blindfold to reveal herself fully clothed, he had sent a mosquito to the moment the next day. It was when he had first sat at his desk and watched her face through the mosquito’s eyes that he realized he had never loved anyone more.

Samuel closed the video and pressed his palms over his eyes, leaning against his desk. After a long moment, he pulled open the analysis he had been working on, and attacked the data in frenzy until he pulled functional coordinates. Drawing a shuddering breath, he warmed up the machine.

He sent the Anopheles to his last conversation with Julia. He oriented the mosquito-bot and followed her as she stalked from room to room, slamming doors. Staring at her passionate eyes in the video-feed, he cringed at the shallowness of their argument. He had been baiting her – he just wanted to taunt her, to see her eyes flash, to see her dark hair against her face when she tossed her head. He manipulated the controls, and the mosquito swooped through the half open door as she leaned in from the frame, cursing Chroncast. The bot slipped past her and followed her to her car.

Samuel’s fingers were sweaty against the controls, but he adjusted the altitude and made it through the car’s door just before she slammed it shut and turned the key. The Anopheles settled on the headrest of the passenger seat for a maximum view of Julia and a panorama of the surroundings.

Watching Julia, he wanted so badly to make her stop driving. But even if he flew the Anopheles into her face and prevented her leaving for another couple of seconds, he could not change the past. He bit his lip and watched her bangs fall in front of her eyes as she gunned the gas and jerked the stick into first gear.

Julia calmed down once she reached the interstate. Her cranberry lips pursed into a small smile. She flipped on the radio and murmured along with the Beatles. She turned onto the twisty Appalachian road, muttering something about the scarcity of blackbirds.

Samuel saw the truck approaching, the sun glaring off the steel trailer. A speck of shadow dislodged itself from the edge of the windshield. The bug – a mosquito – arced in front of her face. She screamed and clutched at her eyes. The car swerved and he could see the grille of the truck. He jerked the Anopheles out of the time stream, shaking.

He burned the video to a disk, and used an illegal program to delete the record from the computer’s timeline. Proof that he was using the technology to spy on a citizen would get him fired and fined heavily. After Delmark’s crimes, the company might suspend operations and search for violations. While the file transferred, he punched in the code to hear the feeds and personal notes he had missed, determined not to think. A voice from his speakers read the messages without emotion or reflection.

Sender: Chronology Inc. Anopheles Division

Subject: Bulletin

It is against company policy to respond to requests for a Hitler sample. The ten we sold for the morality study were a closed group. Note that any communiqués concerning Hitler and Gandhi in the underground boxing world are strictly prohibited…

Sender: Nigeria

Subject: Need fast cash?

Dear Sir,

I received your name from a mutual acquaintance. I recently inherited a great sum of money, but the password is lost to the past. I need a contract with Chroncast Inc. to recover it. If you provide the cash for the contract, my inheritance would be more than sufficient to reimburse you five times over…

Samuel snapped the command to hear the next message.

Sender: Subcast

Subject: Obituary: George Delmark

Oscar and Acron winning director commits suicide in home at age 46.

Following the death of his wife and the scandal that hit earlier today, an expert in the field of past-voyeurism, Mr. Delmark (The Truth of the Druids, and the more popular Die, Rasputin) took measures to prevent his own demise from being broadcast as next autumn’s moral anecdote. He released a strobe EMP (the latest from Liberty Inc.) to produce a field of static which destroyed all electronics in his house as well as the possibility of his colleagues using a video-bot to spread the footage of his death.

George had committed suicide. Samuel read the news and realized he had been expecting it. He laced his fingers behind his head and leaned back in his chair. Life in only three dimensions seemed far too mundane. He was surprised to realize that despite the suicide, he was jealous of the man. Delmark had been married to Julia for most of three years. Samuel would never have that chance.

The file completed, and he played the disk. Samuel watched isolated the last thirty seconds of the video and played it on loop. By the twentieth, he was convinced that the stripes on the back of the other mosquito marked it as a model of an Anopheles he had never seen before, and that it began the strafing run in front of Julia’s eyes with a full abdomen. When it completed the pass in front of her face, the bot was deflated. A reverse valve? What did it spray? He had never heard of a mosquito used as a weapon.

Samuel played the entire video clip, watching the mosquito to memorize its placement. The other Operator kept his bug staring directly at her face, leaving a blind spot behind its swollen abdomen.

He set up a tracer and sent the Anopheles-42V back to a set of coordinates he had marked while she idled the car at a stoplight. He landed the bot by the passenger window and made it crawl to the blind spot with the painful speed of fingernails growing. He extended the proboscis, and applied the least pressure possible to stick it to the underside of the other bot’s leg, where sensors should not alert the Operator.

Samuel fell asleep in his chair while the computer processed the tracker to determine where in time and space the mosquito originated. He set a tentative range of dates, but the program glitched, and he expanded the search field. He jerked awake to a flashing pop-up on the screen. He stared at the coordinates, but they didn’t make sense in his head. They came from the Chroncast building, but three years in the future. He punched in the suspect coordinates, and downed an energy drink to shake the lead feeling of his eyelids.

The Anopheles popped into the office, and he maneuvered the bug to see the operator. He stared at the screen of his notebook and could not bring himself to touch the controls again. He rubbed his eyes, but the face didn’t change.

On the screen, he saw his own face. They were his fingers that punched Julia’s code, and heard the slow beeping as the connection established. “Julia?” It was his voice. “Hi honey. I just wondered where we should have our anniversary. New Zealand? That could be interesting.” He stood and started pacing. “You’re having lunch with George again? Oh. Yes, it bothers me when my wife eats with her ex husband. Yes, I know. No, that doesn’t make it better. Good bye. I’m still at work. I have to go. No, I’m busy. Bye.”

The man on the screen punched the keyboard and severed the connection. “Bitch. It was too much to hope for,” he muttered. “But you make the funniest face when you die.” He punched another number.

“Bob? The Tabun worked splendidly. If I can use a real-time bot, it should work. No, it shouldn’t be noticed. The crash will kill her, not the nerve gas. Look, no one has forgotten George’s Oscar-winning look into Nazi Germany. And he has plenty of cause. You read the file I hacked from her computer? She knows that I started selling financial codes. But Delmark’s done worse shit. Selling DNA to labs and pimps is going to get him crucified.”

“Yeah, I know. No, I won’t miss her.” He squinted at his computer, and Samuel swiveled the mosquito to see the screen. The video record had been paused on Julia clutching her eyes with the truck approaching. “That bitch used me. She wanted to destroy us both at once and kill the credibility of the industry. Yes, because we were the top. No, no, we don’t have other options. She has to go. I can’t sit in jail. I have too much work to do.”

He paced his office, and Samuel distantly noticed that he looked like he hadn’t slept in days. He rubbed the stubble on his jaw, and glanced around with hollowed eyes. He nodded at something, the headset bobbing precariously.

“Yes, Bob, I said I tried it, didn’t I? No hesitation, no regret. It was just a test, but I know I can do it again. Of course she’s alive right now. You know the research – it doesn’t work to change the past. Yes, I’m getting rid of her before our anniversary.”

Samuel hit the controls to recall the mosquito, and his strained face vanished from the screen. The mosquito popped back into the glass tube and landed, wings shutting down. Samuel sat quietly at his desk for a long time, matching the gray faceted stare from the tube. He deleted the footage from his computer and walked out of his office.