STORYSOLD: CITY 

My Storybank Account – The End,

THE PART WHERE MY ACCOUNT OF STORYSOLD: CITY MINTS ITS FRESHEST MONETARY MOMENT…

They say it’s possible to spoil an ending.

I suppose spoiler alerts make sense if the ending you’re buying can be processed and packaged and ran across a retail scanner like the rest of the story didn’t matter. Trouble is, I don’t think stories can be sold like humans sell other natural resources. As far as I know, there is no word for an ending like beef, salad, or lumber that goes bleep across the scanner without its story.

So yeah, I’m pretty sure our stories need their endings.

Yet humans use “spoiler alert” in sentences all the time. I get it. You can’t all be wrong. I suppose, maybe saying “spoiler alert” makes sense if (let’s say) you’re a proud, brand riding lifetime member of That Audience and you’ve been buying The Same Old Story since forever. That I understand. If you’re That Guy you can say “spoiler alert” and it will make sense, because you’re buying The Same Old Story. For you, the brand you’re buying will never spoil. And how could it? After you read, watch, experience, and host that story time and time again you will become the holy got-damned Buddha of prophetic visions and you’re going to be fucking pissed if it doesn’t meet your expectations.

Truth is, I’ve been to Storysold: City. I believe in crazy salty seafaring krakens, badass barbarian hunters, demon free bread, and surgical ninjas, but I don’t believe “spoiler alerts” exist. All I know is what I know. I was there at The End. I stood on the deck of Traveler’s Storytime Machine beside Maggie, Ole Bookmaker, Wilderness Security Guide, her weird friend the Pest Predator, and other refugees from Storysold: City and we watched our homes burn into the ocean. I had been in the moments, scenes, and stories set there, and I watched The End like I was watching The Fourth Wall (making the blank face look) for Its screens, theaters, podiums, sports fields, and service counters like a good member of the audience, but I still didn’t Get It.

All I felt in that moment was wrong. It was an overwhelming feeling like the feeling of being objectively right—like the old gut feeling cops use to solve murder mysteries in the movies, or the one that tells the action hero to shoot right—now! (the bad guy is on your left)—but in reverse. It was a bad-not-good gut feeling, and I never wanted to feel it again. I had no satisfying movie revelations in The End.

It wasn’t until years later, after the storybankers of Storysold: City had scattered across The World Stage like seeds and our surviving cast of characters had returned to The Old Market in Portland, Oregon, America (where it always rains, natives don’t own umbrellas, and the bike lanes are painted green), Ole Bookmaker finally sold me on theming up with him to co-produce a book about our ocean-going metropolis where products like cheese, bread, shoes, veggies, paper, and phones were sold as props, and services like plumbing, rat catching, and therapy are sold as actions, and our stories were the only “goods and services” bought and sold in our city sun up to sun down.

It was easy for Ole Bookmaker (aka Bookmaker Jake) and I to part out our business/book production theme. He agreed to do the work an Old Market publisher would do: designing, editing, marketing, and collaborating with our  illustrator Danny Greenhalgh to add some pop to my story—plus, when called upon, he would also play the part of an on-demand book factory: printing and cutting the pages, crafting the cover, inserting the illustrations, then binding it all together, usually with needle and thread in one hand and a beer in the other while Pip the Evergreen Jungle Cat stalks his lap trying to get in The Action as his playlist of punk, hiphop, and shoegaze blast in the background.

I, on the other hand, agreed to play the book’s narrator, which wasn’t too unlike the live-narrative-representative character I play for what our kind calls our “governing body.” The difference was, I wasn’t narrating The Action of earth. I was using our handheld Storyclock: TV to play—pause, fast-forward, rewind—and watch the many moments I deposited in my storybank account before The End, and use them to remember my story.

For years, our business theme’s work scenes were routine: a) we’d set a stage at home, or in a park, bar, or coffee shop by sitting side by side in The Action. When we were set, Bookmaker would flip open his laptop and I’d turn on our Storyclock: TV; b) I’d watch my life’s story on the screen like I was a member of my own audience who had permission to speak during the show; c) I’d speak my words aloud while my thememate clickity clacked my words into his laptop’s word processor. Often I’d be too embarrassed to speak aloud and I’d switch to clickity clacking words on the laptop, writing in silence, as he read my work and offered his unending supply of editorial advice. “No,” he’d say. “Not like that. Say the same thing but say it with more pop.”

Writing fiction wasn’t was easy as I imagined. And yes, that’s the right word to describe our book. This is a fiction, because nothing about the making of a prop long after the actions this prop is propping up is anywhere close to being like it was in The Action. My storybank account itself (the digital recording of my life) is as close to “non-fiction” as it gets, but that feels like fiction too. It doesn’t bring me back to the same feelings, or even close to the same feelings I felt when I was there performing it on The World Stage. Most times I’d watch my story unfold on screen like a stranger attempting to choose the right words to match The Action. That compulsive need to read it right, “That’s what really happened!”—and write my story right, “This is what it really means!” was how I felt most of the time, but the perfect words always seemed to pop to mind long before, or long after The Action of our bookmaking scenes. My thememate was a dick about it. He’d say things like, “Live or in rewind, your need to follow orders and do it perfectly is your strongest character trait, so don’t worry about  doing it right so much. Just write that feeling of needing to be right.”

“And what would that look like on page?”

“Imagine you’re standing high on a mountaintop and you’re writing down to word starved huddled masses.”

“And if that doesn’t work. What do I do next?”

“Imagine you have a god living in your heart. Then write your words to that asshole. Same, same. Either way works.”

“But I don’t want to write this book like an asshole.”

“Too late,” he laughed. “That’s what this book’s about.”

Our bookmaking theme has many endings, but we can’t say we’ve ever arrived at that moment when we take our bows, drop the curtain, and call The End. Our book production is more like a live stage performance than, let’s say, a movie you can stream and rewatch in its mass perfection time and time again. Bookmaker and I still tinker with the “final product” like the guy who goes home after a long day of work to tinker on an old car or work on a home improvement project. Often beer is involved. Or some other classic quick work release from The Daily Grind. All that’s to say is, the prop production in your hands is likely the worse of all possible products you could buy. If we were to stamp a final date on the production of this book (for shits and giggles) I’d say “20 years.” Storysold: City first sank into the ocean in the Fall of 2001 and it’s Winter of 2023 now. Our human host is 46 years old, and our first character “Bookmaker Jake” has been making copies of this thing since 2011. So yeah, what I’m saying is, “writing fiction isn’t easy.” After all these years, the whatever you call it “creative writing process” still feels violent like I’m trying to hurl—or thrust—my perfect words meant for mass production like rocks through the beautiful stain glass pages of life.

Hands down, the hardest part isn’t the part where we arrived at some sort of ending book in hand. We’ve never suffered from exotic mental diseases like “writer’s block.” The hard part was the never-ending dialogue we had about why we were producing a book about Storysold: City in the first place and what the hell we wanted to do with it once we had it. That’s what turned our conflict most times. I mean, what are these props marked with dead word things good for? You can’t wear or eat books, and they don’t provide any shelter from rain, wind, or sun. Yet here we are! We make books and you buy them! I imagine, the only thing more absurd than making books might be the business of making money. Making gold bricks, cutting shiny stones, printing dead human faces on pressed and dyed fibers (then collecting them in vaults with guns), all that shit made perfect sense to me before I owned a storybank account.

But yeah. Never mind that now. We’ll get there soon enough.

I remember the first time I read our first finished book cover to cover. After I relived the moment when I stood beside Maggie and our cast and watched our homes sink into the ocean again, I handed the book back to my thememate. “So what do you think?” Bookmaker asked.

All I felt was wrong. I was at The End all over again. The first thing I could think to say was, “No one’s going to buy this crap.”

Bookmaker nodded and said, “Even Maggie?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean she’s your co-star,” Bookmaker grinned. “Allowing her to read ‘this crap’ might have very real, life-altering consequences.”

“That’s not what I meant. I mean, maybe we shouldn’t move forward with our action plan to hire a factory full of word stamping robots and human wage slaves to mass produce this book by the millions, so we can sell copies to every living breathing book buying human on earth.”

“Yikes!” He laughed. “That’s our action plan?”

“How else are we going to become rich?”

“You read the same story I did, right?”

“Of course. It’s my story.”

Bookmaker laughed and laughed and laughed some more. When I had enough mockery, I asked, “Okay smart ass. What else do we do with this stupid thing then? Sell it at craft bazaars next to the stoic old men with the long tailed finch feeders and the nice old ladies selling the sweaters no one wears?”

“Use it to open a storybank exchange here in Portland.”

“And how would we make that magic happen? We’re now living and working for The People who bombed our homes, because our new banking system threatened to destroy The American Way of Life.”

“As if that matters…”

“Of course it matters. We’re literally living and working side by side The People who destroyed our homes.”

“It doesn’t. Not really.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” I reached slowly. “But I’m starting to pick up a hidden storyline here.”

“I am hiding nothing.”

“Okay I get it now. You don’t feel our bookmaking adventure will be profitable unless we succeed in selling this book to Maggie?”

Fucking crickets in the audience.

“What about you?” I tried again. “You invested as much storytime, if not more, in the production of this book thing…won’t you be disappointed if we don’t become famous bestselling authors?

“No,” Bookmaker grinned. “I’ve been paid.”

“Technically I haven’t paid you yet.”

“You will,” he smiled. “I’m perfectly okay with savoring the balancing out of our accounts. But honestly, I’m a lot less excited about that if you fail to maintain your homemaking theme with Maggie.”

“That is it!”

“That’s what?”

“You want me to sell this book to Maggie in the hope that she’ll read it and be reminded of all the reasons why we’re together!”

“Oh no. That’s certainly not a given,” Bookmaker laughed. “You read the same story I did, right?”

“Yes! Stop asking that.”

“Sorry to be a bother,” he paused to thumb through our book like you might. “Just curious what Maggie’s read on this ‘crap’ is.”

“It’s not crap,” I shot back. “I mean, it could be worse.”

“Oh yeah? That’s not how you began the scene.”

I sighed. “How do you beat a book about a city where our stories are money, and the only ‘goods and services’ humans buy and sell every day are actions and props for our stories? That’s kinda cool.”

“Kinda cool? Storysold: City challenges everything about everything the humans think they know about making good homes.”

“Well yeah. Like they say, ’It sounds good on paper…’”

“I don’t think you’re giving our readers enough credit.”

“Readers?” I laughed. “Like readers other than Maggie?”

“Well,” Bookmaker grinned. “I suppose, so long as Maggie reads this ‘crap’ and doesn’t immediately leave you again for Patricia or Philoh…”

“Do you think that’s likely?”

“Absolutely. If I were Maggie, I would read this book and immediately leave you and your lame story and runaway with Patricia again.”

“Fuck you. You’re such an asshole.”

“Thanks buddy,” he laughed. “You host a pretty solid Asshole (classic man character) yourself. But that doesn’t help us. The question remains: Why do you feel no one will buy this crap?”

“Because I’m afraid…”

“That Maggie will read it and she won’t heart-emoji love it.”

“Yes, you asshole…I am afraid Maggie will buy it, read it, and she will be reminded of how much like you I am.”

“Oh come now. Am I really that bad?”

“Yes, you’re the most assholish character I know.”

“True, but you’re here because, deep down, you want to know…”

“Yes you fucker! I want to know if my story, as it stands now, is our truest/most authentic story…”

“And not built on one pile of crap after the next?”

“Yes! I’m fucking terrified she will read this and be reminded of all the wrong things I’ve done in my life. Her story is so amazing…”

“And there it is, folks. That’s Our Product.

“Knowing that fact or whatever doesn’t make it easier.”

“Sure it does, because you’re going to do it now. Inspiration (aka The Action) is, by far, our planet’s most valuable resource.”

“God I hate you so much.”

“Yeah me too. That’s how this works.”

With that said, Bookmaker placed our book back in my hands. Then he very seriously said, “I want you to balance my account with food from your future farm. Do whatever you have to do to make that happen.”

The next day I asked Maggie to read our first book. She accepted that storyline without argument. A month or so later, we were in bed struggling to sleep. Side by side, we stared at the darkness like a blank page.

Then she rolled over and said, “I finished Storysold: City today.”

“Oh wow. How did that go?”

“Oh you know,” she paused for thought. “You made a book based on our storybank accounts.”

I laughed nervously, and asked, “And what do you think?”

“I think you guys invested a lot of your storytime in the production of a book about the only home I’ve ever known.”

I took a deep breath and asked, “Was it worth it?”

“What do you plan to do with it?”

“Sell it to employables.”

“Why specifically?”

“I want them to know the kind of home we’re building here.”

“What home?” Maggie laughed. “We’re living in a shitty one bedroom apartment in a city where no one owns their homes, because everyone’s renting them out and turning them into investments to pay for them. Even renters are renting rooms in their rentals, playing landlord just to pay The Bills.”

I didn’t hesitate. “I don’t care how shitty this city is,” I said as I held her tight. “We’re going to remember our city and show them a home they’ve never seen before. Then we’re going to be rich.”

“In that order?” Maggie asked, pushing away.

“Yes,” I lied. “The book is for you…I mean for us…I’m going to do everything I can to support our homemaking theme. It’s killing me that you’re not able to host your character the Garden Tender and wake up each morning to work in your Happy Garden.”

“What’s the plan?”

“Wilderness Guide, Bookmaker, and I are planning to embody an Old Market business entity and start a pest control theme.”

“What are you going to call it?”

“Storysold: Pest Control.”

“That’s original.”

“I haven’t told you this,” Maggie paused, “but I’m planning to end my organic farm internship this year and start my own farm theme.”

“What are you going to call it?”

“Full Cellar Farm.”

“Storysold: Full Cellar Farm?”

“No,” Maggie laughed. “Just Full Cellar Farm.”

“So you don’t hate me?”

“For what?”

“I thought you’d read our book and, you know, it would remind you of what an asshole I am.”

“No,” Maggie laughed. “I know you’re an asshole.”

“But I’ve changed,” I laughed and kissed her ear. “I’m like the assholes in movies who become the hero to win the love of their princess.”

“Nope,” she kissed me back.

“Come on! I can’t still be an asshole after all that.”

“Yes you can. Our stories don’t change us. Not really. Owning and accounting for them just makes it easier for others to know us.”

“Your story makes me want to know you more.”

“Oh really?” Maggie laughed. “Your book makes me want to not read it. You need to do something about that sales pitch.”

“The Impossible Sales Pitch I wrote about breaking The Fourth Wall and selling the humans a story that’s not The Same Old Story?”

“That’s the one.”

“Is fourteen pages too long?

Maggie laughed. “Don’t start with it. Put it at the end.”

[ See Bonus Material for the long introduction ]

“I knew you wouldn’t like it!” I laughed and held her tight. “So how do you think we should sell our book?”

Maggie didn’t reply. Instead she kissed me, and I kissed her, and our governing bodies touched each other, then we fell asleep. And we woke feeling ready for another action-packed day minting the stories of our lives.

That was the morning I finally let this fucking thing go.

We remembered Storysold: City. Then we let our stories sell themselves and we minted our freshest moments together.

My Storybank Account – The Beginning,

THE PART WHERE OUR HERO RETURNS HOME AND ACCOUNTS FOR THE RICHNESS OF HIS ADVENTURE…

All I ever wanted was to become rich.

I also wanted to become a Real American Hero, but I only wanted to become a hero because I believed I had to work heroically—pounding hot steel with my shirt off (and shit like that)—in order to earn my riches. Somewhere along the way I missed the part of The Earth that explains it makes more sense to work “smarter; not harder,” sit back, and watch cash roll in.

Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine it was possible to become rich—like rich, not spiritually or symbolically “rich”—owning and operating a fully embodied (employee free) business entity named “Dishmaster Jones” who makes a fortune washing dishes clean in his two story, farm-to-fork residential restaurant. I believed economic storylines like that were impossible.

Now I know better. The Earth did, in fact, produce a city where our dreams, as stories, didn’t merely “come true” for a few humans like Disney magic. In Storysold: City, our stories were alive and we produced The Action for them like clockwork every day. And this one is mine.

Welcome to my storybank account.

I’m going to begin at the beginning with a little backstory…

I was born in a suburb a mile from the nearest church, eighteen blocks from the nearest school, and three short blocks from the nearest cop-stocked coffee shop. I had a big family, which my father supported like Atlas with his well-paying government job. My mother worked hard too, but she didn’t have paid sick days, union breaks, vacations, or promotions. She was a musician at heart who governed our family like a Broadway show, parading us with aplomb like Julie Andrews through the free places: the thrift stores, libraries, and city parks of suburbia—“Be on your best at all times!”—because the hills were alive with important people, and they cared how we performed for them.

I loved my family. We rarely argued. When we did, it was about dumb things like sports, board games, and politics. My father called me his “Eager Beaver.” The word “no” wasn’t in my vocabulary. I think that’s what he liked about me best. The Beaver is my defining characteristic.

In school, I learned to want more than the love of my father, mother, or sisters. There I learned that I was a small part of something grander called a “class.” In my class, I learned that the best way to get closer to the something grander was to be everything to everybody, keep everyone on my side, and follow my teachers’ every instruction. My Eager Beaver character thrived in this environment. When the class needed a student, I became a Grade-A Student. When it needed a quarterback, I became an All State Quarterback. When it needed a leader, I became Class President.

I drifted for a few months after I graduated (at the top of my class) waiting for the something grander to contact me. It was an excruciatingly painful time in my life. I hated not knowing what to do next.

Then one day it happened. It hit me like they say it does–like light, or a ton of bricks. I was watching the newest James Bond film when The Something Grander spoke. “You could do that,” Something said. “You could make spying for Uncle Sam great again.” At first, I thought my date was whispering sweet nothings in my ear. When I asked, she made her signature don’t-be-crazy face and said, “Do I look like I give a damn about Uncle Sam?” We broke up a week later after I called her commie/pinko friend a “snowflake.”

The next day I had a strange feeling. It was strong, like the gut feeling real heroes use to get the bad guys, so I followed it like it was my teacher’s next assignment. It was weird not receiving my instructions at the top of the page, or on the upper right hand corner of a white board, but I figured I’d graduated for a reason. I was a mature American now…ready to receive my daily missions directly from the source. And the old gut feeling was telling me The Something Grander wanted me to become a spy.

It took a few years, but I eventually ticked off all of the requirements I needed to submit my job application: a) earn a master degree in criminal psychology; b) learn new languages, including Chinese, Russian, and Arabic; c) volunteer for a international charity organization like the ones that teach third world peoples how to use stoves (because their third world stoves were causing global warming); lead people to gain leadership experience; and more! I would have ticked off a hundred boxes if that’s what I had to do to earn Its respect, but thankfully the application only featured thirteen requirements.

When I finally landed the job, I called my parents to tell them the good news. “I’m going to work for the government!” I exclaimed.

And they replied, “We’ve never been prouder!”

My parents had a lot more to say on the subject of working as a “Data Analyst” for the government, but honestly I don’t remember the other stuff they said. I didn’t have to. My parents said it (and I heard them say it). “They’ve never been prouder!” I’d passed The Test. I was now an Eager Beaver working for something grander (than my class) called the FBI.

I remember I was so amped when I began. And it wasn’t all the energy drinks, coffee, and booze I drank everyday. I was naturally locked on, dialed in, and jacked about becoming an honest-to-God spy. In fact, I used to drink the energy drinks to seem normal. Every time I appeared to be too eager to please and perform, I’d have something to blame it on. “Oh sorry,” I’d say and point to the energy drink in my hand. “I think I had one too many of these Monsters today.” It was good to have a scapegoat, because no coworker in any workplace anywhere wants to work with a superhuman that has the power to mainstream raw can-do crowd-pleasing/get-er-done bootlicking on command. The mood stabilizers and sedatives served to dumb down my super character, The Eager Beaver, so my coworkers (and other humans) would be less threatened by a divine power they could not understand, or manifest without the help of many years of career coaching. So I took my espressos before work and liquor shots after work like I was taking communion, all the while dreaming and waiting for my day in the sun when I could release the full power of my Eager Beaver and gnaw my way, all the way, to that big office in the sky.

It was hard being different from everyone else. Working every day to please and perform heroically had a side effect that was often more of a burden than a gift. As they say, “Practice makes perfect!” And I practiced harder than anyone to become the most intelligent agent in the bureau of intelligence. The shits of that was (as any one who’s worked in government knows) most public servants don’t care about being the best they can be. Most of them care about their “real life” that happens after work: future rock star band practice, raising happy kids, running ultra marathons, or walking briskly in The Nature. And they generally hate anyone who remind them they’re at work.

As a result, I had to dumb down my intelligence too.

It killed me to make small talk about sports, politics, and TV shows in order to fit in. All I wanted to do was talk shop with my fellow G-men about how best to win The Great Game, but I found that surprisingly difficult to do. Most of my coworkers didn’t even know our nation was engaged in The Great Game for total world domination. Can you believe that? Apparently the wheels of government turned slowly even at the FBI.

Yet I still had hope. In the short run, I knew dumbing down my Eager Beaver and its production of super intelligence was not good. I was aware that if I indulged The Dumbing for too long, one day I’d wake from my slumber and be blissfully unaware that I’d become dumb for real. Capital-H Hope was my belief in the long game…the part where I had faith that the FBI needed me as much as I needed It. As I was learning, the trick was to pay attention to life’s many details and follow the old gut feeling like the instructions I once followed on the old school whiteboard. And there were so many god-awful stupid details to pay attention to! But I did it. I paid attention, because I knew that was what separated the wheat from the chaff…

For example, I knew the Bureau put the bulk bottle of non-liquid dairy creamer in the break room to test for real heroics. It was an easy test really. Any real up-and-coming hero would realize: a) everything we did at The Bureau was a test, because that’s how all our planet’s grander characters relate to their human hosts; b) in spite of its impressive pool of mediocre agents, the Federal Bureau of Intelligence was still more intelligent than most generic characters hosted by humans: e.g., Orkin Man, Burger King, and The Cowboys; c) no intelligent person (or person place) would ever buy a bottle of non-liquid dairy creamer and set it beside the coffee machine in their break room. Only hookers, junkies, criminals, and other losers who haunt dirty/cheap motels feel drawn to the sedimentary rock known as “non-liquid dairy creamer.” It’s an inalienable law of nature: Only Losers Use Non-Liquid Dairy Creamer.

“Father forgive them,” I cried inside every time I saw my coworkers reach for the bottle. “They know not what they do…”

I know I should have stood and screamed for them to “Stop! Put that crap down now!” But I knew, after That Show, whatever explanation I gave any  audience for the wrongness of non-liquid dairy creamer would be met with the blank-face look. Like I said, intelligence is a burden. If my audience doesn’t already Get It (and get that it’s a test) then I, the New Guy who Drinks 3-to-5 Monster-brand Energy Drinks Everyday won’t be The Wise One they call humbly for explanation. Only real heroes (or heroes in the making)—the cream of The Cream of The Crop—will understand why it’s always better to reach for the cream that comes from cows. It’s one of the many lessons that can’t be copied, passed around, and memorized the night before the test.

At the time, I believed I was on my way to becoming a Real American Hero like Jesus and James Bond. I wanted more than anything to be the hero who held The Line when it mattered most—be the guy who didn’t flinch when I was called on to sacrifice my life for others, defending the innocence of women and children. I wanted to hook and jab, slash and stab, and kick ass. I wanted the villains of planet earth to fear The Something Grander. I wanted them to know there would be consequences if they crossed the sleeping giant of our military might, because we loved our collective Capital-F Freedom. I had an “A” in History before I could read. I was a born hero. “Freedom wasn’t free—it was paid for by the blood of heroes.” The lesson was in my bones.

Every day I waited for my Bureau’s Director to appear and yell, “Jackson! I just received word from The Highest Level. We need a Hero on the double! Get your ass in my office now!” Drugs were helpful, sex was nice, rock-in-roll was good for passing time, but The Heroic Call to Duty was the only moment I really lived for.

All I had to do was wait for it…settle into my dream job, marry the next nice girl who said yes more times than she said no, and buy a house big enough for a few kids, a few dogs, and a man cave where I could escape the wife and kids with the dogs—where I could watch sports and drink brews with my workout buddies from the fitness club down the street. All I had to do was wait like my turn at the drinking fountain, but I’ve never been good at waiting. I hate supermarkets, especially the ones that pride themselves on customer service. Chatty checkers make no sense to me. No one can have a meaningful conversation with any human in 1.85 minutes. I figure, it’s only a matter of time before the food industry catches up with America’s creative engine, the military, and begins to use helicopters, drones, or some other flying machine to airlift our sustenance direct to our home bivouac sites.

I’m sorry. I don’t mean to whine. All I’m trying to say is, I was an Eager Beaver—and my life wasn’t going the way it was supposed to go. Real spy work was flashy, but there was nothing flashy about my work. My first undercover assignment was gathering intel on a group of environmentalists in Portland, Oregon. It was easy. I drank a lot of local microbrews, smoked a lot of organic weed, and infiltrated a small, super ill-defined “group” of harmless idealists. Eventually a few of the individuals (who may or may not have actually been members of the group) torched a tax paying customer’s car lot, damaging a few sports utility vehicles. Thanks to me, Suzy, Sally, Randy, and Johnny Bad Guys were labeled as Capital-T “Eco-Terrorists” instead of an insane torch-bearing mob, or individual vandals.

Yes, I did that. I also spied on the mayor of New Orleans for a few months, but that was boring too. Like everything else I did!

That reality took a while to really sink in…

I was bored, and I thought I was bored because I wasn’t on the fast track to becoming Uncle Sam’s next newest Real American Hero.

Most days, I watched my days flash away, wasted, staring at the bulk bottle of non-liquid dairy creamer in the Bureau’s break room in Washington DC. I felt like I was living some other guy’s life.

My Storybank Account – Scene One,

THE PART WHERE JEFF JACKSON GETS HIS FIRST, REAL, HERO ASSIGNMENT AS A SPY FOR THE FBI…

Like I said, working for the FBI wasn’t like it was in the movies. Our break room wasn’t stocked with guns, free condoms, and underling interns employed to pass out towels in the bathroom and laugh when we made witty observations and shared our adventures with them. The only action in our break room was watching the man, whose uniform style hadn’t changed since the sixties, change out the mummified deli snacks, food widgets, and other odes to sustenance in our vending machine.

Then one afternoon, when I was in the process of freeing my food thing from its sarcophagus, something finally happened. The Director didn’t appear, but he sat at his desk far away and assigned Agent Sturgis, the Man in Charge of Me, to assign me to my first real assignment. I remember it like it was yesterday. Sturgis’s voice boomed through the intercom and demanded to see me in his office immediately. I thought I was fired for sure. Instead he pointed at the empty seat set on The Other Side of his large wooden desk. Then he told me, still speaking in his intercom voice, to “sit” in the seat that I was sure was made of the bones of the failed spies who’d come before me.

There was something about the way he told me to sit that made it clear I wasn’t permitted to look at the photo of his wife on his desk. She was on a beach, in a swimsuit, splashing in the waves. Luckily I didn’t have any trouble passing that test. I found it easy, almost calming, to look deep into his eyes and wait for The Instructions to appear like magic ink in the upper left hand corner of my brain. To this day, I don’t know how I know that his wife wore a hot pink bikini. I must have caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of my eye. That had to be it, because I never actually looked at it.

  “Agent Jackson,” the Man in Charge said less dramatically. “I have an important assignment for you.”

Yeah sure, I thought. I’ve heard that one before.

Just as I expected: Instead of a bigwig briefing for my benefit, I spent the next forty-eight hours in front of my laptop, alone with my coffee, reading the files Agent Sturgis told me to read. They were bios on a wide range of individual bad guys. None of whom I’d classify as bad in my classic Professor Moriarty/Dr. No sense of bad guys. “Super!” I thought as I watched the ink peel off the pages. “More of the same for Best Shot in the Bureau, Top-of-the-Class, Cream-of-the-Crop Agent Jackson. If this keeps up, in a few years, I’ll be aged, boring, old Average Paper-Pushing Agent Jeff.”

“I don’t understand why this requires top-level security,” I said to Agent Sturgis in his office. “From what I gather, this is routine.”

The Man in Charge of Me was blunt. “You’ve done a good job so far, Jackson,” he replied, “but you’re no hardened Cold War veteran. That’s for sure. As far as I’m concerned, you’re just another rookie fuck up waiting to happen. But, thanks to the great American baby-booming herogasm after The Big One, all my qualified agents are retiring. I have no choice but to give this assignment to a fuck-up waiting to happen like you.”

I almost took that personally. I might have if I hadn’t been able to identify my boss’s verbal abuse as a test. “Yes, sir,” I replied like I was taking a test. “I appreciate any chance I get to serve…”

Sturgis sighed. “You have no fucking clue, do you?”

“I’m going undercover to gather information on a former executive of the World Bank, self-made millionaire Chester A. Weston, who retired in 1992 to his small empire based in the city of Acapulco, and I’m being sent to spy on him, because we’re worried he’s losing his mind—suffering from Alzheimer’s or something—and he doesn’t have any relatives or friends powerful enough to put him, and his mega fortune, in a home where they’re safe?” I replied, riffing off the plot of Apocalypse Now in the absence of any better ideas.

He was suddenly a lot more serious.  “No, Jackson. That’s the plot of Apocalypse Now. I’m sending you up against the greatest threat to our way of life since rock ‘n’ roll. If this guy’s transnational corporation gains its independence and expands, there will be nothing left of our great nation, but savages, hunting deer with sticks and arrows in our malls and freeways.”

“What weapon could he have with that kind of firepower?”   

The Man in Charge of Me raised his eyebrows and slid a photo across the desk. “The bio I gave you on Weston was accurate. Weston owns over a hundred square miles of land in and around the city of Acapulco, but his small empire there isn’t why we’re here—” The photo was taken from a spy satellite. It showed a massive land structure floating in the ocean somewhere. The image reminded me of an earthbound moon colony. “As you see,” he continued, “Weston’s expanded. He now owns land off the coast of Mexico too.”

“That’s a city…” I said, gasping in disbelief “…in the ocean.”

“Yes,” he nodded solemnly. “And he calls his fantastical ocean-going metropolis, a ‘transnational city,’ the Nation Free City of Westonton.”

“How come I’ve never heard about this?”

“Because he pays his taxes.”

“I don’t follow, sir.”

“Soon after Weston retired he invested his fortune in the enterprise he now calls The Westonton Corporation,” Sturgis said. “On paper his business is banking and real estate, using bitcoin and other alternative currencies to sell underwater condos to the super rich, nationless globetrotters, privileged people who will gladly pay a fortune to own oceanfront property in the middle of the ocean…where they can live free from the people and governments who made them rich in the first place. The tens of millions Weston once invested in this venture now number in the tens of billions.”

“I still don’t follow. Is Weston selling his underwater condos to drug czars, or crooked politicians running off with their nation’s wealth?”

“Aside from those files and a schematic overview we generated based on satellite images,” Agent Sturgis replied. “We don’t know much.”

“We’ve had over a decade to investigate this guy.”

“Like I said,” Sturgis snipped. “He pays his taxes. And aside from a taste for youthful interns and a ton of speeding tickets, Weston’s records are exemplary. On paper, he’s a True Blue Nephew of Uncle Sam. Besides, ever since 9/11, Homeland Security has been too busy fighting dangerous bio-nuclear terrorists to worry about an aging playboy like Weston.”

“Until now,” I said, anticipating his next line.

“Yes,” Agent Sturgis the Man in Charge of Me said, passing a letter across his desk as he spoke. “Until last week, when the President’s office received this email from Mr. Chester Weston.”

DEAR Mr. President,

I’m about to do something American.

Like Carnegie who SUPPLied the steel rails that carved The West, AND EDISON WHO SUPPLied OUR HOMES WITH ELECTRIC LIGHT, AND Rockefeller who supplied the oil that liberated our roadways, and what’s-his-name (that enterprising genius) who put hamburgers, fries, and soda pop within 5-minutes reach of every freeway off-ramp in America…I too am about to launch a new product into the great American mainstream that will change our way of life forever.

IT’S A NEW KIND OF MONEY engineered TO COMPETE WITH, AND EVENTUALLY REPLACE, OUR PLANET’S OUTDATED OLD MARKET MONEY SYSTEM. I CALL OUR INNOVATIon “THE STORYSOLD EXCHANGE SYSTEM,” AND (unlike the dollar) our currency MEASURES THE VALUES OF OUR GOODS AND SERVICES QUALITATIVELY IN FULL, LIVING COLOR.

We don’t expect The people to react well to this news at first. Americans are proud, god-fearing folk who hate new things. We know many of you will cling to the titS of tradition like newborns.

That’s to be expected. We’re prepared to make whatever investments are needed to show the world why our product is superior to the many old BROKEN money systems.

I’d like to begin those investments now, starting with investments in good all American world leaders like you. We get it. We need to make good investments in good world leaders like you who will decide what we will do next. We don’t want world war III.

In that spirit, I suggest you sell my product for what it is: “the ULTIMATE economic stimulus package that has the power to bailout our planet’s antiquated old market COMPLETELY.”

Your choice is clear. You can do that, or you can be left behind with the losers.

don’t be a loser; Back a winner!

FOR QUESTIONS, COMMENTS, OR CONCERNS YOU CAN CONTACT ME AT: chesterweston@westonton.com

Signed—                 

Chester Weston

president of WESTONTON corporation

When I looked up and read Agent Sturgis’s face, I knew what it felt like to be a real spy. “What’s our next move, Boss?” I asked solemnly as I slid the letter back across the desk. It was the moment when someone’s supposed to light a smoke and puff nervously as the camera pans out, but neither of us smoked. So we sat in the silence breathing heavy like smokers.

“We asked the President to email Weston in an attempt to test the waters,” Agent Sturgis replied. “Surprisingly Weston replied within a matter of hours, extending a formal invitation for an all-expense paid tour of his ocean-going city. After a lot of deliberation, we advised the President to accept the playboys’s offer…only if he wins his second term in next year’s election. A day later, the President’s re-election campaign fund received a three thousand dollar contribution. A minute later, another three thousand dollar donation was made to the fund. The contributions continued to roll in, at the top of every minute, for twenty-five thousand two hundred and ten minutes. The small fortune was followed by a letter from Weston explaining that all his 25, 210 Westonton employees wished the Honorable American the best of luck in the upcoming election. I checked source of the contributions. They seemed to be as Weston said, each transferred from an individual bank account.”

“How does the President feel about accepting contributions from employees of a man who’s plotting to put the dollar out of business?”

“We advised him to take the money. As far as we know it’s legit. They all came from private citizens. We don’t want to raise Weston’s alarms until we can determine what he’s capable of doing.”

“And how long do we have to do that?” I asked stoically.

“The President wants to know everything about Weston’s business.”  Sturgis paused. “He wants to know if this Westonton Corporation is a friend to The American Way of Life, or not. And if our relationship with Weston isn’t profitable, then he wants to know his weaknesses. And by weaknesses, I mean Mr. Honorable wants to know the most effective way to take him out, if he needs to, without causing a public uproar. And he wants to know all that before he meets the man in person. So I’d say you have a year, maybe more, to gather information…and that of course depends on what you dig up.”

“Then we better get cracking,” I said seriously.

I delivered the line seriously, but I was not serious. I was bubbling with excitement like a kid at my first sport’s game…

This was it. I was finally getting my piece of The Action.

“Yes,” Sturgis said dryly. “Your flight leaves in 2 hours. Agent Oates will brief you on the details of The Mission while you’re en route to Portland.” Then he stood, shuffled his files and prepared to leave. “And Jackson?”

“Yes, sir?” I answered. My heart was pumping rivers.

“You’re now an independently wealthy, globetrotting, freelance journalist named Wylie Jones,” he said. “For our sakes, let’s hope you write as well as your file says you do.” He walked out, adding, “Good luck. You’re the best potential pile of crap we’ve got under fifty. You’ll do fine.”

On the flight Agent Oates filled me in. The first thing I realized was, Sturgis didn’t choose me because of my marks as a writer. Chester Weston’s daughter, Maggie, was to be our Asset: the ticket into his world. Like he said in his way, the Bureau was short on handsome dashing young agents. And as Agent Oates (age 45, feeding her ex-football star husband and their five future ex-football stars) put it, “Trust me, you’re hot. I’d do you if I wasn’t as smart as I am now.” Oates was clear on the subject of “asset relations.” She said, “Under no circumstances will you ever fall in love with your Asset.” Then she told me a jangled story of how she once felt something for an Asset, and how he felt it too, and how she felt him feel her feel something, and how their unbridled sex frenzy came to an abrupt end when Agent Oates was forced, for the sake of national security, to kill him—double tap to the head.

Clearly her professionalism was unmatched.

Agent Oates and I enjoyed the booze and peanuts the FBI stocked for long fights. As we did, I tried to imagine a scene where I’d kiss an asset one moment, and then turn around and kill them in the next. While I was having deep thoughts about killing near strangers, Oates read Maggie’s bio. By the end of the flight, Oates had persuaded me to replace my nice, comfy, pressed brown slacks, polo shirt, and boots for the costume of a Portland hipster. Then she drilled my cover story into me. I was Wylie Jones, a wealthy globetrotting, freelance journalist hipster of mysterious origins who had read a magazine about the best green cities in America to live. Apparently, the magazine’s Greener Meter ranked Portland, Oregon higher than the previous year’s winner Austin, Texas. Now I, Wylie Jones Globetrotting Journalist, was moving to Portland to join my fellow hipsters in America’s Greenest Scene.

That was my cover. It didn’t feel natural. I could feel my jeans wedge further up my ass with every stilt-legged step off the plane. To add horror to the horror, I discovered an agent waiting for us on the runway in Portland. He had my new ride: a nerdy scooter that came with a thoroughly researched mix of trendy radical bumper stickers, a flashy white-and-red striped helmet, and an obnoxious horn for me to blow at “all the idiots on the road.” I thought it was anything but sweet. But Oates assured me that the scooter combo kit matched my skin tight indie-rocker T-shirt, military surplus pea coat, artsy black-rimmed glasses, and the scarf-o-mystery, which I tossed whimsically—“sort of super pretentiously” (as Agent Oates advised) over my shoulder as I mounted my new vehicular emasculation.

“If you need anything, Agent Chandler will be your contact in the area,” Oates said, introducing the fifty-something and graying FBI Agent.

I shook his hand, and tried not to imagine him riding the scooter.

“Everything you need is here in this scooter bag,” Agent Chandler explained, “including the information you will need to access the twenty-five thousand dollars our bean counters authorized you to use…”

“Yeah thanks. I’ll be in touch,” I snipped coolly, getting into my hipster character. I interpreted the role as being a kind of introspective dude who has no substantial, life experience that would help him relate to people who weren’t “hip,” which was code for anyone who wasn’t like him.

Agent Oates handed me my helmet and said, “OK, Jones. Let’s hear it. What would a wealthy hipster who moved to Portland, because a magazine told him to, say as he rode away from two aging co-workers?”

It took me a second to find it, but then I said, “You know, nobody would have to wear helmets if there weren’t so many cars on the road. Cars are stupid, and people who own cars are stupid too. The whole world’s just so stupid sometimes I can’t stand it. Know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” both Agents nodded. “We know what you mean.”

“Really?” I asked, diving deeper into my character. “Or are you just saying that because that’s what you think I want you to say?”

I left both agents laughing as I puttered-up my scooter and zipped into the city with my scarf-o-mystery fluttering on a winter’s day.

My Storybank Account – Scene Two,

THE PART WHERE MAGGIE AND WYLIE MEET IN A GARDEN SPACE MADE FOR A CAR OR SPORTS UTILITY VEHICLE…

My ticket into Weston’s world was his daughter. Usually, as a matter of policy, the FBI doesn’t use unsuspecting civilians to meet its ends. This was different. The President of the United States needed to know about Weston before Weston did something he couldn’t explain away as easily as a foundering economy, or a terrorist attack.

In any case, they could have found a cheaper ticket. Weston had two, three, five, or more kids (depending on which story you believed) each from a different woman. But, no matter which story you believed, he gave all of them up for adoption, or abandoned them in some way. Based on the intelligence we gathered, Maggie was his first child…the one he had with the first and last woman he married for love or any other reason. Maggie’s mother, Annie Duelce, was a few years out of Yale making her mark at The World Bank as an intern when she met Chester. They fell deeply in love. He built her a vacation cabin with his own hands in the foothills of Wyoming’s Wind River Range. It had a creek and hot springs running behind it. Rumor had it, Weston cut one of the trees beside the spring, carve it out and make it a tub, so he and Annie could soak and hold each other as they gazed upon the enchanting old growth forest living all around them. Annie gave birth to Maggie in that tree tub one rainy morning with their midwife Ginger and husband looking on. That was what we called The Honeymoon Phase of Weston’s story.

Two long lonely years later, while Weston was away on business in South America (again), Annie dropped Maggie off at a friend’s house in nearby Jackson Hole before she went on a solo-backpacking trek into The Winds. It wasn’t meant to last any more than a week, but it did. Nobody saw her again. Annie vanished into the wilderness without a sign.

Months after his wife’s disappearance, Chester signed Maggie’s adoption papers and gave custody of his first daughter to his old fraternity buddy Jimmy Norton and his wife Kitty who lived in Portland.

The other women after Annie (including the two or three or four he had children with) were all interns at the World Bank, and they all liked the outdoors just like Annie did. It was Chester’s signature romance, which always followed the same plot: After a few months of hot romantic nature-adventures sailing the Seven Seas, bio-backpacking in Patagonia, farming with the noble savages in Tibet, or diving for sunken treasures in Bermuda—Weston left his intern lovers the way Annie had left him, all alone.

Based on Weston’s profile, the FBI was willing to bet that he’d care when the child of his true love came searching for her father. I wasn’t sure if I liked that bet or not, but the Man in Charge of Me didn’t care what I thought. The Mission would succeed, or fail, based on Mr. Chester Weston’s love for his Long Lost Daughter Maggie…

The last entry in Maggie’s bio read: JULY 5, 2004: KITTY NORTON CALLS 911 TO REPORT THAT MAGGIE STOLE TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHT DOLLARS WORTH OF THEIR FOOD, CLOTHING, BOOKS, AND CASH BEFORE SHE RAN AWAY FROM HOME

7.8 out of 10 Asset Profilers of the FBI believed that Maggie ran away from her adopted parents because she was consciously (or subconsciously (or deep consciously) searching for her biological patriarch; or the guy they felt she felt could anoint her life with meaning, like magic, if she found Him and He showed her how He dined at restaurants, played games, or streamed movies in His More Meaningful Fatherly Way. I didn’t buy their read of her character. The more likely read was that life with the Nortons was intolerable. No matter what the right read was, I wish the Bureau would have found a cheaper ticket into Weston’s world. I spent three days zipping around on my cool scooter, getting reacquainted with Portland, spying on Maggie’s every move.

I was pleased to see that she was off the streets and independent. She had a job at a convenience store a few blocks from her apartment. I looked in her windows when she was away at work. The walls of her apartment were decorated with the strange tribal creations of local artists she’d bought at the radical organic coffee shop down the road. I sampled the shop a few times just to get a feel for her social life. It sold coffee all right, but by my read it primarily sold radical organic atmosphere to weekend radicals who leashed their dogs to the trees outside. Maggie fit in, but it was clear she had to work at it. Her apartment complex didn’t allow dogs, so she had to fill the water bowls for the dogs outside in order to talk dogs like the rest of the radical organic coffee drinkers. I tried to find her hidden rebellious side, but the only rebellious thing she’d done since she left her life on the streets was change her name from Norton to Stone without the permission of the government. In certain circles that act would have been unforgivable, but minimum wage employees get away with shit like that all the time without any legal consequences. Mainly because no one cares what those people do, so long as they show up on time and keep the customer service line flowing fast, at all times.

With that in mind, I made my move on spy day four. When Maggie’s morning shift was over, I threw open the door of my hotel room, threw up my lapel, and mounted my scooter with bravado. Then I snapped the safety strap of my helmet like I was loading an M-16 and rode to meet my destiny, career-making Maggie Stone, with my scarf-o-mystery flying for all to see!

Knock, knock—the sound of knocking at the door of Maggie’s second floor apartment. I checked the door. It was open. I heard the sound of music in the distance. I thought she might be showering with the radio on, so I knocked louder and called, “Hello!” through the open door.

Behind me, a young woman carrying groceries was walking up the stairs. I smiled at her, assuming she lived next door.

“Hey,” she said, stopping. “Are you looking for Maggie?”

“Yes,” I replied, pretending to be too warm in the cool, crisp, sun-soaked afternoon as I peeled off my coat. “I think she’s inside.”

“Not likely…She’s probably out back gardening.”

Then woman unlocked her apartment, dumped everything except a box of wine on her couch, gave me a wink, and said, “Follow me.”

Somehow, I’d missed the fact that Maggie had a garden. I cursed my powers of observation as I followed Mel—Maggie’s spiky shorthaired wine-toting friend—through a hallway that lead to a parking lot at the center of the complex. There, sandwiched between parking spaces number ten and twelve, was a car-sized hoop house covering low wooden boxes filled with soil. Mel explained that Maggie built the hoop house from salvaged plastic, old tent poles, and other parts she found in thrift stores, or dumpsters.

“Hey Maggie,” Mel said as she opened her wine. “I found another lost-looking man hanging around your door. He says he’s a Globetrotting Journalist named Wylie. Do you know him?”

“No,” Maggie replied from inside the hoop house. “Tell him to go away, and bring the vino in.”

“Sorry,” Mel smiled. “Go away.”

Then she walked to the front of the hoop house, unzipped the door, and asked, “How are our babies?”

“Stressed.”

There was a long, uncomfortable silence.

“Hello?” I said, calling through the hoop house wall. “My name’s Wylie Jones. I’m a freelance journalist doing a story on your father, Chester Weston, and I’d like to take you to dinner…a nice dinner with vino…and hear what you have to say about him. It’ll be my treat.”

There was another long silence. Then Maggie appeared. She was dressed in a thermal underwear shirt, thigh-length gray corduroy skirt, combat boots, and thick black stockings, soiled at the knees. In her hands, she held a bunch of banded kale.

“How do you know who my father is?” she asked as Mel stepped up behind her. “I didn’t even know that until a few years ago.”

“I have his email address if you want it.”

“You have his email address?”

“Super creepy,” Mel said under her breath.

“Sure,” I replied. “It’s chesterweston@westonton.com.”

Maggie studied me like a piece of bad art while Mel poured more wine into a sawed-off pop bottle and handed it to Maggie.

“I wish I could help,” Maggie finally replied, “you probably already know more about that man then I do.”

“Probably,” I replied, “but he doesn’t reply to my emails. And honestly, I don’t think I’ll be able to get his story without your help.”

Maggie drank the wine down—then she studied me for a moment before she coolly asked, “What’s your favorite vegetable?”

“Carrots,” I said without pause. “I’m a huge fan of carrots.”

“Well…we don’t have any carrots yet, stud,” she said, very near to smiling. “All we have is kale, cabbage, and spinach.”

“Did I say carrots? I meant to say kale. It’s my favorite vegetable for sure,” I said with my best charming smile, imagining what kale tasted like. My knowledge of vegetables was limited to frozen bags of mixed vegetables, so I imagined kale tasted something like soggy broccoli.

Mel, sensing some sort of social danger, pulled her friend back into the hoop-house for a conversation. A few minutes later, Maggie reemerged and said seriously, “I’m not interested, Mr. Jones. Go away.”

To which I smiled and I said, “Did I say I wanted to take you out to dinner? I meant to say I’d like to take you both out, on me.”

“Deal!” Mel said—suddenly beaming brightly. “Let’s go to that spot on Water Ave with the beet soup that’s to die for.”

Two bowls of beet soup, seven small plates of trendy food, and three bottles of wine later, I was stumbling back up the stairs to Maggie’s door with my arm around Mel.

“Tell me more about that article you wrote,” Mel asked like she was throwing chum off a fishing boat.

“Which one?” I replied confidently. “There are so many!”

“Tell us about the one you wrote about mothers in Sudan,” she said with a twinkle of mischief in her eye. “You know the one you were telling us about before you almost chucked up the soup.”

“Oh yeah…that article!”

“Did those Assholes really sell their formula…by telling mothers that it was better for their children than breast milk?”

I had no idea what she was saying, but I rolled with it like a champ anyway. “You better believe those Assholes did!”

Maggie rolled her eyes. “Really Mel?”

Mel winked as we stumbled into Maggie’s living room and fell together on the couch. Mel grabbed my head like a limp melon and stared deeply into my eyes. “Woe to the world when some Asshole corporate formula can replace mother’s milk!” she cried as she shook my head like a protest sign.

“I can’t agree more,” I said, reaching for the wine. “I’ve always been a fan of real cream.”

“I wonder,” she said fixing my eyes with hers again. “You seem like an Asshole. Are you just talking nice, when deep down you’re plotting like every other Asshole to control the world’s supply of milk?”

“No,” I replied (nervous gulp). “I’m a believer.”

“I don’t believe you. You look like a formula guy to me.”   

“No way,” I replied. “I only buy organic.”

“Of course you do, but what about all those poor babies?”

“Everyone knows,” I said drinking the last of the wine, “only losers drink non-dairy formulas that don’t come from mothers.”

Mel roared with laughter like my line was the funniest line she’d heard in a long time. Then she stopped laughing suddenly.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, a little bewildered.

“I still don’t believe you,” Mel said as she pulled me closer. “I want my little baby boy to prove that he loves his mother’s milk.”

“I, I can’t,” I stammered. “I have to go.”

“What’s wrong?” Mel smiled. “I thought you were a believer?”

I turned to Maggie. She was laughing so hard Mel began to point to the ceiling. “Neighbors,” she said, putting her finger to her lips. “Don’t forget about your neighbors. Five kids, three jobs each.”

“About the article,” I said on my way out. “I think we might make a good team. You know, professionally. To get to the bottom of things.”

Maggie laughed at Mel again. Then she read me as I tried my best to make a smooth exit. “Let’s say next Friday night at seven,” she agreed with a sigh. “But this time, dinner’s my treat.”

Before I was able to say, “Great! See you then!” Mel hustled me out the front door and shut it with a slam.   

I was certain Mel wanted me. Why else would she have touched my head so much? That’s what lovers do. They try to control each other’s heads like their own. Just like The Something Grander does with its humans. I tried to figure it all out—checking and double checking my conclusions against my old gut feeling—as I pushed my scooter back to my hotel in order to avoid a drunk drinking ticket from the local law enforcement. By the time I hit my bed, I was certain I’d done the right thing. Uncle Sam was paying me to manipulate my asset Maggie, not Mel. After all, this wasn’t a spy novel. This was The Real World where we, The Cream of The Crop/Future Special Agents of the FBI had to keep our professional standards high as priests.

My Storybank Account – Scene Three,

THE PART WHERE AGENT JONES APPARENTLY COMES CLEAN AND EATS WITH A HUNGRY LOOK ON HIS FACE…

I showed up at her door at seven o’ clock sharp, sporting my tight indie-rocker T-shirt, clutching a two-serving bag of organic greens and a bunch of certified organic carrots grown somewhere like California, anywhere other than Portland in winter. What a joke that turned out to be. I might as well have shown up with a dozen roses and a box of chocolates.

“Hello again,” I said, presenting the vegetables.

She looked at my offering, and smiled—laughing to herself. “Come in,” she said as she turned and walked to the kitchen where she mixed greens, garlic, and potatoes from her parking space garden in a bowl, adding store-bought butter and salt as needed.

I sat at the table. It was set with the fixings for tacos.

“You can keep that stuff you brought in the fridge until you go.”

“Keep them,” I said, sweet as pie. “They’re yours.”

  “No thanks,” she said, setting her salad on the table.

“Oh that’s right, you said tonight was your treat.”

She smiled disingenuously and said, “I hope you like tofu.”

“Are you a vegetarian?” I asked, bracing my taste buds for hell.    

“I like to eat vegetables, especially mine,” she replied. “Big Ag puts all kinds of crap in their food products, even the organic ones.”

“Organic veggies are the way to go. I can’t buy enough of the stuff.” I nodded, remembering my spy class on How to Impersonate a Liberal.   

“Hum,” was the only thing she said as began to eat in silence.

The tofu tacos tasted like inedible chunks of white rubber mixed with real lettuce, cheese, beans, shells, and seasoning. But, because I was the Good Guy (and good guys are naturally polite), I ate with theatrics—never once betraying my true feelings about tacos: tacos are tacos, a taco shell with chicken, beef, or fish in it.

“What are you doing here?” Maggie asked finally.

Crunch, chew, chew, I ventured another bite of her so-called taco and replied, “Your father built an ocean-going metropolis off the coast of Mexico, and I need your help scooping his story.”

“Get a boat, go knocking. I’m sure he’ll tell you everything.”

I knew I wouldn’t get anywhere without an obvious in, so I said, “The thought had crossed my mind, but I’d rather get a boat and go with you.”

“What are you doing—trying to give your story a heartwarming edge?” she asked sarcastically. “I can see the headline now, Aging Millionaire Playboy Reunites Teary Eyed with Long Lost Daughter.”

“No, nothing like that. I’d say it’s more like—Abandoned Daughter of Aging Millionaire Playboy Gives Her Father What He Deserves.”

She froze, reading me as if for the first time.

Agent Oates said Maggie might be open to helping the Bureau (and ultimately be more effective) if I cut her in on a slice of the truth. I agreed. I believed that giving her an opportunity for revenge, or at least some kind of closure, was a sweeter carrot than asking her to help me write a story for a magazine about famous people. Nobody reads these days anyway.

“How much do you know about me?” she asked cautiously.

I pulled her bio (not her official file mind you) and her father’s bio from my scooter bag and put them on the table.

“Exactly that much,” I replied, fingering the files between us.

She took the bait. Quietly she skimmed them. Then asked, “Where did you get this? You can’t get information like this on The Web.”

I took a deep breath and answered, “I got this from the FBI.”

She looked surprised. “As in the Federal Bureau of Investigations?”

“Yes,” I presented sincerely, looking deep in her eyes. “You might say the FBI’s paying me to write about your father.”

“You might say that…Agent…whoever you are?”

“Wylie Jones is my real name,” I lied—and added, “but we both know you can’t say the same. Am I right about that Miss Maggie Stone?”

“So, I ran away and changed my last name,” she said, clearing the table of what remained of my tofu taco. “Am I a criminal now?”

  “No,” I said, following her into the kitchen with my dishes. “It’s been too long. The Nortons can’t press charges for the stuff you took when you ran away. But you did, however, change your name without the official permission of the government. And you haven’t paid your taxes. That’s a serious offense indeed. The IRS never forgets a debt.”

“And I suppose you’ll remind them if I don’t help?” she asked.

“The Bureau’s not as conspiratorial as Hollywood frames it,” I replied, laughing lightly. “But yes, that’s the general idea…” Then I paused to flash her my best warm, big-eyed look. “Here, why don’t you read up on what your dad’s done since he dumped you…while I do the dishes.”

“Good, I’m not big on doing dishes.”

That’s when I noticed that Maggie had more to her character than I’d first imagined. I’d expected her to put up some sort of a fight, or a front, when I told her the name of my employer. Nobody in America—not on the Left, or the Right—trusts the government. One of my instructors in spy school called it “the universal constant of our time,” and the FBI used it when they factored their missions. It’s easy to spin people the way you want if you understand what motivates them. Maggie was unpredictable from the beginning. She sat quietly sipping tea, reading files as I washed her dishes—twice—wondering if there was something special about women who were birthed in tubs made from trees grown in Wyoming’s Wind River Range.

When I dried and racked my last dish, she asked, “Do you like washing dishes Agent Jones?”

I paused a moment for thought, then smiled and replied, “You bet I do. It’s relaxing…and kind of fun.”

“You’re joking. Nobody likes washing dishes.”

“I do,” I said with surprising sincerity. “In college I washed dishes at a sorority for beer money and to meet girls.”

“That’s weird. And it’s even weirder that the government’s paying you to stand there and wash my dishes.”

“I’m not being paid for this,” I lied, trying to be charming. “I clocked out hours ago. Washing dishes is my way of thanking you for your fabulous garden homegrown dinner.”

“Oh. Then I suppose I should say, ‘You’re welcome.’”

“That’d be nice, but I’d rather have a little of your trust.”

“Well then,” she replied. “You’re welcome…with a little trust.”

  A few days later in my hotel room, Maggie signed a piece of paper that made her an Asset of the FBI, an unofficial employee of the United States Government without all the benefits like healthcare because, on paper, she was a contract worker working with, not for, the Bureau. I stood over her shoulders as she wrote her first ever email to her father. I liked the way she smelled. She smelled like the greens in a market when the timer turns on the mist.

Her email read like this:

DEAR CHESTER,

IT’S ME, MAGGIE. MY FAMOUS JOURNALIST BOYFRIEND TOLD ME YOU BUILT A CITY IN THE OCEAN. WOW, I DIDN’T KNOW THAT WAS POSSIBLE. WAY TO GO. KEEP ON BEING THE BEST YOU THAT YOU CAN BE!

I CAN’T EXPECT ANYTHING MORE THAN THAT.

BUT, IF YOU HAVE THE TIME, I’D LIKE TO KNOW WHO MY FATHER IS BEFORE YOU DIE.

SIGNED, YOUR LONG LOST DAUGHTER

I thought the letter was great. It more than met the performance expectations of The Mission, but it also made me wonder…was she serious? I mean, please, what kind of sane person tells the deadbeat dad they never knew to keep on being the best you that you can be? Drat! I wish I knew. I watched Maggie click SEND like she was passing a note to a dear friend.

Based on the evidence at hand, she held no animosity for him.

Bullshit. That’s what I thought. Total bullshit. Why else would she be willing to help a vast, unknowable, organization like the FBI gather information on him? Nobody trusts the government, unless there’s benefits.

My Storybank Account – Scene Four,

THE PART WHERE THE COVER BOYFRIEND AND GIRLFRIEND PRACTICE THEIR ROLES IN PUBLIC, AND BECOME TARGETED BY AN ARMY OF SUCKER HUSTLING BUMS…

No reply the next day, then no reply the day after that, then no reply the month after that. Into late February, we waited for a reply while the Man in Charge of Me in Washington said stressful things to me over the phone. He wanted results, and so did the President—and both of them working as One Indivisible Union, expected more action. I knew the plot. I’d seen the spy movies. I needed some screen flashing action, fast.

To make matters worse, Maggie was having difficulty getting into her character. She claimed that her cover role (the one that the government issued her) was too boring for her to play seriously. Playing Girlfriend to a Wealthy, Globetrotting Hipster Journalist wasn’t good enough for her. She abhorred the idea that we expected her role to stand alone without a backstory. I tried to explain. I told her that I was the one who needed the backstory because she was Mr. Chester Weston’s daughter. That only made her more difficult. She wasn’t OK with her official government role as Girlfriend, Asset, or Daughter to Mr. Chester Weston. She said that those roles needed a man to exist, and she claimed that she “existed fine without a man” around to cue her role. I wasn’t sure how to spin it, so I called Agent Oates. She told me that one way to read a  protest, or “tantrum” (as she put it) was to realize that a protest is often a call from an Asset to the Leader to respond in some way, which means the call is a call for a relationship. It’s a good thing. As Oates said, “Don’t argue with your Asset, dummy! We want her to be asking you for things!” So I permitted her to write a backstory for her character as long as her story met the needs of The Mission and fit in correctly with classic American politics. I thought I was being magnanimous. Maggie didn’t see it that way. She told me, coolly, that she didn’t need my permission. Then she told me that she would only play her role with me in public, and she expected to be paid by the hour. I reminded her that the government agreed to pardon her tax debts in exchange for her efforts.

Eventually, we came to an understanding. I would provide her with an expense account and the official government role of Goddess the Worshipful Object of Mortal Fool/Boyfriend Wylie Jones. Our backstory would be that I, Wealthy Globetrotting Hipster Journalist (Mortal Fool) had fallen ass-over-tea-kettles in love when I parked my scooter near a hoop house one sunny day in SE Portland where the Worshipful Goddess reveled herself—Lady of the Lake style—emerging from her hoop house with a scepter of kale leaves and carrots bunched and banded triumphantly in hand. As it went, she allowed me to love her (for pity’s sake), because I’d met her in a moment of weakness when she was feeling bad for enslaving the hearts of so many mortals.

All in all, despite the fact that her character was brimming with hate for all mankind, I’d say I made out OK. She signed on the dotted line to be my US Government-issued Asset. Thus, henceforth, agreeing to be joined As One (Boyfriend and Girlfriend) in support of The Mission (until death by bad guys or contractual termination do we part). She signed the paper, but even then, at the beginning, I felt our working relationship was missing something vital. I found myself wondering what I was doing wrong. What was it that Real Spies did that I wasn’t doing? What did James Bond do that drove women mad with devotion and made them so sure-fired willing to stand by their spy through thick and thin, sickness, heath, and gunfire—facing death at the hands of bad guys with pet gunmen and shark pits? How did they tame their assets so completely? Was it the hot sex, or the spy adventure? Or maybe a Good Asset needed Jesus in their hearts before they met their Hero at the bar drinking martinis? All I knew was, I was failing to trigger the gene for domestication in Maggie and that was not making it easy to feel like the righteous leader of The Mission.

At best, I managed nominal control of my Asset. I changed her name to Stone officially and agreed to add her name to the bank account granted by the FBI, because as Maggie put it…“Mortal men should never be permitted to hold the purse strings of a Goddess.” So I added Maggie to the account to give our cover story more weight, but—as I explained—the FBI was grander than her Goddess in The Great Chain of Being (a.k.a. the old American rank structure) and It didn’t permit me to issue her “our” account’s personal access code. I lied and told her it was “against the law.” No doubt the leaders of the world would applaud my managerial technique: I retained control of her by making myself the keeper of the knowledge/king of the personal identification number. This was how I planned to put her in her place. Maggie would have to ask me for permission to buy anything, even bubble gum, because being in charge of herself was not a role she was qualified to play. But like I said, I managed nominal control of her at best. As it goes, she was better at persuading me to say, “yes” than I was at saying, “no.”

In any case, while we waited for Mr. Chester Weston to reply, we went out in public on evenings and weekends to practice our undercover roles, so we’d be more normal if and when we arrived in Weston’s new city.   

“I’m tired of waiting,” I said as we strolled arm-in-arm through the artisan booths of Saturday Market, an open-air market at Waterfront Park. The Mission was practicing unit cohesion—performing the perfect Boyfriend and Girlfriend—while we shopped for Mel’s birthday gift. Maggie didn’t reply to my last line about waiting, so I asked, “What, no opinion? Maybe we should we charter a boat and show up on your father’s front porch.”

“I don’t know. This is your mission, Mr. Jones,” she replied as she held a sarong up, imagining it on Mel. “I’m here in fear of the IRS.”

“Is that why you’re doing this?” I asked, still trying to understand precisely why she joined The Mission.

She put the sarong back, and moved on to the next booth where a bearded sandal-wearing art dude was selling pottery. “Here it is!” Maggie exclaimed. “This is totally Mel.”

“What is it?” I asked, sincerely baffled.

“It keeps butter fresh without electric refrigeration,” she explained as the vendor showed off his techless wonder appliance.

“Don’t worry, Honey,” she said, reading my mind. “I don’t expect you to understand. It’s French.”

“Figures,” I said, wondering why sealing butter in a container with a pool of water was better than sealing it in a container without water.

“How much is it?” Maggie asked the vendor.

“Twenty five dollars.”

Maggie’s eyes went wide. “Go higher,” she whispered. “My man’s a Wealthy Hipster Journalist. Your art is worth it.”

Unsure the vendor said, “How about fifty?”

“And a hug?”

“OK,” the vendor chuckled. “Fifty dollars and a hug.”

Under protest, I paid the vendor his dollars and a hug. Maggie was so happy with my performance as her Mortal Boyfriend she gave me a dancing ovation as we strolled to the foot carts.

“I’m hungry,” Maggie said, tugging my arm. “Buy me lunch.”

So I did. I bought her lunch at “Bowl,” a food cart serving soup in sourdough bread bowls. I ordered clam chowder for me and spit pea soup for her. When the device they gave me buzzed, I grabbed our meals and their many accessories—the paper plates, plastic spoons, plastic forks, and a thick stack of napkins. The accessories almost weighed as much as our meals. Balancing it all in hand, we found seats with the other eaters in the food court.

A few bites into our bowls, an odd crowd of strangers surrounded us. The tall man in the front was young like me, but he was obviously not a proud pay-earning member of the American working normal. He was wearing a pink dress, hiking boots, red beanie rolled past his ears, and an old Army field jacket over a T-shirt that read: I DO WHATEVER THE VOICES IN MY HEAD TELL ME TO DO. I was certain he was homeless. No doubt, the pink dress cut him out of ninety-three percent of the possible paid positions available in America. The short, long-armed woman beside him—wearing more bargain jewelry than a crack high pirate—appeared equally unemployable. Most jobs required their females to wear lipstick on their lips and not smear the red paste about their face like a two-year old with crayons. All in all, there were at least ten of them, and they had an edgy energy about them that made me want to run. A youth on roller skates who wore dark eyeliner and a poodle skirt like a twisted 60s drive-in waitress circled us like a soldier making a perimeter around her new base. The roller warrior was unnerving, but the freakiest by far was the punk girl in the pegged pants and logging boots, with the many face tattoos and Mohawk, who stood like a statue and stared over our shoulders.

“Name’s Bill the Bum,” the man in the pink dress said, striking a pose. “And we are the Bio-friendly Bum Army.”

I looked up from my bread bowl. “Nice to meet you, Bill the Bum of the Bio-friendly Bum Army. I’m Wylie the Hungry, and I’ll pay you ten bucks if you can find me some real New England chowder. This stuff they call chowder is terrible,” I said, continuing to eat as I tried to ignore the long-armed pirate woman. Her hand was shaking involuntarily.

“I got a better idea,” Bill said boisterously. “Why don’t you purchase one of our factory-free Sugar Suckers and take a spin at winning a pair of one-way tickets to Storysold: City courtesy of Traveler’s Storytime Machine Cruise Lines Incorporated?” One of the unemployables in the group stepped forward with a tray filled with colored, swirling lollypops. “Trust me, they’re cool.”

Wylie reached in his wallet and pulled out a five. “You win, friend. Here, you earned it. That was a great show, but…”

“Whatever!” the long-armed woman blurted suddenly.

“Scout here’s extremely sensitive to conflict,” Bill explained. “I like to think of her as our early warning system. Scout can sense an in-coming conflict long before it happens. The social worker who tried to treat her for years called her outbursts ‘involuntary acts of irrational behavior,’ but as we now know her seemingly involuntary acts are simply the way she expresses how she feels when some asshole is lying to her.”

“No way!” Maggie said—suddenly engaged. “You mean she knew my, eh, Boyfriend was going to lie before he lied?”

“Yes, way,” he said. “A majority of the new war writers in our army are gifted with amazing powers that your society doesn’t value.”

“Unreal,” Maggie said, amazed. “What’s your power?”

“I’m unemployable,” Bill said, beaming with pride.

“Huh?” Maggie squinted like she was trying to see the man.

“No matter what management They use on me in the ongoing war to employ my body in insane ways, I can’t be broken,” Bill replied. “I am totally unemployable. My government is organic.”

“We’ve been good sports about this…now will you kindly please leave us in peace?” I asked, trying to be honest. “Soups getting cold.”

The bums found my line hilarious. They laughed so loud the people walking around the food court didn’t know whether to call the police, or crowd around for the next part of the show.

“Peace?” Punk Girl scoffed. “Peace isn’t profitable, not here.”

Suddenly the tough looking “bio-friendly war writer” began to wail and cry tears of sorrow like she was standing over her friend’s coffin. I wasn’t sure what triggered her. Was it something I said?

“Well, that’s not monkey fun,” Bill said, as Table Sage rolled over to Punk Girl and gave her a hug. “How about those Sugar Suckers? Something tells me, you folks would enjoy a free cruise to Storysold: City.”

“Oh, please buy our Suckers!” Table Sage pled, clasping her hands together as she rolling in. “No humans were harmed in the production of our factory-free Sugar Suckers. We made them last night, in the fast food feedlot where Punk Girl and Teddy the Veteran Burger Chef work. Once their boss left Teddy in charge, we all busted out our bio-friendly new war weapons of choice, and jammed, and danced, and loved each other, while we produced this batch of Sugar Suckers!” Right on cue, the bums brandished their new war weapons of choice and pointed them at us. Sage had a kazoo. Punk Girl had a rocking guitar. Teddy had a pickle bucket drum, and Bill had a sawed off funnel he spit funky beats through. Other weapons included a pan flute, chimes, and trumpets. “Oh, please!” was the often-repeated refrain.

“Have you ever heard of Storysold: City?” Maggie whispered.

“No,” I replied, wishing with every desperate mouthful of chowder that she would ignore the bums, like me, and make small talk that wouldn’t excite their volatile imaginations. “These people are crazy,” I said, hoping my statement of Capital-T Truth would coax her back into the routine.

“How much do they cost?” Maggie asked Punk Girl.

“Every bloody cent you have on you now.”

“Oh dear!” Maggie exclaimed, gripped my arm like Girlfriends are supposed to when they’re frightened. “These brazen bums are trying to rob us in broad daylight. Do something!”

I didn’t understand at first. “That was good,” I said, turning quietly to praise my Asset for her performance. Then I puffed out my chest and let them have it. “You all need to leave now, or I will call the cops.”

Bill laughed like he meant it. Maggie was laughing too.

  “What?!” Bill the Bum roared. “And miss your big chance to cruise to  Westonton in style?”

That got my attention. “What did you say?”   

  Table Sage replied, “Westonton is known to all who lives there—but Mr. Chester Weston—as Storysold: City.”

I was already reaching for my wallet.

“If I were you, I’d call it ‘Westonton’ when you meet your father,” Bill added his 2 Cents. “He gets pretty emotional about that.”

I handed the nearest bum all the paper in my wallet, and asked, “Did Weston send you to bring us to his city?”

“No,” Bill replied. “Like I said: if you win, the free tickets to Storysold: City are courtesy of Storytime Machine Cruise Lines Incorporated.”

“So how do we win?”   

“It’s simple,” he replied. “Choose your favorite Sugar Sucker. The winning Sugar Sucker will have a message inside that’ll read: YOU WIN! with instructions on how to claim your prize.”

“How many Suckers will $317 dollars buy us?”

“One,” Bill smirked. “The Almighty Dollar is not as mighty as it once was. But, don’t fret, one winner will do. You will receive two one-way tickets for one, prize-winning Sugar Sucker.”   

“Oh I see how this works…” I grumbled.

Maggie was studying the tray full of lollypops wrapped in pieces of reused shopping bags. Deep in concentration she put her hand on mine, and with almost trance-like sincerity, she said, “Bill’s right. One Sucker will be enough. I can feel it. We’re going to be winners.”

“This isn’t science,” I said, figuring she was screwing with me again, not taking The Mission seriously. “It’s luck. You can’t figure it out.”

“Sure she can,” Bill offered encouragingly.

I watched in horror as Maggie closed her eyes and plucked a single Sugar Sucker from the array of Sugar Suckers in the tray.

“Ah! Look!” she screamed as she unwrapped it. “We won!”

The paper read: YOU WIN! 🤩 SEE BILL THE BUM FOR INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO CLAIM YOUR TICKETS.

Bill took one of my dollars and a marker from his pocket, and wrote FREE TICKET on it. Then he handed it to Maggie. All around us, the Bio-friendly Bum Army clapped like a game show audience.

“I don’t believe in luck,” I whispered to Maggie. Then I selected another Sugar Sucker, and unwrapped it. Oh surprise! the scrap of paper inside read the same. So did the next one! And the next one after that one! The bums offered no explanation, other than their laughter.

Maggie was unmoved by my revealing of their theatrics.

“What happens next?” she asked Bill, clutching the FREE TICKET in her hand like a prize.

“Hold that thought a beat,” Bill replied, smiling big. “We have some important business to attend to first.”

Scout set a green, metal toy vault on the pavement. Bill spun the code into the plastic combination lock, and opened the thin door. Then he stacked our three hundred and seventeen dollars into it. Table Sage, Punk Girl, and the other employed members of the Army followed Bill’s example, pulled their paychecks from their pockets, and set them inside the vault atop our bills. Then Scout, Bill, and the houseless, unemployable new war writers among them placed all the “almighty pressed and dyed fibers” they’d panhandled that day in too. When their pockets were empty, Bill locked the door. “Who wants to do the honors?” He turned to Maggie and asked, “How about you? Would you like to help our army invest this vault full of funny, cartoon currency into The Happiness for Belabored Employees Fund?”

“Sure,” she agreed, intrigued by the ritual. “What do I do?”

“It’s simple,” he replied. “Turn that knob on the side of the vault all the way clockwise, then press that big red button firmly—with as much consumer confidence as you can muster. It has a tendency to stick.”

Maggie followed his instructions. She turned the knob clockwise, pressed the red button, and poof! flames blew out around the cracks.

Bill opened the door and displayed a heaping pile of ash that once held an estimated value of three thousand dollars. “I love this thing,” Bill grinned. “I made it with an old barbecue, backpacking stove, and a half-used fuel canister. Works like a charm. Our money is now safe.”

I was horrified. There’s no other word to describe it. I’d never seen such a boldfaced display of idiocy in all my life. They were burning money like it was paper! “What do you think you’re doing?” I cried. “How do you expect to live? And pay your taxes?”

“Something tells me, Mr. Man,” Bill replied coolly, “that you haven’t taken our name seriously. We’re a Bio-friendly Bum Army. Even though many of us have cover jobs, we glean our meals from trashcans, compost bins, and our allies…friendlies who exchange their goods and services for ours all pay in equal time for equal time worked qualitatively like the storybankers in Storysold: City do. Free folks have no need for the funny money you use. It’s dangerously unstable. It’s boom or bust, feast or famine, all or nothing. Vaults are better used as incinerators for your counterfeit-to-life toxic papers that pass, every day, for trustworthy proof that some person did something worthwhile to bestow value on them. I’d rather be this…that strange pink-dress wearing bum you employables ogle at through your safety glass, than be an accomplice in the mass circulation of a planetary biohazard.”

Suddenly I knew what kind of person I was dealing with.

“Wow,” I said nodding my head as I tugged on Maggie’s sleeve to indicate that it was time to go. “I dig your light, man. Make love, not war, and let the sunshine in. I dig…now how do we redeem our prize?”

“No I ‘dig,’ Man,” Bill sighed. “You didn’t like my monologue.”

“It wasn’t bad. A bit over the top and hard to relate to, but not bad,” I replied, soothing Bill with even tones—much like a therapist might after he discovered that the human in his office wasn’t a man, or a woman, but a patient in the grip of a free-ranging, psychological disorder.

Punk Girl cleared her throat, and said, “I liked it, Bill.”

“It sure made me feel better,” Teddy agreed. “I was feeling kind of bummed about burning my check this time around. I could use a shower and a few nights in a hotel. My pits stink.”

“Liar!” Scout exclaimed. “You’re not bummed because your pits stink. They always stink, even after you shower. You’re bummed because you’re tired of tenting with me, that’s why.”

“You fart constantly and snore, but no. The day this well-aged man can’t stealth camp, feast on bruised fruit and day-old bread, shower under a dish room hose, and share a tent with you Scout—will be the day I surrender my dentures and walk into the wilds never to return.”

Scout gave Teddy a big sloppy kiss on the cheek, and the bums lifted their friend Teddy high in their hearts, knowing all too well that he meant what he said. By most civilized people’s standards, Teddy had already walked into The Wilderness to die. He had no apartment, no thrift store television, no half-broke used car in his parking space—no refrigerator full of pop, hot dogs, and potato salad—none of the things an old burger vet might own. The tent home he shared with Scout, and his story, was all he owned.

Out of the blue, Maggie said, “Let’s go.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked like a social scientist studying this curious new twist in her personality. I wondered—was it Teddy’s comment about walking off to die that upset her? Did it remind her of her mother?

“I think I ate something that didn’t agree with me.”

“In a minute,” I said. “We don’t know where to go.”

“I’m not feeling good. I’m going home.”

Then Maggie walked away, disappearing into the crowd.

I wanted to follow, to make sure she was OK. Instead, I turned back to Bill and the bums needing to know What Happened Next.

“Are you sure you want to go?” he asked ominously. “Storysold: City is unlike any city on earth. It’ll change you. I guarantee it.”

“Yes,” I replied, worried that I was losing the use of my new asset forever. “I want to go to Storysold: City.”

“Good for you,” he smiled. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“Will you please hurry, I need to find my Girlfriend.”

“Be at Salmon Street Fountain in Waterfront Park at three o’ clock, your time, next Friday morning. And be ready. Our friend Traveler’s gone to great expense to make this happen for you.”

I can’t say why. I had the information I needed, but I found myself giving Bill the Bum, corruptor of corruptible street youths and veteran burger chefs, the only true smile I produced that day. Then I rushed off, into the crowded streets, to find my Cover Girlfriend feeling upbeat about my chances of establishing contact with Mr. Chester Weston.

My Storybank Account – Scene Five,

THE PART WHERE TWO CO-WORKERS ACTING AS ONE LEAVE PORTLAND WITH MINIMAL FANFARE…

I lost Maggie in the crowd that day. If she had been any other run-of-the-mill paid government asset, I would’ve plugged in the conventional wisdom (the old everybody-hates-the-government universal constant) and figured that she ran away because she was preparing to back out. Instead, I followed my old gut feeling and gave her some space.

It paid off big. She called me a few days later, ready to go.

Or should I say she was ready to go so long as the US Government promised to pay her rent and water her garden while she was away. Deal. No problem. “I’ll get right on that.” And I did. I got Agent Chandler to get right on it, and he got a woman named Minnie he found on the Internet who agreed to sublet Maggie’s apartment (and water her plants) to get right on it.

The night before the big go, Maggie and I met at her apartment to review The Mission and get our stories straight before we dove even deeper undercover. I brought pizza and beers. I should’ve brought salad dressing. She was intent on eating what remained of her parking lot greens.

I walked in, cracked a beer, and said, “The place looks empty.”

“I threw a Going Away Party and got rid of my old things.”

“How did it go? Were your friends sad that you were going away?”

“Bob was livid,” she replied, nibbling on uncooked vegetables like a rabbit. “Everyone else was pleasant and wished me the best.”   

“Who’s Bob?” I said, wishing again that I’d thought to bring salad dressing—if not for me, then for Maggie. The idea of eating raw vegetable anything turned my stomach.

“Bob was my boss. He says that my deadbeat dad doesn’t deserve the effort. He said I’m better than that.”

“Unofficially I agree. He doesn’t deserve the effort,” I said, trying to build some trust into our working relationship. “But I also believe this mission will be an adventure of a lifetime for both of us. I got butterflies in my stomach on my way here. I mean, wow—how many people can say that the government paid them to explore the world’s first ocean-going city?”

“You mean the city Chester raised instead of me?”

Gulp, down the hatch. “Yeah,” I backpedaled. “What sort of man leaves his daughter and dedicates his life to building an island city?” Crack, gulp, no response. “Come to think of it,” I went on, “your father’s sort of a modern version of evil, old Captain Nemo.”

“I always liked Captain Nemo. He fought injustice imperfectly as any of us.” She paused, and added, “And don’t call him that.”

“Call him what?” I replied innocently.

“Father. That’s what. He hasn’t done anything to earn it.”

“Oh sure,” I said, still backpedaling. “I understand.”

“Thanks,” she said, cold as ice. “What’s next, Agent Jones?”

We went over The Mission and our cover stories. I quizzed her on my backstory and Maggie quizzed me on hers. Then we worked together to choose an appropriate set of clothing for her that would match my skintight jeans, tight indie-rock T-shirt, loafers, fake glasses, and pea coat costume. The costume she settled on was a red turtleneck, knee-high black boots, and black polyester bellbottoms. She reported that she chose red to signify her loss of innocence on the eve of “selling out.” I refused to let her social commentary raise any emotions in me. Instead I gulped my last beer, smiled at the thought that our costumes sort of matched, and praised my co-worker for being ready to start our mission on time.

And we were. We stashed her keys in the mailbox for Chandler, strapped our luggage to the scooter, hopped on, and away we went. When I told her to “hold on tight” and Maggie wrapped her arms around me, I felt something new. Sort of like happiness, but stronger. Whatever it was, I enjoyed it. I loved the way Maggie felt—her body, her smell, the sounds she made—as we puttered down the quiet, pre-dawn streets of the city.

Maggie’s hair blew wildly behind us as we crossed over the Hawthorne Bridge to Waterfront Park. There was nobody around. I puttered the scooter onto the slab featuring the park’s iconic Salmon Street Fountain, then I parked it there—right next to the fountain! I didn’t care to secure it properly, because I was feeling like a real action-packed spy—willing to sacrifice my security for style. Besides, I knew Agent Chandler was watching from a nearby hotel. He would wait until I was gone, then whisk my scooter away into the wings like a stagehand. It was all part of The Mission.

I checked my watch, and then checked it again. Our host wasn’t supposed to arrive for another fifteen minutes, and I had to pee. I beat myself up for not going before we left, as I threw my bag over my shoulder, untied our luggage, and sauntered to the railing like a dime novel cowboy.

“It’s go time,” I said. “Are you ready for this?”

Maggie laughed. “Do you have to pee?”

“No.” I paused. “Why?”

“You’re walking funny, like you have to pee.”   

“No, I don’t,” I lied. “I walk this way all the time.”

“Agent Jones,” she said seriously. “As your Girlfriend appointed by the government’s authority, I suggest that you stick to the script. I am the Worshipful Goddess, and you are the Mortal Boyfriend. Please do us both a favor. Stop trying to act tough…and go pee.”

She had me there. I expressed my concession by sulking in silent rage like many Mortal Boyfriends before me.

“You’re right,” I agreed defiantly. “I need to urinate.”

While I hid my manhood in the bushes near the fountain, Maggie searched downriver for signs of our ride like the bus was late for her first day of work. The closest bridge downriver was a bridge named “Morrison,” the bridge that followed next was a bridge named “Burnside,” the bridge after Burnside was less personifyable. It was “Steel,” and it was up, permitting a ship to flow below it. When I returned from my mission, we waited—side-by-side, leaning on the railing—and studied the vessel powering its way up river. Other than the sails on a ship that was not a sailboat, and the domed greenhouse set atop a circular window-lined control tower, and the solar panels installed on deck tactically as artillery, and the bubble skylights in back—the ship docking along Waterfront Park looked like any other ship.

We watched the scene for signs of life, but there were none. No crew running about the deck. No passengers eager to go ashore; just a wet fog that whistled over the ship like wind through a mountain pass. Finally, after what seemed like forever, a male attendant dressed in a white cruise ship uniform appeared on deck. As he approached—walking heel to toe, back arched, chin up like a soldier—I realized I might have mistaken their gender.

He/she tipped their goofy sailor’s cap in our direction, blew a whistle, lowered the gangplank, and motioned for us to come aboard. Maggie wasted no time. She grabbed her suitcase and walked briskly aboard.

“Good morning, Maggie,” greeted the attendant. “Welcome to Time Machine Cruise Lines Incorporated. Seawoman Second Class at your service!”    

The attendant cut Maggie a sharp salute.

“Oh, how nice!” Maggie beamed warmly, apparently enjoying the service of the “Seawoman,” who was now clearly not a man. She was an older woman with her hair tucked up under her cap. Maggie cut the sailor a salute in return, and then accepted Seawoman’s offer to carry her “tote.”

I clambered aboard expecting the same service.

I knocked my heels together, locked my body, lifted my chin, and cut Seawoman Second Class a sharp salute.

Blink, blink, the sailor looked me up and down. Then she grabbed my suitcase and turned away without returning my salute.

“Oh wow,” Maggie laughed. “She left you hanging!”

It was bad enough I had to take it from Maggie. I didn’t have to take it from The Help, even if it was free. Undaunted, full of courage, I manned my Boyfriend duty station beside my Girlfriend. “Show us to our room, my good man!” I snickered. “Oops, I mean my good woman.”

“I apologize,” Maggie said, not laughing along with my gag. “He was born in a strip mall and raised in a frat house.”

Seawoman eyed me warily. “Do you apologize for him often?”

“Yes,” she fired quickly. “He’s a halfwit, insensitive to the feelings of others. But I permit him to worship me. He is, after all, only a man.”

“I see,” she replied. “I can arrange for you to have your own room if you prefer. That way, you may permit him to worship at your leisure.”

Maggie didn’t flinch. “That would be nice. Thank you.”

Christ! We’d talked about this. We were supposed to be the classic, All American Boyfriend and Girlfriend, and maintaining the symbolism of One Flesh is a very important part of American culture. We were supposed to stand in rooms together, walk in parks together, sit in dark theaters together, sleep in beds together, grow old together, and do our duty to remember The Union at all times, positioning our bodies in the appropriate symbolic proximity, so we look as One Flesh in just the right light.

Maggie was defying that time-honored code from the word go. What would the other passengers think if we slept in separate rooms? They’d scratch their heads, turn their backs, and whisper about our lack of unit cohesion. Separate rooms! Was she mad? It was then that I began, for the first time, to doubt Maggie’s ability to maintain our cover roles and meet the performance expectations of The Mission.

We followed the attendant across a colorfully lit deck, through a hatch located mid-ship, and then we clambered down some stairs that led under the domed greenhouse. Below deck, we turned down a passageway lined with rooms on either side. The door to each of the rooms was different—meant to represent the time period indicated on the sign posted above it. We stopped at a door labeled: NOW. It looked like any hotel room door. It had a punch-in-key-code lock, a handicap-friendly lever instead of a knob, and the numbers 00 etched into a sign at about eye-level. Nothing to report there, I thought. Then I looked to my left and right, spy-like. The sign to my left read: THE PAST. It looked similar, except it had a knob and a classic key lock. It even had the same room number, 00, etched into a slightly different, older-looking sign. Nothing to report there, either, but the sign above the door on my right was different. It read: THE FUTURE. It didn’t have a lock, or a signifying numeral. Instead of a proper door, it had a rusty bed frame. It was on hinges, and it covered the space between the passageway and the room with the help of someone’s old bedsheets and a few stretchy cords.

“Here’s your room, sir,” the attendant said, after punching a code into the lock on my door. “I hope you find the accommodations to your liking. If you need anything, feel free to ring the bell beside your bed.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” I said, eyeing Maggie intently. “This will meet our expectations nicely. Would you like to see my room, Apple Pie?”

“No, I don’t believe I will,” she replied, feigning exhaustion. “We’ve been up all night! Go get some rest, Honey.”

Drat! She’d defied our agreed-upon mission plans again!

“Here let me help you with that,” the attendant said, moving to the door on the right with Maggie’s suitcase in hand. “If I had a favorite room, this would be the one,” she said as she pulled open the bed-frame door.

Apparently I was staying in THE PAST while Maggie was staying in THE FUTURE. For the life of me, I didn’t know what that meant.

Feeling frustrated, I walked into the passageway and let the door to my room lock behind me. Then I made a scene and asked, “Damnit! What did you say the key code for my lock was again?”

“Try one,” she called from Maggie’s room. “It should work.”

“Sleep well, sweet prince,” my Girlfriend added pleasantly. “I’ll see you in the morning.” Then she closed the door behind her.

I stared at the lock, trying to remember the code-cracking class I’d attended in spy school (trying to out-think the damned thing’s creator) until I finally took the attendant’s advice and tried one, any one. Wow, I thought. It worked. Then again, so did all the codes I punched in.

  My room, like my door, was like any hotel room: designed to make the space feel strangely familiar. There was a neatly made bed with no visible wrinkles, a nightstand with a free bible, a phone with a red light and easy-to-use instructions, brass lamps and cheap paintings, ash trays, television with remote, and a bathroom stocked with individually packaged soaps and decoratively folded two-ply toilet paper, ready to roll.

I tossed my scooter bag on the bed and walked over to the wide round window. Along the railing above the window, I spied a gathering of familiar bums. Once they spotted me—they started hooting, hollering, and causing a commotion. There was a sign in Table Sage’s hand. It read: WE WILL MISS YOU (EVEN THOUGH WE DIDN’T KNOW YOU TOO WELL)! Bill was holding one that read: BEST OF STORIES TO YOU IN STORYSOLD: CITY! Punk Girl’s read: DEATH TO ICE. And Scout’s simply said: GOODBYE, WITH MINIMAL FANFARE.

Bill leaned over the railing and started yelling at me. “Tell that crazy son-of-a-bitch barbarian Jarl I’m saving a spot for him under the bridge! Tell him that The Bio-Friendly New War Story to Save Planet Earth is underway! He can’t hide in Storysold: City  forever! The new war will find him!” I, of course, had no clue what the bum was saying at the time, but I do now.

Bill went on yelling like that until I mouthed my goodbye, waved politely, and closed my curtain. Then, with the whir of the Storytime Machine’s electric propeller, we began our journey to .

After I’d made sure my door was locked, I used my spy skills to secure the room: checking it for bugs, cameras, and other such information-gathering devices. I was afraid that someone might be silently, intently watching my every move, watching me for signs of paranoid behavior; so, I searched for cameras without looking like I was searching for cameras. I learned that in Psych for Spies 101: only truly paranoid people always appear normal. The folks who appear to be paranoid clearly aren’t paranoid enough to act normal.

I didn’t find any bugs, but I found cameras. They were round like pencils and they were out in the open like someone wanted me to find them. Minding my every move, I changed into my pajamas, brushed and flossed my teeth, clipped my toenails, grabbed the remote control, flopped on the bed, and clicked the television ON. And—to my surprise—there I was projected on the screen watching myself on the screen from a third person perspective. I’d turned on the television because I wanted to appear as normal as possible to whoever was lurking behind the cameras. The fact that I was watching myself watch TV immediately threw a wrench in that plot. Watching myself watch TV was not normal, and it freaked me out.

It was clear that my image was coming from the camera behind me in the upper right corner of the room. I studied the remote. It had two sets of directional arrows. The top set of arrows was labeled: HERE. The bottom set was labeled: THERE. Beside the HERE arrows, there were two other buttons. One that read: PUBLIC—and one that read: PRIVATE. I was curious, so I looked around for some kind of instructions for the remote. I found them on the nightstand, and I read them. The PRIVATE button, when pushed, blocked “my channel” and kept the space in my room from being viewed by any of the other viewers onboard. The PUBLIC opened it up again. Once I realized that, I pressed the PRIVATE button and blocked my channel from view.

Then I pressed HERE and tinkered with the arrows. I discovered that they here-arrows were precisely that: arrows that allowed me to surf through the perspectives offered and projected into the television from the cameras in my room. I didn’t play with that feature long. I didn’t find myself that interesting, so—I pushed THERE.

And oh boy! Instant access! Everything a spy could want in a piece of voyeuristic technology! I could spy on everyone without the nasty side effect of having to interact with them!

Using the there-arrows to view the open channels aboard the Time Machine, I surfed through the passageways, deck spaces, crawlspaces, and guest rooms in the ship. Most of the rooms were open for viewing, but they were dark—lit dimly by the moonlight coming in their windows. As I surfed through the ship, I discovered (with the aid of the lamplights on deck) that a giant-sized patchwork quilt covered the domed greenhouse. I also found what seemed to be some kind of dark cargo hold full of animal sounds, a cook’s galley, and a crow’s nest view from a camera set atop one of the masts.

Then I surfed through the perspectives offered by the crow’s nest camera until I found the one that showed a view of the window lined control tower that wrapped around the greenhouse. When I saw The Figure cloaked in moonlight, my heart did a doowop ditty. Standing behind a clipper-ship style steering wheel set front and center in the con tower was what appeared to be some sort of buccaneer or pirate. Behind The Figure, a massive oak door lead back to the domed greenhouse. I clicked the there-arrows frantically until I found a closer view. The slender figure’s face was covered in moon shadows, but for some reason I decided it was a woman. She was wearing knee-high leather boots, floppy feathered cap, white ruffled blouse, buckskin vest, and a broadsword sheathed and strapped to her back. Instead of the classic pirate’s skull and crossbones there was a white O on her black cap, which seemed to glow with brandname pride. The massive oak door behind The Figure had the words—STORYTIME MACHINE—carved on it.

She looked fierce, confident, and captain-like in control of her ship. And it scared the crap out of me. My god, I thought, we’ve been shanghaied by a pirate! I hope my Girlfriend hasn’t been run through, tied up, or walked off a plank! I thought as I pressed the arrows in search of Maggie’s room. I was relieved when I discovered that her channel was still open to casual viewers like me. Her room was dark except for a broad ray of moonlight that illuminated a chair beside the bed where her red turtleneck, bellbottoms, and underwear were tossed in no particular order. In the moon glow, I saw a lump in the bed, which I presumed to be my Asset. At first, I thought she was having trouble sleeping, mumbling in the grip of some nightmare. Then she suddenly cried, “O!” And then she cried, “O!” again and again, until she finally threw off her covers and stretched on the bed naked as the day she was born. She looked happy, covered in sweat, trying to catch her breath like she’d finished a nice long run.

“Oh good. She hasn’t been swashbuckled,” I thought.

I continued to watch Maggie’s channel, hypnotized by the intimacy of a scene that I knew hadn’t been produced for an audience, especially me.

I should have felt guilt, but I didn’t. It was on TV.

My Storybank Account – Scene Six,

THE PART WHERE THE COOK COOKS FACTORY-FREE FOOD FROM HER GOAT HANGAR AND STRANGERS SPEND A NIGHT TOGETHER IN THE NAME OF SYMBOLIC PROXIMITY…

It was a lose, lose, lose situation. One: If I knocked on Maggie’s door and alerted her to the presence of the Bad Guy, the pirate captain might be watching (and therefore be roused to arms). Two: If I fell asleep and did nothing to alert Maggie, then I’d be responsible if the pirate snuck into her room (knife in her teeth) and swashbuckled her in her sleep. Three: If I kept guard and continued to watch her on the ship’s spy-friendly TV network, I could rush in and thwart any attempted swashbuckling; but that would make me feel more creepy than I already did—like those NSA agents I met once who bragged that they take their tech toys home to spy on their neighbors. And I definitely didn’t want to be like those guys. Everyone knows NSA agents aren’t Real American Heroes. They’re the US Government’s version of adult children who never leave their parent’s basement except to get their mail, crap, or greet the pizza delivery dude. Real spies spy on their assets all the time, but they don’t spy on their assets for fun, and that’s the difference.

So I compromised. I cranked the volume up and fell asleep with the TV turned on. Situation normal, I thought. I did the same thing after a long day at the office back in Washington, DC.

Knock, knock. “Sir, are you awake?” called the attendant. “Sir? Are you in there? It’s time for breakfast.”

Hands stretched, wiping my eyes, I faced the television. There, on the screen before me, was my official Government Asset going through her daily dressing ritual. “Ah hell,” I cried and fell off my bed—scrambling for the remote, the OFF button, and a renewed sense of decency.   

Knock, knock. “Are you OK in there, sir?”

“Yes. I’m fine,” I answered as I pointed the remote, clicked OFF, and hobbled to the door. I opened it, and tried to play it cool. “Hey,” I said like a boot shine. “I remember you. You didn’t return my salute.”

“That’s us, alright,” she chuckled. “Did you sleep well?”   

“Yes, I did,” I lied. “Thanks for asking.”

“Did you have any dreams worth remembering, sir?”

“No,” I replied, taken aback by the strange question. “I probably dreamed something, but I don’t remember. You know how it is.”

“No sir. I’m living every dream I remember.”   

“Oh…?” Now even more taken aback by her odd behavior.

“How about some breakfast?” she suggested, sparkling. “You may eat in the galley, or I can bring your food to you. Your choice, sir.”

“Here will be fine.”

“What do you want for breakfast?”

“How about a ham and cheese croissant with a pot of coffee?”

“We’re permanently out of ham, sir,” she explained. “May I suggest our historically famous spinach, cheese, and egg biscuit breakfast sandwich with a cup of our signature blend Mexican coffee?”

“Wow… yes,” I said as the hunger rushed in, “that sounds delicious, but hold the spinach. Yuck!”

“One breakfast coming up,” she said as she walked away.

“I’m sorry,” she said as she turned back around. “I forgot to ask. Do you want your food to be processed by a team of underpaid employees, or made by a cheerful, financially secure human being who’s free to be herself at work and cook in her own style…and as a bonus, knows exactly where your food came from as well as why she’s cooking it for you?”

“Come again?” I asked, and she rattled off her lines again.

“Let’s go with the one who knows where my food came from.”

“Excellent choice,” she said, walking away. “It’s nice to know that Time Machine Cruise Line Incorporated customers are humans too.”

When she was gone, I knocked on Maggie’s bed frame door.

“Are you awake?” I called out.

She opened the door already dressed (as I knew).

“I’ve been awake,” she said as she walked through the door and closed it behind her. “I’m going to breakfast. Are you coming with me?”

“So, you’re going to the galley?”

“Of course,” she answered. “I can’t wait to meet the cook. Last night, the attendant said that she’s really riding the edge of food creation.”

“Is that so?” I said, whispering. “Well…I already told her to bring my food to my room, so I can relax and watch some more television.”   

I emphasized the word television, hoping she would read the scene and understand that I wanted to stay in my room and use the television to continue The Mission, spying on everything in and on the strange ship.

“You watched the TV?” she asked, crossing her arms.

“Of course, my Apple Pie,” I cooed with wide-eyed innocence. “You know how much I like watching television. It’s very relaxing.”

Maggie was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “You know, last night the attendant asked me if I wanted to leave my channel open to you on what she called a ‘public channel line’…”

“What did you tell her?” I asked, playing dumb.

“I said ‘Sure, why not’…for the sake of ‘our relationship’…”

“Oh thanks,” I said. “I know how hard it is for you to trust people after all that time you spent living like a feral street cat.”

Maggie stepped closer, gritted her teeth, and said, “Feral?”   

“Ha, ha,” I chuckled. “You know what I mean.”

“No. Why don’t you enlighten me?”

I didn’t like where that was going, so I changed the subject. “Why don’t you run along and eat breakfast? When you get back we’ll move your things to my room. That way we can watch television together.”

“Are you sure our relationship’s at the room-sharing stage yet?”

“You’re my Girlfriend,” I replied. “Girlfriends and Boyfriends are supposed to be As One on romantic cruises.”

“We’re on a romantic cruise?” she asked, feigning surprise. “I thought we won tickets to Storysold: City , so I could meet my father.”

She wasn’t following my cues, and her performance was suffering because of it. And so was The Mission. Why was she being so difficult?

I nervously checked for cameras in the passageway and said, “And of course I’m doing a journalistic expose on your joyous reunion.”

“Won’t it be great when you sell the story and we move to New York to live a life of fame and excess!”

“Yes, that’s the ticket,” I grinned. “Now, don’t you agree that it’d be best if we did like Boyfriends and Girlfriends do, and share a room?”

“I’d rather wait until we’re ready.”

“But…we’ve been together for over a year now,” I said, citing our cover story with authority. “Wouldn’t you say that it’s unusual for Boyfriends and Girlfriends to sleep in separate rooms after a year?”

“I don’t,” she replied. “Not if I can’t trust you.”

“You can’t trust me?” I asked with seeming innocence.

She studied me, and asked, “When you watched the television last night, which channels did you watch?”

“Nature channels mostly,” I lied boldly. “I found the birds on deck highly entertaining. I also watched a few passageways and explored the large greenhouse, but I didn’t watch you…if that’s what you’re insinuating.”

She narrowed her eyes, and said, “You swear you didn’t.”

“I swear,” I lied again. “I watched the seabirds. Our relationship is too important to me; I would never do anything to jeopardize it.”

“Good…” she paused with uncertainty. “But if I ever catch you spying on me behind my back, ever, this relationship is over. Got it?”

“Of course,” I agreed. “Now can I have a hug?”

  “What makes you think you deserve a hug?”

“Because I’m your Worshipful Mortal Boyfriend,” I cooed, “and I need to know that we’re okay.”

I held my arms out for my hug. Maggie paused; then she waddled over to me (like a penguin) with charity on her face like she was a Goddess granting a leper a final touch of humanity before she kicked his raft across the river to the colony quarantined on the other side. But she did it. She hugged me. And she held it long enough to make it believable. Fair enough.

“On second thought,” she said before she walked away again. “Maybe it’s not such a bad idea to move into your room after breakfast. That way I can keep an eye on you, Wylie Jones.”

“That’s an excellent decision,” I agreed, using Positive Reinforcement Team Building Skill #1 from Asset Manipulation 101, remembering to add a personal touch to my managerial skill. “That’s the way it’s meant to be, Boyfriends and Girlfriends together exercising extreme discipline.”   

“Say again?” Maggie exclaimed, tossing me a funny look.

“I mean, will your Goddessness care if I join her?”

“What about relaxing in front of the TV?”

“I don’t know. It might be better for our relationship if we explored the ship together. That would be more, uh, fun.”

“Whatever,” she said, and we left for breakfast as a unit.

The galley was located near the rear of the ship. It looked like the galley I remembered from a mission I had in The Middle East—most of which was spent aboard a battleship in the Persian Gulf. Navy cooks always had the good stuff: eggs from a carton (instead of hydratable in a bag), butter served on a plate (instead of having to squirt it out of single-serving packets), coffee brewed from ground beans (instead of instant flavor crystals), and the best part of life on a battleship: the chicken fried steak served hot at least twice a week, topped with all the gooey white peppered gravy we could eat. The few civilians I knew (people without hand-to-hand combat training) never understood why I love Navy brand chicken fried steak so much. They didn’t know (and I couldn’t officially tell them) what it was like to spent months baking in a Saudi Arabian desert where barbecuing meant letting the sun sizzle our meat products on the bottom of the cans they were packaged in.

Maggie took a seat at a table while I walked around the galley studying the framed photos, glass-cased artifacts, and captions that highlighted the ship’s history. Apparently, the Navy built it to be a fast-attack troop transport ship that could deliver cargo (soldiers, supplies, and other equipment) to hostile lands. They named it USS General R. J. Steward after a career general who served honorably in World War II. One of the photos on the wall showed the four battle stars the USS Steward won during WWII; the photo beside it showed the nine battle stars it won during the Korean Conflict. Each photo had a caption and a few lines describing what the captain and crew of the USS Steward did to achieve their battle stars.

Then the ship’s history shifted. The next photo showed an old timey captain brandishing her broadsword on the deck of the newly improved, rebuilt version of the old war warship. The caption below it read: USS STEWARD SAVED FROM A WASTEFUL END BY MISS SAMANTHA CHASE AND RENAMED THE TIME MACHINE. The last photo in line was an action shot, which showed the ship sailing through an arched gateway into a high walled canal with people on either side, throwing streamers and cheering wildly like it was V-Day. It was exactly the kind of celebratory scene every hero wants to see when he or she returns home in victory.

The caption read: THE TIME MACHINE SAILS VICTORIOUS INTO A PROMISING NEW FUTURE.

As I read up on the ship’s history, Maggie watched a small TV that was bolted to the upper corner of the galley. It showed a view of the ocean from the crow’s nest camera in real-time. I was amazed. She seemed genuinely amused by the sights and sounds of the open ocean…   

Suddenly the door to the kitchen swung open and we were presented with a woman dressed like a man dressed like a greasy short order cook. The costume came complete with a ribbed tank top, jeans, boots, poofy white chef’s hat, and a beard.  “Good. You both came,” he grumbled with an unlit cigarette dancing from the side of his mouth. “The biscuits are ready, but I’m having a time making your Spinach, Egg, and Cheese Biscuit Breakfast Sandwich without the spinach. It makes no sense, I’m trying to be hospitable about it.”

Squinting, I studied his face. “I thought you were the attendant.”

“Welcome to Time Machine Cruise Line Incorporated,” he replied. “The hussy who owns this business thinks it’s more cost-effective to have me do the cooking too. Anyway, I’m sure you’ll hear all about her later. For now, follow me…and I’ll show you where to find your eggs.”

Maggie and I looked at each other. Maggie pointed to the pirate captain in the photo, and asked, “Is that the owner?”

“Yes. I am,” The Cook said, using his apron to clean his hands.

“I am…what?” I asked, confused.

“I am the owner of The Storytime Machine.”

“That’s you?” I asked, sneaking another peak at the photo.

“Yes. That’s the ship’s captain, tough-talking Captain Chaos.”

“And you must be…?” I asked, hoping for a straight answer.

“Take a closer look if you need to, Mac. I’m The Cook.”

“And the attendant in the sailor’s suit… who is she?”

“She’s Seawoman Second Class.”

“Second Class who?” Maggie asked.

“That’s who she is. She’s a second-class character in our cruise line theme here,” Cook said. “It’d be cruel to name her anything else. How would you like to be given an upstanding name in a story that consistently robs you of all hope of ever owning your own conscionable sense of self?”

“But she’s a person!” Maggie said. “She has to have a name!”

I looked at Maggie in wide-eyed wonder as if to emphasize the fact that Captain Chaos and The Cook didn’t have proper names either.   

“When you own your story, feel free to give the lackey attendant character in your story any name you wish,” they snapped. “In the meantime, please follow me. I’ll show you where to gather your eggs.”

We followed The Cook into his kitchen. It was small, but it had all the usual amenities: stove, oven, refrigerator, freezer, and a prep counter with pots, pans, and utensils dangling above it.

“What did you say you wanted for breakfast, princess?”

Maggie thought, and asked, “What’s on the menu?”

“For you?”

“Yes, for me,” Maggie answered a bit dazed.

The Cook replied, “Spinach, Spinach, and Green Onion Razzmatazz with Guest Star Feta Cheese.”

Maggie waited for the rest of the options. “Is that it?”

“Do you hate spinach too?” the Cook said, drawing a broadsword from a closet, and pulling a grip of large spinach leaves from the fridge.

“No,” Maggie said, stepping back. “Spinach whatever’s perfect.”

Crack, crack, crack—The Cook sent the broadsword down on his cutting board. “Oh good…” he said, hacking away at the spinach. “You’ll find the door to the Goat Hangar and Chicken Tram there. Be careful—my Ill-Tempered Time-Traveling Chickens are not to be trifled with.”    

As we walked to the door I whispered, “I like him. He reminds me of a cook I knew in The Gulf.” I stopped at the door, preparing to open it. “No matter what that bastard served we shined him on like it was our best meal ever because we didn’t want to hear him whine.”

Twist, pull, I opened the door…

The sound of goats and the rustle of chicken feathers greeted us. The door opened into a large cargo bay lit by a vaulted ceiling filled with inverted bubble-shaped skylights and a system of low hanging heat lamps. In front of us, a stairway led down to the bay floor that was growing with wild grasses and other plants, surrounding a small grove of orange trees. Above us, vents with fans were keeping the air fresh. A system of inverted bubble-shaped skylights was collecting rainwater from a passing rain cloud. At the base of each skylight were unusual sprinkler contraptions, which would spin every so often and release a mist onto the plants below. The parts of the floor that were growing grass were divided into pens for a herd of goats.

“Whoa!” Maggie said, gasping. “This is awesome!”

I didn’t share her sentiment. I focused on The Mission. “When we opened the door, I swore I heard the sound of chickens.”

Cluck, cluck—Maggie looked up.

“Very cool,” she said, pointing up to a coop suspended above us on a system of cables that wove back and forth across the length the bay. “I never thought something like this could work.”

“And that something is?”

“Don’t you see? This, uh, this Chicken Tram zips along that cable like a circus ride while it drops fertilizer on the grass through that screen.”

“That thing drops chicken shit on everything, and that’s cool?”

“Sure. Chicken shit’s rich in nitrogen. I bet it works great, so long as you don’t run the chickens over the goats, or the orange trees.”

“Or me…” I added.

“I’m sure they have a herding rhythm that works too.”

“They who? We don’t even know who we’re dealing with here!”

“Ok then, Brave Boyfriend of mine—” she teased, eyeing a ladder set beside us on the platform. It scaled the side of the bay, leading to another platform and then the Tram. “Maybe we should gather our eggs, and go back and be friendly like, and get some clues to what’s going on here.”

“Shush,” I said—one finger to my lips. “She could be listening.”

Maggie rolled her eyes, and started towards the ladder.

We climbed, opened the door to the Chicken Tram, and walked in. A stout plank ran down the middle of the coop (speckled with shit), but otherwise the floor was made of chicken wire. We could see the grass below. The coop swayed each time we reached past the chickens on their roosts to gather eggs from the nest boxes stacked like apartments on the walls. I could see why The Cook had called them “Ill-Tempered.” They weren’t the oval-eyed friendly chickens I knew from cartoons. These birds jabbed their pointy little beaks into my flesh every time they had the chance. And if the high wire act and pecking chickens weren’t bad enough, the eggs weren’t even normal: some eggs were big, some eggs were small, some eggs were long, some round, some eggs were brown, some eggs were green, some of them had dots. None of them were the white, egg-shaped eggs I knew as eggs.

“What’s taking so long?” asked The Cook as he climbed aboard.

I flashed an angry look as I hunched over our eggs, bundled in a fold of my indie-rocker T-shirt. She returned the gesture with the same hateful smile you get at restaurants when the staff’s slammed and you point to your half-empty glass, saying, “Miss! Can I have another one of these please?” And like the typical asshole customer, I countered her hateful smile with one of my own as she pressed a big red button on the side of the Chicken Tram, and the odd contraption began to move.

“Whoa!” Maggie exclaimed, and braced herself on a hen box.

Rickety, rackety, the Tram followed the cable the length of the bay, descending to the floor on the opposite side. It stopped in a dirt-covered yard with a fence. The Cook grabbed a bucket of galley scraps and tossed them into the yard. The chickens must have been hungry. They ate more like piranha or wild dogs than chickens.   

“They’re Ill-Tempered Time-Traveling Chickens,” The Cook explained as she led us through the gate onto the grass. “Traveler gave them that name because, well… they’re not as happy as they would be roaming free, scratching for bugs in a meadow, but they get to do what few chickens do. They get to storytime travel around the globe with me and eat the finest factory-free scraps in the world, all for the cost of their eggs.”

“And fertilizer,” Maggie added, stepping over a splattering of shit.

“Yes,” he replied. “But I put more work into their poop than they do. It’s hard to make quality poop. In fact, I only feel good about letting them shit on the oranges because I know where my scraps came from.”

“That makes sense,” Maggie mused thoughtfully. “I think…”

The Cook picked a handful of oranges from the trees, and handed them to Maggie. “You must be starving,” he said, walking towards the stairs and the kitchen. He stopped briefly at a pen that held a small herd of goats. The Cook petted them, then opened a gate that led to another pen. Unlike their last pen, the new one was overgrown with long, healthy blades of yummy grasses for the herd to feast on. Maggie watched the goats with wonder like they were a herd of mythic magic beasts.

“Watching them eat makes me hungry,” Maggie said, rubbing her belly. “I can’t wait to eat…what was it again?”

“A scramble,” The Cook said as I watched the goats eat.

“It’s kind of stinky, but I think it’s amazing,” I said, trying my best to stay hip to the new scene.

“Hum,” Maggie said as The Cook stared at me quizzically.

“I’m not talking about the smell,” I backpedaled. “I was referring to the system you have rigged here. It’s amazing. Very industrious.”

“I don’t think I’d call it industrious,” The Cook said defensively. “I call it the Goat Hangar, but if I was looking for words to describe my scene I might call it simply, “not cruel.” It’s hard to imagine that this bay was once used as a holding pen for humans—living, breathing, loving soldiers with families, friends, and dreams. I want to cry when I imagine them crammed in here like cattle, waiting for their officers to herd them outside into a slaughter scene unfit for man or beast. I care for these animals, my walking meat, better than the old generals do their soldiers. I have meaningful relationships with my Goat Team and my Ill-Tempered Time-Traveling Chickens. They are blood of my blood, and I care for them. They die, as I’d like to die, without the panic and terror of wholesale slaughter. Unlike modern soldiers, they will die knowing the One who orders their deaths personally. I’m a predator. This is my territory and they know they’re my prey. I’m not a distant, impersonal symbol.”

Maggie was horrified. “You kill them?”

“Naturally. I write The Menu, and I’m no vegetarian.”

Back in the kitchen, The Cook took the eggs we gathered and then returned to his work. We returned to the dining room—sitting at opposite sides of the table—watching the ocean scene on the TV quietly.

“Maggie?” I asked, finally breaking the silence.

“Yes, Wylie.”

“What do you think about all this?”

“This what?” Maggie replied, eyes fixed to the screen.

“You wrote a nice email to a father,” I began, “a father you haven’t seen since birth. Instead of a reply, we were accosted by a cult of bums who went to great lengths to sell us their lollipops, and a guaranteed chance to win this one-way trip to Storysold: City …Westonton, whatever. Now we’re here cruising Time Machine Cruise Line Incorporated with a lady who keeps a herd of goats and a tram of chickens in the cargo hold of her salvaged old warship. Not only that, she has a personality parade a mile long that includes some sort of pirate captain, a predatory cook, and an androgynous attendant. That’s what I mean. What do you think about all this craziness?”

“I don’t know,” Maggie shrugged. “I’m not bored enough to think like that yet. This is the most fun I’ve had since the BLM protests. But I do think you should use ‘they’ when you’re talking about them in general.”

“You’re watching the ocean on TV…”

“I like this channel,” she said, a little defensively. “It’s like watching the news without the talking heads and commercial interruptions.”

I blinked. “Watching the ocean is like the news?”

“Naturally,” she replied. “Just look at it. It’s a great story.”

“I can’t believe you haven’t asked our host about your father yet.”

“You mean,” she corrected, “you can’t believe I haven’t helped my Journalist Boyfriend find some material for his news story yet.”

“You know what I mean,” I snapped, angry that she wasn’t playing her part, but still doing my best to speak in couple code-talk. “All I’m asking for is a little help from my Girlfriend.”

“Food’s up!” called The Cook, beaming as she presented our food. I can’t lie. It looked delicious. I didn’t hesitate to gobble down the first of my four Spinach, Egg, and Cheese Biscuit Breakfast Sandwich sandwiches. Across the table, Maggie’s Spinach, Spinach, and Green Onion Razzmatazz with Guest Star Feta Cheese smelled almost as good as mine.

The Cook left, and returned without her apron. He was carrying a pot of coffee, a pitcher of fresh squeezed orange juice, and a plate of his own as she sat at our table and presumed to eat with us.

  It was the worst customer service experience ever. Nowhere in the civilized world would a cook have their customers gather their own food, speak to them rudely, terrify them with a sword, and prepare the meal in a kitchen without a clearly posted government-issued license to be Cook. If doing it all wrong wasn’t enough, he took her sweet-ass time doing it too…and to top it off she had the audacity to assume that we were OK with permitting The Help to dine at our table! We were his customers. It was our table. We rented it with our winner tickets. I was upset at first. I left without leaving a tip, or helping to clear the table. But, as I soon as my hunger returned, I learned I wasn’t in any position to grumble. Begrudgingly, I ate lunch with The Cook too.

That evening, after another dramatic meal, Maggie moved her stuff into my room. It was awkward. I walked into the bathroom; she walked out. I turned on the TV; she read the bible. I tried to make small talk; she replied with silence. She asked about our “relationship,” and I turned up the volume on the television. The FBI was paying us to be Boyfriend and Girlfriend. On paper, we were supposed to make some kind of effort to show our affection for each other. For example, we should hug often and kiss (if only on the cheek), laugh at each other’s jokes, and snuggle under the same covers while we watched TV together, but that performance just wasn’t happening. We were strangers, not actors. I wanted to do it right, but her many insubordinations made it hard for me to play the tolerant, understanding Boyfriend.

The first night, after I turned the cameras to PRIVATE, I patted the bed beside me and said, “I promise I won’t bite.”

“I’d rather sleep on the floor,” was her reply.

“I think we should make an effort to share the same bed,” I said seriously. “What if the attendant or the captain walks in and sees you sleeping on the floor? They’re going to suspect foul play. Boyfriend and Girlfriends share the same bed. It’s the American way.”

I was amazed; the ploy worked. Maggie crawled under the covers with me, and two near strangers shared a bed in the name of maintaining symbolic proximity. I didn’t touch her, and she didn’t touch me…but I imagined what it would be like to touch her, and I imagined what it would be like if she touched me. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep that night. I tossed and turned as Maggie’s presence invaded my body. I can’t tell you how hard it was to keep the upper hand for Uncle Sam, exercise extreme discipline, and maintain my role like a border between nations. I wanted so much to express my feelings for the co-worker sleeping in bed beside me, but I knew it was inappropriate.

When I watched the sun rise after my second night without a wink of sleep, I knew I was beaten. I knew if I slept beside her again, I would lose all control. I’d touch her, and she’d touch me, and I’d tell her how I felt about her while I licked the sweet candy of her body. I’d tell her that I found her strong-willed independent nature intoxicating. I’d tell her, with all my nasty emotions gushing like a geyser, that I hadn’t found a woman so attractive since I watched Lt. Uhura work the bridge of the starship Enterprise for the first time. I knew if I continued down that path I’d lose control of The Mission, so the first thing I said to Maggie in the morning was, “Thanks for keeping up appearances, but I think I was being unduly paranoid. Tonight I’ll sleep on the floor.”

“Good. Because if you don’t, I will…” she replied crossly. “Your farts smell like rotting chicken ass.”

While we continued to sail for Storysold: City , I watched the ship’s live-action TV network while my Worshipful Goddess did her thing: unraveling the rhythmic mysteries of the Goat Hangar, communing with Ill-Tempered Chickens, and learning how to milk the Goat Team.

As she worked, I plotted…and became increasingly convinced that Captain Chaos wasn’t one of the Good Guys. I know I should have spent more time getting to know our host before I formulated a judgment like that, but I was a spy. It was my job to discern meaning at a distance without actual, direct, face-to-face confrontation. A spy, ordained by Uncle Sam Himself, doesn’t do research. That was sidekick, sissy stuff. Real spies shot from the hip, and went with their gut. And my gut was telling me that nobody puts on a pirate costume every day without meaning it. I mean, we hadn’t seen her swashbuckle any shipping vessels on the high seas, or yell, “Ramming speed!” before she plowed her old warship through the flanks of her competitors. Not yet at least. But I was willing to bet my bottom dollar that the Captain was involved in a terrorist activity that, once discovered, would be given a marketable name. And if I was right (and I felt that I was), there was a good chance that whatever dubious plot she was hatching wouldn’t stop there. The plot might even go all the way to the top, to our objective Mr. Chester Weston.

My Storybank Account – Scene Seven,

THE PART WHERE WYLIE USES HIS SPY SKILLS TO INTERVIEW THE CAPTAIN OF THE STORYTIME MACHINE…

After we had made our tenth morning meal without help from the Cook, Maggie told me she was doing her first “big scene” alone in the Goat Hanger today. I asked her what sort of scene. She said that she was planning to rotate the Goat Team and reseed their old pen by hand, using hand tools, without the aid of machines. I was impressed. We hadn’t been on the ship that long. When did she have the time to learn all that?

“Do you want to watch?” Maggie offered hopefully.

The first line that came to mind was, “I’d rather watch paint dry than watch you herd goats.” I didn’t say that. Instead, I heard myself say, “I’d like to watch your big scene, but I’m interviewing our captain today.”   

Great, I thought as Maggie walked away. Now I have to interview the captain. I guess it was as good a time as any for my Independently Wealthy Globetrotting Hipster Journalist character to earn his pay.

The light of day was breaking slow over the horizon. The air was salty and cold. I stepped onto the deck of the Control Tower with my press bag and digital recorder slung over my shoulder. In keeping with my character, I pulled the collar of my pea coat up pretending to be colder than I was. Then I pulled my microphone from my press bag and held it out like a snake’s tongue, tasting the morning air, as I approached our captain at the wheel.

“So, you’re our brave Captain?”   

There was no reply. The Captain continued to steer and scan the horizon for something—danger, storms, mermen, who knows. I tried again. “Cut me some slack, friend. I’m not your average member of The Press. I’m an Independently Wealthy Globetrotting Hipster Journalist, and I’d be honored if I could get the scoop on you, our mysterious swashbuckling host.”

“Argh!” she replied. “You’ve come for me treasure, have ya?”

“You bet I’ve come for your treasure!” I replied. “I’m also interested in your connection to Mr. Chester Weston.”

  “Argh!” The Captain gave me the squinty eye, and thundered, “So you’re after Chester Weston’s treasure too?”

I did the squinty eye thing too, and then I lied, “Aye. But yar’s is the real treasure here. Weston’s yarn is fools’ gold compared to yar’s.”

“Aye?” she grinned. “Yar’s X is on me treasure?”

“Aye, Captain. As God breathes, that’s no sailor’s lie.”

“Bullshit,” they replied plainly. “I know you’re writing an article on Maggie’s Long Lost Father.” Then our host braced the wheel with a stick and tucked their captain’s cap under one arm, faced about, and performed the old war ritual changing of the guard. The ritual was executed precisely except the odd fact that they were relieved by a sailor of their own invention.

“Don’t look so worried,” they said, unbuttoning their vest. “It should be clear by now; I want to share my treasure with you.” Then she turned to face the large oak door that read: STORYTIME MACHINE. It was covered with an intricately carved mural featuring their entire stock of characters. At the time, though, I only recognized the Cook, Captain Chaos, and Seawoman.

“So,” I interjected as she opened the door. “Who are you?”   

They took off her pirate’s vest, and said, “I’m always changing.”

“I can see that,” I said, and followed them through the door. “But who are you really? You know, deep down.”

They didn’t skip a beat. “Humans are hosts. That’s what we do in The Earth Show. It’s insane to think that we have to choose a main character. They call slaves ‘subjects’ for a reason. I am Traveler—the world’s first intentional live action novelist!—and I am precisely the past-like, present-like, and future-like courses I travel in my story. Instead of wasting my life writing my story scenes, themes, and characters in an imagined bubble world, I work to pack my story with The Action I need to live, wild and free.”

We walked through the door into the domed greenhouse. I looked in wonder at the lush jungle of plants, small trees, bugs, birds, and the other sun-chasing, creepy-crawling, wild, living creatures in the space. Morning was on its way, but inside it was dark as night shrouded with a massive patchwork curtain that covered the greenhouse like a blanket thrown over a giant cage to keep the wild animals calm. Traveler flicked a switch inside the door. A soft glow sprang from a series of LED lanterns that popped up from the floor, which appeared to be made of the same sort of decomposing matter one would expect to find in a forest floor. I followed them down a narrow, lit path that was covered in part by fiddlehead ferns and wild berry bushes.

“Welcome to the Con Tower Greenhouse,” they said.

“Why do you call it that?” I asked as a white-furred, red-eyed rabbit hopped across the path.

“Because without all this, my characters and I would sink for lack of food,” they said. “It’s hard to command a ship like this without producing a balanced ration of food-making scenes every day.”

Right, I thought, it’s hard to command a ship of this size without a balanced captain either. That’s for sure!

“Are you taking me to your leader?” I asked like a Brave Spy for God, King, and Country who’d been taken captive by aliens, or heathens.

“No,” she replied flatly.

We walked into a clearing in the jungle. At its center was a square stage, elevated a few feet from the dirt floor.

“Well then,” I tried again. “Where are you taking me?”

“You mean, when am I taking you?” our host replied with a hint of mischief. “This is called the Storytime Machine for a reason.”

“Of course,” I said, trying not to roll my eyes.

Then our quirky changeling host stepped onto the stage with their feet a shoulder’s width apart, fists on their hips like Wonder Woman. “You don’t sound convinced,” they said. Then they pointed a finger to a bush at the edge of the clearing. “Put those spry young legs of yours to work on that bike over yonder, and I’ll make you a believer.”

Sure enough, behind the bush was an old orange reformed exercise bike. At first, I thought it was hooked to an electric generator. Upon a closer investigation, I discovered that its chain was fixed to a gearbox that I could see through a small square hole in the floor. Instead of a traditional seat, it had a plush throne-like recliner made from hide and stained hardwood that faced a pair of swept-back handlebars with tassels, which in turn faced a control panel podium that had three crystal-handled levers. The levers were labeled: PAST, PRESENT, and FUTURE. Behind the recliner was a massive metal disk that was artfully painted with a variety of strange symbols, pictographs, hieroglyphs, which appeared to tell a story of some kind.

My father was, among other things, a science fiction nut. I’m sure it only happened once, but it felt like he was watching that old 60s version of The Time Machine every time I wanted to use the television to play my Nintendo. He encouraged me to watch, claiming it was “educational.” He always paused it, in the beginning, when George the Time Traveler described how an object could travel from the airspace of The Present and arrive in the airspace of The Future all thanks the magic of time travel. I was a kid. I didn’t care. All I knew was that our house was only equipped with one TV space, and it was being used for my father’s time-traveling pleasure. I watched all two hours of George saving cow-eyed domesticates from the clutches of green cave-dwelling industrialists. All that was to say, the orange bike, plush throne, and spinning disk-of-mystery reminded me of the time machine prop they used in that movie. My guess was that our captain had seen that one too. At first I thought it was clearly a parody until I wondered, what if this really is a time machine?

“Go on,” they prompted, still standing with hands on hips, feet spread a shoulder’s length apart. “Get your skinny ass on that bike and start pedaling. Then pull the crystal-handled lever labeled PAST, and send me rip-roaring into My Past. If it helps, imagine that you’re Sulu on the deck of the Enterprise in that part of Star Trek where his brave captain orders him to travel back in time in hopes of adding two humpback whales to their long list of aliens who they’d ripped from their homes, reeducated, and conscripted into The Federation,” they laughed. “Go ahead, start pedaling. Exercise is fun.”

So I did what they said. I set my microphone and recorder down to face the stage, and I pedaled. To my surprise, the disk behind me began to spin and glow and flash with color that illuminated the stage. At first, I had to stand to crank the pedals. I felt like I was biking up a mountain. Once I felt the hum of the machine, I lowered the lever labeled PAST. I half-expected a portal or wormhole to open—flash! like 1.21 gigawatts—and swallow our host like a big fish in space, but that didn’t happen. They did, in fact, disappear in a grand display of lights, but they didn’t disappear as quickly as I would expect a time traveler to disappear. Instead, I saw the whole boring explanation. I pedaled the bike contraption, and the stage lowered them below the floor.

“I thought you’d disappear in a flash of light!”

“Ha!” they yelled up from the hole. “Isn’t it funny how powerful The Fourth Wall is? The first thing the Audience expects in life is all the stories Hollywood sells them. Storytime traveling on The World Stage can’t meet your expectations in 90 minutes. It takes a lot of hard work to make your dreams come true in The Action of The Earth Show.”

“I was just kidding,” I called from the bike.

“Yeah, but you believed I was supposed to disappear in a flash of light like the movies…and you were disappointed when I didn’t rip roar anywhere like Captain Kirk in his time traveling spacecraft.”

“So, does that mean I’m a boob tube watching idiot now?”

They ignored my question. Instead they chose to continue their lively introduction. “Come see!” they yelled up like a swimmer beckoning me to join them. “The past is nice down here!” Microphone in hand, I crawled to the edge of the theatric wormhole, and peered down. They were in a round room lined with racks full of props: clothes, gadgets, gears, gizmos, books, widgets, curios, antiques, and junk—lots and lots of junk. Or so it seemed.

I watched The Scene from the edge of the greenhouse floor. They faced me like they were facing a bathroom mirror as they changed out of the Captain Chaos costume. I wasn’t used to watching people undress, and I was especially unused to watching shameless old people undress. The only undressing scene I was used to watching was the sexy kind the Bond girls do for their boss/lover before they infiltrate the evil genius’s lair, guns in hands, as a team.   

“Welcome to my Changing Room,” they smiled up at me. “This is how I travel through storytime…by changing my stage settings, props, and characters to become the past, present, and future-like stories I want to be. You see, time isn’t a space thing we can measure with a grid box. It’s an intentional direction we choose to take in the ever-present action of The Super Real.”

“Yeah,” I said, unsure of what to say. “I don’t Get It.”

“Don’t worry, you won’t Get It,” they laughed. “It’s not a part of The Same Old Story you can recognize in an instant. I could describe my Theory of Storytime Traveling in The Super Real using the generic languages of math, science, and American English, but you could spend a lifetime reading, watching, and studying it—and still not Get It. It’s mostly a verb. To Get It, you have to explore The Earth Show, play, write, and produce a part of your own in The Action. Blah, blah, blah, bletch! Words are mad little bubbles made of the shit parts of our actions—and they’re easily popped. In My Future, The Action becomes our tiny planet’s most valuable resource, reducing gold, diamonds, castles, fast cars, and land bodies to their proper roles in The Earth Show. They aren’t The Story that matters most. They’re props produced to support The Action of our stories. The words we use to build The Fourth Wall aren’t special. They aren’t magic spells. Words are the smoke to the fires of inspiration that burn in the governing-host bodies of every living creature, including our planet’s most powerful governing body, Earth. The Action is wild, and you have to feel it to know it.”

I waited to make sure she was done ranting at me. Then I said, “I’m not sure about all that. Sounds like hippie wu-wu to me.”

“See what I mean?” they laughed again. “Fuck The Wall and Its love of collecting all the most perfect little ‘right’ words. They’re always such a turn off.” She hummed a song that sounded familiar as she rummaged through her clothing racks. It bugged me that I couldn’t name it. A moment later, she was facing me wearing an ankle-length dress, dark brown pantyhose, pumps, a rhinestone-studded pair of horned-rimmed glasses, and a lot more cosmetics than I’d call conservative. “Wylie Jones,” they announced, “meet my first stock character, the intrepid Professor Chase.”

I tried to process what I was experiencing, but the name of the song was on the tip of my tongue. And it was bugging me.

“It’s Today by The Smashing Pumpkins.”

“Ha! I knew it!” I cried, feeling instantly relieved.

“Isn’t it weird how soothing it feels to name things?” Professor Chase  asked as she began to hum Time in A Bottle by Jim Croce. “You can stand on a mountain top and have no idea what you’re looking at, then with the help of a map you can slap names on the rivers, peaks, and valleys you’re seeing, and suddenly it all makes perfect sense. Trouble is, all the words in the world won’t help you understand it. You have to travel down the river, explore the valley, and climb the distant peaks—and feel it—to have even a basic understanding of The Scene you seem to see with such objectivity clarity on high.”

“Is that what I’m doing with you now?”

“No,” The Professor smiled. “You’re here to power the stage. Now get back to work, Journalist. I want to show you My Past.”

“I was a distinguished professor teaching at a distinguished university in California decade before I made my breakthrough discovery,” The Professor began as I pedaled the stage back up into the dark of the Con Tower. “I was a happy Californian. I battled the wildfires and debris flows in my unaffordable ranch style home at the base of the San Gabriel Mts, owned enough land for a garden, goats, and chicken, and changed partners like engine oil to keep my life fresh and new. I was an American. I had Buddha statues in my lawn, a BMW in my garage, and hated Hollywood as much as I wished I would someday meet a producer at Trader Joes or my yoga class who would read my novel and make a movie of it someday. It was called, Guzzlers! It was all about a heroic search and rescue alcoholic who battled water-thieving space aliens who’d landed on earth in search of water. ‘Hold it right there, buster!’ He would say to the evil aliens as they lowered their massive water guzzling face nozzles into the Owens Valley reservoir. ‘That’s our water!’ Then of course we would learn, in The End (after we eradicated all the aliens), that Californians had a lot in common with them. The last shot would show our hero quitting his job to open an art gallery featuring his paintings of alien water guzzlers. Like I said, I was a Californian through and through. All that changed when I made my discovery.”

When the stage reached the surface, Professor Chase was standing in the middle of a holographic classroom scene. Her students looked like typical  late 80s Californians: Hypercolor T-shirts, Ocean Pacific shorts, LA Gear light shoes, and a few leather-loving peroxide punks. The scene was set in a large lecture hall. The students were crowding in, taking their seats.

Taking her position behind the holographic podium, she faced me and said, “It happened like it does in the movies. I discovered The Fourth Wall by accident. I’d just broke it off with my third longtime partner after cheating on her with a man who was more of a friend than a partner, and I had to rush my precancerous dog to the ER that morning, so I was too sad to prep a lesson plan for the day…and I tried to wing it.”

I watched as she rifled through her desk, pulling out old notes, looking through her briefcase. The class was now settled. Everyone in the room was making the blank face look at her podium, but The Professor was not ready to transmit The Day’s Lesson. Crouching behind her desk (pretending to care about the notes she dropped on the floor), she took a long pull off her Frappuccino grande—then she looked around the room for inspiration. In the back, behind the row of peroxide punks, there was an old built-in bookshelf. Walking to the bookshelf Professor Chase began her lecture, saying, “Good morning students. I know we’ve been working hard on the subject of entropy…and why it doesn’t exist in a universe that’s always able to expand and input new resources into its system…but today we’re going to take a break…” After she brushed the dusty the titles off a few books, she said, “…today we’re going to have some fun and explore a little known theory about time travel.” Then she selected a book and opened it. “It’s called, THE MNEMONICS OF TIME TRAVEL.”

Our host faced me for a quick Fourth Wall break, saying, “I remember thinking I was probably the first person on earth to read that book. It looked like it’d been sitting there, on the shelf, since its publishing date.”

Returning to the podium, The Professor read the book’s introductory line aloud, “To begin, let’s assume time travel is possible. Let’s assume our time traveling hero can rip-roar to the past, the present, and the future at will. Once we sideline that old worn debate, we’re free to ask other interesting questions like, What kind of side effects can our time travelers expect to experience? We imagine there’s many, but this book is only going to address one: the devastating effects of both chronic short and long term memory loss as a result of constant travel through dissociative events in spacetime and or temporal zones.” She paused, turned the page, and then she continued to read, “Chapter 1: The Spacetime Continuum – Every time traveler has a baseline, a reality, from which he or she depart on their wild adventures through spacetime. When they travel from their personal baseline to experience a new event in another spacetime the traveler has a natural need to make connections from their baseline reality to the new event. Usually that connection is made by an object: a machine, a clock, or a person like a lover or parent. No matter how our time traveler maintains his or her connections to their baseline reality, all time travelers must work hard to maintain those connections, because The Moment they forget their origin story (and sever their connections) they destroy and reset their baseline spacetime continuum. Therefore the more our traveler travels to random events in random spacetime, the greater the chance they will dissociate from their baseline reality, forget, and destroy their spacetime continuum. Conversely, if our hero travels to one idealized event or set of idealized events anywhere in their spacetime continuum too frequently without any lasting connections to their baseline reality (usually an attempt to control their narrative arch), they’ll also be at risk for a dissociative event, a destructive resetting of their spacetime continuum.” Professor Chase read the book silently for a moment, flipping through pages, then continued to read aloud from the podium, “As I will show in the chapters that follow, the old notion that we live in an objective spacetime with a linear, knowable, objective Present, Past, and Future is an ancient myth that needs to be replaced with a better/more accurate way to measure time. As comforting and utilitarian as it is to project a third person narrator (like a god) or project a  third person storage place (like spacetime) into The Earth Show, it’s objectively wrong. In the pages that follow, I hope to show that the only Ones hosting The Earth Show are the inhabitants of our planet Earth…and all earthlings (humans, animals, and bugs alike) all travel through ‘storytime’ differently, each creature moving through and evolving their baseline realities, in time, with the part they play in The Earth Show. In my retelling of The Story of Time, our storytimes are not valued relative to one kind of storytime that’s more valuable than the rest of our planet’s storytimes. All storytimes are measured equally.”

At that moment Professor Chase broke their character, faced me, and said, “At that point, I puked all over the floor, blamed it on ‘morning sickness,’ gathering my belongings, and went home to finish the rest of that book…and then I ate a tub of pralines and cream when I realized what that damned book was saying. I didn’t go back to work the next morning. Instead I used all the ‘personal days’ I’d saved in my ‘vacation bank.’ When I returned, I had a new theory I planned to prove. I called it, The Storysold Method (aka Storytime Traveling in The Super Real). I knew I was onto something, because I lost interest in all my usual crutch loves like sugar coffees, ice cream, and chips. I know it wasn’t healthy, but I lost twenty-five pounds in two weeks…”

The Changing Room glowed with a new scene. We were back in her lecture hall. Traveler stood beside me and we watched a holographic character of Professor Chase passing out flashlights to her students. She was already half way through setting the performance expectations for her assignment. “Now students, I will need you to use the information on the board to download an app my friend Malcolm Riggs developed for this assignment. He developed the flashlight cam in your hands as well. In order for this to work right, I will need you to know what I mean when I say, ‘temporal zone.’ For the purpose of this assignment, a temporal zone is any one unified body of raw information like a subject, topic, or story like a movie, novel, or broadway show; or a unified land body like a city, state, biome, or bioregion; or a unified communal body like a workplace, home, mall, or social event like a party, funeral, or wedding.” When she was done passing out her new technology, she held a flashlight and stood before her captive audience. “The flashlights are both a flashlight and a camera which activates when you turn the light on. As long as you connect the app to the flashlight, like you would any wireless device, it will record The Data for you with minimal effort. Collecting The Data is your assignment. And the only thing you need to remember to do that rightly is, you have to turn the Light Cam on when you travel from one temporal zone to another and say, ‘Whoosh!’ The voice command isn’t meant to be not-so-subtle sarcasm aimed at all the would-be science types who still believe in the linear nature of spacetime. The Arrow of Time is an old story, which has been retold in many exciting new ways like The Multiverse Theory, which still holds that time has temporal zones we need some special machine—like a rip roaring spacecraft—to travel to, because there’s Something Grander writing, producing, recording, and storing the data of The Earth Show that’s not our planet’s natural hosts, namely human hosts like us and animals too. And bugs. And I suppose you could say that even rocks have their own governing bodies too, because they host heat…” The Professor began to walk to the door (her door, not the students’ doors) on the side of the lecture hall, then she opened it and walked outside. The light from the sun flooded in the hall. “Like I said, the voice command ‘Whoosh!’ isn’t only sarcasm. It’s a fail safe. It keeps you idiots from activating the Light Cam every time you flip this switch. The device will only activate when you flip the switch and give the voice command. So please be aware of your temporal zones.”

She demonstrated the process by walking through the door. Then she picked her teeth for a few seconds, then demonstrated it again. “Whoosh!” The Professor said as she walked back into the evenly lit theater-like lights of the lecture hall.  “I will be joining you on our journey of discovery. Together we’ll spend our allotted classtime writing our adventures through storytimes. For fun I will call them ‘self tests,’ but the only performance expectation I have, as your authority figure, is do your best to remember as much data from your story as possible: first from memory; secondly with the aid of the Light Cam. Examples of The Data include all the factoids you have been taught and tested on in other classes, meaningful family stories, meals you remember, highlights from parties, etc. The point of our self tests will be to determine how much help, if any, an active tracking and recording of our baseline realities, or live action stories, is to the preservation of our personal memory banks. In The End, I hope to prove that qualitative measurements—like our stories told in whatever language we identify with (and choose as our own)—are of equal and or greater importance to The Scientific Process, which has long relied almost exclusively on quantitative measurements for its understanding of time. The notion that math is a higher (more accurate) language than, let’s say, hieroglyphics is nonsensical. In many ways, our natural qualitative process for measuring time may be better than The Scientific Process, because we humans have a tendency to forget and exclude data that’s not ours. An astronaut will need to use math if they want to build a cool rip roaring spacecraft to the moon, but a farmer won’t be any less intelligent if they don’t speak mathematics. They can mark the moon cycles and seasons any way they like, and still be just as accurate. It’s not like the story of The Moon is better told with math vs. crayons. In fact, using crayon drawings to mark our personal measurements of The Moon might, actually, be better because it’s more memorable. All The Education in the world won’t amount to crap if none of you can remember it. Do you have any questions?”

Young boy with light shoes, spiky hair, and sunglasses was the first to test the validity of her assignment. “I have an excellent memory,” He grinned and slurped a Slushy. “That self test will take all day.”

“There is no time limit for the self test,” she replied. “If you need to take it home, that’s fine. It’s your test…to show you your story. I can no longer test other humans, to show me my story, with a straight face.”

“I thought this was Physics 101?” Another student chimed in. “Aren’t we supposed to be learning about how gravity works and shit?”

“Yeah,” another one agreed. “Can’t you simply teach us what time is like a normal teacher? Why all the theatrics?”

“The first rule of good writing is, ‘Show don’t tell.’ And that’s exactly what I’m doing here. I’m showing you what time is.”

“This seems like a lot of work for one lesson…?” another student in the front whined. “I have other classes too.”

“I promise, in the long run, you’ll thank me,” Professor Chase replied sincerely. “If you don’t learn what time is first, then all that other science stuff I’m supposed to teach you won’t matter a lick. In fact, I’d be damaging you if I spent my storytime here, with you all, teaching you The Same Old Story about time. There is no Arrow of Time where The Past is somewhere behind us, and The Future is somewhere in the ether. There is no Spacetime Wormhole you can rip roar through faster than the speed of light (and try to outrun a force of nature that infests everything and travels in no single direction ever) and then, somehow, arrive in a live recording of The Earth Show that looks and feels like The Action of the original spacetime scene that’s already happened. Or even more miraculously, you rip roar into a scene that hasn’t happened in The Action of The Earth Show at all. As much as you might believe, or imagine it to be true, there is no place our bodies—and or spiritual bodies—are beamed to, like Star Trek, when we die. There is no place where Something Grander saves The Earth Show for our everlasting viewing pleasure. Even if we die and learn that’s true, the point of this assignment is to show that we, you and I, are the natural hosts who are the ones responsible—now—for marking our storytimes in The Action of The Earth Show (aka The Super Real) each in our own ways. I mean, is there anything wrong with letting The Action speak for itself? Why can’t humans have a direct relationship with The Data amassed by scientists. It seemed to me that any theory spun by any observer of The Data is a good theory if it inspires the observer to produce better actions for their story. If any given story is ‘good’ in the ‘objective sense,’ then we will applaud and buy it. If a story is ‘bad’ in the ‘objective sense,’ then we will boo, or mock it, and decide not to buy it. Science is terrified of qualitative measurements, because it undermines its authority—but what good is a theory if no one takes it to heart? What good is a story if it isn’t sold? Objective Capital-T Time is a lie anyway you twist it. It’s time we allow The Data to tell its…to tell our own stories.”

The lecture hall was silent. The students were all making the blank face look at the podium like they were supposed to do, but their eyes were wild, and their bodies were restless, and they were afraid because they didn’t know what The Professor was asking them to do with this new information.

Finally one of the peroxide punks stood and said, “Fuck this! You can keep your dumb flashlight.” He put the Light Cam on his desk and walk toward the door. “I’m not going to turn on a flashlight and say—“Whoosh!”—every time I walk from one ‘temporal zone’ to another.”

The Slurpy Slurper stood and faced the Punk. “What’s wrong? Are you too booshy to say—“Whoosh!”—aloud in public?”

“No,” the Booshy Punk replied. “It’s not that…”

“Bullshit,” he laughed. “I bet your too embarrassed to do this in public with all your punk friends around.”

Professor Chase studied her audience for a few moments, then she said (almost in a whisper), “I’m going to make this easy, folks. If you complete this assignment, I will give you an A+. I’ll also make sure you receive a sizable donation to The Belabored Students Fund, which should compensate you for the extracurricular time you spend in this storytime.”

“How much money?” One of the other punks asked.

“I dunno,” The Professor smiled. “How much is your time worth?”

The Punk thought about that for a moment, then said, “I want $25 an hour for any work I do outside of the classroom.”

“Yes! Yes! Yes!” The Professor clapped and did a little victory dance for what no one knew. “I accept your qualitative measurement of time! I’d be honored to buy your story for $25 an hour!”

“How about $45 an hour?” Another student asked.

“Sure why not!” She agreed excitedly, and then she did the math. “But if I don’t feel your story is worth that after the first week, I reserve the right to offer you a lower price for your work, or fire you. Agreed?”

Meanwhile back in The Changing Room the holograms faded like ghosts in the light. “The Storysold Method was born in that moment in the lecture hall,” they said, facing me as I continued to watch on from my seat on the odd bike contraption, “but of course I didn’t realize it. As always, our words lag far behind The Action of our governing bodies.”

I immediately related to that last line. “No shit,” I laughed. “I’ve been trying, but I still don’t Get It. How is traveling through storytime any different from traveling through spacetime? Seems like your rebranding the old word with a new one, but it all means the same, same.”

“Don’t worry,” they beamed. “Nobody Got It until many years later when Mr. Chester Weston and I showed it in scene in the creation of Storysold: City . But trust me, marking (or naming) time using raw action data recorded in story form is more accurate than using Cartesian coordinate grids.”

“So we’re getting there?” I smiled and held my recording device out hopefully. “To the part where you introduce Mr. Chester Weston?”

They rolled their eyes and said, “Yes, yes we’re getting there. Now why don’t you make yourself useful? My Past didn’t fade out because it was a natural ending. The Storytime Machine only has so much stored power.”

I pedaled for a moment, then The Changing Room changed to a new scene featuring a living room in what appeared to be a classic 70s style home in Los Angeles. Professor Chase was walking in the front door with a fancy bottle of wine in her hands. The living room was filled with her coworkers. They had been talking in small groups, drinking and eating fancy snacks. Now they were making the blank face look for Professor Chase.

“Hi everyone,” she said. “Sorry I’m late.”

After her coworkers took her coat and made her feel at home, they all returned to The Action of making the blank face look in her direction.

“Oh right,” she smiled and began to hand out copies of her new thesis in the works. “Let’s get started shall we…?”

Her friend and coworker Malcom Riggs, dressed like every man in the room, stood and was about to say something when Professor Chase launched into her presentation. “Science has been operating on the assumption that we humans have a normal, natural, balanced relationship with The Earth Show, or what science calls The Spacetime Continuum, where we host the past, present, and the future—all of which we access and understand with the aid of yardsticks, thermometers, data-crunching computers, and other devices, including the king of all devices The Time Machine—but that’s just not true. The Data I gathered from my self tests shows that we have anything but a natural relationship with The Earth Show. For most humans our baseline reality, story, or continuum is a list, which we have to constantly consult to remember what happens next. The List is linear…like The Arrow of Time…or at least mostly linear. The List has a sequence, but it has no beginning, middle, and end—no narrative arch, or storyline—no trackable past, present, and future course…only one long jangled alpha and omega list. Taken at face value, The List humans perform in their daily travels through the many temporal zones of their lives resemble nothing. The List has no apparent order: a) walk dog; b) take kids to school; c) talk to coworkers on the computer about management techniques; d) eat food from who-knows-where; c) steam a TV show about an apocalyptic future where nothing changes for the better; d) and so it goes. Often the random lists form collections. These groupings of like-with-like make us feel like The List has a storyline, but The Collection is just as bizarre. For example, a work collection might feature only one scene—what I call a One Act Wonder—played out all day where a human scans frozen meat over a measuring device and collects money (imagine that a collection of a collection!) in the setting of a grocery store. The same idea on a much larger scale is national identity, the thing we call ‘History.’ Anytime we artificially inject a storyline in the collection of data known as History and assign meaning to one group over another, the other groups are edited out of the narrative. In order to maintain the appearance of a story, a nation’s History has to be told like students sit in school cafeterias, amassing Its data in like-with-like collectives. So yeah, it begs the question: if these mass collections of data—often parading as communities—can’t hold an intelligible storyline, then how do we identify, class, and name these unseen super massive leviathans we identify so strongly with?” She paused for a moment to give her audience time to think before she rolled on. “The theory that spacetime has a continuum featuring a linear sequence of past, present, and future events is hogwash, so is any theory that’s cemented in the fiction of objective time. The idea that our Spacetime Continuum has a multiverse of possible pasts, presents, and futures that exist in inhabitable bubbles outside of our human experiences hosting The Earth Show is laughable.” Professor Chase laughed aloud. “It’s like science reads its own data first before it reads The Data it gets from The Earth Show, every time. I mean, really, how is that any better than the old religions that measure The Action using the words of their books as yardsticks? Ha! And we call schizophrenia a disorder! Isn’t that hilarious? It’s the norm in a world where we cage and control The Action before we measure it.”

Riggs tried to stand and say something to his friend again, but she was so excited she wasn’t paying any attention to her audience. “Hold on hold on,” she grinned big. “I’m about to wrap it up with a nice neat bow.”

“No,” a more brazen colleague spoke out. “We’re not…”

“Don’t worry,” The Professor marched on. “I’ll give you all the time you need to ask questions when I reach The End…what I discovered in the course of our self tests was, all the seemingly random lists and collections we humans host everyday do add up. They’re parts of The Earth Show (yes, a kind of story) which I call ‘generically engineered collectives,’ or what we commonly know as national characters, cultures, corporate narratives, etcetera. And all the many generically engineered collectives—or Generics for short—add up to one super massive universal thing, a canon of collectives that tries so hard to be a real story by growing so big and powerful it can’t be questioned. And no, Old Jose Campbell didn’t get it right. Earth’s overarching ‘subconscious’ monomyth isn’t The Hero’s Journey. I call It The Same Old Story, or The Suck (depending on my mood), and Its controlled by an ancient global literary device called The Fourth Wall. Given the amount of control The Fourth Wall has over The Action of The Earth Show, you’d think there’d be more books written about it…but it seems that Ferris Bueller is the only human host to really Get It. And he didn’t really Get It, because wall breaks in the movies aren’t wall breaks. They’re characters in action simulations speaking in the second person.” Then Professor Chase looked up, at the ceiling (skyward to face the future) and said, “For more info about The Same Old Story and The Fourth Wall see the sales pitch for our future book Storysold: City—coming soon to bookmakers near you!”

At that point, I was aware that Not Getting It was the theme of the day every day with our intrepid storytime-traveling host. So naturally, I didn’t think about that line until Bookmaker and I were writing this book. Then, as much as I hated that Traveler knew long before I knew, I decided to follow my friend’s lead and name the book in your hands Storysold: City and start it off with a sales pitch for selling you a story that isn’t The Same Old Story.

“In short, that was my discovery,” Professor Chase continued while her audience continued to take nervous little sips of their wine, “based on The Data humans were put on earth to sit pretty, make the rooster ready blank face look, only speak to other humans when property cued, and receive our regular generically engineered school assignments, performance expectations, customer service routines, working roles, cultural identities, and other tellings of The Same Old Story from a global literary device called The Fourth Wall.”

Professor Chase’s old college from The Science Department began to gather his belongings. “I’m sorry, I don’t have time to waste on your science fiction Samantha” the old professor suddenly announced as he walked to the door. “Humans aren’t hosts for intelligent body snatching alien characters bent on controlling all life on earth, and The Theater is most definitely not a global brainwashing device! That’s preposterous!”

Riggs came to his friend’s defense. “Why is it so crazy? Maybe there’s a reason why we write so many stories like that?”

Samantha laughed as the old professor showed himself out. Then she continued her lecture. “I don’t know about you, but I’m terrified,” she said as she read her audience. “I mean, is this It? Is that why we’re here? Are we here to sacrifice our living lives, our stories, to The Fourth Wall, so It can control the flow of The Action and produce the image of The Earth Show It feels is best? God knows no one human, or group of humans, control The Wall. That’s why humans build empires and fight wars. Each generic character believing that they have the one true telling of The Earth Show. Were the god-worshiping primitives right? Is The Fourth Wall alive? Is It a Super Being that preys on the living lives of Its human hosts, demanding us to ask It (and Its Generics) into our hearts like Jesus (Netflix, Apple, or Nike) and consume It like a sacrificial offering (or facts for a test), and then grant It ever-lasting life by incorporating It into The Action of our lives like an immortal name brand. The consumption of a ritual sacrificial offering—be that drinking wine like blood, or tithing a prized ox to a priest to prepare for a ritual feast—is an outstanding show-and-tell training aid for the acts of The Same Old Story. Who knows? All I know is, The Same Old Story is beginning to suck like a blackhole. And unless we’re ok with our planet’s most valuable resource—The Action—becoming one super massive suckhole of likeness, we will need a new qualitative-based measurement of time. If we don’t do something to stop The Suck, The Fourth Wall will not stop Its collecting of like things until we all—every human, animal, and plant on earth—live only to host The Same Old Story, from cradle to grave, as Lifetime Members of The Audience. If this goes on long enough, eventually there will be no hosts left to produce the wildside of The Earth Show. We’ll all be domesticates.” By this time Traveler was no longer facing her holographic audience, she was facing the light blazing through a crack in the massive blanket covering the dome of The Con Tower Greenhouse. “There’s no scientific exploration more vital to the survival of life on our planet than trying to find a route—what I call a future-like course through storytime—back to the wilderness of The Action that lies beyond The Fourth Wall. We need to work together to find an effective way to exterminate these Generic creatures. It’s time for these super action creatures, incorporated monster gods, inorganic governing bodies, and disembodied business entities to die. It’s time for us to retake control of The Action, then reclaim the rightful riches, the literary gold of our stories, the treasures these dragons have been guarding in their secret bodies century after century. I don’t know about you, friends, but I’m done letting the Generics feed on The Action of our flesh by reducing humans to empty vessels/generic members of The Audience meant to preserve their precious collections, asking us to make our sacrifices in the name of branding their immortal collections. I’m no longer under any illusions. We are not our planet’s apex predator. The Generics and The Fourth Wall rule The Action of earth, and we better find a way to kill them, or we will die a living death in the selling of our stories for homes we don’t own.”

There was a long silence. Traveler was still facing the light.

Quietly Riggs gave his friend Professor Chase a big hug and held the hug for a long moment. “We didn’t invite you here tonight to listen to your new theory. We’re here tonight because we love and respect you, and we wanted to tell you in person that the University is planning to let you go…”

Professor Chase was speechless.

Another one of her colleagues stood and said, “The University ran The Numbers. They say over 90% percent of the students who participated in your self tests dropped out, all claiming the University wasn’t able to provide them with a memorable story-driven curriculum.”

Another colleague took a long pull of her wine and added, “In fact, a number of them are filing lawsuits—claiming that the University’s dissociative system of bells, segregated subjects, and ever-changing random temporal zones actually damaged their natural ability to learn and remember what they learned. I spoke with one student who angrily asked me, ‘What do you remember from your time at school? What good is learning information that we never use, then forget? We need to use information to remember it, and we none of us will use information we had crammed down our throats by some random curriculum written by some Random Man who thought He knew how best to organize our brains.’ I argued with her. She calmly asked me if I still remembered how to do algebra. I teach Political Science. I haven’t used my math to do anything beyond paying the bills for decades. It was humbling, but she was right. I went home that night and performed a self test. I don’t remember a lot.”

Finally The Professor faced her audience and said, “I agree. The Data speaks for itself. The Numbers never lie. I’m no longer a host body for the old Generic who employs you. I haven’t been for a while now.”

“What will you do next?” Riggs asked sincerely.

“I’m going to explore the wilderness of The Action beyond The Fourth Wall. If you join me, we can discover The Earth Show together.”

One by one, The Professor’s coworkers excused themselves. The last of her gathering still standing was Riggs. Before he left, he smiled at his friend and said, “It’s a good time to sell. Who knows when the next big debris flow will level this neighborhood again.”

“Come with me,” was her reply. “I need you.”

Riggs only winked and said, “Maybe.”

With that Traveler ended the scene.

They walked off The Changing Room stage and stood beside a long rope attached to the crown of the dome. “Never fear The Light Mr. Journalist Jones. Welcome to Storytime Traveling in The Super Real.”

Then they pulled the rope and the blanket fell away.

The light of day was so blinding I stumbled a little when I got off the bike and walked to where I could see The Ocean better.

It was The Ocean, and I was there.

My Storybank Account – Scene Eight,

THE PART WHERE THE INTERVIEW CONTINUES, PART ONE: THE  CAST TAKES A BREAK TO EAT RAT KABOBS…

Professor Chase ended that part of her story with a look of pain on her face like she’d just relived it, but Traveler didn’t seem to give a damn. They opened a hatch in the stage (that I hadn’t noted before) and began to strip off Professor Chase’s costume as she disappeared into The Changing Room. A few moments later, Traveler returned to the surface of the Con Tower changed into Seawoman Second Class with a smile.

“Is that the end of your story?” I wondered aloud.

“You mean, why haven’t I got to The Good Part where I tell you how I met Weston and built Storysold: City  with him?”

“No,” I lied. “I’m a journalist. I’m interested in the whole story.”

She pulled a map from the duffle bag of props she had slung over her shoulder, and said, “The sun’s up, and I have a lot of work to do today to keep us afloat, but I use these props to help the mainland domesticates, like you, to explore their storytimes on Time Machine Cruise Line Incorporated. See if you can make sense of my map without me.”

“But what about The Interview?” I asked eagerly.

“Let’s tune in again tonight after dinner…” Seawoman smiled a big service smile. “Don’t worry, I want to sell you my story as much as you want to buy it. The future of Storysold: City  is in your hands.”

Then Seawoman made her exit, leaving me alone. I unfolded the map on the stage and tried to make some sense of them. The map had a color code in the upper right hand corner, which matched the colors of the rainbow with The Storytime Spectrum. Red was “third person past,” orange was “second person past,” yellow was “first person past,” green was “home,” blue was “first person future,” indigo was “second person future,” violet was “third person future,” black was “our past,” and white was “our future.” Each destination had a letter and number marking it. On the back of the map were a few words describing the destinations. Mt. Rainer and The Amazon were labeled “ever-present past” and marked as black; the oceans were also black; Los Angeles and San Diego were labeled “The Return of The Desert coming soon!” and marked as red; Rome and Paris were labeled “old past” and marked as orange; Patagonia was labeled “up and coming” and marked as indigo; a person named Farmer Emily in the land body of Oregon was labeled “local organic food producer” and marked as violet, another small farmer in Nairobi was marked as indigo; a long trail from Mexico to Canada was labeled “supply route” and marked as violet as well; the coast of Mexico was labeled “second home” and marked as blue; a cartoon image of the Storytime Machine was labeled The Action and marked as green, and for some reason The Bermuda Triangle was labeled “root future” and marked as white. The only other destination on the map that was marked as white was a city floating in the Pacific labeled, Storysold: City .

Being who I was at that time, I spent all of five minutes (a little over one monetary moment) trying to understand the map on my own. Then I was overwhelmed by the idea that the Something Grander (aka White Man’s Great Spirit the US Government) was somehow watching my every move, testing me, and demanding quicker results for the accomplishment of Its Mission. So like Superman, I flew off to find Lois and ask her what the earthlings meant when they made maps like the one our host put in my hands.

Maggie was still working hard in The Goat Hanger. When I walked in her scene she was tossing seeds on a freshly tilled plot of soil almost as fast as the ship rats were feeding on the seeds. Maggie didn’t look happy.

I saw that she was busy. I tried to interrupt in a respectful way—“Uh Maggie. I need your help with something”—but I didn’t walk away, or help her with the rats, or wait until she was free. “As you know,” I continued as Maggie began to kick the rats away from the seeds. “I interviewed our mysterious host today. She, or should I say, ‘they’ gave me a map of what they called The Super Real. It shows their storytime-traveling destinations.”

Maggie blinked a few times, then said, “So what?”

“So can you take a look at it and tell me what you think?”

Out of the corner of her eyes Maggie saw a big momma rat moving fast towards the seeds by my feet. With one swift motion, Maggie grabbed the map from my hand and punted big momma rat, football style, over the electric fence into the neighboring plot with the goats.

She took one look at the map and said, “It’s a storytime-traveling map of The Super Real. The dots are destinations. It’s not rocket science.”

Maggie booted another rat.

“Yeah,” I exclaimed, “but how can the future be a place we can go? I thought we had to travel faster than the speed of light to ever visit the future or the past? It makes no sense, scientifically that is.”

“What makes no sense is the idea that we can’t travel to our future, or travel to the past—that’s silly.” Maggie paused to toss out more seeds and kick a few more rats. “I imagine my future and go there all the time.”

“Yeah sure, but what about the past? You can’t…”

“Stop kicking the rats!” A voice suddenly boomed over a loudspeaker we didn’t know was there. “You’ll bruise the meat!”

Maggie stopped and looked around. I knew it couldn’t be anyone else but our mysterious host, clearly spying on us from one of the ship’s many live action TV channels. “You can’t imagine the past and go there,” I forged onward like a bad day with Asperger’s Syndrome. “The Past is behind us somewhere where we can’t go unless we slingshot around the sun and watch our heads float in the  space of our spacecraft like a dream, or roar through a wormhole.”

Maggie ignored me. “They’re eating the seeds!” She screamed at the loudspeaker like sports fans scream at TVs.

“And besides,” I held the map out for her to see. “This fucking ship is not my home, and no way is organic farming in any country the future; even a violet, or indigo, or white future. It’s a fad, which will be replaced by a new fad when it becomes commercialized and over produced and fully exploited by some clever bastard with a farming empire who finally squeezes the last of the magic from the magic word, ORGANIC.”

The voice boomed suddenly, “Release the hound!”

“How?” Maggie screamed back.

“I refuse to believe there’s no One True Time,” I continued to talk. “Bob Marley didn’t lie to us. I believe One Love is real.”

“Hit the button that reads DOG on the wall beside the door leading to galley,” the voice replied. Maggie fumbled around, looking for that button as the voice continued to narrate The Action. “No, not the one that reads RATS. That feeds the rats.”

Maggie shot me a cold, hard look. “If you don’t agree with their map of storytime,” she hammered the button. “Then make your own!”

Seemingly from nowhere, what appeared to be a malnourished terrier began to hunt and kill the rats in The Goat Hanger. She would corner one, sink her teeth in them, shake them for a hot moment, break their backs or neck, and then drop the body to move onto the next hunt. The rats ran, but they were running for the holes along the walls that were no longer there.

“Don’t worry Dog is a good dog,” the voice boomed. “She’s very nice once you get to know her.” It reminded me of what all dog owners say when you meet them in at their front door, or a park, or wherever.

Maggie yelled the loudspeaker, “Why can’t the rats escape?”

I blinked and Captain Chaos was standing beside us. “Yargh! I got the idea from a book written by a rat catcher in pre industrial London.”

“Oh hello!” Maggie turned to meet Chaos for the first time.

“Back then rat catchers used to spend the time to find where the rats were entering a home, or warehouse, or barn,” Captain Chaos narrated. “Once they’d identified all the holes, they’d feed the rats cheap grain for a few nights.  Then, when the rat catcher knew the rats were hooked on his food source, he’d  craft custom exclusion blocks for the entry holes. Then he’d wait in the dead of night, waiting for not one—but all the rats!—to scamper from their nests and feed on his offerings. Once the catcher felt he had captivated his audience, he’d block up the holes—quick as possible—sometimes using ropes to drop them in place like a scene from a cartoon. Then he’d release his pack of terriers—his killing machines—that killed the rats, one after the next, like well-fed soldiers. This is another example of how wrong the ‘modern’ present can be. There’s so, so many profitable stories from Our Pasts that have been lost, because humans have been hoodwinked into believing in the mythological Arrow of Time. Not all actions progress. In fact, I’d say most of them digress. That’s why animals are in many ways smarter than humans, even idiot domesticates. It didn’t take my dog friend long to remember how this works. And the rats are getting smarter. The smart ones now know all they need to do is hide in here long enough for the predator to have his fill, or tire of the sport.”

I leaned close to Chaos and whispered, “Aye matey, you didn’t sound like a pirate. I wonder, do you often have trouble staying in character?”

They rolled their eyes, then they leaned close and whispered, “Staying in Character is an old story invented to control actors and housewives. I’m a live action novelist, and that’s the only character I have to be.”

Maggie watched the rat killing scene hypnotized like she was watching space aliens land on earth. “This is fucking brilliant!” She exclaimed and began to toss the seeds around again like Little House in The Prairie.

“Yeah,” Chaos chuckled. “So is the seeder. It’s over there.”

“Oh yeah—right!” Maggie laughed and began to play around with the seeder. “I bet seeds are expensive feed for rats.”

“Yes, yes, they are…but it’s not a big loss if we eat the rats.”

“I love this,” was all Maggie could say.

“Eat the rats?” I started at them in disbelief.

“How hungry are you all?”

“For rats?” I exclaimed while Maggie simply shrugged her shoulders and made the hand-signal for “so-so.”

Chaos waited a few more moments, and then he walked over to the button that read RATS and pushed it. At once the Tom-and-Jerry holes around the perimeter of The Goat Hanger opened, allowing the surviving rats to run for the cover of their nesting area, which doubled as a composter.

“Be good guests and gather up the rats,” our Captain instructed. “I’m going to make sure my autopilot’s not aiming us at any oil tankers. The Cook will meet you in the galley in a few.” Then they looked at me. “Tonight’s Dinner will be served with entertainment. As a reward for your bravery, I’ll finish my backstory/interview and show you how our city came to be.”

  After we gathered the rats for The Cook, we watched him chop their heads and tails off and skin them. Then we helped him pack a portable grill to The Con Tower Greenhouse along with the rest of the props he needed to make Tonight’s Dinner. Moments later, we were ready for The Action of dinner in our ways facing The Changing Room’s stage. I sat and faced the stage like I had been trained to do. Maggie, on the other hand, didn’t immediately take her seat like a member of an audience. She took the opportunity to harvest some fresh veggies for our rat kabobs. Meanwhile I continued to sit—like a good member of some kind of universal pack—waiting for someone/anyone to say the thing that made the act of eating rats okay. I waited, and waited, and waited for some clear customer service (expectation management) on the subject, so I asked The Question (That No Doubt Was On Everyone’s Mind, So I Asked it). All our host had to say about that was, “If you were a sailor 400 years ago—rats provided not only food but entertainment, especially when they were caught in doldrums for long periods. Ask Dog friend. Catching a veteran rat isn’t easy.” And all Maggie said was, “I Get It. This is your way of traveling back to The Past, because this kind of remembering is better than remembering using words and pictures and  action simulations on screens.” Clearly the health (or moral) question about the eating of rats hadn’t once penetrated my co-workers thick skull.

I couldn’t win. “When In Rome, right?” Was all I said before I joined The Action. I performed the scene. We marinated the flesh in Boone’s Dipping Sauce (that’s what it read on the bottle), grilled them, and ate the rats while we played The Audience for our host’s presentation of her past. Each time they changed from one temporal zone to the next (in the storytime continuum) our host would stand on The Changing Room stage, hands on hips like Wonder Woman, and say, “Whoosh!” And Maggie or I would work the weird bike thing, pedal it up or down, and make their new storytime happen.

Notebook and microphone in hand (appropriate props for a journalist doing an interview in any scene), Maggie and I watched as The Cook became  Professor Samantha Chase. Samantha’s comfortable Californian costume-of-the-day was a kimono. Once the stage had been returned to the surface of the Con Tower Greenhouse, she walked into the limelight of the stage and began her narration of The Earth Show. Behind her, a holographic scene projected the goats that used to live in the backyard of her home. Beside her, a holographic projection of Malcolm Riggs was standing with her on the deck, drink in hand, watching the goats. Riggs was wearing a light gray business suit, goofy cartoon fish tie, shiny dress shoes, and a thick pair of black-rimmed shades.

“I wish I could say that I handled my unemployment well,” Samatha began, “but I didn’t. My friend Malcolm made many kind hearted attempts to snap me back to his (or should I say their) Perfect Mathematical Reality. When his pitches failed to ‘bring me back from around the bend,’ Riggs suggested that I meet his friend who worked in the department of psychology. I told him that only crazy people believe that people are crazy; the rest of us know we’re crazy. He told me that embracing insanity wasn’t going to help me control it. And I argued that The Earth Show didn’t need us to control it. The Action needed us to know it and flow with it. Only humans are arrogant enough to believe we can write, produce, and control The Earth Show any way we imagine it in our books. Then we argued about debris flows and wildfires for a while until Malcolm gave up. After more than nine months of watching reality-TV programs and eating ice cream for every meal, a black hole began to form in the center of my sofa. Or, at least, that’s what it felt like. I felt paralyzed, unable to think of anything other than all the bad things that were wrong with The Earth Show. The melting glaciers were wrong. The rising oceans were wrong. The genocide of bees was wrong. The dead jungles were wrong. The people who clear-cut the jungles were wrong. The people who paid taxes to the people who paid the people to clear-cut the jungles were wrong. But mostly, I was wrong. I was wrong for wasting The Earth’s air. I was wrong for not being smart enough to make the people understand the importance of breaking The Fourth Wall and storytime traveling in The Super Real. I was wrong for eating too much ice cream, and I was wrong for not having enough money to feed my goats. That last wrong was the wrong that finally did it. I remember staring at a Mercy Corps magnet on my freezer door, which featured Gandhi’s quote: BE THE CHANGE YOU WISH TO SEE IN THE WORLD. I must have read it a hundred times, each time I opened the freezer to dig out another bowl of ice cream.

“The last time I read it, I wasn’t thinking about filling up on creamy frozen goodness. I was thinking about poor Earl—my favorite goat—wasting away in the backyard because his food giver was stuck in The Suck swirling black hole at the center of her sofa. In that one, single, amazing, high valued moment  in my story I knew what I had to do to turn the tide. I had to write The Action and right my wrongs, starting with my responsibility to feed Earl. The obvious math answer to the problem was, ‘get a job.’ But that wasn’t enough. A new job would feed Earl for a while, until I quit (or was fired again) when my awareness of The Super Real began to feel too real. What I needed to do was find a way to turn a profit…being me. I didn’t know it at the time, but I’ve since learned that the first, authentic live action character hosted by humans usually becomes their narrator. The Storytime Traveler is my first love and narrator.”

At that point, they put their hands on their hips like Wonder Woman and gave the command, “Whoosh!” I knew the drill. I handed my rat kabob to Maggie and hopped on the bike—peddling, the wheel behind me began to spin and I pulled the lever labeled PRESENT down, which in turned the level for THE PAST up. A few moments later, Samatha called from the bowels of The Changing Room and cued me to return to Her Past. They were now wearing the costume of the Storytime Traveler: bug-eyed silver rimmed sunglasses, cropped hairdo, rainbow-striped pants, a tight torn undershirt, and a vintage bomber’s jacked with a “0” filled with a wild medley of colors painted on its back. Once the stage was flush with the Greenhouse floor, I retrieved my rat kabob from Maggie and we resumed our roles as The Audience. First thing Traveler did was walk off stage. “Check, check,” they said, tapping the outstretched microphone in my hand. “Ready to hear how our city of The Future was born?”

“Finally we’re getting to the good part!”

Traveler laughed—and I asked (trying to be a real journalist), “What I want to know is, how has a story as big as an ocean-going metropolis escaped The Media’s attention all these years?”

“It hasn’t escaped their attention,” Traveler laughed again. “I’ve ferried sixty-seven reporters, from all over, to Weston’s Westonton. None of them left to break the story to the outside world.”

“What happened?” I asked, feeling a little spooked—“Did Mr. Chester Weston imprison them…or worse?”

“No,” she replied coolly. “Once they finally Got It, they didn’t want to leave our city and return to their old stories on the mainland. In exchange for everything they owned, we worked with them to move their supporting casts,  friends and family, to our city…and sold them all new stories.”

“Why?” Maggie asked as we watched a hologram of The World Stage appear on The Changing Room stage. The holographic projection featured pop ups, little windows, which appeared and disappeared at specific locations on the globe. Each little window was a teaser (one moment’s worth of action) which  displayed one human’s live action story. And by “live action story,” I mean the window showed a human (somewhere on earth) producing their story: turning a wrench in their plumbing scene, kneading the dough in their bread making scene, sewing the cloth in their costume making scene—or one of the millions of ways humans produce our daily work scenes for The Earth Show.

“The journalists who came to report the story of Storysold: City  never left to report it, because they discovered a story that was worth more to them than whatever their employers were paying them. It’s no big conspiracy. In our city, they discovered that our stories—their story—had value. What storyteller wouldn’t drop all their dogged pursuits of other people’s stories, and leap at the chance to make a fortune, getting paid ‘big money,’ to write The Action of their own story? For any storyteller (who’s not a prostitute at heart) saying yes to that adventure is a no brainer. Of course they chose to stay and live their lives in Storysold: City . Who would return to their old prefabricated home stories in big  prefabricated national stories if they didn’t have to?” Traveler grinned like the Cheshire Cat. “What the world hasn’t figured out yet is…Storysold: City  has all the nuts. Our city offers humans a commodity the nations of the world cannot. We do that thing you call ‘freedom’ better than any of them, but the story runs deeper than that. You see, in the time that followed my epiphany for righting the wrongs of the world (and how to feed my goats in the process), I began to think seriously about what I was up against. The biggest problem I ran into wasn’t really a lack of freedom. It was a lack of control. In order to travel in storytime and explore The Action of The Super Real beyond The Fourth Wall, I needed to first own, operate, and control a story of my own…

“This isn’t nearly as clear-cut as you might think. Ask any American on the street. They’ll tell you that they’re free, but what they won’t tell you is the story of how that happens exactly. They won’t tell you, because they have no idea what their personal story of freedom is about. If pressed, they will tell you the next best thing. Jane Doe American will stand there and tell you about the nearly non-existent supporting roles they’re playing in The American Way of Life, because they’ve never actually experienced freedom. From cradle to grave, John Jane Doe has never had enough summertime school vacations, paid time off, or state holidays to gain a foothold—establish a beachhead—and take operational control of even one original storyline they can call their own. The only brand of freedom those wallbots know is The American Dream, a script story where the freedom to choose which employer they want to sell their freedom to, which politician or political group they want to govern them from a capital city far, far away, and which friends, neighbors, and coworkers they invite over to barbecue and watch the annual Super Bowl ritual. Somewhere along the way, playing our all American generic, expendable, interchangeable, scripted parts in the production of The American Way of Life began to somehow pass as “being free.” Somehow somewhere along the way, “being free” meant becoming a human host body, a wallbot, a passive viewer whose gut sense of freedom was manufactured like a widget in the same mystic factory that produced the fiction at the heart of their corporations, sports shows, church services, reality TV shows, pre-programmed structured funtime tourist destinations, and the fantastic realism of live action political dramas. Now “being free” means anything other than owing the daily action of our stories. That was what I was up against. That was The Thing that was sucking my ability to own and operate my story. As you know, I call It The Fourth Wall and It’s the spiraling source of all the crap fiction that controls our lives. I admit. It felt good—really good—to finally have a target to focus my rage. It was exciting. I wrote The Action of my story like I was planning a bank heist caper, studying my enemy for signs of weakness like I was the hero of a movie everyone would watch someday. I won’t lie. It was highly motivating to have finally discovered a villain that I could bubble into my life like an answer on a test without feeling guilt, bad, or wrong, or feel morally uncomfortable (around my friends at parties) when I spoke about my plans to violently destroy the generically engineered creatures of The Fourth Wall. It felt good to imagine my character Traveler slaughtering and exterminating Generics like Conan the Destroyer slaughtered giant snakes and monsters. All the fear and rage and hate really focused me. I learned a lot about The Wall and I learned it fast. The first lesson I learned was, breaking The Fourth Wall wasn’t breaking It like Ferris Bueller. Speaking to the captivated audience from inside The Wall doesn’t break It. All a generic, socially sanctioned wall break does is strengthen It. That’s why so many rebels and revolutionaries fail. The Wall loves to alienate and isolate Its host bodies by conning them into believing they’re rebelling against It. Take the classic teenager for example. They never get the part where they’re supposed to love their mom and hate their dad (or whatever), so long as the youth rebells, asserts their independence, and then falls in love at first paycheck with a new brandname family that scripts a meaningful working role for them. Humans are not cattle. We’re worse than cattle, because we do the work of domestication for our ranchers and do it freely. Rebels, punks, and freedom fighters usually fail because they don’t realize The Wall produces a brick for The Same Old Bloody Revolution too. It excels at staying at least five steps ahead of us.”

The World Stage shifted to live action stories featuring characters who were all breaking The Fourth Wall: a single mother with seven screaming kids holding up a grocery line, two tough talking women drinking beers after a long day of breaking mustangs on a dude ranch, a poor dishwasher (and his raccoon friend) dining on leftover feasts of rich folks in the dim lights of a kitchen after  closing time, a homeless man performing a monologue for passersby without a stage, a student boycotting their teacher’s demands to work for free, a mother stealing her own money back from her video-game playing husband to pay for diapers, an elderly woman sitting on a curb in New York City with her suitcase waiting in vain for her kids to pick her up, a customer service rep crying on the clock after receiving bad news about their lover, coyotes killing an old dog and howling at the moon, and many more scenes featuring characters—hosted by humans—who failed to rightly follow The Same Old Story.

“At first I thought I’d discovered an entire theme of natural born wall breakers. I thought all the folks who were being held in hospitals, group homes, and prisons were like, you know, ‘on my side.’ That was a misadventure. What I learned there was, humans have a very strong will to escape their responsibility to produce The Action of The Earth Show. It’s like a Thing. Most humans would rather suffer the misery of a thousand childbirths than face the feeling of not knowing what’s going to happen next. Institutions are brimming with humans who have tried and failed to answer The Question—how do we make breaking The Fourth Wall profitable? Clearly, judging by our world leaders, you can act insane as you like all day every day—so long as you’re comfortable, rich, and free enough to command an audience/market massive enough to support your irresponsibility. The common denominator for crazy is the inability to govern   The Action of your body, usually because either you’re not in control of it, or you’re too busy managing other host bodies to control your own. Groups can do the most insane things and never be diagnosed and committed to restraints. The closest theme humans have to treating a club, team, corporation, church, or tribe that’s gone insane is war, and the only way that old war ritual redirects a disordered generic character is ‘death therapy.’ Humans have yet to invent a healthy way of curing the insanity of groups. Humans have been trying to kill insane group characters by killing off their human hosts for as long as humans have been walking the earth. So yeah, breaking The Fourth Wall in any real way was going to be as complex and rigorous as sending humans to the moon. Back when my journey as Storytime Traveler began in earnest, even making humans aware of The Fourth Wall and Its The Same Old Story felt like an insurmountable challenge. It felt like I was trying to explain water to fish. It never worked. In time I called my failed attempt to sell human hosts a story that wasn’t The Same Old Story, The Impossible Sales Pitch. I tried time and time again. All I got for my efforts was the rooster ready blank face look.

“But for whatever reason I still had hope…

“After much exploration, I hit upon another old theme that I decided might work. I could break the Generics of The Fourth Wall—and cripple The Same Old Story—by competing with them. Or more specifically, developing a new/better kind of story to sell human hosts that would, if sold, bankrupt the Generics and starve their characters to death. To date, selling their audiences a better product—and starving them out—is the only way I know how to kill a character. God knows trying kill a bad character by trying to  bomb, shoot, stab, or enslave all Its host bodies to death doesn’t work. There’s centuries of proof for that one. War is a ritual and it doesn’t produce better stories. If anything, all the bloodshed and sacrifice makes the Generics who enact the war ritual more powerful. Self sacrifice is what The Same Old Story is all about. The Fear that war produces only makes humans breed more…”

I listened to Traveler’s monologue, but my attention drifted to the live action scenes unfolding on The World Stage. The notion that The Action on our planet was controlled by a global literary device called, “The Fourth Wall” was foreign to me, so I did what I always did when I was confronted with a foreign idea. I began to divide it into smaller parts, looking for little breaks in the idea to disprove, debunk, and destroy it. Anything to feel normal again.

“Isn’t this a little like blaming hip hop for youthful rebellion in The Burbs, or blaming sex in movies for declining family values?” I tried to laugh  off the idea confidently. “You can’t seriously believe our lives are all controlled by some all powerful device called The Fourth Wall?”

“I do,” Traveler replied flatly.

“Oh I see,” I lied. “Who controls It then?”

“You mean like what one evil genius, or conspiracy of evil humans controls The Fourth Wall?”

“Well, yeah…sort of…I mean, someone has to control It, right?”

“No,” Traveler replied. “It’s an organism, or at least a part of a living organism. Maybe It’s The Earth’s central nervous system. I don’t know. What I do know is, The Wall is predatory. However you classify it, I’m pretty sure It’s our planet’s apex predator. Its control of Its prey is absolute.”

“I Get It,” Maggie offered our host a rat kabob. “The Generics of The Wall feed on us, using our bodies and the tech we build to host their immortal characters. They’d die if we didn’t save them like Jesus in our hearts.”

“Exactly,” Traveler smiled, accepting the food gratefully.

I watched the two of them eating their rats for a moment or two, then I felt a sudden strong urge to stay in character. Pointing my micro at our host like a gun, I said, “Looks like you broke on through to The Other Side. When do we get to the part where you meet Mr. Chester Weston?”

Traveler took their rat stick and pointed at The World Stage. “Not too unlike a novelist, I wrote a lot of bad beginnings—wandering from city to city around The World Stage tracking The Fourth Wall and Its sources like a hunter hunting big game. In fact, I often describe my narrator as a live action novelist, because that’s what I was doing: intentionally writing my story for the first time in my life. I’m a Live Action Novelist; that’s my Traveler’s other ego.” As they pointed to cities on The World Stage, the little windows popped up and showed us images of what Traveler called her “bad beginnings.”

“Your so-called bad beginnings look good to me,” Maggie commented as we watched her likeness thru-hike across the land body of America on The Pacific Crest Trail, foraging on the offerings of small town quickie marts and gas stations (Slim Jims, Snickers, peanut butter and tortillas, and mac and cheese) as our host attempted to forge a relationship with The Wilderness.

“After a year or so of bad beginnings, I felt like I’d built up enough courage and experience to attempt my big break. I traveled back to my past and sold everything. I cashed out all of my bank accounts; all my stocks, bonds, and  insurance policies, all that paper nonsense. I sold anything that would put cash in my hand now. I sold my house to the young professor who’d been renting from me. I even sold all my small stuff: my ancient Volvo, my mystic crystal collection, my grandmother’s jewels, my motion sofa, my great aunt’s favorite golden cross. I sold everything that could be sold. Then Earl and I hitchhiked to San Diego where I bought this costume at the first thrift shop I found that wasn’t run by Goodwill International—and I became Traveler.”

I laughed. “Your story isn’t special. Didn’t all the post world war rich kids become liberal superheroes in the 60s?”

“No,” they paused. “My story might have had some similarities with the hippies, but my path was different. I had no group to join. I broke through on a level you may, if you’re lucky, understand if you work in Storysold: City  long enough to culture a profitable storybank account of your own.”

“Never mind him,” Maggie interjected with interest. “Tell me all about your first storytime adventure as Traveler!”

“The day I bought my first big prop was a good start. I remember it well. I tried to explain to the retired vet—nearly volunteering at a Navy surplus shipyard in San Diego—why I needed to buy one of Uncle Sam’s eldest fast-attack troop transport ships. He wanted to know if I was a terrorist. I told him that I was becoming The Future I wanted to be, and that future course wouldn’t be complete without an old fast-attack troop transport warship. I suspect that I made his Personal Terrorist Watch List that day, but I didn’t care. He sold that ship to me anyway. And that’s what mattered to me.”

“How did you afford that?”

“Small business loan,” Traveler grinned. “On paper, I was buying it to start Storytime Machine Cruise Line Incorporated. My loan officer and his family was the first of my customers. They loved their adventure, cruising one of my first person past courses in The Earth Show. If I remember right, Toothless Brit took them on a hunting adventure in a South American jungle where he poached a cow from one of McDonald’s many clearcut pasturelands, then he produced a cookout featuring his signature ranch-to-mouth Big Macs.”

“Who’s Toothless Brit?”

“He’s my colonial, racist, white male chauvinist.”

“You own a colonial, racist, white male chauvinist character?”

“Well, of course,” they answered straight away. “They’re everywhere. I’d be lost without at least one of those assholes in stock.”

“That doesn’t seem right,” Maggie declared. “Love is all we need. No one should ever have to be an Asshole.”

“I’m sorry,” they laughed. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves…

“After I rebuilt the warship to my standards, I painted STORYTIME MACHINE on its hull. Then I set sail for any adventure I could write beyond the safety, comfort, and civility of The Fourth Wall. At first, I didn’t have a map. I didn’t know my first person past from my third person future anymore than you do. To begin to establish a beginning, middle, and end to my existence (without any witchery or math), I added ‘like’ to my past, present, and future courses through my ever-present storytime. Originally I added “like” to my courses because, as I said, I don’t believe that there’s any Martian Moviemakers recording The Action of The Earth Show. There are no aliens, gods, or scientists storing It in a giant super computer where we can rip roar to and from, on our vacations from reality like Buck Rogers or some hero like that. There is only The Fourth Wall, and It is definitely doing Its best to control all The Action on the planet. Every story that has happened, every precious story that is, and all the stories waiting like star seeds in space to be born are here, now, in the ever-present storytime of our lives, which we can control if we choose to do so. I determined to discover mine. It was harder than I imagined.”

I hadn’t forgotten about my US government-issued character, or The Mission to secure an interview from our host. Pushing my microphone forward like a real journalist I asked, “Seems like the headline of your story is, Life is Hard for Privileged Liberals Too. Is it possible that the only conflicts you’d known in your cushy life were the ones you imagined for yourselves?”

Traveler shot that one back at me quick. “We’re in the mess we’re in because we measure our stories quantitatively,” they replied. “More of that kind of division won’t help. Stories are qualitative by nature.”

“Spoke like a true liberal.”

“What do you mean?”

“You gotta be rich in the first place to think like that.”

“So says who?”

“King in Oliver Stone’s Platoon.”

“What was that?” Traveler laughed. “You quoted that movie line like The Law, or The Bible after the printing press.”

“It’s not law,” I shot back. “It’s more like real life like for real.”

“What does your life say about storytime traveling? Do you still think you can rip roar back to The Past, or sling shot into The Future around the sun or through a wormhole sitting in your Captain Kirk style swivel chair?”

“Uh well,” I thought about that for a few moments. “I can’t say that I know for certain that anything is storing The Past anywhere I can rip roar to, or from, in my rip roaring spacecraft…but I do like Star Trek.”

“I bet you do.”

“It’s a hard thing for me to talk about…”

“I feel a sad childhood story coming on. Did your classmates alienate you when you walked to class wearing your trekkie uniform?”

“I’d rather not talk about it. It’s a painful memory.”

Traveler sighed. “Can we please follow this farce of an interview to its natural conclusion now? I have a lot of my story left to share with you and whatever governmental character you’re spying for…”

“I’m not spying…”

“Of course you’re not a spy. Just saying, there’s not a big difference between writing to The Fourth Wall as a journalist and writing as a spy—both are reporter characters who start their stories with statements.”

In the interest of The Mission I said, “I’m shutting up now. Please proceed. What happened next?”

“Welcome back,” Traveler smiled and continued their story. Once the Storytime Machine was operational, I began to consciously navigate the spaces of storytime for the first time. The first past-like courses I set were storytimes I believed best represented the oldest chapters of The Earth Show. I signed my signature like an author’s autograph to such classics as The Wilderness of Alaska, The Jungles of the Amazon River, The Grasslands of Africa, The Islands of the Caribbean, and one of my all-time favorite storytime/spaces, The Open Ocean. Unlike traveling in My Present, or My Future, I decided I didn’t want to set past-like courses in The Earth Show that changed The Past as I knew it. I have and always will love The Wild. The Action is the home where I hang my hat. It’s an artistic choice, and the decision I made for My Past was that I’d: ‘respect the durability of actions.’ That simply means that I would not make it my business to change the past; or at least the oldest natural ones; not too sure about the older cultural ones. It’s not a rule, but I show my love for our planet’s oldest stories that have weathered the many storms of change and civilization by ‘leaving no trace’ like nature-loving backpackers do in wild parks. Sun up to sun down I work hard to respect the original chapters of The Earth Show, because I can’t tell those stories alone…those ones no one can tell alone…”

As they narrated The World Stage changed, showing us windows into the storytime travels Traveler built their story on.

“The next storyline in my plot to break beyond The Fourth Wall was the part where I found a sustainable way to feed Earl without compromising my storytime travels. To do that I needed to develop My Present, which is not the same as the ever-present storytime all around us. My Present is developed from the storyspaces I choose to travel to (and own) with my physical presence. If that wasn’t confusing enough, the most successful present-like courses I set for The Action function like this stage. They behave as a balancing point for all  actions in my story, all my past-like, present-like, and future-like courses. The strongest of my present storyspaces are the ones that are powerful enough to maintain the most diversity. Like a forest. Like a desert. Like the ocean. We have to know, operate, and own the ecosystems of our governing bodies first before we can ever begin the process of patching together the larger land body themes. The story that served that purpose—the one where I finally began to own my story—was, and still is, the course I call, Storytime Machine Cruise Line Incorporated. It’s a ‘successful business’ in the old market sense of the word ‘success.’ Sales were hot! Customers from all over The World Stage were willing to wait in line to buy my adventures through storytime.”

They paused, and as the windows on The World Stage closed and the image returned to The Earth Show as it looks from space.

“As Traveler, I wowed my paying guests with my ‘storytime-traveling trips’ to adventurous temporal zones that no other tourist corporation could offer. I was the escape the employables wished they could be. I was the sports hero. I was the hopeful reform politician. I was the sexy movie star. I fought all the bad guys. It’s amazing how much a human host will pay for one hot sweet moment, or ten, of life in a story they wish they were in. The Action is the most undervalued and most valuable resource on our planet. You should have seen them. They loved The Action. There was the past-like course of Classic Ancient Egypt, which I presented my guests with a tour of the ancient, unused props of the Egyptians; and The Third World Eco-Trip; a journey through the present parts of The Earth Show where so called ‘underdeveloped’ humans hosts were writing great stories without the aid of The Wall and Its model for success (aka The Same Old Story); and The Atlantis Rising Trip, which set a future-like course in the Caribbean…where I sold them that adventure, searching the depths for the lost ruins of Atlantis. If they didn’t buy The Mysteries of Atlantis in the new hope of launching the human race into a groovy utopian future, I sold it as a past-like course: Atlantis, Quest for Sunken Treasure. At first it didn’t matter to me. Back then, before we built Storysold: City , I was still one of our planet’s billions of humans who lived and died to provide others with customer service…

“I worked hard to make my customers happy. I developed a Storysold character for every trip. Headdress Maker to Ramses II was an ancient artisan who narrated the Classic Ancient Egypt trip in an authentic costume. Sam the Goat Coach coached a team of goats (starring Earl) to pack the food, supplies, and things of my employable guests, so they could enjoy their Third World Eco-Trip without the third world inconveniences of packing their food. Toothless Brit successfully led unsuccessful hunting trips into The Heart of Darkness, a past-like course into the heart of colonialism that came complete with dry humor, pith helmets, and racist tales of exploitation on The Dark Continent. Brit also led postmodern colonial adventures, which featured the rewilding of cows and other wilderness creatures that had their land stolen by inhuman heathen characters like The Hamburglar. As Brit saw it, any cow that didn’t run when they were startled by their natural predator was, in fact, sick and needed to be either culled or rewilded for the benefit of the herd…

“That was also the part where I began to create my favorite character: Captain Chaos. He is my anti-hero hero who leads guests on his Raiding Parties, boarding tour boats, cruise liners, and fishing charters to plunder a bounty of free food, booze, dances, and hugs from whomever Captain Chaos and his Lost Crew of Rag-Tag Tourists wanted. I loved developing Chaos. He boarded his victims’ spacetimes without as much as a heads up. The guests would go along on his Raiding Parties assuming it was all a set-up, preprogrammed fun for their pleasure, which it wasn’t. It was totally spontaneous, but all characters involved rolled with The Action like good audience members anyway. His Tourists always returned grinning—hauling armfuls of towels, TP, and shampoo for their brave leader. It was crazy fun. I knew I had a winner in Chaos when the Boarded (as I called them) began to contact Storytime Machine Cruise Line Incorporated pleading for the famous Captain Chaos to board and plunder them. The Boarded loved the excitement as much as my guests, so I started charging the Boarded top dollar for the thrill of being plundered by Captain Chaos and his motley crew of gap-mouthed tourists. And my business was good, until one day, when my constitution broke under the strain of too much newness…”

“Too much newness?” I asked, and held my recorder out.

“Newness is the most creatively destructive force in The Universe,” they replied seriously. “Something authentically new is the only force that can break The Fourth Wall and liberate Its captive audiences, so we can begin the long journey home back to The Earth Show. Lucky for me, unlike The Wall the act of creating something new doesn’t demand human sacrifice, or what modern day humans like to euphemistically call ‘the blood of patriots,” which is really The Same Old Story of ritualized human sacrifice it’s always been. That said, the act of producing newness is very hard to maintain for long. I mean, I’m tough as any Tough Guy—but my will power to write novel actions eventually burnout under the production of too much day-to-day constant change. Someday we may know each other well enough for me to tell you how bad it was, but for today let’s say that I returned from my waking nightmares on the edge of The  Action seeking support. I expected to spend years looking under every rock and tree in The Universe for help, but I didn’t. Almost as soon as I decided to look for help, I found the help I needed.”

The projection on the stage suddenly changed. We were now watching The Open Ocean. In the distance, we could see a city.

My Storybank Account – Scene Eight.Five,

THE PART WHERE THE INTERVIEW CONTINUES, PART TWO: THE PART WHERE THEY FINALLY GET TO THE GOOD PART…

Traveler disappeared down under the Changing Room stage. Moments later, they reappeared wearing a new costume. They were now a she dressed in a pressed pair of polyester slacks, white blouse, padded professional suit coat, and heels. Her hair was pulled back in a bun. She reminded me of an office intern of some kind. They called her character Miss Chase.

The stage was projecting a holograph of Storysold: City . We watched the scene ogle-eyed like it was an oracle’s crystal, watching our future selves sail through one of Storysold: City’s Arched Gateways. Beyond the Gateways, there was a high walled canal with a massive gathering of characters of every size, shape, color, and costume standing along its edge cheering, all celebrating the Storytime Machine’s return home.

The scene faded away and our narrator began to speak again. As she spoke the holograms on stage dramatized her story.

“I was on a past-like course to explore a farm of Peruvian Hippies who were working to revive their past and produce The Earth Show like their Incan ancestors,” Traveler paused dramatically. “When lo and behold! Off the port bow! I spied the big lights of a construction site on a beach where, a year before, there had only been the silly programmed funtime lights of oceanfront tourism. I had to check this out! We dropped anchor and paddled ashore in my homemade kayak. Dressed as Traveler, we walked up to a group of workers welding a steel platform that was half on land and half in the ocean. I’d seen their sparks from the ship. ‘Hey guys,’ I said in my shitty Spanish. ‘What are you doing?’ One of the workers flipped open his welding mask and replied, ‘What does it look like, lady? We’re building an ocean-going city.’ It was then, for the first time, I saw My Future flash before my eyes…

“After a few days of mulling around the construction site, drinking soda and getting to know the workers, I was convinced that I’d finally found the beginnings of a city that was free of The Wall and Its story. I couldn’t help it. I immediately named it, ‘Storysold: City .’ Why that name? I can’t say. It was the words that best described my new home.”

Miss Chase sighed when a holograph of Mr. Chester Weston appeared on stage. I thought his costume—derby hat, black pinstriped banker’s suit and vest, mirror-shined shoes, and pocket watch was clichéd, even for a banker. His face was cleanly shaved with dark roaming eyes.

“Of course, the man responsible for financing the epic venture was calling it something else. His employees called him “President” in the language they spoke. From that moment on, I was determined to meet this President and build his city my way…

“I spent days in my Changing Room working on a new character to fit my new future course of action. My body shuttered—almost squirmed—when I put her on for the first time. A professional working girl like Miss Chase is a real stretch for a baseline liberal Californian intellectual.

When I had Miss Chase down, I returned to the construction site and waited to meet the master financier. When the man finally arrived a few weeks later, I met ‘El Presidente’ on the beach with my heels in my hand. A young woman working for Weston once told me she thought he was ‘handsome with an intoxicating charisma.’ I, however, did not. I thought he looked like a generic box of manhood. Very much like himself.

“Our first exchange on the beach makes more sense now that we know each other. I told him in no uncertain terms how long I’d been waiting to meet him, and he told his Security Chief Moyniham to have me arrested for trespassing on private property. I remember shouting loudly, in a rage, as his goon employees hauled me away. ‘Give me your time, and I’ll make you the most successful banker who ever lived!’ I screamed.

“Weston’s reply was clear. He checked his pocket watch (as if he needed to check his pocket watch) and said, ‘I already am the most successful banker ever.’ Then Chester turned away, and his Security Chief locked me away in his local, corporate jail without so much as a free phone call.

“Five days later, Mr. Chester Weston released me. He asked if there was anything he could do to ‘make amends,’ because he was ‘man enough’ to admit that he’d ‘made a mistake.’ I gave him my most winning smile and told him that he could make me breakfast. I thought he’d smile too, but he didn’t smile. Instead he proved that anyone seems charming after a few days in jail; or maybe, on second thought, if I’m honest I will say that I did find him charming in a way. He was charming like a silver dollar is charming when you spy one on the ground and no one else sees it. In any case, I permitted my captor to sweep me away to his mansion on a hill overlooking Acapulco bay. The next morning,  Miss Chase had Weston serving her his ‘famous Belgium waffles with blueberry sauce’ in bed. I know I’m not the most gifted of his lovers (and he surely isn’t the best of mine), but we had something real there from The Beginning. I think he found the fire of my imagination as attractive as I did his. Our minds flowed together like powerful rivers do, each from their mountaintops.”

“It’s like this, Mr. Journalist Jones,” Miss Chase said, turning to face me. “Unlike some people who fall in love and make babies like it was the most normal thing to do, I fell in love with ‘Westonton’ like an astronomer who’d been patiently plotting her passions, waiting for just the right star to pass over her heavens. I did this, because I knew the star that I would fall for would be brilliant and worth the wait when it came. And it was.”

“Oh wow!” I exclaimed. “You’re Weston’s newest wife!”

“Not exactly,” she replied. “I’m Chester’s Lover.”

“Oh wow! So you’re Weston’s Lover!”

“Yes, Wylie,” she sighed. “I am.”

I thought about that one and suddenly realized that I had to shift our crazy host from the G-23 TERRORIST CATEGORY to THE G-12.3 ASSET CATEGORY. When my transaction was complete I said,“Oh.”

“Oh, what?”

“Oh,” Wylie smiled. “That’s good to know.”

There was another long pause, which went unquestioned.

“Before I met him,” she continued, “Mr. Chester Weston’s floating city was going to have twenty square miles of lush green golfing pastures for white old men. He was going to install a super high-speed state-of-the-art wireless, electronic Internet banking system that would connect his clients’ accounts in his nation-free crypto-banking utopia to any market in the world. That was his plan, until he heard a persuasive sales pitch from Miss Chase. After five months of making waffles (and amazing conversations!), Chester changed his business plan. He had been planning to construct an off-shore oasis, a home away from home made for the top 1% percent of the world’s population, billionaires who were looking for a place to live and work where they could invest profitably, in peace, and do it without having to wet nurse politicians and dictators. After we merged, our new city was going to be that and more. He changed his plans ever so slightly, and we began to market our city as the city of the future, a city where people—The Rich and The Poor—could live free from the politicians and dictators too. I think he Got It went I pitch it with Ford’s story. He got the idea that real/lasting power was selling to everyone, all The People.”

“And you named your baby Storysold: City .”

“No,’ she said. “He still calls our baby Westonton.”

Holy shit, I thought, this is so much worse than Bitcoin!

With that, Maggie and I tuned to the holographic story projected on stage. The Storytime Machine was sailing out of the high walled canal into an internal harbor where we were surrounded on all sides by novel ocean-going contraptions. One appeared to be a small submarine with the head of a sailor poking out of its top hatch. I couldn’t shake the thought that the sailor looked like I’d imagined Captain Nemo: sophisticated, with a beard, and a brooding constitution, dressed in a sailor’s uniform. Nemo was wasn’t waving to us, but it looked like there was a good chance that he might wave to us. Beyond the small harbor, I saw a massive, transparent geodesic dome. I had to look twice, but it looked like it was gathering clouds—preparing to rain.

I know I was supposed to be playing a Wealthy Globetrotting Hipster Journalist character, but I was done. I couldn’t handle playing the audience for our host’s insane origin story a second longer. I was still hungry. The rat meat was hardly enough to satisfy. “Uh,” I said, staring at the stage as the image of Storysold: City  faded away. “Thanks for the interview.”

“You’re welcome. Do you have any questions?”

“Do you have any potato chips?”

“No,” Traveler replied, offering no other options.

“Can we get out of here and go watch The Earth Show now?” Maggie smiled. “The stars are out, and I don’t want to miss any of The Action.”

And so we watched The Earth Show. I was surprised how quickly my hunger faded when Maggie sort of stood on the deck beside me.

The stars were truly magical. So was Maggie.

My Storybank Account – Scene Nine,

THE PART WHERE BOYFRIEND AND GIRLFRIEND TRY TO PLAY LIKE THEY’RE NOT ACTING BADLY…   

The services at Time Machine Cruise Line Incorporated faded after my interview with the Storytime Traveler. No more Seawoman Second Class to fluff our pillows and make our bed in the morning; no more Mainstay the Deckhand to mop up our Tasty Beverages with Kick when we spilled them sunning ourselves on the deck; no more Toothless Brit to entertain us with his strange, racist tales of hunting lions, tigers, bears, and natives in The Dark Continent, and most infuriatingly, no Cook to make meals for us.   

Maybe I shouldn’t have asked her to hold the spinach on her Spinach, Egg, and Cheese Biscuit Breakfast Sandwich special? Who knows?

Only the tough-talking Captain Chaos stayed to sail the Storytime Machine onward. I wasn’t sure whether (as an FBI Agent) I should encourage (and/or participate) in one of Chaos’s Raiding Parties, but like any good, safety-minded Boyfriend I made it clear that Maggie wasn’t permitted to plunder any conflict-starved, matching-shirt tourists. I told her I’d tie her to the ship’s masthead before I allowed her to join our captain on a Raiding Party. I held my breath (and watched Maggie like a hawk) every time Chaos slipped overboard and boarded a passing cruise ship or whale-watching tour, then returned with a devilish smile and a full bounty of toilet paper, chocolate, gum, engine parts, and other amenities not easily produced from raw ingredients on the high seas.

I was thankful that my Asset never tested me on that point. We sailed on with minimal drama. The biggest of those small dramas was the reoccurring argument we had in the kitchen. You see, Maggie liked to cook. She was skilled at making meals from ingredients she gathered from the Goat Hanger, but she was surprisingly bad at cooking meals for me, especially when the ingredients began to run low and our food options began to wear thin. In other words, I tried, but I’m not what you’d call a ‘true omnivore.’ I had my limits. There were so many things I wouldn’t ever put in my mouth. After I debated and lost many rounds of that argument, Maggie finally agreed to ask The Captain to ask The Cook to help us expand our culinary options. Of course we asked on what turned out to be the last day of our journey.

“We’re hungry,” we said as we watched Chaos steer the ship from the bridge of the Con Tower. He must have heard us, but he sailed on ignoring us for many moments, so Maggie added, “The fridge and pantry are empty.”

Long pause, then Chaos said, “Milk the goats and make cheese.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Cheese? How do you make cheese?”

They both rolled their eyes at me, and said, “It’s not hard.”

“I Get It,” Maggie replied, “but we’re sort of in crisis.”

“Have you tried harvesting from the Con Tower Greenhouse?”

“We’ve picked it clean,” Maggie replied. “I’d say it’ll be a week or two before you will have enough greens to make a salad.”

“Yargh! Get the fishing poles from the Changing Room.”

“Where in the Changing Room?” I asked.

“Where I keep the rest of my props.”

“You have a lot of props.”

“On the right when you first walk in,” they directed. “The poles are beside my balloon launcher, under my pile of vampire cloaks and corsets.”

“Have you ever fished in the ocean?” Maggie whispered.

I shook my head. “No; the last fish I caught was at a trout farm.”

“Factory lovers! I figured as much,” Chaos grumbled, throwing their cap down in disgust. Then he propped the wheel, peeled off her vest, popped off his boots, and rolled up his trousers. We followed The Captain curiously as he stormed down to the deck below, where he heaved open a double door with a grunt. Surprise! a few feet below the surface of the deck was a waist-high pool filled with a variety of ocean creatures.

“There’s your dinner,” Traveler said as they waded in.

What other choice did we have? We slipped off our shoes, rolled up our pants, and joined Traveler, as our dinner swam around us.

“OK,” I said, studying the fish intently. “Where’s the net?”

Traveler smiled. “Net? Where’s the fun in that?”

Then they turned their attention to the fish. They watched them for a moment, feeling their rhythm as they waited for just the right—“Ha, ha! I’ve gotcha!”—moment to strike. Standing with a fish in their hand, they coaxed, “Now you try. It’s easier than it looks. Spread your focus out over the pool. Don’t aim. Wait for your body to be ready. Then, when you feel one of them tell you to take it (which it will)—grab it and don’t let go. Whatever you do, don’t come at them head on with your hands open. Their soldiers are well aware of their duty to feed you for the greater good of their school, to ensure that you don’t eat their weaker ones, but they don’t want their fish buddies to think that they made the ultimate sacrificed without a fight. They’ve learned that it’s easier for those left alive, swimming around in Fish World, to believe that you simply overpowered their brave soldiers.”

Maggie read the pool for a moment. Then she followed Traveler’s advice and, sure enough, a moment later her hands were clasped around a fish gasping for its life. “Now what?” she asked as she struggled to focus on wanting the fish enough to play the part.

“You have to kill it.”

“Kill it?”

“Smash its head, like this.” Then they demonstrated with their fish.

As we watched Traveler, Maggie’s fish slipped from her hands. “There has to be a better way to kill a fish,” she said.

Traveler nodded thoughtfully, then they climbed on deck and returned with their broadsword. “Smash it, or whack it with something. That will kill it quick as anything. Or, you can use my broadsword.”

She laid the sword beside the pool like a question.

“Thanks…” Maggie replied.

I assumed a lineman’s stance, rolled up my sleeves, and eyed a fish. “What’s the matter, Maggie?” I asked as I stabbed at it with my hands. “I thought you said you were a real cold-blooded meat-eater.”

“When did I say that?”

“When you said you weren’t a vegetarian.”

Maggie sighed. “When did I say I wasn’t a vegetarian?”

“Tofu taco night you said that you weren’t a vegetarian.”

“I told you ‘I like to eat vegetables.’ That’s all I said.”

“What are you doing just standing there? Help us catch dinner.”

Maggie crossed her arms. “Why should I? You’re doing fine,” she said as I scooped up a fish and beat it until it was dead.

“You should help, because I won’t share if you don’t.”

“Why? Is it because I didn’t want to share a room with you?”

“Maybe,” I shot back with a wide grin. “Or maybe I think you’re too squeamish and girly to kill a fish.”

“I lived on the streets for a year and a half,” she replied. “I’m not squeamish about anything. It’s a choice. I like to eat vegetables.”

“Exactly my point,” I said, laughing, attempting to exploit my Asset’s weaknesses and gain the upper hand. “I hate to say this, especially in front of our host here, but you are girly. When challenged, a man would have told me to ‘go fuck myself’ then he’d go on eating vegetables whenever he pleased. That’s what men do. You, on the other hand (in spite of your title as Worshipful Goddess) lowered yourself to the level of Mortal Boyfriend and felt the need to explain yourself. I shouldn’t have to tell you that explaining yourself when you’re challenged is easily as girly as not killing your own fish. A real Goddess would already know that.”

Maggie tightened her fists. “OK, Asshole!” she said. “How girly do you think I’d be if I shared our deep, dark ‘relationship secrets’ with them?”

She had me there. I was smart enough to know better than to tempt fate. One word from Maggie about the FBI, and The Mission was shot to hell. Reluctantly I gave in. Soft as a June tulip I smiled big, and said, “You wouldn’t share our bedroom secrets with her, would you?”

Her eyes flashed with malice. “I might,” she replied.

“What kind of secrets?” I prompted with my best juicy, seductive tone, hoping she would stick to our cover story script.   

“Oh,” she grinned. “Like your penis.”

“What about my penis?”

“It’s small.”

I paused long enough to swallow my rage. “Yes,” I agreed, taking one for The Mission like a good Mortal Boyfriend. “That’s true,” I continued, “I am small…compared to the circus freaks you used to date.”

I watched her eyes dance with glee as she blew by my question with a laugh. “See Honey? That wasn’t so hard to admit. Now was it?”

“No Apple Pie, it wasn’t.”

“Good communication is important,” she went on.

“Yes,” I agreed. “Good communication is important.”

“And it’s not girly. In fact, good communication is manly.”

“You couldn’t be more right,” I replied dryly. “Explaining why you do what you do is a very manly way to build trust in any relationship.”

“As manly as pounding hot steel without your shirt on?”

“Yes, trust building is that manly.”

“And your penis is small, very small, freakishly small, much smaller than my average, normy ex-boyfriends.”

In that moment, hate would be a good word to describe what I felt for my Girlfriend the Goddess of Undying Evil, but I was trained by Uncle Sam to be emotionless, except when cued by a ranking leader. So I sucked it up again, and said, “It’s true. I have a small penis. Thanks for bringing it up again.”

Traveler laughed like we’d staged it all for their entertainment.

“How long have you been together?” they asked.   

“A month or so,” I answered, siting our cover story.

“You could have fooled me!” Traveler laughed. “You two banter like an old married couple who, somewhere along way, fell in love with hating each other. It’s a classic trope. It’s sort of sweet, so don’t feel bad about it. It’s one of the oldest of story loops humans fall into in life.”

Shit, I thought, she’s onto us. “We’re not in love with hating each other,” I said, scrambling to maintain our cover as I splashed some water at Maggie, saying, “We’re not a classic trope. See—we’re cute. Maggie’s my loving Water Bunny Girlfriend!”

Maggie didn’t splash back at me. She stood there unmoved—arms folded, coolly refusing to play my cutesy Water Bunny Girlfriend.

We’re open, exposed, I thought. The enemy was sure to discover us. Something had to be done before Maggie compromised our mission security completely. So I laughed, splashed more water at her, and said, “Ha! So that’s the game! You’re playing hard to get!”

Indeed! Maggie was playing hard to get. She didn’t crack a smile, or nod agreeably, or run playfully away from me. She just stared at me.

“Ready or not, here I come!” I hollered and charged—tackling her in the water like she was carrying a ball through a stadium full of high lights and beer hats. The competition was supposed to be fun.

“Ah!” she screamed. “I can’t believe you did that!”

“Well, I did,” I declared with confidence. “And I’ll do it again!”

She put her hand out like a running back, and replied, “No.” Then she backed away, saying, “Don’t you dare.”

“Too late!” I cried, and grappled her like a wrestler.

Before I could throw her into the pool again, Maggie grabbed my shoulders and gave me a swift kick to the groin.

“Wha…Wha…What was that for?”

“You attacked me.”

“I was trying to be playful,” I whimpered and flopped, facedown on deck. “Boyfriends and Girlfriends are supposed to be playful.”

Traveler shook their head. “You have problems,” they said. Then they grabbed a fish, lifted their sword, and lopped its head off.

Defeat looked imminent. The enemy was closing in. If we kept this up, our host would suspect something was amiss. Any average G-Man in my place would have surrendered. But not me…I was the Cream of the Crop; not average pencil pushing, Agent Jeff Jackson of the FBI.   

Laid out with my face flat against the deck, I gazed into the ocean through a porthole in the waist-high wall that wrapped around the deck. I tried to think of a way to win, but the pain made that impossible. It felt like I stared at that ocean scene like a sad sappy artist for an hour before my balls finally released their grip on my attention. When the pain cleared, the first thing that came to mind was a lesson I learned in Asset Manipulation 101: WHEN IN DOUBT, DIRECT YOUR ASSET ANY WAY YOU CAN. SCIENTISTS HAVE PROVEN THAT THE ACT OF TAKING DIRECTIONS CAN BE HABIT FORMING AND HIGHLY ADDICTIVE. So I searched for a silly busywork mission to give Maggie.

“Ouch!” I cried. “Can you fetch me a glass of water?”

“No,” Maggie replied, arms crossed.

Then I saw it…a familiar city lining the horizon. It seemed to float in space, like the city I saw on Traveler’s stage, but I couldn’t be sure. Was this a prophetic vision? Or did this confirm the fact that my girlfriends had suspected for years: that my brains were indeed in my balls, and Maggie had kicked something loose? I stared, awestruck at the sight, trying to work the strange cityscape into some kind of known category.

Standing, I studied the ocean-going city. As we got closer, I could see a high wall of what appeared to be trash of every shape and size. The wall was made of old roof rafters (from homes that had been washed away in tsunamis), rusted old appliances, waterlogged furniture, barnacled pipes, eroded girders, and busted up plywood. At the top of the trash wall, cars, trucks, motorbikes, yachts, boats, and other modern vehicular contraptions stood on end, each run through with a steel beam like a row of severed heads on pikes outside a castle. Spaced intermittently along what Traveler called “The Reef Wall” were arched gateways with massive doors that were now closed, which looked large enough for a supertanker to sail through. Beyond the wall, thousands of multi-colored, multi-shaped sails billowed in the winds. Above those, I saw the top of a clear skyscraper-sized dome that seemed to have rain clouds forming in it.

It is real, I decided. There is a city floating in the ocean.

Without warning, my mind snapped back to its originally scheduled programming—The US Government Mission—“Land ho! Maggie,” I cooed like a dove, trying to gain her attention. “The city’s really there! Do you see that car at the top of the wall. I think it’s a Ferrari. No not there…over there.”

As we sailed closer we could see the city’s domes, wind turbines, massive sails, and arched gateways where ships large and small were sailing to and from Storysold: City . Even at our distance, we heard the waves pounding against the Reef Wall that wrapped around the city.

“Unbelievable…Chester really did it,” Maggie thought aloud. “There it is, a city large-as-life, floating in the ocean.”

Traveler shared the moment with her guests. When it passed, she said, “I bet I can persuade the Cook to fry this fish up for dinner if you Old Goats care to join me in the galley. I have something important to tell you before we sail into Mr. Chester Weston’s Westonton.”

After the Cook fried the fish (and the potatoes he was hiding from us) he switched the cameras in the galley from PUBLIC to PRIVATE like I’d learned to do with the live action TV in my room. His need for secrecy made me feel both fearful and alert, watching on the edge of my seat as he sat at our table, poured the coffee, and gave us the bad news.

“Your father doesn’t know you’re coming,” he reported as Maggie and I blinked dumbly, pausing mid-bite with our mouths full of food.

Maggie was cool. I was not.

“That’s unacceptable,” I said, standing abruptly to show how irritated I was. I paced and stomped for effect, and then I gave our host my best tone of authority, and said, “We boarded on the premise that Weston sent for us after he received Maggie’s email asking for his hand in fatherhood!”

We watched as the Cook became Traveler again.

Maggie cupped her hands to her mouth, leaned towards Traveler, and said, “As you know, he’s an Independently Wealthy Hipster Journalist. He has a hard time dealing with change…and people who say no…”

Traveler cupped their hands too, and said, “I can see that.”

“Furthermore,” I continued to rant. “I mean, wow! How’s this going to work? ‘Hello. I’m Maggie your daughter you didn’t send for?’” I turned to my Asset. “Don’t you feel trapped by this woman’s deception?”

“Yes, Honey,” she nodded. “I most definitely feel trapped.”   

“Look, Maggie,” Traveler said, “I’m sorry. I read your email, and I get it. If I were you, I’d want to know my father too.”

“Why did you wait to tell us?” Maggie asked.

“I would have asked Bill to tell you.” Traveler paused, stirring her coffee with her head down. “But I wasn’t sure you’d come if you knew.”

“If I knew that he doesn’t want to see me?”

“No. That’s not it. Not exactly.”

“Then what?”

“Chester’s sick.”

“How sick?” Maggie asked.

“Very, very sick.” She replied.

“Does he have cancer or something?” I asked.

“Yes,” she answered slowly. “It’s a cancer of sorts.”

“What kind is it?” I asked. “Lung? Skin? Throat? What?”

“No,” she replied, turning to Maggie. “None of those. Your father Chester is suffering from a terminal case of cancerous irresponsibility.”

“Oh Jesus, here we go!” I said as I buried my head in my hands.

“I’m serious. The city’s best Healer, Grand Rachna, has identified the growth. I know you’re used to thinking that serious health problems are limited to the world of flesh, genes, fluids, and such—but we, in Storysold: City , know firsthand how important it is for us to govern our stories. Our stories affect every aspect of our lives, and Chester has neglected to govern his in every way possible. Grand Rachna believes the root of his cancerous irresponsibility is his addiction to factory-processed currency. It may sound strange to you, but it’s well known in our city that any generalized form of money—any commodity currency like oxen, beans, beads, or dollars—can be ingested mentally like any internally digested upper: Pepsi, Coke, Crack, you name it. The ‘dope currency,’ as Grand Rachna puts it, gives him a high-and-mighty feeling without physically injecting chemicals in his bloodstream. And we’re afraid that this dope currency will continue to push him to ever higher and higher means of controlling all things in his narrative environment, but himself…until he finally, tragically dies alone with nothing to show for his life but a bankrupt story about a boring guy who spent his life collecting pressed and dyed fibers.”   

“He’s addicted to dope currency?” I laughed. “That’s crazy.”

“Is it so hard to believe that excessive spending power can infest a human host with an unnatural amount of righteousness?”

“I suppose,” I said with a lot of reservation.

“Is there a cure?” Maggie asked, clearly buying into the malarkey.

“Yes,” she replied and pointed to a strange clock-like object on the wall. “The economics of Westonton—aka Storysold: City —is ruled by a new, more accurate form of currency that’s based on a new kind of time we call ‘storytime’ or ‘narrative time,’ and that, ‘storyclock’ on the galley wall is how we measure it. Our new Storysold brand currency makes it a lot harder for its users to unnaturally inflate the value of their work. Trouble is, my Lover doesn’t use the product he peddles. He still uses his Super Massive Vault full of old market cash to buy everything he wants….

“For example, there’s hundreds of great potato chip producers in the city, but Weston still has his favorite brands of factory processed potato chips and bottled water shipped in from the mainland.”

The face of the storyclock was a screen. It had digital numbers at the center of a screen that displayed our scene—what was happening in the galley now. It read: $70:25. Traveler explained that it measured our storytime (both qualitatively and quantitatively) minting our years, days, scenes, moments, beats, and momentary hundredths, or clips, instead of measuring time in the classical years, days, hours, minutes, and seconds. Traveler explained that the newfangled storyclock made it possible for city’s “storybankers” to count their “monetary moments,” which broke the day—one full spin of the earth on its axis—into one hundred easy-to-calculate monetary units. That means, no one in Storysold: City —“The city where every good and service is bought and sold with its story”—could earn more than $100:00 mms each day. Maggie asked what the time was now, in old market time, as she pointed to the hands on the storyclock that read: $70:25 mms. Traveler translated, saying, “Seventy and a quarter moments till the day roughly translates to 5:15 PM.”

“I don’t get it,” I said, feeling threatened. “And I still don’t understand why you shanghaied us…”

“Slow down,” Traveler replied. “It will take you a lot of time to learn the Storysold system and adjust to our new way of life.”

“I’m not adjusting to shit!” I huffed. “The American Way of Life is the best way of life on the planet, period. You can’t improve on perfection…”

I was about to continue my rant, but Maggie cut me off.

“I’m still listening,” she said, eyeing me coldly. “Can you explain again how your new clock can cure Chester’s addiction to money?”

“Not all money, just generalized money,” Traveler corrected.

“Whatever,” Maggie replied. “Money’s money.”

“No—it’s not,” Traveler corrected again. “If you can’t prove that the money in your hand is yours and not your friend’s or neighbor’s money, or the stolen property of a robber, then it’s not as good as the money we use in our city. Our qualitative-based currency, minted with our living, live action signatures, is our proof of work in storytime. Our goods and service stories are proof that we did something to earn our pay.”

“But real money, like dollars, has always been The Standard by which we measure everything else,” I protested. “And it will always be.”   

“You’re right. It’s always been that way, and I’ve learned to respect the durability of things, but it’s mad to believe that one abstract prop in our stories can be The Standard by which the values of everything else is measured. The sad part of my Lover’s life is, he really thinks he’s winning. He really believes if he collects enough of the world’s supply of cash, the audience will stand and clap and cheer his name for eternity. Truth is, Chester’s story has a lot of spending power, but it’s also repetitious, simplistic, and boring beyond belief. And I’m afraid, in The End, the future will not be kind when they judge his story about a Great Man Business Tycoon who amassed a great collection of magical pressed and dyed fibers, which bestowed him with the power to buy any brand of car, wine, and lodgings he liked. In many ways, Weston’s tragedy has already begun to unfold. His future is here; and it stars ‘his employees’ (what I would call my “fellow storybankers”) who already treat him like a leper. It’s not that they don’t want to buy his One Act Wonder…it’s just that nobody knows how.”

“And I suppose that’s where we come in…”

“Yes,” Traveler replied. “I’ve tried everything to break Chester of his boring old business routine, but I’m not winning…”

“Oh Christ,” Maggie sighed. “You think I’m the cure…”

“You’re Chester’s Long-Lost Daughter,” she replied. “I brought you here because I believe you can break the spell and give Chester something to live for, other than his dope currency collection.”

“I get what you’re trying to say, I think, and I like that you clearly care enough to try to help him, but I don’t even know him!”

“Trust me,” she said warmly. “No one in that city will expect you to be anything more, or less, than you…whoever you become…”

Maggie was quiet for a moment, and then she agreed, “Ok I’ll do what I can. What’s your plan?”

The conversation that followed between my asset and our host was, to date, my greatest gathering of intelligence yet…

Traveler explained why Chester continued to pay his taxes. Unlike most transnational globetrotting billionaires who stop paying taxes once they no longer fear their parent nations, Weston still very much considered himself an American, and he believed—because he collected dollars and continued to pay his taxes—he, his corporation, and its employees were entitled to the same protection and rights as all US Citizens working abroad. Traveler said, as hard as it was to believe, the Great Capitalist didn’t see anything overt anti-American with his plot to openly develop an alternative to The Almighty Dollar and then compete with it in The Free Market. If anything, Weston saw his competition with America’s US Mint as a natural expression of his parent nation’s National Character: rigged, independent, a never-give-an-inch fighter who welcomes the chance to test the strength of their prized dollar against other brands. Children are supposed to outgrow their parents, and the True Blue Son of America was trying to do that in the most sportsman-like way possible.   

Almost all of Weston’s employees (who prefer the new character title of storybankers to the old wage slave label of employee) believe the opposite is true. They believe that openly competing with the most lethal nation in history in the hope of a bloodless gentleman’s contest is dangerously naïve. Like our host said, many attempts have been made to cure Weston of his addiction to collecting dope currency. The most dramatic of those attempts was the non-violent protests launched by a theme that now calls itself, The Bio-Friendly Bum Army. Bill the Bum, Scout, Punk Girl, Table Sage, and Teddy (who all had different character titles when they worked in Storysold: City ) they believed that collecting dope currency was unsafe, because it could be stolen, plundered, and taxed by Generics who would use it to buy war props—bombs, bullets, beans, and bandages—from the death dealers of the world. The Bum Army believed it was only a matter of time before the stockpile in Chester’s Super Massive Vault would lure the death dealers to the city like rats to peanut butter. And they believed, once these death dealers arrived, they would do great harm to the humans who lived and worked in Storysold: City  in their attempts to control Weston and his Super Massive Vault full of cash.

That conflict finally climaxed after the newly formed new war writers of the Bum Army “vandalized” Westonton Corporate Headquarters (Weston’s home at the heart of the city) with “graffiti” depicting him as an dog chasing a trail of dope dollars that were spewing from the tailpipe of a monster truck. The truck was flying Old Glory and other patriotic flags like the Raiders football flag. The next day, Weston fired Bill and every suspected member of what he called “that gang of slackers, ruffians, and roustabouts.” It was sad because most of them, including Bill, had worked hard for Weston without fail from the beginning. They’d given everything to become Storysold in the city they built from the ground up, and Weston didn’t give refunds.

Traveler explained that—because The Dope Currency Protests were so popular—the only way Weston could “fire” the protesters was brute force. He deleted their storybank accounts and told his lackey Security Chief Moyniham to “remove them from the premises forever.”

The more our host tried to win our support for her plan, the more I couldn’t wait to slap a pair of cuffs on Traveler and all her crazy characters. The Something Grander called America was not a “death dealer” in any story. We were making the world safe for democracy. It seemed like, if anything, the threat was Traveler and her Bum Army friends and any other anti-dollar character in their city. It took me a longtime to come up with the right term, but I decided to call Traveler’s anti-dollar movement, “The Terror Banking Cult.” The FBI doesn’t take kindly to terror cults of any kind—especially those that present a clear and present danger to The American Way of Life.

My Storybank Account – Scene Ten,

THE PART WHERE THE UNDERCOVER COUPLE ENTER THE SCENES IN STORYSOLD: CITY…

  We stood on the deck of the Time Machine watching the colors of sunset—the reds, purples, and pinks—rocket through the atmosphere.

“Perfect timing!” Traveler said, smiling as they waved at someone on one of the many seaworthy contraptions sailing outside the city.

Maggie studied Traveler, and asked, “You wanted our conversation in the galley to end when it did, so we could see the sunset?”

They smiled. “Of course. You can’t develop a good story without a keen sense of timing. But it takes practice, so don’t let it frustrate you in the first year or so after you open your storybank accounts.”

“Year or so? I doubt I’ll survive days in there, let alone years.”

“You will,” Traveler replied. “And your story will be wonderful.”

I wasn’t listening. I was studying the approaching city. I rubbed my eyes and blinked. I didn’t know how else to react.

Traveler laughed knowingly. “That’s the Reef Wall,” she said as I followed their finger to the seawall in front of us. “It protects our stories from rogue waves and storms, the same way trees, marshlands, and other natural features protect the mainland. To Chester’s credit, he followed the advice of a bright, young, engineering geek—my old friend Riggs—and his former partner Blue Suit who suggested that they construct the Reef Wall from all the trash floating in the North Pacific Gyre. They built the entire Reef Wall, all for the cost of labor and transportation.”

“Hum,” I said, feeling almost impressed. “What are those sails for? Do they actually move the city?”

“It moves,” she answered as she steered her wind/solar-powered ship towards one of the Arched Gateways leading through the Reef Wall. “Those hydraulically lifted sails are coordinated to keep the city sailing in a relatively tight circle, keeping the city circling like a shark. Its mass is too great for any system of anchors to bring under submission.”

Maggie squinted at the sixteen domes spread out on the cityscape and asked, “What’re those? They look like they’re forming clouds.”

“Those are the Weather Bubbles. They supply the city’s sixteen Island Markets and Residential Shopping Centers with fresh water,” they explained. “Regulatory Pores along the base of the Weather Bubbles release ocean water from the Canal System we are sailing into now. The water then cascades into the Hollow Core of a Residential Shopping Center, where it gathers in a large desalination system. It’s boiled there and turned to steam. The steam then rises back up through holes at the top of the Hollow Core into the Center’s Weather Bubble, where the steam gathers like clouds. The clouds ‘rain’ and the fresh water gathers at the bottom of the Bubble in a conical lake-like Reservoir that sits higher than the canals.”

“I don’t totally understand,” Maggie said, “but I got the basics. Those domes take ocean water from the canals and turn it into fresh water.”

“Yeah that’s it,” Traveler smiled. “It will be easier to understand it in greater detail when you watch a freshwater production scene.”

“Oh wow—I thought genetic modification was evil,” I said. “Now we make weather too? What next…? Robot wives might be nice.”

Maggie rolled her eyes, while Traveler chose to ignore me.   

“Now,” our host continued to narrate, “we’re about to sail out of this canalway into one of the Hidden Harbors that are spaced between the sixteen Market Islands, which each have a Residential Center and Weather Bubble at their center. Together they form the city’s octagonal whole.”

I looked up. We were passing two half-naked statues of gardeners who were looking down at us with bunches of beets, radishes, and mustard greens in their hands. Traveler explained that a “theme of Ancient Greeks” built them to protect their city from “bad guys.”   

The Hidden Harbor was busy. Vessels of every size, shape, and color were docked along a collage of old salvaged boardwalks that wrapped around its circular shore. It looked like the shore of a lake in a city park that was filled with playful scenes of family and friends enjoying life, than it did a harbor used for the trafficking of things. Beyond the Hidden Harbor’s busy boardwalk, the last rays of daylight were making rainbows in the captive clouds of our nearest Bubble that presided like a mountain over its many miles of plant life.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Traveler said.

“Yes,” I replied, staring dumbly. “Yes, it is.”

“Well what are we waiting for?” Traveler grinned. “Let’s go explore the city in style! We only have ten moments or so before dark.”

To my surprise, Traveler climbed aboard a “whirligig” parked on a pad adjacent to the boardwalk. The whirligig was an open-air, compact, 2-seat helicopter that was owned by a theme of storybankers who staged their “high road rides” around the city—like Portland did bicycles—for other storybankers to rent with their monetary moments. As I watched Maggie strap on her safety gear beside Traveler and the whine of the propellers filled the air, I waved at them and yelled, “What about me?”

Traveler lowered their sunglasses and flashed me their best American movie star grin of mischief. Then they pointed to the next available whirligig, and said, “Don’t worry about paying, the Whirligigers are writing our flights off as tax tributes paid to King Andrew’s Royal Shopping List!”

I had no clue what the harpy was saying, but I wasn’t about to be left behind like a sinner on Rapture Sunday. After I strapped my gear to the rack on the back of the whirligig, I hopped in driver’s seat and fired it up. I learned to fly death dealing attack helicopters in spy school, but I discovered I didn’t need that skill. Someone must have designed whirligigs to fly intuitively without instruction. Buckminster Fuller would have been proud.

Once in the air, I goofed with the controls a few times to dumb down my intelligence and government training (and stay in character)—before I raced ahead and took the lead like a cat running ahead of his owner’s path.   

I didn’t lie. The city was beautiful.

A series of stilted aqueducts fanned out from the Weather Bubble’s fresh water Reservoir and crossed the canal that flowed around its perimeter. The aqueducts moved the fresh water supply out to the Garden Surface where it fed hundreds of themes of vegetables, grains, medicinal herbs, foliage, trees, and other plants. The fresh water ran by a wide variety of farming structures, under the droning beat of wind turbines and the fluttering of sails, farther into the city’s kaleidoscopic plant scenes.

As we flew further into the heart of the city, we saw a colossal stadium that was lined top to bottom with asymmetrically set windows. Some were set with shapes like circles, stars, rectangles, others had familiar shapes like animals, mountains, rivers, people, but most of them had novel shapes made to signify the stories of their makers like flags, banners, or brands do. In the center of the stadium four round window-lined saucers popped up from an overgrown field of some sort. They rose into the sky on cylindrical stems like Seattle’s Space Needle. Above the windows, around the stadium’s elliptical rim, what appeared to be a grove of leafless trees failed to sway in the wind.

Reluctantly, I followed Traveler’s lead and landed my whirligig in an open meadow at the center of the stadium. It was surrounded on all sides by a lush wild garden that came complete with the harmonious cacophony of wild creatures you’d expect to find in a wild garden: voles, jays, squirrels, weasels, owls, falcons, ferrets, mice, coyote, rats, and song birds.

When the whir of our machines had quieted enough to speak, I asked Traveler, “Why are trees growing on top of the stadium?”

“Those are Antenna Trees,” they replied. “They send our signatures from Center Stage out to the rest of the city in storytime, so we can tune to the personal channels of our family, friends, thememates, and other supporting cast members. That is, so long as the person’s channel isn’t blocked for privacy, which happens less than you’d think. You’ll see what I mean when you open a storybank account and buy a storyclock of your own. There’re many producers of storyclocks here, and each of them has a signature of their own. Some of my favorites are Storysold: TVs by the Clocktinkers; Gravesights and Light Being Dwellings by Blue Suit the Nanotech Mechanic; Holy Word Vessels by Sister Lei and the First Congregational Army—and Projectavisions by Winner and Reality the Gaming Community.” Then she whispered, “But if I were you, I wouldn’t buy a Projectavision from Winner the Gamemaster of Reality. His props will work—better than most—but I’d think twice about developing cast relations with Winner. He’s a poor loser.”

“Yeah okay,” I replied, staring at the throng of onlookers gathering in the meadow. “I have no idea what you just said.”

“Wow!” Maggie exclaimed. “Who are all these people?”

“Those are the people who are gawking at us,” I laughed.

“Those people are my food, my blood, my life,” Traveler answered as a man in a beaver hat caught my eye and winked. “These storybankers are my supporting cast,” she continued. “Many of them supported my plot to bring you here. At least…some of them…I see a lot of new faces. You employables naturally draw crowds. Anyway, I’m going to change. I’ll be back in a moment. That’s about fifteen of your minutes. Feel free to hang out, and get to know my cast. Ask them how free your free one-way tickets really were!”

Then Traveler grabbed what looked like a sport’s bag off the back of the whirligig and disappeared into the garden.

Maggie and I stood in silence watching the colorful cast of characters around us, and they watched us. For the first time in my life I wasn’t sure if I was on stage or in the audience. I couldn’t tell you if we were the aliens landing on their strange planet, or they were the aliens who’d landed on ours.   

“Well, what now Brave Leader?” Maggie asked almost seriously.

“I suppose we should introduce ourselves to the natives before they grow restless and start feeding on our brains.”

“Go for it,” she said as we both watched, riveted, as a boy dressed like a knight in cardboard armor, riding on the back of his big shaggy dog, circled us like a hawk eyeing a mouse burrow. We watched on, stunned in disbelief, as the boy knight pulled a piece of rotten fruit from his satchel and hurled it at my head. The rotten fruit bomb hit its mark, and it was followed a volley of rotting tomatoes that came from the wild western pioneer folks on our right.

“They seem more like your kind of people,” I said, ducking another one of the boy’s rotten fruit bombs. “Why don’t you do the honors?”

“Oh no,” Maggie laughed. “This is your show Boyfriend.”

I didn’t want to project any more fear than we had already, so I took a step forward and faced the savages like a good hunk of chum—

“Greetings from America,” I announced. “My name is Wylie, Wylie Jones. I’m an Independently Wealthy Globetrotting Hipster Journalist. Here with me is my Girlfriend Maggie. She ran away from home at sixteen to make her living on the street collecting pop-cans, selling greeting cards, and sleeping with lonely frat guys and bar dudes for their beds and showers. In time, she left her life on the streets, got a job at a convenience store, and started a brand-new life: drinking radical organic coffee, reading about the latest breakfast cereal conspiracy, and growing vegetables in her parking-space hoop house. That was until one fine day, we fell in love. It happened when I was parking my scooter. I watched her walk out of her parking space hoop-house—Lady of the Lake style—emerging from her celestial garden as The Worshipful Goddess with a scepter of carrots in her hand. I couldn’t help myself. I was hooked like many men before me. It was love at first sight.”

“Was that how it really happened, Maggie?” asked a handsome young woman with a rock climbing costume and a rope slung over her shoulders. She also had some props that didn’t match the rock climber look, like a tool belt, a yellow hard hat she tucked under one arm, and a bandana that pinned her hair back. She was standing beside a man in a beaver hat, which had a wilted rose tucked in its band. He was wearing a cheap suit, cowboy boots, and a silver broach. A large tattoo of a one-eyed jack of spades ran up his neck and covered the left side of his face.

“I suppose,” Maggie replied. “He got it right…everything but the carrots.” Then she smiled, turned, and placed her hand in mine. “I can’t believe you don’t remember, Honey. I walked out of my hoop house with kale in my hand, not carrots…and it wasn’t love at first sight. I still struggle to find you attractive at times. In fact, the first night of our voyage to Westonton we slept in separate rooms.”

The cast fell silent. They were probably wondering, like me, what the hell my Government Asset was saying. Everyone knows that Boyfriends and Girlfriends sleep As One on romantic cruises to exotic destinations.

“We’re a new couple,” I explained, trying to spin the damage done by Maggie. “We’re still ironing out a few of our differences.”

The rock climber cinched her tool belt, put her finger out like she was checking the wind, and said, “I disagree. I’ve been watching your stories play out on my Storysold: TV since the Time Machine was within range. And it sure seems like your stories have more than a ‘few differences’ to iron out. Not that that makes sense. I assume you’re just speaking Generic American. I’m sure you didn’t want to actually work to edit your lover’s differences out.”

The cast thought that was funny. They laughed loudly as I turned to my Asset in search of support, saying, “What’s wrong with these people? No ‘Hello?’ No ‘Nice to meet you?’ No ‘Welcome to Storysold: City ?’”

“Welcome to the what?” we heard Traveler say.

“No welcome to Storysold: City …” I said again.

“I don’t know where you think you are, buddy. This is Westonton, a transnational corporate city owned by Mr. Chester Weston.”

We turned to see Traveler standing behind us. They changed again and were now traveling a future-like course as Miss Chase.

“How long has she been standing behind us?” I whispered to Maggie.

“You mean, how long have they been standing behind us?”

“He, she, they, we,” I whispered. “Whatever!”

“Now chop, chop,” Miss Chase interrupted. “Let’s get cracking. I need to get you settled in, so Sam will have time to pasture his Goat Team.”

“Are the goats hungry?” I asked Miss Chase.

“What do you care?” Maggie replied. “You’ve never cared what kind of scenes Sam the Goat Coach was producing on the Time Machine.”

“You’re right,” I shot back hotly. “I was only trying to show concern for their goats. You know. To be nice.”

“Actually,” Maggie grinned. “Sam is a man. So they’re his goats.”

“Ha!” I cheered like a winner. “I was right! I asked you ‘How long she was standing behind us?’ They’re now traveling as Miss Chase!”

“Good one, Wylie,” Miss Chase laughed. “Now grab your things from the whirligigs and meet me back here ASAP. I’ve arranged for you to stay in one of Center Stage’s luxurious Guest Nests.”

“Did you hear what that rock climber chic said?” I whispered to Maggie as we gathering our belongings. “He’s probably watching us now.”

“Whose watching who Big Brother?” Maggie chuckled.

“Weston’s watching! That’s who!” I exclaimed, finally feeling like I was in the thick of some authentic, heroic spy stuff. “He probably owns what they call a Storyclock: TV. Why else would Traveler suddenly get lip-locked when I used the wrong name for the city? I bet he’s watching right now…”

“Yes—he might be watching,” Maggie said, rolling her eyes. “But that doesn’t mean he’ll like what he sees. Your Hipster Journalist character is annoying as hell. I’d tone down the hip macho talk if I were you. I don’t think it’s going to score you points with the people who live here.”

“I don’t care what the wackos here think! I’m here to do an article on Weston…and I bet he will like my hip macho talk.”

“I hope for his sake you’re wrong.”

When Miss Chase saw us return, she broke off her conversation with the beaver hat man and the rock climber youth and met us in the center of the meadow again. “Let’s go,” she said—and we followed her, heels in her hand, to the trail that led to one of the four Guest Nests set inside the massive stadium Miss. Chase called, “Center Stage.”

My Storybank Account – Scene Eleven,

THE PART WHERE THE COVER COUPLE WAKE IN AN EXOTIC DESTINATION AND STRIKE A FAMILIAR POSE…

I woke the next day on the floor—as far as possible from the only bed in the one-room Guest Nest—feeling unsatisfied with my Asset’s performance. After Traveler showed us how to switch the Nest’s cameras from PUBLIC to PRIVATE like we had on the ship and said goodnight, we argued about how to use the bathroom and change our clothes without peeking like a couple of kids  forced to share the same space at summer camp.

Cohabitating with Maggie would have been easier if the Nest had been constructed with even a few walls. The set made me feel like I was the star of a social experiment. In the center of the circular Nest was a massive skylight set above a kitchen and a staircase spiraling down to the ground level of Center Stage. The kitchen came compete with a smelly compost shoot that funneled its contents down to the garden below, where any storybanker in need of organic compost props for gardening, feeding chickens, or whatever could gather and use it. On the right side of the kitchen was an open bathroom, which included one toilet, a tub (with curtains and a shower), a sink (but no mirror), and a few rolls of rough recycled paper to wipe our asses. On the left side of the kitchen stood an old couch and a fifties-era television set. The TV was labeled with the brandname: STORYSOLD. In the space between the so-called bathroom and the living room area was a king-sized canopy bed, dressers, a lamp, and an old rocking chair. The sleeping area was also built without walls. The Guest Nest didn’t even have a changing curtain.

Maggie didn’t like the idea of sharing such an open living space with me. She acted as if we were shipwrecked in the ocean, fighting over the only piece of driftwood. I valued my privacy too, but I was willing to make it work. The Mission demanded that we make sacrifices. I didn’t care if her shit stunk. My shit stunk. Dealing with stinking shit was part of the job. We were supposed to be working as a team, putting aside our personal differences, patting each other on the back for moral support like good co-workers, because that’s the role we were playing as Coworkers. I tried to soothe her anxieties about sharing a room without walls explaining that we really didn’t have a choice in the matter. Our Ever-Present Boss—The American People—demanded that we get along. I tried to explain that she’d never whine to her Boss if he asked her to work in an office without walls. It’s just what we needed to do to win.   

But Maggie didn’t understand. The trust issues the Asset Profilers at the FBI had warned me about were having their effect on The Mission. I wanted to fire her, but we were in the thick of the action, so I used one of the many strategies I learned in Asset Manipulation 101. In paragraph ten, line five of the chapter titled Ways to “Put Yourself Out There” and Build a Bridge of Codependence, it said that Assets (especially woman) respond appropriately to team leaders who aren’t afraid to show their vulnerabilities.

When Maggie woke and saw me nearly naked—toweling off—she shrieked and pulled her covers over her head. I laughed shyly and wrapped my towel around my waist, and went in search of coffee.

“Here we are,” I said, reaching into the cupboard.     

“What are you doing?” she asked, rubbing sleepies from her eyes.

“Making coffee,” I said, looking for a coffee machine. “It seems that I’ll be making coffee the hard way today. Would you like some?”

“You didn’t switch the cameras to PUBLIC did you?”

“No,” I replied, pouring water into a kettle. “We need time to go over The Mission before we do that interview with your father today.”

“Please don’t call him that,” she said, wrapping her body in blankets as she made her way to her suitcase. “He hasn’t earned that right yet.”

“Knew it,” I said as I found a rock with the words COFFEE ROCK carved in it sitting on the counter where the coffee machine should be. Without thinking, I grabbed the rock and began to crush the beans by hand.

“Knew what?” Maggie said as I honored our arrangement, turning my back while she changed into a pair of jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt.

“I knew you had unspoken animosity for your father.” I paused to let the drama sink in. “I mean Chester, or Mr. Chester Weston. Don’t you think it’s weird that Traveler calls her Lover ‘mister’?”

The kettle blew, and I made coffee happen.

There was no reply from Maggie. She stood at the edge of the Nest, watching the panoramic view of the city. Quietly I tiptoed behind her with two steaming cups of coffee in my hands, and said, “Here you are Apple Pie, your morning coffee, fresh off the rock.”

Maggie took the coffee without breaking her view.

I looked to see what she was into, and said, “That’s cool.”

“It’s amazing,” she said, still gazing. “And to think, this city would have never happened if Miss Chase hadn’t met Chester on that beach.”

We stood side by side, gazing out the windows as the sun peeked over the rim of Center Stage. The Antenna Trees cast long shadows over the inner bowl of the stadium as Westonton came to life. Below us, a huge garden grew where I expected (in any other city) a sports field would be. A system of trails ran through the garden, all leading to the open meadow were we landed our whirligigs. Miss Chase called it the Wild Garden Arena. And it looked wild in need of weeding. It didn’t have shrubs lined like a Cartesian coordinate grid, boxes to bed the vegetables in, cement goldfish ponds, or lawn gnomes. It looked like an army of landscapers had intentionally designed it to grow wild like The Nature. “Now that’s a five star view. I’ve never had a room with such a beautiful view,” I said, still trying to make conversation.

As Maggie sipped her coffee and watched a woman gather worms for her mobile food cart stocked with caged birds, I studied the elliptical walkway spiraling up the many terraced levels of the bowl-shaped stadium, which made it look like an inverted pyramid. The walkway provided access to hundreds of shops built into the sides of the terraced levels. Every shop opened to the long walkway on its level, and every shop (except the shops on the highest level) had a roof that doubled as the walkway on the level above it. The levels were connected by a series of stairways that allowed people to climb from level to level more quickly. Every so often I saw someone on a bike, or some other odd vehicular contraption, but for the most part the walkway was free of motorized traffic. The Stage had a lively market atmosphere, which made the scene more interesting to watch than the smog-choked street grids and freeways I’d see from the window of any high-rise hotel in any other city in the world.   

I could feel the dynamic energy in the scene below like I could when I was a kid watching a thunderstorm through my bedroom window. As soon as the morning sun broke over the rim of Center Stage like light flooding into a canyon, the walkway, shops, and trails through the Wild Garden Arena began to swell with Weston’s “employees.” It was as if sunrise was the cue to begin the workday. I laughed when I thought of people working in a stadium. Didn’t most cities build stadiums to help people forget about work?

We didn’t know it at the time, but we were watching our premiere showing of The Storybank Exchange in Center Stage.

Maggie was the first one to talk. “What did you do, drop rocks in this coffee?” she asked; I could hear the grounds grinding in her teeth.

“It’s cowboy coffee,” I beamed. “You can stuff it in your cheeks like this and save it for later.”    

I showed Maggie my cheek full of coffee chaw. “That’s weird,” she said as she checked me out. I was still only wearing a towel, and it was slowly slipping from my hips. “Jesus—Wylie! Get some clothes on, will you?”

I just smiled, chewed my coffee, and complied with my Cover Girlfriend’s wishes—pleased that we were doing something, as a team, to meet the performance expectations of The Mission. As I figured it, if we could see the storybankers, then they could see us. From their perspective, we must have looked like American Boyfriends and Girlfriends do when they roll out of bed in an exotic setting to watch the sunrise. Just like the movies.

“Chop, chop,” a voice called through the stairwell. “I hope you’re ready to do this interview, kids. Because I am!”

Miss Chase emerged from the spiral stairwell as I struggled to work my skinny hipster jeans over my government-issued muscles.

“Good god,” she paused, a finger to her lips. “I was beginning to wonder what you saw in him, Maggie, but I Get It now.”

Maggie laughed, but I wasn’t amused.

“Samantha!” I exclaimed as I put my indie-rocker T-shirt on. “Or should I say, Miss Chase. How are you all today?”

“Glorious,” she replied. “Now let’s get moving. Mainstay my deck hand has a noontime date with a mop, and I don’t want him to be late. Our ship’s a nightmare after our journey from The Past. He’s not looking forward to scrubbing off the karmic gunk.”

“Karmic gunk?”

“Yes, karmic gunk—all the nasty irresponsible eating, sunbathing, and shitting that was done by two nameless employables who traveled to Westonton on our incorporated bill. Mainstay hates karmic gunk, but he cleans the ship anyway because he knows someone has to do it. Just don’t ask him to like it, too. Do you ever wonder what a guy like Mainstay the Deckhand dreams about when he mops, Mr. Jones?”

“I can’t say that I do,” I replied, almost interested.

“He’s the Sweeney Todd of deck hands. As he works he dreams that he’s swabbing up the blood of nasty employables like you. Now, what do you say we get to that interview? Chop, chop.”

Employables? I thought. How crazy can one person be?

A moment and a half later (or about twenty-four minutes) we were on a trail leading through the Wild Garden Arena. The trail led north to Weston’s penthouse, a space-age saucer like the Guest Nest called Westonton Corporate Headquarters. As we hiked through what Miss Chase called a “sports gardening scene” filled with plants, animals, and insects (most of which I couldn’t identify to save my life), I rehearsed my lines in secret: “Hello sir,” I’d say when I met Weston. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you face-to-face. I’ve been a fan since your days at The World Bank. That bailout you orchestrated in Argentina was miraculous. Christ himself couldn’t have breathed live back into that economy any better!” Was that over the top? I thought. Maybe his work was more like an economic touchdown than a miracle? Maybe I should say, “Tom Brady couldn’t have scored that economic touchdown any better!”

“Garlic whips!” Maggie exclaimed suddenly. Then she bent down to what she believed to be a wild garlic plant growing beside the trail. Without a second thought Maggie pulled the curly whip from the rest of the plant. She watched with delight as it telescoped out and separated with a pop.

Miss Chase gasped, looking around nervously. “I don’t think that was a good idea. Just because it’s wild doesn’t mean it’s yours.”

“Don’t worry,” Maggie replied coolly. “It’s good to pull the whips on garlic plants. It encourages them to make bigger bulbs.”

“I know. But that’s not what I mean.”

“Oh?” Maggie said as she nibbled the end of the whip.    

“I mean, like: Oops! You’re stealing a sports gardener’s garlic.”

Maggie nibbled a little less enthusiastically. “I thought you said this was a wild garden,” she protested. “I found it growing along the trail.”

“This is the Wild Garden Arena,” Miss Chase replied. Then she repeated the words: “Wild, Garden, Arena” again with emphasis.

I didn’t see what she was driving at, but Maggie thought she did. “I get it,” she nibbled. “This is like a National Park where Woodsy and Ranger Rick protect public wilderness from people who ‘steal government property.’ I get it, but I don’t care. Earth doesn’t belong to The Man’s governments.”

“No, damn you!” Miss Chase exclaimed. “The Wild Garden isn’t the product of any one group, but thousands of individual storybankers known as ‘sports gardeners,’ who compete with each other in much the same way plants compete naturally. So stop munching, and put the plant back where you found it. The least you can do now is return it to its original position in The Game of Life, so what’s left of it can be added to the fertile profitability of the soil that surrounds it. That way, whoever the sports gardener is who owns that green game piece might not be at a total loss.”

Maggie stared at Miss Chase like she was speaking jibber jabber as she popped the last bite in her mouth, and said, “Oops, all gone.”

I could see that angered Miss Chase. She put her head down in disgust and continued down the trail.

I turned to Maggie and whispered, “I guess you’ll just have to crap it out now, and add some ‘fertile profitability’ back to the soil. Or maybe you should wait for your tummy’s turn before you make your move?”

“I think I’ll wait for my turn,” Maggie laughed, and smiled like a Girlfriend’s supposed to smile at her Boyfriend. “Only thing is, I’m not so sure my game pieces will be green.”

“I hope you employables are ready,” Miss Chase said when we arrived at Westonton Corporate Headquarters and stared up at the tower. “The man you’re about to meet can be a Bear at times and a Bull at others, but he’s always a Capitalist. He runs like a dog when he hears a cash register ring.”

So what if he runs? I thought. Everyone runs when they hear the cash register ring. That was the natural order of things.   

My Storybank Account – Scene Twelve,

THE PART WHERE THEY MEET THE LAST EMPLOYEE IN THE CITY WHO GETS PAID IN PAPER…

I spun the revolving door at Westonton Corporate Headquarters like it was a working wheel of fortune that would grant me three wishes and a career (with benefits) if I spun it with enough reverence. My mind was filled with visions of unwilting roses, happy dragons, and loyal cats. My confidence soared grander with every step. I’d found Mr. Chester Weston’s lair, and I was sure the information I needed was buried inside like treasure.

We stood awestruck on the polished chessboard-checkered floor of the lobby, breathing in the scene. Ah! I thought…not too warm, not too cold, this scene’s been set just right with climate-controlled air.

A security service counter stood across the lobby from us. It had all the routine props an audience might expect of any security service counter in any corporate building in the world: video monitors, phones, armaments, puzzles, and a swivel chair that came complete with a guard.

“Can I help you folks?” the youthful man-mountain on the business side of the counter asked as Maggie and I approached him like kids do when they’re lost in a mall. He was wearing a digitally designed blue and white camouflaged ball cap that read SECURITY on it, a pair of trousers and a blouse made of the same camouflage, and leather boots. A Westonton Security badge was pinned over his left breast pocket.

Miss Chase leaned over the counter and grabbed the Guard’s cell phone. “Hey Bradley,” she said to him as she dialed Mr. Chester Weston’s number. “How’s your love life these days?”

Security Chief (Bradley) Moyniham snatched the cell phone from her hand, and said, “Thanks for asking, Miss Chase, but you know as well as I do that I don’t have a Girlfriend.”

“That’s too bad, Bradley. You should get out more. Maybe you could meet a sexy super star storybanker…” Then she leaned forward, winked, and whispered, “…like me.”

The guard’s face crumpled like a wrapper. “My employer pays me to keep his city safe from all enemies, both foreign and domestic.”

Miss Chase turned to us and whispered, “Bradley’s the only one in the city who’s still on the dole. By that I mean he gets paid electronically in black and white digit-o-dollars, which—of course—he can redeem for pressed and dyed green fibers, like dollars were once redeemable for gold.”

The Security Chief heard her and cut in to defend himself. “It’s true,” he said to Maggie and me. “My employer insists I be paid in cash to avoid any conflicts of interest that might arise…from guarding his assets without a proper appreciation for the value of his property.”

Miss Chase turned to whisper again, “He gets paid thirty-thousand dollars a month to sit and do puzzles. He’s worth every penny. Aside from being the only employee paid in cash, he’s also the only human other than Chester who knows the location of the Super Massive Vault.”

  As it is with authority types when a conversation gets too personal for their comfort level, Chief Moynihan’s face changed abruptly like an actor who suddenly realized he was reading someone else’s lines. “I’m sorry,” the Chief said, “but the Honorable Mr. Chester Weston asked not to be disturbed today, so I’ll have to ask you folks to leave. You too, Miss Chase.”   

“Here we go,” Miss Chase exclaimed, rolling her eyes. “He’s gone and got himself stuck in character again. Break away, Bradley, before you end up playing this lame role of yours forever!”

“Sorry, no visitors today. Weston’s orders.” He said as he swiveled away and put his head back in his puzzle.

I liked him immediately. He was polite, cool, and immovable at the same time—very Sly Stallone. The man was a powerhouse of discipline; able to close the door on us (and the rest of the world) whenever he liked.

Miss Chase presented Maggie, and said, “But this is his Long Lost Daughter and her Boyfriend here to visit her father for the first time.”

Maggie smiled graciously, and gave the Chief a wave.

The phone rang. Moyniham answered it. “Uh, yes sir… I’ll ask,” Chief turned to Maggie. “Boss says he has many long lost daughters. Which long lost daughter are you?”

“I’m his Long Lost Daughter Maggie,” she replied.

Moyniham put the receiver to his ear, listened, and asked, “Is that Maggie spelled with an IE or Maggy with a Y?”

“I’ve never met a Maggie spelled with a Y.”

He waited for his reply again, and said, “The boss says that he named his third daughter after his first Maggie spelled with an IE, but he decided to change the spelling of the third one to Maggy with a Y.”

“Why?” Maggie asked curiously.

“That’s what I said, Maggy with a Y…” Bradley shot back.

“I’m sorry,” Maggie sighed. “What I meant to say was why?”

“Oh,” he replied, “I have no idea. You’ll have to ask him yourself.”

Miss Chase looked beyond the security counter into the eye of the camera behind it. “I’ve storytime traveled with her,” she said boldly. “She’s a wonderful person. Don’t deny her an interview because I went behind your back to bring her here. Everyone needs a good kick in the ass every once in a while…and well, Lover.…you’re long overdue.”

Chief waited for Chester’s reply, then handed the phone to Miss Chase, saying, “He wants to speak with you, ma’am.”

“Thank you, Bradley. I hope you find love someday.”

Miss Chase and her Lover fussed and haggled over their stories while Maggie and I took turns trying to turn Bradley back into a person. He made us wait until he finished his puzzle before he acknowledged us. Even then, we didn’t really talk with the man. He talked at us. He fired questions across the counter about “the economy,” sports, and old TV programs (from when he was still living on the mainland), and we did our best to answer them. He was particularly interested in the “Govanator.” He wanted to know if Arnold was going to make movies again when he was done with politics. I didn’t feel like I was communicating with him, and judging by the blank look on Maggie’s face I saw she wasn’t feeling the communication either.

Suddenly, another phone rang. Moyniham picked it up, and then put it down again without saying a word. Weston must have instructed his employee to lower his Guard and usher us to the elevator, because that’s what he did. Just like that, we were on our way to Weston’s penthouse suite.   

Whoosh, the steel door opened to a hall that led to the rest of the saucer-shaped structure. There we found two doors. One door was open. It led into a bathroom that was bigger than most people’s master bedrooms. I peaked inside. A path paved with golden bricks wound through the bathroom leading to a porcelain throne. Around the shitter, there was a mural featuring mythical winged creatures. The bathroom also featured other gaudy decor like a wall-sized mirror, a silver sink set in the stone countertop, and a small pool sized bubble jet bathtub with a golden faucet the size and shape of a swan. There was no dirt to be found anywhere in the scene.

The other door was closed. It had a sign that read MR. CHESTER WESTON – PRESIDENT AND CEO OF WESTONTON CORPS.

Miss Chase knocked and then knocked again.

“Come in,” Weston boomed.

Another blast of climate-controlled air filled the hallway with the flavors of leather, cigars, perfume, and faint traces of ancient newsprint. I was immediately flooded with images of wealth: wonder-lit ballrooms, prop humans in flossy swimsuits, talking refrigerators, exotic libations, organic salad, artisan cheese, chemical cleanliness, and stiff starchy costumes.

We walked in. Weston’s living/work space was round with no walls like the Guest Nest. In one corner of Weston’s space there was a kitchen that came complete with an employee, a chef costumed in a Westonton uniform. She was cleaning something. It was hard to tell what. The kitchen looked as spotless and clean as the bathroom. On the other side of the space was a canopy bed that was set beside a balcony that looked out over the city. The biggest difference between Westonton Corporate Headquarters and our Guest Nest was, the only windows were the windows in the French door leading out to the balcony. All the rest of the walls were occupied by a wall-sized screen that wrapped around the space. The screen was broken into twelve sections like a clock. Each of the sections were tuned to different scenes. Professor Chase explained later that all of the scenes were classic Fourth Wall projections of The Same Old Story: news shows, sports games, sitcoms, reality TV, movies, cooking shows, etc. Not one of them projected any of the live action/Earth Show channels broadcasted by  the city’s Antenna Trees. Miss Chase explained that her Lover was clear about why he didn’t watch The Earth Show. He said it was “boring.”

Traveler’s description of Mr. Chester Weston was spot-on: derby, black pinstriped banker’s suit, vest, and mirror-shined shoes. “Welcome,” Weston said as he spun his high-backed leather chair away from The Wheel of Fortune show he was watching, spread his hands over the large oak desk at the center of his office, and asked, “Can I interest any of you in a beverage?”

“No, thanks,” Miss Chase replied, watching as Maggie walked around the office. She paused at the photo of Weston with a group of sheiks golfing in California; a trophy for a yachting competition; a framed dollar bill with a caption that read WON FROM THE LEMONADE STAND I BOUGHT AT THE AGE OF THIRTEEN FROM THE ORIGINAL OWNER, WHOM I THEN PAID TO RUN THE STAND AND GIVE ITS PROFITS TO ME; several autographed copies of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People; and a stuffed grizzly standing full length and frozen in mid-growl. Maggie also paused to read a framed photo on Weston’s desk. In it, a striking young woman, plain but pretty, was standing in front of a craggy mountain scene with her arms around a youthful version of the man we saw before us. The couple looked happy in their matching backpacking gear.

Weston turned to me. “What about you?” he said, with eyes that pierced me like swords. “Do you want a beverage?”

In spite of my many years of training, I froze in The Lights.

“Hey you, standing there like a virgin on prom night,” he said more forcefully. “I’m offering you a refreshment.”

He was drinking from a bottle of factory-processed water.    

“Virgin on prom night…that’s a good one.” I chuckled as I approached his desk and presented my hand like a good Eager Beaver. “My name’s Jones,” I said, “I’m an…”

“…Independently Wealthy Globetrotting Hipster of mysterious origins,” Weston interrupted. “I know, by thunder.”

“Silly me…I should’ve assumed…”

“You should never assume anything, Jones,” he said, pausing to shove a water bottle into my hand. “It makes an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me.’ And it makes a terrible first impression. In any case, as you know, my name is Chester. But I encourage my employees to call me Mr. Chester Weston. It’s less confusing that way.” He tipped his bottle back—then turned to Maggie and said, “Let me guess. You lovebirds came because you’re tired of walking up, working for The Man every day with nothing to show for it. You heard about my city, and now you’re here, hat in hand, hoping I’ll let you buy in.”

Miss Chase and I watched with interest as Maggie turned to face a man she knew of, but had never known. Cool as a cucumber she asked, “Miss Chase says you don’t watch The Earth Show.”

“No,” Weston replied. “It’s boring; not nearly enough action.”

“Then how did you know who Wylie was if you haven’t been watching our live Earth Show channels, or whatever you call them?”

Weston paused to study his Long Lost Daughter. Then replied, “Every morning after breakfast—Kellogg’s Raisin Bran in 2% Kroger milk, Folger’s coffee, and one Little Debbie’s donut—Miss Chase briefs me on the important  operations of Westonton, including the performances of my employees…and future employees. Then I read The New York Times for the real news.”

“How could Miss Chase brief you about Wylie and I if she was sailing the Storytime Machine as Captain Chaos?”

“She briefed me this morning, by thunder, right after we made sweet, sweet love, and my cook served us waffles in bed. We always eat waffles after sex. It’s the only time I don’t order my normal breakfast. It’s like a treat. Do you have any other dumb questions?”

“Why wasn’t your security guy expecting us?”

“I don’t tell that orangutang everything. He’s an employee. Besides it was fun watching your reaction. Is it my turn now?”

“No,” Maggie smiled. “I have one more question.”

“Okay,” Weston almost smiled. “Last one. Then it’s my turn.”

“You’re wrong about us. We’re not here hat in hand.”

“That wasn’t a question.”

“Did you get the email I sent you?”

“I got it,” he replied, “and I would’ve sent you a reply, but as you can see, I’ve been busy keeping my city afloat.”

Maggie remembered her job working at Mt. Tabor Market and the mess that appeared on the counter without fail. She looked Weston in the eyes, and said, “This office looks too clean for you to be too busy.”

“Yes, I see,” he said, grabbing another bottle from a mini-fridge in the corner of the office. “I’m sorry if I didn’t give you a hug and greet you when you blew back into my life, but I left you in the Norton’s capable hands a long time ago, with good reason.”

Maggie didn’t reply. She turned to make the blank face look for one of the screens. As she turned away, Chester smiled at me and winked. Then the aging banker pulled a photo from his desk drawer and switched it with the one that showed him with the plain but pretty woman on his desk. The new photo showed Mr. Chester Weston standing beside an exotic beauty, a woman with long frazzled hair and hazel green eyes that seemed to hold oceans of pain and joy back like damns on the verge of collapse. I could have called her an Angel, or an Astronaut, or a Grease Monkey, and I would have felt right. It took some thought, but I eventually recognized her from Weston’s file. She was his first and last wife, Annie Duelce. And Annie was standing with Chester in front of a cabin, presenting their baby girl.

“I ran away from Jimmy and Kitty Norton,” Maggie said, “because they were trying to make me be someone I didn’t want to be.”

Weston chuckled to himself. “It must have been tough growing up with everything you wanted.” There was no reply. Weston took a big swig from his water bottle. “I don’t blame you for running away,” he went on. “I probably would have done the same thing in your place. Jimmy was always three, or four, steps behind the rest of us. And Kitty, well she was at least five. That’s why she fell for Jimmy. They were the only couple I knew who wanted children. When Annie left…I thought it was best.”

“They didn’t talk about you often,” Maggie said, “but when I asked about you, they would shake their heads, and say, ‘I’m sorry princess, but your father’s not going to make it. He’s a banker, and there aren’t many names of bankers written in The Book of Life.’ Then they would go on about threading rich men and camels through needles.”

“Kitty was always very religious,” Weston laughed. “Four Square, or Evangelical, I think. One of those denominations where they say they’re open to everything, but they’re really selling you something specific. I don’t know if they told you, but Jimmy was my fraternity brother and Kitty lived in the sorority across the street. Kitty’s ‘pillow-talk sermons’ were notorious. Jokingly, my brothers and I used to say that listening to her sermons was the price we paid for jumping in the sack with her. And we paid our debts, selfless martyrs to the end, as we went right on sinning. None of us liked her sermons—none of us, except Jimmy. Poor Jimmy. He bought in hook line and sinker.”

Then he spun around and returned to watching his old rerun.

“Hello? Anybody home?” Miss Chase interjected. “Your daughter is here to see you. Maybe you should spend some time with her?”

“Why should I?” he thundered. “She’s a spoiled brat who ran away from good God-fearing parents who had the means to send her to the moon and back if she wanted to go.”

Suddenly the office was silent.

After a long awkward moment, I attempted to break the silence with a little old-fashioned falsified cheer. “So,” I chuckled. “When do we get to do this interview I’ve heard so much about?”

“So?!” Weston mocked. “What does my Long Lost Daughter think about that? Of course you want to do the interview! No one travels all the way to Westonton without taking a free ride on my world famous Gravy Train!”

“I’m not here to ride your Gravy Train,” Maggie replied coldly. “I only wanted a chance to know you for who you are.”

Chester was quiet for a moment. “You can’t seriously expect me to believe that you came because you wanted to get to know me. I’m a world-class greedy bastard. End of story.”

“I don’t care if you’re the Devil. It’s hard to have high expectations for a father I’ve never had.”

Chester stared at the floor. Then he suddenly looked up at Maggie and said, “Fiddlesticks. I hope your man is as ‘independently wealthy’ as he says, because against my better judgment I’m going to interview you clowns for the job of becoming a part of my story.”

My Storybank Account – Scene Thirteen,

THE PART WHERE THE GREAT CAPITALIST INTERVIEWS HIS DAUGHTER AND HER BOYFRIEND FOR THE OPPORTUNITY TO PAY HIM TO BE HIS EMPLOYEES…

At the time, I thought Maggie was simply meeting her performance expectations when she said, “I only want the chance to know you for who you are.” I thought it was a brilliant line produced by a hustler who’d learned to survive the harsh realities of The Streets by knowing people and knowing how to use that knowledge to gain power over them. Looking back, I’m not surprised I couldn’t see that Maggie was trying to represent her self. I still figured everyone did and said things based on either the “good” or “bad” part they were playing in The All American Hero Story of our lives. The act of representing oneself, for no heroic (or villainous) reason at all, made no sense to me.

The CEO of Westonton Corporation powered up the computer on his desk, and said, “Let’s begin your interview with a few preliminary questions, shall we?” I was so excited. I couldn’t wait to see what he did next…

Miss Chase had played a supporting role in her boss’s interviews many times. As was her routine, she offered us seats at the front of the desk. Then she brought us a snack platter with fruit, sliced meats, crackers, donuts, and soda drinks she introduced by saying, “This is factory-free Fizzy Pop. It’s made here, in Westonton, by my friends the Fizzy Pop Family Corporation.”

I acted duly impressed and sampled the Fizzy Pop. It tasted fruity and sweet, but not too sweet. The drink was so refreshing I guzzled it and grinned when it was gone like I was in a TV ad.    

“First question!” Weston thundered.

“Fire away,” I replied cheerfully.

“How much money do you got?”

“Individually?” I asked. “Or as a couple?”

“I don’t care. How much money do you have?”

“A little less than twenty-five thousand dollars. Why?”

“Twenty-five thousand dollars!” he thundered. “I made ten times that off any one of the dirt-poor, third-world employees who built my city for me!” With a pained look, he turned to Miss Chase, and cried, “Twenty-five thousand dollars?” Miss Chase took the opportunity to educate us, explaining why her Boss felt outraged. As unbelievable as it sounds, Weston was able to recruit the poorest of the poor workers to build his city, invest in them, then turn around and sell them the product they made for him. The going rate Weston charged his dirt poor workers to live and work in Westonton was everything….all their worldly possessions…including their final paychecks, which he never bothered to print and mail. It was a pretty sweet set up. In effect the only good or service he sold them, for every dollar they owned, was the freedom to be self-governed storybankers in his city. And his employees all paid the price (and became his customers) because they knew, first hand, how much better life was when they bought and sold their goods and services with stories.

When Miss Chase was done, she turned to her Boss and said, “Listen Lover, I know its not a lot…but Maggie risked a lot to be here with you.”

“Like what? Her career at the local mini-market?” he scoffed, then turned to me. “I thought you said you were wealthy.”

“Oh, I am…but I only have access to twenty-five thousand of my family’s fortune at the moment,” I replied, wishing the Bureau had given me a lot more money to work with.

Chester laughed, “Do you even know what you’re buying?”

“I explained the basics of our Storysold system to them,” Miss Chase replied, “but I didn’t tell them what it might cost to become storybankers, because I didn’t expect you to charge your Daughter to work for you.”

“Is that what this interview is about?” Maggie asked coolly. “You’re going to charge us to work for you?”

“I am,” Chester replied. “I’m the CEO of Westonton Corporation. I don’t have the luxury of employing storybankers for free. That wouldn’t be fair to the rest of my star employees, who gave everything they owned to live and work in my city.” Then he wistfully recited a slogan of his own invention. “Westonton Corporate City – Where even the world’s most lovable loser can become a super star!”

Miss Chase whispered to Maggie, “I hate that slogan.”

“What was that, Miss Chase?” Weston thundered.

“You know,” she said, digging in. “I hate your slogan.”

“It’s better than the last one you hated.”

“Anything’s better than the last one: ‘Life’s a movie…and we can all be  Westontonians working like one big team upon The World Stage.’”

“Yes, yes. Now, shall we get on with this?” he said, leaning back in his chair with his hands on his head like a snake fanned to strike. “In an attempt to show you that I can be the paternal man you seem to want me to be, I’ll give you both jobs for twenty-five thousand dollars.” Then he slid a document across the table with a pen, and with charm added, “All I need from you are your bank account and routing numbers, and of course your signatures on these lines here, and it’s a done deal.”

I didn’t flinch. “Yes sir, Mr. Chester Weston sir,” I said. I signed the document, and then dug through my hip, retro Velcro wallet searching for the cover account information the FBI had issued me. “I don’t know how to thank you,” I said as I dug. “Twenty-five thousand dollars is a reasonable price to pay to work for you. I mean, I get it’s an investment. Compared to paying some Big Named University to train us to work for you, this is a steal!”

“Yeah…” Maggie said as she picked up the pen and stared at the document on the desk. “In the future, I’m sure people will be killing each other for the chance to pay you to work here.” Chester chuckled as Maggie paused thoughtfully. “What’s the point of this interview if the only thing you wanted to know was how much money we had?” she asked her father. “This deal of yours is all backwards. We should be interviewing you for the opportunity to make you even richer. That’s how this is supposed to go.” Then she snatched the cover account information from my hand and thundered, “In fact, giving my Boyfriend a proper interview might make us both feel better about signing our bank accounts over to you. Wouldn’t you say, Boss?”

Weston flashed a grin at Miss Chase, and said, “Who would have guessed? She’s a natural.” Then he turned to his Long Lost Daughter, and said, “OK, you got a deal. Sign the paper, and I’ll grant your Not-So Independently Wealthy Globetrotting Journalist Boyfriend an interview, and maybe even spend some quality time playing Father for you.”

Maggie thought that through, and said, “I want you to promise you’ll give him a full access professional interview.”   

“I’ll tell you what,” Weston chuckled. “I’ll give your man $30:00 monetary moments worth of access. Does that suit your purpose?”

Traveler explained “monetary moments” on the Time Machine, but neither of us remembered what that meant. Maggie turned to Miss Chase. She was shaking her head “yes,” so Maggie agreed.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” Chester chuckled more as he entered the account information into his computer. “I don’t do hugs.”

We watched Chester’s mood sour after he pressed ENTER. He turned the screen to face us, pointing to a message from the bank. It read: THIS TRANSACTION CANNOT BE PROCESSED DUE TO INSUFFICIENT FUNDS. CONTACT A CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE FOR ASSISTANCE. HAVE A NICE DAY 😄

“What is this shit?” Chester asked gruffly.

“I told you we have a little less than twenty-five thousand.”

Maggie smiled, and listed: “Soup served in a bread bowl, a present for my friend Mel, and the three hundred seventeen dollars we gave to an army of lollipop-manufacturing bums for the chance to win a free trip to Westonton courtesy of Time Machine Cruise-Line Incorporated.”

That piqued Chester’s interest. “Did that lollipop-manufacturing bum’s name happen to be Bill?”

“It was—Bill the Bum of the Bio-friendly Bum Army.”   

Then quicker than fire to tinder, Mr. Chester Weston temper blew sky-high. “You and you,” he said, pointing to us. “You’re both fired.”

“What?” I protested.

“You have till tomorrow morning to vacate the premises, before I have Security Chief Moyniham escort you off my property.”

“You’re being unfair,” Miss Chase said. “I introduced Bill the Bum and the Bum Army into their stories, not the other way around. If anyone, I’m the one you should hold accountable.”

“Fine!” Chester thundered. “Then you’re fired!”

“You know you can’t fire me.”

“I’m the President; I can fire anyone I want.”

Miss Chase dug in, and said, “You can fire anyone but me. We’ve been partners in this since the beginning. Where would your precious Westonton Corporation be without us? Besides, you love your crazy kitty cat.” Then she pawed the air like a cat and said, “Roar!”

Weston thought long and hard about that one.

“Damn it, I know. I can’t fire my crazy kitty…even though she’s been a very, very, bad cat!”

“Then why did you say it?”

“Because it feels good to say, ‘You’re fired!’ It’s cathartic.”

“You know you shouldn’t joke around about stuff like that.”   

Chester took off his hat and rubbed his forehead in gentle soothing circles. “Why can’t you indulge me every now and again?”

“I indulge you every time I travel as Miss Chase,” she replied. “She is your fantasy intern, not mine. Roar!”

“Great, here comes the screw!” Weston cried. “I already feel it.”

“Yes, here it comes The Big Screw. It’s your turn to indulge my story and at least pretend like you’re a normal human father with a daughter.”   

Chester rubbed his forehead again, and said, “I’ll do whatever you like, Lover. Maybe you can conjure up a Shrink in that cast of yours and lead us in some family therapy. Maggie can use my walls to paint a mural depicting her unhappy childhood, and I can light my desk on fire to keep her warm.”

“Goddamn you’re such an Asshole. She’s right here!”

While the Lovers waged war, I took command of the computer. In a few short clips, I transferred three hundred and seventy-six dollars and two cents from my credit card to our cover account to round out the full-twenty five thousand dollars we owed him, down to the last penny.

In the midst of their war, I turned the screen to face Weston and pointed to the $25,000 digit-o-dollars displayed in his account. When he saw it was all there, he said, “Fine. Okay. You’re not fired.”

Then it was like he was just done with us.

Without another word, he made the rooster ready blank face look for The Fourth Wall, and continued to watch The Wheel of Fortune—leaving his employee Miss Chase to fill in the details.

After she’d cooled down, she began to set us up with the tools we’d need to become storybankers. The first thing she did was issue our “Storysold addresses,” which served as login identification for our own channels.

My address was: wyliejones25474@storyexchange.tlc

Maggie’s address was: maggiestone25475@storyexchange.tlc

Miss Chase, who had adopted her cooler Traveler tone of voice by this time, explained that there were now exactly 25,475 storybankers in the city, and they all owned a private channel like ours. The channels were broadcasted from the Antenna Trees branching out along the rim of Center Stage. She said when storybankers speak of all the living stories broadcasted on all the channels in the city they use the title The Storybank Exchange, in italics, to remind them that the new Storysold system isn’t a person, place, or thing. It’s a story.

As she talked, I became more and more confused. It wasn’t that I couldn’t comprehend her. I couldn’t fathom the reality of what it was she was telling us. Finally, I snapped. “Yeah, yeah, I get it,” I interrupted. “But what are we supposed to do with our own televised live action channels? Dance a jig? Do comedy? Plot an operatic tragedy?”

“Be patient. This will likely take you years to fully understand,” she replied. Then she showed us how to access our “storybank accounts,” which she described as permanent memory banks that stored our “signature stories” before they’re broadcasted on the airwaves on our channels in near-real-time with what she called, “the three count delay.” Next Miss Chase asked Maggie to sit at the computer, enter my Storysold address, and click the AUTHORIZE SIGNATURE icon. She did, and it spun its wheels for a couple of clips, then it read: ACCESS DENIED. Then she asked me to do the same. So, I did. When its wheel was done spinning it read: WELCOME TO YOUR STORYBANK ACCOUNT – SUPER STAR JONES! There on the screen was a shot of me as a life-like computer generated image watching myself watch me, on high, in a third person perspective. She called it my “signature,” which she defined as an ever-changing authorization code for my new storybank account. I was shocked to learn that my signature was constructed from the information gathered by thousands of Artificial Eyes, or A-eyes, which recorded every inch of storytime in the city. I was a spy, and I didn’t like being spied on. But there I was, on screen, watching myself watch me in a third-person perspective. As I watched blank faced, I once again felt jealous of real spies who could prowl around in black tights and simply spray paint the cameras to avoid detection. This simply wasn’t playing fair. It’s not as fun to spy if everyone spies on everyone.

On the screen above my signature was a toolbar with a bunch of headings to click. Some read: SUPPORTING CAST ACCOUNTS, STOCK CHARACTERS, WORKING ROLES IN DEVELOPMENT, MAKE A WITHDRAWAL, EDIT MY STORY, MAKE A DEPOSIT, MY SHOPPING LISTS, COMMON THEMES, COMMON DEFENSE THEMES, LIVE-ACTION VOTES…The headings went on and on.

I was a government man. I understood electronic security systems, but what I saw blew me away. “Are you telling me that this new banking system of yours doesn’t need a number code to authorize access to my bank account, because it recognizes my body signature, like our security systems back home recognize thumb prints, eyeballs, and faces?”

“Yes,” Miss Chase replied. “Our state-of-the-art Storysold system recognizes your signature, your spirit, soul, or aura, your informative glow: all the differences that make you…you. The Storysold system knows you. It grants you, and only you, access to your personal storybank account. We call it a signature because that’s what it is—your authorizing signature. And I must say, our new Storysold signatures make a lot more sense than the odd, old way of authorizing your transactions with a garbled mess of symbols and numbers that somehow, in some way, represent you and your interests.”

“Wow,” I said honestly. “This is amazing. But if this is my personal storybank account, where is my money?”

Where indeed? I was having serious-to-major difficulties wrapping my mind around the idea that I’d exchanged twenty-five thousand electro-digital dollars for a bank account that was rigged to circulate a brand new currency called monetary moments. I felt like I was playing a new card game with a lot of rules I didn’t understand. What made it even more difficult was the fact that I did not care deeply about learning the new “qualitative-based Storysold economy.” I didn’t see anything wrong with the old-fashioned pressed and dyed green fibers the FBI paid me. I was more interested in seeming interested in Miss Chase’s period of instruction. I didn’t want her to suspect that I suspected her and every other storybanker in Westonton of “macroeconomic terrorism,” so I asked a lot of questions to make it look like I was paying attention. After she answered a few, she suddenly grew weary. She shrugged off my last question and told us that we needed to do our own on-the-job training. Then she gave us a copy of Mr. Chester Weston’s Official Westonton Employee Handbook, which was as thin as a program for a sports game or church service. After a few obligatory lines of welcome it read:

EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE EXPECTATIONS

JOB TITLE: SUPER STAR STORYBANKER

JOB DESCRIPTION: BE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE STORYBANK ACCOUNT IN YOUR CHARGE

1. Don’t starve – balance your storybank account in a proficient manNEr. produce a QUALITY signature that doesn’t fail to feED YOU.
2. Mind your own business – Be accountable for your signature. govern your stock characters and your other WORKING roles at all times.
3. Don’t steal – Provide proof for your work scenes WITH storybank account cards. don’t try to paste any clips, scenes, or moments into your work scenes that you didn’t mint, make, or produce. AND rEMEMBER: aCCEPTING PAYMENT FOR WORK YOU DIDN’T DO IS THE SAME AS STEALING!
4. Have fun – Be happy in YOUR story. enjoy your work scenes. If you’re not, then work harder to Develop more profitable ways to be happy. Tragedies and conflicts happen, but nobody WANTS to invest in a story that produces fear, deals in destructive goods, and expects THEIR SUPPORTING CAST MEMBERS to bail them out OF ECONOMIC DEPRESSION AND OR EMOTIONAL BANKRUPTCY DAY AFTER DAY.     
5. Be a shining super star – Everyone likes a good story. work hard and make your story the best you can, so when you reach the end of your account you can close out WITH the knowledge that you produced a super star life that was worth more than the sum of your props.
6. Be aware – YOUR President and CEO reserves the right to terminate the employment of anyone who fails to meet the expectations listed above. in the event of termination, EX-EMPLOYEES havE 24 hours to leave WESTONTON. After that, they will be escorted off the premises. WESTONTON corporation reserves the right to retain all of its employees original investmentS. There will be no refunds.   

It made me wonder which of the expectations Bill the Bum, Punk Girl, and their “gang of slackers and roustabouts” failed to meet. Was Bill unhappy? Did he fail to develop a happier, more profitable way to own and operate his signature? Or were Bill and the Bum Army filled with so much fear and hate for Weston and his Super Massive Vault full of cash that they became incapable of owning and operating their own stories profitably?

It was hard to say, but if I were Weston I would have fired them for not minding their own business.

My Storybank Account – Scene Fourteen,

THE PART WHERE THE CITY’S NEWEST STORYBANKERS HAVE TO SHOP FOR THEIR DINNER ON CENTER STAGE…

After we waved goodbye to Bradley, pushed through the revolving doors, and walked into the hot noon air of the Wild Garden Arena, Miss Chase asked, “Do you know what you’re buying for dinner?”

“Dinner?” Maggie replied. “I’m stuffed. Something about being in that man’s presence kept me reaching for the snacks.”

“I don’t know about you ladies, but I’m starving!” I said, rubbing my tummy to signify hunger.

They glanced at me to acknowledge that I’d spoken. Then Miss Chase turned to Maggie and said, “You should start shopping for dinner as soon as possible. If you’re lucky, you will find an adventurous storybanker on Center Stage who’ll do you the favor of depositing a couple of food production scenes in your untapped storybank accounts.”     

“Rustling up dinner shouldn’t be a problem,” I boasted. “Bring on the dog soup and monkey brains, I’m not picky. I’ll eat anything.”

“You may not be picky,” Miss Chase laughed, “but they are. I’m sure you’ll find someone, but it won’t be easy.” Then she walked away.

“Where are you going?” I asked as I watched her exit stage right.

“I’m going back to the Storytime Machine to change into someone more comfortable. I’m sick of playing this employable prostitute.”

Miss Chase vanished into the Wild Garden Arena, leaving us to stare blankly, unsure of where to begin. We followed the walkway leading away from Westonton Corporate Headquarters towards the shops set around the ground level perimeter of Center Stage’s spiraling, terraced levels.

“Well,” I said as we walked. “You heard the prostitute. What do you want to eat for dinner?”

“I don’t know,” Maggie replied flatly. “What do you what?”

“How about burgers: one without meat for you, a real burger for me, a basket of fries, and a milkshake with two straws and a cherry on top?”

“Hum,” Maggie replied. “Maybe we should shop around first.”

“It will be easier if we decide first, so we know what we’re looking for,” I said, giving her what I thought was good advice. “My Ex-Girlfriend Sue and I always did that, ‘What do you want to eat?’ ‘I don’t care Sweetie. What do you want to eat?’ routine for twelve long months before I finally put my foot down. Trust me. It’s easier if we decide first.”

“I see,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Men are hunters. You choose your target prey before you and your team walk into the jungle to hunt it.”

“Right,” I smiled. “Men are natural hunters.”

“And women are gatherers who walk into the jungle armed with knowledge of plants, so the ones they kill don’t kill everyone in their family stone dead at dinnertime.”

“Right,” I said, trying to smile. “Women are natural gatherers.”

“And our man hunters get to put their foot down, because why?”

“Because hunting is more dangerous…and women need to listen to what we say, or they’ll be attacked and eaten by wild panthers.”

“Oh I see,” Maggie lied. “I suppose women should gather and coddle our brave hunters like hungry children to our tits when they throw tantrums and “put their foot down,” because panthers are more dangerous than, let’s say, genocide by poisoned plant, botulism, or everyone shitting themselves to death because some idiot brought back bad water from the jungle.”

“Yes,” I replied without listening. “Panthers have sharp teeth.”

“OK,” she agreed with a flash of mischief in her eyes. “Let’s try it your way, Great Hunter. Hunting hamburgers, fries, and two milkshakes with two straws sound bearable to me.”

That’s not The Mission, I thought. Two shakes? Is she crazy?

“But,” I cooed. “Boyfriends and Girlfriends share one milkshake with two straws so they can look longingly into each other’s eyes.”

“OK,” Maggie said. “One strawberry rhubarb milkshake with two straws, and there’s a chance that I might slurp blankly in your direction.”

“Good enough,” I said as we turned up a stairway leading from the ground level to the walkway above.

At every turn we were presented with fascinating and often familiar characters. It was like a mad librarian had found a way to free the characters of the ages from their books. Some of them were classic: alchemists, kings, jesters, queens, divas, monsters, plowmen, pirates, strumpets, and a Huckleberry Finn lookalike who ate a watermelon and smoke a hand carved pipe while he spat his seeds on us from a grassy ledge overlooking the stairway. Other characters were classic and religious: monks, ascetics, demons, rabbis, servile virgins, and a sheepherder dressed as the Lamb of God tending to her congressional flock of sheep grazing on the other side of Huckleberry Finn. There were also historical characters: presidents, dictators, levelers, peasants, suffragettes, opium addicts, belly dancers, Zulu warriors, and sodbusters. A tribe of cave people was sitting on a grassy ledge outside a shop with a sign that read: WALL THE MART. They were busy sculpting bowls, plates, and other tools by hand. The diverse mix of scenes and characters along the walkway was too much for my brain to process. The strange new information overloaded my ability to maintain my discipline to The Mission for a moment. I laughed aloud when I saw a Greek-speaking Zeus character with a cardboard-lighting bolt threaten an old lady because the god wasn’t happy with the quality of her goods.

“So,” I laughed again, “these are our co-workers?”

Maggie was grinning. “Yeah,” she said. “Aren’t they great?”

“Sure, they’re great,” I whispered. “Great big suckers.”

Maggie gave me a puzzled look, and asked, “Don’t you get it? They get to go to work and be who they want to be!”

“I Get It alright,” I laughed lightly. “Weston’s a genius. He found a way to get people to pay him to work for free.”

“These people are living their dreams,” she said. “As far as I know, there is no other workplace in the world where the only job expectation is that you govern your narrative body like a business.”

We strolled along level one’s walkway for a while swimming in the strange sea of storybankers before we decided to check out a shop that was set under level two’s grassy ledge and walkway.

It didn’t have a front door, or a service counter, or any of the usual characteristics of a shop I’d expect to find in a mall or shopping center. Instead it reminded me of a garage with a simple roll-down door to protect it from the weather. Inside, a lady was sitting beside handcrafted barrels filled with root vegetables, wooden toys, and a colorful variety of yarn goods. Apparently, the employee uniform of the day was a fairy costume. I stared at the lady and her winged costume as she used an old, antiquated spinning wheel to make yarn. Naturally, I assumed the fairy spoke the language of the world, English, so I spoke to her of golden moon dust, midnight flights through magic poppy fields, and her role in heroic quests. I thought I was relating to her like a good tourist who’d read enough travel guides to know something about fairy culture. I wanted to be cool with her and talk of tiddlywinks, and maintain my cover story as Mortal Man (lover of art and culture) and do all the things I needed to do to please my Goddess. For my efforts, she gave me a mouthful of “Blah, blah, blah,” fairy-speak like she understood everything I’d just said.

“Stupid fairy,” I grumbled as we walked away. “How do you expect to sell your silly wooden toys if you don’t speak English?”

We checked out the next few shops on the level, and none of them were any easier to understand, so we walked up to the next level. There, sitting with his legs dangling over the grassy ledge, we spied an approachable old man wearing jeans, a plain white T-shirt, and a well-worn Boston Red Sox hat. He was binding a book. Or, at least, he was trying to bind a book. A large, orange tabby cat with what looked like eagles wings harnessed to his side was batting the loose end of his string. “Bad cat!” the old man shouted every so often and the griffin/cat would retreat for a moment, or two, and then go right back to batting the string at the end of his book. After a brief introduction, Maggie asked Ole Bookmaker (and Pip the Evergreen Jungle Cat) to explain what we were experiencing. I hung back, aloof and arm-crossed, as he told us that the shops on Center Stage were primarily “stage shops,” which he said were “the sequels of old market grocery stores.” He explained that the “stage-stocking grocers,” who owned stage shops rarely made the goods they sold there. Instead, stage-stocking grocers made their monetary moments selling their cast members the convenient service of shelf-stocking scenes, which featured them gathering goods from all around the city and stocking them in their shop. The newfangled grocers also made a living by: producing product-research scenes where the grocers reviewed the quality of the product production stories they sold; and debt-consolidation scenes where they developed bills for their cast members that put the monetary moments they owed other producers of goods all on one storybank account payable to the grocer. Without pause (like we’d just put a quarter in him) Bookmaker explained that books have always been compacted storytime—or “consolidation scenes”—designed to show us our past debts and future credits. Whatever that meant.

I turned to Maggie in the middle of the monologue. I was glad she was making the blank face look too. “Yeah,” I interrupted, “I understand all that. Books are the grocery stores of our minds.”

Bookmaker paused and read me almost hopefully.

“But what I really want to know is,” I continued with aplomb, “what are these ‘monetary moments’ I keep hearing about?”

When he heard that, the old man gathered his bookmaking props and walked off without another word—leaving his large cat with the wild hunter eyes to swipe at our legs in the absence of string.

“Bad cat!” I snapped instinctively.

Maggie simply shook her head and left the scene.    

Soon after that, somewhere between the third and fourth level, we heard the sounds of a serious drama.

“I said, knock it off!” a woman shouted.

From the stairway in front of us, a man backed onto the walkway. It was the man in the beaver hat with the tattoo of a one-eyed jack on his face who’d winked at me in the meadow. He was in full retreat. Hot on his trail was a lady wearing a frilly dress and bonnet, waving a parasol.

It was strange. As he dodged her parasol, he kept looking up at the sky like he was talking to an unseen audience who was watching him from one of the high white clouds floating by. “I gamble,” he pleaded, “but I’m no cheater. A man can get strung up that way. And I swear I didn’t cheat on you, Betty. I swear to the moon. I swear to the stars in the sky.”

“Maybe you didn’t cheat, but you were plotting to!”

“I only said that if…” He paused, as if to collect his thoughts. “If I was to do a love scene with any woman in the city, other than you, I would do a love scene with Rosy.”

“Because why?”

“Because… because I, uh…”

“You said it once Gambler. You can say it again.”

“I said that her story is always, uh, so well put together.”

“Oh, and I suppose mine’s not? I’m your Southern Belle!”

“I never encouraged you to develop Betty the Belle,” he protested.

“How can you say that?” she hollered, still swinging. “You own a saloon! Saloons always have belles hanging from their railings.”

“Yes, Betty. I own a saloon, and I wear cowboy boots, and I like a good fistfight every now and again for fun—but that doesn’t mean I want my ace cast member to gussy up like a doll to match what she believes my theme to be. I’m insulted that you believe I’m so marketable.”

Betty sucked in, and released, “This isn’t for you, you dimwit! I wanted to be Betty the Belle for me!”

“But why?”

“Because I ain’t got no fucking cows!”

“That’s why you’re roping your guts in with that bodice?”

“Yes. I like roping my guts in. It’s dainty, and fine, and womanish, and it keeps me off the hog.”

“And?” he prompted knowingly.

“And, and it’s everything Cowboy Betty isn’t.”

“What’s wrong with being Cowboy Betty?” Gambler asked as he held his hand out peaceably. “I liked that she wasn’t dainty…”

“Are you saying you don’t like Belle?”

“I’m just saying your Betty the Belle character’s confusing.”

“Why?” Betty asked, taking his hand. “Because you can see that deep inside I’m a Cowboy, even if I don’t own any cows?”

“No, I just don’t know what Belle’s supposed to do.”

Betty pulled away. “You don’t know what she’s supposed to do?”

“You know what I mean. Is Belle a Lady, Lady in Waiting, or Trophy Housewife who goes to work like a baker to make the babies, or something like that? You know what I mean.”

“Oh, you’re so vain! I told you, asshole. I’m developing Betty the Belle for me, not you! Because I don’t got any fucking cows!”

“OK,” Gambler replied calmly. “Then what does she do?”

“Other than pleasing you?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s gonna make pies and lemonade…”

“Are you going to grow your lemons dressed like that?”

She untied her bonnet. “No, I ain’t gonna grow my fucking lemons dressed like this, Asshole!”

“Does that mean Cowboy Betty’s on the comeback trail?”

“No,” she said as she tossed the bonnet in his face. “It means I’m telling you to go to Hell! We’re through! You don’t understand anything about my story.” Then she ripped off her Belle costume (down to her red knickers) like it was burning her skin. Gambler picked up the bonnet and put it in his pocket. As he turned to leave he glanced skyward, and said, “I told you this wouldn’t end well, Rosy dear.”

Betty listened in shock as Gambler walked away, speaking into the air, saying, “If you care to join me at my Saloon later, say sometime after a quarter to the day, the steak and beers are on me.”

“I think the woman with the parasol was right,” Maggie whispered like we were seated comfortably in a theater. “He was plotting to cheat on her. Why else would Rosy be listening in?”

“Yeah,” I said, feigning interest. “What a cold-hearted snake.”

“What’re you employables staring at?” Betty Belle snapped.

“Uh…” I scrambled for words. “We’re looking for hamburgers.”

Without a word—Betty pulled back her fist, aimed, and crack! She popped me square in the nose. Help! I thought. Call the cops!

“What was that for?” I whined, as a stream of blood oozed from my nose. “I didn’t do anything to deserve that!”

Cowboy Betty looked at Maggie, then back at me, and something other than rage flashed across her face. “Wait a hot-damned moment,” she snickered. “You’re the Boss’s Long Lost Daughter Maggie…and you’re her Tinhorn Boyfriend.” She ripped a piece of her dress, and handed it to me. “Here, use this to clot the blood. I’m sorry, Tinhorn; I mistook you for some other Asshole who knew better.”

“Don’t worry. I’m fine,” I said, feeling grateful to have her dress to bleed on instead of my indie rocker T-shirt. Seizing the opportunity to gain the help of a local, I asked, “What didn’t I know better than?”

She read me like a book. “Never you mind. I got better things to do than wet nurse a couple of greenhorns.”

“Maybe if you help us,” Maggie suggested, “we could help you get some cows, so you don’t have to play characters you don’t want to play.”

Betty studied Maggie inquisitively. “Now what makes you say something as nice and sugar-dipped as that, Greenhorn?”

“Storysold moments,” she replied cheerfully. “You help my story, and I help yours; I scratch your belly, you scratch mine. Storyselling isn’t as hard as it seems. It’s The Golden Rule in action.”

Betty slapped her knee. “Shit, she catches on quick. Don’t she?”

“Yes, yes, she does,” I agreed as I held my hand out and open, like a good Eager Beaver, and introduced myself.

Betty ignored me. “Supposin’ I help you? Where do you and your Tinhorn plan to find cows in a city floatin’ in the ocean?”

“We’ll have Chester ship them in,” Maggie offered. “Then we’ll help you head em’ up and move em’ out in true cowboy style.”

“Listen Maggie,” Cowboy Betty smiled sadly. “I like you. You got spirit, but I think I better get my own cows. Developing a cattle scene in the middle of the ocean is harder than you think.”

“It can’t be any harder than on the mainland.”

“Here you got to own the land your cows graze on, every inch of it. Here ink pen and paper signatures don’t mean poppy-squat unless you sign the land itself with the dirt in your nails, seal the deal with the sweat of your brow, and show you own it with the work of your hands. Here you got to own the land like it was kin, and develop an honest-to-god relationship with every rock and tree, every blade of grass, every worm hole and rat hole in your plot. Here you can’t get away with the kind of bullshit the landowners get away with on the mainland. You can’t round up your good ole boys, hand them guns, pound out stakes, and claim it’s yours—‘just because.’ You got to prove that you own your plot with your living, breathing, bleeding signature.”

She paused to read our blank faces and laughed loud. “See what I mean? I like your spirit, Maggie dear, but never you mind about helping me get cows. You’re too green to be of any real help. And that’s all there is. I’ll get my cows someday. In the meantime, how about I help you for a spell in exchange for busting your Tinhorn’s nose?”

“How many monetary moments will that get us?” Maggie asked.

“Chap my hide!” she cheered. “This winged filly sure catches on quick!” Then she paused, and said, “By my run of things, I figure I owe you as many moments as my PG-rated violence caused him distress.”

“Why don’t we say that the period of my distress was from the time you clocked me until my nose stops bleeding?” I offered, trying to sound as hip to Storysold as Maggie.

“I reckon that’s a fair read,” Betty agreed.

Just then a woman on a bike rode into the scene and handed Betty a well-worn cowboy hat. After a brief exchange the woman rode away.

We stared blankly at Betty (wondering what that was all about)—until she explained, “She bet that I’d pay just about anyone, anything right now to have my hat. And she was right. I’ll be sanding cabinets with her tomorrow to balance the hat-fetching scene she did today.”

“Did you know that woman?” I asked.

“Never done a scene with her in my life,” she answered and turned her attention back to Maggie. “Now, where were we?”

“We could use your help rustling up some dinner.”

“OK,” she agreed. “Do you Greenhorns know what you want?”

“How about some burgers,” I said, rubbing my belly again. “We want one meatless burger for her, a beef one for me, a basket of fries and a milkshake with a cherry on top. I’m sure that’ll ease my suffering.”

Betty rolled her eyes. “Like I said, owning range land for cattle isn’t easy here. If you’re after meat, you’ll have to settle for chicken, fish, or maybe venison if you can find a venture hunter to serve you. Or if you can stomach the rabbit food, there are lots of storybankers around who produce a variety of tasty, finger-licking veggie burgers.”   

“Let’s do that,” Maggie said boldly.   

“Shouldn’t we try to find a hamburger?” I protested.

“I thought you were starving!” Maggie shot back.

“I am,” I agreed, struggling to maintain the upper hand. “But if I’m being coerced to eat rabbit food, we should go. And go now.”

“Alright then,” Betty said, heading up the stairway. “Let’s Go Now, as you say. I know a cool dude on the sixteenth level named Buddha. His Nirvana Burgers are the best fresh, factory-free veggie burgers in town.”   

As we climbed the stairway up, low hanging clouds formed around us, becoming thicker with every step. Through the holes in the clouds I saw the massive, leafless Antenna Trees swaying stiffly along the rim of Center Stage. They reminded me that our signatures were being broadcasted out for any of the thousands of storybankers in the city to see.

After our talk with Betty, I began to worry that our all-American cover stories were a smidge underdeveloped in contrast to the inspiring super star stories that were being developed on Center Stage.

We climbed—level six, level seven, level eight, and on…

“This is a real bun burner,” I said. “Wouldn’t you say, Apple Pie?”

Maggie ignored me. She turned to Betty. “Are you going to be a Cowboy now, even without the cows?”

“Not sure,” Betty replied. “Before I traded in my inheritance for a storybank account, I’d never left White Fish. My father’s still alive. He plays Bingo in the best memory care home in Montana. We split up his fortune after a doctor diagnosed him with dementia. He was using his cable cords to lock his house shut by day, and crawling out his windows at night, trying to run from his make-believe burglars. It was sad. I said we should take him into the wild and shoot him—give him a merciful death. Anything was better than ripping him up by the roots and watching him die like flowers in a vase. But my older brother was granted the power of attorney and decided that a group home was the best place for my dad to die. That’s when I washed my hands of the deal. I broke up with my yahoo chew-spitting bartender boyfriend, and I lit out for anywhere but White Fish, Montana.

“I ended up in Portland, where I met Punk Girl. After a few nights of whooping it up, Punk turned me on to Westonton. A month later, I lit out for the ocean to find Chester Weston. Shit, you should’ve seen me. I was greener than green. I knew how to ride horses around barrels; I knew how to drink whiskey; I knew how to fight boys on Fridays nights, and I knew how to wipe my brow with a bandana when I was hot, but I’d never owned a cow. Until I came here and opened a storybank account like you two baby birds, I didn’t know how much sand it took to actually become a real cowboy…

“There’s nothing romantic about cows. Cows are cows. They eat, shit, sleep, and cry for attention. If I’d wanted that sort of thing, I would’ve settled down with a man. It’s shameful, but I didn’t realize it until I tried to make an honest living, trying to be a real Cowboy. It took a lot of effort, honest-to-god trying to be, before I got it. I wasn’t a Cowboy. I was just another dumb ass who believed my own bullshit. I was a joke, Betty the Cowless Cowboy. Ha, friggin’ ha! I was the laughing stock of The City. Everyone, but me, thought I was producing a comedy. I was so angry, but there was no one to blame but me. It was right there in my storybank account. I was a fool. Instead of giving up, I got wise and bought myself some cows.”

“What happened to them?” I asked, trying to get in on the action.

“Long story short,” Cowboy Betty replied, “my neighbors, the New Market Pioneers—a damn profitable theme of farmers, grassland growers, dirt devils, and cabbageheads—hired a wicked scene slinging pest control operator named Wilderness Security Guide. They opened The Bio-Friendly Range War on Cowboy Betty…and I lost. My cows are lining their stomachs now.”

“Is that how you came to play Betty the Belle?” Maggie asked.

“You could say that,” Betty chucked. “Gambler’s Gambler, but his cast is split into two distinct themes—New Market Pioneers and American Dreamstates. Before The Range War, I was the biggest Fan of The American Dreamstates of America and the Band, especially Uncle Sam. When the smoke of The Range War cleared, I wasn’t in good with anyone. Gambler was the first to ‘go all in,’ invest in what little story I had left, and put an end to my downward spiral into emotional bankruptcy, or worse. I guess you could say he went a little too far in, because I fell madly in love with him.

“He was right. Belle was my idea. I thought it’d make him happy if I could prove to him, and everyone at the Saloon, that I wasn’t a ‘howling nightmare.’ I wanted to be sociable and refined, poker-faced and cool like Gambler. I wanted my story to be ‘well put together’ like Rosy’s.” Then Betty slapped Maggie on the back, and said, “But to hell with all that! With or without cows, Cowboy Betty’s back! And if you don’t like her, then…” She unbuttoned the hatch of her red knickers and mooned Center Stage. “Then you all can kiss my sweet candy ass!”

It sure wasn’t Hollywood drama. I had no idea what was going to happen next. That was a rare commodity indeed seeing how most of the stories I’d watched in my lifetime were marketably predicable: the lovers fell in love and the bad guys got it in The End. The beauty of Betty’s scene was that the producer of her signature story didn’t know what was going to happen next either. And that made for good drama. Where was she taking us? Who was she really? Did she enjoy long walks on the beach, or snorting blow in bathrooms with the Sons of Satan? In any case, I was hooked. I wanted to know what sort of action was in store for Cowboy Betty next…

Then again, I thought we continued up the stairs, there are benefits to never meeting the characters we meet on The Big Screen. In theaters, Boyfriends and Girlfriends can retreat into the darkness, and the Boyfriend doesn’t need to worry about his Asset befriending a man-hating cowboy named Betty. I saw it plain as day. My Asset and Cowboy Betty would exchange fragile smiles and heartbroken looks of unspoken oppression at the hands of men like Gambler and me, then—before I knew it—they’d be in cahoots. I saw the scene coming all right, but what could I do to stop them? I was only one man.

My Storybank Account – Scene Fifteen,

THE PART WHERE THE GREENHORNS WALK THE EIGHT FOLD AISLES TO BECOME UNENHUNGERED…

Cowboy Betty stopped in front of a curtain made from strings and bottle caps, which blocked the view into a dimly lit stage shop. “Oh I hope Buddha’s in,” she said and smiled as she parted the curtain.

Inside, eight salvaged bookshelves were arranged in rows with their ends facing us like in a mainland convenience store. Betty pointed at her feet. A line was painted on the floor, along with the words: BEGIN THE EIGHT-FOLD AISLES TO A NIRVANA BURGER HERE. Beside the starting line was a table displaying a shrine and a statue of the Buddha. His belly had a ring on it with a sign that read: PULL ME. I had no reason not to, and I was tired of following Cowboy Betty, so I pulled it. The Buddha statue said, “Follow my storyline along the Eight-Fold Aisles to Nirvana Burgers that are guaranteed to leave even the hungriest seekers wholly unenhungered.”

The offer sounded good in spite of its odd sales pitch. Ten out of ten people who’ve really known Capital-H Hunger agree that hunger can play tricks on your mind. Real Hunger will make you do crazy things that you wouldn’t normally do like work in a smelly shoe factory, or wash your boss’s car, or walk the Eight Fold Aisles for a Nirvana Burger.

The backside of the first bookshelf had a colorful mural depicting our journey’s beginning, using abstract Buddhist symbolism and an arrow with a caption that instructed us to pick a basket from a stack located at the bottom of the mural. We followed the instructions like kindergarteners with crayons, and rounded the first fold in the path to face the first of seven aisles that were lined with shelves. The first was labeled BUNS, and its shelves were stocked with a variety of buns stored in bins set around a Storysold: TV. Betty lifted a bin lid. As she did, the screen sprung to life and showed us a bun-making scene starring a tattooed hip-hop storybanker who introduced herself as “Biscuits.” She rapped free-style through her scene, claiming her “muthaphuckkin dough” was “legit” and “factory free” from “thugs and haters that don’t represent.” It ended when Biscuits dropped her Big Buns off in the bin that Betty had opened. We both agreed she was too cliched for our tastes, so we walked to another bin further down the aisle and opened its lid. Again, the TV flashed on, and we watched as a storybanker in a red, white, and blue Day-Glow jumpsuit named “American Spirit” narrated her bun-making scene with the help of Donald her pet chimpanzee. “Speak Donald, speak!” Spirit prompted, but her monkey just stood, chest (and lower lip) out, trying to look presidential. Then Spirit presented a little chunk of dough, as a “treat,” and repeated the prompt to speak. Donald suddenly became irate, chattering, jumping, and clawing at the treat, until Spirit finally relented and fed him the dough. Maggie and Betty laughed so loud and hard at Spirit’s dialogue with her idiot monkey that Maggie had to close the lid and turn it off in order to catch her breath.

After previewing a few more bun-making scenes, we put our buns of choice in our baskets, rounded the corner, and strolled into the second aisle, which was labeled, REUSABLE PACKAGING. In this fold, instead of lifting lids we used red buttons fixed to the shelves in front of the goods to activate the TV. When pushed, the red buttons displayed their corresponding work scene. Most of the goods looked like the usual square fast-food cartons one would find on the mainland. However, none of them were produced from expendable paper, cardboard, plastic, or any strange foam that was made to be thrown away. It didn’t take me long to find the packaging that fit my hipster character best. Why? I didn’t know exactly. It was just cool. It was in the shape of a giant clam. It had been carved from driftwood by a kind-eyed man named Boone, who we later learned was Dan of the New Market Pioneer theme. He looked weathered and worn by a life fully lived, and he introduced himself carefully, explaining that he gave his fortune worth many millions to Weston in exchange for a storybank account, because the one thing he wanted in his retirement was to run an “good old-fashioned woodshop”—like the one on This Old House—where he could putter around without the time constrains of “the rat race,” make things out of wood, and then sell them to “good-natured folks who know the value of an honest day’s work.” As Boone carved his giant-clam-shaped-burger-package-thing, he explained that he could have bought a woodshop anywhere, but he couldn’t find anywhere where folks understood the value of an honest day’s work. He explained that selling his woodworks at a Retirement Community Center, or manning a table beside the Knitting Club at the annual bazaar wasn’t good enough for a man who made his first million “selling oil to the Arabs” before he was thirty. It took Mr. Chester Weston less than ten moments with Boone on Center Stage to sell him what became An Honest Day’s Woodshop in Island Market Eight’s Residential Shopping Center. Before the end of the woodworking scene Boone made it clear that after he’d “settled up with Buddha,” he’d never buy a Nirvana Burger again, claiming that they made him “shit every hour, on the hour.” It seemed that Boone meant what he said, but it also seemed that he was equally as serious about the quality of his signature in spite of his distaste for Buddhism.   

The next aisle was labeled CONDIMENTS. Once again, we used the red buttons to activate the Storyclock: TV and sample the condiment scenes. Then we put our buns in our new packaging and smeared on our chosen condiments before we continued along the Eight Fold Aisles to the aisle labeled TOPPINGS. There we surfed through the production scenes, chose our favorites, and then piled on the toppings. Next, we rounded the fifth fold to face a pair of refrigerators, standing side by side, sandwiching a Storybank: TV on a classic TV dinner stand. Inside we found PATTIES, and many interesting patty-making scenes that demonstrated the labor-intensive process of making factory-free veggie patties. I was curious to know how they held their veggies together (and made it look like a real meat patty), but I was hungry, so I moved on to the next fold and aisle six, which was labeled: CANONIZE YOUR BURGER. There we spent a few clips frying our patties on a grubby rebuilt electric range under the ever watchful eye of another Buddha statue. When canonization was complete, I closed the lid of my Giant Clam Package and rounded the seventh fold into an aisle that had a screen flashing a collage of advertising scenes: one ad scene for every storybanker in the city who’d reached unenhungerment there. Most of them were holding up their Nirvana Burgers, licking their lips, and saying, “Yum!” It was a signature ritual we decided to pass forward by pressing a button and posing for the A-eye on the shelf as we took turns holding our burgers up, licking our lips, and saying, “Yum!” And that was how we authorized our purchase—with our goofy, grinning signatures. Like I said: hunger makes you do crazy things.

The eighth and final fold was following the storyline to another bottle-cap-beaded curtain and the Buddha himself.   

“Hey!” Cowboy hollered. “You in there, partner?”

“Ommm,” said a voice. “Ommm…”

“Hey Buddha! It’s Cowboy Betty. I’m back, and I let these Greenhorns tag along, and we wanna eat our burgers in your presence.”

“Ommm,” said the voice again. “Ommm…”

“Jesus, he must be sleeping,” she said, walking beyond the curtain as she hollered. “Wake yourself, Fat Man! Our burgers are getting cold!”

We moved the curtain aside so we could see. There was Buddha on a platform, round as his statues, holding his arms up and out—English tea fingers, legs crossed—wearing a pair of Elvis sunglasses, looking unmoved as a rock in what appeared to be a deep meditation.

“As far as I know,” Betty whispered, “Buddha’s the only person on earth who can meditate and sleep at the same time…” She walked up to him, cupped her hands to his ear, and hollered, “Hello, anybody home?”

“Harrumph,” he mumbled, snapping out of it. “Aw, Betty. It’s nice to see you came to your senses and brought the Cowboy back.”

“How were your dreams?” she asked.

“Deep indeed,” he replied. “I was in a thick forest, with trees, and mossy logs. Then I saw a logger with a shaved head. He was wearing an orange robe. He began cutting a big tree with the side of his hand: whack, whack, then crack it began to fall, fall, slowly to the ground…Then wow! magic! the logger vanished, poof! Holy flash! And I realized that I wasn’t really there either. I saw myself meditating miles and miles away here in my shop—far from the tree and the spot of ground where it was going to land…I was far away awaiting the Truth…Was the tree going to fall silently when nobody was around, or was it going to fall with the same-old earth-shattering thud? I waited, miles away, meditating on Not Being There as the tree continued to fall, and fall, and…”

“Get to it!” Betty broke in. “We’re starving here man!”

“Shazam! The tree made a sound,” Buddha continued, unfazed. “And the tree that fell alone in the forest sounded like…”

He took a breath, and hollered—“Hello, anybody home?”

Roaring with laughter, Buddha rubbed his belly, saying, “Now we’ll never know the Truth! Thanks, Betty! No Truth for any of you! That will teach you fools to mess with My Enlightenment when I’m meditating.”

“You were asleep,” Betty laughed. “That’s the same stale story you told me when I strolled in cow-eyed and hungry years ago.”

“Oh, enhungered one.” He nodded at us, and whispered, “Look how pleased your Greenhorns appear now that I’ve told my stale old story.”

He was right. Maggie and I were entertained. The story was terrible, but Buddha’s outpouring of energy and laugher was infectious.

“Can we eat our burgers now?” I asked, opening my Giant Clam.

“Can you eat your burgers?” Buddha roared with laughter. “How in hell do I know? You followed the Eight Fold Aisles, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I replied. “We followed your instructions exactly.”

“Then you found your bliss? Your Nirvana Burger?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “I haven’t tried it yet.”

“Hold it out, so I can see it.”

I held it out as Buddha leaned forward and inquisitively removed his shades. “Yes. That there’s a Nirvana Burger.”

“I know,” I said, getting hot under the collar. “But, like I said, I have no way of knowing whether it’ll unenhunger me, or not.”

Buddha nodded his head. “Take it from me,” he said. “That’s the most enlightened burger you’ll ever own, I guarantee it.”

“How can you be so certain? I’ve eaten thousands of burgers.”

Buddha looked me in the eyes, and said, “Meditate for a moment and imagine how much it would suck if you spent your life journeying along the Eight Fold Aisles to that Nirvana Burger…and it wasn’t enlightened. What if it filled your gut like any old wholly unenlightened burger assembled by a poor employable you didn’t know? Now wouldn’t that suck?”

“Yes,” I agreed, eyeing my burger. “I suppose that would suck.”

Then I took a bite of Nirvana as scenes from The Eight Fold Aisles filled my mind with all the characters, settings, and props that went into making that bite happen. As I chewed (with my mouth open), I said, “Not bad. I think next time I take the Eight Aisles to unenhungerment I’ll skip Hugo’s Special Sauce. It’s too sweet. But, wow. This burger is great.”

“It’s not too sweet for Hugo’s taste,” Maggie replied.

I ignored her comment. I was busy not listening to anything but the sound of my teeth grinding big things into smaller things.

Before we left the shop, we bought a few more items of importance from the Stage Stocking Grocer. Buddha called them “storybank account cards,” and they looked like old market credit cards. On the face of our new storybank cards Buddha wrote: FIRST TIME NIRVANA BURGERS FOR MAGGIE and the same for mine, except it read WYLIE. Buddha explained that he would “love if it blissed us out” to balance our new storybank accounts and become cast members of Nirvana Burgers, a theme of storybankers he naturally called “Buddhists.” We weren’t in a position to disagree. We’d already walked the Aisles, assembled our burgers, and eaten them. Buddha’s marketing strategy reminded me of casinos: they make going in easy, but they make the getting out as difficult as possible. We now owed some rando calling himself Buddha “equal storytime for equal storytime worked,” payable in whatever work scenes we “Buddhists” were inspired to produce, so long as the moments we minted were on Buddha’s personal shopping list.

“OK!” Betty exclaimed. “That’s it. I’ve had enough for one day. I’m going to crack the whiskey I’ve been saving for a rainy day.” She shook our hands, then turned to me and said: “Sorry again about your nose, but since I don’t see any new signs of suffering…I’ll be seeing you.”

Then she walked away, howling at the moon rising overhead.    

Funny thing. As we hiked back to the Guest Nest through the glow of lamplight in the Wild Garden Arena, I remembered our plan for dinner. We’d managed to find a couple of burgers, but we didn’t hunt down a basket of fries and a strawberry rhubarb milkshake with two straws and a cherry on top, and we didn’t look longingly into each other’s eyes. That filled me with a sense of failure. I didn’t think The Mission demanded it. Not really. We could do other things to maintain our Boyfriend and Girlfriend roles. We didn’t have to slurp a milkshake As One Flesh to maintain our cover story. We could walk in a park at nightfall through the glow of lamplight. I was bummed because I was hoping I’d have a chance to look longingly into Maggie’s eyes, and mean it.

My Storybank Account – Scene Sixteen,

THE PART WHERE CO-WORKERS HAVE THEIR FIRST BIG FIGHT AS BOYFRIEND AND GIRLFRIEND…

That evening, Traveler met us at the Guest Nest with more snacks in case we weren’t able to buy dinner. And thank god: my Nirvana Burger was good, but I was still hungry.

As I played with my empty Clam Package and ate Traveler’s snacks she gave us another quick period of instruction on the operations of the Guest Nest’s Storysold: TV. Our storybanking lesson lasted about as long as it took us to pick the snacks clean. Then she left—once again claiming that Mainstay had a lot of swabbing to do on the Storytime Machine.   

As soon as we were alone, Maggie flopped on the couch, wrapped her arms around her knees, and stared at the moon rising in the distance. I waited like a cat for the right moment, and causally sat beside her. Then, more out of habit than anything, I scooped up the remote for the rebuilt dinosaur TV and pressed the ON button…

The MAIN MENU popped up, and gave us some options:

1. LOGIN TO YOUR STORYSOLD CHANNEL
2. LOGIN TO YOUR STORYSOLD ACCOUNT
3. SURF THE STORYSOLD EXCHANGE
4. CONTACT A LOCAL STORYBANKER
5. SEARCH YOUR ADDRESS BOOK
6. BALANCE YOUR ACCOUNT
7. EDIT YOUR ACCOUNT

I used the arrows to highlight option 1, then I pressed the ENTER button. I was presented with a login window. Next I used the remote’s keypad to enter my storybanking address, pressed the AUTHORIZE SIGNATURE button, and I watched my signature pop up on the screen. There I was, once again, watching my signature watch me in a third person perspective. At the top of the screen was a toolbar with a block icon labeled: PRIVACY. I highlighted it and moved the cursor down, clicked PRIVATE, and watched my channel go fuzzy, blocked from view, with a screen full of buzzing white noise.

I prompted Maggie to do the same. Reluctantly, after a few well-placed lines of positive reinforcement from her supervisor, Maggie took the remote in hand and changed her live action channel from PUBLIC to PRIVATE. When our channel 25474 and 25475 were both blocked and fuzzy, Maggie scooted as far away from me as she could be, and still be on the couch.

“I’m not that bad. Am I?” I joked.

She didn’t answer. Instead she took the card Buddha had sold her, inserted it into a slot on the side of the Storysold: TV, and returned to the MAIN MENU to login to her storybank account. After she followed the steps that were required to open it, a screen opened with new menu. She pressed the MAKE A DEPOSIT icon—and a pop up asked, WHERE DO YOUR MOMENTS BELONG? It listed three options: SUPPORTING CAST, STOCK CHARACTERS, and COMMON THEMES. Maggie chose the first option and a digital image of a storyclock appeared with three hands spinning around the hundred monetary moments marked on its face, indicating that the Storysold: TV was busily transferring burger-assembly scenes from the account card and depositing them into The Storysold Exchange. When it was done the TV gave her an option to label which of her cast members had deposited moments into her account. Maggie typed in Buddha’s name and economic role, then she pressed the ENTER button to view her SUPPORTING CAST menu. The only cast member listed was: 1. BUDDHA THE STAGE-STOCKING GROCER…$156.00 mms owed for FIRST TIME NIRVANA BURGERS FOR MAGGIE. It seemed easy enough, but I didn’t like it. Why? I had no idea why at the time, but I think it had something to do with the fact that I’d been banking in black-and-white digit-o-dollars since I was ten, and Maggie appeared to lose her herself in the new qualitative based storybanking system like a big kid with a new video game. I wouldn’t be as worried if she used The Storysold System off the clock to escape reality like a proper couch potato. What worried me was the possibility that, unlike TV shows or sports, the storybanking system of “entertainment” offered its users a permanent place to escape to…

And that realization really put The Fear in me.

“You owe him almost a full day for a lousy burger!” I cried.

“I also bought a Storysold card, a reusable food package, and we also spent a lot of time chatting in his enlightened presence.”

“He charged us for that? I thought Buddha was supposed to have found a way to transcend the suffering of the world—not impose it!”

Maggie double clicked on FIRST TIME NIRVANA BURGERS FOR MAGGIE, and another menu popped up with two options: 1. PROOF OF CAPITAL INVESTMENTS -and- 2. PROOF OF PROFIT. The first showed proof of the moments invested (like Hugo’s special sauce making scene) that Buddha had bought from his cast of Buddhists, then stocked (or had stocked) along the Eight Fold Aisles. The second showed Buddha’s storytime profits: the clips, scenes, and moments Buddha had produced himself, like his stocking scenes, aisle-cleaning scenes, bill-consolidation scenes, customer-service scenes (producing his wisdom and infectious cheer), and so on. Maggie clicked at the capital investment icon, and pressed PLAY. The TV came to life with the first in a long series of scenes. I recognized the first one as the bun-making scene produced by American Spirit and her pet monkey Donald. On the upper left-hand corner of the screen the storyclock displayed the value in mms of the scenes shown. Maggie pressed FAST-FORWARD and the digital display sped rapidly from $00:03 mms to $00:12 mms. We were now watching Spirit mid-scene, the part where she slapped Donald’s hands every time he made a move for her dough balls rising near her wood-fired oven.

After watching the making of our Nirvana Burgers awhile, it became clear that the contributing Buddhists had edited their scenes to show only the parts in their production stories where they were actually working, so the flow of moments displayed on the screen was choppy, cutting moment to moment, clip to clip—as needed—to provide accountable proof of their work.

Every once in a while, Maggie pressed PLAY and we’d watch a scene that caught her eye. Otherwise, we continued to fast-forward from $00:12 to $101:45 where our familiar scene on the Eight Fold Aisle concluded. Then it moved on to account-card-making scenes produced by a skinny middle-aged Buddhist in a blue mechanics jumpsuit. His account card-manufacturing scene was fascinating. He reformed the plastic himself. I didn’t know it was possible to recycle or reform plastic by hand. I thought plastic manufacturing was the reason why humans invented big machines. But there he was—Blue Suit the Nanotech Mechanic, using a magnifying glass and tweezers to piece the tiny parts of our Storysold account cards together. When we were done watching, Maggie pressed FAST FORWARD and we arrived at $153:34 mms, or the part where the capital-investment scenes ended.

Try as I might, I couldn’t argue with Maggie’s observation that Buddha’s cast of unenhungered Buddhists had proven (beyond a reasonable doubt) that they had done their jobs. They’d accounted for all the capital they’d produced in support of our two, mouthwatering Nirvana Burgers. Maggie said that she felt better knowing that somebody somewhere had done something to earn the money we owed. I wasn’t as impressed. Seemed to me like a good way of cheating corporate persons out of their rightful cut of the profits.

Next, she clicked the PROOF OF PROFIT icon and we watched Buddha the Stage-Stocking Grocer perform his work scenes in much the same spirit as a mainland grocer, distributor, or warehouse worker. Buddha lifted, rolled, and heaved large boxes and sacks, and did the kind of aspirin-popping labor that’s usually associated with developing a diversity of goods all stocked in one conveniently staged location. For his services, Buddha minted precisely “two, and sixty-six clips,” or $02:66 mms (about forty-one minutes) worth of work: specifically, clips from his mural-painting scenes, shrine-stove-cleaning scenes, a couple of clips of him stocking and facing the Eight Fold Aisles, and of course his enlightened customer service dialogue.

“Darn,” I said when Buddha’s proof-of-profit scenes faded out. “I wanted to see the part where he humped his goods to his shop.”

I was joking, but Maggie said, “You’re right. We didn’t see those scenes. I’m sure we owe someone something for running around Westonton gathering our goods for us.”

I stared at my Cover Girlfriend like she was a post, and said, “The Enlightened One must have decided to have mercy and cut us a deal after he robbed us stupid for over a day and a half of our lives!”   

She shook her head in disbelief. “You’ve obviously never worked for minimum wage a day in your life.”

“No,” I said, “I haven’t. My motto has always been, ‘Work smarter not harder.’ Smart people don’t waste their lives in quickie marts collecting cash for the smart person who owns the business.”   

That line didn’t go over well. Maggie stood, and said, “For some people, working smarter means not working hard at all.”

“Smart people work hard, too.”

“So do dumb people.”

“Listen,” I said, feeling a little flustered. “I earned my money.”

“Because, apparently, ‘independently wealthy hipster journalists’ like you are smarter than quickie mart employees like me?”

“No,” I shot back. “I deserve my pay, because I bettered myself by investing in a college education.”

“Going to school is a cake walk compared to The Streets. The only thing that’s required to succeed in school is the will to learn, and the money to pay for it. You’re crazy if you think you deserve your wealth because your parents were able to pay your tuition.”

“My parents are poor, first-generation Americans,” I said, standing as I rolled my shoulders back. “I paid my own way through school.”

Maggie’s eyes widened as she smiled and said, “Oh really…”

  Realizing that I’d just broke character, I cleared my throat and cooked up more fiction in support of The Mission: “I mean, I paid my way through school working as a part-time barback and sorority house boy…Uh…because I wanted to, one day, stand in the corporate board room of my family’s business and tell the Union Rep that I’d paid my way too…”

When I was done bullshitting, Maggie said, “That was the worst recovery ever. You’re lucky our channels are blocked.”

“Oh wow, that was a close one! Can you imagine what would have happened if that had aired?” I said, still secretly sweating it. I wasn’t worried about breaking character on The Air. I knew our channels were blocked. I was worried about breaking the cover story I was selling Maggie.

Maggie studied me. “Yes. That would have been bad.” She paused. “That’s why, in the spirit of maintaining our cover story, we should find the storybankers who packed our ingredients up to Buddha’s shop and pay them equal time for equal time worked in the interest of The Mission.”

“You think that’s The Mission?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Do what you like…” I said, attempting to reclaim ground I wasn’t sure I ever owned. “I’m going to start ramping up for my Pulitzer Prize-winning article on Mr. Chester Weston.”

“I’m not OK with that,” she shot back. “If we’re going to make this cover story work, then we should learn to do our jobs as storybankers first before we do anything else.”   

“Listen,” I replied hotly. “I’m in charge here, not you.”

“Why?”

“Because I have the training that’s required to lead The Mission. You don’t even have the training of a high school graduate.”

“I refuse to go on like this,” she said, walking to the window.

“Go on like what?” I replied, following behind her.

“Like this,” she shouted. “I hate this peek-a-boo bullshit game.”

“This ‘bullshit game’ is why we’re here.”

“Level with me, Wylie,” she said in a more tender tone. “What are we doing? I mean, really…why were we sent here?”

Suddenly I was struck by a wave of panic. “You want to know what’s going on?” I replied. “Lots of couples do it. It’s called fighting. Usually it’s what happens before someone gets hurt.”   

Maggie’s eyes widened with an uneasy mix of shock and awe as she said, “I don’t know what I saw in you. This is a mistake.”

“Say what you want,” I replied, taking a step in her direction, “but remember: We’re in this together. If I go down, you go down too.”

“Was that a threat?” she shouted. “If you dare threaten me, again, I’m walking. You can play spy all by yourself Roger Ramjet.”

I put my fingers to my lips and whispered, “Shush! What if someone walks in right now our covers would be blown for sure!”

At that moment, I wished I had taken more advanced courses in Asset Manipulation as I folded to her neatly packaged counter-threat threat. “Alright you win,” I said, blowing in like a tropical breeze. “I was wrong to threaten you like that. You know, we never did find that milkshake. What do you say we try again tomorrow? My treat.”

She closed her eyes firmly, and then opened them again. “I’m going to bed,” she said. “If you come within five feet of this bed, I will break you and throw your sad broken body to the sharks.”

“Yeah, well…” I said, searching for an equally vile comeback. “I’m going to take a monster shit…and you can’t stop me.”

Thus ended Our First Big Fight…with a monster shit. I was too busy wrestling the beast from my bowels to focus on much else, but I thought I heard Maggie laughing to herself before she pulled her blankets over her head and went to bed. I stayed up most the night at the window looking out, trying to think positive thoughts like winners do. I wanted to believe that The Mission was still under my control. I wanted to believe Maggie would come around to meeting our performance expectations; I wanted to believe that I was OO7 man enough to make my bond girl follow me anywhere.

My Storybank Account – Scene Seventeen,

THE PART WHERE MAGGIE RUNS AWAY AGAIN AND WYLIE WONDERS IF HE MISSES HER LIKE DOLLARS…

I woke the next morning twisted like an avalanche victim in a pile of blankets on the floor, five feet from Maggie’s bed. Once I found my way out, I stood in my boxer shorts, scratched, stretched, and yawned like a jungle cat waking to rule his pride. In that instant, my old gut instinct decided (with some reservations) that I was going to be a benevolent boss and forgive my Asset for fighting with me. “Good morning sleepyhead,” I said as I crossed the defensive perimeter of her bed. “I’ve decided to surrender.”

As I moved closer to her bed, I felt a sudden urge to curl beside her under the blankets and lose myself in the touch of her skin.

I peeked under the blankets, and asked, “Can you hear me under there? I said I surrender.” I waited. There was no reply.

I lifted the blanket higher and saw a pillow. “Rise and shine,” I said as I peeled the blankets back—only to find another pillow. That’s when I realized it’d been had. I threw the blankets off, and stared at the neat row of pillows set there to fool me. “No!” I cried, as The Fear crept in.

When I was calm enough to move again, I walked over to the TV, turned it on, tuned to my channel, switched it to PUBLIC, and then I sprinted across the room, threw myself on the bed, buried my head in a pillow, and performed my best heartbroken American Boyfriend. As I clenched my fists in rage, I channeled Honest Abe. There was nothing more heartbreaking than the moment when a man realizes he’s lost half of his indivisible union.

I lifted my head from my pillow, and cried, “Oh shit! Oh shit! Some villain has stolen my sweet Apple Pie!”

This should have been a routine performance. Nobody climbs as high up The Ladder of Success as I had without knowing how to meet my performance expectations with a measure of theatric flare, but I had a hard time getting into character. I knew how it was supposed to go. In movies, this scene—the one where my loving maiden is kidnapped, stabbed, poisoned, or shot dead—cues the next scene where I clench my fists in rage, swear my revenge, and go to war with the villain. I was supposed to shed a tear (or two), and then dash off, guns blazing, to rescue her from a human hive of a thousand bad guys. The problem was, there was no clear Bad Guy to subdue. The result was nothing. No call to duty. No righteous rush to action. Just nothing, because I knew my job was to be the Good Guy—and good guys can’t be blamed for making their Girlfriends runaway. It didn’t work that way. All I knew, as I cried “Vengeance!” face down in her pillows, was that Maggie was in The Wrong for running away from her duty, not me. She needed to be rescued from herself, for her own good and the good of The Mission. Oh if only she knew how much The American People loved her! I cried inside. She would love us too.

Once I’d straightened my performance expectations out, I manned the couch and tuned our Storysold: TV to Maggie’s channel. I was surprised that she wasn’t blocking her signature from my view. It was open to everyone like it was the first night on the Time Machine. I won’t lie. I was a little disappointed when I saw that my Asset wasn’t tied up and dangling over lava. That would have been so much easier to deal with.

Best as I could tell, she was somewhere on the hot, sunlit Garden Surface of an Island Market. My Girlfriend was standing in a field of head-high sugarcane, wearing a pair of purple corduroy pants rolled to her knees and one of my indie rock T-shirts, which she’d stolen like the books she stole when she ran away from her adopted parents. It was one of my favorite indie rock T-shirts by Rage Against the Machine. But that wasn’t what really got me. In one hand, she held a sugarcane. In the other she held a long menacing harvest blade with a handle wrapped in thick leather straps, which she used to cut the plant down in the prime of its life. Then Maggie tossed the dying plant in a pile she was making in a harvest scene she was producing with a group of characters who appeared like they’d been transported from The Wild West. My mind failed to process any of that information at the time. Instead I chose to fixate on her shoes, or lack of them. She was barefoot laboring in the equatorial sun without her proper safety equipment on. “Where’s your shoes, sweetie?” I shouted at the screen like a football game. “Remember safety first!”

The young woman beside her—who I later learned had named herself “Half Pint”—wore a plain dress with a high collar and a scarf that she tied modestly in a bow. Her hair flowed from a sunbonnet in braids that hung down below the small of her back. She was barefoot too, and so were the other New Market Pioneers working with her.

It was weird. Maggie seemed to be the only one in scene sweating like a rock star in the lights. In spite of their long sleeves and pants, I didn’t see a drop of sweat on the faces, or armpits, of the characters working as a “theme of storybankers” to harvest sugarcane, make piles, and transport them by bike and wagon into the next scene where a burly one-armed New Pioneer named Stumpy was crushing the sugar piles. Stumpy was handsome. He had man sized pectorals, doe eyes, and hairless skin like the actors you’d see in deodorant commercials. He was wearing a rolled-up bandana and a pair of cut-off jeans, and he was muscling a long, wooden pole fixed to a flat wheel around in circles. The Pioneers riding their bike-and-wagons into his work scene cheered for, talked with, and poured attention on their friend Stumpy while they dropped their piles under his wheel. When Stumpy was done crushing the cane to pulp, other Pioneers moved the pulp to the next nearby scene, where still more wild western lookalikes were tending fires under a number of caldrons. Stumpy reacted to his friends’ cheers like an Olympic champion competing to beat his best work, a score I’m sure his fellow New Pioneers knew well. I’m sure they knew it well, but I watched on like I was watching an alien sport.

Nobody talked in the theme’s work scene. Maggie, Half Pint, and the other characters worked in rhythm with each other. It was an unfamiliar scene to watch, an orchestra of spontaneously coordinated actions, which stood in contrast to the usual broken beat of individuals managed in teams. Every so often, they would quicken the pace like it was the upbeat of a soundtrack that lifted their spirits. The scene was inspiring, but I couldn’t help but wonder: How did she do that? I mean, we’d had just arrived…now she was harvesting sugarcane with the lost tribe of extras from The Little House on The Prairie. How was she qualified to do what she was doing so effortlessly?

Moments later, eyes still glued to the screen, I watched as one of the Pioneers called “Cut!” and the theme took a water break. During the break, my Girlfriend turned to Half Pint, and asked, “I’m looking for a new home. Does anyone here know where I might find a Realtor?”

When Half Pint, and a few other eavesdroppers, heard that they broke into wild laughter. “We know you’re in virgin territory,” Half Pint explained warmly. “That’s why we invited you to join our scene. We wanted to see if you had what it takes to stake out a home in our theme.”

Half Pint saw that Maggie was struggling to Get It.

“Listen,” she continued, “I’m not much of a talker. And it wouldn’t hurt for you to explore more of your virgin territory before you get too hooked on any one theme. If you plant your story here a spell, one of my favorite cast members—Patricia the Daughter of Fizzy Pop Family Corporation—will be by to gather her moments worth of our sugar-production scenes. We’re probably too big of a theme to be much help to you now, but Patricia will be able to help you break ground in style. She’s amazing.”

“How long is a spell?” Maggie asked eagerly.

“Dunno,” she grinned as the theme returned to work. “The Fizzy Pop Family Corporation changes Patricia’s supply route every day, but they can only go so long without sugar. She’ll be by in her good time.”

It occurred to me, while I was watching Maggie harvest sugarcane like she meant it, that I could join her—or at least use the TV to locate her, walk to where they were working, and try my best to return her to her proper place working beside me. It also occurred to me that I’d lose power in our struggle to determine who “wore the pants in our relationship” if I ran all over God’s Green Earth every time we fought and she found some odd misdirected sense of relief in the scene of some anachronistic storyline. If I’d learned anything about being a man in charge, it was that the Man in Charge never, ever goes to the Asset. He makes his Asset come to Him. This is, unless his Asset is about to be dropped in a shark pit and or volcano.

So, I stayed where I was. In spite of the fact that it was normal for a Man in Charge of Assets to supervise from afar (many of history’s great leaders were masters at it), I felt restless. I paced. I stared out windows. I searched the Nest for food I knew wasn’t there. I even made Maggie’s bed as I watched and waited for a break, any break, in her work scene. I was amazed by Maggie’s will to work. She cut, piled, moved piles, and cut some more as I watched the sun set behind the pink clouds forming in the city’s Weather Bubbles. I wondered why Maggie didn’t work as hard for The FBI. We were paying her $78,341.25 dollars a year, after taxes. That was more money than the average, convenience store working American made in two years.

In spite of my old gut feeling, I was optimistic. I continued to spy on Maggie from afar—studying her signature for signs of toil. I wanted to see a sign, a flinch; a hint that she was acting, faking it, and only pretending to enjoy her work scene with the natives. I was desperate for any sign of self-sacrificial obedience to The Mission, because (at a glance) she appeared way too willing, too free, to be faking it like unhappy hardworking Americans do.

Finally, at twilight, the theme called it a day. The New Pioneers didn’t go all at one time, as if the great storyclock on the wall of the universe had blown and directed them all to exit stage LEFT. First one would leave, then another, then a pause, and then a few more would follow, until they’d all made  the journey home to their residential shops in one of the city’s Residential Shopping Centers, an apartment-like structure set below the waves at the heart of the city’s Island Markets. Half Pint invited Maggie to join them, but the street-style LED lamps on the Garden Surface were all flickering on and she wasn’t ready to quit yet. Maggie remained in scene, working alone, cutting and piling sugarcane in the lamplight.

Before Half Pint logged off The Storysold Exchange and walked home to make a pot of stew, she said, “The Pioneers like you, and I do too,” she said as she watched her work. “You’re welcome in our theme anytime.”

“Thanks,” Maggie smiled and paused long enough to give her new friend a big hug. “I like you too.”

“Oh,” Half Pint said as she was walking away. “Thanks for balancing out that green game piece you bought the other day.”

“What game piece?”

“Remember the garlic whip you ate in the Arena?”

“Yes, of course,” Maggie replied. “It was tasty.”

“I’m glad you liked it,” she smiled. “It was mine.”

Then Half Pint walked away whistling the theme from The Little House on The Prairie. A moment later, I tuned to Half Pint’s channel in time to watch a shaggy dog “Jack” run into scene, panting excitedly as it leapt into his human’s arms (weeks later, Maggie explained that cultural reference to me).

By the time I tuned back to Maggie’s channel, the lights from distant suns had joined The Action. I tried to be good for a clip or two, but I soon gave up my search for signs of toil, sacrifice, obedience, and submission to the will of The Mission. I was hooked like a TV addict glued to their favorite show. She was only cutting sugar cane in the starlight, but her action was hypnotic like the first shot of whiskey after a long day at work.

I know what I did next was inappropriate workplace behavior, but I did it anyway. Somehow it seemed natural. I switched my channel to PRIVATE and sprawled out on the couch, hands in boxers, and continued to watch my underling work. The watching wasn’t inappropriate so long as I was monitoring Maggie in a supervisory position—but, in that moment, it wasn’t the innocent rigors of The Mission I wanted her to obey. I wanted my subordinate to fall into my tender, loving embrace, and then, when that was done, I’d assign her to the task of feeding me grapes with her lips. “No, baby, no store bought grapes,” I’d say in the heat of passion. “Feed me the ones with love in them.”

Wish I may, wish I might, Maggie did not drop her harvest blade and run into my arms that night. Instead she submitted to the cold of night, curled up under the cloth tarps the Pioneers used for hauling, and fell asleep watching the stars dance high in the equatorial sky. The fact that she looked happy made the scene even sexier. Like I said, it was inappropriate.

My Storybank Account – Scene Eighteen,

THE PART WHERE MAGGIE MEETS THE DAUGHTER OF FIZZY POP FAMILY CORPORATION…

I was woken by the same splash of water that woke Maggie. And she was woken by a Daughter of Fizzy Pop Family Corporation who unwound a hose from a water tower that looked like a huge barrel on stilts, aimed it, and let the water flow. The youth appeared like one would expect a human hosting an incorporated character to appear. Her hair was cropped, high and tight, with no style. She wore a classic corporate short-sleeved polo shirt, which she tucked neatly into her khaki pants. On the left breast pocket of her uniform shirt was the image of a cartoon corporate person with a long, green bottle for a body and straws for hair and arms. The words above it read: MR. FIZZ.   

Maggie froze under the tarps, quiet as a mouse, as she lay listening to the rhythm of the water splash on her makeshift shelter.

“Rise and shine Maggie!” the youth sounded like a bugle announcing the beginning of the workday. “Time to greet the day!”

The tarp rose slowly like a ghost, until suddenly Maggie tossed it aside and shot out like a seedling in spring. Straight-faced, the youth aimed the hose upward. Neither of them spoke right away, preferring to enjoy the sun’s scene making rainbows in the droplets falling all around.

“I’m Maggie,” Maggie said with a smile.

The youth didn’t acknowledge her introduction. Instead she watched the rainbows for a few more beats before she turned off the water and wound the hose back where it belonged. Then she gave Maggie a sales grin, extended a hand of greeting, and said, “I know. I’m Patricia.”

“Did Half Pint tell you I’m looking for help?” Maggie asked, as she eyed the youth’s fancy work rig.

“She said you were looking to break ground for a new home,” Patricia stood aside proudly and let Maggie ogle at her bike and wagon. It was a wood and metal made recumbent that looked more like a canoe-shaped car than a bike. Hitched behind it, the contraption towed a flatbed full of Fizzy Pop that rolled on old bike wheels. “I would have dropped in your scene last night after dinner, but we were really loving watching your work scene. It’s nice to watch a fledging storybanker fresh from the mainland join The Action so quickly.”

Maggie blushed and deflected the compliment. “We who?”

“We the Fizzy Pop Family Corporation,” Patricia said with her head held high. “Right now, Mr. Fizz incorporates my Father Ernesto Villa, my Mother Mercedes Villa, my brother Baby Villa, and yours truly. We postponed my deliveries so we could work in shop and watch your channel.”

“I was only cutting sugarcane like the rest of the New Pioneers. You act like I was doing something special…”

“Oh you were for sure,” Patricia smiled warmly. “Usually employables need a lot of time to break the postnatal bonds you have with your old familiar generically engineered characters. But not you…you hit The Storybank Exchange running like a natural-born storybanker.”

“I had some help,” Maggie said blushing again. “You could say I was sort of pushed out of the Nest.”

“Who pushed you?”

“Never mind,” Maggie said, looking to the heavens like Gambler did during his fight with Betty. “How long does it take normal, uh, employables to adjust to your, uh, new way of life?”

“Most employables like you fresh out of the Guest Nest take months, sometimes years, to Get It.”

“Years!” Maggie cried. “Are there some training classes I, uh, we can take to speed the acclimation process along?

“Classes?” Patricia laughed. “Grand Rachna says classes are made for making employables. Are you thinking about your Tinhorn Boyfriend?”

Maggie looked to the heavens again, winced, and said, “No.”

“What do you need ‘classes’ for then?” the youth asked. “You totally got this. You’re a natural.”

“But I don’t Get It at all,” Maggie replied.

“Did you enjoy working in theme with the New Pioneers?”

“Yes,” Maggie said. “I didn’t want the day to end.”

“Then you Got It.”

“Got what exactly?” Maggie almost looked angry.

“Don’t worry,” Patricia said. “You’ll Get It soon enough.”

“I thought you said I already Got It?”

“Yeah…You Got It,” she smiled, “but I’m not going to stand here and explain it to you. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

“What do you mean ‘we’?”

“I mean, we. You want to find a shop for you and your Boyfriend to stage your stories in, don’t you?”

“Sure…but…”

“What is he doing up there anyway? We tried to tune to his channel and it was blocked all day!”   

“Oh, you know.” Maggie looked up. “He’s a Journalist. He’s ‘ramping up’ for his prize-winning article on Mr. Chester Weston, as we speak.”

“You mean he’s watching The Clock.”

Maggie laughed. “Yes, he’s probably watching TV.”

Patricia pointed to the only open space on her flatbed wagon, smiled, and said, “Hop on, friend.”   

“Where are we going?”

“I’m going to show you my story.”

“Far out,” Maggie replied as she sat with her legs dangling off the back of the wagon. “I’m ready for adventure!”

“Good,” Patricia said. Then she got on her bike, started pedaling, and steered into the sun rising over the Garden Surface.

As Maggie and her new friend biked deeper into the city, I tuned to the A-eyes broadcasting from the tops of the wind turbines to get an overview of the city. From a distance (in the right bend of light) the Garden Surface appeared to be something solid, a noun like land, gold, or some other eternal, seemingly undying thing—but I was wrong. After a closer study, I realized the mass green growing surfaces were made of thousands of interlocking artificial land pontoons. Each pontoon was constructed with a base of hollow steel core cells that supported its barge-sized “raised garden box” that was filled with the kind of compost and organic matter worms, microbes, and other earth-making creatures make their homes in. From my perspective (sizing up the land like a low flying crop duster) I expected to see the modern monochromatic X-Y-X farming grids—miles and miles of green squares filled with corn or soy beans followed by miles and miles of amber squares waving with wheat. But I saw nothing like that. There was no obvious/instantly knowable Holy Roman Order to the Garden Surface. It appeared rich with complexity like a healthy forest, coral reef, or a Jackson Pollock painting. Curious, I panned further out. Each Island Market had a Garden Surface, and every Garden Surface had what looked like a glass mushroom at its center. The “mushrooms” were Residential Shopping Centers: large underwater apartment buildings that had been capped with geodesic dome-shaped Weather Bubbles that looked like cloudy crystal balls. The interlocking, octagonal Island Markets (16 in all) formed the body of the city. The longer I watched the cityscape the more my government-issued brain tried to buck and label it with some familiar everlasting noun.

By the time I tuned back to Maggie’s channel she was sweating again (beside Patricia’s cool signature) as they delivered Patricia’s wagonload of Fizzy Pop to their cast spread throughout the city. I watched them work for a while, but it didn’t take long before I began to fixate, obsessively, on the route Patricia was routing through the Garden Surface. It made no clear, realistic, mathematic sense. The city’s throughways weren’t labeled with signs, mileage markers, or arrows with directions to tell you, YOU ARE HERE. I watched, jaw dropped, as the new Wonder Twins biked into a garden plot blooming with poppies, and rabbits, and kids hunting rabbits with crossbows. I couldn’t believe it. Patricia had to bike at least a quarter of a mile into the plot, deliver her goods, and then bike back out again. The US Postal Service would never stand for that kind of poor city planning. They would demand that someone develop the backwoods plot and make a proper city grid of it.

Using the A-eyes, I scanned the cityscape for anything that might resemble a road like the freeways I was used to. The only such “freeways” I found in Westonton were the canalways that flowed around the Island Markets. They connected the Residential Shopping Centers (and their Weather Bubbles) to the Hidden Harbors, Arched Gateways, and Center Stage. As I scanned, I began to wonder: If our military was called to invade the city, how would we move our tanks, troops, and supplies from the Hidden Harbors to Weston’s Headquarters on Center Stage? It would be suicide to float any army down those narrow high-walled canalways. The bad guys could shoot us like fish in a barrel. And the throughways were a joke. We’d have to build roads for our motor vehicles if we wanted to move them anywhere.

Later, I learned that many storybankers navigated the Surface using what they called “the landmark method.” The idea was that the hundreds of sovereign plots being developed by storybankers (and themes of individual storybankers) were all different enough from each other—not too unlike a balanced wilderness scene—that most people traveling in the city were able to remember the cityscape as a whole, a whole lot easier. The problem with the landmark method in any other city in the world was that most modern cities lack the level of diversity that is needed to stimulate our long term, big picture memory centers. It doesn’t take long to feel lost in a city where the X and Y rows of employee housing grids, strip malls, and skylines blocked with tall steel cracker boxes, all begin to look the same.

Not only was Patricia’s delivery route different (and less classically efficient) than any route I’d seen, the way she delivered her family’s goods was different as well. It was clear that every storybanker on her route was more than a regular customer, a long-standing client, or familiar asset in their old corporate accounts. It seemed that The Villas had created a corporate family that included their “customers” in a way the old corporations were only able to simulate. It was clear from the smiles, hugs, and handshakes that Patricia didn’t need to hire marketing pros or celebrities to make their corporate thing come to life like a wooden puppet. She was born native in Westonton and she was the manifestation of her corporate family in action.

The first corporate family member on their routine that day, Puck the Hot Spring Fairy King, taught Patricia how to speak English, Italian, and fairy speak. Their second stop was at the Sea Hag Café owned by a theme of Gentle Water Monsters who’d taught her how to catch fish in the open ocean and then cook her catch in amazing ways. On their third shop, Maggie met the man in the blue mechanics jumpsuit who’d handcrafted our first Storysold card. His name was Blue Suit the Nanotech Mechanic and Patricia explained that he was one of her favorite Fizzy Pop family members. As the story went, Blue Suit had spent many months worth of his monetary moments teaching Patricia how to use math to engineer and draft her dreams, and showing her how to make them real using his supply of tools and machines. Patricia was the world’s first native born storybanker, and Blue Suit considered it an honor to be one of Patricia’s teachers. Although she never used the word “teacher,” because every one in her supporting cast taught her some kind of worthwhile action.

[ SIDE NOTE: The world’s second native-born storybanker was the daughter of a Wall Street Tycoon. Nobody knows her “real name,” because she became the first person ever to play a fictional role for real. Everyone in the city knows her as Finn, or Huckleberry Finn. ]

On their fourth delivery, they dropped a “scene’s worth” of Fizzy Pop on the deck of a crewless Storytime Machine where Patricia told Maggie that Traveler exchanged her tales of storytime-traveling around the world (and the plundered props that belonged to them) for their Fizzy Pop.

Patricia’s list of corporate family relatives was long. She’d learned to garden herbs and “helpful drugs” from a “Happy Garden” owner named Solji Kim; she’d learned to develop a “working healthcare role” (the Surgical Ninja) from a Healer named Grand Rachna; she’d learned to make bikes and wagons from Stumpy the New Market Pioneer (who’d lost his arm trying to ‘grin down a bear’ on Island Market 12 with Crockett and Dan Boone); and she’d learned to produce Fizzy Pop, to read and write in her family’s signature Spanish-based jargon, and an untold number of other life lessons from her mother and father Ernesto and Mercedes Villa. It was a fascinating idea. Patricia’s story was a pre-industrial throwback to the part in The Earth Show where kids were raised by the family without the anxiety and fear of separation kids experience when they see that big yellow school bus pull up for the first time. Yet clearly she wasn’t at the mercy of whatever story her family wanted to force feed her. Patricia appeared to be, very much, in control of her “education.”

Somewhere along the delivery scene, which the native storybanker valued at “nine plot points,” or “beats,” Maggie asked, “Do you have to go to school?” There was no reply from the youth. “You know…like, do you have to go someplace everyday where you learn about things?”

“Traveler told me about your schools,” Patricia replied. “She said that they’re designed to domesticate humans mostly, and turn them into marketable audiences. What a total waste of life! Who wants to sit around all day listening to some stranger monologue in a box when they could be out, on The World Stage, in The Action, learning something cool?”

I shook my head as Patricia’s words sank in. If the world had rules, laws, and expectations for the lives we lived, then how could these people live and work with civilized Law and Order if they didn’t have some kind of formal education to teach them Right from Wrong? Clearly these people were living like savages. Or better yet, living like members of a cult…brainwashed terrorists who were drinking Mr. Chester Weston’s Kool-Aid. And I still had no idea how Patricia was navigating her delivery route. It baffled me in the same way I was baffled by the fact that birds with small brains could navigate The World Stage without GPS or leaders at the heads of their flocks.

The next character on the route was a storybanker they met along the throughway. She was wearing leather sandals, a long white robe with a red cross on its front like a medieval knight, and a band of gold etched with strange words around her brow. She was pulling what seemed to be an Automatic Teller Machine behind her in a wagon. She’d dyed her hair blood red to match the cross she had coopted as her signature. Patricia introduced her family member as “Tim the Templar Knight of The Three Hundred and Fifteenth Order who’d been charged by God and Sister Lei’s First Congregational Army of Christ to defend her Automatic Telling Machine from the Dark Lord Satan’s bandits along the passageways, canalways, and throughways of Westonton.”

After a brief reading from Tim’s story, Patricia leaned close to Maggie and whispered, “Tim’s super hooked on Fizzy Pop. She drinks more than most Water Monsters do, and those guys can really put it down.”

Maggie followed Patricia’s narrative lead and transferred twelve bottles of Fizzy Pop onto Tim’s wagon. While Tim and Patricia balanced out their storybank accounts using Tim’s Automatic Telling Machine (which was the Knight’s signature Storysold: TV), Maggie took a nice long read of one of the bottles for the first time. It had a label glued to it like factory-produced pop bottles do, but Patricia’s label featured a snapshot their work producing Fizzy Pop together as a family. The particular image she saw was the one that showed Mercedes washing the bottle in Maggie’s hand. Printed like a trademark logo in the middle of the image was this line:

FizzyPop(popscene321)/Tim(12of54)

When Patricia had finished her transaction with one of Fizzy Pop’s oldest corporate family members, Maggie asked, “What does the writing on the side of your bottles mean? It looks like a secret code.”

The dialogue that followed was easily as confusing as any corporate jargon. I could have listened and learned about the code, but I tuned out and let Maggie learn it for me. After all, I was under no pressure to learn. I was a spy, a perfect tourist in an unholy land, a good guy in a strange place crawling with bad guys. I mean, did I really need to know how to storysell? The Something Grander had put my Eager Beaver on a need to know basis, and I felt that I only needed to know enough of the native storyselling tongue to bluff the savages into believing our cover story. That was The Mission.

I yawned and took a nap as Tim and Patricia “themed up” to bring Maggie “up to speed” on her family’s currency, explaining that the code on the side of their bottles was the “long-hand version” of the language storybankers used to write The Storysold Exchange system.

[ Want to read more? See Bonus Material #2 ]

As the sun sank over Center Stage, Maggie looked at the near empty wagon, and said, “The way your family mints your currency is more complex than I first gave it credit for. I just don’t Get It.”

To which Patricia (young woman born in the city with no experience of working as an employable on the mainland) replied, “I know. Sometimes I wish our accounting was easier, and for most storybankers in the city it is. Most storybankers do their accounting in short-hand, stringing their action sentences together using meta-symbols and other icons to mark their scenes instead of the longhand codes our family uses. I hate accounting in longhand, but every time I complain about having to mint in longhand, my Father Ernesto likes to say, ‘You’re lucky to have the freedom to mint anything in your name. There’s a wide world out there where good hard-working people like you and I, don’t have the simple, most basic freedom to own and operate their stories.’” Then Patricia paused. “I remember we argued about that plot point on day. I wasn’t listening to them, so Father Ernesto and Mother Mercedes plotted against me. They blocked my access to my storybank account. Then they started directing my every moment like they owned me, or something. It lasted for a few weeks, or longer (I forget) before I surrendered—pleading with them to change their characters back to the way I knew them. They agreed to change back, so long as I promised to remember what it felt like to live and work without a character role, or story, of my own. It was so horrible. I’ve never forgotten.”

I woke up long enough to hear her last few lines. Since when does freedom have anything to do with being in control of our own stories? That’s circular logic, I thought. God, Corps, and Country are the only stories average Americans need to “operate.” Anyway, The People prefer them. Our personal stories are boring. That’s why we watch The Fourth Wall.

When Patricia and Tim finished theming up, there was an awkward moment of silence. Maggie kicked her head back on the props in the Fizzy Pop family delivery wagon, watching the pink and purple clouds roll across the sky, while the youth peddled her way home. Patricia and her bike-drawn wagon shared the throughway with her fellow storybankers with, what seemed to be, an easy instinctive mind. The youth even turned minor accidents and traffic jams into opportunities for fun, or learning—like skipping after tripping, or a  movie were everything that happens on screen happens for a reason.

Patricia stopped suddenly a few beats before they crossed the arched cobblestone bridge leading into her Residential Shopping Center’s Common Area. Patricia turned to Maggie and asked, “Do you know why I introduced my corporate story to you this morning?”

“No,” Maggie replied. “I have no idea.”

“I want to run away from home after dinner tonight.”

They read each other’s signatures in silence, then Maggie broke the silence and said, “I ran away from home once.”

“I know,” Patricia said. “Traveler told me.”

“It wasn’t easy,” Maggie said. “I did a lot of things I’m not proud of in order to survive every day on The Streets.”

“I know you did…” Patricia said. “That’s why I turned the hose on you this morning…”

“And why exactly was that?”

“Because you’ve done what I’m about to do.”

“And you think that’s OK?”

“Yes,” she smiled. “Running away—when you feel the need to grow when you can’t grow—happens all the time around here.”

Maggie told me later she was so touched by that last line that she nearly cried. Even as mission-oriented as I was, I could relate. In spite of our efforts to tame them, our truer characters sneak out sometimes.

My Storybank Account – Scene Nineteen,

THE PART WHERE THE FIZZY POP CORPORATION LOSES A FAMILY MEMBER…

When Patricia finally cut their delivery scene for the day, I expected Maggie to return to her post. She didn’t. Patricia invited her to spend dinner with her corporation, and my Cover Girlfriend/co-worker/Government Asset accepted without so much as an honorable mention of me.

I wasn’t jealous of her invitation. Not really. I think the agitation I felt when I realized she wasn’t returning to me, again, was hunger. The only food I’d eaten all day were the plate of snacks some storybanker had left in the wooden bowl at the foot of the man-sized wooden statue of a dog that sat like a gargoyle outside the door of the Guest Nest. I’d seen the statue when we first walked in, and I’d also noted the inscription carved on the sign posted beside it: DON’T FEED THE EMPLOYABLES. That’s what the sign said, but at least once a day some kind person would fill the bowl with snacks, ring the doorbell, and then scoot away without a word. I figured it was like one of those signs the neighborhood curmudgeon posts in their lawn to vent their rage. In any case, I was glad for that wooden bowl. The snacks and other food and drink products were always edible. The only thing I didn’t like about it was: it made me feel like a bum, even though I knew I wasn’t one. I was more like a secular priest who lived off the offerings of his followers. I would have attempted to “mint a food production scene,” or do a “proof-of-work scene” in exchange for bread and peanut butter, but I didn’t have time to fool around, farming and cooking all day, doing work that was less valuable than the work I was doing in support of The Mission. So I continued to eat my offerings and watch TV.

The Family Corporation occupied three shops set side-by-side on level ten of Island Market 4’s Residential Shopping Center. Patricia didn’t offer any tourist-style explanations of what Maggie was experiencing as she biked from the Garden Surface, over a bridge that spanned the canalway flowing around the Residential Shopping Center, under its Weather Bubble, into an open Common Area filled with a circus of odd themes, then through the labyrinth-like maze of columns that appeared, at first glance, to carry the massive weight of the cone-shaped freshwater reservoir at the base of the Weather Bubble. She offered no explanation, but I later learned that the weight of the reservoir was held by the natural buoyancy of the Center’s Hollow Core, which bobbed in the ocean like a giant steel iceberg. It made me nervous to watch Maggie walk through the Common Area under a human-made lake. I would have been more nervous, but I wasn’t there—which helped. If I was there I’d be freaking out. I have what I’d consider a natural phobia of walking under lakes. In any case, somewhere between the perimeter and the vent hole that supplied the Garden Surface with freshwater, Patricia and Maggie gathered with Patricia’s neighbors at a door leading into one of the larger pillars. Patricia said they were waiting for an “Elevator Tube.” When their turn came, they entered the Tube and rode it down into the heart of the apartment-like structure. When the Tube opened on her level, Patricia biked through a street-sized hallway, lined on both sides, with shops—while Maggie let her legs dangle off the back of the wagon, eyes wide with wonder.  “We’re a few moments late,” the youth reported as she parked her bike and wagon outside their shop. Its storefront was made from pop bottles that had been salvaged from dumps on the mainland. The green ones above the double doors leading inside spelled out: FIZZY POP.

The shop they entered wasn’t the setting where the family staged their pop-making scenes. It was what Patricia called their “boardroom,” or living space. Its walls were filled with picture frames, some of them hung higher than others, with what looked like home movies playing in them. Patricia explained that the “motion picture frames” were playing The Greatest Hits of Fizzy Pop Family Corporation. Spaced in between the motion picture frames were three doors, one for each of the three walls they now faced. Door #1 to their left led to their “first shop space,” which they used for her parent’s “office space” (or bedroom), Patricia’s office space, and a bathroom they all shared. Door #2 in the front of them led to “the makeup room,” which featured a toilet, tub, and a brightly lit mirror with three chairs and a highchair set in front of it. And Door #3 on their right led to their “third shop space” that they set with a kitchen and other Fizzy Pop-making props.

At the center of their family’s corporate boardroom—Ernesto, Mercedes, and Baby Villa—were seated in office chairs around a long, glass table set with plates, glasses, and utensils, waiting for the Daughter of Fizzy Pop Corporation and her new friend to join them.

Her parents were older than I expected. Ernesto was a short man with a head full of gray. He wore a sleek pair of slacks, loafers, a polo shirt with the image of Mr. Fizz on the front, and wire-rimmed glasses that were so big they gave him owl eyes. He looked like he was working to keep himself seated, fighting against an unseen ball of energy (will to move) trapped inside him. Mercedes was a lot taller than her husband. She wore a handspun silk bathrobe with images of flowers embroidered in it, which she kept fussing with, tugging at, ever cinching, tightening, and wrapping around the dynamic curves of her body like she was fighting a gift that unwrapped itself, as if by magic, every time she touched the robe. I would have guessed that the youth’s Mother had just rolled out of bed into her favorite slippers, but her hair rose from her head with a passionate order, like chimney smoke. She must have spent a fortune in storytime getting her rebel hairs to wisp that way. The corporation’s youngest family member—Patricia’s brother Baby Villa (who will no longer be known as Baby Villa when he’s old enough to choose a signature name for himself)—sat between his Mother and his Father at the head of the table in a highchair. He was sporting a one-piece costume that came complete with grip-bottom footies and a Fizzy Pop family corporate logo.

Patricia’s family presented themselves, steel eyed and austere, like I expected “real” corporate decision-makers to act after they’d been waiting for a final member of their Board to arrive on set. Daughter greeted them in their family jargon, which was a creative spinoff of Spanish that they’d begun to develop soon after they paid Weston every pressed-and-dyed piece of green fiber they’d ever earned in order to own their family corporation. The final paychecks the family handed back to their CEO, for Chester’s special brand of freedom, were earned for the roles they played in Chester Weston’s Westonton Corporation: Ernesto had been paid $32.55 an hour to play his Super Star Structural Engineer #12, while Mercedes had been paid a lot less to play her Super Star Employee Housewife #175. And yes, Weston paid men and women  $15.25 an hour to play Housewives who performed the roles of teacher and daycare, but once Westonton was full operational and Weston no longer paid his employees (because they graduated to become storybankers), Mercedes and many other human hosts chose not to feed actions to their worn old roles as Housewives. As Patricia introduced her family, Maggie realized that the amount of sacrifice her family had made to reach that moment in their stories, standing in a living boardroom of their own, was immeasurable.

When Patricia was done making her introductions, Mercedes turned to Maggie and spoke to her in a pleasing tone. Patricia translated, saying, “Before we present our dinner scene to you, Mother wants to know if you have any objections to importing Adom’s Killer Rabbit Stew.”

“I don’t know,” she shrugged. “Who’s Adom?”

“He produced the city’s first murder scene,” Patricia replied.

“That’s a new one,” Maggie thought aloud. “Usually people ask me if I eat meat, and I politely explain that I prefer to eat vegetables.”

“We have plenty of bread and cheese and vegetables in our storage bins,” Patricia offered. “You don’t have to eat the stew.”

Maggie was curious. “If you think this guy’s meat is good…or, should I say, if you think his story’s worth buying, then I’d love to join your family in eating Adom’s Killer Rabbit Stew,” she replied diplomatically.

Patricia translated, the Board nodded their approval, and Ernesto rose, walked to the kitchen, and returned a moment later with their dinner on a rolling metal cart. As was their policy, after everyone was seated around the boardroom table, Mercedes pointed a remote to one end of the room, pressed a button, and a large movie screen lowered from the ceiling to cover part of the wall. Ernesto served the soup, sliced the bread, filled their glasses from a pitcher of Fizzy Pop, and presented a platter loaded with roasted turnips and cauliflower, which made Maggie’s eyes light up. Then they ate and watched the screen flicker with the moneyed moments that made their meal.

I watched my Asset intently. She nibbled on the vegetables and ate a few slices of her bread, but she waited to eat Adom’s Killer Stew, on Patricia’s recommendation, until she was able to get at least a quick read of Adom and review his story. I laughed aloud when I realized The Central Conflict of Maggie’s dinner scene turned on her desire to know the soup’s maker, and the classic human desire to eat her soup before it became cold.

The breaking point in the conflict came when she watched Adom butcher his first rabbit. He was standing in his shop wearing nothing but his leather butcher’s smock. Adom didn’t appear to have an ounce of fat (or hair) on him. His head hung, bald as an egg, over his block like a bird of prey in its nest preparing to peck apart the feast still squirreling in its claws. Judging by his signature, I expected to witness a scene of supreme butchery. Instead, Adom pulled a rabbit from a large pocket sewn in the front of his smock. It struggled against the butcher’s grip at first. Then it calmed as Adom stroked its fur and fed it treats from his open hand. Maggie (and I) watched awestruck as Adom worked patiently to calm the rabbit to the point where it sat on his block and stayed there of its own free will. Once the rabbit was ready, Adom leaned down to face his fellow creature. Then he whispered a few lines in a language I didn’t understand. His tone was passionate and gentle.

Whack! Adom’s cleaver came down on the rabbit without warning. It died, instantly, with as little fear as Adom was able to produce. The scene was so tender I cried, but Maggie didn’t grieve over her meal. Steam was still rising from her bowl when she dipped her spoon in and took her first bite.

When their dinner scene concluded, Patricia and Maggie themed up to clear and wash the dirty dishes. As they washed, they talked about Adom and the ways he’d earned enough trust to buy Fizzy Pop from them. Patricia retold the story of his long road back from the day he’d taken a man’s life, in full, like the man had belonged to him. The youth explained to the new storybanker that Adom’s crime of “taking a man’s life as his own” was a crime that employables commit in lesser ways every day. Patricia said that the most unprofitable thing a storybanker could do in The City was to take responsibly in part, or in full, for the governing of another human’s life. “Storybankers don’t eat humans like we do rabbits,” Patricia said as they washed. “Any child can see the waste of taking human lives as their own. Humans don’t taste as good as rabbits do.”

I watched their dishwashing scene intently. I wanted to know if my US Government Asset had told me the truth on Tofu Taco Night. Did Maggie really dislike washing dishes? Or was that line total bullshit?

I watched them work waiting at the edge of my seat for Maggie to find an excuse—bathroom, backache, something stupid—to relieve her of the duty she supposedly hated. Then she did it. She pulled the classic move and asked to use the bathroom. “Ha!” I cheered. “I knew it!” Maggie was in the bathroom for 15 minutes (about 3 beats worth of storytime). That’s how long it took her to perform her bathroom-break scene. I clocked it. Nobody needs that long to take a shit. I didn’t know what she was doing in there, exactly, but it didn’t really matter. It was clear enough to me. She was shirking her duty, because she didn’t like washing dishes. And the youth didn’t Get It. She welcomed Maggie back from the world’s longest bathroom break like she hadn’t left her to do all the work alone. I snickered aloud when I saw Maggie’s next move. She grabbed a rag and a suds’ bucket and began to wipe countertops down slow as molasses in January. That’s the 2^nd most classic move for any coworker trying to flee their duties in The Dish Pit. Yet, once again, Patricia continued to rack clean dishes without appearing angry about the inequality of their dish scene.

They swapped stories (about what I forget) while Maggie continued to milk the clock and Patricia racked the last clean dish. Then they cleaned up and returned to the boardroom where Mercedes and Ernesto were using their ATM (Automatic Telling Machine) to mint the day’s Fizzy Pop production scenes: cutting their work moments and capital investments from their storybank accounts, pasting them together into batches, choosing and printing the day’s signature snapshot label, and writing their family’s Storysold currency in longhand code for their members to enjoy at their dinnertimes. When they were done, Patricia took her turn with the ATM to show Maggie how to mint her day’s delivery scene. I listened to the youth’s YouTube-style narration on How to Mint Your Currency, and I understood all of it. It wasn’t as complex as, let’s say, international trading relationships (or balancing the checkbook of a meth addict), but I still wanted it to be difficult. I wanted The New Thing in the path of my righteousness to be more stupid than the usual stupid economic system I always complained about, but secretly loved because it was a part of The Mission—and The Mission was always good like beauty pageants, backyard barbecues, dogs, babies, and high school sports.

Maggie sat quietly listening, taking all the newness in like a newborn, until Patricia asked, “If I interpreted the work you performed today supporting my delivery scene accurately, you earned twenty-five-and-a-quarter monetary moments in all. Do you agree?”

Maggie nodded yes, but I could tell by the blank look on her face the youth’s accounting hadn’t registered.

“And,” Patricia went on, “if I interpreted the value of the food scenes you bought at dinner correctly, you need to balance our storybank accounts out with twenty-four point five moments. Do you agree?   

Maggie nodded yes again, and said, “Sounds good to me.”

“Do you want to balance our accounts out with the delivery scene you earned today?” Patricia asked.

“Yes. I would like to balance out our accounts.”

“Then that leaves you with one whole moment of profit to spend on whatever you like. Would you like to save it, or spend it?”

“Well,” Maggie replied, “I don’t know.”

“Our signature family currency is good with many storybankers in Westonton,” Patricia said. “We can give you a moment’s worth of Fizzy Pop to balance out the account of one of your cast members.”

“Well,” Maggie thought aloud. “I bet Buddha would like to stock a few bottles of your Fizzy Pop along his Eight Fold Aisles…But…”

“But what?” Patricia asked, moving closer to her new friend.

“But I think I’d rather spend my moment of profit with you.”

Patricia beamed. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

Then she took Maggie by the hand and led her to her bedroom. On the back wall, a large bubble-shaped window provided a view of the ocean. A school of multi-colored fish swam by as Patricia presented the props in her bedroom: a bed with carvings depicting scenes from her story, a simple wooden table and lamp, a Storysold: TV hung on the wall opposite her bed, a dresser and some clothing racks full of costumes, and an oval rug set in the middle of the room. The props that first grabbed Maggie’s and my attention were the poster-sized drawings Patricia had pinned up on her walls. Most teens I knew pinned up pictures of shirtless rock stars, teen idols, wild stallions, or shirtless rock stars and teen idols riding wild stallions—anything other than a hundred plus hand-drawn illustrations of bicycles.

Patricia presented a few of her best plans to Maggie. When her sales pitch ended, Patricia asked, “What do you say, do you want one?”

“All that for one of my measly moments…?”

I hadn’t noticed until then, but Patricia’s parents were now standing at her door, watching quietly as the scene played out.

“My Father taught me that every great relationship begins with a moment,” Patricia replied. “This one could be ours.”

Maggie walked around, reading each drawing carefully like any good shopper would before a major purchase. She passed over three plans, then four; then she stopped in front of the drawing pinned up over Patricia’s bed. It was a road bike with a red banana-seat, blue fenders, sparkly tassels, and an old fashioned wagon that came complete with metal hoops, a canvas rain cover, salvaged bike wheels, and a couple of side mounted barrels. The barrels were drawn with a variety of garden tools in them.

Maggie didn’t have to look any further. She smiled big, pointed at the drawing, and said, “Yes, please. I want that one.”

Suddenly, Ernesto began to weep. Patricia and Maggie turned to the doorway and watched as Mercedes tried to comfort him. She wrapped her arms around her husband, spoke to him in soothing tones, and tried to hold her tears back like she was holding rain from falling from a rain cloud.

Maggie turned to Patricia for an explanation. Patricia was watching her parents hold each other lovingly in the doorway. She smiled as she turned to Maggie, and said, “Are you sure you want that one?”

Maggie read the excitement in Patricia eyes, and said, “Yes. I want to buy that bike from you, whatever the cost.”

“Good,” Patricia said. “You can start by helping me run away.”

“I don’t get it. You have such a good home here.”

“I know. That’s why I’m running away.”

Maggie looked suddenly torn. I’m sure it wasn’t easy for Maggie to relive the decision she’d made to run away from her adoptive parents. I was on the edge of my seat, wondering: Would she support the youth’s decision to flee and reinforce her own? Or would she withdraw her offer to buy the bike in a move towards redemption? Ernesto turned to Maggie, dried his eyes, and spoke to her in a warm but firm tone. Patricia translated, saying, “Father wants to know how you’re planning to mint your storytime?”

“I’m not sure what that means.”

Patricia looked confused. “You know,” she repeated. “How are you going to mint your money?”

“I think,” Maggie paused thoughtfully. “I will mint my money like you guys do, in longhand with all the codes, math, and stuff.”    

Patricia sighed.

Ernesto walked over to Maggie, put a hand on her shoulder, and spoke in Maggie’s brand of English jargon, saying, “In our city, that was the nice way of asking how you’re planning to pay your debts.”

“Oh,” Maggie nodded, looking embarrassed. “You mean you want to know how I’ll pay your Daughter for making me a brand-new bicycle?”

“Bingo,” Ernesto grinned.

“Well,” she balked, “I don’t really know.”

“She doesn’t have to know yet, Father,” Patricia protested. “She’s only a few days out of the Guest Nest.”

Ernesto spoke to his Daughter in their family corporate speak. When they were done dialoguing, Patricia turned to her new friend, and smiled. Then she said, “I’m ready to run away now…”

“Are you sure this is a good idea Patricia?”

“Yes,” she replied. “I’m ready to begin my new life with you.”

“I still don’t get it. Why would you run away with me?”

“You’re the perfect person to start a new home with, because we’re both running away. We’re both starting fresh.”

Suddenly Maggie got it. “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t see it like that, but I suppose I am running away from my old home in America.”

“And that Tinhorn Boyfriend of yours,” Patricia smiled.

“Well,” Maggie replied, looking into the nearest camera, “I don’t think I’m ready to run away from him just yet.”

“Why?” Patricia asked. “I’ve never seen you love him.”

Maggie looked through the A-eye. “The love’s there,” she explained with a strange sense of certainty. “It’s true, I am growing weary of playing the badass heroine who’s been forced by circumstance to love the boorish man who treats her like chattel because he’s not strong enough to show his feelings for her. It’s such a boring old story. But I have hope…like all badass heroines do…that one day my frog will be strong enough to show his love for the world like you do. I don’t know if everyone in this city is amazing like you, but you are the most amazing person I’ve met in a long time…”

“Thanks.” Patricia smiled. “I think you’re great too.”

Mercedes and Ernesto walked into the scene carrying a six-pack of old Coke bottles. The old corporate Coke labels had been peeled off and replaced with what looked like cave paintings of Ernesto and Mercedes making Fizzy Pop. The bottles had about an inch of dust on them.

Mercedes spoke proudly in her jargon as she presented the bottles to their Daughter. “These are the first bottles of Fizzy Pop my family corporation ever made,” Patricia translated. “Mother said they’ve been saving them for the day I ran away. It’s a down-payment on a home of my own.”

“They were expecting you to run away someday?”

“We’re a family corporation,” Ernesto replied. “From the moment Patricia was born, we knew if our corporation was going to expand it would have to expand on its own, naturally, without two old folks like us trying to force it. We’re her Mother and Father, but we are humans too. We have stories of our own to account for. Super star employee performance expectation #2 says, ‘Be accountable for your signature, self-governing your stock character roles at all times.’ President Weston would fire us if we were to spend our days governing our Daughter’s signature like she was our employee. We knew she’d run away someday, but someday came too soon! It seems like just yesterday she was washing her first Fizzy Pop bottles!”

It was then that I realized that the tears Patricia’s parents cried weren’t all tears of sorrow. They watched, side by side, as the Daughter of Fizzy Pop Family Corporation packed her bike and wagon full of props for the last time and lit off for deliveries unknown…

That night, the runaways made camp under the pillars of an aqueduct that ran through a garden plot governed by the New Pioneers. They talked, dreamed, plotted their new storylines, and stayed warm wrapped in the quilts Patricia had balanced out, at the age of thirteen, from one of her oldest cast members, a seamstress Patricia called the “Governing General of The Needle.” I hadn’t known Maggie long, but I’d never seen her happier. Patricia made a fire for them to share as she watched the stars rise in the new night like actors who shone so brilliantly that every host in the audience felt like the performance was meant for them. It was then, in that eerie mix of light, Maggie leapt to her feet and faced her audience, and shouted, “I’ve Got It.”

“I know you do,” Patricia replied.

“No,” Maggie grinned. “I’ve really Got It.”

“Well, go ahead then,” Patricia smiled. “Tell us.”

“I’m going to be a gardener,” Maggie whispered like she was telling her new friend a very special secret.

“Why are you whispering?” Patricia laughed.

“I’m going to be a gardener,” Maggie said a little louder.

“Oh sorry,” Patricia teased. “Why don’t I believe you?”

Maggie walked away from the fire, faced the cold starlight, took a deep breath, and screamed, “I’m Maggie! And I’m going to be a Gardener!” Then she turned back to Patricia with a smile, and asked, “Was that better?”

Patricia stood and began to clap. To Maggie’s surprise, an unseen audience joined her new friend in a round of applause. When the riotous cheer died down, each member of the audience who had gathered there to watch The Runaway Scene live walked into the light, gave the runaways a quick introduction (or asked a few questions), and then took their bows and faded back into the wilderness. When Maggie was asked to describe her future garden plot, she looked at the stars, then down at the soil under her feet. “I’m not sure yet,” she replied, “but I do know there will be peas—lots of peas!”

I could have been in Maggie’s audience and watched The Action around the fire unfold live under the stars. I could have, but I was still playing spy high in the Guest Nest. Why wasn’t I down there with her? I pondered as I paced like a prisoner. Was Maggie just following orders? Was she doing what she was doing to develop our cover story on her own, so I’d be free to do the real work of spying on everyone? Or was she moments away from betraying The Mission and blowing our cover, because she—like everyone in this screwy city—was in hostile competition with The American Way of Life? The more I paced, the more I cursed Weston’s monstrous new city. Why can’t I walk down the street, pay my dollars, and buy a six-pack of beer? There’s something seriously wrong with people who don’t understand the value of Miller Time.

My Storybank Account – Scene Twenty,

THE PART WHERE A TROUBLED TEENAGER INSPIRES WYLIE TO WRITE HIS FIRST OFFICIAL REPORT …

I woke the next day still thinking bad thoughts.

Didn’t Patricia’s parents know they were playing with fire?

Teenagers don’t need freedom! They need guidance, a purpose, role models, and instructions to follow at the top of their pages. Teenagers need to be hooked on games, snacks, and movies as rewards for doing their homework, so all those things can be taken away if they fail to do it right. Suddenly, before I knew it, my inner monologue became an outer monologue: “One shouldn’t toy with the imprintable minds of the youth,” I said aloud with my channel switched to PRIVATE. “It’s dangerous. If kids aren’t trained to respect adults, then they won’t respect adults when they grow up; and if they grow up not respecting adults, then they will have terrible customer service skills. And that harms The Economy like pirating movies. It’s not a victimless crime!”

Fear fueled my righteous rage. What would happen to our great society if teenagers (and other government assets) were permitted to runaway from their homes, schools, and authority figures? All I wanted in that moment was a Social Services Office, so I could do my civil duty and report the Villas. I would storm in, take my ticket, wait in a long line, and then a stoic servant of the US Government would direct me to the appropriate form. And then I’d get my release: I’d check all The Right boxes: (1) for child neglect, (2) for non-adult adult behavior, and (3) for failing to own and operate a teenager properly.

“Check, check, and check…check.”     

When I managed to calm myself, I tuned, once again, to the channels that featured the city’s newest star runaways. They were “shop-shopping” for a “wonder bike shop” for Patricia and a “garden shop” for Maggie. Most of their dialogue was unintelligible chatter like the conversations my mom and grandma would have when they were cooking. Maggie had a million questions about the workings of the city, and the youth answered them. The only question that I found interesting was the part where Maggie asked Patricia if she had any “love interests” in her story. Patricia confessed that she’d been following the channel of some guy named Juan the Great White Tuna Hunter for a long time now. Maggie asked if she’d ever kissed him. Patricia said she’d never talked to him. Maggie asked if she ever fantasized about him in secret…

At first I thought Maggie’s interest in Patricia’s love interest had no value to The Mission. Just more girly chit-chat. But, as Maggie rattled off the questions, I realized she was tracking something grander.

“Have you ever fantasized about him?” Maggie asked as they pushed Patricia’s loaded bike and wagon along the crowded throughway.

Patricia was quiet. “I don’t think so,” she replied thoughtfully. “Like I said, I haven’t met him In Scene yet…”

“Yeah I know you said that, but what I’m asking is…have you ever, you know, imagined that you were with him?”

“Like where?” Patricia asked, still looking puzzled.

“Like under your covers at night…”

The youth stopped pushing. “What would Juan be doing under my covers at night if I’ve never met him?”

“Not for real,” Maggie laughed. “I mean, have you ever imagined that he was under the covers with you, holding you close?”

“Why would I want to imagine I was holding an imaginary Juan?” she laughed back. “He’s not one of my bike inventions.”

At first, I thought Patricia was cognitively disabled—struggling with basic teenage concepts like “fantasizing about a boy,” or “sneaking away for a kiss.” After all, what was growing up without sneaking? Cookie Jars? Late-night television? Socking your brother in the mouth when your parents weren’t looking? Drugs, sex, and rock and roll? The American Way of Life? If anything, I thought growing up was the process of learning to be sneaky, then sneakier, eventually graduating to mature adult with a doctorate in Sneakology. Hide the games from your boss. Leave a few minutes early on Fridays. Label your files SECRET and read them when no one’s around. Get your lonely coworker to cover your shift for “Cousin Joe’s wedding.” Eat a pint of mint cookie dough ice cream when no one’s looking. Sell snake oil, fancy perfume, diamond rings, and bear bells to unsuspecting tourists. Drink liquor on Sunday and run naked through the neighbors’ sprinklers before they return from church. What was The American Way of Life if not one long sneak? Or not…I wasn’t confident in my thoughts on the subject. Maybe some adults don’t sneak? Maybe some parents are honest with their kids. Maybe some employers never keep secrets from their workers. I didn’t really know. My loco parentis the US Government trained me to be a Spy and I was sneaky as hell.

Maggie shifted gears slightly. “Don’t you sneak around sometimes to keep people from knowing what you’re doing?”

“Like what?”

“Like pooping with the door closed…”

Patricia stared at Maggie blankly, shrugged her shoulders, and sat in the tall grass. “I don’t care if I poop alone or in a group,” she replied with a classic teenage eye roll. “Mostly I poop in bathrooms without persons, with my signature paused for broadcasting, but I like to poop where the A-eyes can still mint my moments. I don’t know about you, but I have some of my best ideas for scenes while I’m pooping.”

Maggie rubbed her face in frustration. “What if you wanted to make a romantic love scene with Juan? Would you switch your signature channel to the private mode when you were with him?”

“Why would I?” Patricia exclaimed. “He’s an awesome fisherman and he has this great ship he calls the ‘Tuna Boat.’ It’d be crazy for me to block off his signature if we shared a loving, action scene together.”

“Hum,” Maggie went on. “Well, what if you and Juan were on his Tuna Boat spending time alone, you know, kissing and stuff?”

“That’s none of your business!” she laughed, standing suddenly.

“So, you do know what I’m talking about!”

“Of course. I’m just playing with you.”

“Where are you going?”

“Come on. Let’s run.”

“Now?” Maggie asked as Patricia stretched her legs.

“Naturally. We’re running away from home, aren’t we?”

“Yeah sure,” she replied. “But do we have to actually run away?”

“It’ll make for better stories if we do,” Patricia said as she began to run onto the nearest pathway filled with storybankers.   

“I suppose,” Maggie hollered as she began to run. “Hold on. Wait for me! Where are we going?”

Patricia yelled over her shoulder, “Let’s go, slow poke!”

“What about your stuff?” she asked, looking back at Patricia’s bike and wagon parked under the aqueduct.

“We’ll pick it up later. Now shake those legs and move.”

I never took Maggie for a runner type, but she had a gentle stride that was able to match Patricia’s youthful bounds, step for step. They were already sweating hot under the equatorial sun by the time they ran over a long bridge spanning the canalway that divided Island Market 4’s Garden Surface from the Garden Surface of Island Market 5.

  “Where are we going?” Maggie asked as she looked down at the ocean cutting through the city deep and wide like a new mountain river.

“We’re shop-shopping for our new homes, of course.”

“OK,” Maggie said, now huffing and puffing beside the youth. “And what exactly does that sort of scene mean to you?”

“We’re shopping for settings that represent us best.”

“Like what?” Maggie asked, sweat poured from her brow.

“How do I know? Have you decided what your signature will be?”

Huff, puff—“I think I’ll sign my story as Maggie for a while.”

“You’re joking! You’re going to be a gardener!” Patricia replied as they ran down a throughway filled with storybankers traveling on foot, on bikes, and many other inventive vehicular contraptions.

“Why can’t I just be Maggie?”

“Maggie who?” Patricia laughed. “Maggie the Maggie?”

“Sure,” Maggie replied, still struggling to keep pace. “Why not?”

“Can you imagine how boring it’d be to develop one role for the rest of your life…forever becoming Patricia the Patricia, or Patricia the Everyday Baker?” She laughed again. “No friend, I’m sorry. I am only Patricia. I can’t weed your garden, or fix your bike, or teach you our family jargon. I’m only Patricia the Patricia the Everyday Baker. But if you want a donut, I have as many as you want. I have hundreds of donuts, cakes, and breads, because all I do is bake. Ha! What a silly story that would be!”

Maggie tried to laugh too. “That’s hilarious, alright.”

“Maggie the Maggie,” Patricia laughed again.

“What about you? What are you going to be besides Patricia the Wonder Bike Inventor?”

“Oh,” she grinned. “I have plenty of characters in stock.”

“Like what?” Maggie asked as Patricia suddenly darted ahead, running along a narrower throughway in the direction of an aqueduct, passing small odd-shaped plots of farmland on either side.

“Like Patricia, Destroyer of Tooth Decay.”

“Oh how does that work?”

“I become Patricia, Destroyer of Tooth Decay when I brush my teeth at night before I go to sleep.”

“Huh, what other characters do you have in stock?”

“I’m Patricia, Food Pet Handler of Well-Behaved Crocodiles.”

“Oooh,” Maggie said, awed. “I like that one. What’s a food pet?”

“You know: food pets, walking meat: rabbits, goats, chickens, and crocs, any animal you tame to be meat with the intent to eat.”

“I don’t think I could eat my pet,” Maggie shouted as Patricia paused under the aqueduct, grabbed an irrigation hose, and hid behind a pillar.

“Have you ever owned one?” Patricia called from the dark.

“Of course!” Maggie replied, feeling unsure of where to run next.

“Then you’ve owned a piece of walking meat,” Patricia stated like a fact. Then she opened the valve and aimed the water at Maggie.

“You asshole!” Maggie screamed, and tried to wrestle the hose from the youth. The struggle didn’t last long. By the time Maggie had the hose under her control, Patricia was running away again.

It was almost noon and I was still fuming from both ears. Who are these people? I cried in PRIVATE. Every civil citizen of earth knows the right answer to the question—“What do you want to be when you grow up?” It isn’t meant to be a question of taste. The teacher asks Johnny, and Johnny says, “I want to be a doctor.” If not a doctor, Johnny says, “I want to be a lawyer,” or an engineer, stockbroker, programmer, collage professor, judge, or lawyer. No child’s supposed to look at their teacher and very excitedly say, “I want to be a burger chef,” or a sanitary technician, exterminator, mortician, or dishwasher. In The End, they give pharmaceuticals to children who give answers like that, because it’s not normal to choose to be poor. Poverty is something unnatural that happens to people—like burning forever in hell—when they fail (or fail to try) to pass the many tests of The Something Grander.

But, there Patricia was—that unnatural thing in the flesh—and I was watching her runaway with my full-grown US Government Asset…

“What other characters do you have in stock?” Maggie asked after she caught up. “You know, other than Food Pet Handler of Crocs?”   

“I host the following profitable characters,” she replied and took a deep breath. “Basket Weaver, Paper Producer, Sofa Maker, Goldsmith, Bedbug Hunter, Beard Trimmer, Astrological Gardener, Trash Marauder, Electrician, Bad Bee Retriever, Fork Carver, Cobbler’s Elf, Monster Pooka Poker, and I’m an understudy for Sam the Goat Coach, Blue Suit’s Nanotech Mechanic, and America Spirit’s bun-making character whatever she’s called…Spirit’s not big on slapping brandnames on every profitable action she performs…”

And Patricia’s list of profitable stock characters continued to grow, by the mile, as Maggie struggled to keep up. Every once in a while Patricia would stop her listing and tell one of her working character’s origin story like a proud parent telling a friend the story of their child’s birth.

“Forget this running nonsense! I’m done,” Maggie cried out as she collapsed in the shade of an aspen grove, gasping, flat on her back.

Patricia circled back to Maggie. “Isn’t this great?” she grinned as she gazed down at her new friend, hands on knees. “Now you know what it feels like to travel through the city without a bike.”

The only reply Maggie managed was a nod—and the goofiest grin I’ve seen Maggie make yet. She looked really happy.

“So what about you?” Patricia asked as she struggled to help Maggie to her feet. “What vegetables will you grow in your new garden?”

It was Maggie’s turn to rattle off her list. “I’m going to grow chard, beets, cabbage, peas, carrots, arugula, mustard greens, radishes, squash, turnips, parsnips, kohlrabi, peppers, you name it…and I’ll grow it!”

Patricia pulled Maggie to her feet—but once she was up her knees began to knock like a cartoon before she fell back with a thud.

That was the moment that inspired me to do something grander than watch the TV screen like a football fan. “Ok,” I said in PRIVATE. “I’ve had enough of this bullshit.” I opened my spy laptop and entered the secret code to connect to my secure satellite uplink. Then I wrote my first encrypted report to the Man in Charge of Me in DC like I was writing an angry letter to The Editor that begins with the old classic line, “What’s wrong with the youth these days?” Here’s a sample of the report I wrote that day:

REPORT #1: FROM AGENT JACKSON TO AGENT STURGIS

I’VE ESTABLISHED CONTACT WITH WESTON AND HE HAS AGREED TO ALLOW ME TO INTERVIEW HIM.

MISSION SECURITY IS BEING MAINTAINED. HOWEVER, THE ASSET—MAGGIE NORTON-STONE—IS SHOWING SIGNS OF DISSIDENCE. SHE OFTEN FAILS TO MEET PERFORMANCE EXPECTATIONS. I WILL CONTINUE TO IMPLEMENT CORRECTIVE MEASURES TO KEEP HER IN CHECK.

Then I listed 49 facts about “The Terror Banking Cult”—

1. ACCORDING TO WESTON’S ASSISTANT AND LOVER MISS CHASE, WESTONTON CORPORATION ONLY HAS ONE JOB, POSITION, AND/OR WORKING ROLE FOR ITS EMPLOYEES TO PERFORM…WHICH IS TO OWN AND RUN THEIR STORYBANK ACCOUNTS AS “SUPER STAR” STORYBANKERS. THE RARE EXCEPTIONS TO THAT POLICY ARE THE ROLES OF CEO, PRESIDENT, AND SECURITY CHIEF. WESTON AND CHIEF MOYNIHAM DO NOT OWN STORYBANK ACCOUNTS.    

1. WESTON’S CORPORATE POLICIES PERMIT CHILDREN TO RUN AROUND UNSUPERVISED, VIOLATING THE MOST BASIC OF OUR CHILD LABOR LAWS. FROM AN EARLY AGE, THEY ARE PERMITTED THE SO-CALLED FREEDOM TO BE RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR OWN ECONOMIC/BUSINESS CHARACTERS. THEY, IN TURN, USE THE PROFITS FROM THOSE CHARACTERS TO PAY FOR THE KIND OF EDUCATION THEY FEEL BEST FITS THEIR STORIES. THIS NEWFANGLED CURRICULUM APPEARS TO DEVELOP A STRONG SENSE OF RESPONSIBILITY (AND SELF ESTEEM) FOR THEIR PERSONAL ECONOMIES. IT ALSO NURTURES AN EXTENSIVE KNOWLEDGE OF THEIR HOMES AND “SUPPORTING CAST MEMBERS.” THE CLEAR DOWNSIDE OF ALL THIS IS, NO ONE (AND I DO MEAN NO ONE) IS TEACHING THE YOUTH ANY OF THE TOP-DOWN RULES OF ADULTHOOD. I HAVE YET TO FIND ANY MENTION OF THE YOUTH LEARNING ABOUT LITERATURE, SCIENCE, LAW AND ORDER, OR OTHER SUBJECTS FROM THE CLASSIC CANNON OF CIVILIZATION. I FIND IT IRONIC THAT WESTONTON HAS NO SCHOOLS OR TEACHERS WHO REQUIRE THE YOUTH TO READ LORD OF THE FLIES, BECAUSE I’M HERE LIVING WITH THE UNGOVERNED YOUTHS RUN WILD.

1. THROUGH VARIOUS MEANS, WESTON HAS BRAINWASHED HIS TERROR-BANKING CULT FOLLOWERS INTO PAYING HIM EVERYTHING THEY OWN (ALL THEIR ASSETS) IN EXCHANGE FOR THEIR NEW WORKING ROLES AS STORYBANKERS. SIDE NOTE: IN ORDER TO PAY FOR OUR ADMITTANCE INTO THE BANKING CULT, I PAID WESTON EVERYTHING I HAD LEFT IN THE COVER ACCOUNT, BUT THAT WASN’T ENOUGH. I PAID THE DIFFERENCE WITH MY OWN MONEY…WHICH I HOPE WILL BE REIMBURSED? PLEASE? GOD BLESS AMERICA! MY VENMO HANDLE IS: @WYLIE-JONES-5 ☺

1. THERE’S A MORE RADICAL TERROR BANKING CELL WITHIN THE CULT. IT’S LED BY WESTON’S LOVER, SAMANTHA CHASE. SHE BELIEVES HER LOVER HAS AN UNHEALTHY ADDICTION TO “DOPE CURRENCY.” SAMANTHA CHASE DEFINES THAT AS   “GENERALIZED CURRENCIES,” INCLUDING THE ALMIGHTY DOLLAR IN BOTH ITS FIBROUS AND DIGITAL FORMS.

1. THE SECRET LOCATION OF MR. WESTON’S SUPER-MASSIVE VAULT HAS YET TO BE DISCOVERED, BUT WE KNOW THAT HIS SECURITY CHIEF, A FORMIDABLE MAN NAMED BRADLEY MOYNIHAM KNOWS WHERE THE VAULT IS LOCATED.

1. OUR OBJECTIVE SEEMS TO BE UNIMPRESSED WITH BEING REUNITED WITH HIS LONG, LOST DAUGHTER.

Thanks to our Storysold: TV I was able to stay tuned to Maggie and Patricia’s channel while I wrote my report, and then stuff my laptop back into my scooter bag a few beats before the runaways ran up the Guest Nest’s spiral staircase. Maggie didn’t greet me with a hug or a kiss. She ran straight to the oven and turned it on. “They’re Ready-Bake Saudi Arabian Hand-Tossed Five-Cheese Pizzas,” she explained as she unwrapped the contents of the package in her hand. “I bought them on credit from one of my followers who joined us in scene to watch my story live!” Maggie continued. “You’ll never believe what he calls his main character. It’s Saudi Arabia! He has a personal relationship with his old market nationality. He says he loves his homeland so much he manifests its governing body in The Action every day. Isn’t that wild?”

I didn’t know the right answer to that question, so I said nothing as I watched Maggie and Patricia make a salad to compliment the pizzas. They must have been in my scene for more than three whole moments (about 45 minutes) before Maggie made any real effort to acknowledge my presence. I decided to let the insult to my authority go. To be fair, she had never been trained to stand at attention, salute, or greet the Man in Charge of Her properly.

Besides, I was hungry and the pizza was delicious.

My Storybank Account – Scene Twenty One,

THE PART WHERE A FLESH-SLICING NINJA INTRODUCES THE GRAND RACHNA AS THEY PREPARE FOR A FUNERAL…

After $932:04 mms worth of living houseless (out of her bike and wagon) Patricia began developing the city’s newest bike-production shop. $273 mms after that, Maggie was still shopping for a shop and garden plot; and we were still living in the Guest Nest, being fed like baby birds by Traveler and others. I was in no hurry to leave. I liked sitting on the couch and using the Storysold technology to do my job. It was more effective than wearing make-up and sneaking behind bushes, trying to catch the information The Storysold Exchange broadcasted openly for free.

Maggie was doing her best to find a shop, but—thanks to the baby boom that hit soon after the city launched into the ocean, when thousands of construction workers paid everything they earned and owned to buy storybank accounts from Weston—there were a lot of bright youths like Patricia making their runs on the city’s supply of open shops. And they were all a lot better at storyselling than Maggie. Like Patricia, these youths had been investing in their wealth of profitable relationships since the day they were born.

Needless to say, we weren’t winning any awards.

To make matters worse, Miss Chase gave us an ending for our stay in the Guest Nest. She informed us that we had precisely $152:34 mms to get our “food-sucking signatures out” because Chester Weston had a billionaire couple sailing in from Tokyo to sample a storybank account and see for themselves why qualitative-based banking in real-life, colorized monetary moments was indubitably the wave of the future.    

In spite of our rising crisis, I continued my routine—pleasantly couch-sitting, watching The Storybank Exchange on the TV, crushing my coffee grounds with the Coffee Rock, and emailing reports to DC whenever I could sneak away for a PRIVATE moment or two.

“Why do I have to do this every time you pee?” Maggie whined as she switched her channel to PRIVATE then turned to face the windows.

“Why?” I replied as I switched my channel to PRIVATE, walked to the toilet, unzipped my pants, and prepared to recite what had become my party line on the subject of bathroom breaks. “You know why.”

“I know why you think this makes sense.”

“We’re not married yet Apple Pie. That’s why.”

Maggie crossed her arms, and said, “Don’t Apple Pie me, Honey. Our channels are blocked. I’m off The Clock.”

“I wish I know what you were talking about, Apple Pie,” I replied, raising my voice over the sound of my tinkle. “Boyfriends and Girlfriends are never off The Clock. It’s like being an American.”

“Jesus fucking Christ. Give it a rest, will you?”

“Will you please not use the word ‘fucking’ in the same sentence as our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?”

I turned to see that Maggie was facing me.

“I can put my fucking, fuckings anywhere I want, fucker.”

In spite of my training, I laughed. “Is that so?”

“Did you just laugh?” Maggie asked.

“Yeah,” I replied with a grin.

“What does your Lord and Savor Jesus Christ think about that?”

“He thinks we should be married before we poop and pee in each other’s presence. That’s what He thinks.”

Maggie raised an eyebrow and asked, “Really?”

“Yes,” I said as we walked closer to each other. “It so happens that I know that our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ wants us to be happy, and we can’t be happy if we don’t trust each other.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Maggie smiled. “I trust you Wylie.”

“You mean you trust me to be the best Boyfriend I can be?”

“No,” Maggie said, and moved closer. “I trust that our Lord and Savior wants us to be happy.”

“Are you talking about the same Lord and Savor I am?”

“No,” she said. “I’m talking about My Lord and Savior, the one that doesn’t have a mind like a one way highway.” She put her lips close enough to mine for me to smell and feel Her Everything. “I think Your Jesus is the one that’s making us miserable. Mine wants us to be happy together.”

I blushed when she said that. And if I’d been smarter, I would have followed my passion, kissed her, and allowed myself fall into her like a rock in space. But I didn’t. Instead, I put my hands on her shoulders and looked her in the eyes like a coach delivering a pep talk to his backup quarterback. “You’re right,” I said. “We could be happy together. Our Lord and Savior has a plan for our lives, and even though it may seem like He has done nothing but heap pain and heartache on us from The Beginning, that’s only because we’ve been doing a shitty job of following his master plan. I’m sure if we began to work, together, with greater efficiency, Our Savior will have golden crowns—and maybe a cash bonus—waiting for us in the life after this. Our Lord has been known to be very generous to his good and faithful servants.”    

Maggie knocked my arms away and stepped back. “What’s wrong with you?” she shouted. “Why do you hate me so much?”

“I don’t hate you…I just…”

We were too wrapped up in the moment to notice Patricia, or her new costume. She’d snuck up the spiral staircase, tip-toed through the kitchen, and she was now in our scene wearing all black nursing scrubs with a black surgical mask covering her mouth—screaming, “Haiiyah!”

When I saw her hands slicing the air like knives and her foot aimed in my direction as menacingly as was possible for a teen raised without the benefit of scissor-snapping Hollywood action flicks, I looked appropriately frightened and said, “Whoa there Enter the Dragon. I mean you no harm!”

“Meet Patricia the Surgical Ninja!” she announced, as we stood there stunned. “How do you like my story in this e-role?”

“E-role?”

“Economic role.”

“I think teenage confusion is a now proven universal constant,” I laughed. “What happened to the Wonder Bike Inventor?”

She pulled off her mask. “Why, do you want a bike?”

Hard as it was for me to believe, the youth stood there straight-faced and said that she’d just performed her ninth surgery scene on a reportedly undead woodland fairy king named Puck. Then she used her Storysold-brand smart phone to show us a clip of her surgery scene in all its gruesome details. She went on to explain that her e-role was inspired by something her friend and signature example and “illustrator,” Grand Rachna the Healer had said (and I quote): “Surgical performances are the only scenes where ripping a human host open with flesh-slicing objects makes any profitable sense.”

I, of course, found that line difficult to swallow. I had been trained to believe that the most profitable contribution to the aggregate good of the universe I could offer, as a Hero, was to rip the innards of my enemies open with a knife, gun, or grenade without any intention of healing them. I tried to explain that to Patricia the Surgical Ninja—effectively citing the long, brave history of the ancient ninja who protected the property and labor pool of their Ninja King, and so on. But she didn’t understand. She asserted that it took more “ninja skills” to heal a life-threatening wound than it took to slice open an enemy while screaming artfully in slow motion with no action plan to heal their affliction. I asserted that the most effective, age-old treatment for our enemies was (what’s the right word?) “bloodletting” the bad guys to make sure they got it in The End. I did my best to educate her, but Patricia couldn’t comprehend the simple idea that the heroes needed the bad guys to die, so they could kiss  the maiden and live happily ever after. “It’s not her fault,” I mumbled aloud to myself, shaking my head. “Her chemicals aren’t firing right. The Problem must be in her pineal gland, or frontal lobe, or maybe it’s environmental?”

“What are you mumbling about?”

I hadn’t gathered enough data to prove that she was environmentally imbalanced, so I squinted in the face of teenage confusion—and asked, “What kind of crazy person allowed you cut on a living, human being without at least a decade’s worth of medical training?”     

Patricia shrugged. “It’s not crazy. Grand Rachna says they let young people on the mainland perform field surgeries with scalpels called ‘bayonets’ after only ninety days of ‘boot camp’ illustrations.”

“Was it this ‘Rachna’ who encouraged this character in you?”

“Yes and no,” she replied. “She illustrated a lot of important surgical scenes for me, but the Surgical Ninja is mine. When The Moment of Truth comes and I have to cut one of my friends open with precision and skill, I am the only Surgical Ninja in scene. It’s up to me to make The Action happen.”

I sighed. “Yes, but who is this Rachna person?”

From behind, I heard a firm but gentle voice ask, “Why, are you in the market for the best healthcare your dollars can’t buy?”

The voice was that of Grand Rachna the Healer. I turned to see a short older woman with bright eyes and no hair. She was wearing a thick, gray, high-neck dress with lots of pockets, white nursing walkers, and a floppy straw sunhat with daisies tucked in its band.

“No,” I replied, setting my hands firmly on hips. “I’m in the market for a good old-fashioned dose of common sense! Are you the so-called adult who put a scalpel in this youth’s hand?”

Rachna didn’t say a word. She reached into one of her pockets and handed me a Storysold bank card with a title that read—EIGHT HUNDRED SUCCESSFUL SURGERIES BY GRAND RACHNA IN STORYSOLD: CITY. When she felt her point had been made effectively, she added, “If you are as instantly faithless in my surgical skills as you are in Patricia’s, I am sure ‘this youth’ will gladly grant you access to her account too, so you can see her worth for yourself. Unlike an old market surgeon, Patricia’s only developing one kind of surgery scene for my Working Healthcare System. The only skill her e-role as Surgical Ninja profitably performs is what you’d call ‘tonsillectomies.’ And I must say, her ninth performance removing our friend Puck’s royal tonsils was flawless. Patricia even presented the Fairy King with a bowl of hand-cranked ice cream to thank him for his bravery.”

There was no winning with these people, I thought. They’re all brainwashed beyond the repair of professional help. “Here,” I passed the card back to Rachna and I lied, saying, “I’m sure you’re qualified enough to do whatever you do…to whoever you do it to.”

“Thanks for saying so, so politely,” she replied, studying me with her soul-piercing eyes. “Now what do you say to owning a shop in Island Market Seven’s Residential Shopping Center? You’d be three levels above Patricia and across the hall from me and my husband, Blue Suit.”   

“Sure,” Maggie agreed before I could say anything. “Sounds great! What do we need to do?”

“Put on your truest costumes, and follow me,” Rachna replied as she moved towards the stairs. “I’m going to be your Director at my good friend Solji Kim’s funeral.”

I hadn’t been out of the Guest Nest in days, and I didn’t know what the mad doctor meant by my “truest costume,” so I took a tip from the Surgical Ninja and decided to dress in black: tight black hipster jeans, stylized hipster hairdo, and a suit jacket over a white T-shirt. Maggie didn’t dress up at all. Her truest costume was a hoodie, jeans, and sneakers.

Before we left the Nest, I told my Cover Girlfriend that her choice for truest costume wasn’t as true as it could be, and then I suggested that she would look better in her red turtleneck and bell-bottomed polyester pants, but my commentary was met with silence.

My Girlfriend was going in street clothes.   

As we walked, I eavesdropped while Patricia explained that Grand Rachna the Healer was “one of the richest storybankers in Storysold: City .” She was Weston’s Professional Back Rubber, a role she performed a few moments every week in exchange for being one of the few storybankers in the city, aside from Traveler, who was granted powers by the President to call “his city” Storysold: City  without the fear of being fired and forcibly removed from the premises by Security Chief Moyniham.

“What does ‘being rich’ mean in a city where everyone has to prove the value of the money they put into their accounts?” Maggie asked what I thought was a good, Mission-oriented question.

Patricia said that “rich” was simply another word for good, and went on to explain that making a good story had its privileges. From what I gathered from their conversation, the privileges of rich storybankers like Grand Rachna were systemically different from the sort of privileges one might expect to gain as a rich Old Market Anyone with a hoard of quantitative spending power over other humans. The difference was that, in Storysold: City , storybankers earned more justly what they deserved. Here, the quality of a storybanker’s moneyed moments mattered a measure more than its quantity. Here, a rich storybanker was an individual, a human who gained privileges as a result of successfully creating a quality, outstandingly profitable/good story. And naturally, it’s hard to produce a good story without a good supporting cast all working together in common themes they owned with their moments.

Patricia elaborated so much on “how cool it was” to be the owner of a good storybank account that was profitable—above and beyond the sum of its contents—that I began to wonder if there was anything better in life than producing a qualitatively attractive story. According to her, storybankers who produce moments of great richness are showered with all kinds of delightful returns. A few of which were: (1) greater powers to choose better supporting cast members; (2) greater demand for whatever goods and services (props and actions) they produce; (3) going to bed at night confident in the knowledge that they’ve added and not taken from the good of The Earth Show; (4) exchanging moments with friends and family who grant them starring roles in their casts because their stories would be poorer without them; (5) and so on.

Maggie was quick to point out that the privileges of the “employable rich” were nine times out of ten reflective of the quantitative nature of the old market. By the numbers, they earned what they deserved (all the goods and services they wanted from anyone): a bottle of fine wine bottled by strangers; a plate of flame-roasted free-range duck and organic baby carrots prepared by strangers; one red speedy sports car fabricated by a whole factory of strangers; and a hundred digit-o-dollars per hour paid to a stranger to listen to them, give advice, and help them cope with life like they weren’t a stranger. As we crossed an arched bridge onto Island Market Seven’s Garden Surface, I felt that Maggie nailed the difference between riches and richness, saying, “I guess I can ‘buy me love’ after all, so long as I’m not trying to buy it with millions of dollars’ worth of bad stories.” The Beatles were so profound.

And so went the exchange between Patricia the Terror Banking Cultist and Maggie my US Government Asset. I memorized everything they said, so one day (when I had more time) I could check their lines against the FBI’s Dangerous Ideologies Manual. What’s wrong with a stranger serving me roasted duck and fine wine? What’s wrong with buying a nice car made by a team of strangers from far away? It’s the way the duck tastes, the fineness of the wine (and the obsequious way they’re served): not the quality of the duck’s life or death, or the way the wine maker minted their moments. I mean, nobody cares if the waitress is having a good day or not, so long as the food comes fast and hot and she doesn’t talk for longer than a few lines at a time. Everyone on earth, who isn’t a member of a Terror Banking Cult, knows that waitress would expect the same service if she ordered the wine from us.

My Storybank Account – Scene Twenty Two, 

THE PART WHERE MAGGIE THE GARDEN TENDER INHERITS THE HAPPY GARDEN PLOT OF SOLJI KIM…   

A few moments before dusk, we arrived in an overgrown weed plot, about a quarter of a football field in size, in the middle of the Island Market’s Garden Surface. In the far corner of the blob-shaped garden plot—along a border defined by uneven waves of wheat, an old-fashioned street lamp, and a classic red, Old McDonald’s Farm barn—a hundred or more storybankers were digging a hole. Some of them were laughing, some were crying, some were somber—while others were smiling, talking, and working together in what I assumed were their truest of costumes.

“What’s happening?” I whispered to Rachna as we approached the gathering. “I’ve never been to a…uh, Westonton funeral before.”

“Me neither,” Rachna replied. “I’m from Storysold: City .”

“Oh,” I replied as I watched her move through the gathering towards a big man in a blue mechanic’s jumpsuit I recognized as Blue Suit. He was weeping silently. Rachna placed her hand on his shoulder and they talked as the pillowy evening clouds drifted by. At the other side of the garden plot, a second gathering of storybankers emerged from a thicket set with fruit trees and shrubbery. On their shoulders, they carried a wooden box that held the lifeless end of Solji Kim’s story. They walked naturally without pomp, or ritual step, towards the storybankers who were digging the hole. Beside the box, five of Solji Kim’s surviving cast members carried a beautiful picnic table that was carved with scenes and illustrations that celebrated their friend’s story. The human hosts of The Funeral assembled under the street lamp, and a silence fell over the gathering as Grand Rachna the Healer spoke…

“We, the supporting cast of Solji Kim,” Rachna began as Patricia, Maggie, and I moved closer to better hear the Director’s words, “We have gathered here today, each in our own ways, to say goodbye to Solji Kim. Most of you know me. I am Rachna the Healer. I worked with Solji for eleven-and-a-half years producing Working Healthcare scenes. I knew from the first one we made together that I wanted to share my story with her, for life. I loved Solji Kim. She was a dear friend, and I will miss her.”

In the background, Blue Suit was busy connecting one of his signature Gravesights to the city’s power supply. As unbelievable as it sounds, each of Blue Suit’s Gravesights was handcrafted. He carved the stone that his touch screens were imbedded in. He dipped each wire in its protective plastic, connected each wire to its corresponding chip, built every widget the touch screen needed, to give his Gravesights the power to show The Living the full life’s story of the human ends they marked in celebration.

As Blue Suit connected the Gravesight, Rachna continued, “I was a surgeon on the mainland before I found this city. The endless, impersonal, inhuman revolving-door experiences of that job left me jaded and frightened to open myself to others, especially patients. I would cry after work because I was unable to become that better person I wanted to be. Solji Kim didn’t have that problem. I know she must have been afraid at times, but she never showed it. Solji was a joy—inviting, warm, lovely as a sunny day.”

Rachna paused as Solji Kim’s cast lifted her box and, using ropes, lowered her remains into the hole. Then the Funeral Director recounted the first scene where she met Solji in her Korean-style restaurant, which translated roughly as “Solji’s Kitchen.” She laughed as she remembered the fun she had breaching the communication barrier with their actions, learning how to cook and enjoy delicious Korean-style food fresh from her Happy Garden. Rachna said that, except for her Husband, Solji was her first cast member to support her now famous theme, Rachna’s Working Healthcare System. Which meant that Solji was the first human in Rachna’s career that she was able to treat and trust openly, as a friend, and not treat like a patient. As the producer of the Working Healthcare System, Rachna worked with Solji to grow a variety of medicinal plants, showed her how to make helpful drugs from them, and inspired Solji to develop her own self-styled healthcare role, Solji the Helpful Drug Maker. A few live action work scenes every week, Solji became a pharmacist of sorts who produced helpful drugs for her own needs first, and then—if the Helpful Drug Maker was inspired—she minted drug-making scenes for others too.

When she was done speaking, Rachna knelt down to scoop up a handful of soil from the garden and tossed it into the hole. After a moment of silence, Rachna turned to face Solji Kim’s Gravesight, inserted a Storysold card into a slot in the stone slab, and deposited the best of moments she’d spent with Solji. With her Husband’s help, she used the Gravesight’s touch-screen controls to label her deposit with a title that read, RACHNA’S BEST-OF MOMENTS WITH SOLJI KIM.

One at a time, Solji’s cast followed Rachna’s example, each in their ways. Some tossed a handful of soil into the hole to pay their respects; some deposited their best-of scenes into the Gravesight’s memorial canon; some evoked older, traditional rituals to make the departure of their friend bearable; and some shared their favorite Solji scene with a friend, or three.

By the time a man in a custom-made Uncle Sam costume made the day’s last deposit in Solji’s Gravesight, a street lamp was the only light lighting the funeral scene. The Uncle Sam look-alike titled his deposit, “Korean and American Barbecues: The Secret to Profitable US and Korean Relations on the High Seas.” I found it difficult to imagine a national character like Uncle Sam displaying emotions—other than duty, drum-beating pride, and vengeance—but there he was, authentically American as boxed apple pie. He cried softly as he gave his friends (who came along to show support) a big group hug. As I watched their scene, I couldn’t get over how short Uncle Sam was in real life. He was a lot shorter than I imagined any great leader of men should be.

Uncle Sam’s friends were dressed in familiar costumes too. There was a woman dressed as the Statue of Liberty, a large bald man carrying a sledge hammer, an Abe Lincoln look-alike, and a half-naked white man wearing face paint and buckskin pants. For the first time that night I wondered: What are we doing here? I had no beautiful scenes to deposit in the Gravesight, or stories to share. It was the end of a woman’s life, and I had nothing to say. For a while I tried to be something that made sense—Wylie Jones the Freelance Journalist, or Wylie the Culture-Seeking Tourist, or Anthropologist Jones the Adventurer (without the whip)—but nothing made me feel better about being the stranger in a circle of friends. I wanted to cry, laugh, or do a jig around her grave, but I felt nothing, just nothing, and I hated that more than anything.

I stood there, staring, as Blue Suit downloaded a special, high-density Storysold card that read: SOLJI KIM’S LIFE-SAVINGS. A clip later, after a few touches of the screen, we watched the entirety of Solji’s storybank account flash forward from the beginning to the end. The gathering grew silent in the recollection of the part Solji Kim played in The Earth Show—all The Action she minted in Storysold: City —now resting at her story’s end in the Gravesight that Blue Suit made to mark the resting of her body.

I turned to the woman beside me. She looked like something out of a Star Trek movie, dressed in a skintight jumpsuit and a helmet. I learned later that she was a member of Winner’s Reality the Gaming Community. She tried to communicate something to me through the glass of her helmet, but any words she might have made were drowned in sobs.

Solji Kim’s Life Savings continued to flash, nearing the end.

Moments before it did, Blue Suit touched the PLAY icon and we watched Solji’s final scene. It was produced by the A-eyes known as “Tinker Glasses,” which Solji’s friend Lady Liberty was wearing with Solji when she died. The scene showed Solji hiking up a windy, cloud-covered trail with her friends, breathing deeply as she reached the top of a mountain.

Our Funeral Director narrated, saying, “As you know, our friend Solji died doing the one thing she loved more than producing her produce, Korean-style, in her Happy Garden for her cast members to enjoy: Solji died climbing a mountain in Korea with my Husband the Blue Suit, Go Faster, Liberty, Guide, Savage, and Uncle Sam. She decided to go, answer that call, with full knowledge of her condition. We liked to joke that her heart was bursting from too much love. But, in effect, that’s what was happening. Her aorta was tearing slowly, bursting. Solji called it her Stubborn Friend. We all knew, and we did our best to keep her from living too hard, but Solji would have none of that. She’d listen to us politely, laugh, and nod, then do what she wanted to do.

“The annual backpacking trip to the Korean mountains was her idea; it was inspired by men like her father, her brothers, and the shit husband she left behind in Korea when she journeyed to Storysold: City . Originally it was their tradition. Every year they assembled under a tent at the base of a mountain to eat good food, share good company, and drink lots of wine. When the drinking reached its pitch, they hiked en masse up the mountain, climbed to the tallest rock they could find, and then—one by one—released their primal screams, yelling, “Assah!” in a competition to outdo the man who came before. This was great fun, and Solji wanted to join in, but the men always left her behind, in the tent, to cook, and watch from afar.

“Solji didn’t decide to invest her fortune in Storysold: City because the men in her life told her ‘no.’ She didn’t really talk about why. To this day I don’t know why she made her home in Storysold: City . I do know, Solji loved the part in her story where she gathered a cast of fun-loving friends who say, yes to good food, yes to good company, yes to Korean-style rice wine, and yes to climbing mountaintops and screaming ‘Assah!’ at the top of their lungs. Those who knew her used her signature Assah lovingly in their daily scenes. It was a hit throughout the city too, so big in fact she named her signature rice wine production Assah in honor of her annual backpacking trip.

“It was hard for me to see her go on her last adventure. I knew her Stubborn Friend might push her beyond her physical limitations. I might have fought harder to keep her from going if I didn’t know her so well. How could I tell her no? I loved Solji, and because I did, I didn’t want to be the one who persuaded her, at the climax of her life, that she should finally give in, surrender, and accept the ‘No!’ she’d spent a lifetime fighting. It would have taken a heartless villain to pin her down, make her stay in camp, and tell her to rest while her friends screamed ‘Assah!’ without her.”                                            

Rachna turned to the Gravesight and we watched as Solji climbed the last few steps to the top and stood on the tallest rock she could find. Then Solji Kim (age 89) screamed “Assah!” like she was eighteen. A few short clips later, Solji’s Stubborn Friend gave out on the trail back to camp.

“Solji had a mighty scream,” Uncle Sam said when the Gravesight scene faded to fuzz. “Solji’s voice was not lost, crying in the wilderness alone. We were climbing with her, in spirit, every step of the way. And I, for one, will continue to climb with her signature tucked up under my hat. My friend’s life was a happy dream, forged from bitter roots, which I hope we never forget. Let us never forget someone as good as she walked this earth.”

The funeral gathering exploded in riotous rounds of applause for Uncle Sam’s call to remember their friend.

When the hole in the Happy Garden was filled and covered with a mound of earth, the picnic table carved with illustrations of Solji’s life story was placed in front of the grave mound and her Gravesight.

“Now,” Rachna announced. “Solji developed a simple Will. Her last request was that we, her cast, find someone in Storysold: City  in need of a shop and garden plot, someone who would be willing to inherit her debt, work the heritage of her signature into theirs happily, and reuse as many of her props as they can…Is there anyone who would be so honored as to keep our friend’s rich heritage alive?” Rachna looked right at Maggie, wide-eyed, nodding—and then winked, hoping she would catch a cue. But Maggie didn’t react. She stood there, blank-faced, in the grip of stage fright.

“Solji Kim has asked,” Rachna prompted, “that someone keep this storytelling table of hers supplied at all times with a jar of her signature kimchi and a bottle of her signature Assah; and keep this Gravesight up and running and weeded for our enjoyment, so we can drop by her Gravesight Picnic Area and eat kimchi and sip Assah in memory of her, as we sit and watch her Life Savings. And maybe even share her with a loved one, or a young storybanker who never had the pleasure of minting a scene in the life of Solji Kim. I ask again,” she raised her voice louder, “is there anyone here who’s willing carry on the debt and heritage of our friend?”

There was half a moment of silence, then Maggie raised her hand slowly, and said, “I… I will carry on…”

The gathering exploded in a round of cheer and applause.

Suddenly, we were surrounded. Uncle Sam grabbed my hand and shook it forcibly, saying, “Great Gatsby, what a bargain! Congratulations man! You and the missus will be happy here. I guarantee it.”

Honest Abe tipped his tall black stovepipe hat. Then, in a deep rascally voice, he said, “I agree with my colleague. Solji was one of the finest among us, and it warms my heart to know that it’ll be a real American couple who’s gonna step up, and do their duty, to fill Solji’s place at our table. Best we never forget that our Korean friends like Solji Kim have played their parts, with great grit and bearing, in Our Emancipated American Histories.”

Before I knew what I was doing, I said, “Don’t worry, sir. You can count on me!” Then I saluted the man like The Flag. Cazarts! I thought when I realized what I was doing. That government training really works!

Meanwhile, Maggie was in the thick of the scene. Members of Solji Kim’s cast circled her like bandits on Wall Street, each member enthusiastically shared with her their part in Solji’s heritage: $11:36 mms of inherited debt owed to Son the Tool Maker; $135:00 mms owed to Blue Suit the Nanotech Mechanic; $2,350:78 inherited moments owed to Winner the Gamemaster of Reality; $91:00 inherited mms owed to Honest Abe the Saltmaker; $295:50 inherited moments owed to Wall the Stage-Stocking Grocer; $312:49 mms owed to the American Dreamstate Band for The Happy Garden Harvesting Food Jam with Guest Star Solji Kim. And the debts went on and on.

Needless to say, Solji died without a moment to her name.

Or so it seemed. In the midst of the debt collectors, Rachna spoke to my befuddlement. “Behind every good story, there’s a good supporting cast. That’s our economic reality. Only a fool would toss away a chance to inherit Solji’s debts. Good cast members like hers are hard to find. These folks aren’t liabilities. They helped Solji develop her garden and her restaurant shop; and they will help you, too, so long as you balance their accounts. This isn’t the old market. Here wealth isn’t black and white. You can’t always file good in the assets, and bad in the liabilities. Here, how much you inherit doesn’t matter as much as what, when, why, how, and whose signature heritage you’re carrying on. Here, The Numbers don’t rule supreme…because, in a qualitative-based economy, it doesn’t make any profitable sense to collect your money, or hoard it away in pursuit of ‘interest’—waiting for its demand to grow until your cast will do anything you ask to get it. There’s nothing good about passing on a legacy of impoverishing others after death. Here, our supporting cast—our homes (friends, family, and customers)—are the fortunes we develop and pass on to future generations. Think about that. What’s so great about inheriting an empty  house full of props, or a collection of pressed and dyed fibers? In the end, it’s not the love you take, but the love you make that’s valuable.”

Right, I thought, and who gives a hoot in hell about inheriting their rich uncle’s mansion and vault full of cash? Answer: Everybody.

I stood, stunned, as Rachna left me. I watched in numb anger as my Asset the Girlfriend socialized with Solji’s cast, consorted with the enemy, and smiled like she meant it in the lamplight of Weston’s Terror Banking Cult. I watched as if in slow motion as she nodded, shook the hands of the Healer, and agreed to balance out $3,004:67 mms owed to Rachna’s Working Healthcare System. I was aghast when Rachna suggested that Maggie develop a healthcare role that dealt with the toxic spread of dope currency addiction. I was horrified when Maggie failed to nod sympathetically, feign interest, and say, ‘Well maybe. I have to ask my Boyfriend first.’ From where I stood, she was all about joining Rachna’s culty crusade to cure the whole blessed world of our ‘dope currency addiction,’ whatever that means. All I knew was, this would never do. She was too convincing to be faking it for the sake of The Mission.

A few beats before dawn, I made it clear to Maggie that it was time to go. “I’m beat,” I whined. “I need food and sleep.” Maggie agreed (nodding sympathetically), but she wasn’t in need of food and sleep.

Maggie was looking spry, fueled on energy of another kind.

“I don’t understand, Grand Rachna,” Maggie said curiously, taking to calling Rachna by her grand title. “What did you do to earn the name of Grand Rachna the Funeral Director? It seemed that the funeral gathering worked on its own without your direction.”

The Healer smiled, placed her floppy straw sunhat on Maggie’s head, and said, “You’ll need this now that you’re a Gardener. You can pay me for that hat each time it keeps the sun out of your eyes and you remember that you were the only ones I was performing that role for. I spoke, and they listened, because I am Grand Rachna the Healer, friend of Solji Kim. They didn’t listen because I was the governing body of the group, the employable that filled the working role of Funeral Director. Everyone interprets my signature differently, and I customize my titles and characters in celebration of those differences; but I’ll never fail to be who I am. I know who I am. When you understand that for yourself, you will be as rich as I.”   

My Storybank Account – Scene Twenty Three, 

THE PART WHERE THE GREENHORN STORYBANKERS MOVE INTO DEBT ON ISLAND MARKET SEVEN…

Usually the customer calls the moving company, the company calls their movers, and the movers show up without much to say.

In Westonton, our Movers decided that they were ready to move us out of the Guest Nest a few days after Solji’s funeral. And they weren’t your usual wage slave employables ripped and ready to go with their veins fueled on caffeine, nicotine, coka cola, and whatever else they needed to balance their chemicals. No, they weren’t your usual class of people who do quantifiably less valuable forms of work—you know, Poor People who would rob you, drop your fancy new sofa in the street, or hurt you badly if they weren’t on parole, or paying for their small army of children from the bottom of their tip jar. Those kind of 2nd cardboard characters didn’t last long in Storysold: City . Our Movers were our neighbors from Island Market Seven’s Residential Shopping Center: Blue Suit, Patricia, and Grand Rachna the Healer.   

“What is a Residential Shopping Center?” I asked as we moved our things down the Nest’s spiral staircase. The curious man in the blue suit lugged Maggie’s suitcase as the other Movers carried everything else—except my spy laptop, which I carried in my scooter bag for safekeeping.

I didn’t want any of them to stumble across my secrets.     

I walked behind Rachna and Maggie. They were discussing Maggie’s future roles in Grand Rachna’s Working Healthcare System. The two healthcare roles, or “stock characters,” my Asset was entertaining were “Dope Currency Counselor,” and “Self-Diagnosing Doctor of My Most Intimate, Immediate Anatomy.” Rachna said that Self-Diagnosing Doctor was a time-tested-to-be profitable character, but if she chose to become a Dope Currency Counselor she would likely have to write the character off as a personal investment, or capital. Rachna explained that making any solid capital investment was a hard sell, especially for new storybankers who were eager to develop profitable stock characters, but she urged Maggie, like doctors do, to spend whatever storytime she could on characters like Dope Currency Counselor, which might, in the long run, help her transcend her addiction (to collecting things) and move on to greener gardens. She then went on to explain that the reason why a character like Dope Currency Counselor wasn’t profitable, beyond a capital investment, was due to the reality that dope currency addicts like Mr. Chester Weston were fairly rare in Storysold: City . There were a few storybankers who struggled with obsessive collections, hoarding one commodity above all others, but not many. Most employables fresh off the boat were able to make enough immediate investments in their signatures to cope with their dope currency withdrawals without much help. For most people, the transition was as easily as overcoming a change from radio to television, or rotary phones to cell or smart phones, or VHS to DVDs. For most people, storyselling in living color simply made good sense. I walked behind the women and listened, but I don’t recall much of their conversation. Everything that woman said made me angry.

Patricia must have read my signature and saw that I wasn’t winning and decided to throw some social charity my way (or something); because she walked up from behind and offered, “Would you like to know something about your new home? I can shed some light if you’d like?”

“My new home?” I replied as if I was tasting the word “home” for poison. “Do you mean the city, or our new shop?”

“Your new shop of course,” Patricia laughed. “Cities are too big to be any one’s home. That’s just crazy like saying the ocean is our home.”

“Yeah ok,” I tried to laugh along with the wayward youth. “What do you people call your home for homes? You know, the massive underwater complexes where everyone lives?”

“Homes for homes is good…that makes sense…but no, we call them Residential Shopping Centers,” the youth paused to gather her thoughts. “For starters, what do you already know about them?”

“They sound like Redneck yard sale heaven to me.”

“What’s a yard sale?”

“It’s when people sell things on the lawn outside their homes.”

“Outside their homes?” Patricia asked, looking a little confused.

“Yes, people sell things outside their homes,” I replied, still straining to listen and keep tabs on my Girlfriend’s conversation.

“Why would someone sell their goods outside their home?”

“Why not? Outside’s just as good as inside.”

“Why would anyone go to the trouble to move their goods outside their homes when they could sell them inside?”

“I haven’t the foggiest.”

“You’re an employable. Shouldn’t you know why you do things?”

“Sorry kid, I can’t speak for every ‘employable’ in the world.”

“Why not? My Mother says that you employables vote for people to speak for you all the time. Imagine you’re a representative.”

“Maybe another time,” I said as we hiked out of the Wild Garden and entered a tunnel leading onto Island Seven’s Garden Surface.

“When?” Patricia prodded. “I’d really like to see how you’re able to speak for another person. Do you move their mouth with your fingers?”

“Do you know what I’d really like?”

“What?”

“For you to stay on subject…”

“What’s a subject?” Patricia smiled, relishing the drama. “Are they sort of like employees for our minds?”

“No,” I stated with authority. “Now will you please ‘shed some light’ on Residential Shopping Centers?”

“Of course,” she began. “I call this illustrative story How Monsters Built Our Residential Shopping Centers. A long time ago, before Mr. Chester Weston created Westonton and granted his employees the power to become the live action stars of their own stories, Monsters roamed the earth…”

“No, no, no,” I sighed. “Just tell me what it is. No more stories.”

“But this is Storysold: City ,” she smiled, relishing the truer name of her city in mouth, “where everything is bought and sold with its story. It’s what you employables call our ‘culture,’ or our way of life.”

“Yes, of course,” I said, holding my rage in. “Can you do your best to make it short? I’m not in the mood for another long winded story.”

“You bet,” Patricia smiled. “My father was a Monster once, but I’ll skip the backstory of how the Monsters built your home…”

“Great, thanks.”

“The dumbest story I can tell is,” she continued, trying hard to think of the dumbest way to tell her story. “Imagine that a giant stomped into one of your old market cities. Then imagine that giant ripped one of your ‘apartment buildings’ from its foundation like a weed, sat on the nearest mountain for a few moments and hollowed its core out like a pumpkin, and sealed it with an inner wall and water tight base, which the giant called the Hollow Core. Then she stomped off to the ocean where she dunked the whole structure in the middle of a Garden Surface—where the Core kept it bobbing like an empty bottle—and finally the giant capped it with a Weather Bubble for collecting steam and freshwater. And presto! You have a Residential Shopping Center. Now how was that for short?”

“Wow, thanks. That was short,” I smiled at the youth as we crossed over an arched cobblestone bridge and walked onto the Garden Surface. The garden plot on our right looked like a vicious jungle habitat—the sort from which one would expect a giant reptilian to suddenly emerge. On our left, a theme of seven farmers were harvesting face-down, strapped into some kind of motorized contraption that wheeled along slowly, holding them suspended a foot or so above their crops. Unreal, I thought. One-stop-shopping: wild bananas and domestic vegetables grown side by side.

“I’m glad you’re pleased with how dumb it was,” she smiled slyly. “You know real Monsters can’t rip buildings from their roots like weeds.”

“Yes, I know…thanks.”

“You know,” Patricia went on. “Rachna says when employables use the word ‘thanks’ it really means ‘fuck off.’ But, no worries, I can tell you the rest of How Monsters Built Our Residential Shopping Centers whenever you like. I’m sure once you live there for a few days you’ll care more…”

Clearly the youth wouldn’t be satisfied until she told me the whole story. I wasn’t sure if she was baiting my Eager Beaver intentionally—using her asset manipulation skills (what we at The Bureau call ‘seduction’ or ‘witchcraft’ when women use it)—or was she simply excited to share her story with me. No matter. Whatever her motive, my Eager Beaver sensed that I was disappointing the youth, so I took the bait. How could I say “no” to someone who almost nearly fit both of my most sacred categories for hero dependents? She would be first in line for lifeboats on the Titanic as both woman and child.

“OK, you win,” said Eager Beaver. “Tell me how monsters built your Residential Shopping Centers…”

“A long time ago,” Patricia began again, “before Mr. Chester Weston created Westonton and granted ‘his employees’ the power to become the live action stars of their stories, Monsters roamed the earth. Of course no one called them ‘Monsters.’ That was a character name they gave themselves when they became Storysold. They felt like it fit, because the Monsters’ natural predators, a powerful collective of generically engineered characters called The Generics, hunted their characters down because they governed their homes like wild animals: from home. The Generics hate all wild, live action characters that fail to be domesticated, tamed, controlled, and fall in line behind their planetary literary control device, The Fourth Wall. And if enough Monsters failed to follow the generic narratives flashing across the thousands of screens, service counters, desks, and stages of The Fourth Wall, The Generics would do more than hunt and tame them. They’d kill off their unfit hosts like novelists kill their darlings honorifically in the ritual killings called war.”

I instantly regretted my decision to hear the youth’s long, jangled story about monsters, so I tried to redirect her. “That’s very interesting,” I lied. “But, aren’t you a little too old to believe in monsters?”     

“What do you mean by believe?”

“I mean like assigning reality to things that you can’t see.”

“Like land mob nations?” she replied. “Or incorporated persons?”

“No,” I replied hotly, “like big-ass scary monsters with fangs, wild eyes, razor sharp claws, and unquenchable appetites for human flesh. You know the type, monster monsters.”

At that point, I felt like I’d successfully redirected her story about how Monsters built the city’s Residential Shopping Centers. In retrospect, I’m not so sure about that. I think the youth may have decided to use the cityscape to show me what she meant instead of relying on words…

“The Monsters I know don’t eat humans. They eat fish.”

“Ha!” I exclaimed. “You do believe in monsters!”

“No,” she corrected. “I know monsters.”

I laughed. “You have personal relationships with monsters?”

“I do. I know many monsters. Would you like to meet one?”

“Oh sure,” I laughed as Patricia veered onto a pathway leading to what she called a “Wild Park,” which was fed by a freshwater aqueduct from Island Market Seven’s Weather Bubble. The aqueduct had been transformed into a semi-wild creek that roared through the mock wilderness. The other Movers followed Patricia’s lead without question.

We followed a trail along the creek until we reached a clearing with a saltwater pond, which was no more than a hole in the artificial land pontoons of the Garden Surface that gave storybankers access to the ocean below their feet. In the middle of the pond, a “Monster” was swimming towards us. It looked like a classic monster—maybe Godzilla—costumed in a scaly green scuba suit and hood with a pointy fake snout, dark holes for eyes, and a row full of blunted rubber teeth.

“In the old market,” Rachna explained, “our friend there would’ve been diagnosed with a societal-securing disability, medicated, sedated, then forgotten in a medieval facility where she wouldn’t disrupt the work routines of employables. Here, she’s forged a signature for herself as Rompasaurus the Salty Seafaring Kraken, a much celebrated Gentle Water Monster.”

I watched as the scaly green hood ducked below the surface of the ocean, followed by a flipper-kick and a long, blunted rubber-spiked tail. A few clips later, Rompasaurus returned from the depths with a fish writhing on the pointy tip of her harpoon.

“She sells her catch to her friends at the Sea Hag Café,” Patricia said as the Seafaring Kraken swam to the boardwalk. “The water monster theme has an amazing cast in our Residential Shopping Center. Lava Monster mops and cleans the Café, the Sea Hag Mermaids cook and balance the accounts, O2 the Oxygenator makes the props they need for their bimonthly deep-sea harvesting adventures, Rompasaurus and Puff the Fishing Dragon keep the Café stocked with their Catch of The Day Specials. Those are the most active cast members of the water monster theme, but there are also cross-themed ‘half monsters’ like Captain Nemo of the American Dreamstates Band, Neptune, Fair Atlantis, and my personal favorite, Juan the Great White Tuna Hunter,” she smiled like she was remembering a good dream. “Ah Juan—now there’s a storybanker who really knows how The Action flows.”   

“Crazy,” I said. “These friends of yours really live their lives stuck in monster movies?”

“They’re not stuck. Their characters are profitable.”

“So, you’re saying you’re paying them to play monsters?”

“Yes,” Rachna chimed in. “They have a very popular theme.”

I paused dramatically, and asked, “Isn’t that dangerous?”

“What?”

“Enabling monster madness.”

“No. They’re honest storybankers. They represent themselves well. If you spend the time to read their signatures, they’re crystal clear about what sort of scenes make them happy…and what scenes make them mad.”

“How clear can they be? Who knows why Godzilla burned Tokyo to the ground? Or why Trolls, Giants, and Ugly Things eat babies?”

Patricia rolled her eyes. “Their theme title is Sea-Harvesting with Gentle Water Monsters: Until the Land Mob Makes Monsters Mad—and the Monsters Snap, Go Blank in a Fit of Madness, and Have to Romp-a-Stomp, Smash Everyone…”

“Dear God, please protect our great nation from this cultish banking terror,” I mumbled to myself as I watched Rompasaurus rise from the ocean and flop onto the boardwalk with a net full of fish in tow.

“What was that?”

“Nothing.”

Blue Suit set Maggie’s suitcase down and approached Rompasaurus very slowly. Then he pulled an iPhone-like computer from his blue Nanotech Mechanic’s jumpsuit, very slowly, and entered something on its keypad. When he was done, he showed its screen to the monster.

“Romp-a-romp-a-Rompasaurus Raar!” the monster replied.

“Remind her to invite Juan!” Patricia called to Blue Suit.

Blue Suit nodded knowingly, pressed his keypad a few times, then held the screen to Rompasaurus again and waited for her reply.

“Juan!” she declared happily. “Romp-a-roar!”

  “What the heck?” I said, turning to my Girlfriend in confusion.

Maggie didn’t reply, but Patricia said, “Blue Suit used his prop to ask Rompasaurus if she wanted to go to our Shop Warming Party tonight.”

“And?” I asked, suddenly feeling concerned.

“You saw the scene,” Maggie replied. “What do you think?”

“That’s the first thing you’ve said to me all day!” I exclaimed.

“What are you talking about?”

I turned to Patricia (and spoke to Maggie) saying, “You see, young lady, Maggie’s been giving me the silent treatment all day. On ‘the mainland’ Boyfriends and Girlfriends sometimes play little relationship games with each other. Maggie plays like she’s a reasonable woman oppressed by the brutish ways of Mortal Man, and I play like I’m a reasonable man who’s been hexed by a Worshipful Goddess cursed to attend to her desires until the end of my days. Then we refuse to speak to each other, as a punishment. And like all games, the object of The Silent Treatment is to win. The game ends when one of us speaks to the other, which signals to the other that they surrender and accept the justice of their punishment, and admit that they were wrong.”

“It sounds like a horrible game to me,” Patricia replied.   

Maggie returned to her position, ignoring me as we left the Gentle Water Monster to her fishing. We continued our journey across the Surface of Island Market Seven, passing hundreds of garden plots including Solji’s Happy Garden. The women laughed a lot as they helped Patricia plot the premiere of Patricia’s Wonder Bikes. I tried to join their conversation, but they weren’t interested in hearing my opinions on women in the workplace, so I tuned my attention to my new neighbor. Blue Suit was walking ahead of our moving scene. I was struck by how effortlessly he walked. He set his sneakers down lightly, leading with his toes and rocking back to his heels, with a confident stride that could’ve been engineered to stalk cats. He walked like he was going somewhere, without a doubt, but that somewhere didn’t seem to include his wife. This guy is making no effort to maintain his proper symbolic proximity to Rachna, I thought, as I picked up my pace.

“Hey, you, fast walker in blue!” I called out, now almost running to catch him. “Wait for me neighbor!”

He turned, made eye contact, all without breaking his pace.

“Oh, I see,” I said, walking faster. “You don’t want to talk to me either. I’m really starting to get a bad feeling about this place.”

When I finally caught up, Blue Suit dropped Maggie’s suitcase. Then he pulled out his handheld devise again. He turned it ON, and handed it to me. The words—MY LIGHT BEING COMMUNICATOR—had been etched in the plastic at the top of the devise.

I took it and watched the screen. The device showed a fictional scene where he and I were much older. We were working in a mechanics’ shop of some kind, building Light Being Gravesights together. My hair was gray, my beard was long, and I was wearing a jumpsuit like his, except that mine was green. I thought it was a friendly, but very odd gesture. I’d just met the guy, and he was already digitally daydreaming about growing old with me.

“Cool technology,” I said, handing it back to him.

Blue Suit handed me the suitcase. Then he used the Communicator’s keypad to manipulate the reality of our moments in order to create his live-action, computer-graphic fiction while we walked on. I felt awkward walking beside him in silence as he punched the keys without looking up.

“Did you make that gadget for your science fiction story, Adventures of the Blue-Suited Super Nerd?” I smiled, hoping he’d take it as a joke.

Straight faced, Blue Suit handed me the Communicator. It showed Maggie and me in Solji’s shop surrounded by storybankers. I didn’t recognize any of them other than Blue Suit, Grand Rachna, Patricia, and Rompasaurus. I guessed it was the future Shop Warming Party they were plotting for us.

“Is that the party you invited the monster to back there?”

Blue Suit nodded and beamed proudly as I watched the device. The scene looked inviting. People were laughing, playing music and games, dancing, snacking on finger food, and swapping stories. In the front room, I watched my fictional-self give a hug and kiss to a make-believe Maggie. The make-believe Maggie flushed red with passion, and smiled as she kissed me again gently on the cheek. I knew it wasn’t in either of our job descriptions to fall in love for real—but, wow, Blue Suit’s CG-fiction scene made falling in love look good. I wondered why he’d feel the need to make it up? Did he know that something was missing in our relationship?

“Looks like a fun party,” I said. “How did you do that?”

Someone must have asked that one before, because it didn’t take Blue Suit long to generate his fantastic answer, press PLAY, and present it. The illustrative scene was over 12 beats long…by the time it was done the others were watching the scene over my shoulders. Maggie beat me to the punch, and said, “I have no idea what I just watched.”

Grand Rachna interpreted. “Blue Suit my Husband can speak, but he chooses not to. He took a vow of silence to protest the day Weston exiled the founding members of the Bio-Friendly Bum Army. He believes, as they believe, that Weston’s oppressive policy censoring us from using the name of Storysold: City  is not good. My Husband also believes that the dope currency Weston’s stockpiling will, someday soon, bring an invasion of dope currency addicts to this city, and they will do great harm in their mad compulsion to plunder and collect the green gods of Weston’s Super Massive Vault.”

“That doesn’t explain what he showed us,” I said flatly.

“No,” Rachna chuckled, “but at least now you understand why he uses his Light Being Communicator to speak. My Husband’s story-based language takes a little getting used to. Like a reader, try to discern what he’s trying to tell you with the word/scenes he shows you.”

  We played the scene again. When it was done Maggie scratched her head. “I’m trying to be a good reader,” she said, “but I still don’t get it.”

Rachna held her hand out for the Light Being Communicator. She played it again in slow motion, explaining each clip as it unfolded. The scene was meant to show us how his Light Being Communicator interfaces with the city’s Storysold Exchange system. First, at any given moment on any given day, the information-gathering Artificial Eyes of the city capture, record, and mint Blue Suit’s signature, what he calls his “Light Being Community.” The A-eyes then send his signature scenes to the system’s Master Storyclock where it matches the new signature inputs against his “archetypal signature.” Rachna explained that everyone has an archetypal signature—an ideal, likeness, essence, self, or familiar spirit—that The Storysold Exchange system uses as a mnemonic space-saving device. Once an A-eye sends a signature to the Master Storyclock, it matches the new signature input to its archetypal signature, then it checks the new one for differences. Then it labels those differences with a set of abstract symbols, or “words,” which the Master Storyclock then copies, packages, and ships out. Like Blue Suit’s old analogue governing body, Blue Suit’s storybank account and The Storysold Exchange system host his signature as well as his “word” differences; which makes the hardcopy of his story The Antenna Trees broadcast out, into the city, on the airwaves for all to view as long as Blue Suit  wants to advertise his story in PUBLIC on his channel.

She wrapped up by explaining that the new Storysold system can store vast amounts of monetary information in that way, by saving the differences between signatures, saving the “words,” instead of saving every moment of every signature minted by the A-eyes. Rachna said that Blue Suit’s Light Being Communicator was able to tune into the broadcasted signatures of Storysold: City, harness them, and use them to meet his needs. And that was the long answer to the question, “How did you do that?”

All in all, I found Rachna’s explanation disturbing. Unlike a classic video camera, the A-eyes and Master Storyclock—which Rachna described as the “central nervous system” of the city—didn’t really store anything it “saw, heard, or felt” outside of itself. It stored archetypes, words, and the differences between things, which meant that the monetary moments stored in our personal storybank accounts didn’t exist in wholes—none of them were minted there like bills pressed, dyed, and printed on sacred objects for the sake of posterity. That was a radical thought. I was raised on television. I’d grown up believing that cameras were dependably honest (reflecting our reality back like a mirror) not operatively dependent on meaningful differences, individuality, and The Action between things. What would THE WORD be if it wasn’t objective or idol-like as it appeared? I thought. What if The Word needed a relationship with a human host to give it meaning? You know, like the God in Star Trek V who needed a starship to escape Its planet…

  I pondered that while we crossed the arched bridge that spanned the canal into Island Market Seven’s Residential Shopping Center. I stopped for a moment to gawk at the dark clouds forming in its enormous Weather Bubble. Amazing, I thought. Someone finally found a way to tame the sky.

On the other side of the bridge we found a Common Area that was set around the Bubble’s conical Freshwater Reservoir. There wasn’t much structure to the Common Area—no fire pits, game centers, public gardens, or bolted benches facing The Nature. There were just columns that held the slight conical slopes of the Reservoir, which in turn were supported by the buoyancy of the Market Island as a whole. In addition to the puzzling fact that kids didn’t have any swings sets, or monkey bars, or wild spinning wheels to program their funtime, the columns in the Common Area weren’t even Egyptian, Greek, Roman, or Virginian. They were like Storysold: City produced individually with style. One was made to look like a steam of freshwater was spiraling from the reservoir to the shopping levels below. Another was carved like an ancient totem depicting the short generational lineage of its maker.     

Blue Suit continued on, walking through the Common Area like a man on a mission. He finally stopped in front of an Elevator Tube that led down to the ten levels below the waves. We gathered there for a few beats, waiting for the Tube. Then, ding! The doors opened. Uncle Sam, Noble Savage, and a dog walked out. I recognized them from the funeral gathering, and I gave them a head nod hello. That was enough to trigger Sam. He immediately launched his character into storyspace, featuring a monologue on the subject of the dog. He introduced their “hyperactive mutt” as National Character. Noble Savage said that he preferred to call the mutt NC, because Savage believed that shortening National Character’s name was more in step with America’s character, thanks to The Generic’s acronym-loving Military Industrial Complex. That was the last line Noble Savage was able to wedge in Sam’s grand production on the topic of the dog’s domestication and why it was somehow better than the domestication his “predecessor The Queen” was able to produce for Her subjects. Maggie and our Movers seemed to be engaged, but I lost interest when I realized he really cared about the difference between a domesticated pet, a tamed employee, and subjects of The Crown. It all smelled like the same bullshit to me.

When his fear fueled monologue finally ran out of ammunition, Uncle Sam spoke for the American Dreamstates (as their Representative) and told us, again, how pleased they all were that we had inherited their friend’s signature. Then the American Dreamstates walked away, following NC into the Common Area, as we walked into the Elevator Tube.

Like everything in the city, the way the Elevator Tube worked was not normal. Rachna pushed the button for level three and we heard the sound of saltwater rushing into the Tube’s ballast chamber. As the chamber filled, we felt the Tube sink—down, down into the depths below—until the whatever-it-was that regulated our depth stopped it at LEVEL 3. Then Blue Suit cranked the wheel/door latch that looked like a submarine hatch, pushed the thing open, and walked into a LED-lit hallway bustling with storybankers.

“So when’s dinner?” I asked hungrily.

Maggie just stared, as Rachna replied, “The event ad I posted on my channel sets your Shop Warming Party at fifteen before midnight.”

“Fifteen before?” Maggie asked as Blue Suit stopped in front of a shop with a piece of driftwood above the door. The wood was carved with Korean words that translated: SOLJI’S KITCHEN.

Rachna read that we didn’t read her last line and explained, “Fifteen moments before midnight is sometime like eight o’ clock at night.”

“I wish you would have told us about the party,” Maggie said, poking her head curiously through the doorway of Solji’s Kitchen. “I’m not hopelessly useless. I would have made some snacks.”

“It’s a Shop Warming Party,” Rachna smiled. “The Bills (as employables would say) are covered for the rest of the night.”   

We explored the new shop. I liked it. The residential shop would make an adequate bivouac site for the duration of The Mission. I might’ve cared more about our tactical terrain (and fussed more about Maggie’s willingness to inherit Solji’s kitchen) but keeping my Cover Girlfriend pacified in her working role as my Asset was key. And pacified she was—happily laying hands on every prop in the shop like she was touching the soul of Solji herself.     

Our new “home” face faced into the Hollow Core instead of out into the ocean like the Villas’ Fizzy Pop shop. In the back was a bubble-like window with a view of the Hollow Core and its four waterfalls cascading down into the Boiler from the Pores in the Canal System. Faintly, through the mist and falling saltwater, I could see the bubble-like windows of the residential shops, a stone’s throw away, on the other side of the Core. We were living in a fishbowl looking out into other fishbowls. Beside the window was a windowless stonewalled bathroom made of river rocks. It came with what I recognized from my Asian assets manipulation class (aka generic Asian American History) as a Korean-style toilet: an oblong hole in the earth with a flushing mechanism. On the other side of the window there was a bed. Its frame was carved with a medley of designs. It was topped with a mattress made for one, maybe two. Beside the bed I found a pile of bed coverings and quilts set on a woven grass mat that appeared to be equally as factory-free as all props in Storysold: City. In the center of the room, between our new shop’s private living-space and public stage-space, was a silver curtain with a golden rope that raised the curtain when it was pulled…which I thought was odd. The rope hung on the living-space side beside a control panel of switches, which Blue Suit connected to our accounts, so that we were able to switch our channels from PRIVATE to PUBLIC with ease.

Where was the line of demarcation? I wondered. The rope was set in such a way that suggested we, the performers, would lift the curtain—and then walk out, off stage, into the theater. Where were our adoring masses supposed to produce the rooster ready blankface look? Was it on the living-space side, or stage-side of our shop? The space itself was making me question my identity as a man. Were we supposed to pull the rope from the living-space side when we were in character (all costumed and ready to perform) and then walk casually onto a stage filled with our audience? Who were We—if Not Them? Where were the thrones, confessional screens, and podiums that were drawn and held by the host bodies of what the cultists called The Fourth Wall?

No matter. Sorry that wasn’t a real question. All I’m attempting to say here is, “Our shop was weird any way I read it.”

The stage-side of our shop was weird too. In front of, or behind, the silver curtain, the stage-side was plotted to function like a restaurant/kitchen combo. In the center stood a U-shaped bar surrounded by an assortment of stools, chairs, and chair swings hanging from the ceiling. All the seats faced the kitchen: a seven-burner electric range, self-cleaning oven, pots and pans hung on hooks above the food-prep island, and (most impressively) a classic three-sink dishwashing station with a double-decker wood drying rack and reusable soap dispenser. Around the work island were shin-high Korean tables circled with pillow seats, each table made with a built-in barbecue for the meal-making enjoyment of Solji’s cast in The Korean Barbecue Show. Beside the front door that was sandwiched between two big bay windows, two stools faced a desk with a Storysold: TV on it. I could see (based on its signature) that the TV was made by the Clocktinker theme like the TV in the Nest. Rounding out the shop were six large wall-mounted flatscreen Projectavisions (made by Winner’s Gaming Community); a sizable rebuilt freezer; shelves stocked with canned and dry goods, canning supplies and other food production props—and over a hundred bottles of Assah, Solji Kim’s signature rice wine.

My national pride cried: If this was supposed to be a shop, where was the pleasant music wafting in the hallway? Where were the wide-eyed pubescent sales reps? Where were the free cookies and magazines? Where was the shop that I could count on to sell me something clean, generic, and free from the unpleasantness of knowing the drudgery the faceless factory workers endured to make it? Where was the plastic wrapped in plastic under the plastic carrying the plastic? I looked around, but that shop wasn’t there.

At least it was stocked with plenty of booze.

My Storybank Account – Scene Twenty Four, 

THE PART WHERE THE MONSTERS COME IN PEACE WITH CRAB CAKES, AND BETTY SCHOOLS WYLIE ON OWNERSHIP AT THE SHOP WARMING PARTY…

As our shop warming party warmed up, Patricia had been watching a channel with the address gonetunahunting9567@storyexchange.tlc on our new shop’s Storysold: TV until now.

“Ah! Oh no! He’s coming!” Patricia screamed like a Beatles fan and promptly turned the screen off.

  “How’s my dialogue?” she asked frantically. “Am-I-speaking-clearly-and-pausing-a-lot-so-others-can-speak-or-am-I-talking-to-you-like-an-asshole-who-keeps-talking-and-talking-and-spewing-philosophies-because-she’s-afraid-that-her-audience-will-bust-her-bubble-if-she-allows-them-time-to-reply? Dear god, my words are running together and I’m spewing philosophy! I’m doing the asshole thing! Ah! I’m doomed.”

“Chill,” Maggie replied. “We all know you’re not an asshole.”

“I can’t believe the Great White Tuna Hunter is going to be on the same set as me…Ah! I can’t stand it! Juan is going to develop his story here in your shop, at your Shop-Warming Party!”   

In spite of Patricia’s stage fright scene, everyone there who knew her shared her excitement and showed their support for her hopeful first—dare I say, ‘romantic’—scene with Juan.

“Good luck,” I said from the bar, doing my best to get my piece of the action. “Just remember. No hunter, ever, wants to be hunted by his prey. If I were you, I’d play it cool. Be the flower if you know what I mean.”

Everyone laughed. Apparently, they didn’t share my sentiments. As they laughed, Blue Suit passed his Communicator to me. It showed everyone laughing at me in that moment from a third-person perspective. “Thanks,” I nodded, handing it back, trying to save face by smiling at everyone.

What I am missing here? Why is everyone laughing?

As I pondered this, our new neighbors began to join our scene in waves. I took the opportunity to change the subject. “Smells good! When do we eat?” I asked, sniffing our offerings as they arrived. “I’m starving.”

“You look smart,” Rachna replied. “You figure it out.”

After I watched Buddha and Cowboy Betty dig in, I concluded that there would be no sign to EAT NOW from heaven, so I made a command decision to fill my plate with two Nirvana Burgers. Ha! I’m unenhungering myself for free! I thought while I sat pumping food into my mouth, dripping droplets of mustard and ketchup on the tweed blazer I was wearing over my T-shirt. “Yum,” was the only thing I could think to say.

Between mouthfuls, out of the corner of my eyes, I watched in horror as a parade of Banking Cultists marched out of our shop with ten bottles of Assah, one quilt, six wall-mounted Projectavisions, one stack of what looked like toilet paper, and a few of the Korean-style tables.

I put the burger down and turned to face the cultists.

“Stop! That’s ours!” I said, standing in front of an astronaut look-alike who was holding one of our Projectavisions. She was costumed in a full-body, skintight dayglow moon suit with an official-looking ranking insignia that read, YEOMATARIAN THE SPACE CADET.

Sensing my confusion, Rachna explained that my suspected thief was really a Space Cadet playing a Reality Gaming Community theme called Level Ten: Utopian Moon Colony Defended by Lasers.

“Stop stealing our stuff!” I held my hand up, effectively blocking her path. “That thing in your hand was willed to us—not you—and I’d appreciate it if you put it back where it belongs!”

Yeomatarian looked around innocently for help just as Juan and his cast of Gentle Water Monsters—O2, Lava Monster, Rompasaurus, a Sea Hag Mermaid, and a striking mastodon wearing a long, yellow rain slicker named Jellyfish—arrived, skipping and stomping in with steaming potluck plates in their hands. After they took stock of the scene, they set their plates around the bar and began to roar, chirp, purr, and tick, and mingled as monsters do at parties. I ignored them. I tapped my feet, held out my hand, and waited for Yeomatarian to return our property.

Across the stage, Betty slammed a shot of whiskey and answered the Cadet’s silent call for help. Betty was dressed in her usual costume: cowboy boots, chaps, cowboy hat, and a long leather coat, which Gertel the Governing General of The Needle made from the first and last cow Betty slaughtered.   

“Ya don’t have a friggin’ clue what’s goin’ on, do ya?” Betty asked as she threw her arm over my shoulders, whiskey bent, for stability.

“Sure, I do,” I replied. “I’m stopping this Space Cadet from running off with our stuff. What’s it to you?”

“Do you even know what that ‘stuff’ is?”

“It’s a computer.”

“What kind of computer?”

“It doesn’t matter what kind it is. It’s ours.”

“You know what kind of ‘stuff’ that is, don’t you Cadet?”

“Of course, we do,” she replied like a robot. “This Projectavision was made by Reality the Gaming Community on the hundred and thirty-second day in the third year of our Grand Program Director Winner’s victory over the forces of Reality. We know this Projectavision intimately. It was made for the express purpose of allying ourselves with Solji Kim.”

Cowboy Betty looked at Yeomatarian, one arm still planted firmly on my shoulder, and bellowed, “Looks as if she knows a hootin’ hell of a lot more about that ‘computer’ than you do.”

“So?” I replied hotly. “Since when do we have to know anything about our things to own them?”

“Since now,” Betty shot back. Then she turned to Yeomatarian and said, “Run along now. I’ll straighten this Tinhorn out.”

The Gamer stared at us for a beat, waiting for her programming to activate, before she turned smartly and left the party.   

“Here,” Betty passed her bottle. “Drink this, and follow me.”

As I took a swig, Betty took my hand like a freshman and led me into the party. I glanced around: Maggie was all smiles, in the kitchen with Patricia, Blue Suit, Buddha, and Lava Monster. They were not subtly eyeing Juan as he conversed with his Monster friend, Jellyfish, unsuspecting of those who were plotting in his direction. Jellyfish had taken off her yellow slicker. Under it she was wearing a strangely comfortable looking bearskin bikini like the ones cave people wore in the movies with Claymation dinosaurs. The bikini matched her beard, but nothing about her seemed like a jellyfish.

“Listen here,” Betty said as she sat me down in a quiet place at the bar. “I’m going to take a few moments out of my hard-earned drinking-time to set you straight, because I know that dumb, dead-eye look you—and all the bull-brained Tinhorns like you—got right between your eyes. I know it all too well. Listen here. If I hadn’t stopped your dumb ass, you might have picked a fight with one of the largest themes in the city, Charles Roth Thompson’s Reality the Gaming Community…all because you (and your hoodwinked sense of things) can’t imagine that we, storyselling savages living way out here on The Edge of Creation might have invented a new way of owning things.”

Cowboy Betty took another swig, and eyed me coldly. “Are you still listening, Tinhorn? Because I hate to think I’m wasting my time.”

“Yes,” I said with a straight face. “I’m listening.”

“Good,” Betty said. Then she told me the part of her backstory she called, The Bio-Friendly Range War on Hornswoggler Betty…

When Betty arrived in Storysold: City , the Garden Surface of Island Market Seven was mostly unpopulated. The only ones who’d been using the Surface were the star employees—not yet paid in full and freed by Mr. Chester Weston to work as storybankers. They were tasked with the job of constructing the Island Market and its long list of artificial land development themes. These employees, soon to become full-fledged storybankers, were mostly poor skilled laborers from “third world land mobs” who had been handing their paychecks back to Weston every payday since the day they began—working as indentured servants until they paid the outrageous price their CEO had set for becoming what he called “employed storybankers,” or “owners of storybank accounts.” In typical tycoon fashion, he chose to frame his business as the selling of a “new cutting-edge banking product” instead of the more liberal view, which was—Weston was selling freedom from his own brand of slavery—selling the poison and the cure. In any case, many of the land development workers from impoverished old market nations were the ones who coined two of Island Market Seven’s richest themes: the aforementioned Gentle Water Monsters and New Market Pioneers.

Betty likened the New Market Pioneers (many of whom invested heavily in the development of artificial land) to Native Americans. The New Pioneers knew the land they made and maintained. They knew how much weight their thousands of steel-core land pontoons could sustain. They knew how to layer the soil so that grasses, vegetables, flowers, and trees could grow there. They knew how fragile the non-humans were, and how important it was to treat every bee, worm, and rat on the Garden Surface with the same respect they would grant any of their fellow storybankers. Hard as it was to believe, the New Pioneers actually entered the non-humans (even the rats!) on their land into their storybank accounts, and balanced their moments in kind. They paid trees for their wood by respecting the wildness of their signatures, by eating plant seeds and dispensing them in new lands, by never taking too much, and never turning them into weakened dependents by planting them in rows and columns, perverting their natural settings and destroying the richness of their stories. The Pioneers paid their worm friends with offerings of compost, bees with flowers, and the owls with live rats they caught in their traps.

And then there was Betty. She paid Mr. Chester Weston up front all in cash, took the shop Miss. Chase found for her, and arrived on scene at Island Market Seven randy dandy in her factory-made cowboy duds, whooping it up on the Garden Surface like she’d done something to deserve it.

The first thing Betty did was ship a herd of cattle from Montana and set them loose on the richest part of Grassland she could find.

The New Pioneers didn’t take kindly to that. They’d invested a lot of storytime in developing the Garden Surface’s Grassland story. They did their best to explain that to Betty, showing her scene-by-scene proof of the parts they’d worked in the development of Grassland. But neither the sun-beaten leather of their faces, nor the wrinkles carved by the wind around their eyes, nor the dirt ground into their sandpapered hands, proved anything to Cowboy Betty. Mr. Chester Weston the CEO of Westonton Corporation had given her permission to raise beef scenes on the Garden Surface.

The peace was preserved for months as the Pioneers waited patiently for Betty to “wake up and get it.” They understood that it took time for any employable from the old market world to adjust to their new, qualitative-based economy and become Storysold. But, while they waited, Betty only got worse. She didn’t care to know the land, or the New Pioneers who had developed it. Her herd grew and grew, hoof-loose and fancy free on the riches supplied by many years of responsible land development.

The New Pioneers built fences and pens, and often ran electric wires around various plots, but their containment props weren’t meant to show ownership. They were made to be moved from one plot of grass to another; built to focus what they called “walking meat” domesticates (chickens, goats, beefalo, rabbits, and such) on the grasses that were ready for grazing in the pre-plotted, grass-growing rhythms of Grassland. Cowboy Betty, on the other hand, still believed that fences were what they used to be. She believed they were like laws, clear boundaries drawn on papers that were blessed and granted life by what many storybankers call, White Man’s Great Spirit the Government.” And because Betty believed in the magical ownership of fences, the Cowboy didn’t hesitate to drive her cattle onto any seemingly open range. If Grassland was unfenced, it was wild and therefore open for the taking. That made the Pioneers (and their worms) mad as hell. They’d earned the right to own their individual parts of Grassland. They had stamped the land with their signatures. They had minted their grassland scenes with authentic working relationships with the soil, with the bugs, with the birds, with the gophers, with the weeds, with the layers upon layers of moments that made Grassland profitable. The mud they tracked home at night from their fields was all the proof they needed to show they owned it, but Betty was unmoved. Like her ancestors in Montana who worshiped White Man’s Great Spirit the Government, Cowboy Betty believed that she could stroll onto a plot of land, flag it at four corners, and claim it as her own—because she was “there first”—owning it divinely for no good reason other than that she was there.

When it became clear to the New Market Pioneers that Cowboy Betty was not going to change, adapt to the new Storysold economy, and learn to govern her life and story qualitatively, they decided to go to war. It was at that point in Betty’s story that she underwent a bio-friendly new war assault more ferocious than chemotherapy.

First they did what every psychologist does everyday. They repackaged her self-given name, Cowboy Betty, and slapped that character with a label they believed more accountably represented her story. They wanted the name to tell the real story and honestly reflect all the times she’d driven her herd onto their Grassland, allowing her beasts to steal the wealth of their labors. They wanted everyone who heard the name to know that the only investments Betty ever made in their land-development scenes were the cow-shitting scenes and mud-hole-productions Betty’s beasts left behind after she’d moved onto the next unfenced, unprotected, seemingly wild, unclaimed pastureland. And that’s how the character of “Hornswoggler Betty” was born.   

Next, they made it clear that Betty’s system of ownership based on the nonsensical swapping of papers will no longer be permitted to hold any value without the backing of action. From there on in, Betty would have to show proof for everything she owned, or starve in her greed.

In order to enforce their new action-backed system of ownership, the New Pioneers gathered together in theme and recruited the help of the world’s first pest control operator who specialized in the “non-lethal environmental control” of our planet’s first and most infested pest: humans. Superficially her pest control character behaved more like a classic cop, or social worker, but she developed her environmental control methods—like “dropping the exclusion bomb”—from her work ending rat infestations. The radical difference between classic human control operators like cops, social workers, shrinks, and soldiers was Guide didn’t have to trap any humans in cages, treat them with chemicals, or kill them to control them. She was so good at pest control, in fact, she rarely had to trap and kill even rats. She preferred instead to exclude them, trap them live, and then release them into the control of her owl friends.

Her employable name was Odessa, but Storysold: City  knew her as Wilderness Security Guide. Uncommonly tall, commonly beautiful, Wilderness Guide appeared to always be in control like an actor, or superhero, with her disarmingly cutesy costume—tennis skirt, pastel polyester shirt, backpack, and a pair of trekking-poles worn down to nubs from use—and her power totem: a mask made from the remains of her owl friend who had become one with The Action. For all her poise under pressure, she was well aware that her character was an act. The Fear, as she called it, was ever-present.

Cool and savage, with the endurance of an ultra-marathoner, Guide hiked in and out of every shop in Island Market Seven’s Residential Shopping Center, selling, pitching, and promoting The Pioneer’s theme, The Bio-Friendly Range War on Hornswoggler Betty. Guide sold her new war strategy as “the bailout and occupy maneuver.” It didn’t take long to gain support. Once her theme had enough cast support, Guide told Betty that her signature would forever be Hornswoggler Betty the Grassland Thief if she didn’t stop stealing the work scenes of her neighbors. Polite as a small-town wave, Guide left Betty with the knowledge that she wouldn’t stop her trek to spread the story of her no-good signature to every corner of The City, until Betty changed and began to invest in the grassland scenes her herd grazed upon.

The bio-friendly range war lasted thirty-eight days, fifty moments, and twenty-six beats from the moment Guide issued her first line. Throughout the range war, Guide ate Betty, slept Betty, thought Betty, and tenaciously supplied her with “outs.” She showed her better ways to herd; directed her to open plots that she could develop; gave her the names of New Pioneers who were open to having her walking meat graze on their Grassland plots in exchange for fertile manure; introduced her to profitable working examples of storybankers who were able to balance Grassland accountably, and other tips. All of which were meant to entice Betty to bail out her old storyline, throw it out before her story was completely bankrupt, and blaze a new trail that would guide Betty to more profitable pastures. Guide shadowed Betty’s every step. Like the moon, she used her gravitational presence to effect a true change in Betty’s governing body. Guide wanted Betty to know, beyond a doubt, that if she went down in storytime as the Hornswoggler then it would be her choice.

Any classically trained sheriff would’ve laughed at the idea of giving aid and comfort to a known crook every day, by trying to give them a better way to live—presenting them with a handful of outs, get-out-of-jail-free cards, and opportunities to help them usurp their darker options. What do the cops with guns and sunglasses do when they decide to fight Crime instead of fighting criminals? Ask Wilderness Guide, because she was doing it.

When the dust of The Bio-Friendly Range War cleared, Betty sat down with her antagonist, and they plotted to add and develop a Grassland Grower to Betty’s shallow stock of economic character roles. Together they developed a “trail guide” or “script” that mapped a clear course of action for Betty’s neighbors, so they could rebuild the trust that was broken with every scene that passed without Betty entering their stories uninvited. At the end of every day on “script arrest,” Guide broadcasted a few sample clips of Betty following her script throughout the city on her channel, The Earth Show News to show proof of her brand new/better actions. And the days passed into weeks and months, and Betty’s storybank account slowly began to rebuild the consumer confidence that was broken like a growing pile of promissory notes. In time, not only did Guide’s work with Betty produce the Grassland Grower, and her sequel Betty the Reluctant Prairie Investor, their adventure also brought about the first personal constitution in the city.

That was the part in their stories where Betty and Guide were working on her script in Betty’s shop, The Barn, and Betty lost her shit…

“It’s been months! What the hell do I have to do to get you off my back?” Betty screamed. “I’m tired of running your script!”

“You mean ‘our’ script.”

“Oh I’m sorry,” Betty shot back. “I mean…our got-damned, mother fucking, ball busting, blood sucking fuck all prison script that I’m running like a cattle shoot day in and day out. That script.”

“You want to know how to end this?”

“You bet I do…I’m plum tired of you, your silly owl mask, and that damned dog of yours. It’s so well behaved its creepy.”

By this time in Betty’s presentation we were watching her backstory on her handheld storyclock TV. It was the first time she’d mentioned Guide’s half-wild German Shepard friend, Fritzee Good Boy. Betty was right. The dog was seemingly well behaved. It blended into The Action like a prop, or an extra, or an employee all dolled up for service to look like their coworkers.   

“Hunt the herd, shit serviceberries, sleep in the winter, be the best bear you can be,” Guide replied with one of her old lines. “Find that niche the wilderness has for you, fill it, and try to be happy. Don’t do stupid dangerous things, like chewing through your food supply and the food supply of your neighbors. Don’t dick around with larger predatory mammals, or capable herds of formidable storybankers. This isn’t the old market. Freedom doesn’t mean you get to freely take whatever you want, from whomever you want, whenever you want it. Idiocy like that will turn The Wilderness against you, and force it to choke you out—one way or another—and recycle your ready supply of organic matter back to the soil that bore you. Don’t be like so many dead mountaineers who kept pushing to the highest highs when they should have been watching the clouds rolling in around them.”

“That’s your advice?” Betty cried. “Be the best bear I can be? Forget you and forget your granola-spewing philosophies. I’m gonna sit down right now, and write out what yawl can expect from Cowboy Betty.” Then she tore a piece of cardboard from a box in the corner of the Barn. “I’m going to give you…No, I’m going to show you my word, in writing, and post it on my channel, and on The Barn door, so you folks don’t come in moaning like red-eyed cows when I’ve gone and done a scene out of script. Owning my own constitution will set all yawl straight.”

Guide opened her mouth to protest strictly on the basis of her tone (and over thirty-eight days of dramatic conflict), but closed it as soon as the meaning of Betty’s words sunk in.

“You mean,” Guide replied coolly, “you’re proposing to write your own brand of laws and govern your body by them?”

Betty winced for half a hot moment, preparing to bolt; and then, like light through rain clouds, she let out a Betty-brand hoot, and said, “Well, yes, I reckon if all the pure evil sinners of earth can have a personal relationship with the Good Lord, then a rough-riding, fire-breathing Hornswoggler, like me, can take an honest crack at a personal relationship with The Law.”

And Betty called her personal relationship with the abstract concept know as law, “My Personal Yahoo and Rugged Constitution.” 

And from that moment on, ancient sentiments for generic law began to break down as more and more storybankers were inspired to fashion, pen, legislate, stylize, sign, and self-govern with the aid of personal representative constitutions. Betty’s change of heart marked the beginning of the process of busting up The Old Law Monopolies that had long supplied their consumers with long jangled lists of generic laws that were crafted by and for the interpretation of priests, lawyers, politicians, and other power seekers who, in turn, used it to wrangle humans into large, marketable groups.

“Fuck me,” I said and reached for Betty’s bottle. “Do you realize what you’re saying? People can’t govern themselves. That’s crazy talk.”

“Blame John Wayne,” Betty said, as she snatched the bottle back. “He always took The Law into his own hands. Having an intimate relationship with The Law is grand. Like Guide always says, one law written by heart is worth a hundred beaten into you by memory with books and batons.”

In The End, tragically, even though the Cowboy followed the scripted trail she produced with Guide and started to write and post her own personal constitution governing her life and role in The Grassland, Betty had pushed her luck for too long before she began editing her story. The bio-friendly range war cost her dearly. In what she called “the winter of her story,” her supporting cast had dwindled to one, a Saloon Owner and Beer Brewer named Gambler. Brokenhearted, Betty was forced to sell her herd to Half Pint the New Pioneer in balance for the debt she’d accrued as the Hornswoggler. And that was the moment Betty, and the Pioneers, both agreed was The End.

Truth told, I didn’t remember half of that story. “Our” bottle was dry by the time Betty reached The End. And so was “our” plate of Jellyfish’s Mermen Crab Cakes and Spunk Surprise. I didn’t Get It until much later in our adventure when I rewound my storybank account and watched it, for the first time, in the third person. It was hard to watch. I didn’t look as cool, or in control, as I remember feeling when I was drinking Betty’s whiskey.

My Storybank Account – Scene Twenty Five, 

THE PART WHERE THE MONSTERS AT THE PARTY GET MAD BECAUSE WYLIE DOESN’T GET IT…

I was still at the party, but I was only there in body. The whiskey said I was busy doing spy work, when in fact I was only spying on Maggie, and eating all the crab cakes. Maggie was fluttering around the party meeting all our new neighbors. I tried to wrangle my emotions like a real hero, but it bothered me that she looked happy. My reaction was classic. I slunk to the back of our shop like any Mortal Boyfriend wounded by a Worshipful Goddess, and watched the light filtering in from the back window. A set of colorful spotlights were illuminating the steam rising up, through the Hollow Core, from the Boiler at the bottom to the steam vent at the center of the Weather Bubble’s freshwater Reservoir. It reminded me of sunset, which made sense because the lights were turned on at sunset to signify a sunset. When I was done sulking, my old gut feeling returned with a flash of rage—indicating it was time for action. I hadn’t spent anytime shopping for what action next served me best. But, then again, I didn’t need to shop around. I’d been given a mission. And that mission wasn’t supposed to make me happy like Maggie. It was dark, stoic, and self-sacrificing like lifting weights in a gym alone. The reward was the rightness I’d feel when Maggie someday realized I was right to stand at the edge of the party and study our assets from a third person perspective. Based on all my reading, managing assets impersonally from afar was always best.

With that in mind, I began a head count: Buddha, Rachna, and Blue Suit had already left the party, which left two Reality Gamers named Thelma and Richard (who were both playing Level Eight, Dreamy Nineteen-Fifties Pre-Fabricated Suburban Lifestyle), Riggs the Master Clocktinker, Wall the Mart, Betty, Philoh the Junker, Patricia, the Water Monsters—Jellyfish, Lava Monster, O2, Rompasaurus, Juan the Tuna Hunter, and a hefty, moody latecomer named Neptune—and Maggie. When I had my head count, I deepened my objective study by cataloguing everyone’s character flaws, so—if needed—I could use them like a preacher uses sins to manipulate them in the interest of The Mission. That plan didn’t last long. Not because I couldn’t identify their weaknesses, or bend them to my will. The trouble was quantity. The terror-banking cultists all had so, so many monstrous flaws.

“Fish in a barrel,” I mumbled aloud and snickered at the thought that any of those simpletons would be smart enough to get the mental upper hand on a highly trained, cream of the crop, agent of the FBI like me.

Everyone looked like they were having fun. Maggie, Riggs, and Philoh were gathered around the Storysold: TV beside the door. Maggie was nodding, smiling, and laughing as they gave her pointers on how to use the storyclock’s special features. Richard and Thelma were at the bar facing the kitchen space, attempting to show O2 (costumed in his usual diving suit), Lava Monster (dressed in checkered flannel and a hardhat), and Rompasaurus (in her scales and green Kraken suit) how to play a board game, in the style of Level Eight, Dreamy Nineteen-Fifties Pre-Fabricated Suburban Lifestyle.

As I helped myself to the Gamers’ fifty’s-style snack mix, I turned in time to see Betty slip out of scene, leading a shirtless Neptune into the hallway by the three-pronged golden points of his own triton. The grin on the man’s face was unmistakable. Was he a monster, or a god? It didn’t matter. Betty was going to take him either way. It made me laugh so hard that I sprayed snack-mix all over Wall the Mart, Jellyfish, and Juan the Great White Tuna Hunter, who seemed to be having a serious conversation about something. They ignored me, and moved their circle to the other side of the curtain, where Patricia had been watching her target market as she munched carrots and slurped Fizzy Pop through a swamp reed.

Feeling confident, I followed the circle of three.   

“Hello. We haven’t met,” I slurred to the aging man wearing green tights, a frou-frou feathered Shakespearean hat, a bulging codpiece, and a long sheet painted to resemble a brick wall. “I’m Wylie, Wylie Jones. I’m a Wealthy Globetrotting Hipster Journalist.”

He shook my hand like I was a salesman. “Hello, Wylie Jones the so on and so forth. I’m Wall the Mart, Stage-Stocking Grocer.”

“Oh, like Buddha,” I said, trying to sound smart. “He’s a Stage-Stocking Grocer too…” Wall just stared. “So, why Wall the Mart?” I continued. “I mean, why the parody? Are you jealous of that company’s everyday low prices and top-notch customer service?”

“My dear Jones,” Wall replied, “before I gave my fortune for a storybank account, I was an accomplished actor in New York, London, and New Delhi. I have chosen Wall from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream to represent my main character. I emulate Wall, the wall with a single hole of humanity through which the lovers express their love. O! To be Wall! That both pushes and pulls those around it like gravity supplying both distance and closeness. Intimacy! I hold You above all others! O, for love of Wall. Those of us who know, who purse our lips to the Wall to smell, taste, hear, and love the distance between: history, science, culture, commerce, and the theater! All is possible with love for the hole in Wall; and I, dear Jones, am Wall.”

“Well,” I said, feeling speechless. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Wall.”

Then I tried to walk away, but Jellyfish reeled me back.

“Where are you going?” Jellyfish asked. By now, Patricia had joined our scene, standing beside Wall, Jellyfish, and Juan.

“I needed to go before he purses his lips again.”

“That’s no excuse for leaving our little party!”

“His conversation’s uh…too deep for me,” I lied. “Besides, I haven’t spoken to my Girlfriend at all this evening. I’m going to see what she’s doing, hanging out with that boy-faced retard.”

“What boy-faced retard?” Patricia asked.   

“That retard…with the cleft lip, the mechanical grabber hand, and the I HEART JUNK hat.”

“Are you always mean when you drink?”

“You should just ask him if he’s always mean,” Jellyfish added. “Look at the way he tries to smile. Looks like a classic Asshole to me.”   

“I think you’re right Jelly,” Patricia replied, turning to me. “Are you always mean to people you don’t know?”

“Oh, I see. I’m the Asshole because I call it like it is? Your buddy is walking around with a grabber hand! Isn’t that kind of odd?”

“He’s a Junker,” Patricia replied. “He uses his mechanical grabber instead of bending over hundreds of times a day to get junk. It’s preventive healing. It’s how he participates in Rachna’s Working Healthcare System.”

“Oh yeah…well…” I whispered. “I know some things too.”

“Like what?” Patricia whispered like I did.

“Like you were sitting over there by yourself waiting…and nobody’s bothered to tell you the truth about the situation.”

“The truth about what situation?” Patricia asked curiously.

I grabbed Patricia by the sleeve her Fizzy Pop uniform (which she was still wearing proudly), pulled her aside, and whispered, “Truth is, you’re at least twice as good-looking as Juan,” I paused, checking to see that Juan wasn’t watching us. “And your boy, the Great White Tuna Hunter knows it. You’re wasting your time waiting like a wallflower for him to make the first move. Go introduce yourself. He’ll be putty in your hand.”

“I thought you said hunters don’t like to be stalked by their prey?”

“Damn your memory. I was wrong,” I paused for thought. “It doesn’t matter what I think. Truth is truth. Now go get him tiger.”

“But Juan already has an amazing story,” Patricia replied, searching my eyes for a way to make me understand. “We’re the same age, and I haven’t produced my first bike-making scene for Maggie yet. I can’t simply walk into his story, introduce myself, and expect him to drop his life and start editing all the great themes he’s been developing, just for me. That’s bad! I wouldn’t want Juan to develop a Boyfriend character for me if it meant he had to cut his ties with his monster friends like the Sea Hags, O2, and Lava Monster, or stop hunting the Great White Tuna, to develop a new theme with me. Why would I want to destroy the parts of his story that I found attractive in the beginning? I’d never forgive myself if I crashed his storyline and tried to change it without a natural introduction. You know, a good reason, or segue, or something to work with. He knows who I am, and I know who he is, but I want the timing for our first lines to be right, beautiful, and right for both of us.”   

I was stunned. Once again, the sixteen-year-old born in Storysold: City  had found a way to rile me. “Holy Moses,” I grumbled. “That’s not right. What teenage girl doesn’t believe in love at first sight?”

“What was that?” Patricia asked, pretending not to hear.

“What’s the capital of Ohio?” I asked suddenly.

“Who’s Ohio?”

“What’s five times five?”

“Five times five what?” Patricia replied quizzically.

“It doesn’t matter. Five of anything times five of anything.”

“Nothing. Anythings don’t have values. Nothings of value times nothings of value equals zero,” she answered smartly.

I wasn’t about to give up. She was too confident…

“If a train was traveling at ten miles an hour from town A to town B twenty miles away,” I asked, desperate to find any sign of weakness from the youth, “how long would it take to go from town A to town B?”

To which she replied, “What’s an hour?”

“It’s a unit of time.”

“Who owns ‘the hours,’ the train, or the people on the train?”

“What does it matter?” I cried. “Just answer the question: How long does the train take to go from town A to town B?”

“It matters a lot…”

“My God, you’re brainwashed!”

“Rachna says that by the time most employables are full grown they’ve already forgotten most of the facts and figures and other nonsensical things they learned in their schools. She says they forget for lack of action, practice, and practical application. But she says none of them forget how to sit quietly and make the rooster ready blankface look for The Fourth Wall.”

“Not true,” I replied, glancing at Maggie. “Not in my Country. Most Americans know our state capitals, basic math, home economics, and history and such—many years after we graduate—and we don’t sit quietly and listen to our leaders. Americans grumble all the time. We hate going to meetings.”

Patricia read me. “So, what was Betty talking to you about?’

“Nothing,” I lied.

“I thought she was giving you a lesson on ownership?”

“No. We were discussing the mating rituals of wild salmon.”

“Is it difficult for you employables to conceive of another kind of ownership that’s not your own?”

“Employable?” I asked, almost mad. “What does that mean, anyway? Everyone in this world is employed in one way or another.”

“Being an employable means that you’re able to be employed.”

“Employable means that you’re able to be employed. Brilliant!” I shook my head like a teacher facing a student that “just didn’t get it.” Then I excused myself (awkwardly), and stumbled off to where Maggie and her new friends, our neighbors, were gathered at the Storysold: TV.   

“Hey Boyfriend,” she greeted me cheerfully. “How’s it going?”

I turned to see if there was another man behind me. Nope. She looked happy to see me…but why? Either she was as drunk as I, or she’d found Jesus since the last time we spoke.

“Good!” I said, happy to be working with a willing asset. “Very good in fact. How about you? Looks like you guys are having fun.”

“We are!” she replied. “We finished updating my account!”

“Oh fun, storyselling,” I replied, trying for sincerity. “Good times to be had by all. Do you mind if I join you?”

“Not at all,” she smiled, stood, and offered me her seat. “Check this out. It shows my whole account. Tell me if you think it’s fair.”

“Fair?” I asked, like the last sane man in a world gone mad.

“Yes,” she replied. “I mean, do you think I’m getting a good deal on the monetary moments displayed on the screen there.”

I shrugged, nodded, and said, “Sure, looks good.”

“I’m glad you agree,” Maggie smiled. “Now that mine’s good, I can help you update your personal storybank account!”     

I looked left, and then I looked right—but there was no more whiskey in sight. In the absence of a proper reply, I whined, “Sweetie…?”

“Yes, Boyfriend.”

“I have a surprise for you,” I cooled sweeter then factory-made apple pie. “I think you’re going to like it.”

Maggie rolled her eyes. “I hope so…”    

“I feel that the trust level of our relationship has, well—reached the next level,” I powered through her disbelief like a champ. “I think we’re really ready to be like real adult couples who share a joint bank account.”

Once again, everyone was suddenly laughing at me.

  Riggs fell off his stool. “Joint bank account!” he laughed.

“Yes,” I replied, staring down at the man in the gray suit, sunglasses, spit-shined shoes, and goofy tie, still laughing on the floor. “I believe Maggie and I are responsible enough to handle a joint Storysold account. What’s so funny? Why are you laughing?”

“Who do you think you are, Doctor Frankenstein?” Riggs asked, as he regained his composure. “Tell me, how do you plan to live your lives in one lump sum, where your flesh, bones, and blood merge and collectively inhabit and operate one very loosely jointed leviathan?”    

“OK,” I said, turning to Maggie for help. “I surrender, friends. I give up. Ha, ha. Fill me in on the joke.”

Maggie read the sincerity in my eyes, and asked, “You really don’t understand what Riggs was getting at, do you?”

Ouch. That one hurt. My face flushed red, and I sat there staring at Maggie my US Government Asset like a lost, starving puppy.

“I see,” she said. “Betty’s whiskey was better than her story.”

I didn’t want to appear weaker than I did already, so I lied, “It’s not like that. I understood her The Bio-friendly Range War…I’m just a little hazy on how these accounts work. It might help if you show me yours.”

Without protest, or a verbal jab, she tuned the Storysold: TV to her account page labeled SUPPORTING CAST MENU:   

1. BUDDHA, STOCKING GROCER…$156:00 mms owed for FIRST TIME NIRVANA BURGERS FOR MAGGIE
2. SON, TOOL MAKER…$11:00 mms owed for TOOL SCENES FOR THE HAPPY GARDEN [DEBT INHERITED BY MAGGIE]
3. GERTEL…$24:00 mms owed for BED-COVERING AND QUILT-MAKING SCENES [DEBT INHERITED BY MAGGIE]
4. ANTI-CHRIST THE CARPENTER….$00:01 mms owed for A NEARLY INHUMAN BED [DEBT INHERITED BY MAGGIE]
5. BLUE SUIT, NANOTECH MECHANIC…$30.00 mms owed for SOLJI’S GRAVESIGHT [DEBT INHERITED BY MAGGIE] 
6. WALL THE MART, STAGE-STOCKING GROCER… $111:00 mms owed for RAW PROPS AND GROCERIES FOR MAGGIE
7. RIGGS, MASTER CLOCKTINKER…. $85:00 mms owed for GENERAL MAINTENANCE ON HER STORYSOLD TV
8. UNCLE SAM, PUBLIC SERVANT… $2:00 mms owed for THE PUBLIC SERVICE SCENES PERFORMED ON A DAMAGED SECTION OF THE REEF WALL THAT WAS BATTERED BY A ROGUE WAVE [DEBT INHERITED BY MAGGIE]
9. THE GRAND RACHNA…$109:46 mms owned for SERVICES RENDERED AS MOVER, PARTY COORDINATOR, AND HEALER [NOTE: RACHNA EXPECTS THIS BALANCE AND OTHER BALANCES TO BE BALANCED IN ACCORDANCE WITH HER WORKING HEALTHCARE SYSTEM]
10. PATRICIA, WONDER BIKE INVENTOR… moments are currently being minted for MAGGIE’S WONDER BIKE AND WAGON
11. TRAVELER… no balance yet accrued for THE GIFT OF A ONE-WAY TICKET TO Storysold: City
12. SOLJI KIM’S SIGNATURE… $9,634:67 mms owed for SOLJI’S ENTIRE LIFE SAVINGS’ WORTH OF MONETARY MOMENTS DEVELOPING THE HAPPY GARDEN AND SOLJI’S KITCHEN, TRANSFERRED TO MAGGIE IN EQUAL EXCHANGE FOR A SUPPLY OF ASSAH AND KIMCHI TO BE MADE AND SET AT SOLJI’S GRAVESIGHT FOR THE ENJOYMENT OF HER CAST

Tick, tick, I did the mental tabulations. “Yikes!” I cried when I was done. “You might as well have signed off on the national debt!”

Maggie’s eyes grew wild. “Listen, Buster. I’m trying to show you how it is here. If you don’t want to listen then…well…”

“Well, what?” I challenged, returning to my usual modus operandi like I hadn’t been trying to play it cool.

“I don’t know,” she said, sinking. “But, inheriting debt isn’t a bad thing here. It’s good…better than inheriting gold. Every debt on that list is a promise to support my signature for the moments listed. It’s exciting. For whatever reason, these storybankers are willing to risk it and value my future gardening scenes now, before I mint them.”       

“What about the nice tables, the bottles of wine, and those moving paintings the Space Cadet took off the wall…then ran off with?”

Maggie sighed as Riggs and Philoh wandered away.

“Blue Suit told that story,” Maggie said. “He said that Winner the Gamemaster of Reality is a staunch supporter of Chester’s corporate banking theme. Winner doesn’t like the fact that Traveler snuck behind the President’s back to bring us into The City. He believes Chester’s doing the right thing, collecting dope currency, and paying taxes to the US Government. He sent his Gamers, Thelma and Richard, to bore us with their trivial board games in an effort to ruin our Shop Warming Party.”

“So?” I replied blankly.

“So, instead of allying his theme with us, Winner pulled his support and instructed Yeomatarian to reclaim their unbalanced products.”    

“Solji must’ve paid off some of those things.”

“Sure,” Maggie explained, “but she’s dead…and we haven’t minted any work to prove that we own them. Most of those Projectavisions were paid off, and anyone could have made a claim to them, but most storybankers agree that the original producers of the goods in question have the right to reclaim their work before anyone else claims them.”

“Well, what happens if it’s all paid off and no one claims it? Does that mean everyone in the city pig piles to own it?”

Maggie replied, “Blue Suit says that our signatures are as identifiable In Scene, in our stories, as DNA is in flesh and blood.”   

“That’s twice now you’ve said Blue Suit said something to you!” I shouted from that place inside that lacks power or understanding. “The man is stone mute! And you say you guys chatted about something as abstract as using our living signatures to sign for the owning of things?”

Whoosh—like air leaving a balloon, the atmosphere shifted.

Like a caveman trying to fix a broken radio, I failed to tune into the change of mood…oblivious to the social clouds gathering around me.

“Have you seen his Light Being Communicator?” Maggie offered as her eyes drifted, scanning the silent shop while I stormed on.   

“Yes, I’ve seen it. He used it to laugh at me!”   

“I think you should calm down now,” Maggie suggested.

“Why should I? That asshole laughed at me.”

“Well, for one…you’re being an idiot.”

“What was that?” I shot back.

“Nothing,” Maggie replied.

“That’s what I thought, nothing. Now why don’t you run over to the bar and get us some crab cakes, and try to regain your composure.”

“You ate the last crab cake like five moments ago.”

“How do you know what I ate five, five whatevers ago?”

“Ra! Raa! Rompasaurus Roar!” The swill-swallowing, ball-grabbing, kiss-your-ass-goodbye sound of a Salty Seafaring Kraken rising to anger filled the shop with feelings of extreme displeasure.

“Oh shit!” I said, spinning around. “What the hell?”

“Shit is right!” Juan echoed. “You made Rompasaurus mad!”

“But…But…” I stammered innocently. “What did I do?”

Through the rubber hole in her suit she roared, “Sea-Harvesting with Gentle Water Monsters: Until the Land Mob Makes Monsters Mad—and the Monsters Snap, Go Blank in a Fit of Madness, and Have to Romp-a-Stomp, Smash Everyone. Smash everyone!” And then the smashing began…

First went the Gamer’s game board. Flip! Roar! Thelma and then Richard sailed head-over-heels across the room followed by a variety of game pieces. Next went Riggs. The monster tossed him into the center of the work island like a doll. Then Rompasaurus the Salty Seafaring Kraken fanned her green arms out and backhanded Wall square in his wall.

“Rompa-rompa-Rompasaurus Roar!”

The monster spared no one. She lifted Patricia over her head, locked her arms, spun her around wrestling-style, and tossed the future Wonder Bike Inventor into the curtain. She screamed as it crashed down around her.

“Now you did it, Jones,” Maggie cried. “She’s really mad!”

“But what did I do? I was yelling at you, not her.”

“You were trying to enslave your Girlfriend,” Philoh jumped in. “It made Rompasaurus mad, because it reminded the water monster of her old life working for the Land Mob, back on the mainland.”

Rompasaurus must have heard us talking about her because she spun and set her big cut-hole eyes on Philoh, Maggie, and me.

“I don’t get it. What exactly is a Land Mob again?”

“Run!” Maggie screamed as we cleared a volley of ferocious swipes of her claws, running for safety in whatever direction we could find.

Or at least some of us ran. After a few duck-and-covers, I stood fast and put my fists on my thighs, spread my feet shoulders’ width apart, and assumed what my instructor at spy school called “the warrior stance.”

“Kill!” I sounded fiercely and charged—strips of white light racing behind me—as I engaged the beast, man-to-lady-Kraken, in what I thought would certainly be a heroic death struggle.

I’ll save the day, I thought. I’m a Real American Hero.

Then, from behind, I heard someone start to sing. The voice was that of Juan the Great White Tuna Hunter. He was way off-key, but he sang loudly, without reservation. The Gentle Water Monsters had a name for the song he sang. They called it, The Rompasaurus Theme Song.

“Let her go!” Jellyfish commanded as we crashed through the kitchen, tearing up everything in sight. “She’s only mad because she thinks you’re trying to take her job,” she added, countering Philoh’s opinion. “Let her keep her role, or we’ll have a monster arms race on our hands!”

“Never!” I cried. “This monster’s going down!”

Meanwhile, Patricia had untangled herself from the curtain and joined Juan in his song. Standing side-by-side—tall and proud—they held nothing back, showing us how they felt on the subject of hand-to-hand combat at shop-warming parties. I didn’t know the song, but it sounded familiar like a song from an action movie soundtrack. I knew the part well. It was the song they played when the hero beats the bad guys into submission, then rides off into the sunset with his prize while trumpets proclaims the news of his victory throughout the land. Or something to that effect.

Juan and Patricia’s harmony broke through the noise of crashing and smashing we were creating in the kitchen; then they peaked—inspiring Riggs and Wall to join their song. The power of the music rose as Jellyfish busted in, banging out a drum line on one of the pots that had been thrown from the kitchen. Philoh and O2 followed her lead—making beats with anything in reach while Lava Monster danced nervously, watching his feet. Thelma and Richard weren’t used to playing unprogrammed games they didn’t know, especially dangerous, unrealistic, unprogrammed games. The Gamers bobbed and weaved through the shop like journalists through a combat zone, running for the front door, as my Cover Girlfriend weighed in.

Maggie struck an awkward note, red faced, sweating, stage spooked in the spotlight, as the music scene suddenly came crashing together, erupting in the most awe-inspiring sounds that I’d ever heard. The tactical sing along (new war effort) rolled in like a tank and I was forced, ever so slightly at first, to shift my attention away from my heroics, away from Rompasaurus and her romp-a-stomping, and tune in to their production.

Who would have guessed? Music does soothe the savage beast, I thought as I watched the Kraken stop. She just stopped like someone flicked a switch. She turned her tail, and joined the song too. Rompasaurus wailed along horribly (but happily), leaving me to stand bare-chested in the kitchen, alone, with my T-shirt torn like a hulking superhero. Fame, being at the center of the scene, was not as cool as I always imagined. It was lonely in the audience when everyone else was performing on stage.

My Storybank Account – Scene Twenty Six, 

THE PART WHERE MAGGIE BEGINS HER GARDEN WITH THE HELP OF AN ALL-STAR GOAT TEAM…

In the weeks that followed the opening of our new shop, my official line was that I was waiting and prepping for the moment when Mr. Chester Weston granted me the $30:00 mms worth of journalism he’d promised in that farce of an interview we’d suffered to open our storybank accounts. What that “prepping” looked like in action on my TV screen, reflecting back at me in the 3^rd person, looked more like one of those deadbeat boyfriends, husbands, or bosses who work hard at finding ways not to work hard.

“I’m sorry Honey. I can’t help today. I’m busy writing a Pulitzer Prize-winning article on your father,” was one of my best lines. I was also a big fan of the one where I blamed my lack of action on the stifling forces of The Terror Banking Cult. “I’d go out today,” I’d say, “but I don’t understand those people as well as you do. They make me so angry.”

For all of Maggie’s lack of education, she was smart. She was better at detecting inbound bullshit than any of the rank-and-file co-workers I had the displeasure of working with at The Bureau. So naturally, it was inevitable that (at some point in our relationship) I’d succumb to her nagging and join her in the sunlit Happy Garden above our dark underwater hideout.

So that happened. I toiled in Maggie’s garden dressed, covertly hip as possible, in a pair of silky, short running shorts, bright headband, sneakers with black tube socks, and a retro-fitted tank top with glitter-puff-painted pictures of old cartoon shows on it. The master plan was thus: I would toil in the soil, keeping a sharp eye on the skyline and nearby canalway for planes, ships, submarines, any old and boring factory-processed transport inbound from the mainland; until I spied a suspicious one, then I’d excuse myself for a “run around the neighborhood for a bit of exercise.” Then I’d use my running scene as cover to search the city for Weston’s means of mainland transport, and hopefully find some clues to the location of his Super Massive Vault. Thanks to The Intel I had gathered from Miss Chase, I already knew he stored his fortune in cash and never consumed any factory-free food products from his so called “star employees.” And that meant Weston the International Terror Banking Cult Leader must receive routine shipments of factory-processed food, and cash, from the mainland. What I needed to know now was when, where, or how those shipments arrived in his hands…

“Wylie!” Maggie shouted with what seemed to be a real, sudden sense of distress. “Watch it. You almost stepped on that rake.”

Boy—that would have been a good one. I wonder what the people watching my channel would do if I had stepped on that rake? Would they laugh at me again, like I was a comedian? Or would they be horrified, leap from their sofas, and come to my aid? It bothered me to not know.   

“What are we doing again?” I asked, sighing, as I surveyed her garden plot from Solji’s Gravesight Picnic Area. I was standing along the border of an uneven field of wheat. Further in the distance, the wheat became part of the New Pioneer’s Grassland story, which was fenceless because any half-literate storybanker could read the difference between Grassland, and a plot of wheat. Along another border of Solji’s garden plot was what appeared to be a classic American farmhouse, which was surrounded by a balance of crops, animals, people, and a windmill, which spun beside the barn and silo, providing the farm with power. On the far side of the garden, where Solji’s cast had buried her story’s end in a hole, was a thicket full of fruit trees, aspens, and shrubs. As long as I ignored Maggie’s part, the scene flowed together in an identifiable order. The Happy Garden, on the other hand, was no longer an apt title for the garden plot. Maggie’s Pervasive Weed Patch might have been a better title for the plot of land that was now plotting the ruin of civilization.

“Keep weeding,” Maggie directed. “And try to work faster. Spring is here, and we should have planted the peas by now.”

“Give me some gasoline and a match, and I’ll show you weeding,” I muttered under my breath.   

“What did you say?” she muttered back as she struggled to uproot a thistle. When she failed to uproot it, she moved on to the next one.   

“Nothing,” I called back, resting my hoe on my chin. “I’m just saying, there has to be an easier way. Systems thinking is kinda my thing.”

It was Maggie’s turn to mumble under her breath. “Systems thinking is kinda my thing, my ass!” she mocked with a laugh.

“In fact,” I was about to continue to talk my way through our work scene when I watched a silver seaplane fly overhead. It followed the canalway and landed in a nearby Hidden Harbor. “I believe that it’s in both our best interests if I run and find us a rototiller.”

I didn’t wait for her reply. I waved goodbye. “Later!” I cried as I ran off, leaving Maggie behind to battle the thistles alone.

“Get back here!” she hollered, shaking her hoe at me. “Don’t you dare bring back one of those got-damned machines! Do you hear me, Wylie Jones! In the long run, rototilling scenes are less profitable and more time-consuming than doing our weeding scenes by hand!”

“The knot in my back doesn’t agree!” I called back as I ran, fading from Maggie’s scene on a throughway leading to Center Stage.

A few beats later, Traveler’s character Sam the Goat Coach appeared in Maggie’s story with her All-Star Team of Ocean-Going Goats.

“Maggie!” Sam called triumphantly. “Did you miss me?”

“Traveler?” She squinted at the woman sporting a turban, polo shirt, whistle, clipboard, and a classic, crook-necked shepherd’s staff.

“Of course not,” Sam smiled, walking through the weeds. “I’m Sam the Goat Coach—and these guys, as you know, are my Team.”

“You know,” Maggie smiled, “something told me that you would be walking back into my story one of these days.”

“My story! My, how possessive you’ve become since last we met!” Sam teased as she herded the All-Star Goat Team into the Happy Garden. Each of her cast members carried gear on its back. When they’d all arrived, Sam started unstrapping and staging the gear. “Rumor has it your storybank account has been developing smoothly,” Sam said while he worked.

“Storyselling is a blast! I’ve never felt so in charge of myself!”

“Fine, fine,” Sam nodded. “But how’s the Boyfriend?”

“He’s been a pain in my ass since we arrived.”

“Lovers make the best antagonists,” Sam chuckled, knowingly. “Like they say—keep your enemies close, but keep your lovers closer.”

Maggie found that line funny. “Yeah, I suppose if every good story has to have an antagonist…I could do worse, I suppose.”

“Is that a fact?” Sam laughed, and slapped her knee.

“Yes,” Maggie replied seriously. “I could do worse.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t come to pick on Wylie.”

“Then why did you come?”

“Business as usual.”

“What sort of business?” Maggie grinned.

“Well,” the Goat Coach began. “I was watching your channel a few days ago, and frankly—your courageous approach to whacking at all these weeds inspired me.” Sam paused as Maggie dusted off her jeans (like it made any difference), removed her sun hat, and wiped off the sweat with the sleeve of her T-shirt. “With your support,” Sam continued. “I want to train my All-Star Goat Team to play your field as the Lean, Mean Tilling Machine.”

Maggie looked confused. “I don’t follow.”

“Well,” Sam began again, “when I’m not off setting my courses through the various regions of storytime, feeding these goats in the Storytime Machine’s Goat Hangar, I need to find members of my supporting cast who don’t mind if my goat team grazes on their garden plots, or Grassland. That’s where you come in. You’re my cast member, and you have a garden plot that needs a team of goats to weed and till it!”

“Sounds good, but,” Maggie asked sheepishly. “Is it free?”   

“Should be,” Sam answered warmly. “The goats will be paid by the weeds. The goats will pay me in their cheese and meat…and you will save a ton of storytime not having to weed the weeds. The only complex part of this exchange is the coaching—the iron will that’s needed to domesticate—and lead these stubborn beasts into The Winner’s Circle.”

“That line about the ‘iron will’ sounds expensive.”

“Oh, it is,” Sam laughed. “Nothing on earth is more expensive than producing the actions that’s needed to bend a free creature’s will to yours. Not only that, it’s difficult to be qualitatively accountable for any domestication-team-building scene. I know coaches and managers take credit for the work their employees do all the time on the mainland, but here it’s harder to draw The Line between the work scenes that I do, and the work scenes that my team of domesticates do. Here, I can’t domesticate a food pet, or turn a pig into my personal walking meat, without facing the truth that I am, without a doubt, taking that creature’s life as my own. Whether I kill them now, or put them out to pasture at retirement time, doesn’t really matter. Either way I’m claiming their flesh as my own walking meat the moment I successfully bend their will to my storyline and make them a part of my team.”

“That’s heavy,” Maggie sighed. “I don’t like the idea that Sam tames his goats like a high school football coach.”

Sam began to organize her gear and assemble what looked like some sort of harness. “It takes a lot longer to fully tame a human, but domestication isn’t rocket science,” Sam explained, as she grabbed her nearest goat. “It’s a trick, really. Like magic. All you have to do is convince the beasts that they’re more you, than they are themselves. It’s give and take, for sure.”   

I saw Maggie’s face. I reviewed that scene and watch it at least five times, in slow motion, on pause…and I could see, plain as day, what she was thinking about when she made it. She was thinking that I, the Man in Charge of Me, and the Man in Charge of the Man in Charge of Me (all the way to The Top Dog Alpha Man) had been working in cahoots to tame her.   

Traveler must have seen it too. “Let’s not waste the day reading our scenes away,” Sam said as she grabbed the harness and fitted it over her goat’s head without too much struggle. “Don’t worry about the cost. As long as we work together as a theme, you, I, and our goat friends…The Numbers will take care of themselves. Grab one of those goats, will you?”    

In a matter of moments, a pair of harnessed goats were hitched to a plow supported by big, old bike wheels. “Ta, da!” Sam grinned. “Allow me to present the Lean, Mean Tilling Machine!”

“Lean, Mean Tilling Machine,” Maggie echoed like liturgy.

“If this works,” Sam said, “this contraption will afford my All Star Goat Team an opportunity to be more independent. If they can eat weeds and produce their lean, mean tilling scenes, as a team, then I… I mean, we can do more than save food producers, like yourself, weeding time in exchange for weeds. We can charge them monetary moments for producing a scene they couldn’t do, alone, unless they invested in a machine.”

Maggie looked down in wonder at the goats strapped to the Tilling Machine. “That’s a lot of ifs,” she said, still watching the goats watch her in between big mouthfuls of thistle. “How do you get them to move?”

“Don’t worry,” Sam replied. “They’ll move when they’re hungry.”

“You’re going to wait for them to move?” Maggie laughed. “That’s your plan? Why don’t you do something to fire them up…”

“Like what?” the Coach chuckled. “Cheerleaders are expensive.”

“I don’t know. Maybe you should give them a pep talk?”

“You give them a pep talk,” Sam laughed. “I’m going to visit my friend’s Gravesight and open a bottle of Assah. Care to join me?”

“Do you think their rows will be straight?”

“You do have Assah stocked at Solji’s Picnic Area, don’t you?”

“Yes. Solji left enough Assah to keep her Gravesight stocked for a while, hopefully long enough for me to get her signature Korean-rice-wine-making scenes down,” Maggie said, still staring at the goats. “Hey, aren’t you worried about your team? Won’t they wander off?”

“Stop your worrying,” Sam answered back, pulling a slingshot from her pocket. “They won’t go far. It’s the only game they know. They do pretty good about not eating other storybankers’ crops, unlike some other creature I know. Eh, Maggie? Besides, there aren’t any predators around now.”

“Predators?” Maggie asked as they walked to the Picnic Area.

“Sure,” Sam replied calmly. “You know, predatory killers like lions, vipers, and bears, and people killers. Part of the exchange is, as their coach, I provide them with protection. That’s why I carry my trusty slingshot.”

“There are lions roaming free on the Garden Surface?”

“Not on this one… But I do know there’s a badger, a den of foxes, three known killers, two barbarians, an old bear, and about a dozen half wild dogs. The dogs are mostly borderline tame; only a few of them are borderline wild like the bears. One of the borderline wild dogs might pay us a routine visit later today. But, like I said, don’t worry. It’s a scripted visit.”

“Barbarians, bears, and killers? Oh my. Why didn’t anyone tell me about this before I signed on?”

“Here, if you’re worried, take the slingshot.”

“Do you have anything bigger?” she asked, taking it.     

“Come on, let’s share some of Solji’s wine and kimchi…and I’ll show you how to use Blue Suit’s amazing gadget.”   

Sam popped the Assah. Then the storybankers sat at the Gravesight Picnic Area and Sam showed Maggie how to access Solji’s lifetime library of gardening scenes. As they watched the Gravesight’s screen, they took turns target practicing with the slingshot. Sam was getting a kick out of attempting to terrify Maggie, telling her wild stories about protecting her players from man, beast, and the many kinds of predators running about unshackled and free in Storysold: City . Maggie listened like she was watching a scary movie in the safety of a theater, without true feelings of fear for the dangers Sam was illustrating. So much so, as their noontime moments blurred into afternoon and rolled into sunset, Maggie lost interest in Sam’s tales from The Edge of The Wilderness. Instead, the future gardener watched Solji develop The Happy Garden from her Gravesight. Maggie especially liked the part where she narrated (with lots of juicy details) what actions worked best for growing peas.

Periodically, Sam the Coach checked on her Goat Team, subbing in fresh players, hooking fresh walking meat to the Lean, Mean Tilling Machine to energize their game. And, every so often, she fired a few dirt clods at her players when they began to wander “out of bounds.”

Then right on cue, at what I estimated was Dinner Time, I ran back to the Happy Garden feeling accomplished about the spy scenes I’d done that day. “Hey ladies,” I said, sweat pumping from my pores. “I’m back!”

Sam laughed. “Well played, good and faithful Boyfriend! You have successfully simulated what you’d look like if you’d worked today.”

I ignored her commentary. Souring my face like rotten milk, I wrung my headband like a sponge, faced Maggie, and said, “I’m sorry, Girlfriend, I tried…I ran over Hill and Dale and back, but I couldn’t find a rototiller for rent anywhere…” Then I spied the Goat Team at work in the garden. “That’s a new one. What’s it supposed to be? Avant garden art?” I asked; but before they had a chance to answer, I spied the slingshot. “Oh wow!” I exclaimed. “I killed a lot of birds with a slingshot like that when I was a kid. Can it see it?”

“Go for it,” Sam replied, handing me the weapon.

Suddenly, there was a rustle in the thicket. Out stepped a commonly beautiful woman with long legs and an equally long stride, sporting a tennis skirt, sun visor, pastel polyester shirt, puffy blue vest, and worn hiking boots. In her hands, she held a pair of trekking poles, which she planted in the soil like claws, a line of demarcation she expected The Wilderness to respect.

“Dinner’s up!” the woman cried. “Get it, Boy!”

Snarl, snap, snarl, a large German Shepherd ran out of the thicket at top speed in hot pursuit of the nearest, slowest member of the All-Star Goat Team. This was not a rubber-suit-wearing Rompasaurus. This was a big, bad German Shepherd running down Sam’s Goat Team.

“Holy Hounds of Hell!” I bellowed as I looked around for projectiles for the weapon in my hand. “That beast’s out for blood!”

“Stop that animal, before it kills something!” Maggie yelled.

When Sam saw the dog, she hurriedly unhitched her goats from the Lean, Mean Tilling Machine.

I shot rocks from the slingshot at a feverish pace, hurling a barrage of jagged stones at the snarling Shepherd. When Sam saw what I was doing, she yelled, “No! Stop! Didn’t you hear her? It’s dinnertime!” I heard what she had said, but I wasn’t listening. Like a bad manager, I believed based on a few bits of light and sound I knew exactly what was going on. That’s why, I continued to sling projectiles at the dog while the All-Star Goat Team formed like Voltron and gave the Shepard a run for its money.

In their defense, the team formed a phalanx of goat muscle in the center of the garden plot. Snarling, the dog charged the Team and broke them up enough to push a lone goat out into the open. Then the dog shifted its weight and sprinted with a heart-dropping display of acceleration as it broke through my rock barrage, staying locked on, fully focused, skillfully putting its body between the lone goat and the rest of its Team.

Then—snarl, snap, and crack—the game was over. The victor sank its fangs into the goat’s neck, and the goat’s story reached its end, spilling its blood in the same soil that (only moments before) gave life to the weeds that now remained, almost digested, in its stomach.

When the dog had eaten its fill, Guide set her trekking poles down, knelt beside her partner, and praised it. “Good Boy!” she said, rubbing the dog behind its ears. “Looks like we’ll need a doggie bag for that one. Yeah we will! Good Boy, Fritzee. Oh alright, give me some love.”

When Guide was done praising her pet partner like it hadn’t viciously slaughtered a living thing, Guide faced our little impromptu theme.

“Hello Sam,” she greeted warmly. “Thanks for the meat.”

Guide then turned to my Girlfriend with blood on her hands from praising her psycho-killer partner. “Hello,” she said kindly. “You can call me Wilderness Security Guide. What do they call you?”

“I’m Maggie…the Garden Tender.”

“I know,” Wilderness Guide replied. “I’ve been watching both your channels. The Goat Coach and I set this scene up for your benefit to give our stories a proper introduction.”

Maggie stared at the dog, and asked, “What’s his name?”

“Maggie, meet Fritzee,” Guide introduced. “He’s my partner in the preservation of secure wilderness scenes. He’s my friend and cast member, and I trust him with my life unflinchingly.”

“Nice to meet you, Fritzee,” Maggie replied seriously.

What am I, chopped liver? I thought, as I coughed to get Maggie’s attention. Why doesn’t this lengthy dish introduce herself to me?

“Oh,” Maggie added, “and this is my Boyfriend, Wylie.”

I smiled and held my hand out. “Wylie Jones, Independently Wealthy Globetrotting Hipster Journalist at your service.”

Guide didn’t giggle, or gasp, or blush nervously. She studied my hand for half a beat before she finally shook it. Then she replied, “You’re a lucky creature to have a star like Maggie to play your Girlfriend.”

“Yes, I am,” I agreed, wrapping an arm around my Girlfriend. “I’m a lucky man. Very lucky indeed.”

Guide studied my plastic smile and Maggie’s nervous body language, and said, “Hum, that sounded nice.” She paused thoughtfully. “I’d like to stay longer, but I have to get this meat on ice…”

“Don’t go!” Maggie cried.

“Don’t worry,” Guide almost smiled. “I have a suspicion that we’re going to meet again, very soon.”

Guide put an arm around Maggie’s waist, guided her a few steps away from me, and whispered into her ear. When she was done—wormtounging my Girlfriend’s ear—Maggie looked Guide in her eyes, looking surprised, and then she dropped her gaze and nodded thoughtfully.

Looking back now, I feel stupid for not realizing that The Inevitable had happened. It was one of many moments where I watched aware, in living color, as my greatest fear, my darkest dream, became true.

Guide turned to Sam, who was sorting a stack of storybank account cards. She pulled one out with the title, WALKING MEAT INVESTMENT SCENES WITH SAM AND EARL. On it were the moments the Coach had spent caring for Earl: Domesticate Walking Meat and Founding Goat of her Goat Team, a friend she had known from her days playing Professor Chase on the mainland. The deposit on the card proved to Guide that Sam did some work, herding, coaching, and turning Earl into the best member of her All Star Team that he could be. After Sam deposited the card in Guide’s hand, Guide gutted the goat and cut it into manageable parts. Then she put a bag over her hand, picked up the meat, and pulled the bag over the meat like a pet owner picking up poop in a park. When Guide was done “doggie-bagging” Earl, she made her exit and faded into the city. It was only after Guide and Fritzee had left the scene that Traveler cast off Sam’s toughness and began to cry.

Samantha Chase was still crying when we left the scene.

Later that night, after we closed up shop and switched our channels to PRIVATE, Maggie used her inheritance of bed coverings from Gertel the Governing General to construct a blockade around the bed. I knew I’d done something wrong, but I didn’t know what exactly. Was the queenly curtain meant to keep me from looking in, or a wall of discipline meant to keep her from looking out? I didn’t know.

The next day Maggie woke before dawn, walked to her garden, took one look at the crop circles plowed by the Goat Team, and called Son the Tool Maker intent on buying a rototiller. Fortunately, Son had just put the finishing touches on Son’s Rebuilt Rototiller Caper, which featured a rototiller that Son had “borrowed” from a mainland landfill. The Tool Maker salvaged what had been junk, and rebuilt its engine to run on bio-fuels. Maggie wasn’t sure how Sam would react—especially since she felt that she owed Traveler some sort of role in her cast—but, once Maggie explained that she was going to pay for her new tool with a few rows of bio-fuel, Sam (more Traveler than Sam) agreed that Son’s good was better suited to making Maggie’s Garden Tender the best she could be. And that was the end of The Lean, Mean Tilling Machine.

Maggie’s future was in rototilling.

My Storybank Account – Scene Twenty Seven, 

THE PART WHERE WYLIE’S COVER CHARACTER GETS HIS BIG INTERVIEW WITH MR. CHESTER WESTON…

I’d learned a lot on my run. I’d learned that my observations were sighted in correctly: 1) The silver seaplane was Mr. Chester Weston’s vehicle for shipping in cash, bottled water, and plastified food from the mainland. 2) Chief Moyniham escorts the shipments from the Hidden Harbor up into the tree-like saucer of his Headquarters. 3) He does his job armed with a nightstick, sawed-off shotgun (slung over his shoulder), twin gold-plated pistols, tear gas grenades, body armor, and what looks to be throwing stars. 4) He wheels the shipments through the city on an All-Terrain Vehicle that he custom-fitted with side-mounted flame throwers, rocket launchers, and a box full of jacks which he can throw and pop the tires of his pursuers. 5) Bradley likes to sing along to his favorite 90s bands, Rage Against the Machine and White Zombie on his sound-blasting stereo system. 6) He moves the shipments into the elevator, which tells me that the Terror Cult Leader’s Super Massive Vault is somewhere, up (or down?) in his Headquarters. And 7) Miss Chase was right. It didn’t take spy training to see that Bradley needed to get out more. His chin was always tucked down, lower than his shoulders, and it snaps like crosshairs to every new, unknown thing that crosses his path. And it was That Guy who, four weeks after the end of Earl, knocked on our shop door and said, “The Boss is free today, at noon, if you still care to interview him for your big media thing.”

“If I still care? Hot damn!” I cheered.

Suddenly serious, I spent the remainder of the morning in intense preparation, jotting out an outline, and getting my lines down.

Noon sharp, I knocked on Weston’s office door.

“The door’s open,” Weston thundered.

“So it is,” I said, not breathing, as I walked into the office of career-making Terror Cult Leader Mr. Chester Weston. He was sitting like a picture in his high-backed chair wearing his classic banking suit. The screens around him were projecting generic news shows from around the world.

“Water?” Weston asked, lifting his bottle high—shaking it as I held my hand up ‘politely no’ as I sat in the chair on the other side of his desk. “How about a Coka cola?” he tempted again. “I bet you haven’t had a cola in a while. Or maybe you’d like some real potato chips? I’ve got them in ranch, barbecue, dill pickle, or sea salt and vinegar.”

The bastard was cunning. I hadn’t developed any credit with anyone in the city, and Maggie’s garden was “on” as they say in the biz. I was so sick of eating Maggie’s vegetables and the food she was buying on credit at Wall the Mart, I would have killed for a factory sealed bag of high-fructose corn syrup sprinkled with monosodium glutamate.

No, I thought, stay strong. He’s using the chips as bait.

“Sure,” I heard myself say. “I’ve been eating my vegetables like a good boy. I deserve a potato chip or two.”

“What flavor of chips do you want?”

“Hum, I think I’ll try the ranch, please.”

He chuckled as he handed me a bag of ranch-flavored chips from his snack pantry. “It seems that my Long Lost Daughter Maggie has decided to make veggie commodities the foundation of her personal, future empire here in my city. Is that true?”

“Yes—sir,” I said, showing the older man that I understood the importance of respecting my elders. “Maggie’s been busier than a bee getting her garden ready for the next chapter in her story.”

“And what precisely will that be?” Chester asked.

“She’s been growing the crops she’ll need to supply the menu she’s writing for Appetizers On Us. That’s the working title of her restaurant.”

“And,” Weston paused. “How do you feel about that?”

“Good,” I lied instinctively, feeling cornered. “I suppose.”   

“Good,” he chuckled, almost to himself. “Man’s got to show he’s supportive sometimes. No telling what a woman will do if you start stifling their natural, nest-building instincts… Good for you, Jones… I was older than you are now before I learned that. When it comes to women, you got to know when to hold them and know when to fold them. Know what I mean?”

“Yes—sir. I can play The Good Soldier when I have to.”

“Ha!” he roared. “Good one, Jones. Those wenches do have a way of doling out the orders, don’t they?”

“Yes—sir, those wenches sure do.”

“I can see you have a little of that old Carnegie spirit in you,” Weston said, relaxing his thunder a little. “I like that. It means we might be able to do business, you and I. Now, shall we get after whatever it was you said you’re after? What was it again? Some kind of media interview?”

“Yes,” I said, clearing my throat as I pulled out a notepad, pen, and my outline like a Journalist. “Let’s begin with my first question.”

“Questions?” Weston thundered. “I haven’t answered questions in an interview since nineteen seventy-one, when some farm girl from Iowa posing as an International Reporter asked why the World Bank did business with the communists during the Vietnam war. Her eyes were cloudy, hazel green like an ancient queen. I knew I should have pulled her press pass, and booted her out The Clubhouse, but I couldn’t stop. I answered all her questions honestly, with details. I told her that the World Bank had nothing to do with it. I told her that I, Chester Weston did business with the commies during the war, because I’m a Venture Capitalist. And any Venture Capitalist worth his salt never lets the idiot politicians and their ritual hero/war dramas influence their long-term economic decisions. I never saw her again, but I didn’t care. Telling her the truth that day was worth every second of access I had to those eyes of hers. My point is, Mr. Journalist Jones, you don’t have heart-stopping hazel green eyes, so let’s not start my interview with any of your questions.”      

“Oh,” I said, suddenly realizing that journalism might not be as easy as I first thought. “How do you suggest we go about this interview?”

“I’ve prepared a statement, of course,” Chester replied. “When I’m done dictating it to you, then you may presume that any questions you have will have been answered by my statement. I understand; questions are good for the show. They’re great for getting the main idea across to an audience of idiots with short attention spans.” Weston stopped to study me, likely reading me for signs of insolence. Then he asked, “Are you with me here, Jones? Because I’m beginning to wonder why I just wasted my time explaining that all to you. As a professional journalist, you should know the rules of The Great Game. There’s no reason why I should feel the need to coddle you to the tit of live action/real world journalism like some got-damned rookie.”   

“I’m with you here, sir,” I said, sliding my outline under my seat. “I knew all that. I was just, you know…”

“Trying to pull a fast one on me? Huh Jones?” Chester roared with laughter. “I know your kind. I’d do the same thing in your shoes. Now what do you say we get this show on the road?”

“Fire away,” I said, and propped up my notebook.

“Over the years,” he began, “there has been one question that my friends and business associates always ask: What’s the secret to my success? What is it that I’ve done right, and they’ve failed to do?

“When they ask that I used to laugh, put my hand firmly on their shoulder, and seriously, very seriously, say: ‘If you want to be rich like me, then you have to have the biggest balls of them all. You have to be willing to risk it all, and risk it on command. You can do it too. All you need to do is go when I say it’s time to go, and we, you and I, my friend, will sit back, fat and happy, and watch the money roll in like Margarita Sunrise, beachside, with a team of sexy lady interns who’ve been trained by the best schools in the land to meet all our performance expectations. I can’t count the times I used that line. It worked like magic on the mid-classer dreamers: dentist types, landlords, small business owners, insurance agents, and contractors. You know the type, the people who wear plaid, the average of The Average Middle Class, the hopeful losers who can buy a house, put their kids through college, invest in stocks, and enjoy the hard won pleasure of living The Good Life once, maybe two times a year.

“I didn’t become rich, because I had a magic key to the kingdom. I got rich, because I didn’t waste my capital and blow my nut on lesser dreams like becoming a fireman, or physicist, or the owner of the local jokel canned food emporium. I’m rich because I made the single best financial decision possible at the youngest possible age. I’m rich because I invested in the best economic role money can buy, and became a Venture Capitalist. The best teacher on earth will never afford the opportunity to spend his twilight years traveling with his wife and family—sampling the best of local cuisine, drinking the best local wines, and experiencing all the historical people, places of culture, and things he spent his life teaching to children. On the contrary, the best capitalist can afford to buy anything he wants. The best capitalists spend their twilight years going anywhere they please. Why? Because our work is naturally/fundamentally more valuable than any other kind of work. Rationalize it any way you like. That they say is that. Life isn’t fair. And the numbers never lie…

“Nothing feels better than life in The Winner’s Circle. It’s like surfing. I catch a big wave, then a bigger one, and a bigger one still—until I catch The One that spits me higher than a goddamned tsunami. And that’s when the magic happens. I slick my hair back and see that I’m alone, blissfully alone, riding The Cutting Edge of Creation. It’s a strange and wonderful feeling to know that I, and I alone, am no longer subject to The Booms and Busts of The Ocean, because I know all I have to do to harness its power is sprinkle dollars into it like pixie dust, and watch the waves move below my feet.

“That’s what it’s all about, Jones. There’s no secret to becoming rich as Rockefeller, Morgan, and Ford—other than being Rockefeller, Morgan, and Ford. Great Men are great because we scoop our balls off the floor, invest our pot, and catch The One when our times come. That’s it. The rules of The Great Game for global dominion dictate that there has to be many millions of losers for every one, two, or maybe three billion-dollar-jackpot-winning capitalists on earth. And the only thing that trickles down to the Loser Millions is The Score Board—the cold, hard numbers that read SUCK IT UP, NOBODY SAID LIFE WAS FAIR. That’s the no-rules rules of The Great Game, and the loser millions don’t get to wish The Game away when the bust comes and they grow weary of losing. The Free Market will march on whether they like it or not. Life isn’t like Friday poker night. The Game doesn’t give you the option of leaving the table when The Game gets mean. You’re bought in at birth. You have to play. You have to seat belt yourself to the table, do your job, and learn to like losing more than you win, until you lose your last dime playing Bingo, drooling on your game card, in your overpriced old folks’ home.

“The best you people can hope for is cheap pharmaceuticals, quality home entertainment, mint chocolate chip ice cream, anything you Average Joes can scrape together to wipe your mind clean and free it from The Numbers that Never Lie…because you know, like I know, deep down, you people would sell your mother’s last pearl to be, or be with, a Winner. Journalism in America is a perfect example of that principle. That’s why you’re here today.”

Mr. Chester Weston grew quiet with contemplation.

“There was a time when I wouldn’t give you people the business. I was afraid that if I told you the truth, told you that you were not winning, or even in the running for anything like winning—then it would suck the magic from my sells spells. I thought I needed you people. I thought I needed you to be marketable, predictable suckers—losers who could be counted on to live your lives following The Same Old Story the winners write for you on the many stages, screens, podiums, and service counters of The Fourth Wall. I was afraid of leveling with you,” Chester continued as he cracked another water bottle. “But that was a long time ago, before I discovered proof positive that (give or take a few points) it didn’t matter what I did. Trust me, I tried it all. I welcomed the most lovable of you people into The Winner’s Circle. I simulated grandeur for them. Pools, models, drugs, sex, and rock stars, fancy cheeses on fancy crackers, but none of that worked on them. No matter how many times I showed them, they still never developed a real taste for winning big. Then I blamed myself. A doctor friend explained that I was suffering from a psychological disorder that’s too rare to be profitably listed in their diagnostic manual. He called it ‘winner’s guilt.’ He said I needed to be more philanthropic, pass out awards, kiss the babies, pity you, and stroke your hair at night. I tried it, but it was more of the same. You people didn’t recover from your chronic losing disorder, any more than I was cured of my addiction to winning big. After all that, the lesson I learned was it doesn’t matter what I do. I don’t need you people to win.

Weston paused for another splash of his imported water.

“Now before you think I’m monster, I’m not saying we Winners are as far apart as men from monkeys—or women—or as far apart as honest working losers from welfare recipients, or slaves from employables, but it’s something a lot like that. You and I are not The Same. Whatever natural link once made it possible for you to compete in the same gene pool with Winners has vanished. The demand for real Winners is now higher than it was during The Holy Roman Empire, even higher than in our Great Industrial Revolution. The Loser Millions will always demand Winners. The Law of Supply and Demand dictates that I will always have a supply of losers willing to follow my policies—employees who will keep coming to work, day in and day out, because I am the end and the beginning of their stories, always a step or ten ahead of the rest. Winning is The Law of Nature, and I am its humble servant.”

That seemed like a plausible ending to his prepared statement, so I put my notebook down, and switched to eating factory-processed chips.

“So, is that it?” I asked with chips in my mouth.

“No Jones,” he replied. “That’s not ‘it’ at all.”

“What do I do next?” I asked, doing my best to meet his expectations for a proper Wealthy, Globetrotting Hipster Journalist.

Weston grinned. “Now you ask me about my big plan to become the Greatest Venture Capitalist in History.”

“Whoa, that is news!” I exclaimed, hyping my excitement. “How do you plan to become the Greatest Venture Capitalist in History?”

“Glad you asked,” Weston grinned again. “I am the only Great Man in history who’s figured out a way to take it all, the whole glowing pot: every coin, every dollar, every black-and-white phantasmal pulse of electronic cash in the bank accounts of every man, woman, and child on the planet. And I’m making that happen now, as we speak, with my investments in Westonton. Here, in this small empire, I have the power to take it all.”

Munch, munch, I decided to ask a real question. “Why in hell would you, in your position, ever tell a loser like me your big plan?”

Asking that felt good; I felt like I was at the part where the hero feigns weakness in order to bait the villain into unfolding their evil plan.

“I had to consult with my Personal Assistant, Miss Chase, to decide if I should let you in, Jones,” Weston thundered on. “After a long, conflicted conversation, which began soon after you swindlers arrived, I decided it was a good deal. You get the scoop of a lifetime, and I won’t have to warm my big balls in bed, alone, any longer. Besides, like I said, it doesn’t matter what I tell you people. You don’t know how to win without me.”

I dumped the crumbs in my mouth, and said, “We, sir.”

“We, sir, what?” Weston said, as he stood, walked to his pantry, and fetched another bag of potato chips.

“We won’t be warming our big balls in bed alone.”

“Yes, maybe you too,” he sort of chuckled. “I doubt it.”

Weston paced thoughtfully around the room like a general walking his ranks. When he seemed to reach some sort of conclusion, he thundered on about his big plan. “Throughout time, many fine capitalists have tried and failed to solve our greatest investment problem, The Great Growth Barrier that has kept any one of us from amassing a fortune that exceeds that of the fortunes amassed by the other Winners of planet earth…

“What is this mysterious growth barrier, you ask? I like to think of it in medieval terms. I’m a king. I’ve won many wars. I’ve worked hard for my fortune. One day, a gang of mad half-starved peasants storms my castle looking to feast on my riches. One, do I pour hot tar on them and pray for them to go away? Or two, do I let the vermin through the gate and watch as their little bellies explode in a concerto of epic mismanagement? One, right? Pour hot tar on them for their own good. The problem is that the more my riches grow, the madder the vermin become. As a consequence, the half-starved peasants storm the castle more often, forcing me to invest more of my fortune in tar, kettles, and tar pourers, who all need food, housing, and medals of bravery, all that claptrap, to improve their morale when they get down about their work, pouring hot tar on humans. Long story short, it’s very expensive to manage the appetites of The People. In The End the king’s kingdom isn’t toppled by a gang of mad peasants from The Pastoral Countryside or an army of mad peasants from Over the Hill, it’s topped by money. In The End, the security bill for tar and tar pourer amounts to more than the king can pay.”

“Does this fairytale have a moral?” I asked wearily.

Weston shot a look my way—then continued, “The obvious answer to the king’s problem is, the riches. Yes, the riches. The king wouldn’t have to spend his fortune defending his riches, in castles and such, if the mad, half-starved peasants had no desire to feed on his riches. Thus, therefore, hence the solution is: I mint a new form of currency that’s plunder proof. That may sound too good to be true, but any of my Storysold employees here will tell you it’s laughable to imagine a run on The Storysold Exchange. It can’t be done for one, base elemental reason. You can’t take what you can’t touch.”

I finally broke down and asked for a cola. After a few, deep chugs of the familiar fizzy flavor, I asked, “I can’t touch my digit-o-dollars, but that doesn’t make my account plunder proof.”

Weston lowered his eyes and cocked his head like a fighter preparing to throw his knock out punch. “The blips and bleeps in your online accounts can’t be touched, but they can still be exchanged for something that can. The trick to minting my new plunder proof currency is encrypting it, and I don’t mean encrypting the ‘crypto vault’ or some magical mystery place where my money is hoarded away. That’s a tired old scam designed to bolster consumer confidence. I’m talking about encrypting the money, the thing itself. In other words, the army of mad, half-starved peasants will not attack the king’s treasure chamber if they know that all of the king’s ‘coins’ have been minted with an encrypted signature, making it impossible for anyone to spend, but the king himself.” At that point, Weston paused to laugh and enjoy the genius of his diabolical plan. “I know; it’s funny. Hasn’t every king in history tried to stamp their face on their money to remind their subjects who owns it? No doubt, I’m only one in very long line! The difference now is, here, everyone—including The King—has their faces stamped on their money.”

In that moment, I felt stoned; like Weston might have said something worth knowing, but I was too stoned to get it. I wasn’t about to ask him to clarify, so I stuck to my guns. “That’s your big plan?” I laughed a little. “You’re going to make everyone kings?”

“Maybe not everyone,” he shot back. “Doesn’t becoming a Storysold Westontonian make you feel more like the king of your castle?”

“No,” I answered honestly. “Not exactly.”

“OK then, don’t ask stupid questions.”

“OK sorry,” my Eager Beaver replied instinctively.

“Listen up Young Buck,” he grinned again. “I can talk at you all day about why Storysold in living color is the next big revolution in the way we do business. The difference between an employee and a storybanker is as vast as that between ancient slaves and modern day employees. Storybankers create a strikingly better workforce in contrast to any labor role ever created by the former Winners of history. Storybankers make the same investments that most employees do. They house themselves, feed themselves, and put clothes on their own backs. They pay for transportation to and from work, and they pay the recuperative costs of trying to make sense of it all after work: TV, sports, pets, junk food, drugs, clubs, yoga, church, you name it.”

Someone should make a rule limiting the length of excruciatingly long monologues, I thought while I imagined him in handcuffs. No one should ever talk longer than three lines at a time…

“I hate to brag,” Weston continued, “but, not only do storybankers make the same investments employees do, they own their storybank accounts too. Which means, if the workforces of the world were run on Storysold labor, business winners like me wouldn’t have to invest in endless levels of managers, middle managers, and executives to make sure (and doubly sure) that the poor workers in their charge did what they were told. Storybankers self-manage, run their own work scenes, and do better work, because they go to work feeling that same feeling of freedom that employees only feel on their weekends. My new city has already proven it. Storybankers make better workers. What could be more attractive than a new banking product that gives the employees of the world that most precious of powers…the power to own and operate their own stories, and make all their funny little dreams come true?”

Munch, munch, I could sense that the villain was becoming more vulnerable with every line. “What about your little dream?” I asked, daring to ride The Edge of Mr. Chester Weston. “How, exactly, do you plan to fill your Super Massive Vault with ‘the whole glowing pot’ of cash?”

Weston answered right away. “Starving to death is what amounts to a crash in anyone’s storybank account here. What good would a barrel full of pressed and dyed papers do you if you were starving? If you’re starving—if you never learned to grow wheat, bake bread, or produce something of value for someone who grows wheat and bakes bread—then it’s your own damned fault. That’s that. What good would it do to bailout my bankrupt Westontonian employees with cash? That does nothing to help the fact that somewhere along the way they failed to produce a story that plotted out the most basic of human necessities: food, shelter, and fresh water. Cash isn’t magic. Cash can sprout a golden food-producing beanstalk for you to eat for a while, but that magic will  not sustain anyone in The End. It will go poof! like the fairytale it is.”

“So,” I said, knowing well that he’d fed me a line. “How does that explain why you want a cash commodity that will hold no value, according to you, if The Storysold Exchange goes live around the world?”

“I’ve met a lot of terrible Journalist in my time, but you Wylie Jones are the A#1 worst journalist I’ve ever entertained,” Weston said, like he was stalling, waiting for his next genius line to come to him. “I’ll do you the favor of spelling it out for you. M-O-N-E-Y is M-O-N-E-Y, so long as someone somewhere still believes its real. In this new world of mine, after I hire a new employee and they—unlike you two swindlers—deposit their life savings in my vault in exchange for a storybank account, I all but own their old market cash free and clear. Voila. Magic. End of deal. I built a city in the ocean and turned a profit within a year of its grand opening. No other Great Capitalist in history has done that. You see, it’s all profit—my profit—as long as my happy, fully satisfied peasants don’t have a sudden, strong desire to return to their old lives as employables on the mainland, or storm my treasure chamber. And that won’t happen. I can’t imagine any of my employees choosing to rewind storytime and return to the past where humans still bank in black and white on ATM screens. Not now that they’ve seen the faces of earth’s true kings.”

“You’re forgetting one thing,” I pondered, thoughtfully, as I helped myself to more snacks. “What are you going to do about the ‘idiot politicians’ who have nothing to lose by sinking this city of yours like Atlantis?”

“Yes,” Weston replied. “That’s an issue, to say the least.”

For a moment there, I saw the indomitable consumer confidence fade from his face. But it didn’t last. Weston’s winning smile returned stronger than before—eyes shining like diamonds—ready with a reply, “Westonton has no defense. No army. No bombs. No global nuclear threats to make bombs in our defense. All I have, in my defense, is the truth. My storybankers, who you will undoubtedly soon know well, would rather make photographic life savings for themselves, then sit around spinning their monetary moments in slotted drums before they returned to The Old Market. The old system is an old story that will reach its end soon enough. Have no doubt about it…the future of banking will be in color. You people are tired of buying factory-processed crap.”

“So, what you’re saying is,” I said, almost in awe. “You have nothing but a good story, standing between you and the Almighty?”

“No,” Weston replied. “I also have a Super Massive Vault.”

“For the ‘idiot politicians’ to plunder?”

“Not exactly,” he grinned, and said no more.      

When I’d waited long enough to be sure he was done, I tapped my pen a few times on my notebook, and said, “Uh, I was wondering if I could ask a question, on the record, to make it clear to my readers…sum up…what it was you said, exactly, during our interview?”

“Shoot,” Weston said and lifted his water bottle to his mouth.

“Well,” I said, trying to pick the most appropriate words. “I’d like to know. Uh, well…” Squirm, squirm cough. “I want to know whether or not you are plotting to corrupt and overthrow every nation on earth, and then declare yourself the Dictator of your New World Order?”

Weston paced about for a moment (swilling water), then asked, “Do you mean a lower case-d dictator, or a Dictator with a capital-D?”

“Yes, a capital-D Dictator,” I replied. “As in, a man, like yourself, with enough spending-power to hire every human on our planet to play their parts in his master plan for total world domination.”   

“Well, of course!” Weston thundered. “Have you been listening to anything I’ve said? Like Ford before he rolled the first Model-T off his new line, I know there’s a world of demand for my superior Storysold products out there, and I don’t have any wishy-washy sentiments about using it to take all the plunder I can. Would anyone in my position?”

That was it. Weston said it, and I heard him say it. That was enough evidence for me. Mr. Chester Weston the Terror Banking Cult Leader said that he was plotting to inject his ‘viral currency’ into the mainstream of every nation on earth. There was no other explanation. Period. The End. The jury was in. He was a madman plotting to take over the world.

Finally! I thought. I’m dealing with hardcore Real American Hero stuff. Weston had to be stopped, and I was just the man to do it.

My Storybank Account – Scene Twenty Eight, 

THE PART WHERE THE GARDEN TENDER LIGHTS UP HER COWORKER AND FINDS SOMEONE THERE…

After My Big Interview, I thought I’d smile. I smiled when I passed by Security Chief Moyniham. “Hi Brad!” I smiled. “I must say, I love your choice in weaponry!” I smiled when I passed by the storybankers on the throughways on my walk from Westonton Headquarters through the Wild Garden Arena and Center Stage. “Hi children!” I smiled as I turned onto the throughway to Island Market Seven. “Beware I passed a bear a few beats back, but no worries kids! He was busy eating wild blueberries! Now isn’t that cool?” I smiled when I walked on smiling, harmonizing with the flow of The Action traveling across the Island Market’s Garden Surface, over an arched cobblestone bridge leading to the Common Area under our Residential Shopping Center’s Weather Bubble and Freshwater Reservoir, and I smiled when I stopped walking to wait with my neighbors at an Elevator Tube. “Hi neighbor!” I smiled at the man dressed like a giant multi-colored worm. “Love your onesie! Who needs pants anyway, huh?” And I continued to smile as I rode the Tube down and walked on, being chatty and polite to storybankers young and old, as I walked through the dim lit hallway to the door of our shop, where I turned my smile upside down.

Inside, Patricia was showing Maggie her new bike and wagon.

“Maggie,” I said dramatically. “We have to talk.”   

Maggie’s Wonder Bike was a rebuilt and rusted old road bike with a red banana seat, blue fenders, sparkly tassels, and a rubber-wheeled covered wagon that came complete with metal hoops, a canvas covering, and a side-mounted barrel that the Inventor made for Maggie’s gardening tools.

“About what?” she asked as she threw her leg over the bike. “I’m about to make my first payment to Patricia.”

“I have something important we need to talk about.”

“More important than dinner and a movie?” Maggie asked as she peddled the bike and wagon around the kitchen.

“Yes a lot more important than dinner and a movie.”

“What could possibly be more important than watching the Wonder Bike Inventor’s first ever bike-production scene?”

“Does everything have to be difficult with you?”

“Are you about to introduce more conflict into your stories?” Patricia asked curiously. “If you are, we can do our dinner-and-movie scene tomorrow. I’m sea-harvesting with the Great White Tuna Hunter and his Water Monster friends in the morning anyway, and I could use the sleep.”

“Maybe that’s best,” I said as I unplugged the TV and moved it to an open space on the bar. “We need to have a conversation.”

“No,” Maggie said, looking me square in the eye. “Patricia is a good friend and a valued member of my cast. Anything you’ve got to say to me, you can say to her too. I don’t want to be accountable for the damages done to Patricia’s story, and mine, if I start keeping secrets from her.”

Our conflict rolled downhill from there.

“Um,” Patricia interjected after a few beats of conflict. “I appreciate what you just said, Maggie. I don’t want any secrets between us either, but I’m going now. I’ll call you in the morning…after my scene with Juan.”

As she left, I said, “Thanks Patricia. I would ask you to stay too, but I’m not used to talking about family planning issues in public.”

Patricia gave me a hard look, a mix of distrust and confusion. When she left us to develop our conflict alone, I locked the door behind her, walked over to the control panel of switches near the curtain, and flipped the switches labeled WYLIE and MAGGIE from PUBLIC to PRIVATE. “What were you thinking?” I turned to my government-issued Girlfriend in a rage. “What did you mean, ‘I don’t want to be accountable for the damages done by secrets?’ Everything you say to that girl is a lie.”

“What were you thinking when you told her that you weren’t used to talking about ‘family planning issues’ in public?” she fired back. “Does the FBI expect me to prattle on like I’m your trophy breeder too?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head as I turned ON the TV to make doubly sure our channels were blocked and fuzzy. “I don’t expect you to prattle on like baby makers. But, it wouldn’t hurt to spend a few minutes talking about ‘family planning issues.’ I mean, I have no idea how we ‘do it’ in a city that has no factories. Are we doing it with condoms made from organic lamb intestines like good hippies, or what? I mean, how does spin our latex condoms from hand? Come on, Maggie. We need to talk about details like this.”

“Why?” Maggie folded her arms.

“To maintain our cover story, of course.”

“Ha!” Maggie laughed. “Nobody here believes that your sperm and my eggs have ever been close enough to meet.”

“Is it so hard to imagine that we might actually have feelings for each other?” I asked defensively.

“You have feelings?” Maggie laughed. “Imagine that.”

Maggie was barefoot, still straddling her new bike wearing her usual work costume: dirty T-shirt and jeans. Her hair, which hadn’t been cut since before we left, was pulled back in braids. Her face was smeared with sweat and earth. When she looked at me (eyes full of wrath) I believed she could see my heart and soul, seeing through my every device.    

After a long, deep breath I said, “I do, have feelings.”

A calm wave washed over Maggie’s face. “I know you,” she said as she bit her lower lip, “have feelings too.”

“I just want you to do your job.” I replied. “Why is that so hard?”

“I don’t think that’s it. I think you want something more…”

“There’s nothing more,” I said like a confidence projecting robot. “All I want is for you to do your job and do it right.”

She laughed and pierced me with the wonder in her bright beautiful eyes. “You’re a terrible liar for someone in your line of work.”   

I took another deep breath, sighed, and said, “So.”

Maggie parked her bike and wagon beside the door. Then she walked back towards me. “So, I know everything you do is a show,” she said as she unbuttoned her pants, slowly, one button at a time. “Deep down, we want the same thing. This stupid mission has left us feeling alone…cut off from the love of overs…with no connections. I’m in denial, and you’re in love with playing hero like all the other self-righteous assholes I’ve known.” I stood at the edge of The Super Real and stared blankly like I was watching a movie, waiting to see what my Cover Girlfriend was going to do, or say next…

“What do you say we drop The Act for a moment and get to know each other, for real,” she said as she peeled her shirt off. “I’m tired of sneaking under my covers to masturbate like I was thirteen.”

Maggie walked over to the shower in the windowless bathroom made of river rocks, finished undressing, and turned the water on.

I wanted to be the Good Spy. I wanted to make the Man in Charge proud like my Father before him. I wanted to save the American people from Weston’s Terror Cult and become a Real American Hero.

But the problem was, I wanted Maggie too.

Maggie stepped into the shower, and I turned away—facing the scene on the other side of our shop’s bubble-shaped window instead. I stood frozen in the moment, watching the steam from her shower rise from the vent outside our shop and join the clouds moving like a slow, swollen river up, through the Residential Center’s Hollow Core.

I knew what I had to do. Every God-fearing Agent knew where the line was: It was OK to rail, nail, poke, bend over, stick, do, or fuck an Asset in the name of The Mission like a plunder-happy soldier, but it was not OK to “get involved.” Real Agents couldn’t love their Assets any more than we could love our enemies. I stood—staring into the Hollow Core long enough to rationalize my feelings. I figured, deep down it was a mechanical problem. Maggie wasn’t attempting to destroy The Mission. She was simply reporting a problem to her immediate supervisor. My Asset was tired of sneaking off to “masturbate like she was thirteen.” The diagnosis was in, and I had a doctor’s confidence in my Eager Beaver’s ability to be whatever Maggie needed to be happy. With that in mind, I faced the shower like a clinician preparing for his next exam. Meeting Maggie’s basic human need for sex was now The Mission.

We made eye contact instantly. She’d been watching me too.

She turned off the water, toweled off, and walked onto the stage side of our shop like the Lady of the Lake. I saw: Her arms, neck, and face were scorched from the equatorial sun. Her body was thick, rippling with muscle and fat. Her breasts grew cute little wild hairs around her nipples. I saw her naked signature for the first time, and I wanted her now more than ever.

Without a word, she walked to the panel of switches near the silver curtain. I tried to read The Scene right. I wanted to fix The Problem and be a good Eager Beaver for Maggie and the FBI. I wanted to do what heroes do, and do it now, so I reached in my social skills toolkit and chose the line I thought would fix our broken engine: “We can fuck if you want to?” I offered.   

“We can fuck if you want to?”

I could hear Maggie tasting my words in her mouth. Judging by her expression, they tasted like non-liquid dairy creamer.

“Yeah,” I coaxed. “It might be good for The Mission.”

Maggie stared at me like she was still trying to swallow the milk that didn’t come from cows. Then she put her finger on the switches that controlled our channels and raised her eyebrow like a question. “Fuck that,” she said. “I want to do it for real. Let’s do it now…with The Lights on.”

“No!” I said, staring up at the A-eyes in our shop, reeling in horror at the idea of making love, fucking, or being naked with Maggie with our channels switched to PUBLIC. “Listen Maggie,” I pled, as I walked towards Maggie and the switches. “When the President learns about Chester’s big plan for world domination, he will have to do something about it, soon! When that happens, you need to be on The Right Side of this mission. Do you understand what I’m telling you? I, uh, have feelings for you…but…”

“But, what…?” She said, finger on the switches.

“I won’t be able to help, uh, keep you safe if you don’t…”

“If I don’t fuck you like the breeders do in your spy movies?”

“No,” I protested, as I inched closer. “Wake up, Maggie. This is your reality check. If you go rogue, you could be charged with treason!”

Maggie stood strong and naked. The expression on her face was the same look I’d seen her make many times before, and it made me feel like I was the one standing naked before her. “Don’t do it,” I pled again like a guilty man facing the gallows. “I’m not ready to do this now…”

“Come on, 007. Do your job. Let’s play Spy.”

“I…I would, but,” I replied. “I think I’m in love with you.”

“Fuck that,” she grinned, with stars in her eyes, as she threatened to flip the switches and lite up our channels.

“Please Maggie,” I pleaded. “I’m not ready.”

“I am,” she said as she tucked her fingers behind my belt and pulled me to her. The moment I saw she had moved away from the switches without flipping our channels to PUBLIC, I kissed her.

“I love you,” I crooned.

“Of course you do,” she said as she threw me on the bed.

“This is the last time we do this without The Lights On,” Maggie stood firmly. “Do you understand me, Roger Ramjet?”

“Absolutely,” I nodded and fell into her world like a dream.

Naked in bed The Mission—the Man in Charge of Me in Washington, and the Terror Banking Cult, and Weston’s Super Massive Vault—all the parts of my story I thought were so important faded away. Not knowing The Things that made me, Me was a strangely familiar feeling. The Lights of our channels were still off, but so was the little TV in my brain. We kissed. We touched. We explored the landscapes of our bodies like colonists on vacation at a corporate party after one too many drinks. No matter, it was satisfying to finally, for once, work together like a team to bring The Action of our stories to climax.

“Wow,” I said when our work was done. “Was that so hard?”

Maggie climbed my body like a mountain, smiled with light in her eyes, and said, “Yes that was harder than I expected.”

“You mean I was harder than you expected?”

“No idiot,” Maggie grinned, “I mean doing the scene.”

Looking up at her, I felt like the milkshake we were supposed to slurp As One. “Are we real American Boyfriends and Girlfriends now?”

Maggie only laughed and read my body.

“Just asking,” I asked. “What happens now?”

“Now that you fucked me for real like a super hero?”

“No, that’s not what I mean. I’m supposed to fuck you. I mean, what happens now that I said I love you?”

“Dunno,” Maggie shrugged as she dismounted, put her costume back on, and turned her channel on. “I suppose I should say, ‘Good job.’”

“No, you ‘Good job,’” I smiled for the camera. “That was all you.”

“No,” she sighed. “I mean ‘Good job,’ you weren’t playing an annoying man child for a moment there. Thanks for the break.”

“Happy to be of service,” I said, still smiling—trying to be funny. “Do you have time to write me a short review?”

“I’m going to leave you a tip instead.”

“Oh yeah?” I asked hopefully.

“Yeah, my tip will be not writing you a review.”

To this day, I don’t know how she did it. We did our first love scene that day, but I didn’t feel like James Bond when we reached The End. I felt ready to follow her into the villain’s lair without my shirt on.

My Storybank Account – Scene Twenty Nine, 

THE PART WHERE SOMETHING NEW HAPPENS THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN TO SERVE THE MISSION…

I have a book filled with names of Girlfriends. I knew the storyline all too well: Part 1 – Love at First Sight – we fall in love at first sight at a bar, house party, grocery store, church, or online. Part 2 – My House or Yours? – we eat dinner, have a few drinks, and make passionate love. Part 3 – The Afterglow – we enjoy a romantic montage where birds sing on our shoulders. Part 4 – Johnny Marches off to War – then our love story ends in conflict (or cold silence) when the needs of The Mission sound our return to daily life like Morlocks calling the Eloi into their underground lairs. That’s The Same Old Story I knew. The movies are good at only showing the parts where we don’t have to go to work.

I’d always been too much of an Eager Beaver for The Afterglow to last longer than a day, or two, or a week at most. No joke. The longest Boyfriend/Girlfriend relationship I had to date, in my young life, was eight days. I knew it wasn’t normal. I saw the couples my age with babies. I suppose I always felt closer to The Something Grander, than any of my Girlfriends. Raising children is noble, but I felt The Something Grander had a grander role for me to play in Our American History. And The Something Grander was clear about the number of days in my workweek. It was seven days a week, not eight.

I was aware of that fact. So much so, I scratched a mark in the soft wood of our bed like a prisoner, or a junkie (or a prison junkie) for every day I indulged my irresponsible behavior. One mark for every day I basked in the warm and wondrous feelings of loving Maggie in The Afterglow.      

We hadn’t produced a love scene with The Lights on, but our fledgling casts and neighbors were buzzing about the change in our stories. Apparently they didn’t need to watch us kiss (or make babies) to read the moments of love we were writing and pasting into our daily scenes here and there. “Who would have guessed?” Rachna commented when she read our signatures in the hallway the morning after. “You crazy birds are in love.”

Trouble was, I wasn’t used to all that attention. Neighbors I didn’t know existed now acknowledged us when we passed by. They’d smile, or make the effort chat. I even learned that, behind our backs, they called us The Odd Couple, because those who knew us, or watched our channels, rarely read the part in our stories where Our Love was in production.

It felt good to do something right for once. We worked in the Happy Garden. We cooked in Solji’s kitchen. I ate my vegetables without faking liking them. In the evenings, we cuddled and watched our Storysold: TV eating farm fresh popcorn. Patricia was our favorite channel. We enjoyed watching our young friend’s budding love theme with Juan. We laughed like Boyfriends and Girlfriends are supposed to laugh when Patricia tried to deep ocean fish with Juan and the Water Monster theme, and we cheered when Patricia presented the Great White Tuna Hunter with his new tuna-delivery tricycle, which came complete with a sidecar for his favorite Wonder Bike Inventor.

Every night, for seven nights, I read Maggie the Garden Tender’s story like I was in bed, wrapped in blankets, with a good book and a glass of wine. America, The Mission, and the Man in Charge of Me were there, but they were thousands of miles away. I marked our bed nineteen times before I forgot to mark our days of The Afterglow. Only now, I wish I’d been more aware.

The day it ended was normal. We’d closed up shop early to invest a few extra moments in the Happy Garden. When our thistle-pulling scenes were done, we drank a few glass of Assah at the picnic area and watched the sun set on the Garden Surface. Maggie stretched in the high grasses around the Happy Gardner’s Gravesight. I rested my head on her shoulder, and felt the warmth of the fading sun, as she ran her fingers through my hair.

“I used to hate my work,” Maggie began, as I listened, open with no performance expectations in mind. “It was a four-letter word before you and I came to be, here, in this city. The work I do here is, different. I feel like it’s mine for the making, My Life by me, for all of us. Here, I have the power to cast the people I want to share my life with. Isn’t that amazing? I don’t know about you, but I like waking up to what I wake up to, each morning. I love riding my new bike and wagon to work, where I greet my babies, water them, know them, weed for them, and help them grow happy as they can…before the harvest comes and they become our soup, salad, and bread. I used to feel bad at harvest time. Now I feel hungry and happy. I think the plants, all my babies, understand my story better than I do…

“I think they need a gardener to tend their signatures. They need me to seed the spirit of arugula, seed the soul of kale, seed the mind of peas, and the cue The Action of potatoes. I don’t think you’d understand, but I like peas more than I like most people. Peas twist and turn with brilliance. From seed to pea they do no wrong. I love peas. That’s why I decided, with my cast, that I’m going to make split pea soup—Maggie’s Signature Split Pea Soup—and serve it to friends in my future restaurant, Appetizers On Us. It’s coming soon to a shop near you!” Maggie laughed a little, as I closed my eyes.

The sun was almost gone. There was a chill in the air, and the Assah swimming through my veins was no longer strong enough.

“Right now, I’m harvesting a couple times a week,” she continued as I imagined her words. “But, once my restaurant opens, I will wake earlier before the dawn to have more time to harvest my ingredients. You wouldn’t know this, but you should always harvest greens in the cool of the morning anyway, because if you don’t—their leaves with fill with a milky sap and they will become bitter. Rachna says I can use the bitter stuff from dandelions to make liver-healing beer. Imagine that, drinking beer made from dandelions? Even if it’s more mental than medicinal, I think it’s cool that our neighbor found a use for dandelions. My plot is full of them…

“I’m not serious about going into the medicinal brewing scene with her, though. I have too much to do to make my dream of Appetizers On Us a reality. Right now, my menu includes: garden salad scenes, vegetable platter scenes, split-pea soup scenes, kimchi production scenes, and my Scrumptious Cheese Bread production scenes. Never in my wildest dreams did I believe that I, Maggie, Quickie Mart Clerk, could milk goats and make cheese. I was raised in the city. I’m no farm girl, but Sam the Goat Coach showed me how to make mozzarella in less time than it takes to laugh along with a sitcom. Eventually, I want to learn to make rice wine, keep my word, and produce Solji’s Signature Assah. That’s a must! Once Appetizers On Us is up and running, maybe I’ll cast someone in the role of Beer Maker, or maybe I’ll persuade Philoh the Junker to sell me her signature apple cider, Nearly Rotten Delight. I like she a lot. Like her junk, she loves people for who they are and what they can become…

“Anyway, my theme will be a fabulous, pre-dinner eatery where my cast can go to have a fun date with someone special (anyone really!) and enjoy some appetizers—soup, salad, bread, and drinks—while they watch my work scenes on the silver curtain’s big screen, watching their food go from garden to plate on the same day! I imagine they will move on, to some other restaurant shop and some other storybanker for their main course, but who knows? Maybe they’ll stay, tank up on bread and Assah, and keep me company. I can’t wait to see their faces, and their smiles, as they enjoy the appetizer scenes I produce for them! They don’t have to watch the big screen if they don’t want to, but I’ll make sure they leave with their monetary moments, the rich scenes that prove I, Garden Tender, Fabulous Food Producer, and Restaurant Owner did my part to make our cast the best in the city! I can’t wait to show off all my new characters! Grand Opening Night for Maggie’s Appetizers On Us is set to premiere soon. I can’t wait! It’s going to be grand—super rad!

“Once my cast is hooked, my scenes will become routine: Mornings in my garden, afternoons producing rad food, and evenings spent serving and chatting with my cast. Then I’ll close up. I’ll clean, wash the dishes, balance my account, and prepare Appetizers On Us for morning. While I do, I’ll smile and take a bow, because I’ll know that my cast won’t be going to bed hungry. ‘You lost another one today Hunger!’ I’ll scream into the cold depths of space like a superhero. ‘Not on my watch!’ My applause (my reward) will be the part when they return, day after day, encore after encore, to enjoy the best appetizers in the city. Oh—how I look forward to giving them my best. I don’t think I could grow tired of serving my cast. I have good friends like Mel, and my crotchety boss Bob in Portland, but it’s different here somehow. I feel close to Patricia, Blue Suit, Rachna, Traveler, and Philoh in a newer way. Our relationships are stronger because we’re doing things, together, that made a difference. We make decisions—in unison—that we know will send seeable, hearable, touchable ripples of action through our stories. I hate to say it, but I think Chester’s right. This city, and its new qualitative-based storyselling economy, offers us the opportunity to be someone, play a role, other than working as someone else’s employee. I wouldn’t go so far to say all storybankers are super stars who have become their truer identities like masked heroes, in reverse. Becoming a rich storybanker takes a lot of hard work like becoming a rich capitalist, but at the end of the day, there’s no better feeling than knowing that I own My Story. Do you know what I mean, about feeling good about what you do? Wylie? Are you listening to me?” This time, silence was my reply.

I was listening. I was also imagining Our Impeding Future together, as a couple, in The Banking Cult. I saw Agent Sturgis in his black helicopter. I saw my fellow FBI Agents armed like Storm Troopers. I saw a battalion of Marines leading the charge. I saw us in bed, together, when the door splintered, the guns were drawn, and the tear gas filled our new home. I wasn’t there, because I was imagining the worse possible moment when The American Way of Life returned to reclaim its property. When I finally opened my eyes, with my mind filled with The Bad Scenes to Come, I wandered in the fading light looking for Maggie, but she’d already gone home without me.

My Storybank Account – Scene Thirty, 

THE PART WHERE WYLIE’S NEW TERROR BANKING NIGHTMARE BEGINS TO MANIFEST ITS DESTINY…

As I discovered, falling into Maggie’s story like a dream wasn’t the whole story and nothing but the story. I was still there, and we were still living a lie. Was I wrong for feeling the need to protect Maggie from herself? Was it because I was a Man, and men have natural feelings of protection for women and children? Or did I hate the idea of not controlling a natural resource that I needed like food, water, and air?

As always, in times of doubt, I imagined what my hero would do in my place. Would a 007 Man eat the weird vegetables everyday? Answer: No! He would patriotically eat a few strange vegetables to lure this opposition into his confidence, and then—when The Mission was done—007 Man would fly as fast as possible to the nearest American Big Mac. That’s what he’d do.

It was a sad time. As The Afterglow slowly faded from my story, I began to make dumb excuses to stay in our shop while Maggie went to work on the surface. Switching my channel to PRIVATE became my relief from the mortal wound in my heart that reopened every time I saw Maggie. I was a spy, and I had a job to do, and I was going to do what I was paid to do.

Most days, the excuse was writing reports. I opened my spy laptop on the kitchen counter and prepared my “press statements” or “articles” to my “publisher.” Even with my daily pep talks from my inner 007 Man, I felt no joy in doing my duty. I knew the words I wrote would have consequences. I was certain that Agent Sturgis would Get It immediately, and he would alert the President to The Terror Banking Cult Uprising on the High Seas. They would both understand that the banking cult’s brand of “viral currency” was not a level two, or three-level threat to national security, but a clear and present—“Sound the red alert!”—catastrophic danger to the world economy.   

I was proud of the term “viral currency.” I was sure the President would like it, a real feather in my hat. I liked it too. After all, I felt the diagnostic label—“viral currency”—was an effective way to explain my Asset’s reaction to the new qualitative-based Storysold economy. It wasn’t Maggie’s fault. She was infected by a “viral currency.” It induced her disorder. Why else would a hard-working, normal, average American like Maggie behave so bizarrely? She wasn’t on any known drugs. She could pass the alcohol/depression-screening test with flying colors, and she didn’t have a history of mental illnesses other than the time she ran away from home and lived on The Streets. And that was only due to the fact that she was a youth (overwhelmed with strong hormones) and not yet proficient at the skills of a sneaky adult. No, I thought as I wrote that report. My Asset’s “episode” (where she showed her love for her co-worker) was caused by an invasive viral currency developed by Mr. Chester Weston for the purpose of injecting it into The Global Economy.

Every time I hit the SEND button and delivered another report into the hands of my employers I felt like I was in a command bunker, launching missiles at The Happy Garden. In order to ease my mind, and make my job pushing the SEND button easier to do, I developed a full-blown storyline for what I imagined would happen next:

The first of our planet’s free markets to fall to the tyranny of Weston’s decentralized Storysold system would be The Food Market. Back when I was spying on ecoterrorists in Portland, Oregon I’d seen firsthand how damaging an alliance of local, small market farmers could be. The People’s popular belief in the label “organic” was once in its infancy like “Storysold” is now, and now those rebel farmers are threatening to destroy America’s jolly green giant food system. What The People failed to realize was, without Big Ag Heroes like Cargill and Bayer we would starve because food would be too expensive for poor people to buy without a lot of charity. Without Big Ag Heroes (with their super-powered harvesting machines, pesticides, factory fertilizers, and food processing plants) the less economically valuable people on The World Stage would be unemployed, begging for food in their streets because we humans left our small sustainable Old McDonald farms for factory jobs in big cities a long time ago. If that was ever a reality! Humans have always formed kingdoms and empires built on the cheapened actions of farmers. That’s a normal part of The Earth Show like death, taxes, and war. I could only imagine the disorder rogue farmers could do to The Free Market (and our great civilization in general) if they were permitted to sell their carrots, kale, and beans with the banking tools of a Storysold economy that accurately accounted for the value of their daily toils. Organic Storysold vegetables would be worth more than gold—and gold (and other shiny crap) would be valued like vegetables. Imagine the horror of a marketplace where precious metals dug from the earth to make earrings were worth less than precious carrots dug from the earth to feed our bellies! It would turn our economic reality upside down. What post-apocalyptic currency would the End Times Preppers stockpile to calm their fears, if not gold? They would rather starve than exchange their belief in The Gold Standard for a new brand of money backed by kale, carrot, and kohlrabi-growing stories.

My fears had been calmed. I saw the future unfold before me, clear as day, right before my eyes. Once Weston hooked The People on The Storysold Exchange (and they started owning storybank accounts) they would want to buy their food from a local farmer, or a small theme of local famers, who would sell them beautiful carrots and kale that came complete with their beautiful farm moments—real daily victories!—that provided them with science-like proof, in vibrant living colors, that the food on their table was worth the price they paid their farmers! Once Americans were hooked on the new viral currency, The Free Market would change radically. Supermarkets would die. The long haul trucks that supplied the supermarkets would die. The distribution warehouses that supplied the long haul trucks that supplied supermarkets would die. The many immortal agribusiness entities that grew produce for the warehouses would die, and the super massive audience of workers working for the Jolly Green Giant and his fellow Big Ag Heroes would stop marching off to work every morning like Johnny Marches to War. The human hosts of The Earth Show would become Storysold, kickstart their storybank accounts, and begin to reclaim ownership of their characters, stories, and homes. And the generically engineered words meant for mass publication like “Wells Fargo” and “Cheetos” and “Chevron” and “America” would be hurled back into the void of fiction from where they came…and so on, until inevitably The Generics of civilization (and the warm bodies they use to host their immoral characters) would be forced to fight back or die. It would be like watching water roll down hill. The Generics would fight back, declaring war on any of their kind who harbored known Terror Banking Cultists who were working from their local, organic, villainous lairs to erode the blessed union of their civilization from within. Yes I saw it all…

That would just be the beginning. The markets that depended on the world’s Big Ag Heroes would fall like dominos, and the markets that depended on those mass markets would fall soon after. Anarchy and chaos would rule supreme. The worst parts of The Bible would come true, and the civilized world (as we know it) will cease to exist. All these things will come to pass because of a viral infection caused by Weston’s Storysold economy; which was very same disorder that intoxicated Maggie and made her love her coworker.

I wrote the last line of my report to the Man in Charge like Patrick Henry—NEEDLESS TO SAY, IF THE TERROR BANKING CULT LEADER’S VIRAL CURRENCY WERE INJECTED IN OUR AMERICAN MAINSTREAM (AND IT GAINED GROUND), WE MIGHT LOSE ALL POWER TO CONTROL ITS INTOXICATING EFFECT.   

The more I thought about Weston’s plans to trigger a paneconomic meltdown, the more I realized that nobody, except maybe Martin Luther King JR or Gandhi, would be insane enough to challenge The Economics of the Known World (with its many war chests) without a well-fed army standing ripping and ready to fight. The American gods all demanded blood sacrifices like the old gods before them. Guns still ruled all the games I knew.

So yeah, that’s why I surfed The Storysold Exchange day after day spying for Weston’s hidden army. “It has to be here somewhere!”

After I wasted enough of my storytime failing to discover The Storysold Doomsday my John-Wayne gut feeling felt was coming, I was suddenly struck by a different idea. What if all the doctors were wrong, I thought: What if insanity wasn’t hosted in humans, but in places like this?

Storysold: City  had no meaningful public places. Even the high walls and elliptical walkways of Center Stage were all accounted for in parts, owned by real flesh-based earth creatures. Generic characters—the national characters, incorporated persons, business entities, and other governing bodies—didn’t own anything in the city; not even a public library. Medieval knights lived side by side with monsters; alchemists and magicians talked shop with pharmacists; children learned alongside their parents; generals shit in the same latrines as the soldiers; humans and lawyers alike knew their laws; thugs handed-out Knuckle Sandwiches on homemade rye; and wild dogs roamed free with killers. In all that, I found no signs of mass produced fiction anywhere.

The evidence was clear. The People as I knew “The People” didn’t exist in Storysold: City . Yet I still believed, “They” were out there, somewhere, just beyond my senses, like gold, waiting for me to discover “Them.” Where were these villains hiding their army and weapons of mass destruction? I thought as I continued my search of the city. I felt like Indian Jones in The Last Crusade when his faith was being tested. There had to be an altar, tax collections box, or easy on-line tax depository somewhere, but where?

The first group, or “theme of storybankers,” I found in Storysold: City  that was large enough to be classifiable as an army (or even a huddled mass) was a huge theme known as Reality the Gaming Community. Reality was large enough to own all ten “gaming levels” of Island Market Nine. On the surface, I thought their Reality had the potential to be transformed into a top-down, death-dealing army; or at least a formidable, top-down army of factory workers who could be programmed to the task of cranking out an armada of death-dealing products. But that was just what I thought before I surfed the channels of The Storysold Exchange and got a better view.

Charles Roth-Thompson, also known as Winner the Gamemaster, was the byproduct of a New Age Love Fantasy set in a desert town outside southern California’s suburban sprawl. Lucky for him, his parents’ New Age Love Fantasy featured a profitable work ethic and saving money so they could send him to college. In return for their investment, the youth spent six years at Stanford in his dark dorm room playing video games, taping aluminum foil to his venetian blinds in order to keep light from invading his “gaming chamber.” The only times Charles was seen outside his Gaming Chamber was when he power walked to and from the cafeteria for sustenance, or when (when his gaming permitted) he went to class. The nubile maidens on his floor were mystified by his superpower to walk by them, even when they called for him to join their parties. Charles Roth-Thompson was too busy for college girls. In the cyber world of his own making, Warlock Empire of the Triple Headed Dragonslayer, Charles was super busy—programming, testing, playing, and juggling the many conquered wives and eunuchs of Dragonslayer’s Harem.

Unexpectedly, the tributes his parents invested paid off.

Charles graduated O.21 percentage points higher than the lowest GPA in his class, but a few months after graduation he was taping aluminum foil to the windows of his brand-new condo in LA. He bought it outright with the first payment he received for selling his game to the world’s leading game corporation. In spite of his success, Charles was a good son. He bought his parents a cool house a few miles from his condo. It was clear that Charles cared. The refrigerator quoted Robert Heinlein and its floors were made from mystic healing crystals. His parents couldn’t have been happier.

Two years later, the same big corporation bestowed upon Charles the most coveted role in his community, that of Lead Game Designer. Their investment in Charles paid off too. He went on to make hit game after hit game, until one day, Charles had a thought.

“Hey,” he thought. “Wouldn’t it be cool if we invented a game that made it possible for our game players to buy and sell their intellectual game property online?” That was a heavier statement than even he realized. What he meant without realizing it, at the time was, he wanted to create a new game state where his fellow gamers could make good money on their “intellectual property,” their magic dragon slaying swords, trademarked dance moves, and ultimately, their characters; the personal kind.

And that was the thought that projected Charles into the top one percent. For the first time ever, Gamers could buy and sell their intellectual property online—the treasured pieces of their personal gaming worlds—with ease, because of Charles Roth-Thompson’s vision.

Billions of dollars came naturally to Charles. To him, having billions in the bank was like, or was, being a wizard who had perfected a well-crafted spell that made him invincible when he dueled with other wizards. Money came to Charles as naturally as rain in springtime, but—after a few long, unchanging years of playing the Invincible Wizard—Charles decided that he wanted to give something back to his community. That desire was real enough for him to invest, really invest, the time that was needed to know what kind of action would best benefit his community. It was by chance (the sort that turns bronze kings into steel ones) that he made his proclamation. The new kind of action he believed in was a city, a real place, where people of the gaming kind could meet in the flesh and give expression to their video-gaming egos, role-playing roles, and other gaming personalities his people had been working to perfect in the darkness of their tinfoil-wrapped rooms. The rumor was, Charles Roth-Thompson was contacted by Weston before he made his proclamation, but Winner the Gamemaster insists that he had no knowledge of Storysold: City  until one of his people emailed him the news of a state-of-the-art transnational ocean-going metropolis that was being built off the Mexican coast. In any case, once Charles realized what Weston was up to, he practically threw his fortune at the Great Capitalist. In exchange for everything he owned, Charles won the power to transform one of Westonton’s Island Markets into the setting for his new, super real video game: Reality the Gaming Community.

The premise of the game was to mimic reality as closely as possible. There were ten gaming levels. Each game level was represented in reality by the ten levels of Island Market Nine’s Residential Shopping Center ending with level ten, which was nearest to the surface…

[ Want to read more? See Bonus Material #3 ]

When I was done gathering information on the Gamemaster and his small community, I was disappointed. Their so-called Reality could no more raise an effective army than a gaggle of geese. Winner, a man claiming to know reality well enough to program a game about it, waited until his Gamers got to their final level before Charles introduced programs about producing death-dealing weapons like guns and teargas. Even then, the only working death-dealing weapon Winner programmed into Reality was a “death ray” that defended the Utopian Moon Colony (and the rest of the community) against Space Invaders. In spite of Winner’s firm grip on Reality, none of his Gamers have been able to follow the programming the Gamemaster wrote for the production of his death rays. The best “lasers” they were able to manufacture weren’t lasers; they were large spotlights the community could use to light up the night sky in the event of an invasion of Space Invaders.

After I crossed The Reality from my list, I continued my search for the secret army that Weston was, no doubt, hiding like a dirty magazine. I didn’t want to the Good Guys to be caught off guard the day Weston stands before his savage hoard and screams, “Charge!” Then his army (which we missed somehow) tramples through the nations of earth with strict orders to erect a storybank in every city, town, and neighborhood in the world.

It took me too long to realize that the Storysold: TV that I was using to spy on everyone might hold a clue to the location of Chester’s secret army. Malcolm Riggs, Professor Chase’s friend from academia and Blue Suit’s old boss/coworker from his days working for a high-tech corporation based in India, produced all of the city’s signature Storysold: TVs. Riggs was a suspect, because he commanded a massive theme of “Clocktinkers.” Like soldiers, the storybankers Riggs enlisted in the Clocktinker theme wore a kind of uniform: light gray business suit, goofy tie (think: cartoon fish), shiny dress shoes, and a thick pair of black-rimmed, shaded “Tinker Glasses.” And like soldiers, they were disciplined to meet their performance expectations: building, maintaining, and improving the infrastructure of The Storysold Exchange.    

Riggs was also suspect, because he was a bad loser. He never forgot The Immortal Wound he received in his youth when an unseen entrepreneur came rumbling into his neighborhood with a shiny fleet of bio-green curbside recycling trucks with robotic arms. Door-to-door curbside recycling had been his idea. Young Riggs had been going door-to-door with his little red wagon collecting the recyclables of his neighbors for years. Before the big bio-green trucks came, Malcolm could get ten-and-a-quarter dollars for every car full of brown-bagged newspapers he and his father delivered to the recycling center. After the bio-green fleet of robotic arms arrived, the price of yesterday’s news plummeted, shamelessly robbing him of the fortune he would have amassed if he had been given trucks and live action figures (employees) for his birthday instead of a red wagon. It was what Malcolm called The Great Depression of My Childhood. The experience affected him so deeply that he was often quoted, exclaiming, “How can you in good conscience rob a child of an opportunity like that! You can scientifically mark the date and time when a child’s brain seizes—goes taut as a cadaver—when they realize that there isn’t any room in the market for them and their trusty red wagons.”

Riggs was a suspect, but I also liked him. He had good old-fashioned sensibilities, and nearly two thousand Clocktinkers synchronized like church bells to the big beat of his signature theme. Before Riggs and Blue Suit arrived in the city, Mr. Chester Weston and Miss Chase’s vision for The Storysold Exchange was not much brighter than a science fiction fantasy. Both men were known professionals in their fields, but it was Blue Suit who had an instinctive understanding of what the lovers were asking them to build off the coastline of Mexico. Riggs wore the geek-style glasses, but there were no hip costume or props to signify Blue Suit’s genius. It wasn’t classifiable. He was a far out, super nerd. He believed in “irrational things” like action-eating light beings, and the ESP-speaking Lemurians of Mu. Blue Suit struggled with seemingly elementary principles like “entropy.” He believed it was possible that the universe was expanding…and importing energy into our galaxy. Thus, therefore, he believed he might be able to construct a city with an inexhaustible supply of power, for all, as long as he built it in a way that made the light beings happy.

In other words, Blue Suit was more creative than Riggs. It was he who suggested that the emerging artificial life form of Storysold: City  should be made in our image. Back when he was talking, Blue Suit argued that it was limiting to believe that we humans were the only intelligent creatures in the universe. First, he argued for the intelligence of bacterium. Then he argued for the intelligence of herding animals like cows; and then he argued for the new  intelligence of “living cities” or “living machines.” Blue Suit said that, given the right circumstances, cities could “wake-up” and “emerge” and become what he called a “multi-dimensional organism.” He also argued that humans should be mining black holes for energy. Blue Suit was certainly “creative.” But, like many people afflicted with creativity, Blue Suit often asked and answered questions no other human, ever, cared to ask and answer.

Malcolm Riggs, on the other hand, was the one who had the know-how to put wild Journey to the Center of the Earth-style theories into practice. Riggs was an intense/focused realist. He started with practical ways to improve the robotic arm. Then he discovered a way to build a device with enough memory to store the life-recordings of a human being. And he did it for the express purpose of cornering a market the eco-truck owners and profiteers of the world had yet to spoil. Needless to say, Riggs didn’t believe the absurd notion that light was alive or self-organizing—nor did he define intelligent life sweepingly as “dwellings made by and for light beings.” But there was no argument from Riggs when Blue Suit presented him with an outline for what his partner called, “the central nervous system of Storysold: City .” Blue Suit believed that once they gave their new city a Master Storyclock for nerves, a Signature Lobe for its brain, Artificial Eyes to capture its stock of living information, Antenna Trees to circulate that consciousness, many thousands of sensitive storyclock nerve endings to receive it, and thousands of humans (lesser “light being dwellings”) to give their new city depth and meaning, there was no reason why Storysold: City  would fail to be born and bring a new kind of intelligent being into existence.

When their city was completed, Blue Suit rallied the techs employees who had worked with them every step of the way, building under the direct supervision of Riggs. Blue Suit was passionate. He spoke like a general giving a call-to-arms speech. He asked them to invest their “old market monies,” buy storybank accounts, and as he put it: “Stay in Storysold: City  and do meaningful work with your lives. Stay and take responsibility for the new intelligence you have created!” Blue Suit called his theme of techs, The Clocktinkers Union. The techs loved Blue Suit. They bought in—what they called “going all in”—and became storybankers by the thousands.  At that point, Weston was pleased with Blue Suit’s display of leadership and willingness to help him line the shelves of his massive vault. So, most ceremoniously, Mr. Chester Weston made Blue Suit “Master Clocktinker” of The Clocktinkers Union, while Riggs retained his worn role of playing second fiddle to a man who owned two jumpsuits—one dirty, one clean—washing the one that was dirty every day.

Riggs couldn’t help it. He began to hate his partner. The jumpsuit reminded him of the uniforms worn by employees of the curbside recycling business. Riggs might have seethed forever if his chance to take some credit (where credit was due) hadn’t presented itself the form of a “gang” led by Bill the Bum. Blue Suit sympathized with their movement to “recycle the expired dope currency and use it to make green party hats for everyone.” Like many storybankers, Blue Suit believed that using dope currencies like The Almighty Dollar was irresponsible and dangerous—and he wasn’t shy about selling the idea. Every storybanker in the city knew where he stood. When Mr. Chester Weston and Chief Moyniham brought the hammer down on Bill’s fledgling Bio-friendly Bum Army—firing them, then having them escorted off the premises—Weston almost fired Blue Suit too. Instead he made it a policy that using the title “Storysold: City ” was grounds for termination. Then Weston demoted Blue Suit. For his own reasons, Blue Suit didn’t challenge the decision. He accepted his President’s “promotion” of Riggs to Master Clocktinker of the theme he’d built with his old friend.

The rest of that story is history. Malcolm removed the “union” from The Clocktinkers Union and transformed the Clocktinkers into an organization dedicated to maintaining the city’s Storysold infrastructure. The twist was, after his promotion Weston asked Riggs for a favor. Or was it an order? It wasn’t clear. In any case, Mr. Chester Weston asked Riggs to train and prepare his theme of Clocktinkers, and ready them to set sail (on a moment’s notice) for the mainland; their mission was to install a Storysold system in every small town, city, neighborhood, and house on earth.

At the time, I believed Clocktinkers were Weston’s secret army. I was sure they were bent on providing quality computer technologies to the peoples of the world, and nothing but death would keep them from completing that mission. That was until I took some time and distance from the idea. In time I decided the Man in Charge of Me would send my report about The Secret Army of Clocktinkers back all marked in red. It wasn’t so much that the Clocktinkers weren’t an army. It was more like they weren’t an army that was a match for the fighting spirit of the American People…

Americans would protect their way of life at any cost. They would crawl on their bellies through the rain, sleet, hail, and snow clenching knives in their teeth, prepared to fight anyone that would dare to take their freedoms away. For that purpose, Americans built bomb shelters in their backyards. Americans stockpiled shotguns, 45s, bullets, beans, and canned ham in their basements. Americans are fighters. Americans would never, simply, open their homes to well-dressed Clocktinkers, and then permit them to transform their classic American TVs into the tools of a Terror Banking Cult. No way!Americans would see the Clocktinker Army coming from miles away, load their guns, and take The Threat to The American Way of Life out…or be taken out in the trying. The problem was, Weston’s army of geeks in light gray suits, spiffy shoes, and funny fish ties would definitely have a fight on their hands if they tried to push their products on Real Americans. There would be bloodshed, I imagined. Geeks and Americans alike would perish in a bloody struggle for the preservation of classic TVs. And I couldn’t imagine the Clocktinkers fighting back with guns, bombs, or blowguns. I knew, deep down, that the invasion wouldn’t happen like that. If anything, the Clocktinker Army would knock on the doors of Americans, eat a few of grandma’s cookies, and talk shop about old television shows like A-Team, MacGyver, and Star Trek where the heroes didn’t always kill humans to win the day.    

Unsatisfied, I continued to surf The Storysold Exchange for the sinister secret army themes I believed were there. Endless moments of live action (and unscripted weirdness) from the daily lives of storybankers—click, click, and click. I flipped the channels and found no programming for a spy like me in need of a career-making secret army.

Instead I developed my first character. I named The Thing, “Major Depression.” The Major was using Its psychological warfare, Depressive Disorder to unbalance my chemicals, make me make thinking errors, and drink all the Assah I could drink freely without making Maggie too angry. It was a relief to have another authority figure in my life other than The Something Grander, but my Eager Beaver was eager to please our American President too.

My Storybank Account – Scene Thirty One,

THE PART WHERE MAGGIE MAKES HER BREAD MORE HOLY WITH SISTER LEI’S COOKING WITH GOD SHOW…

Philoh the Junker was a wiry, cleft-lipped woman with a few old man parts whose signature costume typically included “sexy old lady dresses” and a mesh back trucker’s hat that read, I HEART JUNK. Philoh made Nearly Rotten Delight from nearly rotten fruit she salvaged around The City, and she used a mechanical grabber hand, like old folks, to collect his junk.

While I was away on business “shopping in the city,” Philoh and Maggie my Girlfriend started “preparing for Grand Opening Night for Maggie’s Appetizers On Us.” In order to “prepare”—if that’s what they were, in fact, really doing!—they produced a junking adventure without my permission. Without my knowledge they sailed to the mainland on Philoh’s large, ocean-going home, a barge that was piled from bow to stern with broken toys, magazines, rusted tools, and old computer parts. PHILOH’S JUNK PALACE was painted in big, rattle can graffiti on the side of her barge. I was livid and lonely (sad and drinky) while Maggie was away, and I was even more livid when she returned from her junking adventure looking happy.

“Hey Wylie!” Maggie called out when she walked through the door of our shop with the Junker in tow. “We got dishware! And silverware! And pots and pans! And a broom! And look! It’s a pressure cooker for canning! The seal’s gone, but Philoh’s sure she’ll be able to find something to replace it. she’s a super star! The best Junker in The City!”

“You sailed to the mainland to find a broom?” I asked, eyeing Philoh as I slid the bottle of Assah I’d been drinking out of sight.

“Yes,” Maggie replied. “We did. Why buy something when the world of employables leave so many good things lying around?”

“Hum,” I said as I held her new/used broom up to the light. “This broom is broken.” I tossed the broom at Philoh. “It’s cracked. You see? That broom is two, maybe three sweeps from just being junk.”

“Just junk?” Philoh replied. “The Earth doesn’t make junk.”

“You believe that?’ I laughed. “You sound like something from a bad made-for-TV Hallmark movie.”

Philoh ignored my lines, took the broom from me, examined it, and said, “This broom has life left in it, as long as we remember to be gentle with it.” Then she wrapped her hand around the crack and swept the floor. “We all have our cracks in life,” she added. “One big difference between our lives here and the lives of employables on the mainland is that, we Get It. We all have our cracks and conflicts. They make wonderful signatures.”

I stared at her looking for anything I could to find and exploit her weakness in front of Maggie. “What about your lip?” I asked, pointing. “Is that a wonderful signature too?”

She covered her mouth with her hand for a beat before she realized what she was doing. I laughed to myself as I watched her lower his hand back to his side, fist clenched.

“Yes I am,” Philoh replied. “I am wonderful.”

“Yeah,” I laughed. “You said that like you were trying to believe it too. The Earth might not make junk, but Nature sure has a way of making it hard for some of us to date.” I paused to watch his reaction. His face was boiling with anger. So I poured more fuel on the fire, and added, “Chicks dig scars, but they’re not big on deformities. Am I right?”

“I don’t date Chicks,” she replied in a calm tone.

I was hoping he’d take a swing at me, so I’d have a guilt-free cause to end the fight. I wasn’t about to lose Maggie to a Junker.

Philoh turned to Maggie, and asked, “What do you think?”

She walked into the kitchen and started to clean. “I think I’ve seen this scene played out somewhere before. And it’s boring.”

“Did you see that?” I exclaimed. “She’s avoiding the issue, because she knows I’m right. Deformities are called ‘deformities’ for a reason. They aren’t signatures, or whatever. No matter how great this wacko economy is, nobody can wave a magic wand and wish all the ugly ducklings into swans.”

That one got Maggie. She walked up to me, put her lips an inch or two from my ear, and whispered, “Philoh and I produced a love scene on the deck of her junk palace on our way back from Mexico. And let me tell you, Asshole, her action is anything but ugly. It’s hot.”

Ouch. My old gut feeling kicked my chest like a mule.

Philoh didn’t have to hear what Maggie whispered to know what she said. She stared through me, smiled, and took a bow.

“Look, you two,” Maggie announced. “Sister Lei’s Cooking with God Show will be on in a few moments, and I could use some help cleaning the kitchen before she starts. Who’s in?”

“I think I’ll catch her show on my own tonight,” Philoh replied as she turned to leave. “I’ve had enough of that man for one day.”

“Will you stay, please?”

“Will you please leave that guy?”

Maggie looked at us, and said, “No.”

“Why not? You said it yourself. He’s an Asshole.”

Maggie threw me a hard look. “He’s under construction.”

“That’s right,” I grinned. “I’m under construction.”    

“No,” Philoh grumbled on her way to the door. “You’re too willing to stand aside and let Maggie be good for you…to be The Good Person you have no fucking clue how to be.”

“Good to know. Thanks for the words of wisdom.”

“You’re welcome,” Philoh said as she opened the door.

Just as she was about to leave, I said, “Oh Philoh…”

“What?” he replied, turning to face me.

“Stay away from my Girlfriend.”

She smiled and said, “Tell her to stay away from me.”

Then she left us to perform his next scene for an unseen audience that wasn’t us. Maggie wasn’t happy. She started cleaning her kitchen: wiping off the countertops, scraping the grime from the stove, whatever she could do to keep her mind from The Mission. I saw her working, but I didn’t help. I set my half-empty bottle of Assah on the bar and drank it. After a few long quiet moments of watching the A-eyes watch us, I said, “You should be ashamed.”

“For what?” Maggie shot back hotly.

“You cheated on me.”

“I can’t cheat a story you’re not in for real.”

I drank deep, and changed the subject. “What did you and That Man call your ‘adventure’ to Mexico again? I forget.”

“It was a junking adventure.”

“What’s adventurous about rummaging through third world landfills like crack-high pirates in search of treasure?”

“It just was,” Maggie replied.

“Most people junk for a living because they have to,” I rambled on like Moses from my mountaintop. “They don’t ‘dumpster-dive’ because it’s the hip thing to do. That’s what comfortable do-gooders do.”

“What are you talking about?” Maggie asked, recoiling like I’d tossed a snake in her lap. “There’s nothing wrong with Philoh and I working together to produce a classically good story. Throughout history, billions of humans have lived frugally either by choice, or by force of economy. It’s a story that should be celebrated, not shamed or pitied.”

I drained the bottle with a loud, indignant belch. “Sure—whatever you say,” I conceded. “Now what’s for dinner?”

“I’m Cooking With God tonight.”

“Oh,” I paused, trying to think. “How long will that take?”

“Sister Lei’s Cooking With God Show will start in a few clips,” Maggie said as she started to pull ingredients out of her shelves and cabinets.

“Good,” I said, rubbing my belly. “I’m hungry. What did you say she was cooking again?”

“I didn’t say,” Maggie replied. “But as Sister Lei advertised on last week’s show, the Good Nun—aka Sovereign Bride of Christ—will be blessing us with a production of Whole Wheat Holy Bread.”

“Since when do you watch TV evangelists?”

“I don’t,” Maggie replied. “Growing up, I was embarrassed to bring friends over after school, because I was afraid that my foster parents would be home getting their televised fix of spirituality. Sister Lei’s show is different. It’s not talk. Her First Congregational Army of Christian Soldiers, Greeters, and Spiritual Warriors don’t negotiate with demons. She slays them in the spirit of her story, The New War Story for the Hearts and Minds of All God’s Children. I think she’s crazier than two loons in a cage, but you can see The Action. It’s not a kind of theatric spiritual battle. It’s real. I really cheer when she wins.”

A few clips later, channel 345 glowed, and Sister Lei appeared in her kitchen. Maggie explained that the Good Nun’s kitchen was located on the top deck of New Ark IV, one of the seven modified supertankers Weston allotted to the First Congregational Army with the expectation that they would be ready at all times as lifeboats if a disaster hit. Not surprisingly, the disaster at the top of Weston’s list was an “end of times cash flood,” or a complete disintegration of the world’s financial systems. In preparation for that apocalyptic cash flood, the Congregational Army supplied the New Arks with at least a year’s worth of food and fresh water to allow the “handpicked star employees of Westonton” to circle the oceans in safety as the nations of earth “ate each other,” as she put it. As we watched Sister Lei work in her kitchen, we could hear animal sounds coming up from the body of the Ark.

The kitchen set was simple (and simply medieval): dead animals hung on hooks, cleavers hung on walls, garlic braids hung from rafters, and a massive stone wash basin and wood drying racks displayed a collection of pots, bowls, utensils, pans, and crockery that looked like they were forged in the fires of Mt. Doom. As for Sister Lei herself, she stood almost four feet, eleven inches tall behind her Pulpit Prep Counter, costumed in a classic nun’s habit.

Maggie called Sister Lei a “Liberated Bride of Christ.”

Before she came to Storysold: City, she was a nun with a secret. She knew her discipline (her role as a nun) made it clear that she was to share her Carnal Temple with Father Pope, Mother Superior, and the rest of the leaders who ran the church. She was cool with that. She liked the church, but she was madly in love with the Great I Am. The trouble started when she realized that she wasn’t able to love everyone and everything she set her mind to loving. In spite of her great love and desire to host the church and the Great I Am, she realized her human body had limitations. She was weak. She simply didn’t have the bandwidth that she needed to host all the live action characters (like Sunday School Teacher, Soup Kitchen Manager, and Holy Wine Stocker) Father Pope and Mother Superior required her to host for the church, and host her great love for God too. The Rub was, as they say, was the question of which of her two great lovers was in charge of her Carnal Temple. How could she act on the love she felt every day for her Heavenly Husband if she was always offering up her control to meet the needs of The Church’s storyline? Sister Lei felt that her God was pretty clear on that point. There was a difference between the church and her Carnal Temple. One was a building, and one was the flesh she walked around in everyday. They were not the same place.

Even after she realized her body had a hosting problem, she continued to compromise. She tried to maintain an equal love for both, but eventually the Great I Am—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—moved in with her, and began to live “in the bosom” of her Carnal Temple. The result was, she had to cram the church somewhere in the basement of her heart in order to make more room for God. As she put it, “Our living situation was unbearable. God was always asking me to feed actions to His Big Three, and Pope was always feeding me instructions for running the Soup Kitchen…and the wine! Oh the holy wine was the worst! Mother Superior was obsessed with which wines I bought for the great transmogrification. It wasn’t enough for the wine to be local, organic, and fit our budget. She had to taste it for holiness too.”   

After many years of unhappy co-habitation (trying to keep The Big Three and the church happy), Sister Lei handed Father Pope and Mother Superior and the rest of the church their eviction notices. Then she married her one true love all over again. Determined to love her Heavenly Husband monogamously, Sister Lei the Liberated Bride of Christ left China and began her pilgrimage to find a home where she could love her Heavenly Husband above all else. After many years of knocking on the doors of the world, and serving the good people who answered that call, Sister Lei found the freedom she sought in Storysold: City. To this day, no one knows how The Good Nun convinced Weston to sell her a storybank account…

On screen, Sister Lei was beginning her show. “Today on Sister Lei’s Cooking with God Show,” she said, “my Heavenly Husband and I will be showing you how to put the goodness back in good food.” She paused to set her Pulpit Prep Counter with ingredients and other props. “For those of you who have never experienced the joy of Cooking with God, I welcome you in the active spirit of communion. We the Greeters, Christian Soldiers, and Spiritual Warriors of the First Congregational Army of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ live and die by The Word. Ephesians 6 says: ‘Put on the Whole Armor of God; that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil; for we wrestle not against the flesh and blood…’ No more—praise God! ‘But against the principalities, against the powers, against the would-be rulers of this world, against the spiritual wickedness lurking in high places.” She paused, putting her apron on ceremoniously like a knight. “Wherefore take unto you the whole armor of God! That you will be able to withstand in the evil day…Stand with your loins fitted with Truth, and having on the Breastplate of Righteousness and your feet shod with the preparation of the Gospel of Peace…Stand and take up the Shield of Faith, wherewith you shall be able to quench the fiery darts of the wicked and stand evermore faithfully with the Helmet of Salvation and the Sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God…”

“Naaah,” the chorus of animals below deck replied as Maggie leaned over and whispered, “That’s how she starts every show.”

“Yes, folks,” the Good Nun smiled. “You heard Him right. Our Heavenly Commander has passed a direct order. Our fight is not against the flesh! We wrestle not against the flesh and blood! We wrestle not: and we’re not to slay, hack, slice, or bomb it either! To that end, I am here with my Husband to engage the Dark Lord Satan in another exciting round of spiritual warfare here on Sister Lei’s Cooking with God Show. Tonight, we’re expanding His Heavenly Kingdom by making our daily bread even holier. Yes, folks. Tonight, we’re going to bake nearly demon-free Whole Wheat Holy Bread. Shall we begin as usual with a spiritual weapons check?”

“Watch this,” Maggie said excitedly. “This is so cool.”

Sister Lei set a sack of whole-wheat flour on the Prep Pulpit. Then she put her hand on it, closed her eyes, and prayed. “Oh Lord,” she began. “Bless this sack of flour produced by your servant Plowman the Christian Soldier. Oh Lord!—only You know where his heart was when he scattered his seed in your field, reaped the bounty of your harvest, and crushed this wheat into flour with the power of your holy wind. We, the congregational cast of Plowman the Christian Soldier, have seen his acts of faith in his flour scenes. Many in our Congregation buy his goods and call them “good.” We know he whistled your praises in the field, and skipped to his windmill, and shared Your Word with a Buddhist who came by his shop looking for flour for her bun-making scenes, all while he produced this very sack. At The End of The Day only You know his heart oh Lord, but if I read your living word righteously, then I’d say that this flour is roughly, about, nearly eighty-five percent demon-free. The other fifteen percent accounts for Plowman’s ninety-seven-clips worth of Demon Pride he felt when his millstone ground the last of this sack, and he stood back, smiled, and said, ‘Now that’s what I call good!’ We all know that only You, My God, can stand back and say what is, or is not good. However, in Plowman’s defense, he struggles with Pride because he makes a pretty damned good sack of flour. That’s no excuse for sin, of course,” she winks. “What do you think, Honey? For the sake of his eternal soul, shall we believe he delivered that prideful line for the demon-product-loving sinners who watch him on their holy screens? Surely it lifted their consumer confidence.”

  “I don’t get it,” I interjected. “How’s this a weapons check?”

“Shush,” Maggie shushed. “Keep watching.”

The Good Nun pushed Plowman’s flour aside and set a jar of honey on the Prep Pulpit, asking her Heavenly Husband to bless it. Then she gave us the story of how a theme of Demon Fighters known as the Beekeepers of Canaan produced the jar of honey in Sister Lei’s hand with enough goodness to label it – NINETY-FIVE PERCENT DEMON-FREE. The secret to their success was, believe it or not, unprotected beekeeping scenes. It seemed a bit extreme to me, but they used the pain of being stung and the fear of bees to focus them on the task at hand. This ancient spiritual war tactic worked to annihilate any vacuous moments the Dark Lord Satan’s demons could use to invade and occupy their “lands flowing with milk and honey.” Apparently, the Beekeepers worked closely with the Milkmaids of Canaan, a theme who were known to headbutt their milking goats in order to keep any impure thoughts from occupying Canaan/their governing bodies.

When she was done weapons-checking her honey for demons, Sister Lei spent the next four-and-a-half moments (well over an hour) checking and blessing St. Elizabeth’s Miraculous Yeast, Fryer Tuck’s Anointed Oils, Lot’s Pillar of Salt Scenes, and her Island Market’s freshwater-production story. All of Sister Lei’s ingredients turned out to be mostly demon-free. The one odd exception was the bottle of oil, which was only forty-two percent demon-free because Tuck admittedly lusted after his competitor Mary and her Extra-Virgin Olive Oil while he made the bottle of Anointed Oils he sold to Sister Lei. The Good Nun forgave him on the condition that Tuck would confess his feelings to Mary the Holy Greeter and Virgin Oil Producer.

“I still don’t get it,” I said again. “Where are the weapons?”

“It’s over now,” Maggie said as she put her ingredients on the counter and checked them, one-by-one, for what she called “signature flaws.” Unlike Sister Lei, she bought her flour, yeast, honey, oil, and salt from non-Christians like Gambler, Wall the Mart, and Neptune the God of Seasalt. Maggie admitted that she didn’t know those cast members well enough to make any meaningful judgments on their characters, but she did feel they were demon-free enough to bake her signature version of Sister Lei’s Whole Wheat Holy Bread.

“Remember,” she continued, “you should also do a comprehensive spiritual weapons check on all the props in your kitchen. The Dark Lord’s demons can lurk anywhere in your cast member’s work scenes. Check your mixing bowls; check your measuring spoons; check the workmanship of your oven. Don’t be left in the dark. It only takes one bad work scene to ruin a whole loaf. Can you imagine the horror of serving Whole Wheat Holy Bread to your cast, only to discover that the knife you sliced it with was fabricated in some godless factory? How embarrassing! How tragic! How completely unholy! Also, don’t forget to keep an eye out for the demon Convenience. Props are only as good as the souls, or signatures of their owners. So, defend yourself against the dark powers of food processors. Shield your soul from high-speed blenders. Keep the fiery darts of microwaves from striking to the heart of your cooking adventures with God. Take it from me, Sister Lei, ice cubes were made to serve the Dark Lord Satan’s will.”

“What’s so bad about ice cubes?” I asked.

“Shush,” Maggie shushed. “Keep watching.”

  “Once you feel that your spiritual weapons won’t invite attack, invasion, occupation, or make your Carnal Temple an easy target as you stand against The Devil, then it is time to go on the offensive and take the battle to him.”  She set a bowl on the Pulpit. “As my friend Don Quixote says, ‘We’re not physical beings having spiritual experiences, we’re spiritual beings having physical experiences.’ Our Savor didn’t die to teach us to sacrifice our young on the Old War Altar every generation. Jesus came to free us from the timeworn tradition of offering blood sacrifices—cows’ blood to Athena, lambs’ blood to Jehovah, or soldiers’ blood to the nation nearest you. There’s never been any evidence to support the claim that spilling blood to any god, idol, nation, or cause has made our homes any better. Wars bring more wars. Blood spills more blood, and there is no reason why we should fight each other in vain. I’ll let you in on a secret. If you want to win a war, achieve a lasting victory, then you have to fight with all your strength to keep your enemy from losing—because if they, he, she, or It loses then we all lose. If they go down, we go down. No exceptions: we’re in this war together, and we better act like it. If we don’t, the terrible parts of Revelations—boiling oceans, blackened sky, and hell—will be our final prize. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be like that. My Hubby meant for his prophesy to be a warning…not a lifestyle.   

“Ok,” she continued. “The strategic key to making good Holy Bread is how purely we wield our spiritual weapons. Love is not a thing. You can’t make it work by replacing its soul parts, or ‘work on it’ like a machine. It’s a spiritual war maneuver. Christian Soldiers use the love our Lord Jesus grants us to aim our spiritual weapons.” She paused for a moment of silence. “Before this turns into one of my long-winded sermons and I lose sight of what I’m doing, let us carry forth in The Action: First mix two teaspoons of Elizabeth’s yeast in a half-cup of warm water.” She said it, and then she did it. When she was done she folded her hands and closed her eyes in prayer. “And pray strategically for a full moment when God blesses us with the wisdom to aim righteously and sow these labors of love throughout the land.”

Then she prayed in silence for exactly a moment.

“Next,” she woke with a start. “Dissolve two tablespoons of Canaan Honey as well as two tablespoons of Anointed Oils in two-and-a-quarter cups of the Island’s lukewarm water. Then stir the Plowman’s eight-five percent demon-free flour and two and a half teaspoons of Lot’s salt in a bowl and make a holy well in the midst of the mixture. Pour there the liquids and yeast and stir, starting from the center and working your way outward until you have dough. Now, listen carefully. Many a Christian Soldier has fallen short of the glory of Cooking with God when called upon to stand firm in this next scene. In order to secure the dough, and free it from demons, you must pound The Hell out of it for at least a moment and a half, or six hundred strokes of the Lord’s blessed vessels—your hands—until your dough becomes elastic, smooth and beatified. Heaven forbid you have trouble, but if you do: add water, or flour, and pray for divine intervention, because that’s the only way you’ll know how much.”

She pulled a decorative wooden bowl out from under the Pulpit, and oiled it with Anointed Oils. “Form the dough into a ball and place it in a well-oiled bowl, cover with a wet cloth, and pray for your holy dough to rise like Lazarus for five to ten moments, depending on your temperature.”

With that said, she began to pray aloud. “Dear Heavenly Husband, while your loaf of Holy Bread rises, I pray to You for management. I am your humble servant. I do not pretend to know your will for this bread, but I do know it will be good as long I keep my spiritual com-channel open and tuned to You.” Then Sister Lei began to speak to her Heavenly Husband in spiritual code talk. Every now and again she’d smile, giggle, and scream, “Oh, momma like! Praise Jesus! Do that again! That felt good!”

The sight of Lei giggling with Christ caused me distress. I’d been to Sunday school. We weren’t literally meant to have personal relationships with Jesus Christ. Our relationships with Jesus Christ were meant to be symbolic, or metaphorical at best, like chatting with a Disney Serpent. The Word was in the Bible, not in our Hearts. If our personal relationships with Christ were literal, and we could talk with Him without reading all God’s dialogue from his Holy Script, then where would we be? We’d be talking to ourselves in our nearest mental ward. That’s where we’d be.

I tipped back the empty bottle of rice wine. Finding nothing there to fill me, I said, “I’m tired. I’ve had a long day; I’m going to bed.”

Maggie paused, and sweet as June-tulips she asked, “Will you wait until you try some of my Whole Wheat Holy Bread?”

I flipped through the channels like Sister Lei’s Cooking with God Show was on a commercial break, and replied, “Why should I?”

“Because you’re my Boyfriend.”

She had me there. After a glance around at the A-eyes in our shop, I replied, “Sure, Apple Pie. I’d love to try some of your bread.”

An ungodly sum of storytime later, I was still sitting at the bar, barely awake, watching Maggie clean the kitchen.

Suddenly Sister Lei cried, “Hallelujah! It is risen!”

Maggie rushed to the bowl, lifted its veil, and looked inside. “It’s true!” she exclaimed. “Hallelujah! It has risen indeed!”

The bakers then shaped the dough into loaves, greased their pans, set the dough inside, and waited two more moments for the final rise. Maggie checked her preheated oven, saying, “Once I put the loaves in, it will only be another three to four moments before thy Holy Bread will be done.”

“And how long is that in real time?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You know,” I replied. “The time the rest of the world uses.”

Maggie paused, blinked, smiled, and said, “I don’t know.”

She didn’t know, but Maggie pulled her Whole Wheat Holy Bread out of the oven in time. The bread was good. I helped myself to a third slice before we switched our channels from PUBLIC to PRIVATE, and I crawled off to the pile of quilts and bed coverings I called a bed. Before I passed out I heard Sister Lei end her show, saying, “Until next time, friends. Make your goods good, and we shall win forever and ever. Amen.”

My Storybank Account – Scene Thirty Two,

THE PART WHERE AGENT JONES GOES IN SEARCH OF THE SECRETS OF SISTER LEI’S NEW ARK…

In the weeks that followed Sister Lei’s Cooking with God Show, I obsessed about the possibility of Weston and Sister Lei teaming up to march an army of Christian Solders to the ends of the earth. With Weston’s financial backing and the tech support of the Clocktinkers, the First Congregational Army would march through Mexico and cross the border into The United States. Without warning, a Clocktinker, Christian Soldier, or some other Terror Banking Cultist would knock on the door of Average Joe American, and they’d unsuspectingly take free samples of Holy Bread. Then they’d fall prey to the seemingly utopian benefits of the city’s new, colorized Storysold products.

Like Castro’s Cuba, Weston’s Terror Banking Cult was within striking distance of America’s heartland. Sister Lei was clearly a false prophet. Her read of The Bible was nothing like Billy Graham’s. It wasn’t hard to imagine the Pale Rider of the Apocalypse as a short, bread-making nun.

After weeks of patiently observing Sister Lei’s routines I finally got my break. While watching the on-screen action of the Congregational Army’s choir practice, I learned that none of the New Arks had been fitted with A-eyes, except those in Sister Lei’s kitchen. The Army used Tinker Glasses and other signature Storysold info-gathering A-eyes worn by individuals to mint their moments. Bingo! I thought. I’ve found their blind spot.

I emailed Agent Sturgis with the news without a moment to lose. A few days later, I received a message from Sturgis. It was an order to search the Sister’s New Ark for weapons of mass destruction. I immediately send the Bureau a list of supplies I’d need to do the job: one frog suit, camouflage makeup, flippers, gloves, rope, grappling hook, creamy peanut butter, three Snickers bars, night vision goggles, a spy lighter, chewing gum, and a gun.

Three days later, I stripped down to my silky short running shorts at the edge of the city’s Reef Wall in the late afternoon, and then I inserted the “rubber bud” that Agent Chandler had given me into my ear, switched it ON, and listened for the ping that I’d use like a game of Marco Polo to navigate the open ocean and find the gear Sturgis had dropped there. When I heard the pings, loud and clear, I dove in and started to swim. Moments later, after following the pings for what seemed like miles, I found the waterproof bag that had been dropped there, under the cover of night, by the stealthiest sub in the US Navy. It wasn’t easy, but I managed to open the bag and slip on the frog suit and flippers, and find the peanut butter and Snickers. With one hand, I repacked the bag, blew some air into it, and rested on it long enough to spoon peanut butter into my mouth with the Snickers.

As I swam back in the rainbow glow of sunset with my gear in tow, two thoughts kept popping to mind: (1) How am I going to sneak around in a city that’s covered on all sides by cameras? And (2) are sharks as attracted to Snickers and peanut butter as I am? I wondered, because something large and slimy kept brushing by my feet…

When I reached the city, I smeared on my camouflage and waited along the Reef Wall for a while to rest and settle my nerves. Then I let go, and let the current of the Canal System sweep me under the Arched Gateway into Storysold: City. The canals were darker than I expected. It was a miracle that I was able to find the right canal that led to the Hidden Harbor where New Ark IV was docked, but I found it.

The boardwalk around the harbor was aglow in curious nightlife. I saw a theme of nearly naked skaters pursuing a bike-riding police lady, who was towing a mountain lion behind her in a wheeled cart. Someone who looked like Tarzan was teaching a young man to speak to the monkey doing backflips on his leopard skin muscle shirt. I ignored lamp-lit scenes for fear that my mission would be lost if they discovered my identity. If they saw me now, in my frog suit, the best I could hope for would be to blast my way free of the bad guys who would, no doubt, be chasing me like henchmen, evil robots, or flesh-eating zombies; and then I would run for the nearest ocean-going vessel I could find, commandeer it, and return to Washington DC in shame.

Pop, zip, clank—my grappling hook hit the deck. Eerie silence followed as I tossed my flippers and fitted suction cups to my feet. Suck, pop, suck, pop, I climbed up the converted supertanker. I could hear the sound of a ram bleating through the wall. Crap, I thought, these suction cups aren’t as smooth as they are in the movies. After I tossed the cups (and took a deep breath) I continued my climb barefoot up the side of the towering New Ark. Once I was within reach of the deck, I rested and chewed gum. Realizing I was without a knife or a stick, I took a mirror from my make-up kit, stuck the gum to its back, waited for a moment until it was sticky, fixed the mirror to my index finger, and used it to peer over the edge of the deck.

Other than a field of solar panels and hydraulically lifted sails, Sister Lei’s shop was the only structure on deck. A few candles lit the kitchen, but the rest of the shop was dark. If my calculations were correct, Sister Lei’s Cooking with God Show would be wrapping up soon and the Congregational Army would begin gathering around the wide staircase that led into the Ark for the nightly ritual they called The Rite of God. I’d seen the scene played out on the Storysold TV in our shop, but I’d never seen it live.

The first to gather were the Christian Soldiers. They wore medieval golden breastplates, white frocks with red crosses, and new war belts and scabbards for their wooden crosses, which were carved from blunt point to hilt with The Word of God. The next to gather were the Greeters, who looked like Southern Baptists in their Sunday best costumes, with bow ties, flowery dresses, and excessive use of hair products. The Greeters were followed by the Spiritual Warriors, who trickled in when they wanted to. They didn’t do the groupthink thing and wear uniforms, and neither did the Demon Fighters who started to join the gathering at that time too, but I felt a certain intuitive ability to spot the differences. I was pretty sure the three guys who were standing around a man I recognized from Sister Lei’s show as Don Quixote the Demon Fighter were also Demon Fighters. They dressed all in leather, wore sunglasses, and held Storysold phones and crossbows with plunger-tipped arrows. I was sure the woman dressed like Ghostbusters, packing a lot of fancy technology on her back, was also a Demon Fighter. I surmised that the Spiritual Warriors were the ones with more pragmatic leanings. Some of them wore the costumes of doctors, monks, shaman, and magicians while others were dressed like healers and musicians. But all that discernment at a distance was only my Spy character at work. I was guessing. I had no idea who those characters were.

When the candles in the Good Nun’s kitchen were blown out and she joined the gathering on deck, the members of the First Congregational Army of Christ started to quiet down.

“Shall we form As One?” Sister Lei asked without raising her voice. Then the gathering grew closer—shoulder-to-shoulder—arms hung over each other in a circle like a football huddle. Sister Lei squeezed between Don Quixote and a big fake-winged Angel, laughed warmly, and said, “Thanks for waiting. Shall we begin?”

“I feel that the production of The New War Story for the Hearts and Minds of All God’s Children has become an unprofitable rut that we’re getting sucked into,” a Greeter with a bouffant and a name tag announced.

“I assure you, Wilma,” replied a bearded man costumed like an ancient Roman centurion, “my Christian Soldiers and I have been rotating and restocking the year’s supplies religiously. All seven of the New Arks are as prepared to set sail and face mankind’s greatest tribulation as they were yesterday. Christ is coming, and we are ready! Halle-hoorah!”

“Halle-hoorah!” echoed a chorus of Soldiers and others.

“Ready my foot,” the Greeter challenged. “Where were you and your tough buddies at the last Hallelujah Choir practice, eh Centurion?”

The gathering grew silent.

“I can’t emphasize enough the importance of attendance!” Wilma went on. “Someday the Armies of Darkness will sweep in from the ocean on demon wings. When that day comes, The Hallelujah Choir may be our only effective counterstrike to a direct assault.”

“An all-out preemptive spiritual assault on the mainland is the only way to neutralize a direct assault by a godless army of death dealers,” said an Angel in black robes as he strummed a few cords on his banjo. “There is no way we can take the death dealers with their death jet fighters, bombers, and killer machine guns head on. We must concentrate our new-war efforts on converting the hearts and minds of the Dark Lord’s soldiers before they load their guns, before they hop into their cockpits, long before they get within striking distance of our Carnal Temples.”

“I disagree,” the Greeter stood firm. “Give me your attendance, and I will forge a choir more powerful than any choir in history. If the Spirit of Our Lord is with us, the death dealers will fail to complete their missions when they hear the triumphant sound of true victory.”

“We have all read the story of how the trumpets of the Lord toppled the walls of Jericho,” Centurion replied. “But…”

“But nothing!” Sister Lei interrupted suddenly. “Wilma the Greeter has a good point. My Husband wouldn’t have created this Congregational Army if He didn’t mean to use it in battle. We cannot fall back on the notion that all spiritual warfare is preventative. The Devil’s vile henchmen will come knocking at our doorstep someday, and they will be carrying guns. Greeter’s right. The Hallelujah Choir is the best spiritual war maneuver we’ve developed to stand against a direct assault.”

“Yes,” Centurion shot back, “but I’d rather nail myself to the cross than give those demon hosts a crowd of targets to shoot at. History has shown again and again that the old war solders will fire into an unarmed crowd when they feel threatened, or for no reason other than they were ordered to fire. I, for one, would rather they work harder to spill my blood.”   

“Then get to work,” a voice at the far side of the Congregation called out, “and develop a common defense theme that’s better!”

“We’re doing all we can to keep the year’s stock rotated and ready for the second coming,” a Christian Soldier protested hotly. “We don’t have the moments we need to develop another spiritual war maneuver!”

“I agree,” said a lady, adorned in golden armor. “We don’t have the spiritual manpower to prepare for the cash flood of The Second Coming and develop an overarching maneuver to defend the city. But I had another vision last night that might shed some insight on all this…”

As one, the Congregational Army groaned.

“Be at peace, Joan of Arc,” a medicine woman replied, rattling a cross made of chicken bones and lizard skins at Joan.

“We’ve had enough of your visions!” someone else cried.

“No wait!” Joan of Arc protested. “This one was really vivid.”

I knew from watching The Rite of God, they could go on communing like that sometimes until daybreak. They’d stay in the huddle dialoguing about everything under the sun, pouring their souls out and confessing every sinful scene they produced that day, until God (or some other unseen force) told them it was time to go to bed. That’s how the Congregational Army of Christ worked; each member received their orders directly from The Source without a chain of command. That’s why no one retired below deck until The Holy Ghost, Christ, or God sent them a personal order to put their heart “at ease.”

As I hung there on a grappling hook, I was thankful that God wasn’t up for one of his marathon sessions. When the circle forming The Rite of God finally broke, they walked together like a congregation filing out of a Sunday service down the staircase into the steel belly of the Ark below. I watched as a grid of skylights spaced out on the deck began to fill with light from the living spaces below. When the deck was clear, I strapped on my night vision goggles, snuck across the dark deck, and spied through the windows of Sister Lei’s kitchen, and found nothing. Then I turned my attention to a nearby skylight. Crouching beside it, I took off my goggles and I spied down into a scene few storybankers in the city knew anything about.

As my eyes readjusted to the light, a scene took shape. It looked like a classic barracks lined with bunk beds and footlockers scattered around the open space without the usual military sense of symmetry. In one corner, a congregation of members in towels, toting hygiene kits, were waiting to use Ark’s communal bathroom. Other soldiers sat on their footlockers, watching their Holy Word Vessels, while a few ironed their Sunday best and hung them neatly at the ends of their beds. I watched in wonder as three Angels worked together to preen their wings, fold their frocks, and pray at the foot of their bunks before they crawled under their covers and closed their eyes. In a few moments, the frenzy of the routine died down. When they were all in their beds, quiet, poised to sleep, the new war soldiers hit the lights, acted As One, and shouted, “Halle-hoorah!”

That was my cue to make My Move. I fastened my goggles securely to my face, and I tiptoed down the staircase, passed the open entrance to the (whatever they called it) barracks, and descended to the next level. It appeared to be some sort of barn filled with what many storybankers call “food pets,” “walking meat,” or “domesticates.” It smelled like a barn too.

As I continued down, the animal noises were drowned-out by the drone of a ventilation contraption that pulled the breathable air down and blew the foul air up. In that moment, I was sure that a herd of elk could have passed right by and I wouldn’t have heard them. The New Ark had many doors that accessed both sides of the staircase. I checked them all as I snuck slowly downward. The next two levels appeared to be warehouse space stocked with thousands of frozen, canned, smoked, dried, and other preserves. Finding nothing overtly sinister there, I walked on and opened the door to the lowest of the Ark’s levels and peeked inside.

The last level was filled with new Storysold products: Holy Word Vessels (storyclocks), storybank account cards, remote storyclocks, and a stockpile of other parts for The Storysold Exchange system.

This was the evidence I was looking for. Sister Lei’s Army was plotting to invade the mainland with their new banking products!

“Holy hell,” I said aloud. “This is the mother lode.”

Suddenly a brilliant light flooded my goggles. I tore them off and tried to shield my eyes. Then I turned and stumbled as I tried to escape the light and the sound of voices coming down the stairs. It was hard to tell where any one thing was coming from. I felt like I was looking up The Staircase to Heaven, unable to get a grip on anything familiar.

“Behold!” a woman’s voice called from the light. “The Angel of the Lord appeared to the man in her pajamas and said, ‘It’s three moments in the morning! What the heck are you doing spying around down here?’”

“Uh,” I replied sheepishly. “I’m not spying.”

“Like heck you’re not,” a Demon Fighter replied.

“I’m not spying.” I insisted. “I’m journaling, because that’s what I do. I’m Wylie Jones, Globetrotting Hipster Journalist at your service.”

“We know who you are,” a Christian Solider stated flatly.

“It’s the Garden Tender’s Slothful Boyfriend!” another Christian Soldier behind her shouted loudly.

“Journalists use the door,” the Angel of the Lord said as I tried to hide my night vision goggles behind my back.

“Get him!” Don Quixote cried.

Then I watched as the Demon Fighter, as if in slow motion, leveled his crossbow at my head, pulled the trigger, and sent a small plunger-tipped dart down range. I watched the dart, unable to believe what I was seeing (or move from its path) as it plunged me between the eyes.

I pulled the dart off with a pop! and felt The Fear take hold as the Army surrounded me. I unzipped the front of my frog suit, reached for my government-issued 9mm handgun, and pulled it out.

In a similar scene, anywhere else in the world, I would have feasted on the fears of my enemies as they ran in terror of the power I was able to wield in the palm of my hand, but that didn’t happen here. They didn’t flinch an inch. They surrounded me and my gun, moving in for a group hug.   

“See! He’s got a gun,” a Greeter wearing plaid exclaimed. “He’s a real Honest-to-God Spy!”   

“I am not a Spy!” I cried as the Army hugged me, pinning my arm that held the gun firmly to my side. “I’m a Journalist!”

“You’re a Spy! Admit it,” Don prompted. “Why else would you be creeping around under the cover of night?”

“I was looking for a late night snack.”

“Lie!” the Angel of the Lord cried like I’d wounded her.

“It’s not a lie… I really like your pickles…and your jellies.”

“You’ve obviously never sampled our pickles. They’re terrible.”

“I know,” I lied again. “But they’re holy demon-free pickles, and that’s what matters. Am I right guys? Or am I right?”

“No more lies, Wylie,” I heard Sister Lei say from somewhere in the hug. “We caught you spying. You might as well confess.”

“Or what?” I lashed back. “Will you torture the truth from me?”

“No. We know the truth. You’re spying, because you are a Spy, plain and simple.” It was weird. I couldn’t see her face, but for some reason, I could see the Good Nun’s smile in my mind’s eye.    

“Oh really?” I challenged. “What country am I spying for?”

“It doesn’t matter which country you’re spying for.”

“Why not?” I hedged nervously.

“Because,” she replied, “we’re at war with them all.”

“Hosanna in the highest!” an Angel near me cheered. “You are a blessing from God, the answer to Our Prayers.”

“I am?” I asked as I struggled to break their hug.

“Yes!” she cheered as she held me in her warm embrace. “Our Prayers have been answered. Now we have our very own Spy!”

“Oh no, you don’t,” I replied as I fought off her hug.

“Devil be damned!” Don Quixote cheered as he joined the hug. “We have ourselves an Honest-to-god Spy!”

“No!” I screamed. “No, you don’t!”

“Oh yes. Yes, we do,” Wilma said as she joined in too.

The more I fought them, the more they rejoiced and praised God for their gift. The more I screamed, the more they laughed and carried on like it was a party. I saw no other way. The Man in Charge would not be pleased if he knew I fell into the hugs of our enemy, so I wrestled my gun from the tangle of arms and bodies, fired a round into the ceiling, and screamed, “No!”

I was surprised how little difference that made. The Congregational Army reacted to the gunshot like it was a sound effect in a wacky Hollywood action movie. I found that throwing my elbows around wildly worked a lot better. It wasn’t easy, but I was able to break their group hug long enough to make a run for it. Adrenaline pumping, I ran up the staircase, across the deck, and dove gracelessly into the Hidden Harbor. There are still parts of my body that haven’t forgiven me for that awkward fall. It hurt, but it became one of the most defining moments of My Life. Instead of swimming for the nearest ocean-going vessel like I’d planned, I swam straight for Maggie.

The first thing I did when I ran into our shop—panting like the hounds of hell were after me—was wave my gun around frantically for a few beats before I barricaded the door to keep what I imagined would be a mob of Frankensteinian proportions at bay. I’d seen every spy movie ever made. Once the bad guys caught the good guys, they would try to kill them. Shoot them. Burn them. Hang them. Inject them with poison. Lock the hero in a cell and let nature do all the dirty work. That was what happened to spies in all civilized societies, and I was afraid that was what Mr. Chester Weston and his city full of Terror Banking Cultists were going to do to me.

My Storybank Account – Scene Thirty Three, 

THE PART WHERE OUR HEROES BEGIN TO TELL THE TRUTH TO THEMSELVES AND EVERYONE ELSE…

The last thing I expected Maggie to do when I ran into the shop waving my gun around was throw her arms around my neck and kiss me. I didn’t know it at the time, but she’d watched my scene on New Ark IV via the broadcast Centurion made with his Tinker Glasses.

“We’re free!” Maggie screamed in joy.

“What do you mean?” I started, but before I could finish my thought Maggie kissed me again, square on the lips.

“You did it,” Maggie beamed. “You really did it!”

“Did what?” I asked as I propped a table against the door.

“You royally fucked up!” Maggie exclaimed. “And now everyone in the city knows the truth about our stories.”

“What are you talking about?” I screamed as I leaned on the door.

Maggie grabbed my arm, and tried to pull me to her. “Do me now, Jones, with The Lights on. It’s the perfect time for a love scene.”

“How can you think about sex at a time like this?” I yelled and aimed my gun at the door. “They’re coming for us.”

Maggie blushed. “I can’t help it,” she grinned ogle-eyed. “You’re finally acting like a real spy and it’s making me hot.”

“You’re shitting me,” I said as I lowered my gun.

“Don’t be a weenie. Do it now, before the moment passes.”

“Listen to me, Maggie. This is serious. Once we’re caught, they will likely kill us in some horribly creative way, and then dangle our rotting bodies outside their city walls as a warning to our fellow countrymen…”

I talked and paced, and then I failed to talk and I failed to pace. That’s when Maggie kissed me. I surrendered immediately. “OKAY!” I said, flashing a winning smile, trying to look brave. “I’m in.”

Maggie looked surprised. “You’re in, what?”

“Let’s do it…now before I say no.”

“With The Lights on?”

“Yes, I’m ready to do it with The Lights on,” I replied, giving my body a direct order to fall in love with Maggie for real.

“Fuck yeah!” Maggie cheered as she flipped our switches and faced our nearest A-eye. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re now floating in space! Wylie and I will now be producing a love scene with The Lights on!”

I don’t remember when I set my gun down, but I reviewed our love scene later and discovered that it was the first thing to go before my frog suit and underwear. The next to go were Maggie’s shirt, pants, and underwear. In any other Hollywood spy movie, we would’ve had a director there to instruct us on the best way to fit our love scene into the standard societal view: she gazes up into his eyes; he mounts her gently as the music swells; she moans and calls his name; he pumps stoically and tries to think about clouds. That wasn’t what happened on our set. In our movie, we were fast and sloppy. The pots, pans, and leftovers on the work island crashed to the floor as we flopped like fish across the counter. I took a jar full of cream that was warming for butter on the bar, poured it on her chest, and rubbed it everywhere. I kissed her lips. I kissed her neck. I kissed her breasts. I kissed her belly, and then I ran my tongue down between her thighs and Kissed Her There until she laughed aloud and pushed me away. Then she kissed me, and pulled me close, into her, and my body tingled with power and pleasure every time I was welcomed into the most beautiful home of the most beautiful person I’d known.   

“Whoa!” I said, bracing for impact. “Ah,” I said as the ecstasy rolled in, ending in a breathtaking finale.

“Now that’s how you do a love scene,” I said as faced Maggie. She was still breathing heavy, sprawled naked across the counter.

Maggie rested her head back on hands, looking satisfied. “Good job Wylie Jones,” she laughed. “We need to do that more often.”   

I looked at the door, and asked, “Now what?”

Maggie didn’t miss a beat. “Well,” she laughed again. “Now that you got the girl, we have to save the day and live happily ever after.”

“And how do you propose we do that?” I said, stepping back like I’d just received a garbled message through a broken phone.

She sat up, looked me in the eyes, and said, “Let’s get married.”

“Married?” I said, almost running for the panel of switches. “Are you out of your got-damned mind?”

“What’s wrong?” she asked as I flipped our channels to PRIVATE and put my clothes on. “Don’t you think we could live happily ever after?”

“No!” was the only thing I could think to say.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Maggie said as she stood, still naked (dripping cream), and walked past her pile of clothes in my direction. “I know you’re an Asshole, but that’s not all you are…we can do this.”    

“Do what?” I asked as she reached out and held my hand, and kept me from buttoning the last button of my skinny jeans.

“We can make each other happy.”   

“Yeah,” I asked. “What does marriage have to do with it?”

“Maybe, with some work,” Maggie smiled, “our stories could be great together. Did you see how great we were today?”

“I think sex is a poor foundation for healthy relationships.”

“And I think enslaving ourselves to your stupid, fucking, mission is a poor foundation for anything. We need to edit that part out pronto.”   

I shook my head like I was trying to shake her words back out of my ears as I said, “I can’t…I don’t know how to quit…not now.”

“Nobody’s asking you to quit anything,” Maggie smiled. “We want to help you be the best All American Spy that you can be.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’ve been talking with my cast and they think that one of the few ways we can pull ourselves out of this lie is to believe in it, with all our hearts and minds, and make it real. You know, do it with The Lights on.”

“Believe it, make it real?” I laughed nervously. “There’s no way we could ever do this for real.”

“I can love you for real,” she said with confidence, “but I’m not too sure if you can do the same.”

Her line hit me like a sack of bricks. I never, not once, did I think that Maggie loved me like I loved her. “Are you on drugs?” I asked, only half joking. “You don’t love me. I’m an Asshole.”

“I don’t show it, because you are an Asshole—always trying to control everything I do. But, you’re definitely lovable. You’re the weirdest guy I’ve ever met,” she said sincerely. “In my book, that’s a good thing.”

“Out with it,” I said in disbelief. “What’s your angle?”

Maggie showered and put her clothes on. Then she studied me for a few beats before she said, “I’m in love with this city.”

“I know…but it’s not right. It’s a Terror Banking Cult.”   

“I’d do anything to stay here, with you.”

“Even marry me?”

“Yes,” she replied. “I’d especially marry you.”

She put her arms tenderly around my waist, and said, “Think of it as an arranged marriage, like the marriages kings and other wealthy assholes used to make for their chattel assets and daughters.”

“I feel like I’m missing something,” I said, still unwilling to believe Maggie could love me. “What’s really going on here?”

“I want to marry you for your story.”

“Ha, ha,” I laughed nervously. “You said that like I had a desirable story of some kind to wed yourself to…”

“Like I said,” she tried to explain, “we want to help you be the best All American Spy Guy you can be, with us, here in the city.”

“Don’t you get it?” I shouted suddenly. “The gig is up. Sister Lei and her army of Jesus freaks found me out. How can I be the best spy I can be when our cover story has been blown?”

I could see that she liked that question, because she leaned closer to me, and said, “Easy.”

“I don’t think you understand,” I said and paused. “I’m at the part in ‘my story’ where they throw us to the sharks for spying on them.”

“You’re wrong,” Maggie replied coolly.

“You think so?” I shot back. “These people have to know that our  Government doesn’t trust them by now.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “They know we were sent to spy on them.”

“Well,” I pleaded, “don’t you think they might want to retaliate for that or something? There’s a real possibility that the Government will do everything in Its power to keep this new economy from spreading around the globe. Do you understand what that will mean?”

“All I know is,” Maggie replied, “I believe you could learn to love a better story if you gave us, and this city, half a chance.”

“Supposing, I do,” I winced. “What if I give us a chance? What would happen next? I mean, what would I have to do to do that?”

“I’ll be easy,” Maggie said again. “We’d join Wilderness Guide and her friend Jarl in their plot to defend the city against employables.”

“I knew it!” I cried. “I knew you were in cahoots with that lanky owl-eyed granola-cruncher in the tennis skirt.”

“Guide has a lot of good ideas about how we can defend this city from an invasion of death dealers.”

“Death dealers?”

“Yes,” Maggie smiled. “That’s what we call you.”

I pondered that. Then I asked, “Do any of those bright ideas of hers involve me? Or you wanting to marry me for my story?”

“Yes,” she said, and took a deep breath. “Guide’s barbarian friend Jarl the Uplander has been looking for a blockbuster theme with enough star power to unite the whole city, and he believes that, well, since we introduced the conflict between Storysold: City and The American Way of Life, we’re the most qualified to reach a climax and end it.”

“Forgive me if I’m not following,” I said as I began to look around for my gun. “What do you mean by qualified?”      

“I’ve never felt anything so strongly in my life,” she replied. “We did this, and now we have to make this right. It’s our responsibility.”

“And you think marrying me will do that?”

“You make it sound cheap,” Maggie sighed. “It’s not like I’m a gold-digging hooker trying to marrying the farmer for The Farm.”

“Isn’t that exactly what you’re proposing to do?”

“Isn’t that exactly what you’ve been doing?” she challenged. “You’ve been working overtime to make this bullshit cover story of yours work in the name of furthering your career. If that’s not Marrying the Farmer for The Farm I don’t know what is! And besides, ending The Conflict we began with a proper wedding is thematically correct…very Shakespearean.”

“But you’re not a farmer. You’re a Garden Tender.”

“I am, yes, but,” Maggie tried to explain. “All I’m saying is, I’ve been standing beside you all this time playing Bullshit. I’m not real, to you, or the Assholes in Washington. I’m an expendable asset in your mission.”

“I don’t think you’re expendable; not anymore.”

“I know you don’t…”

“Sometimes I can’t think straight because I want you so much.”

“I know,” she said, and put her lips to my ear. “And I know that if you put even half as much love into our marriage as you do your precious mission, we will put the great lovers of history to shame.”

The scene ended with Assah. We talked, plotted, planned, and drank heavily. We worked, as a team, to craft an email to Agent Sturgis, reporting the “stockpile of terror banking cult supplies” that I’d discovered in the belly of the Ark. We elected to not tell him the whole truth, not yet.

My Storybank Account – Scene Thirty Four,

THE PART WHERE WILDERNESS SECURITY GUIDE DECLARES A NEW WAR ON WYLIE’S BLOWN COVER STORY…

When I heard the beat of trekking poles in the hallway on the other side of my barricade the next morning, I was still mostly naked, hung over, and feeling vulnerable in the light of yesterday’s dramas.

“One moment,” Maggie called through the door as we returned the tables and chairs to their previous positions. The Garden Tender was already dressed in her gardening costume (grubby T-shirt, overalls, sandals, and straw sunhat), and her Wonder Bike was packed with props, ready to roll.

“Open up,” a voice called. “It’s Guide.”

“What do you want?” I asked.

“I’ve come to help you, Whoever You Are.”

“Help me with what—exactly?” I asked as I reached for the security of my gun like a spy hero, remembering what her partner did to Earl.    

  “I’ve come to bail you out of that rut of yours.”

“I’m not in any rut,” I replied as Maggie opened the door.

I stood unshaven in my boxers, with rice wine on my breath, while Maggie waved goodbye, pedaled down the hallway, and left me to the mercy of Guide and her partner Fritzee Good Boy. I couldn’t remember if the Shepard was half wild or borderline tame, but he trotted into our shop without a leash, wagging its tail, followed by Guide. She was wearing her usual costume: hair pulled back behind her owl mask, tennis skirt, pastel polyester shirt, well-worn hiking boots, and lightweight backpack. She stood in the doorway staring at me, serious and strange, like a shiny alien on a new planet.

Instinctively, I reached down to pet Fritzee. Then I thought better of it, and I reached for my silky short running shorts instead.

“Allow me to put it another way,” Guide said, as I pulled my T-shirt down over my head. “Wylie Jones, I’ve come to save your life from certain doom in the name of your sponsors: Maggie the Garden Tender (and future Fabulous Food Producer), King Andrew, Captain Chaos, Jarl the Uplander, Olaf the Sharpeyed, Uncle Sam, Lady Liberty, American Spirit, a few other All American Dreamstates from The Band, and myself.”   

“You’ve come to save my life from certain doom?” I asked, trying to laugh. “That sounds like a prologue to war.”

Guide almost smiled. “It is,” she said. “We, your aforementioned cast of sponsors, are at war with you. We’re all tired of watching your crap grass story grow. Some of us call this production, The New War to Help Wylie Get the Girl and Live Happily Ever After, while others call it The Wedding Plot.”

“Ha!” I said, trying to laugh the nonsense off again. “I think you’re missing an important point. I’ve seen enough movies to know that I have to save the day first. Then I get the girl and live happily ever after.”

Guide almost smiled again, and said, “Your spy adventure to get the girl and live happily ever after is how you’re going to save the day.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Clearly,” she said, stretching her legs. “The question is, do you care enough to hunt for answers…” Then she was gone, and I was alone. I looked down at Fritzee. He looked back with his black marble eyes, wagged his tail, and then he followed Guide out the door. I should have spent the day in solitary trying to write my way out of telling Agent Sturgis the whole truth and nothing but the truth about how our covers were blown, but I didn’t. Instead, I pulled on my tube socks, laced up my sneakers, and followed Guide.

I had to run to catch her before she closed the big steel door of the Elevator Tube. “Are you ready for war?” she asked, holding the door.

I caught my breath, and said, “I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Very well,” she said. “Then get in.”

Once the door was sealed, Guide used the hand pump at the center of the Tube to make it go. “So,” I asked, “where are you taking me?”

“What do you think this is, the part where the brave space cowboy asks his hideous alien captors where they’re taking him?”

“No; I just want to know what’s going to happen next.”

“Naturally,” she replied. “Most people feel better when they know what’s going to happen next. That’s why, in the name of our wilderness security here, I am asking you to put your story under ‘script arrest.’ It’s the best way, I know, to help my wilderness creature friends feel better about what’s going to happen next in a story as unhappy as yours.”

“I’m happy. We made love with The Lights on.”

“That’s good, but you’re still developing a tragedy that’s set to blow and reign hell down on everyone around you; unless you edit it now, and ‘head it off at the pass,’ as your American heroes would say.”

“Maggie and I are happy,” I protested again. “I’ll never forget the day when I met Maggie in Portland. She emerged like the Lady of the Lake from her hoop house with a scepter of carrots bunched and banded in her hands. It was a vision of beauty, love at first sight.”

“Oh yes The Love Mythology, as Maggie calls it. We’ve heard you recite those lines from your cover story many times now.”

“And how long has she been tattling on our cover story?”

The Elevator Tube stopped at the surface, in the Common Area set under our Weather Bubble’s Fresh Water Reservoir. Guide cranked the door open, and said, “You mean, you want to know how long everyone in the city has known about your character the employable, government spy?

“Yeah,” I stood shocked as the truth rolled in. “How long have you known that Maggie and I were spying on you?”

“Let’s see,” Guide started as we weaved our way through the artful Egyptian/Greek/Atlantean style pillars in the Common Area, over an arched bridge, and out, into the blinding light of the Garden Surface. “Bill the Bum on the Bio-Friendly Bum Army was the first to note that your signatures were too out of whack to be real,” Guide went on. “Bill and Traveler spend some time reading and fleshing you out before you boarded the Storytime Machine.”

“What about Maggie?” I asked like I cross examining her.

“What about Maggie?” Guide shot back as she paused at the edge of a dark thicket, a wild park that bordered the Canalway.

“When did Maggie tell you the truth?”

Guide didn’t reply right away. I follow her to a trailhead at the edge of the thicket, where she stopped and said, “Maggie didn’t have to say a word for the whole city to know you two fakers were hiding something big.” Then she pulled a handheld Storysold TV from her backpack, powered it up, selected the moments she was looking for, and handed it to me.

“After Traveler felt confident in her readings, she paid Maggie a visit at the Happy Garden a few days before we introduced you to my story with the feeding scene Fritzee did with Earl,” Guide narrated the scene I watched on screen. “Traveler made no attempt to hide, but—since you’re asking now—you must have been too busy spying/drinking all Solji’s Assah and watching TV to hear what they talked about while they harvested mustards that day…”

“Traveler asked Maggie if she wanted our help busting free from her ‘abusive relationship’ with you,” Guide narrated, hiking on. “That’s how she framed it at first. Maggie’s reply wasn’t at all what we expected…”

I watched Maggie’s reaction to Traveler’s offer on screen. She didn’t look up. She continued to harvest her arugula. “I knew someone would Get It someday,” Maggie replied coolly. “Storybankers read each other’s signatures like employables watch TV shows. I knew I’d eventually have to explain to all my wonderful new friends why I didn’t tell you the truth the moment I realized I was one of you. And I know now that you won’t likely understand why I want to stay with him. I don’t think I fully Get It either, but it comes down to this: I like, maybe even love, Wylie. He’s the weirdest man I’ve ever known. And I’m curious to see if he has what it takes to one day make his dream come true, and become a real American Hero like 007. Yeah, I know. It’s that bad. James Bond is one of his heroes; Jesus and Iron Man too.”

“What then?” Traveler asked, horrified. “What if he succeeds in his quest to become a real American Hero? Is that a good thing?”

Maggie continued, “This city is unlike any city on the planet because storybankers support each other’s dreams, fantasies…and insanities. I’ve seen how hard you work to support the folks you’ve chosen to cast in your story. It defies common dollars and sense. Take Chester for example. I’m in awe of the work you’ve done with him. Or should I say, ‘in spite of him.’ If that’s not love, I don’t know what is. Crazy as it is…”

Traveler turned to Maggie and said, “I knew I liked you.”

“Wylie has a real desire to be good,” Maggie continued, as I watched the screen in disbelief. “I want to continue my support of Wylie’s Hero Fantasy, because I believe that one day he will walk out onto the Garden Surface, see the clouds forming in the Weather Bubbles, and see the storybankers building better homes all around him, and our hero’s going to Get It. I only hope we don’t have to wait until we reach The End.”

With that, Guide turned the screen off.

“You see,” she explained. “It was Maggie who persuaded not only Traveler, but the rest of the city, to cast their live-action votes for your American Hero Fantasy, and help you maintain the illusion of your fiction.”

I wish she had punched me, or pulled a gun, or did anything other than drop The Truth in my hands. Inside I was screaming: They were totally on to us! Maggie knew our cover story was blown before I blew it, but she failed to report that scene to her superior! I was so angry. I didn’t know any other way to react. All the heroes I knew got angry.   

“Who are you, some sort of insane social worker?”

“No,” Guide replied. “I’m a pest control operator who specializes in the non-lethal environmental control of pesky characters hosted by invasive humans who threaten the wilderness security of my friends.”

“Is that so,” was all I could think to say at first.

“I’m also very good at tracking and trapping the Disney rats that are too infested with the predator-free comforts of civilization to take The Return Trail Home. The fat rats taste great Kentucky fried on a stick…”

“So that’s it?” I cried like an angry hero. “I’m a pest?”   

“No,” she replied. “You’re hosting a pestilence.”

“What’s the fucking difference?”

“You aren’t the enemy. That Asshole in you is.”

“Why isn’t Maggie here?” I cried some more. “Is she too afraid of my ‘abusive Boyfriend’ character to tell me this herself?”

Guide didn’t reply in words. She turned away, planted her poles, and prepared to continue her hike into the ticket on a trail that looked more like a green tunnel than a trail. “Why do you always have to move?” I cried, growing angrier by the moment. “Stand still and face me, will you?”

Before I knew it, I was grabbing one of her trekking poles and pulling it towards me. Guide stopped, eyed my hand on her pole with rage in her eyes, and said, “I am Wilderness Security Guide. If I’m here telling you this and not Maggie, there’s a good reason for it.”

“Thus speaks the wise old owl, right?” I laughed. “I call bullshit. I can see from your eyes…you’re hiding behind that mask like villains do.”

“I’m going to ask you, once again, to place your story under script arrest and help us blaze a better trail for you,” Guide said, cool as a cop.

“No,” I said, and grabbed her pole with both hands.

“You have until the count of ten to let go of my pole before I rip your ear off your head,” she warned. Then she grabbed my earlobe.

“I thought you people didn’t believe in violence?”

“I never said anything about that,” she almost smiled as if daring me to make another dumb move. “I believe, like many of us believe, that we can’t kill bad ideas, or destroy bad behaviors, or conquer toxic ways of life, wielding a bad action that has no lasting value. It’s strategically stupid to expect a man like you to change, in The End, on your own—without making a radical change in your environment. But I have no qualms about ripping your ear off to get my prop back. Violence is great for producing short-term changes.”

She started to count. Before she got too far, I let the poles go. “Do you really expect me to arrest myself?” I asked.

“Naturally,” she replied, stone-faced. “It’s an important first scene in the development of a happy, profitable character of your own. It wouldn’t do any of us any good if I arrested you, threw you in a cell, or forced you to join a program that took responsibility for running your life. I don’t want to be the ‘social working super hero’ who can’t understand why you failed to become the responsible citizen I told you to be. You will not understand what it is like to govern your life if you never learn how to arrest yourself and blaze a better script for your story when you fuck it up.”

I rolled my eyes. “Arrest myself!” I exclaimed as Guide hiked down the trail into the green tunnel. “You people are so weird!”

“You people?” Guide replied. “You sound like Weston.”

“I suppose I’m suffering from dope currency addiction too?”

“You do show many symptoms of cancerous irresponsibility.”

“OKAY. I Get It,” I said after a few long moments of silence. “This is a test to see whether or not I’ll follow you anywhere you go?”

“Tests are only good for brainwashing,” Guide replied. “I’m always moving, because if I stay too long in one scene…they’ll find me.”

“They who?” I asked, as we walked into an open, cave-like clearing at the center of the lightless thicket.

“You’ll see,” she almost smiled. “They’ll be along anytime now.”

Like it was timed, a fresh-faced smiling man emerged from a trail on the other side of the clearing. He looked out of breath, but the much shorter man hiking in behind him was wheezing with exhaustion. Both men were odd looking, but the short wheezing man commanded my attention with such force I had to avert my eyes. His small body was gnarled by some unseen disease, but he wasn’t hiding it. He was wearing nothing but socks and sandals.    

Behind them both followed a phalanx of other men.

“Hey!” the fresh-faced man called out with a Swedish accent. “There you are, my fine Wilderness Guide!”

“Hay is for horses, Klas,” Guide almost smiled at the first man.

Klas was dressed in a costume of Sweden: a waistcoat with hand embroidered flowers, yellow pants made of moleskin, a white shirt and blue silk ribbon, white stockings, hand woven knee ribbons, and a hat with hand woven ribbon. The Swede didn’t introduce himself to me, or even look at me for that matter. “I was wondering,” Klas said, turning on the charm. “After all you did for the Swedes yesterday, helping me blaze a better trail for my story, I was, well…wondering if we could…you know…”

“No—thank you, Klas,” Guide cut in. “As you can see, I am working now. Stick with the toy-making plot. It’s sexy. And remember: your lover won’t cast her live action votes for you, much longer, if you keep refusing to work with her. And watching Sweden on TV doesn’t count. Like I say…”

Klas lowered his head and recited Guide’s line: “You can’t work at a bad relationship without a good theme to work for.”

“That’s The Good Part, Klas.” Guide almost smiled. “I’m leaving you now, friend. Mr. Jones and I have a lot of work to do.”

With that, Fritzee—sensing it was time to go again—gave some love to the duck/toad man, barked, spun around a few times, and charged down the trail. Before Guide followed her partner, she knelt down to face the quiet man who’d gathered at her feet. Then she pulled a costume from her backpack and handed it to him. As the man changed into his costume, and embody his new character, the thicket began to rustle with life. One by one—rats, deer, quail, raccoons, owls, and other creatures I didn’t recognize—Guide’s wild creature friends emerged from the thicket, surrounding her like singing Snow White in a cheesy Disney movie. Only our Snow White wasn’t mooning melancholically in the woods waiting for Superman to save her from her life. Guide was grinning ear-to-ear, like a proud poppa, as her half-wild human friend zipped up his jumpsuit, strapped his new house fly face mask on like a football helmet, and transformed into his hard-earned new character, Pest Predator.

“Want to come along for the ride, Predator?” Guide asked. “I could use your help with a juicy bedbug infestation this afternoon.”

Pest Predator said nothing. He simply smiled as Guide made room for him in her backpack—and then they followed Fritzee down the trail like Luke and Yoga on a training run through the Dagobah swamp.   

The man’s new fly face mask was creepy. His new bug-eyes seemed to stare through me as I tried my best to match Guide’s brutish pace.

“Klas?” I asked, trying to ignore Pest Predator.

“Swedes, the Sweden, or Klas, is a member of the popular theme known as The Committee for the Preservation of Nations, which was founded by Mother Russia, Uncle Sam, and the storybankers embodying Poland, Peru, Ethiopia, Finland, and Nation Heart of the Cherokee. In Klas’s action packed telling of his nation character, he’s the Sweden’s Santa.”

“There’s a committee for the preservation of nations here?”

“Naturally,” she replied. “Now that the unemployables of Storysold: City have been freed from their national land bodies, many of them have chosen of their own free will to govern their lives, bodies, and stories with their authentic national signatures. There are many storybankers here who feel a strong sense of patriotic duty to represent their nations of choice and keep the tradition of manifesting national fictions alive.”

I thought about that one for a few moments, until we turned from the wild park onto a crowded, sunlit throughway leading back to our Residential Shopping Center. “We’re going back home?” I asked—suddenly aware that we were hiking in a big circle.

“Home?” Guide almost laughed.

“Yeah,” I replied. “You know, the place where I sleep.”

“You and I don’t have a home, not really,” she commended. “You’re still living in your Fortress of Solitude back on the mainland somewhere; and I, well, I’m happier living conflict-to-conflict like my wilder friends.”

“Where do you sleep?”

“You’ll see in a few moments,” she replied. “I own a shop on level one of our Residential Shopping Center.”

She was answering my questions well enough, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling of being lost. I felt more out of control with every step.

“Is Wilderness Security Guide your real name?” I asked, as I watched her long legs glide into the Common Area like a specter. “I mean, no way you were born like this. If I know one thing about heroes and villains is…nobody wears a mask unless something life-alteringly bad happens to you.”

“The Mirror,” she replied, stopping long enough to face me. “That’s a classic move. Turn the conflict around. Make it all about me, and my flaws, and my troubles, so you don’t have to read your own story.”

“You call that move The Mirror?” I laughed. “My instructor back in spy school called it, Chapter Five, Lesson Five Alpha.”

“Isn’t that the truth,” Guide gave a look to the nearest A-eye like old movie stars do when they use the 2nd person perspective to communicate with their audience. “What else did you learn in that spy school of yours?”     

I shrugged. “So, are you going to share your story or not?”

  “Before I became Guide,” she answered. “I was known as Odessa the Unicorn, because I never stayed In Scene longer than a few moments…”

“Why? Do you have an anxiety disorder or something?”

“In those days,” she replied, ignoring my question as we waited for an Elevator Tube. “I was perfecting the art of tracking signatures, or what a spy might call ‘body language.’ I didn’t stay in one scene too long because I didn’t want anyone, especially men, to get an accurate read on my signature. It took years before I felt comfortable enough with the humans here to stay In Scene and storysell with them. Before that, Fritzee and I balanced our accounts with the edible plants and animals in the wild parks, following infestations like they were dinner bells, supporting the rats, rabbits, deer, and birds, keeping their stories from becoming too civil and infested, preying on and protecting them as their natural predators, and honoring their stories in The Action.”

Once again, I had no clue what she was talking about. When I thought of pest control operators, I thought of exterminators like John Goodman in Arachnophobia, or Christopher Walken in Mouse Hunt. They were never serious characters like the one I was reading now.

“You perfected the art of tracking body language?” I asked, trying to keep her talking, so she wouldn’t ask me any questions.   

“Tracking is my most valuable skill,” Guide continued to tell her side of the story. “Our signatures never lie. They’re like mirrors. For example, I saw your eyes sparkle with a hint of passion when I walked into your shop this morning. I know you’re attracted to me, because your signature never lies. The hard part is to be OK with knowing that.”

“Why is that so hard?”

“Because I’d rather you keep your fucking sparkle eyes to yourself.”

“That hit a nerve,” I grinned like I’d just popped all the balloons at the fair and won the big prize. “So,” I began to dig again. “How did a nice girl like you get a taste for rat flesh? I mean, I thought rat catchers wore capes and eye patches and preyed on the innocence of children?”

Guide didn’t reply right away. We hiked in silence until we arrived in front of a shop that had no door, or wall, to close it off from the rest of the shops on the first level of our Residential Shopping Center.

“It’s a long story I don’t care to tell you,” Guide finally replied as we walked in. The first thing that caught my eye was an orange, dome tent in the rear near a bubble-shaped window that faced the top of the Hollow Core’s many waterfalls. The tent was open. Inside, a book was cracked open across a sleeping bag like someone had left it in a hurry. At the center of the open space there was a “kitchen” with food storage bins, a few buckets for washing, and a cooler, but there wasn’t no place set for guests with tables or chairs. Guide was right. Her shop looked more like a camp than a home.

Guide set Pest Predator down on the floor. He immediately began to inspect the shop top to bottom.

“Are you hunting for bugs?” I asked the man.

“Yes,” he replied, and then—after a few more moments of looking for bugs—he walked out of the shop without another word.

“Is he okay?” I asked Guide.

“How do you mean?”

“Is he, you know, well enough to be left unsupervised?”

Guide didn’t reply, so I looked around for something else to use to command her attention. Along the wall, what looked to be a news anchor’s desk was set with a theater-sized screen behind it. On the desk, a handcrafted mug had the words—THE EARTH SHOW NEWS—written on it. On the big screen, I saw the mirrored signatures of the desk, the chair behind it, the mug, and the screen itself. Curious, I walked in front of the A-eyes that fed the news scene, and I saw my signature appear on screen.

“What’s all this, looks like a set for a news program?”

“This is my business,” Guide replied. “I do The Earth Show News three times a day, every day.”    

“I’m guessing” I wondered aloud. “The News today will feature a report about a spy who was caught red-handed in Sister Lei’s Ark?”

“Bingo,” Guide almost smiled.

“I wonder,” I said as I set in the office chair and kicked my feet up on her desk, “what good is reporting the news in a city where stories are king currency? Do you report on other people’s stories, or your own?”   

“I’ve discovered that most, if not all earth creatures feel better when they know what’s going to happen next, even if what happens next is horrible or only happens in their minds. The Earth Show News is about providing that service for my cast of antagonists. No matter how bad, criminal, or guilty of wrongdoing an earth creature is…everyone, deep down, wants their story to be known by an audience of their peers. It’s a basic human need like air, water,  shelter, and sex. We all need to be known.”   

“Am I your antagonist?”

“Yes,” Guide reported. “Your pesky, employable, government-issued spy character is threatening the security of every creature in this city.”

“What about you?” I pushed back.

“What about me?”

“Maybe I’m not the threat here…maybe you, and your whicky-wacky city full of storybankers are the greatest threat to The Freedom of hard working people since the communist revolution?”

She read me coldly and said, “Now I know you don’t Get It yet.”   

I put my hands behind my head. “Let me guess,” I said as I stretched my legs across her desk. “You lost your way at Girl Scout Camp one summer and your life was saved by a lonely old Apache woman who taught you how to track and hunt and live self-sustainably in harmony with nature. Then one day, when you were off ultra running on magic mushrooms with the handsome young man you met when you were foraging for wild blueberries on your 18th birthday, the man-hating bear you were supposed to be tracking dropped into your camp and ate your adopted grandmother. Guilt stricken, you aced all your college entrance exams and joined a sorority—Kappa, Kappa Delta Can We Help Ya, Help Ya—but swore to never use your Apache skills to track down and woo handsome men ever again. Now you honor your grandmother’s memory by using your gifts for the common good like Wonder Woman without a golden lasso, or an invisible jet. Have you ever thought about changing your name to Owl Woman, or Who Owl the Earth Guardian?”

“You’re right,” Guide gripped her poles. “Before I took my journey into The Wilderness, I was sorority girl.”

“You look like you were a sorority girl.”

“I was a model too, with a trust fund. I owned a condo, wore the latest fashions, and drove a yellow Karmann Ghia.”

“So, Guide, what happened to your perfect life?”

“I woke one day in my perfect world,” she replied, “and the ‘what’s hot’ column in Cosmo read—HATE THE WHOLE OF CIVILIZATION—so I did. What else do you need to know before we get started?”   

“That’s not how it happened,” I said, as I began to rifle through the desk. “There’s a man and a broken heart in this story. I can feel it.”

“Yes,” she replied. “His name was Rick.”

“I knew it!” I declared triumphantly. “Go on.”

“Rick had spiky hair and a habit of licking his front teeth like he was licking blood,” Guide went on. “He was my modeling agent. He said I had a ‘future in show business.’ Then one afternoon when we’d finished shooting early, he asked to see me in his office. I walked in, he shut the door…and I was sixteen. If I had the skills to track his signature better at the time, I would have edited out that storyline long before he got his hooks into me.”

“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry…I didn’t know…”

“Would your so-called journalist like some more juicy details for your so-called news story?” she asked, still seemingly calm. “Would you feel more in control, more on top of things, to know how he did it? Or where he did it? Or how many times I tried to ask my parents for help…before I was rushed to the ER overdosing on the drugs they prescribed to cure My Disorder. Like you, they believed I was the one with the problem, because—like you Mr. Real American Hero Jones—heroes don’t have problems. We, our family, our corporations, our  nation, our civilizations were on our way to becoming perfectly proven math equations—pure vessels for The Same Old Story. And I’d crossed over. I was no longer pure. I might have made a recovery and returned to my life, playing host body to my Generic of choice before The Fourth Wall, if I hadn’t seen what I’d seen in that emergency room. What I saw was an army of men, women, and Americans all working so hard—so diligently—to make me believe that I was the one who was broken, embraced my victimhood, make a shrine to my pain and suffering, cling to my immoral wound, and become a professional patient in need of constant fixing. Trouble was, I saw their truth. I wasn’t a thing that need fixing. I am one of many parts of The Earth Show, a fierce wild creature in constant search of food, water, shelter, and story. I saw The Thing that needed to be fixed. It was a Thing called ‘civilization’ that could be fixed like a broken engine if we weren’t all hosting It like answers to test questions. It’s insane to believe we, as individual humans, can be held responsible for the good or bad parts of a super massive story we have no control over.”

I didn’t reply. She’d given me what I’d asked for, and it didn’t feel good. Embarrassed, I set my feet back on the floor—and surrendered my position behind the desk. To cover for the awkward moment, I tried to play pet with Fritzee again, without success, and watched, like a spy, as Guide stepped into her orange tent and zipped it behind her.

“I see,” I nodded, feeling a sudden strong need to make Guide feel better. “Now I understand why you were running from those men…”

Guide stepped back out wearing a suit and tie. She looked serious, like Dan Rather, or that guy who sits at the end of every bar in the world and tells it like it is. Guide sat behind the news desk and started pressing buttons on a control panel imbedded in the desk.

“I’m not running from them,” she replied. “I’m intentionally baiting them. Pesky Assholes always need someone to follow…”

“I don’t follow,” I laughed. “How does that make the city more secure for your wild creature friends?”

“Like I said,” she replied. “Everyone needs attention.”

“Yeah, but…those guys can’t follow you forever…”

“No,” Guide almost smiled. “Eventually they’ll Get It. They will begin to write their own stories and feel more in control of their lives. Then my wild creature friends will be more secure, because there will be one less Asshole in The Earth Show who needs to fold some other creature into their group insanity to feel more in control of the story they have no control over.”

“Huh,” I said, searching for a weakness in her theory. “And how long does it usually take for uh, these Assholes to Get It?”

“Depends,” Guide said as she kicked her feet up on the desk. “How long will you need to follow Maggie around before you Get It?”

“I’m not following Maggie,” I protested. “I’m her supervisor.”

“Ha,” Guide smiled. “That’s what they all say.”

My Storybank Account – Scene Thirty Five,

THE PART WHERE A CELEBRITY SPYRRATOR GETS A BAILOUT ON GUIDE’S FLASH REPORT…

I faced Guide’s news desk and screen, made the blankface look, and watched her production of The Earth Show News. Best I could read the newest new part of her new news show was the part where she was tracking live action stories that affected the daily actions of her featured antagonists and audiences alike. In that way, The Earth Show News was more like a retro weather report than reports about the happenings of distant nations, distant politicians, distant celebrities, or generically engineered stories in general.

Guide stood before the big screen behind her desk. The Wall showed a map of her working territory in the city. It looked like a Google driving map featuring a strange array of location markers, emojis, and other hieroglyphic symbols dotted throughout its digital landscape. I didn’t understand it, but (like a driving map) The Action in symbols was updated in storytime.

Her delivery was exceedingly dry. She began, introducing one featured antagonist after the next. Guide would deliver a few lines about any “up to the moment” developments of her antagonists’ stories—like the foraging route of a momma bear with cubs or the whiskey drinking habits of a classic man who was struggling to surrender his control of his wife’s story—and then she would post a emoji beside each her antagonists’ symbolic marker and move onto the next news story. When her routine production of The Earth Show News had concluded, I thought she was done with me. “The blank face you put next to my American flag/spy marker wasn’t so bad,” I said with relief. “At least you didn’t use the Asshole emoji you used for that other guy…”

The look Guide shot me from behind her desk would rival that of an angry wolf. Apparently she wasn’t done telling my story. Without offering me any advice or heads up, Guide jumped into The Action. “Before I begin The Flash Report for today, I’d like to thank all my wilderness creature friends for investing their moments in The Earth Show,” Guide began. “Today, I’m deep diving one of our city’s newest creatures. The human calls himself, ‘Wylie Jones.’ Sit pretty and wave to the A-eyes, and say hello to our wild friends, Wylie.”

It was supposed to be parody, but I straightened my back and waved my fingers at my nearest A-eyes. Now I’m not sure it was parody.

“Last night,” she continued, “Wylie was caught spying on New Ark IV by Sister Lei and her First Congregational Army of Christ.”

As she spoke, The Earth Show map displayed the moments of my storybank account: Wylie the Spy sneaking down the stairs of the New Ark in the dark when an Angel of the Lord flipped on The Lights.

Guide continued her report: “I couldn’t have said it better than Sister Lei when she looked the Spy in his lying eyes, and said, ‘It doesn’t matter which government you’re spying for, because we’re at war with them all.’ That was, by far, my favorite line in the scene. Wylie is a spy, and (based on my tracking of his signature) I have no doubt that he’s spying for that big, dumb, rabbit squeezing, mythic being known as ‘America.’ The question I ask now is: What good can be gained from a human like this? What can The Wilderness do with a character whose root meaning in life is to hide his truest signature from The Earth Show and pass information to the super massive immaterial body that governs him from afar? My channel’s open to you, friends. What’s your read on our city’s strange new creature?”

The first storybanker to call was an antagonist in Guide’s cast named Adom the Butcher. Adom looked like any other butcher I’d ever seen, except he stood behind his butcher’s block wearing an apron splattered with blood and nothing else. He held a cleaver that he used to part the end of the pig’s story he’d ended there. It took me a few moments to remember his signature from Maggie’s scene with Fizzy Pop Family Corporation.

“Hello,” Adom the Butcher greeted. “How are you?”

“Good,” Guide replied. “I need a favor.”

“Name it,” Adom almost smiled as he hung his meat. “You know I owe you, more than my life.”

“Before you tell us why you called,” Guide motioned for me to sit behind the desk with her, “will you give us a report?”

Adom reached down, opened a cage that was just out of sight, and then I watched with wonder as the rabbit hopped up on his block and ate the little treats Adom had set there. “Of course,” he agreed. “But I’m not going to put my hand to my mouth like I’m speaking to my imaginary microphone like we did for that guy in your last Flash Report. Yes, OK?

“I’m okay with cutting the theatrics this time,” Guide replied.

Whack! The cleaver came down on the rabbit as Adom the Butcher began to report on himself. The scene reminded me of a criminal out on parole, calling his parole officer to report his goings on.

Adom had been hired on as labor to build Westonton. Nobody knew at the time, but he had a killer in his stock of characters. It was a horror story, for sure. The warlord’s army killed his family. Then they took him, and they paid him the currency all prosthetic families provide: guns, rape, booze, drugs, and the bonds of brotherhood. Adom sailed around the world, doing what pirates do best for years, before he landed, by chance, on a beach in Mexico where an Asshole in a banker’s suit offered him a job, for good money, hauling building materials around. No blood was sacrificed the day the future Butcher fled his life as a pirate and accepted a job as a super star employee of Weston’s Westonton Corporate City.

Many months later, Adom was lost in a mass gathering of super star employees he didn’t know. He watched the fireworks explode overhead as Mr. Chester Weston stood on a yacht a mile from shore and smashed a fancy glass full of bottled water on the Reef Wall of Westonton. It was awesome to watch the world premiere, the moment when a feet of tugboats pulled our new transnational ocean-going city out to sea…

Adom was used to smoking a lot of pot to keep his killer character down, but that became very, very difficult when the new qualitative Storysold economy kicked in. He struggled to grow enough plants. Finally, his production of marijuana failed to meet the amount he needed to smoke, every day, to keep him from doing what he did that day. He stabbed and killed a man named Stretch for not paying him the monetary moments he felt he deserved for a sack of four Adom had “traded” from Plowman.

At that time, the only choice for “calling the police” was contacting  Security Chief Moyniham. Bradley was the one who rushed in, with sirens blaring and guns drawn, to arrest Adom for the city’s first murder scene. Adom remembered it well. He disabled the Security Chief, with ease, and escaped into Storysold: City, where there were no helicopters, no radio net in hot pursuit, no militia of citizen soldiers who were ready, at a moments notice, to track him down and punish him. Needless to say, the fledgling storybankers panicked. The Fear spread through the city like wildlife. Full of fear for their lives, they began  to write a good old fashioned revenge plot like a wild western posse, or a gang of good guys, or a team of action heroes after The Call to Arms Speech.

As Adom told it, there was a lot of very serious talk about developing a classic prison theme. Only one voice rose above the fearful singular beating heart of the mob. Odessa the Unicorn (future Wilderness Security Guide) was the only one in Storysold: City who, like a haunting ghost from a story no one knew, suddenly appeared and presented a new, very different law enforcement strategy. Odessa stood firm in her truth, speaking loud she spoke, “Do you all want to live in a city rule by fear? Fear is an expensive, inefficient, and wasteful agent of change. Fear, anger, and rage are pesticides that needs to be constantly applied to work. Given a long enough storyline, The Wilderness rejects all actions that are wasteful. Our homes will be safer, more secure, and happier in The End if we work to exterminate the root cause of our fears. Adom is not the last human who will kill other humans in our city. Killing his host body will not kill the infestation of fear, anger, and self hate that grows inside him. And prisons are a cosmic joke. Prisons only served to maintain The Out of Sight, Out of Mind Illusion that civilization can successfully insulate Itself from the wilder character traits and stories we fear and hate.” Unbelievably, the mob bought the new law enforcement story sold by the strange unicorn who’d seemingly appeared from nowhere to accept the challenge of inspiring a change in Adom. Or at least enough of the mob bought in. All Odessa needed was to sell enough of them on The Action of her venture to pay The Bills.

After six months of fierce bio-friendly combat Adom was dying of starvation at the hands of Guide and her partner. She was clear with Adom. Guide told him that she wouldn’t rest, or fail to be his unbending prosthetic conscience, until he met all her demands.

First and foremost, Adom had to develop an economic role for his story that didn’t depend, at all, on his “people hunting skills,” or his natural skills of intimidation, to feed himself. All the grinning teeth, gun posturing, bicep flexing, terror spreading had to go, or The Wilderness would wipe Adom from its world map like a flightless, meaty bird.

Guide made it clear that The City would no longer pay him (food, clothing, and shelter) for the service of terrifying people, or hunting one group of people for the so-called benefit of another. It wasn’t until Adom nearly died from Guide’s boycott that Adom began to change.

“Now I’m a Butcher,” Adom reported, five dead and skinned rabbits later. “I write a script every day, posts it on my channel, and I follow it like Hollywood, so I can do what few of my old friends from My Old Life have been able to do. I have changed, because I made it my business to do good work for the cast of the man I killed, Stretch, to show them in action that I was wrong for taking a man’s life as my own. Now I make profit. Lots of profit. Good profit. Better plunder than pirates. When I’m not Adom the Butcher, I smoke my weed and play full contact nude football with my Lover, Nancy the Meat Smoker, and my cast. That’s who I am when I am richest in action.”

“If it all goes to plot,” Guide cut in, “we’ll produce a big, script-release party for Adom sometime next month.” Then she put her lips to my ear, so Adom couldn’t hear. “Nancy says she has over a hundred live action votes for a party scene she’s been calling, The Naked Brigade. It’s going to be awesome. A hundred, or more, of us are going to all get really high and naked and charge Adom, full speed. Then pig pile him.”

“Great plan,” I whispered back. “Count me in.”

“Really? You’d be down for that?”

“No,” I laughed. Then I turned to Adom on screen, and asked, “I suppose you shared your Coming to Jesus Moment with me, because you and your unicorn buddy here want me to arrest myself?”

“Wrong.” The Butcher replied, “I gave my report, for one, because the Unicorn asked me to give my report. For two, I want to hire you to do some Secret Agent CIA work for me and my cast.”

“I’m not an Agent of the CIA,” I shot back defensively.

“I know your kind,” Adom replied. “Back in My Old Life we had men like you who worked for us. The CIA didn’t like the Other Warlord as much as they liked us, so they delivered your CIA Agents to us with guns and rations to support our rebel cause. I know you, Agent Man. And I want to pay you thirty moments worth of my choice meat-cutting scenes if you spy on me, and tell the CIA to tell my Old Uncle Sam what I’ve been up to. I think Old Uncle will like very much to hear my story from an Agent Man like you.”

“I’m not a Spook,” I pled with the A-eyes in the newsroom. “And even if I was, I wouldn’t spy on you…for you…”

“Why not?” Guide asked quizzically.

“Because I don’t do business with murderers.”

Adom didn’t say a word. He walked to his Storysold: TV and switched his channel from PUBLIC to PRIVATE. As his signature faded to black, Guide turned and said, “He was offering you a good deal.”

“I don’t need his whatever-you-call-it…meat-cutting scenes.”

She raised her eyebrows. “You’re bankrupt. All you seem to be good at is spying in the third person and drinking our late friend Solji’s wine. Adom was throwing you a bone, because he cares. He knows what it means to face The Wilderness without a supporting cast of your own.”

“I have a cast,” I stated like fact. “Maggie’s still with me.”

“I want to explain something and make it as clear as I can,” Guide said suddenly serious. “After that stunt on the Ark, you’re a celebrity. Over three thousand storybankers are watching you, now, on The Flash Report. I’ve never seen ratings that high. The bad news is, having a blockbuster audience here isn’t like it is on the mainland. It isn’t always good. In fact, I’d say that if you don’t find a way to profit on your Spyrrator status—soon—you won’t be worth a damned scene you’re minted in. And if the Garden Tender continues to feed you without return, you will drag her down too.”

I shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t understand what you’re trying to get at,” I lied. “Maggie likes cooking for me.”

“Stop lying to yourself,” she replied. “As always, The Wilderness wants to support you. We want you to be free and responsible for your story, but you can’t do that if you continue to serve The Mission.”

My inner bureaucracy red flagged that line immediately.

Haven’t I’ve seen this scene before somewhere? I thought. Isn’t this the part where the villain tries to turn our hero to The Dark Side? If I resist her advances long enough, I bet she will transform, and cackle, and feed me to her dog. “Good Boy,” she’ll say as the blood oozes from my veins. Or better yet, she will push a secret button in her desk that trips a secret trap door that will drop me into her secret pit of poisonous snakes…

I dropped a pencil from the desk. Tap, tap, I tapped the floor lightly to see if it was hollow. Then I very naturally sat back up, looked my captor in her eyes, and asked, “I’m doomed, aren’t I?”

“No,” Guide replied. “You can make a good living here working as a Spyrrator…but it has to be your character…not theirs.”

“Theirs who?”

“The government’s…”

“You know, in The Real World they have a name for spies who turn against their governments. They’re called traitors.”    

Guide leaned forward. “What’s worse…betraying your disembodied governing body and its never-ending mission, or Maggie?”

“Maggie conspired with The Enemy behind my back.”

“Maggie is the only reason why you didn’t starve months ago.”

I was about to retaliate, like a reflex, and continue to wage my war on the human I identified as The Enemy. But, then, I remembered the good things Maggie did for both our sakes. “I know,” I agreed. “I haven’t figured out why she’s done what she’s done for me, but you’re right. I owe her a lot. More than anyone I know Maggie deserves to be happy.”

“That’s why you need to do this…”

“I can’t be your Spyrrator, out in the open.”

“Why not? Do you need more than what we can offer?”

“You’re asking the impossible!” I almost shouted, standing, pacing in need of escape. “I can’t run off with Maggie and live happily ever after in Storysold: City if I have to betray my country to do it.”

“You don’t have to betray your precious, prosthetic government to save the day, be the hero, and live happily ever after with Maggie.”

“Bullshit!” I shouted. “It’s never been done.”

“I’m not bullshitting,” Guide said seriously. “You can stay and build a happy homemaking theme with Maggie, if she’ll have you. You can spy all you like as long as your spying is, in some way, profitable to your home and cast. I imagine, there’s a great many storybankers in The City who’d love to have you tell your government every living detail of their stories. We were cut off from the rest of the world, floating in the open ocean. A professional spy who works to pass our action stories to the mainland would be a great way to bridge our communication gap with the rest of the world. Hell, I’d pay you to send The Earth Show News to the CIA, or whatever strange governing body you serve. I know, as you know, your coworkers wouldn’t read our stories with eyes like ours, but that’s OK. It’s the thought that counts. At least your country couldn’t say that we weren’t doing our parts to be friendly.” Guide almost laughed. “You could make a name for yourself as Wylie Jones, White Dove to Savage, Death Dealing Employables.”

“No,” I shook my head. “Still sounds like bullshit.”

“It’s not,” Guide said, straight faced. “My only intention is to help you blaze a better trail to happiness. It’s what I do.”

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

“I will do everything in my power to guide you to happiness.”

“Then give me the secret location of Mr. Chester Weston’s Super Massive Vault,” I said coolly. “That will make me happy.”

“Please tell me you’re not after Chester’s trash collection?”

“Are you going to tell me the location, or not?” I replied sternly.

“What is this?” Guide asked, almost rising to emotion. “Some kind of test? We’re teetering on The Edge of Creation, about to make awesome action together, and you want to, suddenly, introduce that?”

“I knew it,” I said, leaning across her desk like a cop with a gun and a spotlight. “You won’t tell me, because you’re not interested in helping me become the best ‘Spyrrator’ I can be. This is all bullshit.”

Guide was about to reply, when a call came in. Beep, beep, it called on her Storysold: TV. Guide patched in The Call. I turned to face the screen and saw two barbarians standing side-by-side in a Wild Park. It had see the park before. It was on Island Seven, but I couldn’t remember where…

“Hello boys,” Guide greeted her callers.

It was clear that attentive silence was their reply.

They were sharing a jar of sauerkraut. The taller one was hairy with a curly beard, stately postured, and nearly naked in his elk hide underwear. The man’s wide-eyes sparkled: big luminous saucers that grew and faded with the intensity of whatever inner hunt was underway. The other, slightly shorter with a longer, bushy red beard, was nearly naked too, but he wore glasses: flashy, thick round glasses like nerds’ wear. The prop had its effect. It made the red beard’s signature look less barbaric than the other. Guide introduced them as brothers. She called the taller younger one, “Jarl the Uplander,” and the shorter, older barbarian, “Olaf the Sharpeyed.”

“Many of my wilderness creature friends speak of the brothers as the Brothers Grim,” Guide narrated in a whisper.

The signatures were new, but I bought The Barbarism. The Brothers Grim had beards. They had no shirts, tree trunks for arms and legs, buckskin boots, and they ate their sauerkraut savagely, with the purple brine dripping like blood from their mouths like barbarians.

“I, Olaf the Sharpeyed of The Winds have answered your call,” Olaf announced his signature in a loud barbaric tone.

“Whose call?” I asked, turning to Guide.

“Not mine,” She replied. “You’re the hero here.”   

“Hero?” I chuckled. “Why do I feel more like the maiden?”

The noise that came next was the low, rumbling, signature snarl of Jarl the Uplander. When the young barbarian was done snarling, he made a declaration: “We, the sons of The Winds have called to pledge our signatures to your quest to discover the location of the Hidden One’s vault.”

“The Hidden One?” I flinched.

“Mr. Chester Weston,” Guide translated.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, guys, but I don’t need your help to find the Hidden One,” I replied. “Either you know where Weston’s Super Massive Vault is, or you don’t. Which is it? Do, or don’t?”

Olaf proudly replied, “I fly shipments of bottled water, processed food, and cash into our city for our President, Mr. Chester Weston.”

“Do you by chance fly a silver seaplane?”

“I do,” Olaf replied.

“Maybe I was too bold about my not needing help,” I said, softening up. “What’s the information going to cost me?”

“We want you to join our annual Epic Hunting Adventure in the Wind River Range. When we return with Weston’s plastic water bottles and pressed dyed fibers we will ask him to tell us the location of his vault.”

“What makes you think he’ll tell you?”

Jarl’s reply was a snarl, but Olaf translated, explaining, “Weston will tell us, because we’re asking nicely with this heads-up we’re delivering now.”

Guide nodded approvingly. “My boys should be writing scripts and posting them every day to put their fellow storybankers at ease, but they don’t…for many reasons I won’t share now. The good news is, they’re rich enough to sponsor the new war I’m waging on you.”

“Are they paying you to do this Flash Report?”

“Yes, in part,” Guide replied. “Fritzee and I already have a hunting scene credited to us. We’re hoping for elk, but deer’s okay too.”

I turned to the screen, and asked, “What do you barbarians care what happens to me, or my story?”

“My story…” Jarl roared with laughter. “My, my, my!”     

“Our interest in The New War to Help Wylie Get the Girl and Live Happily Ever After is complex,” Olaf said. “Time will tell all tales, but for now all we’re asking in exchange for our help is…for you to join our upcoming Epic Hunting Adventure. It’s low risk, even by your standards.” 

“I’d do it if I were you,” Guide coaxed. “If nothing else, they’re offering you a free ride to the mainland.”

I did my best to appear thoughtful, hand on chin, for a beat or two before I crossed my arms and asked, “When do we leave?”

“The Epic Hunting Adventure will begin as it does every year. Meet us on the boardwalk in the Hidden Harbor closest to Center Stage in forty-one days, two moments, and fifty-nine beats,” Olaf replied as Jarl gave us a low growl. “And don’t be late. We hate to wait.”

With that said, the Brothers Grim stepped away from the A-eye and blended in with the bamboo. After they left, a horde of day rats scampered into the scene to munch on the compost the Brothers spread there.

Guide stood, unbuttoning her suit, as she walked to her tent. “That does it for today’s Flash Report. Join us tomorrow, thirty-seven clips after noon fifty for another report with Wylie the Spyrrator when he wows us with more dramatic choices in the pursuit of his own food.”

“I guess I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” I said, walking out.

“Don’t forget,” Guide added, poking her head out of the tent. “Do some plotting on your script tonight. It’s important.”

“Yes ma’am. Do you have any more advice for me?”

“No,” Guide smiled. “Be a Good Boy and run home.”

On my walk back to Maggie, some kid dressed like a newsboy circa The Industrial Revolution followed a few steps behind me calling out like he was selling newspapers to passersby. “Gather one—gather all! Secrets, secrets, secrets! Wylie’s in the business of secrets! Sell him your juicy ones. Sell him your hot gossip. Sell him the lovelies you only whisper in your sleep, and he’ll surely spread them everywhere, in the hallways, through the canals, in the commons, across the ocean, all the way to his United States!”

I read the kid’s signature for a moment. As I did, it dawned on me that maybe he wasn’t delivering his lines to anyone in particular. Maybe the kid was narrating his lines to people he might meet for real in The Future? I was having new thoughts there for sure. I mean, was the act of narrating aloud in public without a stage so weird? Hadn’t the existence of live action narrators been around for centuries? Heralds narrated to Royal Subjects in kingdoms,  news reporters narrated to The People in nations, and advertisers narrated to their Target Audience in markets. It wasn’t so weird to pause The Action of my story for a moment or two, turn and face my nearest A-eye, and narrate aloud to the storybankers of Storysold: City. But what to say?

The kid was right. I was in the business of secrets…but it didn’t feel right to do that business in the open. Did McDonalds or KFC do business in Russia during The Cold War? I didn’t know why the idea of spying in the open like an ad narrator without a stage made me so mad. Somehow it wouldn’t be 007 Man enough to pass the test. Maybe I feared it, because the storybankers weren’t playing by the rules I believed to be The Rules of the ritual war story I’d been hosting since birth. I was supposed to sneak bravely across enemy lines, sneak around until I found their secrets, then sneak them back across enemy lines without anyone suspecting anything. It just wasn’t as fun when they gave their secrets away like advertisements for their favorite brand of ice cream. The more I thought about that, the more I wondered: Are secrets profitable in Storysold: City like they are on the mainland? I wondered, because the secrets I was holding inside like pirate’s treasure weren’t making me feel any richer.

My Storybank Account – Scene Thirty Six,

THE PART WHERE MAGGIE AND WYLIE GET ENGAGED IN A WEDDING PLOT TO SAVE THE DAY…

It had been a long day. I wanted nothing more than to round the bend in the hallway, walk through the front door of our shop, close it, and spend the rest of the evening with Maggie in PRIVATE. I figured, all things considered, I’d done a marvelous job of putting up with Maggie’s friend the Wilderness Guide and all her backwards law enforcement strategies. I didn’t talk back too often. I didn’t shoot her ideas down in flames. I didn’t tell her that the most powerful nation on the planet, now or ever, considered her a known Terror Banking Cultist. I’d played along for Maggie’s sake, and I felt I was owed a treat or something for my good behavior.

That fantasy crashed as soon as I rounded the bend. Instead of a spotlight vision of Maggie in her underwear smiling with a bottle of rice wine in hand, I saw a gathering of storybankers hanging out around our door. I recognized Blue Suit, Rosy, Traveler (as Captain Chaos), Patricia, Juan, Buddha, Cowboy Betty, Philoh, Rompasaurus, Wall, Jellyfish, Riggs, O2, and Gambler. I also recognized Uncle Sam and Son the Tool Maker from Solji’s funeral, but I didn’t recognize Uncle Sam’s friends and fellow members of the American Dreamstate Band. My first instinct was to curse them for something official like loitering or trespassing—any old story I could drum up to put some distance between me and those freaks, but that feeling faded fast when I saw what they were gathering around. Someone had hung a chalkboard that beside our front door. On it was written (in multi-colored chalk):

– MAGGIE’S SCRIPT ARREST –

WORKING TITLE: OUR HOME (THE RESTAURANT THEME FORMERLY KNOWN AS APPETIZERS ON US)

MY STOCK OF CHARACTERS: GARDEN TENDER AND THE FABULOUS FOOD PRODUCER

MORNING: WAKE UP, MAKE BREAKFAST, PACK MY WONDER BIKE AND WAGON, CHANGE INTO MY GARDEN TENDER COSTUME, AND TRAVEL TO THE HAPPY GARDEN WHERE I WILL HARVEST, WATER, PLANT, WEED, AND MAINTAIN MY GARDEN PLOT. NOTE: I WILL BE SURE TO PACK THE HARVEST GENTLY IN BINS, AND STORE THEM IN THE COOLER EDDIES FLOWING DOWN FROM THE NEARBY AQUEDUCT.

AFTERNOON: LUNCH AT SOLJI’S GRAVESIGHT PICNIC AREA WITH A FRIEND (OR FRIENDS), REFILL THE SUPPLY OF ASSAH AND KIMCHI, NAP AND DREAM IF THE WEATHER’S GOOD, DELIVER PRODUCE TO MY CAST ON THE WAY BACK TO THE SHOP, TAKE A LONG SHOWER (AND MAYBE MASTURBATE), THEN CHANGE INTO THE FABULOUS FOOD PRODUCER AND START OUR HOME’S FOOD PRODUCTION SCENES.

OUR HOME GROWN MENU: CHEESE BREAD, SPLIT PEA SOUP, SPICY PICKLED GREEN BEANS, VEGGIE PLATTERS, SALAD MIX, SOLJI’S SIGNATURE KIMCHI AND ASSAH, AND PHILOH’S NEARLY ROTTEN DELIGHT.

EVENING: OPEN OUR HOME, WAIT AS OUR CAST ARRIVES ON SET, SERVE OUR FRIENDS FABULOUS APPETIZERS FROM THE MENU, MINT MY MOMENTS AND BALANCE MY STORYBANK ACCOUNTS WHILE MY CAST IS PRESENT (OR ARRANGE TO DO SO SOON); THEN—WHEN THE DEMAND FOR OUR GOODS FADES, OR WHENEVER THE WHATEVER MOVES ME—CLEAN THE KITCHEN: CLEAR OFF THE TABLES, PUT THE SLOP IN BUCKETS FOR COMPOST, CLEAN OUR HOME WITH HOT SOAPY WATER, PACK DIRTY LAUNDRY INTO THE WAGON TO TAKE TO THE LAVA MONSTER MAT FOR CLEANING, WASH THE DISHES, AND THEN GET SOME SLEEP! AND DREAM OF THE DAY WHEN EVERY EMPLOYABLE IN THE EARTH SHOW HAS A WORKING STORY AS FABULOUS AS MINE!

LIVE-ACTION VOTING DAYS (TAX TIME TAKEN AS NEEDED): (1) STOP THE NOXIOUS SPREAD OF MY ADDICTION TO DOPE CURRENCY BY MEETING WITH RACHNA EVERY MONTH TO AUDIT MY STORYBANK ACCOUNT (2) CAST VOTES FOR A WILDERNESS THEME THAT I WILL SUPPORT (3) CAST A VOTE FOR MY FAVORITE SPORTS GARDENER IN THE WILD GARDEN ARENA EVERY WEEK (4) DO “FUTURE TRAINING” WITH RIGGS ONCE A WEEK, SO I CAN CAST MY VOTES IN A-EYE REPAIRING SCENES AS A CLOCKTINKER (5) CAST LIVE ACTION VOTES FOR ACTIONS THAT INSPIRE ME TO PRODUCE BETTER ACTIONS.   

NIGHTS: SURF THE STORYSOLD EXCHANGE AND WATCH THE PUBLIC CHANNELS I ENJOY; MAKE LOVE SCENES WITH MY FIANCE WHEN HE’S NOT BEING A MISSON-ORIENTED ASSHOLE; MEET ACCOUNTABLE MEN WITH HOT STORIES AND ROCK SOLID GOVERNING BODIES IN CASE MY FIANCE TURNS OUT TO BE TOO EMPLOYABLE TO GOVERN HIS OWN STORY; TAKE A FULL ZERO DAY EVERY SO OFTEN TO RELAX, MINT NO MONEY, DRINK WINE, AND EAT MY VEGETABLES.

THE PERFORMANCE OF TODAY: UNVEIL MY FABULOUS FOOD PRODUCER CHARACTER IN THE GRAND OPENING OF OUR HOME, INTRODUCE MY MENU AND SERVE APPETIZERS TO MY CAST, APOLOGIZE FOR MISREPRESENTING MY SIGNATURE IN THE ROLE OF COVER GIRLFRIEND AND GOVERNMENT ASSET TO WYLIE JONES THE SPY, AND DO MY BEST TO MAKE AMENDS BY ASKING MY FORMER COWORKER TO MARRY ME IN A BLOCKBUSTER COMMON DEFENSE THEME THAT WILL SAVE THE DAY AND BRING VICTORY TO THE EARTH SHOW.

It felt like no one standing around me breathed until I’d read the entire script. That, or maybe that was just the way I felt. I didn’t breathe until I’d read the script; then turned to them, flashed them my best government-issued smile, and said, “Well that’s not very romantic, is it?”

Captain Chaos clasped my shoulders heartily, and said, “No.”

“Arranged marriages often aren’t,” Philoh added with a big grin.

If I’d had lasers for eyes I would have burned a hole in his head for saying that. “The Marriage hasn’t been arranged yet,” I said ominously as Captain Chaos squeezed me gently in a headlock.

“I’m betting you’ll say yes,” Gambler said with a wink.

I wriggled my way out of the Captain’s embrace, and asked, “What makes you so certain that I’ll agree to this arrangement?”

“Because, unless you have an ace up your sleeve,” Gambler replied solemnly, “this arrangement may be your only way to save the day, get the girl, and live happily ever after.”

“And why is that?”

“Because it may be the only way for you to live free with Maggie, or anyone else for that matter, without the guilt of knowing that you were the one who set The Bloodbath in motion that added we, the storybankers of Storysold: City to America’s long list of less-than-willingly acquired assets.”     

A long silence followed. I stood staring at the gathering, wishing I had a gathering of my own to stand as they stood, until I was blindsided by the rubber claws of a familiar antagonist. “Rompa-rompa-Rompasaurus roar!” she roared as she wrapped her scaly appendages around me.

“I think she likes you,” Rosy laughed.

Just then a rotund, ivory-haired woman wearing an old war helmet and a muumuu, a character I recognized as Gertel the Governing General of The Needle, opened the door, and said, “Show’s on, friends. Maggie’s ready!”

The cast flooded through the door leaving Rompasaurus and I in our awkward embrace. At first, I fought the Gentle Water Monster’s overpowering presence. Then I had a moment of insight, which was likely inspired by the knowledge I’d gained in combat with her. I decided to stop struggling, wrap my arms around her waist, lay my head on her scaly breasts, and put myself at ease. I showed my willingness to submit and respect her powers, and she showed me the same. It was weird. It was like I lived my life up to that moment without really knowing, for myself, what a hug was designed to do.

When we broke it off I expected the monster to follow me in, but she didn’t follow. She took a long look in at our shop filled with its many faces and sounds, turned, and stomped down the hallway. I felt bad, like I’d lost my last friend in a party packed with strangers. I wanted to roar, “Rompa-rompa-Rompasaurus roar!” behind her, but I didn’t roar. I wasn’t courageous enough to produce something as honest as that yet. Instead I watched her stomp away alone. Then I turned to play my part in The Grand Opening of Our Home. 

The silver curtain behind the workspace was drawn. The bar stools around the work island that wrapped around the kitchen were taken, and so were most of the pillow seats around the shin-high Korean-style tables in the dining area. The only open seat I spied was around a new table in the corner I’d never seen before. It was a familiar western-style table (plain as plain could be) with four legs and a square top with a round, handmade tablecloth with tassels at its center. Uncle Sam and four others were sitting around the table, talking with the rest of the American Dreamstates Band who sat nearby.

When Uncle Sam saw me standing around looking lost, he waved me over to his table like he was hailing a cabbie. He was wearing a red, white, and blue penguin suit and a top hat made from an American flag.    

“Take a seat, bro. You’re among friends here.”   

“Yeah okay,” I said, and I gladly took a seat at their table.

“Wylie Jones,” Sam said, introducing his friends. “Meet the American Dreamstates Band. We are the governing flesh of our great American nation; storybankers who have chosen of their own freewill to represent, manifest, and be, really be, the immaterial land body you know as ‘America.’ The man in the black stovepipe hat is our Fiddler, Honest Abe. The lady in the crown and the green gown is our Bassist, Lady Liberty. The man with arms like mountains is one of our Roadies, Paul Bunyan. And that guy in the knickers, sneaking sips from his flask of homebrew, is our Founding Father and Sound Engineer, Ben Franklin. The white WASP in the face paint, buckskin, and plastic feathered headdress is our Bird Whistler, Noble Savage. Our Moody Organist is Captain Nemo in the corner there, sporting his Nautilus brand uniform and neatly kept beard. And you’ve met Gambler…

“But I know you haven’t met American Spirit. She is The Band in the same way backup vocalists, bell ringers, drummers, and The Band’s audience are The Band. In other words, she’s a walking/talking manifestation of The American Dream. She’s over there: the buxom fox in the red, white, and blue electric-light jumpsuit chatting with Stumpy and the New Pioneers. Spirit’s been waiting to meet you for a spell now. Watch yourself if she says she ‘wants to put her spirit in you.’ Depending on your taste in spirits…that may not be a good thing. In any case, I think I’ll introduce the rest of our Dreamstates another day. We left our other Roadie, Babe the Blue Ox back at Gambler’s Saloon. That fucker’s a hopeless depressive. We never know if he moos because he’s blue, or because he’s happy. My theory is, he’s long lost his ability to tell what he’s mooing about one way or another. A lifetime of playing Paul’s sidekick has really fucked with his sense of self. Most days, Babe’s lucky to find his way to his food trough and back again. Poor Babe! I’d rather hang with Eeyore over him any day.”

Sam had a lot more to say, as usual, but that’s all I could take at that moment. In my best formal fashion, I walked around our shop and shook hands with some of the American Dreamstates Sam had introduced: (1) “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Franklin Sir.” (2) “I’ve always wondered what Liberty looked like in person.” (3) “Whoa! Don’t crush my hand. That’s a powerful grip you have, Mr. Bunyan.” (4) “No thank you, eh, ma’am. Maybe you can put your spirit in me another time.” I wanted all the important people to see that I was making an effort, especially Maggie.

Then I sat back down at Uncle Sam’s table, turned to Honest Abe, and attempted to move from formal introductions to buddy talk. “So,” I said, looking up. “Who’s your favorite all-American sports team? I’m a big fan of the Red Sox. Nothing better than a beer and a dog at Fenway Park.”

The Ancient hooked his thumbs in his vest pockets, thought deep about The Words he’d say, took a deep breath, and then Gertel hijacked his moment. She stood in front of the silver curtain, grabbed its knotted golden rope, and called out, “Attention! Attention! Like now, folks!”

When the shop was silent, Gertel said, “It is my great honor to present my friend Maggie in her sparkling brand new working role.” Right on cue, the storybankers began to cheer, whistle, growl, clap calmly, and pound their tables with their utensils as Gertel announced, “Precious storybankers and fellow stars, allow me to present the Fabulous Food Producer!”

The curtain parted and unveiled Maggie. She was wearing a pair of hemp sandals and a yellow sundress decorated with a wide variety of colorful patches shaped like veggies. I didn’t need the symbolism. I knew who she was supposed to be. She was being Maggie, more than ever before.

The Fabulous Food Producer blushed in the spotlight of her cast and smiled, with sparkles. I was far from the center of attention, but I felt my body flush with heat. I felt the sweat forming on my brow. I felt my heart flutter and fall like a skydiver free of gravity, free of my past, free of all the stupid things I thought I knew about our stories. And more than anything, I felt. I felt more than I’d felt anything in a long time. I heard The Mission ringing like an alarm in my ears. I heard all the dead old generals rise in my mind and sound the order that I didn’t deserve to be happy. I was about to follow orders and look away, when Maggie locked eyes with mine, flashed a mischievous grin, and showed me, eyeballs to bones, how it felt to be alive.

When the shop was quiet enough to speak, Maggie said, “I’d like to begin The Grand Opening of Our Home tonight with an apology.” She paused to let the silence fill her. “As many of you know, I didn’t come here because I wanted to play a Cover Girlfriend/Government Asset to Wylie’s Leading Man the Hero Spy. I don’t know why I came here. I suppose I’ve always been drawn to the weirder parts of The Earth Show. I’d never met a real spy before; and I’d certainly never met one whose mission it was to spy on my deadbeat dad, a man who, even now, would rather watch from a distance than play a part in my life. I felt like a flying saucer had landed in my backyard, opened its hatch, and a little green man had stepped out to offer me a spin around the universe. It was too weird of an adventure not to take…

“Yeah—now that I played my part in the little green man’s mission, I know better. Sometimes the old movies have it right. Sometimes the green men aren’t benevolent genius space explorers who can be counted on to respect the sovereignties of the planets they tour. Sometimes they’re simply the first wave of space invaders armed with the death rays and proton bombs their empire produces, day in and day out, as a way of life. And sometimes, like it happens in the movies, the good people of planet earth are called to band together, in a time of great need, to stand against the little green men and their mission to turn the next beautiful city on their list into yet another dumping ground for their wasteful way of life. Sometimes that time is now. The little men must be made to understand that we, the storybankers of this city will not be ruled by laws made by strangers who do not live in our homes or hearts.

“I guess what I’m trying to say is…I love you, all of my new friends here in this perfectly imperfect place. Long live Storysold: City!”

When Maggie spoke the name of Storysold: City aloud in defiance of her father’s policy, a cheer rose from the gathering.

Captain Chaos cleared her throat. “So,” she prompted. “I’m glad you love us, but what makes you think we’re going to forgive you for being a part of a story that will likely bring the American death dealers down on us in a way we might not have the power to escape?”

“As many of you already know,” Maggie replied. “I’m prepared to arrest myself, to show you that I’ve fired my old character the Government Asset, to prove to you that I am no longer a threat.”

“But we know you’re not a threat!” Patricia called out from where she was sitting with Juan, O2, and Jellyfish. “And I love you too!”

Many of the storybankers cheered Patricia’s sentiments, but not all of them. Some of them were unconvinced.

“I wish that was true,” Maggie paused to walk behind the island bar into her kitchen, “but The Mission I was responsible for producing is still in motion. I’m not free, until we are all free of its deadly consequences.”   

I was on the edge of my seat, really listening for once. And when I heard Maggie deliver that line about being free of the consequences of our mission, I about lost my brains. I stood, cleared my throat, and waited until I had the attention of my audience before I took aim at the Fabulous Food Producer, and said, “Uh, Maggie?”

“Yes Mr. Jones.”

“How do you plan to free us of these said consequences?”

“Oh, I thought you’d never ask,” Maggie replied, pausing to let her line sink in like a pin pulled from a grenade.

“Well I’m asking,” I said a little more emotion than I wanted.

Maggie almost smiled: lifted the lid from the pot of her signature split pea soup she had simmering on the stove, scooped her green goodness into a bowl, set it on a tray beside a few slices of her holy-whole-wheat-inspired cheese bread, and sauntered to my table, tray in hand, like she was packing Patton’s pearl-handled pistols. I had no reason to fear her, or her bowl of split pea soup—but I retreated, slouching back pouty faced into my seat like a kid in a highchair whose mom had presented him with “yummy vegetables.”    

I watched on, dumbfounded, as she put the steaming bowl and bread on the table in front of me. Then she said, “Don’t take this emotionally, but I’m plotting to marry you. We’re going to have a huge wedding with lots of crab cake. It’s going to be great. Our Wedding Story will either bring us together in a wild celebration of love, or we’re going to die like Romeo and Juliet trying to make our love real. Do you have any objections?”

“Who is this ‘us’ of which you speak?”

“You know. We…you and me.”

“And who are we?”

“Do I have to spell it out for you?”

“Indulge me,” I grinned, knowing well it was likely that everyone in the city was watching my every move in that moment.

“Very well, let’s do this!” Maggie began, turning to face her cast. “You seem to believe that your community—your friends and family, and all The People you call your own—number in the hundreds of millions. Maybe it’s all the movie stars, politicians, sports heroes, and celebrities you watched on TV that help you feel connected to such a massive community. I don’t get it. Never have. Never will. I know who you are, Wylie Jones. ‘America’ is your Zeus, your Thor, your super hero boss with a shield and a star. And that strange, fleshless being needs you, a human, to make it real.

“That’s the ‘you’ part of the wedding of you and I…   

“I am Maggie: former adoptee of my Long Lost Father’s old college buddies, street survivor, and convenience store clerk for my friend Bob at Mt. Tabor Market. I am Maggie, a woman of flesh and blood who has adventured to Storysold: City as an Asset to a Government Spy. And I’m the One who has invested the moments I needed to master the super real power to serve my signature soup and bread to the mortal human I love the best.”

I didn’t have any witty comebacks for that. Instead of formulating a proper reply, I stared into my bowl of pea soup hoping it would spew forth instant answers for me to follow like Google. It looked good, but The Soup had no instant answers for me. All I saw in The Soup was soup.

“Go forth young man,” Honest Abe said, as he put a firm hand on my shoulder. “Stand tall and make The Action happen like a real American.”

Instinctively, I turned to Sam. He nodded his approval.   

I gripped the spoon like a sword and took the plunge.

“Yum,” I said, as I dug in again. “This is good soup.”

“I’m glad you like it,” Maggie smiled on cue.

“What happens next?” I asked between slurps.

“As they say,” Maggie replied. “If you have to ask…?”

In that moment, I knew what I had to do. I was only stalling for the courage to do it. I finished the bowl before I said, “I’m ready.”

“Ready for what?” Maggie replied, looking somewhat baffled.

“Is there a part in your master plot to marry me where you ask me if I want to marry you?” I asked, flashing Maggie a big grin of mischief.

Maggie looked around. All eyes were on us. I couldn’t believe what came next. The Worshipful Goddess of Mortal Wylie Jones got down on one knee, put her hands in mine, and asked, “Will you marry me?”

“You mean,” I corrected, “will I marry you in a ‘defense theme’ meant to protect Storysold: City from space invaders?”

“Yes,” Maggie replied. “Let’s make a wedding together…a victory no one will ever forget—The Old Fashioned Way—like a prince and princess who marry to unite warring kingdoms and eventually find love and happiness with a lot of help from their friends and mouthwatering crab cake.”

“Well,” I said, smiling big. “I do like crab cake.”

“Was that a yes?”

“Yes,” I replied. “Let’s do it.”    

“Good,” Maggie smiled. “Then we’re engaged!”

“So?” I chuckled. “Does that mean we’re back at The Beginning where we each act our parts…but this time for your cause, not mine?”

“No,” she laughed. “But it’s good that you Get It.”

“Oh, I Get It alright.”

“Good,” Maggie said; then she walked away. “I hope you enjoy your meal, because I swear to everything I hold dear that will be the last handout you’ll squeeze out of me. From now on, you will no longer be the screen-watching spy who feels no need to build Our Home with me.”

The silence that followed felt awkward, but, as usual, I think that was more me than the rest of our cast. If I’d been a pirate, I would be holding a black spot: marked for death with an opportunity for parole. Where did all the respectable villains with the shark tanks go? I wondered before I thought better of it. Who cares? This cheese bread and pea soup is to die for.

“Yargh!” Captain Chaos roared. “Let’s get to the plunderin! Where are these appetizers we were promised?”

Maggie my Fiancée began taking orders from her cast. Within a few moments, she was serving the appetizers she’d spent a great many moments producing from seed to plant, from plant to ingredient, from ingredient to bowl, from bowl to table with the lightness of a salesperson who never knew the blood, sweat, and tears that went into every bite. A few moment later, the Fabulous Food Producer had filled all her tables with split pea soup, cheese bread, salad mix, spicy pickled green beans, Solji’s kimchi, Philoh’s Nearly Rotten Delight, and the last bottles of Assah.

I watched the scene. I tried my best to be the good spy and fit in like I’d been trained to do, but I couldn’t do it. I felt overwhelmed by the thought of being committed “married in love” with anyone other than God, Corps, Country, or the Man in Charge of Me. In an attempt to break the tension, I turned to Paul Bunyan, who’d been slurping his soup from his bowl.

“I like this table,” I commented, running my hand across the sanded surface of the new table. “Do you know who made it?”

Paul glanced at me with a measure of interest that faded quickly as it came. Then he said, “I built it for Maggie. As a wedding present.”

“You made this…for us…before we were engaged?”

“We didn’t need you for Our Wedding Plot,” he replied. “You’re just the best candidate for the role of Groom.”

When Paul’s bowl was slurped clean, he stood and helped himself to another bowl from Maggie’s pot in the kitchen.

“What the hell did that mean?”

“Oh hello,” Ben Franklin chimed in with a swig of his homebrew when he realized he had The Floor. “What was your question again?”

“Never mind,” I replied. “I don’t think I want to know.”

“I always say,” Ben said, after another swig. “Knowledge is the key to success, even when it means you know you’ve failed. Because, as I always say, failure is the key to success; because even when you win…you lose too. It’s just impossible to win without losing too. That’s why failure is the key to success and victory is the lock. You got to put the key into the lock to make it all work to win with you know what….”

“With knowledge?” I asked, as I accepted an offer of homebrew.

“Of course,” Ben blustered. “As I say, knowledge is the key!”

That conversation continued on, digressing further from there.     

As the evening wound down, Maggie approached me like a waiter with a pen and pad of paper in her hands.

“Now that we’re engaged,” she began, “I feel OK about scripting you into my story in accountable portions.”   

“Accountable like what?”

“Hell if I know. Why don’t you inspire me for a change?”

I thought about that one. “Why don’t you pencil the Love Doctor in your script for a hot sex scene or two?” I suggested.

“No, but thank you,” she replied. “You’ll need to be more inspiring than that. Stretch your imagination a little…”

“OK,” I smiled. “What do you say we do The Wild Thing without our clothes on, with The Lights on, with pink feather boas…?”

“You’re hopeless,” Maggie laughed. “As tempting as your offer to do ‘The Wild Thing’ sounds, tonight is Philoh’s night.”

“By that…?” I asked. “You mean to have sex with her?”

“Oh maybe,” she replied. “We only plotted a hangout scene.”   

I spied around the set looking for Philoh. I found her eyeballing our scene. We locked eyes. Wide eyed Philoh took a big bite of Maggie’s cheese bread and grinned at me like a crack high pirate.

“Oh good…sounds like fun…I’m happy for you,” I lied.

Maggie appeared a little thrown off by my reply.

“What are you plotting to do tonight?”

What Happened Next felt strange. I’d never felt my liberty as much as did in that moment. Call it inspiration. I pointed to the mountain of dishes Maggie had piled in her sinks—then I said, “Wash dishes.”

“You’re going to wash dishes?”

“Yes,” I said confidently. “No profitable business woman would allow a freeloading Tinhorn, no good Asshole, like me, to leave their restaurant without washing my share of the dishes to pay for my meal.”

Maggie’s eyes shined like Spanish gold.

And I washed those dishes, twice, three times, while Philoh watched and waited for her scene with Maggie that never happen.

It had been a long day. Maggie was asleep before I washed the dishes once. Philoh made an effort to write the hangout scene, even though she clearly never intended to include me. We talked like Americans do—throwing words at each other, but never selling anything of real value to the other.

In The End, Philoh walked out without saying goodbye. A handsome man met her in the hallway. Before she left our scene, she took the eraser from the chalkboard and edited Maggie’s script:

She erased the line that read: MEET ACCOUNTABLE MEN WITH HOT STORIES AND ROCK SOLID GOVERNING BODIES IN CASE MY FIANCE TURNS OUT TO BE TOO EMPLOYABLE TO GOVERN HIS OWN STORY. And he edited a line to read: MAKE LOVE WITH MY DISHWASHING ASSHOLE FIANCE.

I was proud of that line when I read it. That night I slept better than I’d slept in a long time, sleeping beside the bed in my usual pile of quilts and linens, dreaming deep from my victory made of dishes.

My Storybank Account – Scene Thirty Seven,

THE PART WHERE THE SPYRRATOR FIGHTS TO BE AN ASSET IN MAGGIE’S PLOT TO MARRY HIM…

The morning after my strange engagement to Maggie, I woke hoping to find my betrothed, but she had already gone to work.

I was about to suit up and run to the Happy Garden to ask Maggie if there was anything I could do to help like a good Eager Beaver. Or so I thought, until I heard the incoming call light blink on our TV.

It was Guide. “I’m producing The Flash Report at noon,” the Unicorn said, not bothering to greet me. “As your Guide, I suggest highly that you be here, before noon, with a rough draft for your script arrest in hand.”

“Or else, what?” I asked. “Will I be doomed, or cast in prison, or fed to your wild dog partner? Fuck you. I’m going back to sleep.”

Then her channel faded and I heard a knock at the door.

It was Gertel the Governing General. She didn’t greet me either. She cried, “Charge!” and drove her steel helmet directly into my gut.

“Uhooof!” I exhaled as the General bullied me through the shop and pinned me against the work island. “What was that for?” I protested. “I don’t even know you. I mean…not officially.”   

“I don’t know any of the war writers you and your governing body are plotting to destroy us with either, but something tells me I’m going to get to know them anyway,” Gertel said as she pulled the tight, hipster jeans off that I’d just worked so hard to put on.

“Hey!” I cried. “Stop that!”

Gertel lifted her muumuu, high as heaven, and reached into it with one arm like she was going to give me a show I wouldn’t soon forget.

“Sweet Jesus,” I gasped. “What are you doing?”

“Pull those britches off, young man,” Gertel ordered as she pulled a measuring tape from a bra that held more tools than a utility belt. “No time to waste. I’ve got to get your truest measurements now.”

“Where’s the fire? Can we talk a little first?”

“Are you planning to marry my friend Maggie in those rags?”

“I’m not sure,” I replied, really reading my full government-issued hipster costume for the first time. “We just got engaged. I don’t know, as you folks say, what my ‘truest costume’ will be on our wedding day.”

“Do you know what I say?” Gertel smiled. “I say, no time like the present to make The Action happen.” Then she took a step back, drummed a finger on her cheek, and asked, “What did you say your Mission-Oriented Asshole did for a living again—Send your Secret Reports up The Asshole Chain of Command build by Assholes for a Nation of Assholes—something like that?”

“I’m what Guide calls a Spyrrator.”

“Oh right,” she laughed. “I suppose you’d prefer a costume that makes you look tough like a real super hero exterminator of other lifeforms?”

“No,” I surrendered like a hug. “I’d like some help. I haven’t spent any time wondering how my costume effects my story, until now.”

The General didn’t miss a beat. “Well okay,” she said, “The pants still have to go. I have a hand-me-down tuxedo I could fudge, if it fits.”    

I stripped down naked to my underwear. While she professionally groped my inner thigh, I felt a sudden need for marital advice. “Do you think Maggie will like it if I ‘deleted’ my old cover costume?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Gertel answered plainly. “Are you still planning to be an Independently Wealthy, Globetrotting Hipster Journalist?”

I had to think about that one. Up until that moment I’d been relatively happy with “my way or the highway” total co-dependent relationship with God and Country. Can’t say why exactly. Good chance I was happy like housewives are happy. The love I felt for America was really more like a fierce “caring” that was really more like “worry,” which was really more like pure fear of the most  lethal fraternal organization in our planet’s history. In other words, the thinking part of the scene that began with “I had to think about that one” didn’t really happen. I was too afraid to challenge powerful emotions like that yet.

“No,” I snapped angrily. “I think it’s safe to say that my cover story has already been blown beyond repair.”

“Then you’ll need something new to represent you.”

I had to think about that one too. I was surprised how easily my fear of an immortal co-dependent governing body like America was manifested in an individual role like fiancee. Not unlike most American males I’d communed with at work (anywhere) I indulged in the classic “happy wife—happy life” cure for my fears. “What kind of costume do you think Maggie would like?”

Gertel pulled a pencil and notepad from her utility bra, jotted some numbers down, and stuck it back up under her muumuu. Then she took off her old war helmet, tucked it under her arm, and wiped the sweat from her brow with her sleeve. “Your fellow homemaker will like whatever costume represents you best,” Gertel answered in full. “There is nothing sexier than a mate who knows who they are, and isn’t afraid to show it.”

“But I have no idea who I am.”

“I thought you were a Spy.”

“I am,” I replied, “but I don’t feel much like a Spy when the people I’m supposed to be spying on have nothing to hide.”

Gertel put her helmet back on, tapped it a few times thoughtfully, and said, “I Get It. Trust me. We’ve all been where you are now.”

“Oh yeah?” I challenged.

“Yeah,” the older woman replied. “You don’t feel normal—like your lower case self—because, until now, you’ve never had the freedom you need to really get into character. You’re used to having some man choose your ‘team’ of ‘coworkers’ for you. You’re used to asking him to eat and piss, and when to go home, and what costume he wants you to wear for him. I suspect you have never really known your Home. It’s an unreal place like Disneyland you visit, a place where you eat, sleep, shit, and face The Fourth Wall. Until now, you’re not used to making choices that effect your story.”

“And what sort of choices do I have now?”

“Not many, at least when it comes to your wedding costume,” Gertel laughed. “I think that hand-me-down tuxedo will fit you fine.”

“Oh good,” I rolled my eyes. “What happened to wearing my ‘truest costume’ to make myself feel more like a Spyrrator?”

The Governing General laughed again. “Is that what you are?”

“I’m thinking about, eh, accepting my position, here, as a…”

“Don’t worry about paying me for the wedding costume,” she said with a sudden sense of urgency. “First one’s on me…but, as soon as you pull your head out of your ass and decide what you’re supposed to look like: call me, and I’ll have The Needle sew it up for you. Yes, okay, yeah?”

She left me standing there holding my hipster jeans. In that moment, I felt like a caveman who’d been clubbed by his mate and dragged off to his cave full of screaming babies in front of his hunting buddies. My buddies were back in Washington DC, but I could still hear their laughter.

“Yes, OK,” I said aloud to my nearest A-eyes. “If you people want a Spy, I’ll give you a Spy.” I tossed my jeans in a corner, put on my silky short running shorts, and pulled my government issued handgun and laptop from their hiding spot in the kitchen. Then I took a seat at the work-island, put my weapon on the counter, and opened my laptop with every intention of sending my report to the Man in Charge of Me.

I was pleased to see that he replied to my last report:

He advised me to HANG TOUGH, BE VIGILANT, and KEEP SENDING REPORTS. He assured me that THE TERROR BANKING CULT UPRISING ON THE HIGH SEAS was ON THE PRESIDENT’S MIND and that the President was planning to deal with THE WESTON PROBLEM soon after he was reelected, which meant, of course that nothing would happen for at least another five months or so.

Maybe Agent Sturgis will hurry The Mission along once he realizes what a jam we’re in? I thought. Then I wrote: OUR COVER STORY HAS BEEN BLOWN. THEY KNOW WE’RE SPIES. THEY BELIEVE THEY CAN TURN US INTO DOUBLE AGENTS. I’M BEING OVERRUN BY REQUESTS TO PASS “SECRET MESSAGES” TO AMERICA. I WILL BE VIGILANT (AS ALWAYS!) AND CONTINUE THE MISSION TO FIND WESTON’S SUPER MASSIVE VAULT. BE ADVISED: IF I FIND THE VAULT BEFORE THE EPIC-HUNTING ADVENTURE, WHICH IS MY NEXT BEST CHANCE TO LEAVE THE TERROR BANKING CULT, I WILL BRING MY REPORT BACK IN PERSON.

SIGNED, AGENT JACKSON.

As I finished, I suddenly felt a hand on my shoulder. I spun around with my gun in hand only to be immediately disarmed by the friendly, half-drunk face of Ben Franklin. He didn’t look like he’d slept.

“Oh,” I said. “It’s you.”

  “I wouldn’t say you’re being ‘overrun’ by requests to pass ‘secret messages’ to the American mainland,” Founding Father said; then he pulled a large flask from his vest pocket and passed it my way.

“Thanks,” I said and took a drink. It wasn’t homebrew.

“What is this? Water?”

“I didn’t wash out the flask, so it still has some residual brew from last night’s merriments. What’s wrong? Don’t drink water?”

“No,” I replied, feeling weary of our conversation already. “I mean yes, I drink water. It’s just that I was…”

“Hoping for more of the good stuff?”

“Yeah something like that.”

“Next batch of my brew won’t be ready for 95 days, 17 moments, and 43 beats. I’m saving up for the wedding. It’s all water until then…”

“Of course, you’re saving for the wedding,” I thought aloud.

“Yes, but that’s not why I’m here,” Ben said on an upbeat. “I’m here to overrun you with requests to pass ‘secret messages’ to America.”

Blink, blink. “Great!” I said. “How can I help you? Would you like me to send a message to your Aunt Mable in Virginia?”

“Oh no, thanks,” Ben replied. “I want you to tell the Men in Charge of You that the American Dreamstates Band featuring me, Uncle Sam, Honest Abe, Rosy the Riveter, Lady Liberty, Noble Savage, Paul Bunyan, Babe the Blue Ox, and many other beloved American characters are plotting, conspiratorially like God honest revolutionaries, to play an action-packed concert in their honor when they arrive on your wedding day. That’s my secret message.”

Ben saw that I wasn’t writing it down.

“Want some help?” Founding Father asked, moving towards my spy laptop. “I’ve been told by a number of folks that I’m a good writer. The trick is to never write more than three lines at a time; even government-trained readers have short attention spans.”

   

And so, I wrote another report—ATTN: AGENT IN CHARGE STURGIS—MY ASSET MAGGIE HAS FABRICATED A NEW COVER STORY TO REPLACE THE ONE WE WERE ISSUED. IN THIS NEW STORY, WE ARE NO LONGER “BOYFRIEND AND GIRLFRIEND.” WE ARE “ENGAGED” WAITING FOR “OUR FAMILIES” (NAMELY THE STORYBANKERS OF STORYSOLD: CITY ON HER SIDE AND THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ON MY SIDE) TO COME TOGETHER ON OUR WEDDING DAY. THE TERROR CULT MEMBERS ALSO CALL OUR WEDDING A “COMMON DEFENSE THEME.” I’M NOT SURE WHY YET, BUT A MAN COSTUMED IN THE LIKENESS OF BEN FRANKLIN HAS ASKED ME TO TELL “THE PEOPLE” THAT HIS BAND—THE AMERICAN DREAMSTATES BAND—PLAN TO PUT ON A CONCERT FOR YOU WHEN YOU ARRIVE.

  

No sooner had I sent the email off to Washington, I felt Ben slap my back and say, “Well done, Patrick Henry would be proud!”

I did my job. I passed information from a storybanker to the Man in Charge of Me. I thought that was The End of that, but I was wrong. I turned from my screen, and I saw that I had more work to do. My shop was filled with storybankers, all with “secret messages” they wanted me to narrate to the men who could listen and speak for America.

Who was I to deny them? I was only a lowly Eager Beaver. I didn’t have the training I needed to discern what intel information I should pass, or not pass, to the Federal Bureau of Investigations. I wasn’t at liberty to do much thinking for myself. The Men in Charge didn’t want me to be the one to choose The Intelligence; mainly, because, I imagine they didn’t want me deciding what the story was, leading them along like an audience before a movie screen.

Some twenty-seven messages from fifty-two storybankers later, I had finally exhausted the city’s demands for my Spyrrator that day. The last thing I wanted to hear next was Fritzee’s bark at the door. As usual Guide filled the scene with her presence like she was lit by spotlight. I looked at her; she looked at me, and said, “You missed The Flash Report.”

“Yes, I did,” I agreed, as I tried to ignore Founding Father and the ten or so other storybankers who were eating around the work island. They hadn’t used any of Maggie’s ingredient props, but the kitchen was a mess. Guide didn’t reply. She was standing in the doorway, thumping her trekking poles on the floor like an animal might stomp its feet to warn off a predator. After more silence, I finally asked the question, “Are you here to tackle me and pin me to the ground if I don’t arrest myself now?”

“No,” she replied. “Not today.”   

“Why not? Am I less of a danger to The Wilderness today?”

“Yes,” the Security Guide admitted. “It’s something like that.”

Inspired by Maggie’s script, I brushed by Guide and picked up a blue broken piece of chalk. Then I faced the chalkboard that my Fiancé posted outside Our Home and I wrote: I, AGENT WYLIE JONES, FROM THIS MOMENT ON DO SOLEMNLY SWEAR TO PASS INFORMATION FROM WESTONTON CORPORATION TO MAINLAND AMERICA IN REPORTS WRITTEN BY MY CHARACTER, SPYRRATOR.

Then I peeked around the corner and spied the kitchen. And I added the following line to my script: OH, YEAH; AND I DO ALSO SWEAR TO WASH EVERY DIRTY DISH IN OUR HOME, EACH AND EVERY DAY UNTIL THE SUN BURNS OUT OF THE SKY.    

I washed every dirty dish in Our Home that night. Franklin stayed and hung out in our dish pit with me, until I was done. I washed dishes; he talked, and I almost listened. It felt good to have a new friend.

My Storybank Account – Scene Thirty Eight,

THE PART WHERE THE MUSIC SWELLS AND THE ENGAGED PERSONS FALL INTO A NICE, SCRIPTED MONTAGE…

Soon after The Grand Opening of Our Home, I arrested myself.

I was now playing both criminal and jailer writing my own sentences in pursuit of freedom. The trouble was, I wanted to be a good Eager Beaver at the same time I wanted to sneak out, escape, and run for freedom, eat steak and lobsters, drink martinis, shoot bad buys, and turn every attractive woman I met into my next Bond Girl. It was a tough decision; but, after a few days of deliberation, Guide and I were able to make my script as simple as possible. The result was My Storybank Account told in three parts, beginning with—

PART (1) THE SCRIPT WHERE I DEVELOP STOCK CHARACTERS AND LEARN TO FEED MYSELF, SO MAGGIE MY LOVER DOESN’T HAVE TO WORK FOR ME…

I liked helping Maggie in the mornings in the Happy Garden. She said her old employer Bob from Mt. Tabor Market believed in what she called “workplace ESP,” and she believed in it too. In Scene, that meant she didn’t spend many moments training me to be a good Garden Helper. She said that her story, itself, would make what I had to do “fairly obvious.” For example, when Maggie unwound the hose from the base of the nearest aqueduct and began dragging it towards her garden, I looked around for a valve to turn it on. Then I turned it on. Most of our scenes happened in this way, but not all of them. Some work scenes required the Tender Gardener to give me very specific instructions. Those scenes were often full of conflict. The hard part was, once again, our central conflict. Was I the one in charge, or Maggie? The hardest part of submitting to her story was submitting. I was having trouble letting go and accepting the fact that Storysold: City was populated by people like Maggie who failed to act, every day, on the understanding that the most important story on the planet was called, “America.”

Eventually, we began to communicate better. She would say “stop!” when I needed to stop harvesting, and she’d say “more!” when I needed to harvest more vegetables. We even, often, spent a few moments at lunchtime to plot The Happy Harvest Menu Plan together. I found that, once I “got the big picture,” I could channel my workplace ESP more frequently.

Within a few weeks of my arrest, I could harvest, wash, pack, and store all the ingredients on Our Home Grown Menu. Not only that, I coined a satisfying character role I code-named, “Vole Hammer.” The Hammer’s job was simple, yet complex: I killed the voles that were eating all our beautiful vegetables, using either the “surprise and stomp move,” or a variety of snap, snare, and fall traps I fashioned from ocean trash I scavenged from the Reef Wall. Maggie described Vole Hammer’s supply of homemade traps as “very creative,” especially the one where I tried to get the vermin to nest in my trap in mass with the intention of “rounding them all up at once.” All in all, Vole Hammer wasn’t unprofitable. It was a good outlet for an American spy who’d spend most of his adult life training to kill things.      

I also found I could play Spyrrator and Garden Helper at the same time. Storybankers would drop by the Happy Garden and ask Spyrrator to send their stories to America. I would listen while I worked, and then use the voice activated hands free technology I bought from Blue Suit to narrate their stories and send them to America. Many of the requests for reports were cryptic and personal in nature, but some of them were meant to inform Maggie and I (and the FBI) about their live action plans for our wedding day. The way they would say that was, “I’m casting my live action votes for [insert their action plan of choice here] to show my support for The City’s common defense theme, The Wedding Plot.” That was the general idea.

I’d like to say that, with all that information rolling in, Spyrrator became an instant hit, but the question of profitability in Storysold: City was a strange one; or, at least, it was strange to me at the time. The problem with my first stock character was I, as Spyrrator, wasn’t really doing any work. Yes, I gathered information. Yes, I sent that information to the Bureau in DC. Yes, history is full of working roles like the Eye of the King (who was paid to travel around to conquered lands and report his findings), but I wasn’t able to charge my cast/customers any more than the monetary moments that I worked in scene. And that price was clear as day. If a report only took a moment (about fourteen minutes) to produce, I could only get a moment worth of profit in return. “Fourteen minutes” worth of monetary moments wasn’t a bad deal. I could by a lot of “action goods” for that much: a moment worth of a bread making scene, a moment worth of a costume making scene, or “fifteen minutes” worth of Rachna’s famous back massages. The problem with my new stock character Spyrrator was repeat business. As I discovered, it was difficult to spend a moment’s worth of profit in hundreds of accounts spread all over Storysold: City. An economist in any old economy would have said that earning a little profit from as many customers as possible was the best of all possible ways to do business, but that wasn’t the case there. In fact, the opposite was true. The most profitable way to live in Storysold: City was to develop rich, mutually beneficial business relationships that could be counted to be durable, and pass the qualitative test of time, and mean more than the passing of generic odes to consumer confidence. In other words, unless my cast and I made The Action and supported each other, then I’d fail the most basic Storysold expectation of life, to feed myself.

I tried a few times to cash in whatever moment’s worth of work I’d manage to mint as Spyrrator, but the reply from my fledgling supporting cast was always the same. They told me my character wasn’t worth the effort to balance out. They usually accounted for any action goods they sold me in what they called, “live action tax votes cast for The Wedding Plot.” After I heard that a few times, I had Maggie explain it. Apparently, like a bridge, a road, or a hospital, supporting my Spyrrator was in the common interest of many storybankers in Storysold: City. Once I understood that I was a charity case of sorts, I had a greater appreciation for Gertel and Patricia’s efforts to do business with me, “the hard way.” In exchange for dishwashing scenes at her shop, Gertel promised to put The Needle to work stitching me up a wedding prop: a handcrafted sport’s cap with a bouquet of carrots embroidered on its face. Patricia followed the General’s lead and farmed my dishwasher character out to her Monster friends at the Sea Hag Café in exchange for a new Wonder Bike and Wagon. I won’t lie. It felt good to buy something of value with my dishwashing scenes like a real storybanker. Oh wow, I thought one day on my way back from the Sea Hag Café, this feels like winning to me.

PART (2) THE SCRIPT WHERE I DO MY PART IN THE COMMON DEFENSE THEME CALLED THE WEDDING PLOT…

At the time, I was naïve enough to believe that The Wedding Plot was Storysold: City’s weird “cultural” way of planning a classic wedding. I passed information to the Men in Charge in Washington about the plot almost every day, and I still didn’t Get It. And I certainly didn’t fully appreciate the part I was cast to play in The Looming Central Conflict everyone, but I, understood was going happen, then climax in a way I also couldn’t imagine.

Here are a few of the details I passed to Washington:

• Paul the Woodcrafter was casting his votes by crafting a “storybed” to “celebrate the victory of our marital union for all to see.”
• Half Pint said that the New Pioneers were plotting to slaughter their walking meat “with the help of the American side of our family,” so their theme could serve hamburgers after the ceremony.
• Gambler told us he was looking forward to starting a “good old-fashioned/saloon-style fist fight” with my side of the family.
• Rosy and her fellow American Dreamstate John Henry were plotting “tactical ways” to seat our guests when they arrived in the city.
• Patricia offered the skilled service storylines of her Surgical Ninja in anticipation of healing the “wedding wounds” that might arise during the conflict between “our families.” The youth also said that she was sure she could inspire Grand Rachna and a few of her friends in The Working Healthcare System to join her wound-healing theme.
• Jellyfish, King Neptune, O2, and Juan dropped by just to tell us that they were planning to attend, but they hadn’t agreed on roles for our defense theme that were monstrous enough for them.
• After finally introducing themselves, Captain Nemo and Huck Finn shared their action plan to “fight the slavers of men” by joining the American Dreamstate Band for the pre-wedding concert.
• Naturally, Wilderness Security Guide and Fritzee volunteered for the role of Wedding Coordinators in charge of keeping the storybankers (and their many themes) in communication with each other, so “our wedding guests” would feel, “more comfortable.”

New information about The Wedding Plot rolled every day. In spite of the evidence, I couldn’t wrap my brain around the idea that so many of the storybankers seemed to be buying into the strange notion that our incorporated family themes would be able to gather together on our wedding day and create a scene that resembled anything other than pure chaos. My usual reply was, “Oh, that sounds nice. I’ll be sure to pass that along to my boss.” I must have seemed like a cross between a temp employee and an older person suffering from dementia. Or worse, a Spyrrator named Wylie Jones.

PART (3) THE SCRIPT WHERE I MAKE A COMMAND DECISION TO GIVE ALL OF MY LOVE TO MAGGIE…

Being under self-inflicted script arrest was often better than running free through a megamall with a charge card. For one, Maggie and I developed a  standing order for a Lights On-optional afternoon love scene. I discovered that, if our morning work scene at the Happy Garden went well, and my jog home beside Maggie’s bike and wagon was chatty and upbeat, and we worked as a team to pack our harvest in the cooler, and our showers happened, As One, with enough soap to go around: the sexy part of that scene would also happen. I don’t know if Maggie agreed, but I looked forward to our love scenes. It was like having a mission again, but our Storysold: Love Scene was more enjoyable than my hero mission because Maggie was enjoying it too.

Speaking of Maggie, working with her was the only relationship that became markedly more profitable during this part of my story. I began to make up for all the Assah I’d drunk up by learning to grow and gather the ingredients I needed to make it, and then I studied Solji’s Gravesight to learn how to turn those ingredients into her signature rice wine. I also learned to make kimchi! Which I still won’t eat, but I knew many of our cast members enjoyed it at Solji’s Picnic Area. And I enjoyed most of their company when they dropped by to visit Solji’s Gravesight while we toiled in the garden.

In a Storysold banking system, I would have been balancing Maggie’s account for years with all the debts I’d massed in the production of The Mission. It was big budget flop for sure, and I was thankful that Maggie proposed that our engagement day be a New Beginning (a day of amnesty) for my storybank account. Her condition was clear. In return for her forgiveness of my debts (all the food-sucking drunkenness) I had to commit my future moments to the development of our “happy homemaking theme.”

Once again, my script arrest might have made me feel more enslaved like Classic Man with Old Ball and Chain Wife if it wasn’t for my new dishwasher character. My dishwashing action was an easy sell, and best of all: kitchens were where the food was, and I wasn’t too proud to feast on scraps. I often ran home with a couple of “to go containers” full of healthy food scraps left over from the Sea Hag Café to share with Maggie. We both appreciated not having to cook every night. Sometimes, a scene featuring leftovers under the covers with our TV was the perfect ending to a good day.

PART (3.1) THE SECRET PART OF MY SCRIPT THAT I DIDN’T TELL ANYONE ABOUT UNTIL NOW…

Throughout these scenes, we didn’t discuss an official date for our wedding day. And nobody asked about it either.

I was glad for that. Not setting a date made The Wedding Plot a lot less real like going on a mission without clear expectations. It also made the secret James part of my story (I didn’t tell anyone about until now) feel more real and likely to happen. That part was the part where I had no intention of marrying Maggie and living happily ever after in Storysold: City. My plan was to discover the location of Weston’s Super Massive Vault, then fly away in Olaf’s seaplane never to return; or fly away in Olaf’s seaplane, discover the location of the Vault from the Brothers Grim, and then never return. My James Bond plan came complete with a classic revenge-bent inner monologue. “Where does she get off?” I narrated alone to my audience of one. “Did Maggie seriously think I would permit an Asset to seduce me into going rogue with her based purely on my love for her? I’m no sucker. When I return to The Land of Opportunity I can find a better, hotter, garden variety hippie to marry, who will love me for who I am. She’ll be great. Someone who gardens and salutes the flag too, and doesn’t  demand that I betray my country.” I figured, once I was able to produce the location of Weston’s Vault, Agent Sturgis would forgive me for failing to keep my Asset in line, and I’d be rewarded with more work and enough money to buy a farm, with goats, and provide for my left-leaning American woman (with healthy birthing hips) like a princess. Or not…maybe marrying Maggie in a plot to defend a city full of non-violent protesters against the most lethal nation in history was the better story? The hard part about writing The Action of my story was, I didn’t know what was going to happen next. And that sucked.

My Storybank Account – Scene Thirty Nine,

THE PART WHERE OUR HEROES ARE ENGAGED BY A KING DEMANDING TRIBUTE…

Our nice, scripted montage ended the moment Chief Moyniham waltzed through the door of Our Home. He took a seat at the work-island bar and asked Maggie for a pitcher of Nearly Rotten Delight and a plate of cheese bread. He ate and drank in silence, until the pitcher was empty and the plate held only crumbs. Then Moyniham belched (looking satisfied), pulled a wad of old-market cash from his wallet, left it on the counter, stood to face Maggie and I, and said, “Boss wants to talk to you.”

“Who me?” we asked in unison.

“Yeah,” Moyniham grinned. “You.”

“Why?” I asked as I watched, with surprise, as Maggie pocketed the pressed pieces of fiber on her work island counter.

“Boss and Miss Chase want to have you guys over for dinner five days from now, at, as Chase put it, ‘eighty mms in the evening.’”

He didn’t wait for our reply. He just walked out.

After a PRIVATE discussion and a few words of encouragement from Traveler, we decided to put on our truest costumes—Maggie wore her new Fabulous Food Producer costume (veggie patches and all), and I wore my usual skinny jeans and tight T-shirt—and we walked to Westonton Headquarters to dine with the man we’d been sent to spy on.

As we cut across the grassy meadow near the heart of Center Stage Maggie whispered, “Do you owe that boy money or something?”

I looked around confused, until Maggie pointed to the edge of the meadow where a sport gardener had played a grove of aspens protected by a thick ground force of blackberry bushes. The game pieces stood between us and Westonton Corporate Headquarters and so did a boy sitting astride a large dog. The dog had matted hair over its eyes and one long, drool-dripping fang that hung from its jowls like a six shooter in the hand of a cowboy. They were blocking the only trail cut through the blackberries, and the boy was eyeing us, very seriously, like a vigilant checkpoint guard.

“I don’t recognize him,” I replied as we continued to walk through the high, wild grasses of the meadow. “Do you owe him money?”

As we came closer we could see him better. The boy was stocky with an odd flat expression on his face, which was hard to read. My best guess was a smirk, but the boy might have also made the expression to signify an honest question like, “What are you doing here?” In any case, his cheeks were puffy like a prizefighter who hadn’t healed from his last fierce combat. He was dressed in knight’s armor made from thick recycled cardboard, which he wore under a chain mail suit made of bottle caps. He had an image of a roaring mouse on his breastplate, and he carried a shield and a satchel that had many round objects bulging from it. As we approached, I could see that he also had a wooden sword sheathed and strapped to his back.

When we were within a stone’s throw away from the knight in the cardboard armor, he announced, “The kingdom of Maggie is recognized by the sovereign Kings and Queens of Camelot!”

Maggie wasn’t sure how to take that, so she replied, “Thank you, young sir. It is good to be recognized. Who, may I ask, are you?”

The young knight raised his voice louder and colored it with more depth than I’d imagined was possible from a boy of his age. “I am Camelot of Camelot, and I demand my tribute!” the boy roared back.

We later learned what that meant. King Andrew, Keeper of The Royal Shopping List, was the love child of Queen Arthur Guinevere and Don Quixote the Demon Fighter. Arthur was a chaste maiden of the First Congregational Army of Christ (department of Catholicism) before she fell for a Christian Soldier named Simon Says. They were married. She tried to make the Disney love magic happen, but it didn’t happen. Her Husband’s character, Simon Says, Patron Saint of Suffering for Others, was good at his work. He was so good, in fact, Simon often lost sight of his own signature completely. Queen Author Guinevere rarely saw her Husband. For the first few years she tried everything she could to make the Disney magic happen. When that didn’t work, she spent another few years trying to fit the broken magic first in her story, then she tried to edit his story. Inevitably her passion for her work—“working on her relationship” trying to love him like one would love a stone, or a statue—broke under the burden of having to imagine a person for her husband to be when he wasn’t there, and he wasn’t there even when he was there. When the loneness became too much for her to bear, she opened her heart to someone else. That person was a Demon Fighter named Don Quixote who not-so-humbly cast himself as Don, Rescuer of Lonely House Wives. Don named the demon he was fighting in Author’s story “Alienation,” which wasn’t a classic demon like Greed, but he felt Alienation counted as a characteristic worth fighting because no one feels good when they’re alienated from the conversation, touches, and love of other humans for too long. As he put it, “Humans just weren’t made to love stones, statues, or selfless husbands.” Andrew was the unintended twist in their love story. Don never meant to commit to Arthur. He was the Rescuer of Lonely Wives, not the timeworn character otherwise known as Father. Andrew didn’t blame Don, or Simon, for their failures. Andrew blamed the “inhuman generic storyline” pushed by the First Congregational Army, which demanded all Its followers to write The Action of Its holy quests first before they wrote any of The Action of their stories. That’s why Andrew, at a bright young age, began to dream his Mother’s dream of Camelot.

That was all fine and good, but Andrew’s version of Camelot was more radical than the easy-going theme run by his Mother. For her, Camelot was just another word for Storysold: City, but for Andrew: Camelot was an ever-present state of mind that existed everywhere. Everyone had a sovereign kingdom of Camelot in their hearts, waiting to be claimed and ruled by a King or Queen. In other words, Andrew (along with his faithful dog Squire) ate by stomping around The City, pacing wildly, waving his sword, making lengthy speeches, dictating policy, defending the sovereignty of his kingdom, and spreading the “Truth of Camelot” to anyone who’d listen.

One could characterize Andrew as a persuasive beggar, or maybe an idealist, scientist, or missionary who was in constant need of communal grants or charity. The grandmas of Storysold: City had learned to hide their brownies when Andrew came around, but he was more than a classic, high-minded beggar. Guide had spent some time with the youth before his characteristics had cemented themselves in his mind. With Guide by his side, Andrew was eventually able to discover something profitable to do with his life that did not compromise his dream of Camelot! That something profitable he did became known as The Royal Shopping List.

Under Guide’s trailblazing guidance, King Andrew developed a list of common themes. These common themes were important group-oriented tasks like building bridges, securing medical/health services for the aged and dying, stewarding wild parks, fixing the elevators in the common areas, repairing the broken artificial land pontoons of the Garden Surfaces, and all the other infrastructure settings that needed to be built and maintained to keep the city sailing. It became his role in life to sell his fellow storybankers on The Royal Shopping List, because “Camelot is only as strong as its weakest wall.” If Andrew was working his role in The Old Market, the youth might have been categorized somewhere between an at-risk teen and a tax collector. But, in The City, he was King Andrew Keeper of The Royal Shopping List, a boy who made sure his fellow storybankers were casting their live-action votes for the many needed common themes of “Camelot” and Storysold: City too.

Maggie approached the cardboard king and exchanged a few odes of friendship with the boy. Then she walked by him, and followed the trail through the aspens and wild blueberries to Westonton Headquarters. I tried to follow her without “recognizing” the troubled youth. I didn’t get far before he drew his wooden sword and cried, “Halt! The kingdom of Wylie Jones, Agent of his United Kingdom of Kingdoms is not recognized by the sovereign Kings and Queens of Camelot! Thou shall not pass!”

“I don’t have time for this,” I said—then I turned my back on the boy and followed Maggie, who was rounding a bend in the trail.

Splat! I felt something soft and slimy hit the back of my head: juice oozing down my back. Angry, I spun around and spied a rotten grapefruit on the ground an instant before the soft mush of a rotten, softball-sized tomato hit me square between my eyes.     

“What the hell?” I hollered, wiping the juice from my eyes. “Can’t I go anywhere in this city without being hit by something weird?”

“Si-lence!” Andrew roared. “For the ground you walk on, for the trail beneath your feet, for the electricity in your shop: You will pay your tribute to The Royal Shopping List. Charge!” Then he dug his heels into his faithful dog Squire, and they charged at me—or rather they lumbered at me slowly—sword drawn, as Andrew screamed, “Tax the infidel!”

I didn’t know what to do. Spy school hadn’t prepared me for anything like this. The situation would have been a lot easier if the troubled youth had produced a gun from his dad’s hunting locker, or held a pipe bomb he’d made from the broken ends of a hundred firecrackers—anything more normal than hurling rotten fruit bombs at me. I suppose I could have engaged him like I did the Rompasaurus at our Shop Warming Party, but I remembered how that scene ended, so I fled through the aspens, passing Maggie along the way. Yes, you didn’t read that wrong. I ran through the Wild Garden Arena with a boy and his dog trailing behind like the Dark Lord Satan was after me.

In a beat or two, I found myself staring up at the window-lined saucer of Weston’s penthouse. As I stood at the base of the tree-like trunk—waiting to see if I’d lost the youth in the maze of trails—the sounds of Glenn Miller’s big band music drifted down. I was about to relax when I saw Squire emerge, lumbering under the weight of his King.

Panicked, I spun awkwardly through the revolving door and was greeted with a blast of Climate Controlled Air. I studied my options, and decided to make for the safety of Security Chief Moyniham’s counter. Outside, King Andrew dismounted his faithful Squire. Then he hit the door a beat behind me with the heel of his hand in front of him like a running back cutting through a hole in the defensive line. I ran around the counter where Chief Moyniham had been cleaning his sniper rife, and I said, “I think that damned kid has finally lost his last marble.” Then I ducked as King Andrew began to bombard the counter with rotten fruit bombs. As if on cue, the Chief stood tall without any signs of fear for the bombs whizzing-by.

“Oh!” he said. “So, you’ve come back for more! Very well! Prepare to meet your old buddies: Dutch Rub, Charlie Horse, Wet Willie, and the latest weapon in my anti-Andrew arsenal…” The Chief grabbed the barrel of the rifle he was cleaning, ducked down behind the counter, loaded the barrel with a homemade dart of some kind, and then spoke to me like we were old foxhole buddies. “It’s dipped in Thorazine,” he whispered with a triumphant grin. Then he stood, put the barrel to his mouth, and blew the dart at Andrew. When the Security Chief saw that he’d missed his mark, he cried, “Keep it coming, squirt! I won’t miss again! That’s for damned sure!”

“Si-lence, Villain!” the King ordered. Then he flanked us and hurled a fruit bomb at us from the cover of the round elevator shaft that ran through the center of Weston’s Headquarters. The bomb missed. “Ha! You missed!” But the next three hit their marks, oozing rotten fruit all over us.

“Si-lence!” the King ordered again as he flanked the counter from the other side of the elevator. “You are nothings/nobodies/lowly vile villains who have not been recognized by the Kings and Queens of Camelot. Claim your crowns, now, and show yourself, or face the wrath of King Andrew, Keeper of The Royal Shopping List!”     

Moyniham stood in a rage, and started blowing Thorazine darts in rapid succession. They all missed their marks.

“Unbelievable,” I said as I dodged a rotten fruit bomb.

“There’s nothing believable about this place,” Bradley replied.

“Yeah…I know,” I said, crouching lower, “but that kid’s serious.”

The Chief’s tone shifted as he hit the boy’s helmet with a dart, and said, “That crazy kid’s a perfect example of why this city will never work in The Real World. Know what I mean, buddy?”

“Yeah,” I said without thinking, as a tomato bomb hit my face.

Bradley laughed, and continued his commentary. “Don’t get me wrong, I like working for the Boss Man,” he chuckled lightly. “He pays me good money to sit around and do puzzles. I don’t mind sitting around doing puzzles, but this can’t go on. Not like this. It’s only a matter of time before your boys come marching in. Ain’t that right, Agent Jones?”

The gun-loving mercenary was my age. I got what he was saying, and replied, “Yeah. I feel you. I agree, it’s only a matter of time before something dramatic happens. That’s for sure. But I have no idea what…I mean, for real, how will the Man in Charge deal with all this crazy shit?”

“I’ll show you how I’d deal with it,” Moyniham said as he aimed the latest anti-Andrew weapon in his arsenal, and blew. The dart sailed through The Climate Controlled Air, and plunged into the side of Andrew’s neck. The boy kept fighting, hurling expletives and the last of his rotten fruit bombs in our direction, until the sedative powers of the drug dragged his will to fight down to a dull roar. We watched in awe as King Andrew loped, legs dragging on the floor, towards his Squire who was lying inside the revolving door. The boy fell to his knees, trying to stand for a beat or two, before he surrendered his fight, and passed out, drooling, curled up beside his friend.

“Bingo!” Moyniham cheered victoriously as Maggie, who’d been watching through the glass of the revolving door, finally decided to join The Action. She took one look at Andrew, and asked, “What did you guys do to the kid? He was alive a moment ago.”

Moyniham and I swapped looks.

“Oh, you know…” I begin. “We were playing…”   

“And we wore the little man out,” Bradley offered.   

“You two characters wore him out?”

“We sort of wore each other out,” Bradley jumped in.

“Then why aren’t you guys drooling on the floor right now?”

I knew I should have, but I couldn’t go beyond the cliché. I lied to Maggie, again, because I was raised to believe it was my manly duty to lie, or attempt to lie, to the women in my life. “It’s only by The Grace of God that we survived,” I replied to Maggie—while I, on the sly, gave my new man friend Bradley a wink. “He wasn’t playing like nice boys should play.”

She studied us intently. “Oh really?”

Then she looked down at King Andrew. He was mumbling, trying with all his might to lift a pocket-sized scroll to Maggie. “Is this for me?” she asked as she took the scroll from his hand. Andrew tried to make his mouth make words again, but the only thing his mouth made was more drool.

Maggie flashed us a hard, knowing look. Then she turned back to Andrew, and said, “Try again, I’m listening.”

With some effort he managed to say, “Give to…Jones.”

Maggie gave Squire a few gentle pets. Then she walked to where I was standing dumbly watching the scene like TV, trying to determine how angry she was. She handed me the scroll, without breaking her stride, on her way to the elevator where she pressed the UP button and waited for the door to open. “Are you coming or not?” she asked, eyes filled with hate.   

I put my hand on Bradley’s shoulder, and gave him a reassuring pat to let him know that everything would be okay, then I replied, “Of course I’m coming, dear. We have a date, don’t we?”

On our way UP, I opened the scroll. It was King Andrew’s Royal Shopping List (read Bonus Material #4). I glanced over the shopping list of common themes and felt confused, as usual, by the newfangled actions of The Storysold Exchange system. And, as usual, I nodded like I Got It all. I didn’t want to know what it meant to cast my votes in action for the themes, stories, and scenes I wanted to support and “pass into motion.” I was living in a constant crisis too afraid of what happened next to care, so I crammed the boy king’s scroll into my pocket and promptly forgot it was there.    

My Storybank Account – Scene Forty,

THE PART WHERE MAGGIE’S LONG LOST FATHER BLESSES THE WEDDING PLOT FOR ALL THAT’S WORTH…

We rode the elevator up to Weston’s penthouse. When the door slid open, we walked in with the proper degree of awe that anyone would feel in a place where someone had been hiding away like a guru author.

We walked into Weston’s living/working space “office” to see that the many screens of his wrap around fourth wall was ON. Most of the screen were tuned to generic news shows from sources around the world, but the biggest big screen, front and center, was tuned to our scene. I couldn’t see Weston. He was facing the screen in his recliner. On screen (as in life) I could see his right hand resting on the arm of his chair. As we walked closer, I saw The Action of our signatures walking closer to his in bright living colors.

“I love this thing,” the CEO of Westonton Corporation said calmly. “It’s like having eyes on the back of my head.”

“Why are we here?” I asked straight away.

“You screwed up,” Weston replied as he spun his chair around to face me. He was wearing a green velvet robe tied with a golden belt.

“Who me?” we asked in unison.

Weston ignored our question.

“It was your job as Noble Spy of the All Star American empire,” he thundered, “to witness my good works here…then persuade your President to listen to reason and accept the economic stimulus package I designed, with precision, to bail out your country’s boring old banking market completely.” He paused long enough to make me think it was my turn, but before I spoke he asked, “You know you’ve failed, don’t you?”

Our channels were broadcasting The Action live, and I felt the A-eyes of Storysold: City hit me like a spotlight. “How much do…did you know about The Mission I was sent here to accomplish?”

“Oh, I know. I was the one who sent you here.”

“You didn’t send me. My Commander in Chief did.”

“And I was the one who sent the email that prompted him to send you here. If he didn’t send you, he would have sent one of his other expendable government pawns to do the same job.” He paused again long enough to make me think it was my turn again, then he asked, “You don’t believe that we, the Winners and Great Men of Earth communicate like normal people do?”

“Well,” I started. “I uh, I uh…”

“I uh, I uh, I uh what?” Weston thundered.

“The President could have ignored your message.”

“Ha!” he roared. “Nobody ignores a fortune as great as mine.”

“Oh no?” I roared back. “What about your daughter?”

“What about Maggie?” Weston corrected.

“She’s done an outstanding job of ignoring your fortune.”

When Maggie heard that—she eyed me coldly, crossed her arms, and said, “Leave me out of this asshole.”

“I’m just saying,” I said sweetly. “He can’t go around taking credit for work he didn’t do. We were sent by…”

“Whoa there, Buckaroo!” Maggie laughed. “Are you really going to stand there, like a villain, and tell him all the details of The Mission?”

“Uh no,” I said suddenly aware of what I was saying, “I mean yes. It’s no secret. The President sent us because it’s in everyone’s best interest to know everything we can about Terror Banking Cult Leaders who are threatening to overthrow every known economic system in the world.”

Weston thought that was hilarious. “So, I’m a Terror Banking Cult Leader?” he roared. “Is that the best you could come up with?”

“I don’t know,” I replied, as I plopped down on his couch. “I think it’s a good way to describe a madman who’s plotting to inject the good, free-market-loving economies of the world with a viral currency that will, once it gains a critical mass of demand, render the stock markets, banks, and other financial institutions of the world obsolete. I mean, only a crazed cult leader would see something other than sheer terror in a future like that.”

Weston leaned forward, grinned, and said, “You could call me what I am: I am Mr. Chester Weston, the only Great Capitalist in history to break the Great Growth Barrier and take It All.”

Maggie laughed nervously, as I said, “Think what you like, but you will fail. The world economy won’t go down without a fight.”

“And that’s precisely what I’m counting on.”

“What do you mean?” I asked with a sudden perk of interest.

“I mean…” Weston paused. “I knew you would fail to sell the men in charge of you on the obvious benefits of my new economic paradigm. I knew it would come to this.”

“Come to what precisely?”

Weston turned to his Long Lost Daughter and said, “Why don’t you explain to your halfwit Fiancé what I’m talking about.”

Maggie didn’t turn to face me. She continued to look into her Long Lost Father’s eyes, as she explained, “He’s saying that he knew that we would fail to sell his new Storysold Exchange system to our President, which means my father—Chester—was prepared, from the beginning, to fight his competitors for the hearts and minds of his future customers.”   

Weston stood, applauded, and said, “I couldn’t have put those lines any better, Maggie dear.”

“Don’t call me dear,” Maggie said.

As if on cue, we heard the elevator door slide open—and the clip, clop, clop of Miss Chase’s heels filled the scene. “Hello, Lover,” she said.

“You’re late,” Chester said with a smile.

“Sorry,” she said, presenting a smile that didn’t appear to be sorry for anything. “Sam was busy initiating the newest members of his All-Star Goat Team to the world today.”

Maggie was pleased to see her friend. They embraced warmly. Then Miss Chase embraced me too, saying, “I’ve been watching your channel in my spare time, and I must say…you’re doing a fairly good job of making the journey from government stooge to Spyrrator.”

“Thanks,” I said, pulling away. “I think.”

Miss Chase stood back and read all three of our signatures. “I don’t know if you crazy kids know this or not, but I wanted to say it, now, in front of all of you,” she began. “You have Traveler’s full stock of characters in support of The Wedding Plot, including me, Miss Chase. I, in all my storytime travels, believe it’s a real winner of a common defense theme.”

Weston scowled at his dynamic Lover, cinched his belt, and walked dramatically as possible to the kitchen. “Is that how you think it’s going to go down in The Pages of History?” When his only reply was silence, he opened his General Electric brand refrigerator, pulled out a bottle of water, cracked it, and sucked it down like a thirsty pig to a plastic nipple. Then he sat back in his easy chair and tried again. “By your silence, I assume you believe your venture won’t only cause hardship and misery for anyone who buys in.”

“I do,” Miss Chase said without hesitation.

“You do, huh?” He asked again with a frown.

Miss Chase sauntered over to her Lover’s chair and made herself at home on his lap. “Come now,” she replied, flashing a winning smile. “Don’t play like you’re not always two or three steps ahead of all of us.”

“I don’t ‘play’ at anything,” he said with a straight face. “I know why I’m anywhere at any given moment.”

“Then tell us why you invited us here for dinner.”

Weston leaned over and gave his Lover a big kiss. “I’d tell you,” he grinned, “but—then I wouldn’t be a step ahead of you, now would I?”

Miss Chase rolled her eyes and walked off in a huff.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Lover,” Weston grinned again. “It was a very good question. Why do you think we’re here?”

She walked into the kitchen, opened the freezer, and pulled out two thin square cardboard boxes decorated in red, white, and blue, set them on the countertop, and turned on the oven. “I hate it when you pretend like you have a Grand, Master Plan in mind, when you don’t.” She grabbed a six-pack of Fizzy Pop from the fridge, and added, “Deep down, you don’t care how any scene turns out, so long as you’re on the winning side.”

Weston stood and said, “Oh, I care.”   

“Then help me make dinner for our guests.”

“I’d love to,” Weston replied, “but I do believe that you, at one time or another, should tell us why we’re all here first.”

“Make the salad,” she negotiated, “then I’ll think about it.”

“How about I bake the pizza,” Weston counter-offered, “while you entertain our guests. Then we can use teamwork to set the table.”

“Why don’t you set the table, and I’ll bake the pizza.” Miss Chase grinned, mocking her Lover. “Then we can both make the salad. It is, after all, the best of what we have to offer our guests tonight…”

And they went on like that, negotiating every detail of the dinner scene they produced that night until the table on the balcony was set: glasses filled with Fizzy Pop, a big bowl of salad (with tongs), and pizzas hot and cooling in the kitchen. Weston handed us plates. We filled them with pizzas topped with mushrooms, sausage, and peppers, and then we took the seats that had been set for us in the evening’s dinner scene. Traveler’s timing was on, as always. The sun was beginning to sink behind the shop-lined terraced walkways of Center Stage, filling the sky with new colors.

When everyone was settled, Weston turned to Miss Chase, took a deep breath, and said, “OK, you win. I’ll tell you why we’re here.”

Then Mr. Chester Weston—Greatest Capitalist in History—paused long enough for the silence to kick in My Old Fear of not pleasing that person, place, or thing my Eager Beaver believed to be grander than me.   

“No wait,” I jumped in. “I think I got this one…”

“By all means,” Weston beamed like a proud parent while Traveler put her head in her hands. “Tallyho, Mr. Jones. Tallyho.”

First, I made full eye contact. Then I did my best tone of a guru and said, “We’re here to do what all young couples in love do.”

“Which couples?” Maggie said under her breath. “The ones in the movies, or the ones in your head? Like there’s a difference.”

“Don’t do his dirty work for him, Wylie,” Miss Chase said. “Take it from me, the big boss is very skilled at coaxing his subjects into sharing their plots, while he keeps his Grand, Master Plan secret. It makes it easier for him to con us all, when we’re running around believing we’re still the masters and commanders of our own destinies, when in fact—we’re all doing what he’s long-sense directed us to do. Let him tell us why we’re here.”

“Don’t listen to the ladies,” Weston prompted. “Men will always be mysterious to women. They, simply, do not have the balls to understand our kind. Go ahead, Mr. Jones. What do all young couples in love do?”

I looked across the table. Maggie was shaking her head in disbelief while Miss Chase laughed quietly to herself. I thought about telling the man “no,” or something like “no,” but he had me pegged. At that moment, my desire to please my higher power was greater than my desire to please Maggie, Traveler, or myself—so I said, “We’re here tonight to give me, the future Husband of your Daughter Maggie, a chance to do what all young couples in love do, and ask the Father of the Bride to bless our wedding plans.”

“Bravo!” Weston cried and clapped me on my back. Then he stood and raised his glass high. “I’d like to propose a toast,” he roared. “Here’s to whatever you’re calling it, The Wedding Plot…may it lead to victory!”

Miss Chase stood, held her glass to Weston’s, and said, “And here’s to the Bride’s Father, may he one day do something to earn that title!”

“Bravo!” Maggie cried and clapped Miss Chase on the back with a big grin. Then she stood, joined her glass to theirs, and said, “And here’s to Our Home, may my vegetables all be stronger than my Betrothed!”

I felt like I should add something, so I added my glass and said, “And here’s to the Honorable President of the United States of America. May he decide that your transnational city is not a threat to everything The American Way of Life stands for, and spare this weird little city the fate of death by fire and smart bombs dropped from on high like flaming meteors thrown from the gods.” Then I sat back down, put a big piece of pizza in my mouth, and said, “Yum. Now this is pizza! Who did you say made this again?”

I felt the silent attention fall suddenly in my direction.

Then we all sat down, put a big piece of pizza in our mouths, and said, “Yum.” Just like me. We ate in silence for a moment, then Miss Chase told the story of our pizza. A member of The American Dreamstates Band, code-named “American Spirit,” had gathered the sausage, mushrooms, peppers, and other ingredients, produced the pizzas, and then froze them in the red, white, and blue boxes she made for her cast to use and reuse. When she was done telling the production story, the table grew silent again.

I looked at Weston. He was face down, plotting something serious as he guzzled bottled water and filled himself with pizza. I piled a big tong full of mustard greens, baby tomatoes, lettuce, and sliced cabbage, all slathered in a thin layer of sea salt, oil, and vinegar on my plate. Then I took a bite. It was the best salad I’d had. “Wow,” I said in between bites. “This is the best salad I’ve ever had. Who did you say produced the greens?”   

“I didn’t say,” Miss Chase replied.

“Well, don’t hold back,” I prompted. “Who was it?”

“You should know, Asshole,” Maggie said, flushed with pride.

“Oh,” I laughed nervously, realizing my mistake as Weston reached for the bowl and piled a big helping of salad on his plate.

I was about to open my mouth and run my usual damage control program, when Maggie put a finger to my lips, and said, “It’s OK. I forgive you for not knowing. I’m glad you’re enjoying my work.”

“Well, I am,” I said with all my heart. “It’s a great salad.”

Maggie beamed. “I had a lot of help making it great.”

Poof, I felt my Eager Beaver (desire to please the Great Man) vanish like a villain in smoke. Emboldened, I turned to Weston and asked, “So how about that blessing? Eh there, Pop?”

The President and CEO of Super Star City sat in silence and did his best to finish all the vegetables on his plate. Then Chester stood and walked into his living space, opened a secret vault in his wall, pulled out an old VHS player and cassette, and hooked it to his wide-screen Storysold: TV. “I’ve never shown this story to anyone,” Weston said as we gathered around the screen now glowing with color. “Not even you, Lover.”

We waited in silence for what he said next.

“I made this home movie on Maggie’s birthday,” he began. “It’s set on my property in Wyoming’s Wind River Range.”

The narrator was holding the camera in one hand and a big yellow umbrella in the other. The shot moved from a small cabin in the woods (A-frame style construction with moonlight windows for the loft and a sliding glass door leading to a deck that looked out over a lake) to the next shot that showed a long, wooden waist-high tub and changing cabana. It was set beside a roaring creek that ran down from the snow-capped ridges overlooking the cabin into the lake. The tub was steaming, fed from the scalding waters from a nearby hot spring and cooled by the waters from the creek. It was raining lightly. As the narrator walked closer to the tub, the scene began to take focus. We watched as a red-haired woman, dressed in a beaded buckskin dress, helped another woman—who was holding her round belly, screaming in pain—out of her clothes and into the steaming tub.

“That’s your Mother Annie, Maggie,” the narrator began. “The hippie in buckskin who’s helping her into the tub, that’s Annie’s friend and midwife Ginger. Your Mother’s water broke a few minutes before I turned the camera on.” Then the voice on screen paused. “I’m your Father, Maggie—but you can call me Chester. That tub I built for Annie is the only thing I’ve ever built with my hands. It took me a month to build that thing and find a way to channel the hot spring and creek waters into it.”

“Why didn’t you take her to a hospital?” I asked curiously.

“We were in love, madly in love. We wanted our daughter Maggie to be born at home, with us, without the presence of strangers.”

We watched, without a word, as Ginger guided Annie through the delivery. When she was done, and the cord had been cut, and the blood and parts of the new human story that no longer belonged to Maggie floated out of the tub into The Wilderness, Ginger took the camera. Maggie and I held our breath as we watched the scene unfold: Chester stepped naked as the day he was born into the tub, took Maggie in his arms, and smiled. Then they sat in the rain and rising steam, as one family together, looking out into The Winds as they welcomed their daughter into the world.

When the screen had faded away, Weston turned and asked, “Do you know why I showed you that scene?” No one said a word. Mr. Chester Weston turned to his Long Lost Daughter and said, “The world is too cruel a place to try to raise a baby as beautiful as you were. I tried, for a while, but I failed to be strong for you in every way a man can fail.”

“Let me guess,” I paused, fighting my Eager Beaver off for a shot at learning the truth about Weston. “You’re not giving us your blessing, because you don’t feel qualified for the job of Father.”

Weston blinked at me for a beat—then he said, “No, you Halfwit. The only qualification a Father needs to be a Father is to love his Daughter with all he is, and do his best to show her that before he dies.”

“Oh,” I laughed. “Is that’s what you think you’re doing?”

  “I am,” Weston replied like he had his hand on a Bible. “I’m doing what many Fathers before me have done. I’m backing my Daughter’s play in The Wedding Plot in spite of the fact that the young man she’s choosing to co-star her life with is a sneaky, drunk, lying, cowardly US Government Spy who treats my Daughter like she owes him something for being there. I will back Maggie’s play even when you are, in every imaginable way, a lesser man than the star she deserves to work alongside…because I love her.”

What was I supposed to say to that? Deadbeat Dads are like dutiful soldiers? They always have some Great Cause or another that helps them leave their homes behind them. I wanted to tell Weston (and Maggie) that I’d lost my Father to The American Way of Life too. I wanted to tell them that he gave the best of himself to his company like a good soldier for five-plus days a week in order to provide his family with all the comforts of home. I wanted to blurt out My Life’s Story all at once, but I didn’t. I had no reply to Weston’s speech, and neither did Maggie or Miss Chase.

Chester faced our silence like it was a thing. He sighed, and he began to rub his hands, and pace, and study his Long Lost Daughter like a scientist trying to draw a perfect circle around us. Finally, he stopped moving, turned to face Maggie, and said, “I have to know…”

“What do you have to know?” Maggie asked.

“Before we go any further, I have to know if you two really love each other.” He paused to clarify, saying, “I mean, are you prepared to do whatever it takes—for better or worse, in sickness and in heath—to make The Wedding Plot happen? Or will you run from each other at the first sign of hardship and danger? I need to know, now, if I can count on you to be all in.”

I was glad Maggie spoke first.

“I love Our Home,” she paused. “I’ve never loved anything more in my life. It’s mine. And the conflict Wylie and I introduced could, not only, destroy not only Our Home, but every home in our city. I’m also fascinated by Wylie. He is my special Little Green Man, and I’m rooting for him…one day I believe he will become the hero he’s been training since birth to be.”

“Is that it?” Weston thundered.

“Yes,” Maggie replied without hesitation.

“Stay together for the kids, even when your man child husband is one of them. Sounds like the same old, classic, age old ingredients for yet another miserable marriage to me,” Weston grumbled under his breath.

Then he faced me, and asked, “And what about you, Jones?”

“Oh,” I replied, doing my best not to appear nervous. “I know I’ll never be able to convince any of you of anything, anymore. I lost my street credit a long time ago. But, minus a few minor details, I’ve never lied about the day I fell in love with Maggie. I knew I was in trouble the moment I met her outside that hoop house garden she made in her parking space. It was love at first sight, and my love for Maggie—for you—has grown each day.”

“Oh I know,” Maggie smiled. Then she kissed me.

“Very well,” Weston chuckled as he watched Miss Chase loosen her blouse. “Now, I think what scene needs is some celebration Yalp.”

“What’s Yalp?” Maggie asked.

“It’s Olaf’s, my, uh…pilot’s brand of whiskey.”

“Count me in!” I said with sudden interest.

“Good,” Weston said coolly. “It’s in the Vault.”

“‘Vault,’ as in…your Super Massive Vault?” I asked, wide eyed.

“Precisely,” Weston replied. Then Maggie and I followed our CEO into the elevator, where Weston popped one of the panels off the wall and punched 334643 into a secret keypad without bothering to hide the numbers from us. The steel doors were about to close when Traveler suddenly stepped in. I couldn’t help smiling when I saw her. She was wearing her signature torn T-shirt, sunglasses, and bomber’s jacket with an “O” painted abstractly on its back. “Mind if I cut in?” she asked with a laugh as she joined us. “I wouldn’t miss the next scene for all the fancy cheese goats in France.”

And down we went, below the sun lit surface of the ocean, a level below the desk where Security Chief Moyniham spent his days working his puzzles like they were battles in a great war of the imagination.

My Storybank Account – Scene Forty-One,

THE PART WHERE THE CITY’S OLDEST COUPLE BRINGS THE NEWEST TO THE POINT OF NO RETURN…

The elevator doors opened into a windowless room. At the far end of the room was a round steel door. Weston walked to the door, punched in a code, spun a wheel, and pulled the door open, though not without effort. Behind the door was a corridor, lined on either side with windows that looked into the ocean. Further down the corridor, beyond all the windows that looked into the ocean (and all the ocean creatures swimming about), I saw another door. We walked to that door. After Chester opened it, with a spin, we found yet another door that led to yet another door that lead to what Traveler said was the heart of Center Stage.

As we stood before the sixth door, I asked, “Is this the one?”

“Yes, of course.” He smiled like a game show host as he spun the wheel and presented his Super Massive Vault to us. A big blast of Climate Controlled Air hit us as we followed Weston inside. My mouth dropped. Row after row of shelves were piled high with bundled stacks of currency from all around the world. Nonchalantly, the Great Capitalist tossed me a bundle of bills. I held it like he’d just tossed me a magic sword. “When I die,” Weston waved his arm, presenting his hoard. “All this will be yours.”

“Holy fucking Mothership Connection,” Traveler mumbled mostly to herself. “Thanks for not laying that heavy trip on me!”

Weston couldn’t really hear what she said, but he knew what his Lover meant. “This all could have been yours, too,” Weston said, “if only you weren’t so closed-minded…and stubborn.”

Traveler’s eyes danced behind the wall of her sunglasses. She placed her hands on her hips, threw her head back, laughed, and said, “Close-minded doesn’t begin to tell how I feel about this useless hoard of paper crap.”

Weston’s eyes danced as well. “Just because we know these papers will soon be worthless,” he smiled, clearly enjoying the combat, “that doesn’t mean my ‘paper crap’ doesn’t now hold a certain political value.”

“And what might that ‘certain value’ be, oh Master Plotter?”

“For one,” Weston spoke seriously, “it’s good for paying the taxes that have kept the US Government off our backs until now. I still laugh aloud when I think of an IRS Agent trying to tax a city like ours populated with persons who pay their taxes, and vote, with their direct actions.”

“Yeah. And, what else…?” Travel prompted.    

“And, well,” he grinned. “Cash still serves other purposes.”

“Like what?” Traveler pushed again while Weston led us down all the shelves until we reached a small open space surrounded on all sides by more shelves full of cash. In the space was set a plush recliner, coffee table, couch, mini-fridge, cupboard, and an antique, big-screen TV that had been rebuilt into a storyclock. It was projecting our images back to us.

“So!” Traveler exclaimed in a huff. “This is where you go to watch The Storysold Exchange without me!”

Maggie looked more than a little dazzled. “You mean, in all your years together,” she asked, “you’ve never been down here?”

“No,” Traveler replied. “Until now, his macho-android robot—aka Security Chief Moyniham—was the only one who’d seen the Vault.” Traveler flopped up the couch cushions to reveal a hoard of a different sort. Then she faced Weston, and said, “I always suspected you and your pet employee came here, to your ‘man cave,’ to drink factory-processed beer, crunch factory-processed potato chips, and watch all the sports shows and action simulations you beam in from the mainland. Now I know.”

“That’s hilarious!” I laughed. “She’s not mad at you. Not really. She sounds jealous of Moyniham.”

“Yes. Ha, ha,” Weston feigned laughter. “For a government-trained spy, you’re very perceptive.”

“I am?” I asked, doubtful of his sincerity.

“Certainly,” he chuckled. “Most government-trained spies I’ve known are seriously kill or be killed killer types who will stop at nothing to accomplish their missions. You’re not Those Guys. You abandoned your mission for the love of your Asset…and she wasn’t even tied to the train tracks…”

“How does that make me perceptive?” I asked, feeling uncertain of what the Master Plotter was driving at.

“Just look at you, Jones. You’ve arrived,” he chuckled louder this time. “You’re standing in the center of my Super Massive Vault, and I’m standing here—not trying to kill you—promising to love you like a Son and will you my fortune when I die. You made all the right moves. Your mission is now accomplished. How wonderful you must feel, right?”

“I’m not here in the name of The Mission,” I shot back. “I’m here because I love Maggie, and we want you to join The Wedding Plot.”

“Well said! Well said!” Weston roared with laughter.

“This isn’t a joke!” Maggie exclaimed suddenly. “The fate of Our Home hangs in the balance of this conflict.”

Weston stopped laughing and turned to Maggie. “I know exactly what’s at stake here,” he said, reading his Daughter’s face. “Now why don’t you ask me for my blessing, so we can start plotting our action plan?”

“Will you bless our marriage?” I asked nicely.

“Not you,” Weston thundered. “I want Maggie to ask.”

Maggie turned to Traveler, looking for help. She nodded her head, indicating that it would be a good idea to ask her Long Lost Father to join their plot. Maggie opened her mouth, preparing to ask a man she barely knew for his permission to marry another man she barely knew.

Before Maggie could speak, Weston cut in. “Never mind,” he said with fear in his eyes. “Truth be told, I’m benevolent. That’s just the kind of father I am. I will bless your marriage whether you asked for it or not.”   

“Why?” Maggie tried to smile. “Are you supporting us because, after all this time, you decided now was the time to rerun the old classic—The Good Father Make His Little Princess Happy?”   

“Oh no…nothing like that,” Weston laughed. “You don’t have to ask, Maggie dear, because I’m always a step ahead of the rest. I have my own plans for your wedding day. And I’m blessing them too.”

“Good,” Maggie breathed a sigh of relief. “I wasn’t sure where you were going with all this ‘blessing’ business for a moment there.”

“Don’t worry, I’m still me,” Weston grinned. “Do you want to hear about the blessings I have planned for your big day?”

“Sure,” Maggie smiled. “Fire away.”   

We sat with Traveler sandwiched on the couch like three kids waiting for the Disney Sunday movie while the Great Capitalist unfolded his wedding plan for our lives. He talked with his hands like a salesman, and outlined every detail of “Our Big Day.” He wanted to hire a team of wedding planners to stage the biggest wedding in history, complete with giant ice swans, jumping castles for the children, organ grinders with monkeys and ponies, aging arena rockers, a full bar with enough booze for a hundred weddings, fireworks, catered food from the best chefs in the world, and a celebrity guest list that would bring the world’s finest—kings, queens, presidents, singers, actors, artists, and captains of industry—to his Daughter’s big wedding in his Westonton. He was especially excited about inviting the President and Agent Sturgis. He said he was going to give them front row seats.”   

“Once we have the whole world watching,” Chester explained, “I, as Captain of Storysold: City will stand with you on Center Stage and do the honor of pronouncing you Man and Wife!”

That was supposed to be the punch line, but none of us leap to our seats, or reacted in any meaningful way.   

“So, what do you think?” Weston asked after a long pause. “I’m sure there has been worse wedding plans, right?”

I didn’t know where the rightness of his plot began and the rest of us ended, but I could see that Maggie was trying her hardest not to appear horrified. Finally, Maggie said, “That won’t be needed.”

“Which part?” Weston asked hopefully.

“All of it,” she replied firmly.

“Even the part where I marry you as Ship’s Captain?”

“That might be OK,” she conceded, “as long as you promise not to spend even one of these shit papers on our wedding.”

“I think our guests might enjoy an ice swan.” I protested, before I read Maggie’s reaction and began to backpedal. “Or, at least, we could use a little of his money to import the booze. It would take us a year, or more, to balance-out all the beer makers in our center. Need I remind you…we have unusually large ‘families.’ No doubt they will be thirsty.”     

“Trust me,” Maggie shook her head. “We got this.”

“What makes you so sure?” I asked. “He just wants to help.”

“This city lives,” Maggie replied, “because the storybankers here have conquered their signatures and stories, and learned to govern and profit by them. That all goes poof! like a fairytale if we become hooked on my Long Lost Father’s dope currency again.”

I didn’t see anything wrong with taking help from a man who’d made his fortune “working smarter, not harder,” selling the freedom to own their own accounts to people who clearly wanted to own them; but I did see that something was wrong with my Bride to Be. Maggie was facing Chester with fire in her eyes. “Cancel my last,” I said, following Maggie lead. “We do not want any of your fancy things ruining our wedding day.”

“Very well,” Weston conceded after a few long beats of stalemate silence. “I won’t use my money to import any ice swans or aging arena rockers to my city. But, as the Captain of what you people call ‘Storysold: City,’ I would like to ask…permission…to marry you.”

To which Maggie said, “No.”   

“Why not?” Weston protested. “I’m game.”

“I say no,” Maggie smiled, “because I will bless your devious plan for our wedding day whether you marry us or not…”    

I couldn’t believe what I’d heard her say. I turned to Traveler for some sort of sign. She smiled and clocked me hard in the shoulder. That was enough to keep me from trying awkwardly to grope for the truth.   

“Super!” he smiled. “Let’s send out wedding invitations!”

“Wedding invitations?”

“Every wedding has to have invitations.”

“I suppose so,” Maggie hesitated, still trying to find the trap. “Do you want to invite people from my side of The Family, or Wylie’s?”

“Wylie’s, of course…”

“Who do you have in mind?”

“First things first,” he said as he picked up a box of cards on a shelf beside his collection of antique Mexican currency—and spread a few of them across his coffee table. “I want to show you the cards.”

I picked one of the rectangular cards from the pile. From the time I touched it, I knew it had been made from the same mysterious mix of fibers as The Dollar. The banker confirmed that fact. He said he had the “bio-friendly cards” made from the fibers of old, worn paper currencies. The face of the card I’d picked had a stylized, full color photo of the moment Maggie and I stepped off the Storytime Machine into Storysold: City. Maggie picked another card. It showed a modest read of the part where Maggie and I produced a love scene with The Lights On in Our Home. Traveler picked one up too. It was one of our newer moments, which showed us honoring our arrest scripts, working as a homemaking theme in The Happy Garden. We were bent over, weeding a row of carrots. I had a goofy grin, frozen in mid-sentence, and she was laughing at something I’d just said. The image was framed in such a way that made it appear like our signatures formed a heart.

“How long have you had these cards?” Maggie asked.

“Oh—you know,” Weston grinned. “It’s difficult to remember every detail that goes into running a city. But, I think Olaf’s shipment of wedding cards came in a few weeks ago with my last shipment of cash from my newest Storysold employee. Goddamn, it took days to sell that guy on liquidating his assets and deposit his life’s fortune in cash in a bank account where Olaf could haul it off. It was a lot of work, on my part, but it paid off. He’s happily developing his own story with his own storybank account for the first time in his sixty-nine-year old life. I think he’s on Island Market Two. Or was it Island Three? I forget. Anyway, he’s satisfied. And I’m happy to be three, point five million dollars richer. So, what do you think?”   

“What do I think about your clever way of swindling rich folks out of their fortunes?” Maggie asked. “Or the wedding cards?

“The cards,” Weston chuckled. “Of course.”

“Wow,” I exclaimed. “They’re fancy.”

“Go ahead,” he prompted. “Open them.”

I opened mine. Inside I found these words etched in gold:   

DEAR______________________,

I, MR. CHESTER WESTON, PRESIDENT AND CEO OF STORYSOLD CORPORATION, DO HUMBLY INVITE YOU TO JOIN ME AND MY STORYSOLD EMPLOYEES ON THE WORLD’S FIRST TRANSNATIONAL OCEAN-GOING CITY FOR WHAT I PROMISE WILL BE THE WEDDING OF THE CENTURY!   

THE WEDDING STORY WILL CO-STAR MR. WYLIE JONES (FORMERLY KNOWN AS AGENT JEFF JACKSON OF THE FBI) AND MY DAUGHTER, THE GARDEN TENDER AND FABULOUS FOOD PRODUCER, MAGGIE WESTON-STONE.

THE CEREMONY WILL BE HELD IN THE MEADOW AT THE HEART OF WESTONTON’S CENTER STAGE.

ONCE OUR CO-STARS SET A DATE AND TIME, I WILL POST IT ON OUR WEBSITE, www.theweddingplot.com. THE SITE WILL ALSO PROVIDE YOU WITH OUR GRID COORDINATES, A MAP OF THE CITY, AS WELL AS OTHER DETAILS YOUR SECURITY FORCES WILL WANT TO KNOW BEFORE YOU MAKE THE JOURNEY. IF THERE IS ANYTHING I CAN DO TO MAKE YOU FEEL MORE AT HOME HERE, PLEASE DON’T HESITATE TO CONTACT ME!

MY EMAIL IS, chesterweston@storybank.com. 

HOPE TO SEE YOU THERE!

SIGNED,

MAGGIE WESTON-NORTON-STONE, FABULOUS FOOD PRODUCER, GARDEN TENDER, AND BRIDE:

WYLIE JONES THE EAGER BEAVER, SPYRRATOR, KNOWN FREELOADER, AND GROOM:

CHESTER WESTON THE PRESIDENT, CEO, AND SHIP’S CAPTAIN OF WESTONTON:   

MISS CHASE (CO-FOUNDER OF “STORYSOLD: CITY”) AKA THE TRAVELER: PROFESSOR CHASE, SAM THE GOAT COACH, CAPTAIN CHAOS, MAINSTAY, COOK, SEAWOMAN SECOND CLASS, TOOTHLESS BRIT, AND MORE:

* FEEL FREE TO BRING GUESTS, BUT PLEASE RSVP IF YOU PLAN TO BRING ANY MORE THAN A HUNDRED.

Weston turned to Maggie. “Do you like it?”

“Do I?” she beamed. “I fucking love it!”

I didn’t expect Maggie to react like that at all. I watched, stunned, as she gave her Deadbeat Dad a hug and thanked him for the cards like she meant it. Meanwhile, I felt my brain explode as the last foggy notion I had for what The Wedding Plot was supposed to be, was blown away.   

“What are we waiting for?” Weston beamed triumphantly. “Let’s get to work! Who should we invite to your wedding first?”

“How about the Queen of England?” Maggie hedged.

“Done!” Weston thundered. Then he selected a card from the pile and filled it out for THE QUEEN OF ENGLAND. “Who’s next?”   

“How about The Pope?”

“Of course!” Weston chuckled. “I’m sure His Holiness wouldn’t miss his big chance to break The Church into a new market!”

“Oooh!” Maggie imagined excitedly. “Can we invite my friends from Portland like my hottie friend Mel, the Zoo Bombers, and my old friends in the pinball gang, the Flippin’ Fingers of Death?”    

“Of course!” he roared with pleasure. “Invite them all!”   

“And Miranda July!”

“I have her address in my office!”

“No, you don’t. You have no idea who she is.”

“Does it matter?” Weston roared. “It’s your wedding, not mine!”

Then Maggie turned to me, and asked, “Who do you want to invite to Our Terror Banking Wedding on The High Seas?”

It was funny. The first name that came to mind was Iron Man, but he was fiction, so I asked, “How about James Bond? Or, I mean, the actor who played Bond? Is he still alive?”

“Which one?” Weston laughed.

“The handsome one with acting skills.”

“Done!” Weston thundered. Then he selected a card from the pile and filled it out for JAMES BOND (CARE OF MI6).

“Don’t waste that card on a silly joke,” I said, suddenly concerned that Weston was shining me on. “He’s probably not real.”

“Oh, you of little faith,” he smiled. “With my name on it, this card will find your Bond; the real one, in England, who was sent to Westonton same as you and Maggie. He would have moved here, but his kid has a rare disease our heath technologies haven’t mastered yet.”

We spent the next few moments dreaming up people to invite and signing cards. Somewhere along the way, reality hit and I asked, “How are we going to mail these? It’s not like Westonton has a mailing address.”

“Once we’ve signed them all,” Weston replied, “I’ll have Olaf mail them off when he and his brother Jarl the Uplander leave for their annual Epic Hunting Adventure on the mainland.”

“When does that happen?” I asked as my dreams of The Mission (and returning to America like a real hero) returned like an urge for booze.

“Soon,” Weston replied, reading my signature with measure.

As I put pen to paper and signed the wedding invitations bound for the mailboxes of people I didn’t know, The Fear creep inside like I was being hunted by snipers I couldn’t see. It was easy to do the modern psyche thing and make The Fear unreal, reduce it to some kind of personal disorder, or write it up as classic pre-wedding jitters or “cold feet” (lifetime members of the audience, like me, are more likely to believe in the impossible than the implausible)—but there was a very good chance that, in the not too distant future, the President of the most lethal nation on earth would be ordering an army of warships and troops to invade our homes in Storysold: City.

“Now what?” Maggie asked eagerly.

“Now with your permission,” Weston replied, and pulled two shot glasses from his cupboard and a corked bottle of what I assumed was the “Yalp” he’d promised. “I’d like a few words in private with your man.”

“Be my guest,” Maggie said. “You two should talk.”

“What about you, Wylie?” Weston asked. “Would you care to join me for a drink in the Wild Garden Arena?”

I didn’t reply. I just shrugged my shoulders and followed the bottle down the aisle lined with billions and billions of pressed and dyed pieces of fiber to the back of his Vault, where he stopped under a ladder leading up to a round, hatch-like door in the ceiling. I watched as he put the bottle and glasses in his pocket, climbed the ladder, punched in a security code, spun the wheel, opened the door, and continued to climb, up through the hole in the ceiling that was lit with the glow of moonlight.

Then I climbed up, through the hole, and found Weston staring at the moon in the open meadow at the heart of Center Stage. He popped the bottle open, took a swig, and passed it to me.

“What about the glasses?” I asked, and then I took a swig.

“They’re just for show,” Weston laughed. “Women folk enjoy the fantasy that their men drink with a measured degree of control.”

The liquid hit my throat. I felt it, and I spewed it back out. “What the hell is this crap?” I asked. “It tastes like water.”

“It is,” Weston laughed again. “The liquor was for show too. I have a real bottle of Yalp somewhere in the Vault, but I forget where.”

I took his play in stride, and took another pull of his water.

We walked to the edge of the open meadow. The lamplights of the Wild Garden Arena and elliptical walkways were casting their little spot lights over the terraced levels of Center Stage, making it possible to see the shadowy forms of storybankers making their moves on Stage. The scene was hauntingly beautiful. It was like The Stage itself had a signature life of its own.

“Remember this,” Weston commented suddenly.

“Remember what?” I asked as I took the water bottle back.

“Remember how good this moment feels,” Weston paused, suddenly serious, “because I swear to everything I am, and everything I will be, if your wedding plan to defend my city fails…I will unleash hell. There will be nothing measured, or honorable, about the war I will wage. It will be The Revolutionary War all over again. I’ll win like an American. No fancy matching uniforms. No rank and file combat in open meadows. No eye-to-eye driving the knife in the hearts of my enemies and eating their entrails. Only winning. In my war, there will be only winning. And I will rewrite The Earth Show when I’m done spilling the blood of enough soldier sacrifices that the gods all nod, and agree, that I’ve reached The End of my apocalypse. And it will be mine. Fuck the demons, and the horsemen, and the zombies, and all that other horseshit. I will own The End Times like a huge ass mansion on a beach littered with diamonds. I will kick the door to The Free Market open and I will not stop kicking until all humans who host The Earth Show are free enough to buy our better brand of freedom.”

I took another pull off his water, look him square in his eyes, and asked, “You have so much. Why would you want more?”

“Because your ancient, disposable way of life sucks all The Action from everything it touches,” Chester Weston shot back, almost violently. “If we don’t do everything in our power to kill It now, before it’s too late, The Old Market will march on—manufacturing crap and crap to pack their crap in—until every life and story on earth dies trying and failing to reach The End they wished upon a star for, but never felt what it feels like to produce The Action for real.”

I drank the rest of Weston’s water. Then I said, “I wouldn’t be so confident in the power of your fortune to change things if I were you.”

“Nothing has ever changed without spending a fortune.”

“I used to believe that too,” I replied, suddenly aware that I wasn’t bullshitting for once. “If anything, working in your city with Maggie has taught me that one important lesson…”

“Which is?”

“Money has nothing to do with it.”

“It has nothing to do with what?” he asked, almost curiously.

“It has nothing to do with anything,” I said as I turned in time to see Maggie step into the meadow with Traveler. “It can’t buy victory.”

“Of course, it can,” Weston scoffed. “Every victory in every war in History has been fueled by the fortunes of Great Men like me.”

“I don’t know,” I said as Maggie and Traveler walked closer. They looked like they were having fun, drinking from a bottle of their own.

“You don’t know about what?”

“I don’t know if those were actual victories.”

“You don’t know if those were actual victories?” Chester Weston the Great Man exclaimed, repeating my words like worms in his mouth.

“How’s your man talk going?” Maggie asked.

“Just super!” Weston replied. “I think we finally broke him.”

Everyone looked expectantly in my direction. All I could do was nod and smile—and say nothing—and take a convincing swig from an empty bottle. “Let’s go home, Lover,” Maggie said as she threw her arms around me, gave me a fat kiss, and handed me their bottle of Yalp. I was glad it was really whiskey, but I forgot all about it the moment we reached Our Home.    

My Storybank Account – Scene Forty Two,

THE PART WHERE THE CELEBRITY BLOWS OUT OF WYLIE’S SPY LIKE A BLOWN TIRE ON THE FREEWAY…

In the days that followed Weston’s blessing, I thought about what he told me, man to man, while the women were in The Vault. I took his words to heart like a good Future Son in Law. His words terrified me in a way I couldn’t control. The Fear rose inside me every time I thought of failing to bring “our families” together in The Wedding Plot, every time I imagined my Future Father in Law spending his billions to hire an army of terrorists armed with the best bombs, bullets, and beans money could buy to fight—doubles, graveyards, and swing shifts—until The American Way of Life was no longer the winner. I loved my story with Maggie, but I wasn’t really ready. I felt like I had my finger on a global trigger; which, if pulled, would mean certain doom for one of “our families.” In other words, in spite of my best efforts to love and commit to The Wedding Plot, I’d contracted a serious case of Cold Feet.     

Then, as it goes, I finally surrendered—and The Fear began to put Its plans into action. Instead of reporting to the Men in Charge as the Spyrrator (sending the data raw), I turned off The Lights a few moments before Maggie was due to return with her harvest from the Happy Garden, sat down at my laptop, and I wrote the following report—

ATTENTION: AGENT STURGIS

MAGGIE’S WEDDING PLOT IS A TRAP! DO NOT, I REPEAT, DO NOT ACCEPT ANY “WEDDING INVITATIONS” TO ATTEND ANY SO-CALLED “WEDDING” IN MY NAME!

IT IS MY RECOMMENDATION THAT—IF AND WHEN THE HONORABLE PRESIDENT DECIDES TO SEND AN INVASION FORCE TO DEAL WITH WESTON’S TERROR BANKING CULT UPRISING ON THE HIGH SEAS—ARM OUR TROOPS WITH LOTS OF THORAZINE. THE LEGAL DRUG HAS PROVEN TO BE EFFECTIVE IN COMBATING THE BRAINWASHING EFFECTS WESTON’S VIRAL STORYSOLD CURRENCY HAS ON HUMANS.

IN OTHER NEWS! I KNOW YOU ASKED ME TO “HANG TOUGH” AND KEEP SENDING REPORTS, BUT I FEEL I AM NO LONGER AN ASSET TO THE MISSION HERE. I’M REQUESTING PERMISSION TO RETURN TO WASHINGTON DC TO DELIVER THE LOCATION OF WESTON’S SUPER MASSIVE VAULT IN PERSON.

A few days later, I had my reply. Sturgis approved my request to return to Washington DC and give the Director a personal briefing on Storysold: City  and the location of Weston’s Vault, on the condition that I find my own ride. Apparently, the presidential election was too heated to risk a secret extraction by spy sub, black helicopter, or otherwise. That made no sense to me. My cover story had long since been blown. No one in the city had enough live action votes to feed a squad of armed terrorists and pay them to stand around, at the ready to ambush any rescue team the President might send to fetch me.

No matter. I already had a ride. Jarl and Olaf, the barbarians on Guide’s Flash Report, had agreed to help me discover the location of the Vault in exchange for my help in their annual hunting adventure. I had no intention of going on some hunting expedition, but they had a seaplane that was leaving Storysold: City soon, and I was determined to be on it.

The day before my secret mission to flee the city, I woke in bed with Maggie my Bride to Be. She was still asleep with one arm across my chest. Her legs wrapped around mine like pea vines chasing sunshine. I wanted to love her like a Homemaking Hero, but I didn’t have the courage to make The Action my story needed to be great, or at least right. The Fear was ever-present, and it soured my scene. Instead of love, I felt like a fish caught in the tentacles of a giant octopus that fed on manhood and freedom.

“Oh good,” Maggie smiled as I freed myself of her embrace and stood beside the bed and stretched. “You’re up.”

“I am,” I replied.

“Isn’t it your turn to make breakfast?”

“I suppose,” I replied, not really listening. I was preoccupied with grander matters, plotting My Great Escape that I was going to unfurl that night, serious as a flag. The first phase of that plot was to survive the day without anyone (Maggie) suspecting that I was up to no good. In that spirit, I threw on some clothes and rummaged through the kitchen for something easy to put together. In the fridge, I found a few chunks of Sam’s feta cheese and a bunch of Garden Tender grown spinach. Under the work island I found a bag of potatoes from Half Pint and a bottle of Mary’s Extra Virgin Olive Oil. When I’d gathered my ingredients, I turned the stove on and prepared to produce a breakfast scramble scene like the ones I’d performed before.

When it was done, I deposited my newly minted breakfast scramble scene into my account, made a copy, and pasted it into Maggie’s storybank account. Then I served Maggie breakfast in bed. I kissed her and rubbed her feet while she ate and talked about the latest news from The Wedding Plot. She explained that Winner and his Reality the Gaming Community were going to cast their live-action votes by building a wedding stage, which they would defend with the same “lasers” they built to illuminate the night sky if ever the Moon Colony was attacked by Space Invaders. She described the wedding stage in detail, but like I said, I was preoccupied with My Great Escape. The only thing I cared about was looking like I was listening to my Fiancé.

“Uh huh,” I said, trying to sound engaged. “That’s sounds cool. Do you want more scramble scene before I put it away?”   

After Maggie transformed into the Garden Tender and pedaled her Wonder Bike and Wagon down the hallway, I spent my morning entertaining the storybankers who stopped by to ask my Spyrrator to pass “secrets” to the mainland, while I made Our Home. I shelled peas for Maggie’s soup. I chopped cabbage for Solji’s Kimchi, and when lunchtime rolled around, I produced a fried fish scene (for two) from the fish I’d earned earlier that morning, sending secret messages for one of my few regular cast members, Rompasaurus. Her messages were always the same:

ROMPA-ROMPASAURUS ROAR…ROOOAAAR!

I tried to focus on my scenes at hand, but my attention kept drifting to Maggie. What was she doing? Was she happier in the Happy Garden when I didn’t join her action? Who was she minting her moments with today? Finally, I surrendered, turned our TV ON, and tuned to Maggie’s channel.

She was alone in a cloud of earth, rototilling a few new rows for her seedling “babies” in her boots, overalls, and sunhat. She did not look happy. She looked like she was doing her best to keep her arms from falling off, as she continued to till until the tilling was done. But that was just what she looked like. I knew her signature better than that. She was storing up for the big payoff in The End, when her hard work climaxed and she could look back, with pride, at the farm scenes she’d produced that day.

I tried to return to my homemaking scenes, but my eyes were glued to Maggie’s channel. I didn’t turn the TV OFF until Maggie rode her Wonder Bike and Wagon home. As was her routine, Maggie showered, had a snack, and then she started making appetizer scenes for her cast. While she was in the shower, I produced a crock full of brine and finished the kimchi production scene I’d started earlier. Then, when the Fabulous Food Producer joined me in the kitchen, I switched characters and washed our dirty pots, pans, and dishes, and stacked them in our double-decker drying rack.

That evening I helped Maggie prep her veggies; created a playlist of the day’s fabulous food scenes to show on our big screen; cleared the dirties off the tables and washed them again; swept and mopped the floor; cleaned the countertops, and I double-checked to make sure our monetary moments were deposited in their proper accounts. Unlike most nights, I didn’t try to inspire a love scene. I “milked the clock” and did more work, scrubbing the grease off the vents above the stove. The last thing Maggie said before she fell asleep waiting for me to join her in bed was, “Goodnight, Wylie. Thanks for another good day. Don’t stay up too late.”   

Once I felt confident that Maggie was sleeping soundly (and all the dirties had been clean and racked), I switched our channels to PRIVATE and changed into my silky-short running shorts, indie T-shirt, and sneakers. Then I stood in front of our one small mirror and smeared what was left of my camouflage make-up over my body. It felt like I was pouring pavement on grass. When I was ready for action, I took my handgun from its hiding place under the sink, packed my laptop and the last bottle of Assah into my scooter bags, threw them over my shoulder, and walked out of Our Home. The only Dear John Note I left Maggie was an immaculately cleaned kitchen.

Three and a half moments later I was in stealth-mode, under the cover of night, stepping over the string of cans Security Chief Moyniham tied in front of the revolving door of Westonton Headquarters to warn him of intruders. Once I was in, I recalled the intelligence I’d gathered from Bradley (in exchange for A Good Word if and when “my boys” busted the Terror Banking Cult) and danced over the maze of more sophisticated warning lasers he’d had aimed across the lobby. Then I found the Security Chief. He was asleep in his cot behind his security counter. I woke him with the business end of my gun, and asked him, very nicely, to unlock the elevator. He put on a token show of resistance, and then (after he’d been properly subdued) he unlocked the elevator. I was about to thwack Bradley over the head with my gun—like they do in the spy movies—but he handed me a Thorazine dart from his vest to use instead. A moment later, he was out cold.

I rode the elevator up, tiptoed through the darkness of Westonton Corporate Headquarters, and stood beside the veiled canopy bed where Mr. Chester Weston and Traveler were slumbering peaceably. Instead of feeling a rush of power over my helpless victims, I felt like a boy sneaking a peak in a changing room; a real creeper. Finally, I mustered the courage to do what I had to do. I threw back the veil, aimed my gun in their general direction, and screamed, “Freeze! You’re under arrest!” Then I read them their rights.

There was no reply. They were deep asleep, so I shook them a few times, and waited for them to wake. Then I repeated my commands and read them their rights again. They both laughed, until I shot a few rounds through their headboard. I waved my gun, and the President and CEO of the Terror Banking Cult left his bed.

“What do you want?”

“I want the codes to the Vault.”

“You’re making a big mistake, Jones.”

“That’s what they all say,” I sneered. “Give me the codes.”

Weston shot Traveler a sideways glance, then he said, “You already have the code. It’s the same for all the doors.”

“334643?” I asked, remembering the code in the elevator.

“The same,” Weston sighed. “It’s hell trying to remember six codes for six doors; plus, the ones for the hatch and elevator. It’s easier to do it the hard way. Know your enemy, then change your codes as needed.”

“Whatever you say, Boss,” I said, and then I walked away. Behind me, I heard Traveler cry. She’d worked so hard to inspire the future-like course of The Wedding Plot. Now, as she read the gun in my hand, she wasn’t sure any of us would ever see that future happen in The Earth Show someday.

“Traveler cries?” I thought. “She always seems so tough.”

Six doors later, I was standing in the Super Massive Vault. I walked to where Weston had shelved his wedding invitations. Then I did what any Cream of the Crop Agent of the FBI would do. I hauled them up through the hatch into the meadow at the heart of Center Stage. Then I burned them all, reducing every card I’d signed in support of The Wedding Plot to ash.

My smoke rose high that night. And I had no doubt that everyone in the city saw it. Storybankers read everything worth reading (that’s what makes them storybankers), but I didn’t care. I was due to meet the Brothers Grim first thing in the morning, and I was going to board their seaplane whether they liked it or not. Soon I’ll be free of this metropolitan mental ward, forever.

My Storybank Account – Scene Forty Three,

THE PART WHERE WYLIE TRIES TO HIJACK A SEAPLANE FROM A BARBARIAN WHO LOVES WHERE HE’S GOING…

In the predawn light, before the majority of stage-stocking grocers on Center Stage rolled open their doors, I ducked behind a bush in the Wild Garden Arena and changed back into my tight hipster jeans. Then I humped my gear to the nearest Hidden Harbor where, as promised on Guide’s Flash Report, I found the silver seaplane owned by the eldest Brothers Grim, Olaf the Sharpeyed. He must have spotted me on the boardwalk before I spotted him, because the bushy-bearded barbarian in nerd glasses was waving at me through the passenger side of his seaplane when I saw him. As I approached in classic cowboy style—gun tucked in my pants, hung in full view—Olaf’s eyes caught my attention immediately. I couldn’t tell if he was reading right through me into The Great Unknown, or just crazy. Either way, Olaf looked like Santa after he’d pulled one too many doubles at the toy factory.

I waved back like I’d wave to any stranger I’d met on the streets of any city in the world. When Olaf the Sharpeyed saw that, he roared with a laugh that exploded from him with such power it echoed through my mind like it was hitting canyon walls. Beside the seaplane, Jarl the Uplander was busy loading the belly of his brother’s mechanic beast full of props. He was shirtless like his older brother, and like his older brother he was wearing buckskin shorts and high leather boots. The only parts of their costumes that set them apart were the beads, bones, and tattoos they each wore, with pride, to remind themselves of their stories. I tried to open our dialogue with some general comments about sunny weather on the equator. When that didn’t work, I made the-blank-face look in Jarl’s direction and watched him load the plan with hunting props like I was waiting for God to punch in the proper command code and hit the RETURN key. After a long silence, my spy training kicked in and I began to count props: one battle-ax, two crossbows, two bags of bolts, three external meat-packing frames, two cold-weather hunting suits, nine knives, fifty-nine factory-free meat coolers, and a wood-handled toothbrush made of horsehairs, which Jarl tied to a tress of hair and tucked into his beard. Jarl hopped aboard while I continued to count things on the boardwalk. I must have waited for a few full beats—half-dreaming of what Maggie was doing—before I heard the engines roar to life. I finally snapped out of it when Olaf poked his head out of his cockpit and asked, “So are you in, or out?”

I paused for a lot longer than I should have, and then I said, “Sure I’m in. I wouldn’t miss The Epic Hunting Adventure for the world.”

“Good,” Olaf said, grinning into space. “Welcome aboard.”

I ran to the big cargo door with my gear in my hand like a real Eager Beaver ready to go. I tossed my gear in and I was about to follow it, when I looked up and saw Jarl the Uplander blocking my way. He growled, and then he said, “You don’t look like a hunter ready to hunt. You look, to me, like you’re a shitass running from your one shot at true love.”

I had no idea how to reply, so I did what any good guy in my place would do. I showed the Barbarian my gun. “As you can see,” I grinned like a cop pumped on coffee and donuts. “I’m here to hunt.”

“Yes, we saw your scene in the meadow this morning.”

“Oh yeah,” I said, fingering my gun like sticky candy. “I’m especially proud of the scene I played with Bradley. What was your favorite part? Let me guess, you’re a barbarian. You liked the part where I made fire.”

“No,” Jarl replied. “My favorite part was when you made war with the most lethal nation on earth our only option for survival.”

“Glad you liked it,” I said, swallowing hard.

“So good,” Jarl said deadpan. “Made me want to buy popcorn.”     

Olaf poked his head out of the cockpit, with the engines screaming like banshees behind him, and boomed, “What are you waiting for, a personal invitation. Get your shitass aboard!”

With that said—Jarl stepped aside, and I climbed aboard.

Inside I sat beside Jarl on the only seat in the bay, a school bus seat that they had salvaged and welded to the frame. There weren’t any seatbelts, but who cared? I was more concerned about sharing the seat with Jarl. Mere inches to my right, the Barbarian sat staring straight-faced at the wall in front of us. I could sense the adrenaline rushing through him, ticking like bomb waiting for the right moment to blow.

As the seaplane climbed skyward, I turned to Jarl and said, “As you know, I found Weston’s Vault without your help.”

Jarl didn’t break his gaze. “Congratulations,” he said coldly. “What will you do now that your mission’s accomplished?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I replied sarcastically. “Maybe I’ll move to Las Vegas and knit factory-free sweaters for Amish Black Panthers.”

“That’s one plan,” he nodded, “but I’ve been reading your stock of characters. Developing an Amish Black Panther would be difficult for a man with your signature. That character would require nuance, and you struggle to put food in your mouth most days.”

“I struggle…?”

“Yes,” Jarl replied. “You struggle.”

“Maybe,” I grinned at Jarl like a chimpanzee. “But I bet the Bureau will be more than happy to put my signature back to work again…with a new character and a new mission…”   

“Not a bad plan,” Jarl nodded thoughtfully. “You could return to your old job performing The Mission, and turning other tricks, for White Man’s Great Spirit the Government. Then you will die without knowing what it feels like to forge your truest signature from The Action of The Wilderness.”   

“I don’t even know you!” I shot back, standing as I spoke. “What do you care how I write The Action of my story?”

Jarl grinned at me knowingly for a long, uncomfortable moment and then he replied, “I care for many reasons.”

“Like what?”

“For one, I know Maggie loves you.”

I paused, then asked, “How do you know she loves me?”

“Anyone with half a brain who reads your signatures can see that you two were meant to be together.”

“You think so, huh?”

“Yes,” Jarl almost smiled. “There have been few love themes in The City who have endured as much conflict as you two crazy bird have without going bankrupt. If you owned it, in your hearts, you’d be rich.”

“Even richer than the Grand Rachna?”

“No,” Jarl replied. “But I bet, if you work together and set a profitable future-like course, your homemaking theme could be very successful.”

I stared at the wall of the seaplane with Jarl for a few moments before I asked, “And why do you care about that again?”

“Why?” Jarl said straight-faced. “Because I have a personal interest in making sure you don’t get Cold Feet.”

“What makes you think I have Cold Feet?”

Jarl laughed heartily, and replied, “Because you do.”

Suddenly, I felt The Fear rush in. I squirmed in my seat like a kid in a classroom. Cold Feet my foot! I thought. Does he think I’m stupid? I’ve seen this scene before, and I don’t do romantic comedy! This isn’t the part where the audience laughs while I awkwardly try to share my feelings for Maggie with The Guys. This is the part where evil barbarians lure the hero into the woods to stage a dramatic death scene starring me!

“OK,” I began, fingering the trigger of my gun. “Explain to me, once again, simple like first grade, why the fuck do you care what I do?”

“I’ll tell you why…” Jarl took another long look at the wall.

“I care because,” he said, “your Fiancé is my Half-Sister Maggie.”

“Oh, wow,” I said as his words sank in. “Does she know that?”

“No,” Jarl replied. “It’s a long story.”

I cradled my head in my hands and almost sobbed. “Everything’s a ‘long story’ with you goddamned people!”

“You people?” Jarl asked, not very curiously.

“Yes, as in You the People of Weston’s Terror Banking Cult,” I said as I grabbed my spy-laptop and opened it. “Shall we see what My People say about your long story? Let’s find out which of Weston’s interns, secretaries, artistic nannies, outdoorsy teacher types, ambitious news reporters, or broke hippie poets your dear mom was. Just where did she fit In Line?”

No sooner had I established a satellite connection to the base FBI mainframe in DC, Jarl the Uplander tore my spy-laptop from my hands and opened the cargo hold door. Then I watched it fly, like Frisbees fly, and fade from view into the clear blue sky.    

“What did you do that for?” I screamed.

“You don’t need that thing on our adventure,” the Barbarian said as he sat back down. “I will tell you everything you need to know.”

Holy Christ! I thought. I’m right. These assholes are trying to lure me into the woods to kill me. “Of course you’ll tell me everything,” I said like I wasn’t terrified. “Isn’t that how the bad guys usually do it? They tell the hero everything…right before they do him in?”

Jarl leaned forward in his seat like a kid in a theater. “You got that right!” he roared with laughter. “That is how the bad guys do it.”

“Why are you laughing about?”   

“Why this, why that! Hell if I know what you’re jabbering on about spy,” Jarl replied. “You tell me! How do the bad guys usually do it?”

“No,” I shot back. “I asked you why you were laughing first.”

“You did,” Jarl said cold as steel. “You started it.”

“I started what…this dumb ass pissing match?”

Jarl the Uplander looked me dead in my eyes, and said, “No. I mean it was you who started the world’s first bio-friendly new war story.”

“I did not.”

“Why do you think everyone, including Maggie, calls The Wedding Plot a common defense theme?”

“I’m no psychologist,” I said, cradling my gun for comfort. “I don’t know what turns the minds of crazy/brainwashed cultists.”

“Do you believe we’re going to surrender The Wedding because you and your Cold Feet ran back to White Man’s Great Spirit the Government?”

“No,” I replied. “I don’t expect you to give up. I expect, someday soon, the President will deal with you and your Terror Banking Cult.”

“And when will your master ‘deal’ with us?”

“I’m not telling.”

“Why,” Jarl laughed, “because you’re not free to piss without the permission of the Man in Charge of You?”

“I’m not a slave,” I shot back. “I’m free.”

“Then deal with us yourself,” Jarl challenged.

“OK,” I replied. “I was going to wait until we were flying over The United States with a full tank of gas before I broke The News, but I suppose now’s a good time as any.” I pulled my gun from my pants and pointed it at Jarl, and said, “You Barbarians won’t be producing your Epic Hunting Adventure this year, or any year in the foreseeable future. Your days playing Terror Banking Cult Uprising on the High Seas are over!”

“Fantastic!” Jarl said, rubbing his hands together in glee. “It’s about time we finally got to The Good Part!” Then he turned to his brother in the cockpit and yelled, “Hey Olaf!”

“Brother!” he yelled back.

“We finally got to The Good Part!”

“Far out, dude!” Olaf yelled back over the roar of the engines. “Do we have the upper hand, or did he get the drop on us?”

“He got the drop on us, like for real!”

“Oh dear! Whatever shall we do?” he laughed.

Jarl turned to me, laughed, and said, “Oh dear! is right.”

“What do you think this is—a fucking joke?” I yelled as I aimed my death stick at him more pointedly.

“No,” Jarl replied as he stood to his full height. “This is the part where we fight for the honor of our stories.”

“Sit the fuck back down in your seat!” I demanded.

“I would,” Jarl grinned, “but I can’t fight you in my seat.”

“I said, sit the fuck down and shut your fucking yap,” I commanded in my best impression of a cop. “You’re under arrest.”

“How are we going to fight if I’m under arrest?”

“We’re not going to fight!” I declared. “You’re going to sit there in silence until we reach Washington DC, where I’ll hand you two jokers over to the proper authorities: U-N-D-E-R A-R-R-E-S-T.”

“And then what?”

“Then you’ll spend the rest of your days in Federal Prison breaking big rocks into little ones.”

“Why do the rocks need to be broken too?”

“You’re under arrest, because you’re a Terror Banking Cultist who has openly admitted to plotting to inject The American Way of Life with a lethal dose of your viral currency—the instrument of doom you know as ‘monetary moments.’ Is that clear enough for you, Villain?”

“So what you’re trying to say is,” Jarl paused thoughtfully, “you’re not interested in fighting me at all. You only want to tame me, make me sit pretty and play pet, and follow orders like you do.”

“Yes,” I replied without hesitation. “That about sums it up. Now take a seat and shut your cake hole. It’s going to be a long flight.”

Jarl looked baffled. “I still don’t get it,” he said, looking expectantly in my direction. “When do we get to The Good Part?”

“You mean the part I put holes in you and drop you over the open ocean for the sharks to feed on?”

“No!” Jarl exclaimed in anguish. “I mean The Good Part where you and I fight, and I get to know my future Brother-in-Law.”   

“If it’s a fight you’re after…feel free to try your luck, punk.”

“Fantastic!” Olaf cried with joy. “Put that damned thing down and prepare to defend yourself!”

“I didn’t say anything about that.”

Jarl sighed. “How do you expect us to fight then?”

“We can argue with our words…like battle rap or something.”

Jarl sighed again. “Every warrior with the wilder spirit of The Action in their heart knows that only cowards with no sense of honor seek to win without a fight,” he began to speak. “Bears will rise to twice their height and fill the wild with their deafening roar before they attack, because they have honor. Buffalo will stomp and pound the ground to dust with their mighty hooves before they charge, because they have honor. Gorillas will pound their chests, dogs will growl and flatten their ears, eagles will scream and swoop, even the snakes—the most inhuman of our kind—will coil, rattle, and raise their heads high, and show themselves in all their glory, before they go to war. It’s only professionals like you who sneak to war on your bellies and kill other humans like wild creatures hunt for food. You have no honor.”

I laughed at the notion that any soldier—other than Red Coats and Complete Idiots—would choose to march honorably across the battlefield and look their opposition in their eyes when they could win more efficiently by shooting projectiles from the distant safety of rocks, trees, or missile silos set a short distance from where their children play.

“There is nothing for us to fight about,” I said with a determined countenance. “I’ve already won. Either you sit down and shut up, or I will sit you down and shut you up permanently. Got it?”   

“I see. Have it your way,” Jarl said as he sat back in his seat. “I will sit in my seat like a tame circus beast, and I will wait, a while longer, for you to stop cowering behind your gun and get to The Good Part.”

“Whatever you say, King Crazy,” I said as I sat on the cargo deck across from Jarl and trained my gun on him like a third eye.

Many moments later (somewhere over the land body of Mexico) I tied Jarl the Uplander to his seat with the ropes I found on their meat-packing backpacks, so I could join Olaf in the cockpit and make certain that we were both on The Same Page.

“You tied my brother up like a maiden on the tracks,” Olaf said as soon as I plopped down in his co-pilots seat.

“Yes, I did,” I replied—making sure he saw my gun.

“He already gave you his word,” Olaf said, adjusting his glasses as he stared into the wide blue yonder. “He would have stayed in his seat without the rope, or your worn old war theatrics.”

“I don’t know that.”

“If you took some time to fight us and learn something about your prey,” Olaf said calmly, “you’d know that we have characters who live and die by our acts of honor. We care about writing our words in The Action.”

“Fuck that; I don’t care,” I said as I set my gun across my lap with my finger straight and off the trigger. “I don’t want that savage roaming around my plane. And this is my plane…do not test me on that subject.”

“Why because he’s the Bad Guy, and you’re the Good Guy?”

“No,” I shot back, “because I have a mission to accomplish and I know he will do everything in his power to keep me from it.”

“What he wants isn’t so bad. He wants you to marry our Sister, so you can live happily ever after in a super rich home that smells of Maggie’s Signature Split Pea Soup and Scrumptious Cheese Bread every afternoon.”

“Bullshit,” I said coldly. “Your Sister doesn’t even know she’s your Sister. And she hates secrets. She’ll never forgive you for not telling her the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

“You must be joking?” Olaf asked quizzically. “She forgave you for all the lying you did, and do, In The Line of Duty—whatever that means.”

“Maggie still gets angry when she thinks about The Mission,” I shook my head. “Anyway, it’s too late now. She’ll never be able to edit this scene out and continue to write The Action of Our Home like it never happened. Some acts are unforgivable deal breakers…sacrifices we have to live with…”

“Never fear, Little Hunter,” he said, hazarding a quick glance in my direction. “All will be forgiven when we return to our city victorious with the blood of many elk on our hands.”

“Not likely,” I shook my head. “I think she’s a vegetarian.”

“She’s not,” he smiled. “Her story’s been clear on that. She likes eating vegetables, but she’s a sucker for a good story like the rest of us.”

“Yeah whatever,” I said, suddenly feeling strangely comfortable with the bushy bearded barbarian. “I’m so tired of all this shit.”

“You’ll feel better once we’re done with you.”

“Weren’t you listening? I am done…with all of this.”

“Like I was saying,” Olaf said, ignoring me. “By the end of our Epic Hunting Adventure—you will know how to defend your home better.”

“I’m not going on your hunting adventure.”

“Sure you are,” Olaf grinned. “We’re family, and it’s our duty to throw you a proper a bachelor’s party with or without your permission.”

“We’re not family,” I stated like a fact. “And the only place we’re going is The Bureau in DC, where I’m looking forward to taking a proper vacation where I drink enough liquor to forget I was ever here.”

“I’m with you with excessive talking thing,” Olaf said. “I’m okay with agreeing to wait and see what happens next…”

After our last stop to buy fuel, snack food, and soda pops using the credit card Weston gave the Brother Grim in exchange for their willingness to ferry his supply of flattened fibers to and from Storysold: City and import his factory processed goods, I became aware that we were not heading in the direction of Washington DC.

I fed a snack to Jarl. Then I returned to the cockpit and asked, “Do you think I’m stupid or something?”

“Apparently you are if you’re only noticing now,” Olaf laughed. “I haven’t changed my course since we left Storysold: City.”

“I noticed,” I lied. “I was just waiting for you to do the right thing before you forced me to bring the hammer down.”

“And now you’re bringing The Hammer Down?”

“Yes,” I said, aiming my gun at Olaf’s temple. “I am.”

“Go ahead. Pull the trigger. Try to change my mind with that death stick. You will find out pretty quick which mind changes first.”

“I don’t need you,” I bluffed. “I can fly this plane just fine. I learned it in spy school. It was the class after the one on slippery villains.”

“That’s not what I mean. I’m talking about which one of us wins the victory if you pull that trigger and end my story now.”

“If I don’t stop you people,” I said as I cocked the hammer back and pushed the barrel deeper into his temple, “then every American who fought and died and spilled the blood of their enemy in order to defend The American Way of Life will have done so in vain. I refuse to be the one who goes down in the history books as the one who failed to hold The Line now.”

“Pull the trigger and perform the ritual,” Olaf said like law. “Spill my blood and make another old war sacrifice to your White Man’s Great Spirit the Government. My death will bring great honor to your home.”    

I stood. I grabbed a fistful of his long hair, yanked his head back, and pointed my gun up under his chin. His countenance was calm, but the plane started to wobble. I began to count down like a parent with a naughty child. “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six…”

“My story is good. How’s yours?”

“Fuck!” I cried and let the Barbarian go.

“You can’t fly, can you?” Olaf asked with satisfaction.

“No, I can’t fly,” I slammed my fist on the dash. “I was bluffing.”

“You mean you were lying again,” Olaf said as he retook command of his seaplane. “The good thing about you employables is that you can count on the fact that you lie like you breathe. In a way, it’s your way of telling the truth. The trick is, knowing how to translate your bullshit.”

“Good to know,” I said, slouching back in the co-pilot’s seat.

“I hope you’re ready,” Olaf said as I turned to gaze blankly out of the passenger-side window. “Something tells me that this year’s Epic Hunting Adventure will be filled with moments we will never forget.” Olaf had been hugging the coastline for a long time, but this was the first land body that I recognized. The seemingly endless miles of land body sprawl that called itself “Los Angeles” was hard to miss, with its red sun rising and smog that hung over the cityscape like a cloud of poison pixie dust.

I had no reply to Olaf’s commentary. All I could think was that I’d failed, again, to do what every spy in every movie was able to do with ease. I mean, really! How did they overpower the bad guys so easily?

The Action was calm as we crossed over the land bodies of California and Nevada. In Utah, Olaf touched down on an airfield near Zion National Park to gas up. This was my chance, I thought. All I have to do is borrow a phone from the first tourist I met and called the Man in Charge for assistance, or run from the seaplane and blend back into the generic American landscape I knew so well. I could have, but I didn’t run, skip, or walk away. Instead I sat in that cockpit with America calling me home like a hot tub of buttered popcorn, and my body failed to move, voting the motion I needed to retake my place in The American Way of Life down unanimously.

My Storybank Account – Scene Forty Four,

THE PART WHERE THE BROTHERS SHARE THEIR BACKSTORY WITH THE HELP OF A LITTLE YALP…

Moments later, Olaf’s seaplane was cutting through the gray, low-hanging clouds clinging to the Wind River Range—circling a clear blue, rocky bottomed lake. At the far end of the lake, a rowboat was tied to a long dock in front of a cabin that was tucked under a canopy of mossy evergreens. Olaf landed, steered his seaplane to the end of the dock, and cut the engines.

Reluctantly, I untied Jarl. Without a word, he jumped out and started unloading the gear. “Here,” Jarl said, tossing me an external frame pack. “Fill this with gear and pack it to the cabin.”

Yeah, I thought, so you can shoot me with your crossbow when I turn my back on you. “No, you do it,” I snapped as I eyed the arsenal of primitive weaponry within the reach of the Barbarians.

“In this Epic Hunting Adventure, we’re the Hunters—and you’re the Meat Packer,” Jarl said like I wasn’t the one with the gun. “So, start packing like you mean it. Middle managers don’t last long in The Wilderness.”

“I’m not playing Meat Packer to a couple of barbarians.”

“That is how you will earn your share of the meat.”

“I don’t want any meat.”

“Then what do you want, Agent Jones?”

“I want to get to a phone and call the FBI for a ride home.”

“Why didn’t you bail out at our last gas stop?” Olaf joined in.

“I thought about it…” long pause “…but I decided that it was in the best interest of The Mission for me to bring you barbarians in.”

“Bring us ‘in’ to what?” Olaf laughed.

“You know,” I shot back angrily. “I’m going to bring you in to FBI Headquarters in Washington DC for questioning, so we can get to the bottom of your ‘bio-friendly new war plot’ to spread The Storysold Exchange to every corner of the globe.”

“Oh, I see,” Olaf stroked his beard, trying to appear as serious as I sounded. “Is this the one where Lancelot tries to prove his love for Arthur even after he slept with his Queen in an enchanted forest?”

“No,” I replied, obviously struggling to maintain my tone. “This is the one where I single-handedly bring two ringleaders of Weston’s Terror Banking Cult to justice and become a national hero.”

“Oh, I see,” Olaf said again. Then he turned to his Brother and he asked, “What do you think, Brother, should we let Lancelot take us in?”

Jarl stood within inches of my face, and said, “Jackson Hole, and all its glorious civilizations—art galleries, wild western sushi, plastified groceries, fast food, ski resorts, and the best live-action Cowboy Show in America—are only an easy three day’s hike in that direction.” Jarl pointed the way, and then he said, “We will hike a lot further than that on our adventure.”

“Is that so?”

“That’s so,” Jarl said mockingly. “You should go.”

“Why should I?” I shot back. “Because you think I can’t take it?”

“We know you can’t take it,” Olaf replied. “You’ve demonstrated that a hundred times over in Storysold: City. The only reason why you had any success in The Mission was Maggie.”

That didn’t settle well. I did real spy stuff too!

“I don’t care,” I said with grit in my teeth. “I’m not leaving.”

“Good,” Olaf beamed. “You have our word, at the end of The Epic Hunting Adventure, we will take you to where we’re plotted to pick up Weston’s next shipment of cash, bottled water, and factory-processed food. There will be a telephone. You can call the Man in Charge of You and tell him to send in his G-Men to bring us in. We will go freely.”

“No, you won’t,” I said like I wasn’t wondering. “You wouldn’t give your precious freedoms up that easily.”

“Yes, we will,” Olaf stated boldly as Jarl nodded his head.

“Why?” I asked. “What are you getting out of the deal? All you’d get in return is my help on your adventure.”

“We swore to help our Sister,” Olaf replied, kneeling like a knight on the dock. “We’d rather never return home, then return without her Groom and future Homemaking Hero.”

“You will be our Brother,” Jarl added. “If you go down, then we all go down together. What do you say Meat Packer? Are you in?”

In the spirit of Storysold: City, I didn’t say a thing. Instead I cast my first, conscious live-action vote for The Epic Hunting Adventure: I packed as many factory-sealed cans of pork and beans and peanut butter into their backpacks as I could, and then I grumbled my first grumble and packed the first of many loads down the dock to the cabin in the distance.

The Brothers watched me work for a few beats, clearly enjoying the show, before they joined The Action of my work scene too.

It took us a few moments to unload the seaplane, rope the handles of the coolers together, and string them in the lake along the dock in anticipation of meat. The sun was dropping fast as we opened the door to the cabin built by Mr. Chester Weston. “Rustic” might have been a good word to describe it. “Insufficient” might have worked too. It looked a lot nicer in the home movie he showed Maggie and me. Then again, that movie was made a long time ago. In the absence of ownership, or at least a showing of maintenance, the forest had surrounded the cabin with its diverse cast of non-humans, all competing to claim the space. The deck was overgrown with a coating of moss, mold, slugs, and pine needles. The Wilderness theme didn’t stop at the door. Mice had made nests in the kitchen cabinets. Spiders had spun their mobile homes across the doorways, and gnats buzzed As One foggy body above the rusty sink.

As I walked around inside, the cabin presented itself: one bedroom adjoining a shower/cleaning room of sorts, a kitchen, dining room, and a living room stocked with one serious moose head (and one that was not as serious), a handcrafted poker table, a couch, and an expansive collection of funny hats with sayings on them like ELKOHOLIC, or a fake fish swimming through its bill. The hats were tacked up in a line around the four walls that faced a wood stove set on a square brick hearth. Behind the stove, a flight of stairs led to a trapdoor that popped open on a system of weights and pulleys to a loft. One side of the loft was stocked with a library of colorful books from another time. The other side was a nursery set with toys, a cradle, and a rocking chair where I imagined Annie put Maggie to sleep.

After I gave myself the tour, I joined Jarl at the poker table. We sat in silence and watched Olaf. He was busy hatching our dinner from the food gadgets the checker at our last stop in civilization had scanned across his counting lasers. I remember the Brothers laughing about how the checker’s hands shook when he rang us up, as if we were members of a notorious biker gang who might storm the counter and violate him without mercy if he didn’t provide us with the best of all possible customer service.   

I knew this. I knew they thought it was funny to make a person’s hands shake, and that made it harder to keep The Fear away.   

“Are you ready for our backstories?” Jarl said with no prompting on my part. “It will make you feel more, at home, with us.”

I nodded my head like I wasn’t completely relieved when Olaf the Sharpeyed served us dinner, uncorked a bottle of his Yalp, poured three mugs full of whiskey, passed them around, and the Brothers Grim spent the next few moments bringing me up to speed.

Apparently, somehow, I’d missed the part in Weston’s story where he had a lover before Annie. And at first, so did Annie. When they met working at the World Bank, Maggie’s Mother Annie was an intern and Chester was a rising world banking superhero. They met at a company party. They dined out a few times, strolled through town and talked pleasantly of nothing much at all, and they even kissed at Annie’s doorstep once, but Annie wasn’t sold on the quirky young man in a bowler’s hat and banker’s suit until he asked her to join him on a vacation getaway to Wyoming’s Wind River Range. Annie loved the outdoors, so she agreed to give Chester another chance before she moved on to greener pastures. In spite of his lack of social grace, Annie was impressed by the first class flight to Jackson Hole. She was even more impressed when they arrived at the airport and he magically transformed into his outdoor gear, gathered their bags from the jet liner, repacked them in his silver seaplane, and then sat in the pilot’s seat and flew her into The Winds.    

On the way there, Weston told Annie that he was taking her to a cabin he’d build for her “with his own two hands.” Annie didn’t buy it. She laughed at the thought that he’d done anything with his hands, but Chester stuck to his story, explaining that he’d built the cabin with his Father who’d died of a heart attack a few short days after its completion. Chester explained that his Father had willed the cabin and the lakeside property bordering the Wind River Range to him with a note, reading, “FOR YOU MY SON, AND THE WOMAN OF YOUR DREAMS.” That line didn’t really sink in until the seaplane splashed down in the lake, and he opened the door for her, and they walked down the dock with the cabin in view—with the white capped cathedrals of The Winds rising overhead—and young Chester said, “Welcome home, Annie. I’ve been waiting my whole life to meet you.”

She tried her best to resist. She’d wanted to be a superhero banker like Weston. She had sworn to herself a long time ago that she would never play the Do-It-All Housewife in her Workaholic Husband’s dream of fortune, but there he was—and there she was in white marrying Chester in the biggest wedding their coworkers had ever seen. Nine months later Chester and Annie left their work at the World Bank behind for a few months, so Annie could give birth to Maggie in a wooden tub on a rainy day in the Wind River Range.

In all the times they’d visited the cabin together, Annie didn’t think it was strange that Chester had hired a Caretaker to look after his cabin. She got along famously with the earthy woman named Ginger who looked after Weston’s property. Ginger taught Annie how to catch and cook rabbits and fish from the lake, split firewood, make clothes from animal skin, and use a bow and arrow. Annie and Ginger chased clouds of butterflies, gazed at the stars, and skinny-dipped by moonlight together. Annie loved Ginger’s two wild boys, Olaf and Jarl. She gave them nicknames. Annie called the older one “Sharpeyed,” because he often lagged behind, or ran ahead, or hung around, outside their conversations, aloof, preferring to choose the right time and place to join in. Annie called the younger brother “Uplander,” because there wasn’t a tree, mountain, idea, or person he wouldn’t climb on to gain the perspective higher ground. Never once did Annie suspect that many years before she met Chester, he had already taken his high school sweetheart to his cabin in The Winds and gave her the same lines he’d given Annie. His Father had willed the cabin to Weston and the woman of his dreams, but the woman his Father meant was Ginger. Apparently, even in the beginning of his story, one woman wasn’t enough to satisfy Weston’s dreams.

Ginger finally told Annie the truth. The next day Annie dropped her baby Maggie off at a friend’s house in Jackson, and then she backpacked into The Wilderness and vanished from all their lives without a trace. Even when Weston fired Ginger and sent a lawyer to tell her that she had thirty days to leave the cabin, she refused to give up on Annie’s return. After many battles with all the social workers and concerned family members Weston sent to “check on her,” the Sheriff finally came for Ginger with an order to commit her. The Sheriff cuffed her and stuffed her in his police cruiser, but she didn’t tell him what he wanted to know. When he asked and demanded to know where her boys were, Ginger would laugh and say, “Don’t worry, Man. They will be fine. My boys are at home in The Winds.”

And they were. The authorities never found what they were looking for; namely the rotting remains of two boys, whom they suspected were killed by a mother who’d gone insane with grief for the loss of her friend. They assumed Ginger had killed her two boys—either directly or indirectly with neglect—because they didn’t know Olaf and Jarl. They assumed the boys were like any other boys abandoned in The Wilderness. They assumed they would run for the safety and security of civilization the moment their hungry bellies began to ache. Weston was the only one who knew better. Long after the authorities had called off their dogs, he hired the best trackers he could buy to search every inch of the range for his boys. But their mother was right. They were at home in The Winds, and nobody saw any sign of them until the boys were ready to be seen. That day came when they appeared on the same beach where Miss Chase had met Chester wearing bones in their beards, buckskin thongs, and knee-high elk hide boots. They told the workers they found there to tell their “master” that his Long Lost Sons had returned from The Winds.

It was an incredible story, but as I watched the brothers prepare for The Epic Hunting Adventure—sharpening their axes and knives, sighting their crossbows as solemnly as monks—I bought every word of it.

“Why haven’t you told Maggie your story yet?”

It took Olaf a while to reply. “We want to tell our Sister Maggie,” he said, looking down, “but we are still very ashamed of our mother’s lie. We want to do something honorable for her to prove that we are trustworthy before we burden her with the truth.”

“Isn’t that the same sort of logic your mother used?” I challenged. “Don’t you think Ginger kept the truth of her relationship with Weston locked away like gold to preserve Annie’s innocence?”

“What do you know, Agent Jones?” Jarl shot back. “You’ve spent your life crafting character that is, itself, a lie.”

“I guess it takes one to know one, huh?”

“I will tell our Sister when the time is right.”

“How will you know what is, or isn’t, the right time?”

“I will know,” Jarl replied, appearing unusually vulnerable.

“What? like The Spirit of The Winds will move you or something?”

I could almost see Jarl loading his words into his mouth. He filled it like a gun, but before he fired his next round—we heard his older brother’s laughter fill the cabin. “Ah Yalp!” Olaf roared. “It’s 100% guaranteed to make you Yalp! louder with every gulp.” Olaf stood and walked to the stairs leading to the loft. “I’m hitting the rack,” he announced—with a yawn and a long scratch of his belly.  “Our first scene starts at daybreak.”

Without another word, Jarl followed his older brother. And I did the same, after a few more rounds of whiskey for the silent, overdue conversation I needed to have with me. I felt like I finally had something to say.

My Storybank Account – Scene Forty Five,

THE PART WHERE TWO HUNTERS AND A MEAT PACKER SET OFF INTO THE WINDS TO START THEIR ADVENTURE …

The next morning I woke to the sound of Olaf’s farts. “Rise and shine, sleepyhead,” he said, shaking me as I ducked my head back into the moldy sleeping bag. “Time to get moving,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover today.”

After I grumbled down the stairs, I found a backpack full of supplies and an outdoor-friendly costume to match my running shoes set on the kitchen table like a lunch sack prepared for a kid before school. They must have figured that I hadn’t humped a mile in my life. The costume included a black-and-red-checkered flannel, a pair of blood stained green overalls, thermal underwear, a wool stocking cap, and raingear, all of which was once owned by a young capitalist named Chester. It felt strange to wear his costume, but I knew, as the brothers knew, I wouldn’t survive long in The Wilderness dressed as a slick city hipster. We ate our oatmeal and drank what Olaf promised would be my last cup of coffee for weeks, then our small theme set off for adventure in what seemed to be no particular direction other than up.

It was still mostly dark out, growing lighter by the step. Or at least the day was. The worn pads of the ancient frame pack were already digging into my shoulders. It felt like the load was splitting me in two. “Man, this is heavy!” I hollered at the brothers through the morning fog. “If feels like I’m packing a pile of rocks or something!”

Jarl turned back and said, “You are.”

“I am what?” I called back.

“You are packing rocks,” Olaf replied seriously.

“I understand the importance of training,” I protested, “but this is intolerable. I’m going to take a few of these heavy fuckers out.”

“No,” Olaf instructed. “You can do it.”

“Probably,” I agreed, “but I don’t want to.”

“Before you take the rocks out,” Olaf advised. “Try to pack a while longer, imagining that you’re hiking through a warm, mosquito-free alpine meadow and suddenly, wilderness creatures appear from the trees with food and whisky and you begin to feast with your new friends like it’s Thanksgiving Day and your life has been saved like a starving pilgrim.”

“How’s that gonna help?” I grumbled and stuck my thumbs under the straps in an attempt to relieve the pain.

Jarl hiked ahead as Olaf nursed me patiently, saying, “Try to imagine you’re in the presence of something grander.” He said like a fox. “It’ll help relieve that pain in your shoulders…but you better stop if you start feeling pain in your feet. You can wish a blister away with something grander.”

I understood what he was saying, but I wasn’t ready to let him know that. I kept trudging up the ridgeline, crawling over nurse logs, dancing over thickets of vine maples, trying not to wrench an ankle in the sinkholes, doing my best to keep up with brothers who’d been raised in The Winds, breaking branches with every step—crawling up, under, and over windfall—slogging through patches of snow that were getting less and less patchy as we hiked up, and up, and up some more. Hadn’t these guys heard of trails? I thought as we crested the ridgeline and gazed across at the white-capped peaks of the Wind River Range and beyond. By this time my feet were frozen, and I felt a chill run from my head to my fingers and my tones—straight through my bones—every time the autumn wind whipped the trees around like grass. I looked to see if Jarl was as cold as I was, but he looked like a contented old man in his rocking chair, like he could die there and be happy.

“It’s been too long, Brother,” Olaf grinned wildly.

“Too long indeed,” Jarl agreed in almost a whisper—and then the Uplander howled a long and triumphant howl that filled The Winds with his presence. I wasn’t too surprised when a few of their wild creature friends called back. Olaf the Sharpeyed and Jarl the Uplander were home.

For the first few days we followed the crest, scrambling from one snow-capped peak to the next, traversing along mountainsides, zigzagging through boulder fields, post-holing in waist-high snow up the passes, gaps, and saddles of The Winds, then glissading down their backsides. I spent my nights in alpine bowls carved by wind, rain, and glaciers, under the cover of Olaf’s Field Expedient Lean-To beside large, snoring Barbarians, curled up beside them for warmth. Needless to say, mountaineering with the Brothers Grim wasn’t as fun as the action/adventure scenes they show in the outdoor clothing commercials. Feeling in my hands and feet came and went with our gain and lost in elevation. My mind swung from thoughtless physical exhaustion to delirious daydream wanderings to fits of rage to lasting periods of silent surrender, and then there were the good times I will not forget, when The Winds blew and I felt invincible like there was nothing I couldn’t imagine and do.

We saw a lot of sign—deer, bear, moose, elk, rodents of all shapes and sizes, mountain lions, eagles, crows, jays, owls, and we even saw a wolf whom the Brothers claimed to know—but I was too cold and miserable to remember how many days we hiked in circles. Or, at least, that’s how it felt…

Unlike city hunters who only have weekends to fill their freezers with meat trophies they never eat, we followed the elk for days just reading their signatures. We crept beside them, above them, around them, below them, all the while reading them quietly like creatures in the dark. Every once in a while, Olaf would flick my head like a kid until I paid attention, and he’d share his reading of the herd. He’d say, “Watch the elk. I used to think all the fighting was about fighting the Big Rack for the right to mate with the females, but I don’t think that’s true. I think they fight to fight, because combat is the purest form of communication between us. Sex isn’t a conquest, or gold doled out by the king to conquering heroes. It’s a climax, an epiphany that happens, or doesn’t happen, when a wild creature knows who they are, as a character, in a theme of other characters. The elk fight because all living creatures want to die with honor in The Earth Show, and that can’t happen if the creatures they leave behind don’t know their characters well enough to honor their memory. Sex is the same way. Done honorably it’s good. Done without honor, or knowledge, it serves no purpose. There will be nothing of the act, nothing learned, for the young to honor when the wolves come again…”   

Olaf paused to read my reaction. When he saw that I was calm and still willing to listen he continued, “The Herd—itself—is the way these creatures have learned to die honorably.

“The elk bound off when we appear, because they know us. They know we are Hunters who will eat them if they let us. They know that they will not always be able to outrun death. They know, as do we, that every one of us gets it in The End. That’s why the combat between creatures in the wild is valuable. No one will ever know anything about you if you don’t engage in some sort of meaningful combat, because—without combat, without the conflict that drives the heart of every story—there is no relationship. And without relationships, we are just things with no spirit, no soul, or signature, empty bodies with nothing of value to be remembered by anyone. The bucks fight the Big Rack, or fight the coyote, bear, or wolf—and hit them with all their strength to let them know, beyond a doubt, who and what they stand for in this life. The point of the combat isn’t for the bucks to kill the Big Rack or kill each other for the prize of sex, or kill bear, or kill wolf, or kill Hunter, because—as the honorable creatures of The Winds know—it is often our so-called ‘enemies’ who feed on our flesh and remember us best.”

I enjoyed Olaf’s many readings and I learned more than I thought I’d ever learn about a particular herd of elk, but I found myself wondering what Jarl was thinking about with such silent intensity.

I never found out, but one rainy day, three days into our readings of The Herd, Jarl took the pack off my back and tossed the rocks out—one at a time. Then he took a pair of A-eyes that were fixed to a leather band and a recorder unit from his pack, and placed the contraption on his head like a crown. Olaf did the same. Then Olaf showed me the screen of the recorder device. Sure enough, I was watching Olaf watch the world from a first person perspective. It was the beginning of their epic-hunting scenes, which they’d mint and sell when they returned to Storysold: City.

My Storybank Account – Scene Forty Six,

THE PART WHERE THE HUNTERS SPILL THE BLOOD OF MANY ELK IN THEIR EPIC HUNTING ADVENTURE…

Once the Hunters were done rubbing mud all over their bodies, I rubbed some mud on my face for good measure, slung the empty pack back on my shoulders, checked my gun to make sure it was still there, and then we took to the trees in pursuit of blood.

The barbarians had crossbows and axes, but the only weapons they chose to carry, at present, were their hunting knives, which they’d crafted long ago from the molten steel of gun barrels.

Later that day, in an effort to sound tough, I lied to Jarl about my hunting skills. Fact of the matter was, I had spent my career as a spy with a license to kill bad guys, but the only bad guy I’d ever bagged in the line of duty was a rat I’d found in my ex-girlfriend’s condo. It was the size of a small cat, and it gave me the fight of my life. I bagged the rat all right—but I also woke all her neighbors when I emptied by clip into her couch.

“Those glasses make you look funny,” I said as we tromped by a sign for what Olaf called, “White Man’s Great Spirit the Government’s attempt to round the free creatures of earth into wilderness ghettos.” The sign on the trail we weren’t using read, GRAND TETON NATIONAL PARK.

“They look silly,” Olaf answered, “but I need them to mint our epic hunting scenes. They’re called Tinker Glasses. Riggs and the Clocktinkers make them. We know many storybankers who love our venison, but we still struggle to feed ourselves in Storysold: City because of our allegiance to our Father the CEO. He’s even less popular than you.”    

I cinched the straps of my pack as we followed Jarl up and over a steep ridge, and then back down again into the neighboring canyon. We sat beside one of creation’s finest creeks for the better part of the day—doing nothing (as far as I could see)—being as quiet as we could be. Finally, less than a moment before dusk, the herd appeared like cafrom a scene set with evergreens, ferns, and mossy rocks. I was no expert reader of The Herd like Olaf the Sharpeyed, but I thought they appeared relatively cool, collected, and thirsty from a long day’s work.

For the first time in our adventure, I felt hungry. Not hungry like “I can’t wait to eat a big burger and fries after work” sort of hunger. I felt real balls-to-bone hunger that drove me like an element. Slowly, I pulled my gun from my pants and took aim at the nearest young bull standing beside the creek, head up, alert, doing the same thing I was—reading the scene. When Olaf saw that, he motioned for me to lower my gun, pointing to a patch of undergrowth a few feet from the creek. I didn’t see anything but an entangled mess of branches, ferns, fungi, and serviceberries.

“Jarl goes first,” Olaf mouthed. “Then we go.”

Then I spied one of Jarl’s boots inching almost undetectably in the direction of the same bull I was after. The boots moved closer, and closer, and the closer he got, the surer I was that the young bull would spook and bound to safety. Safety indeed! How were any of us safe with the likes of Jarl the Uplander around? He moved the mountain of his body across the forest floor like a giant snake. I watched in awe as Jarl continued to crawl closer to the mighty beast. When the bull was almost in his reach I held my breath as we watched it lower its nubby horns to the creek.

The bull never made it. Before its snout hit the water, Jarl’s hands shot up from the undergrowth. In one swift motion, he grabbed its hind legs, one in each hand, and with what looked like a sort of jujitsu-wrestling move the Uplander toppled it headfirst into the creek. Then he straddled it with one barbarian-sized step and wedged his knees tight against its front legs, pinning it down as he unsheathed his knife, fast as a cougar spreads its claws. After a swift, deep cut across the young bull’s throat, the Hunter wrapped his legs around the bull and held it to the earth. When the beast was calm he delivered his lines of thanks, “Before the light leaves your eyes,” Jarl spoke like people speak in church, “know that your life will not be wasted. Know that I will carry  The Action of your flesh, as my flesh, and I will fight like you fought to The End making sure whoever takes me knows what is ours before I die. This I swear to you. Welcome to my story, friend.” The forest scene around us became silent as we watched as the young bull bled into the cool water of the creek, producing his last moment of The Action for all who knew him.

“Oh wow,” I whispered to Olaf. “I’ve never seen anything like that in my life! How did he do that?”

“He is my Brother; Jarl the Uplander,” Olaf replied proudly.

“No shit!” I blurted, still feeling the rush of The Action produced by the Hunter who’d just single-handedly redefined the word “hunting” for me. In all my years of civilized government training, I’d never imagined it was possible for a hunter anywhere to drop an elk dead—like he was dropping a Styrofoam meat pack in his shopping cart at the local Save-A-Lot—without the aid of some sort of labor-saving firearm.    

Jarl dragged the bull from the creek, pulled a saw from his pack, and severed the head of the bull. When his head was clean off, Jarl held it in front of him like a lit lamp and filled The Action with his barbaric cry. The cry wasn’t boisterous, nor was it a cry of sympathy like wounded creatures cry. It was the signature sound Jarl sang to welcome the elk into his story.    

“That was beautiful,” I said, before I could sensor myself.

“My brother is beautiful. I’ve never met his equal,” Olaf nodded as we gathered our gear and walked into Jarl’s hunting scene, where we helped Jarl quarter the bull and put its meat into sacks for packing.

A few moments later, I, Meat Packer Jones, was humping a third of Jarl’s bull over the steep side of a ridge. The day was fading, and a soft light was breaking through the canopy, bringing radiance and color to the leaves falling to the forest floor. I was working hard, sweating from every pore in my body, but I felt good packing Jarl’s meat in a wild part of The Earth Show for reasons I couldn’t quite pin down. For once I felt like the sun was flooding my eyes with visions that I enjoyed; like the world before my feet was more a friend of mine than a foe; like finally I was doing something that was right.

In the days that followed Jarl’s first kill, the Hunters spilled the blood of many elk, and we worked together to pack the meat back to the cabin and pack it into the coolers we floated on the lake to keep it chilled. I was amazed how many times I paused in the midst of The Action and marveled at the real heroics of the scenes before me…

I’ll never forget day ten—or maybe it was day eleven, or twelve, or five (I forget)—but I remember the part where Olaf hurled his ax twenty or so feet through the air and hit his mark, planting it square between the eyes of the oldest bull they knew. It struggled to flee from death—stumbling through brambles, tripping in sinkholes, falling over logs—fighting with all it had to live  his part of The Earth Show. When the old bull reached the end of its story, it hit the forest floor with a thud that shook the earth.

Olaf was grinning ear to ear when he held his old friend’s head in his lap and gave his thanks, “Before the light leaves your eyes,” Olaf spoke more merrily than his Brother had, “know that your life will not be wasted. Know that I will carry your spirit with me, as I do my own, to death do I honor these words I give you.” Then he let loose a mighty war whoop of joy and thanks for the honor of “taking an old friend home.”

It took me a few moments to get into the joyful spirit of ripping out the old bull’s guts and pulling out its innards, carving its flesh into quarters, and hacking it into packable parts, but the Hunters got me there. The Action of Jarl the Uplander and Olaf the Sharpeyed, Barbarian Hunters of The Winds were a lot more intoxicating than their whiskey.    

Olaf grinned his grin and clapped me on the back when he saw that I’d joined in. Then he carved the heart out of old bull and handed it to me. I stared down at the warm red chunk of flesh like I was holding my own heart in my hands. When Olaf read my response, he took back his old friend’s heart from my hands, lifted it to his mouth, ripped the flesh with his teeth, and he chewed, smiling like a classic American steak eater as the blood dripped down his chin. For some inexplicable reason the horror and shame I’d felt before faded—and I found myself wanting the heart back. I tried to take it from the Hunter’s hands like he’d taken it from mine, but he was too quick. He pulled it away, daring me to take it from him.

What began as a lame shove quickly escalated.

I used my hand-to-hand combat skills to sweep the legs out from under Olaf and pin him forcibly to the ground…where I scrambled to rip the heart from his hands. Olaf fought back with a fierce headbutt. “Yazza!” The Sharpeyed cried as he sent me flailing backwards. It took beat or two before I regained my senses; but, when I did, I planted my feet and charged him, crying with all my strength. I lowered my head to his gut, then I rammed Olaf like I wanted him to remember me forever.

When Jarl saw that he cried, “It’s about time you decided to crawl out from behind that gun and fight us!” And when he saw that I’d managed to fight the heart from his brother’s grasp, Jarl cried, “Eat it! Eat it, and let the river of blood roar through your canyons. Eat it and be full!”

Chomp! I tore the heart like it was my first savage bite of flesh. Then I took another, and another. Then I felt the blood flow like a river through my canyons and fill me with a wildness I’d never known.

And that’s when I heard a gasp. Before us, not more than a stone’s throw from our bloody scene, a man and woman in pastel shirts and trendy light-weight backpacks stared at us, gap-mouthed and riveted to their plots of earth like preacher’s kids at a horror show. I had no idea that we’d been hunting anywhere near a trail.

“Oh yeah, hello?” I began, approaching them gently.

“Run,” I heard one of them say.

“Oh no, don’t go…” I said as I slipped the elk heart behind my back and took another step toward them, wiping my hands on the front of Weston’s overalls. “You see, this scene is all very normal. We killed an old bull…and now we’re chopping it into smaller pieces. You know, so we can pack it out. Have no doubt, someone will eat this. Just like a supermarket. It’s just that we’re not at a supermarket now. We’re harmless, good people just like you.”

The man remained frozen. The woman took off her pack, unzipped one of its many pockets, and produced a can of bear mace. “Like hell you’re harmless,” she shouted as she aimed the can in our direction. “Take another step, and I’ll mace every one of you fuckers!”

I laughed aloud, because I thought she was coming on too strong for my read of The Action. Or so I thought before I turned around to see Olaf the Sharpeyed holding his bloody hunting ax, and Jarl the Uplander standing beside him—packing a handful of guts like it was a snowball, grinning as he imagined what he was going to do with it next.

It was then that I got worried. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I whispered to the barbarians behind me.

“Going to war,” Jarl answered straightly.

I turned back to the tourists expecting to see them fleeing into the woods, but there they were: captivated by the spectacle of our scene like they were making the blank face look for their screens at home.

“We’re not from around here!” I called to the hikers like I was calling to them from the other side of a galactic wormhole.

Finally the mace wielder blinked and said, “I can see that.”

“My barbarian friends here aren’t as dangerous as they look,” I tried to explain. “They’re both profitable storybankers.” I stopped short, realizing that would make no sense to them. “I mean…we’re making a documentary film about real life barbarians hunting in the wild. It’s called The Mighty Winds of the Tetons. The elk is fake, and so is the blood.” I tried to explain while I licked the heart theatrically for good measure. “See fake!”

The mace wielder put her pack on, as the man hiker pulled out his cell-phone and said, “That’s the deadest fake elk I’ve ever seen. If you don’t put that ax down, now, I’m going to call the Forest Ranger.”

“Put down the ax,” I whispered to Olaf.

“You call us your friends,” Olaf replied—with his ax held firmly in his hand. “Is that true? Are we friends?”

“I don’t know,” I whispered. “I was just trying to get you out of this pickle were in. If they call the Forest Ranger, the alert will go out…and I’m sure this place will be swarming with black helicopters in no time.”

“You don’t know?” Jarl asked, while he continued to mold the ball of elk guts. “Do you have warm feelings for us, or not?”

“We don’t have time for a Doctor Phil moment here,” I whispered as I moved closer to Jarl. “We need to do something about this…”

“Don’t worry about those employables,” Olaf laughed. “Answer the question. Do you have warm feelings when you think of us?”

I squirmed, frozen, not wanting to lie or tell the truth. “Why do you people always dog on employables? They seem nice enough.”    

“You people, who?” Olaf asked curiously.

“You know what I mean… you…”

“You international terrorists?” Jarl cut in.

My heart stopped. “No, you’re not international terrorists…” I replied honestly. “We can you, Terror Banking Cultists.”

The Brothers Grim continued to ignore the tourists. “Was ‘Terror Banking Cultist’ the best label you could come up with?”

“At least ‘Brothers Grim’ sounds literary.” Olaf laughed.

Jarl shook his head. “I hate it—it’s generic; totally unoriginal.”   

“Well, it doesn’t matter now,” I said, raising my voice. “That’s what the Agents of the FBI will be calling you when they storm the city.”

Olaf relaxed his ax on his shoulder, adjusted his glasses, and looked at me like he was looking at me. “Why is this so hard for you?” he asked as he walked closer. “Just admit it. You have warm feelings for us.”

The barbarians were now standing side by side in front of me. “Even if that was true,” I shouted, arms crossed. “I would never say that!”

“Why not?” Jarl almost smiled. “It’s only words.”

Suddenly Olaf doubled over laughing as he pointed to the trail where the hikers had stood. “Works every time!” he roared. In the distance, I could still hear the zip, zip sound of the hikers’ thighs rubbing against their quick dry pants as they ran away. Jarl lumbered down to the trail and began to pick through the gear the couple had left behind.

“What did we get this time?” Olaf asked as his brother held up a self-inflating sleeping pad, a camp chair, and a fancy water bladder.

“More crap,” Jarl replied. Then he took the bladder in one hand like a creature, unsheathed his knife, and gutted it—lifting it high, so the water could cascade into his mouth like a waterfall. Next, he deflated the pad (with his knife), broke the chair in half, and spread the guts he’d been packing on the gear, making the scene clear to the next tourist who happened by.     

“Ah,” Olaf whined. “I was hoping for duct tape, or a pen.”

“What works every time?” I asked, dumbfounded.   

“That, my friend, was a new war maneuver.”

“Olaf invented that one,” Jarl beamed. “The action plan was to fight amongst ourselves with enough passion to show a predator that we’re too busy fighting each other to be of any threat, or value to them. The danger is avoided by not posturing—not forming a Civilized Self, Unified Team, or Super Body/Small Army, which would polarize the predator and force them to decide to either go ‘go big or go home.’ Ignoring them, or showing them that we’re not interested in engaging them, frees them to mind their own business.”

“You mean, that was all theatrics?”

“No,” Jarl sighed. “I thought that was our moment, when you finally got there…and Got It.”

“You mean, when we get to The Good Part…where we fight for real, or at least as real as real can be without killing each other?”

Olaf rolled his eyes. “You said that like combat is only real if some creature dies,” Olaf turned away and lumbered uphill to his gear. “And we’re the barbarians!” He shouted into The Winds and cried, “How long will it take for humans to finally Get It, and join The Action?”

“Personally, I don’t care if you Get It,” Jarl shrugged. “I was hoping you’d finally gush and share your warm feelings…”

Jarl suddenly stopped. I saw it too. Not more than thirty feet from the trail, a deer had wandered into our scene. I didn’t hesitate. I slowly drew my government-issued handgun like I’d practiced a hundred times, took aim, and shot the creature like a faceless target on the shooting range. The deer hit the forest floor immediately without a struggle.

I was about to whoop it up like a yahoo sportsman, but I turned and found that I was alone. The Hunters had vanished into The Winds. My heart dropped. They were gone, and I stood there—watching the blood drain from the young buck’s head—trying to remember who I was when I was alone. I was supposed to be Agent Jackson, the man who was cool, calm, and contained, at all times, like a pack of grade-A frozen meat.

And I stood there long enough for The Fear to creep in.

“Jarl! Olaf! Are you out there?” I said almost in a whisper like a shock victim with a hole in his chest. “I get it. I really do! I fucked up! I didn’t know this creature well enough to honor his life!” Then I cried out some more like The Wilderness was listening, like it all owed me something more than it had already given. “I’m sorry. You were right! The last time I spent more than an evening, or weekend with anyone like a girlfriend, or friend was when I was a kid. It was summer camp, and the other boys I was assigned to bunk with all took turns picking me apart piece by piece, laughing in triumph whenever I broke and tried to fight them. What I’m trying to say, guys, is that I’ve never used my vacation time! Not once!”

Silence was my reply. I waited for a long while like an Eager Beaver for something, anything to give me the next-thing-to-do—doing my best to read the trees, ridges, sky, and sinking sun for signs of instruction—but The Earth Show had no kindly wizards wandering my way.   

As if on cue, I felt the temperature drop followed by a gust of wind that rippled through the trees. A light flashed through the canopy. Then the boom. I counted, “One, two…” and BOOM! I ran uphill and began to gather my gear. The Tetons are about thirty miles long, I thought, if I run down that trail I bet I could find a visitor’s center or campground with people before dark. The rain had joined the wind, and it fell hard. I was drenched head to toe in a matter of moments. I was about to start running, but I glanced down at the deer and I remembered Cowboy Betty. She almost died of starvation before she learned to govern her story more responsibly. I looked down, not sure what to do, as I watched the rain wash the blood down the side of the trail. “This is it,” I said aloud. “This is my Moment of Truth.”

Before I knew it my legs, arms, and frigid fingers were doing what I’d developed my character Meat Packer Jones to do. I used the knife Olaf gave me to gut and quarter the buck, and then I strapped my precious load to my pack and tried to lift it to my back. That didn’t work, so I sat, put the straps on, and tried to lift it with my legs. That didn’t work either, so I screamed. “You got nothing!” I screamed into the rain. “Did you hear what I said, Asshole. You got nothing! This time I get to win! Me! Not you!” Lighting flashed through the trees. Blinded for a moment, I heard a tree crack and fall. Suddenly, an image of Jarl popped into my mind. He had set his pack on a nurse log, and then he strapped himself in. Before I knew it, I’d wrestled the pack on the mossy back of a nearby bolder. Another flash of light filled the forest. I groaned and lifted the pack onto my back. I was able to stand and shoulder the load, but I had to lean forward like an old man with a bundle of bricks. When I tried to walk, my legs nearly went out from under me. But I had made my decision. I was going to do this, or die trying. I told my legs to walk, and they walked in what I hoped was the direction of Chester Weston’s cabin.

The longer I trudged uphill—feeling The Weight—the easier it was to let some of my gear go. The Hunters had helped me lighten my load since we began our adventure, but I was still packing a lot of crap: one old sleeping bag (wrapped in a plastic bag), a tarp tent, a little extra food, a mess kit, a lighter, canteens, Olaf’s knife, a box of ammo, and my gun. In a couple miles, after I’d hiked through the storm, I ate the rest of my food. A mile later, I drank the rest of my water and tossed my heavy metal canteens. Next, I disassembled my mess kit, tossed out all the aluminum pots and pans, and decided to keep the plastic cup to drink from the clear, snow-fed creeks that raged down the ridgeline every so often. It wasn’t until the rain returned with the slow sinking of the sun behind the high walls of the Winds did I reach back into my blood-soaked pack and pull out my ammo. My Eager Beaver had grown accustomed to imagining The Worse Case Scenario and living in preparation for it like a good Boy Scout, and I’d been producing that fear for miles. There was a showdown with wolves, an escape from a mother bear preparing for winter, a stalking lion that’d leap from a rock and I’d have to blast it in midair around every tree, over every hill, across every river. My fear of The Earth Show fueled me, flooding my body with power and adrenaline like little hits of methamphetamines. Then I remembered one of Olaf’s readings,“Combat is communication.”

The last thing I remember that night was dropping my pack under a tree, setting up my tarp, and lying on my back, wet and cold in my sleeping bag, shooting round after round off into the air until I no longer had the things that made the heavy hunk of twisted metal useful. In retrospect, I should have used the gun power, ammo box, and the dry moss and branches I found under the evergreen to start a fire, but I didn’t have that scene in me at the time in spite of watching it time after time in every survival movie I’d ever seen.

In the morning, I was greeted by the white-hot reflection of sunlight off a foot of freshly fallen snow. My first instinct was to check to see if some animal had walked off with my deer. It was still there, staring at me with its two lifeless marbles. I was still wet and cold in my bag, but I’d long since stopped shivering. I knew that was bad, but it hurt to move. Every bone, vessel, and cell in my body whispered, “All you need is rest. Don’t move, and you’ll be OK. Everything will be OK.”

I almost fell back asleep when I smelled something familiar. At first, I couldn’t place the smells. Then I began to count them: onion, potato, garlic, carrot, oregano, and peas… “Maggie’s Signature Split Pea Soup!” I knew it wasn’t real. Maggie was thousands of miles away, but it did the trick. My blood began to flow. My muscles began to move, and soon I was standing with my pack on my back taking big, happy slurps of Maggie’s soup.

My first bowl was fabulous. It deadened the pain long enough for me to trudge to the edge of the ridgeline, where I found my first good view of the range in miles. In the distance, I saw a plumb of smoke rising from the edge of a familiar lake. I didn’t have the energy to cheer, so I took a step in the direction of the lake instead—and asked Maggie for another bowl of her delicious soup. After my third bowl of soup in the rising heat of the morning sun, I finally began to feel my legs, feet, and face again. I was so happy to have Maggie’s soup scene in mind, I was afraid to ask her character for anything more. But alack! I am who am, so I asked for more…

“Maggie?” I whined as I post-holed down the ridge.

“You know this isn’t me, Wylie,” her voice replied. “You’re packing a deer through the snow in the Wind River Range.”

“Thanks for that,” I shivered. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“Now that you got me here…what do you want?”

I licked my ice-sculptured lips. “Can I have some of your Scrumptious Cheese Bread too? I promise I’m good for it.”

“Listen,” Maggie sighed as she began to trudge along with me. “I’ll do you one better, Lover. If you make it around that nob, through that wall of little trees, and follow that creek down there to the lake…I’ll give you all the Scrumptious Cheese Bread you can eat…each served with a complementary kiss that you won’t feel because your lips are frozen.”

“Da-da-deal,” I said, smiling as I rounded the nob. “Wa-wa-will the ba-ba bread be one hu-hundred pa-pa-percent Mission free?”

I liked that Maggie’s signature laughed at that. It warmed my spirit to know I could make her laugh. Our conversation continued as I pushed my way through the wall of trees, found the creek, and began the painful process of bushwhacking my own trail along the roaring creek.

Five scrumptious cheese bread scenes later, I looked up from the snow and saw the lake. Eight later, I looked up and saw Olaf’s seaplane. By the time I ate my tenth, I was standing at the front door of the cabin.

I didn’t try to take my pack off. It was frozen to my back. With what felt like my last moment of strength, I pushed the door open. Olaf and Jarl were standing around the stove, talking with a third guy I didn’t know. They looked warm—mugs of Yalp in hand. I stood in the doorway for a moment waiting for them to notice that I’d made my grand entrance.

They were telling stories, which made them throw their heads back and laugh a lot. And slap their knees.

I closed the door, and slowly made my way towards the stove. Ice broke off my pack and crashed to the ground. My teeth were chattering and I’m sure I must have smelled like death, but they still carried on with their scene like I wasn’t there. The closer I came, the more I felt I knew the guy in the middle. Who was he, and what was he doing here?

Tap, tap—I tapped the new guy on the shoulder. He spun around and saw me, and I saw him. He looked like Jeff Jackson in every way. That was until he began to speak. “Wylie!” he laughed. “Glad you could make it! Was it cold out there?” When the brothers heard that they laughed—like it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard—and the new guy laughed too. Then I watched in horror as the guy’s mouth opened like a rising curtain to reveal his big, tree-splitting beaver teeth. I just stared.

“Can you believe this guy!” the Eager Beaver laughed and pointed at the deer still strapped to my back. “He packed that dead deer’s head all the way here. What is he gonna do, eat it? What an idiot!”

Fists out. I pulled my shoulders back. The deer hit the ground with a thud. And that’s when I finally got to The Good Part. I don’t remember what happened next. When I woke from my delirium I was in a tub of hot steaming water, starting up at the Brother’s Grim, feeling a lot like I imagine Bugs Bunny felt in his hunting scenes with Elmer Fudd. I only half listened. The whole time Olaf recounted The Good Part I imagined Jarl cutting carrots and kale with his hunting knife and tossing them in my stew-making scene. Apparently, as Olaf told it, the man-sized Eager Beaver was never there. He vanished the instant I swung at him. The brothers, on the other hand, did not vanish when I swung at them. They fought back; and when I was done fighting, Jarl threw me over his shoulders like a sack of potatoes and packed my weight to the tub, where I was stripped and thrown in the tub like Bugs.

“So who won doc?”

“Huh?” Olaf asked perplexed.

“Did I kick that Beaver’s ass or what?”

It was Jarl who replied. He handed me a bowl of soup, and said, “Oh you won, all right. You killed him. He’d dead. We dragged his meat into The Winds for our wild creature friends to feed on.”

“Good,” I smiled and ate my soup. “Fuck that guy.”

And that’s how my Eager Beaver met its end.

My Storybank Account – Scene Forty Seven,

THE PART WHERE WYLIE FIGHTS THE GUY HE WAS TRAINED SINCE BIRTH TO BE…

I woke the next morning—wrapped in a blanket beside my friends like we were still sharing the Field Expedient Lean-To—still glowing from yesterday’s ordeal like the sun had never gone down.

After I borrowed some more of Weston’s old clothes and we had our instant coffee and wolfed down our just-add-water pancakes with high-fructose-corn-syrup syrup and oily peanut butter, we packed our coolers filled with meat props into the seaplane and flew from the Winds.   

The next stop was a resort along the shores of Jackson Lake, where one of Weston’s mainland employees was waiting with Weston’s next shipment of bottled water, factory-processed food, and cash. I was still planning to call the Man in Charge of Me on the on the nearest telephone I could find. I had a script for my new future-like course through storytime in mind. I rehearsed my lines in silence, again and again, as Olaf flew the seaplane over the cathedrals of the Tetons and splashed down in Jackson Lake.

The engines powered down as we drifted in smooth alongside a dock lined with yachts. At the edge of the dock a large man wearing outdoor active wear and sporty sunglasses waved at us. Beside him were a dozen or so steel lockboxes and twice as many factory-packed cardboard boxes. Olaf greeted the man like they’d known each other for years. The scene felt different then I had imagined in the cabin, and that made me feel less confident in my script for The Action of what I imagine would happen next. Writing a scene of my own was a lot harder following the training program of The Mission. I felt The Fear rise in my heart, but I was determined not to let it rule me. It was no longer the fuel I used to execute my generic performance expectations.

I breathed deep, closed my eyes, and focused on The Action. If I didn’t make this call now I would lose my nerve and spend the rest of my days playing Eager Beaver to some greater man’s mission for my life.

“I’ll be right back,” I told Jarl, and then I walked down the dock in the direction of the lodge without waiting for his reply.

The resort was like any other you’d expect to find in or near America’s national parks. It supplied the tourists of the national park with lodging, food, gas, and gear, so they could experience the grandeur of The Wilderness without having to actually experience it. The lodge had a rustic sort of look: vaulted timber rafter ceilings, cedar shingles, and furniture made to look like a gritty pioneer had carved them from trees with his two hands and a Bowie knife. As I read it, the resort’s most rustic feature was the fact that the rooms didn’t come with wifi, which was savagery the guests complained about daily.

When I walked into the lodge, I asked the college youth at the front desk if I could use a phone. Once he learned that I wasn’t a paying guest he said the only phone available to The Public was a payphone in the bar, so I put on my best face for being Public and found the bar. It was packed with what I read as, mostly, two themes. I called them, Weekend Road Warriors (bikers with good jobs), and Peak Baggers (privileged youths who worked hard bagging any peak they targeted in life as a form of existential recreation), and both themes were bonding over beers and sports on one of the few public television screens in Grand Teton National Park. In the corner beside the ATM, I spied the ancient payphone. If I was still minting The Mission, I would have followed protocol and bug proofed the payphone before I dialed the FBI’s emergency number. It felt good to know that acting (or being) paranoid in Public was no longer part of my story. I simply picked up the phone, dialed the number, gave my security clearance code to the Bureau operator, and waited for Special Agent in Charge Sturgis to answer my call.

“This is Agent Sturgis,” he answered.

“Hello Sturgis,” I said. “This is Jeff Jackson.”

There was a pause, and then he said, “Where are you?”

I scratched the bristles of the little beard I’d grow in the course of my adventure, and replied calmly, “I’m at a small resort along the shores of Jackson Lake in Grand Teton National Park.”

“I thought you were on your way back to DC.”

“I was,” I paused, “but I decided to go hunting instead.”

“What the hell’s going on, Agent Jackson?’ he asked. “We lost the tracking signal on your laptop somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.”

“I know, my friend Jarl the Uplander threw it out the window of his brother’s seaplane on our way to The Winds.”

There was a longer pause, and then the Man said, “I want you back in DC—ASAP—to brief the Director on the location of Weston’s secret Vault.” There was an even longer pause, and then he asked, “Do you need money, or a ride? Is that why you called?”

“No,” I replied, keeping cool. “I called to give you the location of Weston’s Super Massive Vault.”

In my mind’s eye, I saw him leaning back in his fancy government-issued leather chair throwing darts at my photo.

“Outstanding, Agent Jackson,” Sturgis paused to blow some air into his receiver to show a sense of relief. “I was worried there for a minute, with all that talk about the terrorists being your ‘friend’ and all…I thought you might have lost your daggon mind, or worse.”

“I want to give you the location of his Vault now,” I said, preparing to drop my next lines like a bomb, “because I know that’s the only way I’ll be able to convince ‘my side of the family’ to come to our wedding.”

“Fuckin’ hell I knew it!” the man formerly in charge of me cried. “You have lost your daggon mind!”

“You couldn’t be more right, sir,” I said as a big Olaf-sized grin spread across my face. “I have lost my daggon Mind. I lost it in The Winds packing deer meat for my friends.” There was no reply from Agent Sturgis, so I continued, “In any case, I know you well enough to know I have no reason to trust you, but I also know that I’m tired of not trusting people. So, here’s the deal: I’ll tell you where Weston’s Vault is, and you promise to RSVP as soon as you and your people know when you can make the journey to Storysold: City—and be our Guests of Honor at our wedding. I don’t expect you to understand, but I love Maggie, and all I want in life is to make her dirty dishes clean again.”   

Sturgis didn’t even think about it.

“It is the policy of the United States Government not to negotiate with terrorists of any kind,” he said, but he also stayed on the line.

“Thought so,” I paused. “What if I told you that Jellyfish is going to bring enough Mermen Crab Cakes and Spunk Surprise to feed a hundred and fifty-nine fit US Marines?”

“That’s a lot of crab cake,” Sturgis commented coldly.

“No shit, that’s a lot of crab cake!” I exclaimed, allowing myself to get a little excited about The Wedding Plot for once. “Not only that—Uncle Sam and the American Dreamstates Band are plotting to do a concert in your honor before the wedding ceremony. They’re going to play all the classic American revolutionary favorites for you: Yankee Doodle, Battle of New Orleans, and The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and a few modern favorites you probably don’t know. They do a version of Rage Against the Machine’s Know Your Enemy with Honest Abe rocking the fiddle and Captain Nemo on the organ that’ll knock your socks off. I’m telling you! If the Dreamstates can’t rock hard enough to get you in the mood to watch the revolutionary birth of our Storysold: marital union, nothing will.” Then I hummed a few lines from The Battle of New Orleans before I realized I was getting nowhere.

“Listen,” I began again seriously. “I have a plan.”

“You know if you do this,” he said with equal seriousness, “I will be forced to charge you with treason.”

I thought about that one for a few beats, and then I said, “Like I said, I have a plan. Plan B. Do you want to hear it? I think you’ll like it.”

“No,” Sturgis stated gruffly.

“Too bad. I’m going to tell you where the Vault is, whether you like it or not. That’s my plan.” I replied, pausing to let the line sink in. Then I did it. “Weston’s Vault is located under the meadow at the heart of Center Stage, where we’ll be married. You get there using a long tunnel that runs from the elevator at the center of Westonton Corporate Headquarters. If you pull the paneling off the elevator wall you’ll find a keypad. The code—334643—will send the elevator down to the underwater tunnel. I hope you wrote that down, because that’s Plan B. There, I did it. I surrendered my last secret…the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I’m ready to say whatever bullshit words you need to feel right, so long as you join us in The Action and celebrate the all American revolution of our Storysold: marital union with us.”

“Who are you, the Last Boy Scout?” Agent Sturgis exclaimed. “Do really think telling me the truth will get you anywhere?”

“Yes,” I answered hard and fast. “I do. Someone Smart a long time ago once said, ‘The truth will set you free.’ Until now, I only thought that was a line I could use to manipulate my Assets.”

“I knew you were nothing more than a rookie fuck-up waiting to happen, Jackson. I knew…”

“I’m Wylie Jones,” I said, cutting him off.

“Say again? Who the fuck do you think you are?”

“Jeff Jackson was employable. My name is Wylie Jones,” I paused to wait for a reply. There was none, so I continued to speak my mind. “With all the cover stories, work roles, job titles, classes, and characters America gave me over the years, I never had time to know that Jeff Jackson guy. That what we storybankers call ‘my employable name.’ Besides, Wylie Jones is how Maggie the Garden Tender knows me best.”    

“As a professional courtesy,” Agent Sturgis rolled on like I hadn’t said anything, “I will give you seventy-two hours to get your dumb ass back to DC and report to Me. Now that the President has been elected to his second term in office, Weston has become a top priority; which means the Commander in Chief of the greatest nation on Earth needs you to brief him, in person, on the intelligence you gathered on Weston’s cult in the last year, so we can coordinate with the military generals and put a plan together for the invasion, evacuation, and destruction of the Terror Banking Compound. The Super Bowl’s coming soon, and the Presidents would like to give his fellow Americans a big win in the victory column to put them in the right mood for the game. I’m not too sure what The Super Bowl has to do with keeping Weston from injecting his viral currency into our mainstream, but the President cares about it. Deeply. I think it has something to do with his presidential legacy, or selling beer. Anyway, I’ll be honest with you, ‘Jones’…we’re going to have a hell of a time meeting that deadline without your help. He expects the whole operation—codename: The Terror Banking Cult Uprising on the High Seas—to only last a few days. ‘A hell of a lot shorter than Operation Desert Storm’ was his words. As you know, ‘Jones,’ shock and awe only goes so far. I will need you and your intelligence at the tip of our spear. Believe it or not, we liked your Spyrrator. The American People will need a public hero they can see and know for this operation like a character on a TV show. The Director and I have already talked. As far as we’re concerned, you’d be the right fit for the part of our American Bond. All you have to do, Agent Jackson, is get your head back in the game…”     

I won’t lie. That was a good one. I put the receiver down and walked over to the bar where I found the biggest Road Warrior I could, shot him a big Olaf-grin, and pounded his beer. Then I walked back to the payphone without a word, leaving the biker behind to wonder.

“Goddamn you, Jackson!” Sturgis was saying as I put the receiver to my ear. “Are you still there?”

“I’m here,” I said, feeling better.

“Did you hear me?” I heard him bark across the country. “I’m giving you seventy-two hours to be standing in front of me, ready to make your report to the President—clean shaven!—or I’m going to make it my personal mission to see you swing! Do you hear me, Jackson?”

“I hear you,” I replied as I watched the Road Warriors crowd around me. “You said, you’ll kill me if I don’t march on with The Mission.”

“Oh no!” I heard Sturgis laugh. “I won’t just kill you. I’m going to assassinate your whole, mother-loving character. I will drag you through the courts, through the media, and hang you, your family, and anyone you knew in The Public Eye, long before we watch you swing. If I’m satisfied with simply assassinating your character, I might have mercy on you and lock you away for the rest of your life, so you can sit there, and be nobody, eating food you didn’t work for, wishing with every bite I hadn’t been so merciful!”

“I have to go now,” I said as I Olaf-smiled at the bikers.

“Seventy-two hours Jackson!” I heard Agent Sturgis scream as I put the receiver down. I was more ready than I’d ever been to fight for the honor and freedom to rule my body, which was, at present, shaping up to be a nasty fight for my right to steal some yuppie biker’s beer.

The only cause I had was that I needed it more than he did. That and the fact that everything about the guy’s signature—from his neatly trimmed beard, to his unworn leather pants, to the measured way he drank his beer and cheered for his TV sports heroes—was screaming for a wilder person to steal his beer, and remind him of the role he was claiming in The Earth Show.

“Hey Asshole!” the yuppie said, almost fiercely.

“Hay is for horses.” I smiled, remembering Guide’s line as I snatched a beer from the hand of one of his friends, pounded it down, and replied, “I was an Asshole, but I’ve been cured. Now I’m just thirsty.”

The biker and his gang of corporate lackeys continued to talk like they were dealing with a rogue employee of some kind, but I was as tired of my own jabbering nonsense as I was distrusting everyone, so I took my best shot, an upper cut to the jaw of my nearest biker. So began the first real bar fight the tame creatures of The National Park had seen since the wild west.

I almost felt sorry for those employables. They had no way knowing that I had a pair of aces in the hole. Moments after I’d tossed the first biker through the window with a “Romp-a-romp-a-Rompasaurus Raar!” than the Brothers Grim rushed in. Jarl plowed through the mass of bikers like a hot knife through butter. Then he leapt up on the bar, took aim at a girthy tourist in the corner who was doing his best to be the Audience, and pounced, arms outstretched—smothering him like a hawk on a frightened mouse. I laughed when I saw the tourist shriek and strike back, pounding Jarl with a frenzy of blows that left Jarl smiling and struggling with his “future friend” in much the way a father would wrestle playfully with his child. While I was laughing it up, a broad biker in scared leather joined The Action. She wore her sunglasses like knights were shields. In one hand, she held a bottle of cheap wine. In the other she held a fist, which she landed between my eyes.

Next thing I knew, I was face down watching pavement zip by. The biker had hog tied me—face forward, legs to the rear—to the bucket of her three-wheeled Harley like a rocket. In the distance, I heard her biker buddies cheer. “Fuck yeah, Alice!” they cheered—while Alice the Road Warrior tore around the resort’s parking lot, whooping it up with one hand on the throttle and the other on her wine bottle. I squealed, “I’m going to puke!” for her to stop, but she only glanced at me like she was sizing up a side of conquered mean, and kept riding high. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jarl clothesline one of the bikers, knocking him off his bike, and then, smooth as an action hero, he took the bike in hand and laid scratch in my direction.    

“You want to play, motherfucker?” Alice laughed, signaling her gang to follow her lead, as she made tracks to the open highway. “If it’s game you want, boys, let’s go somewhere where we can play.”

Maybe I’d misjudged these bikers, I thought, maybe I only happened to catch them on the day after a 50% sale at the local leather shop.

Alice’s bike flew around the tourist traffic—drivers with their hats set squarely on their heads—with Jarl in hot pursuit. I felt like a flycatcher in a wind tunnel. My eyes watered, and I didn’t dare open my mouth for fear of eating the bugs that were redecorating my face with their guts. After Alice ripped by another Cruise America RV, I ventured a glanced back at the scene behind us. Jarl was still there, doing his best Terminator impression. My eyes widened when I saw that Jarl wasn’t alone. Alice’s whole gang was riding hard behind Jarl, and behind them I caught a glimpse of a familiar seaplane flying low over the tree line. Holy Moses! I cried and whipped my head back to face the road ahead. That scene didn’t look any better. I saw the copters and heard their sirens before I saw the blur of red, white, and blue lights.

“Nice try, Jerkoffs,” Alice shouted at the roadblock the police had set up along the border between Wyoming and Montana. “If you candy asses want to play cops and robbers, I’ll play!”

Then she hung a right, seemingly at random, down a gravel road that was labeled PRIVATE. After I’d sucked dust for a mile or so, I looked ahead in time to watch a gruff looking rancher open his gate for us. The sign on the gate read: TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT ON SIGHT (YES, I MEAN YOU MOTHERFUCKER). He was carrying a shotgun, which he fired a few times at Olaf when his seaplane buzzed our scene.

It didn’t take long to determine that the ranch wasn’t the gang’s lair, hangout, or anything like that. The ranch was a working ranch with a barn and cows, horses, hay, and everything. Mere moments after Alice, Jarl, and the rest of the gang had arrived on set I was dragged into an empty horse corral near a pasture full of lazy cows. Jarl put up a good fight, but he was rounded up and thrown in the corral too. They didn’t seem to care that Jarl’s first action in the corral was to untie me. Once I was free, we stood back to back like tag team wrestlers in a ring watching as the bikers formed a circle around us. In classic American style, the ranch owner assumed the role of legislator. He sauntered up to us with his shotgun cradled in his arms. He patted his gun, and said, “This here’s to make sure this fight stays fair. After that stunt you all pulled at the resort, Mama Bear won’t hold them at the gate for long—with or without a warrant. To be clear, boys, until they breach the gate…I am The Law.”

“They mean to tame us,” Jarl said, pulling me to my feet.

“No shit,” I said as I sized up the gang: five bikers in the corral, two on bikes screaming around the corral, one rancher with a shotgun, a horse trough, a rope, two horseshoes, three bottles of whiskey, and Alice sitting on the fence, laughing, and drinking her wine. “Got a good plan?” I asked the barbarian. “Can you whistle, or something? And call your bear friends from the forest to help us? Maybe a cougar, or an angry buffalo?”

“I don’t whistle,” Jarl said as he sized up the gang.

“Then what are we going to do?”

“We get to The Good Part,” Jarl the Uplander said, then put that plan into action. He wasted no time. He charged straight at the nearest biker with a bottle of whiskey. After he’d cracked a few of the man’s ribs in a barbarian-style bear hug, he picked up the whiskey and tossed it to me.

I slugged my way through a young biker with a Punisher tattoo on his arm, picked up the whiskey, and took a big swig. No sooner had the liquor hit my mouth, I spewed it back out. “Yuk!” I said as I read the label on the factory-processed whiskey. It read, JIM BEAM. “Here, I can’t stomach this guy’s crap after drinking real barbarian whiskey!” I shouted loud and proud as I tossed the bottle in the Punisher’s lap. He thought that was funny, and so did Jarl, who was laughing until Alice weighed in and knocked Jarl on his ass. I was about to help, but one of the circling bikers entered the corral on his bike—rooster tailing the dirt, twirling a rope over his head as he took aim at me. I ran like any wild creature would run. His first toss missed its mark. In the distance, I heard the roar of Olaf’s engines. A beat later, I looked up and saw Olaf’s grinning beard holding a bottle of Yalp out of his window like an old WWI pilot aiming a bomb. The first bottle broke beside the rope-throwing Cowboy on a bike. “No!” I cried like they’d killed my pet dog. I gritted my teeth and turned back to the Cowboy. He was preparing for another throw.

“Hey, John Wayne!” I shouted at him. “Here I am!”

This time, the Cowboy hit his mark. I stood—lassoed—and waited for the Cowboy to do his worse. I watched him tie the rope to his handlebars, rev his engine, and turn his head. That’s when I knew I had him. Quick as greased lighting, I pulled the rope over my head and lassoed it to the corral post a foot from where I stood. The bike roared forward, and the slack tightened. The post stood firm, and the Cowboy biker fell to the ground with a thud. Overhead I heard the seaplane approaching again. As it roared by, Olaf dropped another bottle of Yalp—right on target. This time, I caught it.

I looked up, hoping I could toast a salute to Olaf, but the next thing that passed overhead was a helicopter with a badge branded like a hero mask on its side for all to see. In the distance, I heard the sound of sirens.

Barbarians and bikers alike stopped their fights. A little dazed, a little drunk, everyone took a breather to wrap our brains around the future-like part of our stories where civilized America was about to knock our doors down and do Its best to “put us in our place” like Assholes do their housewives.

I was having fun, and I didn’t want to be the one to call a scene this good to its end, so I lifted my Yalp to the heavens and cried, “This round’s on us, friends! Anyone thirsty?”

In that moment, I heard a cheer rise from The Wilderness. We drank the whiskey in a round—pass, chug, pass, chug—while the police and all their dogs, armor, and guns surrounded the corral like black plague.

Needless to say, we didn’t surrender without a fight. We had a duty to our wilderness creature friends around the world, and ourselves, to show the cops what happened when we got to The Good Part.

When The Action finally fizzled out, the judge determined that we’d “disturbed the peace” and sentenced each barbarian and biker in our cast to two weeks in the county jail, plus a month “community service,” plus a fifteen hundred dollar fine, and reparations paid to the absentee owners of the resort for any damages sustained during the fight. We could have paid our bail with Weston’s cash in the seaplane, but the Brothers Grim agreed it would be best to call their Father on his emergency line; instead of trying to convince one of his mainland employees to fetch the cash and bail us out.

The two weeks in jail wouldn’t have been bad—we got along with the bikers and their jailbird friends famously—if Olaf hadn’t returned from his free phone call with bad news. His Father reported without emotion that he had received an official email from the President of the United States. In short, it was somewhere between an arrest warrant and a declaration of all-out war on Westonton. Olaf had asked Weston what he could do to help. All Weston said was, “Be careful. Get home to us safely. That is what matters in The End.” The brothers were optimistic about our chances of reaching Storysold: City alive, but I wasn’t too sure. I knew how it worked in The Congress of Power. America has never issued a declaration of that sort in the spirit of diplomacy. No doubt, American warships were in route to Storysold: City. The Marines were already hoorahing each other, preparing for their invasion of Our Home.

My Storybank Account – Scene Forty Eight,

THE PART WHERE THE HUNTERS OF THE WINDS SHOW WYLIE WHAT REAL VICTORY LOOKS LIKE…

The bright side of spending two weeks in jail with a well-dressed gang of bikers was, we had a lot of time to share our stories. When the time came to go, I wasn’t sure if we joined their gang, or they joined ours.

“Don’t worry, friend,” Olaf said as he took Alice’s hands. “I know you’d never volunteer to join The Action in Storysold: City if you weren’t really, very seriously, suffering from withdrawal…”

Alice laughed. “Trying to live right day-to-day in this godforsaken country is a withdrawal from everything good.” She smiled, kissed Olaf on his cheek, and whispered, “You better count me in, and so is Big Joe Hill, Rooster Bait, and Hell Cracker. We’re all in, and that’s non-negotiable.”

While they talked, a line of bikers roared into the parking lot of the jail to pick up their members in style. “I can give you the info,” Olaf agreed as the gang rolled in, “but I can’t offer you a lift. We’ll be lucky to get home without having to toss my Father’s cash to lighten the load.”

Alice threw her legs over the back seat of her friend’s bike. “Don’t you worry, friend. Rooster Bait’s our best smuggler. Owns his own plane. In the meantime, hop on. We’ll give you puffnuts a ride to your plane.”

Naturally, we had to stop by the bar at the Jackson Lake resort for a few drinks before we said goodbye. To make sure there were no hard feelings harbored by the employables working there, I walked back to the dish pit and handed the suds buster I found there our share of the reparations due to the resort; plus a few thousand more for shits and giggles. In the spirit of a true dishwasher, he (and his puller) immediately quit—and threw a party in the employee dormitory that shut the resort down for weeks.

The first thing Jarl did when we reached the plane was check on his coolers full of elk meat. He expected the worse. Even in cooler, no way the meat would be any good. The first cooler he checked was empty. “Who the hell?” he growled, and then checked the next cooler. It was empty too. And so were the rest. “Who the fuck stole my meat!” he roared—hopping off the seaplane back onto the dock. “No one steals from Jarl the Uplander!” Jarl cried aloud, until he saw Alice standing on the shore with Hell Cracker and Rooster Bait. Cracker was holding up one of many packages of smoked elk meat that he’d cured on the request of Alice while he waited for his friends to get out of jail. They were holding their middle fingers high. “Fuck you for not believing me!” Alice laughed with her gang. “I told you not to worry!”

The laugher didn’t bother Jarl. He walked straight over to Alice and her gang, gave them a group bear hug, and then packed his elk meat onto the plane, glad to know that his wild creature friends had been honored. As the seaplane rose from Jackson Lake like a phoenix from the ashes of our many combats, Jarl hung his head out of the window—and filled our scenes with the triumphant cry of a barbaric Uplander from The Winds.

“Do you think Alice will join our fight?” I asked Jarl as we sat, side by side, like we were at the back of the Big Yellow School Bus.

“I don’t know,” he replied—staring at the wall again, “but I do know we’re going to need all the help we can get to win this one.”

Then Jarl put an arm over my shoulder, and we listened to the hum of the seaplane until the sun went down.   

My Storybank Account – Scene Forty Nine,

THE PART WHERE THE CREW OF THE SEAPLANE AGREE THAT THE BEST DEFENSE IS NOT FIGHTING RIGHT…

On our way home to Storysold: City we soared over the planetary stage and talked about the invasion. Every war playing scenario I could think of ended with Agent Sturgis and his invasion fleet marching into Storysold: City, quelling The Uprising, and declaring Martial Law. The Brothers Grim, on the other hand, still felt their common defense theme The Wedding Plot had a shot at repelling an invasion force of US Marines.

They described the “new war maneuver” they tactically plotted with the inspiration of Wilderness Security Guide and Traveler. No matter how many times they described it, I still couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that we were, seriously, entertaining the notion of doing exactly what everyone had been saying we were going to do—namely, throw a massive wedding party for Maggie’s family from Storysold: City, and my family of “honored guests” from the invasion force I was certain was now in route to Our Home.

I sort of doubted my reading of The Earth Show there for a while, but sure enough, we saw the American warships on the horizon a few moments before we reached Storysold: City.

“Fuck!” I cursed—and punched the wall. “I was right!’    

Olaf peered back at us from the cockpit. “Peekaboo!” he roared with laughter, pointing back at the horizon full of warships. “It’s Hero Time out there, brothers! Do we have an action plan yet?”

Jarl looked to me, and I looked to Jarl. Then I had an idea.

“You know…” I said like an apple had just rung my bell. “Wooing Agent Sturgis might be easier than wooing Maggie. I mean, when I’m honest with myself, I know Maggie loves me, but not that much. She’s in love with the farm called Storysold: City—willing to Marry the Farmer for The Farm.”

“I don’t follow,” Jarl said with worried eyes.

“Hold that thought,” I said, and walked to the back of the cargo bay where I stashed my belongings and began rummaging through my bag full of government-issued cover costumes. After a few, long moments of indecision I changed to my truer character costume: sweatband, silky short running shorts, bloodstained running shoes, and a sleeveless indie rocker T-shirt.   

“Voila!” I exclaimed, attempting to appear confident as I presented the newest draft of my signature. “What do you think?”

“I still don’t get your plan,” Jarl replied.

“I’m Dishmaster Jones!”

“You’ve got to be shitting me.”

“No, really,” I said, less confidently. “This is it. I’m going to show Agent Sturgis, and Maggie, who I am. You know, deep down Me in my truest character and costume! And The Truth will set us free!”

“Congratulations, you’ve cracked,” Jarl said dryly. “But that doesn’t help us with the action plan we need now…”

“Yes, it does,” I said like I’d cracked the code. “Once Agent Sturgis sees the power of my transformation into Dishmaster Jones, he will flee the scene and run for the mainland…for fear that the viral currency that changed me, so radically, will spread like the plague throughout his crew.”        

Jarl shook his head, walked to the back of the cargo bay, and began rummaging through his pile of props. A few moments later, after I’d seen him busy himself with some Unseen Project, he returned with what appeared to be a tarp. “It’s last year’s Lean-to,” he explained. “I think your plan is not sound, but I think this will help your costume.” Then he tied the tarp around my neck with a length of rope that hung from my chest like a tie.

“Gee,” I said slowly, feeling odd. “Thanks Jarl.”

“Do you like it?” Jarl asked deadpan.

“What is it?” I asked honestly.

“It’s a cape,” he explained. “You know, like a superhero.” Then Jarl took my hands in his and he guided my arms through the holes he’d made in the tarp. He was right. When the “dish cape” was pulled around my body and my arms were through the holes, I could see how it would protect me from suds and slop better than any apron.

“This is genius, Jarl,” I smiled. “Thank you.”

I swooped up to the cockpit to show Olaf my new costume. I spun around and showed off, and then I read Olaf’s face. It wasn’t natural to see terror in the eyes of a barbarian. I looked out. Before us, I saw Storysold: City  floating like a vision in the clear, blue ocean sky. Surrounding it on one side was a fleet of warships. I blinked, and a death jet fighter boomed by, and fired a few hundred rounds, to warn us off.

“I don’t have a radio!” Olaf screamed at the fighter pilot. “Don’t you know I’d reply to your very, clear, air superiority if I was able?”

“Don’t worry,” I said to my friend. “I have a plan.”

“Is it dressed like you?” Olaf said as we watched another death jet fighter take off from an aircraft carrier below us.

“No,” I said, taking Jarl’s new cape off feeling embarrassed. “My plan is: you’ll land us near the lead career…then I’m going to swim…and board the ship, where I will single-handedly persuade Agent Sturgis to turn his warships around and leave the storybankers of Storysold: City in peace.”

“America won’t leave because you whisper sweet nothings in Its ears like civil minded protesters do,” Olaf shook his head. “You’ll be lucky if your old buddy leaves you in peace…instead of pieces.”

“We can wave something white,” I rambled on, not listening. “That way they won’t shoot at us when we land near the carrier…”

“To hell with that horseshit,” Jarl cursed, joining us. “You’re not getting out of this wedding that easy. I have a better plan.”

We turned to the Uplander and waited for his brilliant plan. A death jet fighter boomed by again, guns hot; followed by another.

“Fuck those cowards for hiding behind their machines,” Jarl paused as we waited for the punch line. “I say we dive bomb them.”

“Say again?” Olaf protested. “Do you know the amount of raw killing power that’s In Blessed Congress down there, brother?”

“Dive bomb them,” Jarl said again.

Olaf adjusted his glasses. “No,” he said. “I will not sacrifice my life, or yours, for your classic old war suicide plan.”

“Uh, yeah,” I agreed. “I second that motion…”   

“Dive bomb that carrier’s control tower,” Jarl explained calmly, “and I’ll push our load of cash out when you pull up…”   

Olaf processed that plan for a beat or so and sighed, relieved. “Why didn’t you say that was the plan? We have at least a thirty-two point one percent chance of surviving an action plan like that.”

Focused as always, Olaf pushed his yoke down and aimed his silver seaplane at the massive carrier below. Everything flew forward: pens, maps, old pop cans, candy wrappers, chip bags, all hit the windshield. Jarl called to me, over The Action, and we made our way back to the cargo door.

“This will never work!” Olaf cried as he stared down at the carrier that was becoming ever-presently closer to them. “We can’t play chicken with a tub time death star…and hope to win!”

“It…will…work…” Jarl yelled back through the plane.

“So far, so good,” Olaf said, trying to soothe his nerves, as he read the carrier’s signature for signs of violence. Clearly, whoever the commander of the  lethal warship was, they were less concerned about being rammed by a suicidal seaplane—possibly packing explosives?—then they were about breaking the old war/playground code: Good Guys Never Start Fights.

“Ready?” Olaf called back to us.

“Ready!” we said, cash in hand like robbers.

Then the Sharpeyed barbarian licked his thumb, and held it between his eyes and the deck of the carrier like crosshairs. “Lights… camera… and… Action!” Olaf called back, “Bombs away!” We threw the cash from the plane like union garbagemen as Olaf pulled the yoke back with all his might.

By the time Olaf rolled out of his dive, every death jet fighters in the sky was in full pursuit. “Direct hit!” I cheered as the cash exploded like a snow fall cluster bomb on the carrier’s deck populated with employables working for the Navy, Marines, and FBI. No sooner had I turned back into the plane, Jarl wrapped his big, barbaric arms around me. I wasn’t sure if he was more excited to be alive, or win The Action. It was a clear victory either way.      

“We haven’t broke these Assholes yet!” Olaf hollered back as he ran his engines hot, flying as fast for the nearest of eight Arched Gateways that allowed passage through the thick, junk-packed Reef Wall into the high walled trenches of the city’s Canal System.

We rushed to the cockpit. “The Gate’s closed,” I said, pointing like he hadn’t read that part of our scene. “Pull up!”

“They’d be crazy to follow us, wouldn’t they?” Olaf’s beard grinned big. Unmoved, he continued to fly madly for the closed Gateway—seemingly expecting/pleading for it to open in time.

“Yeah,” I said, fingers gripping the edge of my seat. “They would be crazy to follow us…because…?”

Olaf turned to his brother. “Do you think they read us?”

Jarl eyed the scene. “Storysold: City sees everything,” he said, leaning into The Action. “No way ten plus thousand storybankers will permit a scene this good to end badly. The doors will open.”

I said nothing. I leaned back and prayed, or whatever the equivalent of praying is for people who surrender themselves to The Action and wait for a superhero god of some kind to swoop in and save them.

Miracle isn’t a good word to describe what happened next, but that’s what it was. The gates opened to our Earth Show like ants in springtime—right on time. And the seaplane roared right through. The jet fighter behind us tried to follow, but it couldn’t power down and react to the slow canyon rolls of the Canal System fast enough. Within a beat of the jet’s grand entrance, it pulled up and out into the clear, blue sky. The walls of the Canal were popping with action. Thousands of storybankers stood tall and cheered for us.

Olaf flew his seaplane, mere feet above the water, through the canal until we reached the Hidden Harbor closest to my Residential Shopping Center and Center Stage. As soon as we splashed down, an attack helicopter appeared in scene. It hovered like a lost tourist, aiming its arsenal of missiles and machine guns at us—and the boardwalk full of people—for long enough to make its message clear. We could run, but we couldn’t hide. Not from the most lethal force on earth since the gods invented volcanoes.

When the attack helicopter lifted off and we cheered, my adrenaline was pumping hard. Our last scene was one of those that old soldiers in nursing home remember in spite of losing a lifetime of other memories. Our Guests of Honor had arrived. The new war for Storysold: City had begun!

In the midst of The Action—with all the storybankers who rushed us like a stage of stars—one question rose above the rest. What will Maggie think of my new costume? I thought. I turned to my friends unloading our smoked meat and props onto the boardwalk. They knew what I was going to ask. They knew me like they knew the elk of The Winds.

“Go,” Jarl said. “Find our Sister.”   

“What are you going to do?”

“We’re going to do what we always do,” he replied. “We’re going to deliver our hunting scenes to those who support us.”

“Can I take my meat now…?”

“It’s all yours.”

With that, I strapped the meat to my back. Then I ran like a flightless superhero with my new dish cape flapping behind me. The throughways were buzzing with action. The scenes the storybankers were producing were hard to read. I couldn’t tell if they were rushing to meet The Conflict, or fleeing the city before it began in full. In the distance, I heard the sounds of helicopters, death jet fighters, and the boom of the warships’ big guns target practicing on junk in the ocean, doing their best to terrify us. Through it all, I was amazed how normal it felt. The throughways were always filled with crazy scenes I couldn’t understand. The city just seemed a lot more crazy than normal.

My Storybank Account – Scene Fifty,

THE PART WHERE WYLIE RETURNS TO THE HOME HE USED TO THINK WAS ONLY A COVER…

The Epic Hunting Adventure had worked me into shape, but the deer on my back was heavy. My run soon slowed to a fast walk. As I turned down the throughway that led to our Residential Shopping Center, it became clear that most of the storybankers I was dodging on the throughway were moving away from the Center towards the Hidden Harbor. There wasn’t the usual gathering of neighbors in the Common Area waiting for Elevator Tubes to ride down to the shops below. All the Tubes coming up were full.

A moment later I was standing before Our Home, where I found that someone had wiped Maggie’s Script Arrest from the chalkboard. In its place, an angry neighbor wrote: ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?

“Maggie—are you home?” I called as I walked in.

The scene I saw next made me so sick I almost puked. Our Home was a disaster. Some villain had broke Solji’s old tables, broke her shelves, looted Maggie’s canned goods and most of her ingredients, tossed all our bed, chairs, and props around, and splattered her fresh tomatoes everywhere.

I dropped my meat pack on the work island. Then I ran to the back of Our Home in the hope that Maggie was there. She was gone, and her Wonder Bike and Wagon were gone too. In a panic, I cleaned the tomato juices off our Storysold: TV and tuned to Maggie’s channel. It was blocked, so I tuned to the A-eyes set in the Happy Garden. Some heartless bastards had sacked and looted Maggie’s garden too. There wasn’t a pea, carrot, onion, bean, lettuce, or arugula leaf left in the whole plot. It was like a pestilence had swept through the city and swallowed everything alive in one horrifying bite. Farmer Oh’s plot had suffered a similar fate. The bloody ends of slaughtered chickens and pigs littered his farm like a mob murder scene. I’d met many characters in Storysold: City. I couldn’t imagine any of them committing such wanton acts of violence. Who were these villains? I hope they didn’t hurt Maggie.

I searched everywhere I could think to look. I checked the channels of our cast: Buddha was alone meditating/sleeping as usual. Son was busy packing her tools while she watched The Exodus on her Projectavision. Blue Suit and Riggs were working intently on some scene in Blue Suit’s shop. Grand Rachna and a few of her most competent cast members were in medic mode tending to the wave of violent injuries that broke out when the warships began circling the city. Cowboy Betty was in a fierce argument with Dan Boone, Stumpy, Half Pint, and Davy Crockett of the New Market Pioneers. Guide was doing her best to track The Conflict and its many acts of violence, and report her findings on The Earth Show News. The Brothers Grim were doing what they said they were going to do, delivering their hunting scenes to the members of their cast who hadn’t fled the city. I was able to call and contact a few in our cast members. No one had seen Maggie since they’d said their goodbyes to Maggie’s Ex Intern Lover Philoh. With a heavy heart, she had offloaded much of her Junk Palace to make room for her lifeboat full of refugees who were returning to the mainland city of Portland, Oregon to join Bill and the Bio-friendly Bum Army. I asked Rachna if Maggie might have decided at the last moment to sail away with her old lover. She said it was possible. Apparently, there had been a dialogue about Philoh stepping in the role of Groom in The Wedding Plot, but Maggie said no. I asked why, but Rachna didn’t have time to answer. She was called away to treat an outbreak of mob violence that Wilderness Guide had reported at Westonton Headquarters.   

I didn’t think Maggie would be with her Father at a time like this, but I checked his channel anyway. It was blocked as usual, so I checked Traveler’s. To my surprise it was blocked too, so I tuned to Security Chief Moyniham’s channel. The scene I found there held my attention immediately. The Chief had moved his security counter outside Westonton Headquarters and put it, his body, and his arsenal of death-dealing weapons between the revolving door and a mob of storybankers who had formed around the tower. The Chief had reinforced his counter with a mountain of sandbags, which Bradley stood behind—with a riot-gas gun in each hand, wearing his guerrilla suit and war paint—looking like a very dangerous bush. The Fear must have really gripped the storybankers massing at the base of the tower. The mob was terribly well coordinated. They chanted their lines in unison like, “Hey Weston! Give up the money and save us!” and “Save people; spend money!” and “Hell no! We don’t want the dough!” The scene was a low drama protest cast with characters who believed they could ask their President to change (and he would change if their protests were loud enough), until a few of the more action-minded protesters decided to theme up and rush the security counter like a bank after a Wall Street Crash. They weren’t going to wait for Weston to save them. They were going to take their old market money back by force, and then they were going to burn it all. That way, the old war commanders on the decks of their warships would see that the storybankers of Storysold: City had nothing to plunder. Security Chief Moyniham had another opinion on the subject of the Boss’s cash. As soon as Bradley saw that the “looters,” as he called them, were about to rush his defensive perimeter—he began to lob tear gas canisters down range. Once his gas cloud was nice and thick, he picked up a shotgun loaded with rubber bullets and opened fire. He beat the first so-called looter who dared to cross his counter within an inch of his life. The scene at the counter was growing uglier by the moment. I watched in horror and awe as Rachna and her medic theme arrived on the set and began to heal the wounds of the “looters.”

Suddenly it dawned on me. If anyone knew where Maggie was, it was Patricia. Thankfully, her channel wasn’t blocked. I found the youth working in her Wonder Bike Shop alone. It was its usual mess: rebuilt bikes hanging from the ceiling, bike parts scattered everywhere, old egg cartons stocked with nuts and bolts, oil dripping off an open toolbox, tools piled randomly on her work bench, but the biggest mess was Patricia. She was wearing one of Blue Suit’s signature jumpsuits, which hung on her like flabby skin. Patricia looked intense with her hair spiked with sweat, grease smeared across her face as she worked, absorbed, in her immediate bike-making scene. The Wonder Bike Inventor was working on a double-decker tricycle and hauling wagon that would allow its rider to rise above the throughway traffic and get a third-person perspective on the way ahead. I waited for her to finish her weld before I rang her.

“Goodness!” she shouted and banged the side of her TV in playful disbelief when she saw my signature. “You came home!”

“Yeah,” I smiled. “I missed Maggie.”

“I miss Maggie too. Do you know where she is?”

“I was about to ask you the same thing.”

“I haven’t see her since we said goodbye to Philoh.”

“That’s what everyone says…any ideas where she could be?”

“No,” Patricia said as she returned to her welding scene.

“Did you know some villains trashed Our Home?”

“I know,” she replied. “They got the Happy Garden too.”

“Aren’t you worried? Maggie could be hurt.”

“She’s a big girl,” she said as she finished her welding scene and began cranking her homemade wooden pedals on.

That didn’t sound like the Patricia I knew, so I asked, “How about you? How are you doing with all this?”   

Patricia took a deep breath and screamed, “Shitty! No one’s inspiring anyone to cast their action votes for anything good!”

“What do you think we should do?”

“I’m making bikes.”

“I can see that…but how’s that going to help our situation?”

Then Patricia smiled like only a youth raised in Storysold: City could smile. “Why would I let people who are not my friends change the way I do business? I only change for stories I love.”

I tried to make sense of that line. “So what you’re saying is,” I tried to say without sarcasm. “You have your head buried in The Sand.”

“Don’t play dumb. I know as well as I do my head isn’t in sand.”    

“Never mind,” I laughed. “All we need is love, right?”

“No!” she answered smartly, and then she walked to the corner of her shop and stood beside something covered with a greasy blanket. “All you need is this,” she smiled and flung the cover off to display a black mountain bike and covered wagon. “I built it to be your wedding gift before you got Cold Feet and fled from Maggie’s love like a shitass coward.”   

“It’s beautiful,” I said honestly.

“It’s yours on one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“That you love my friend Maggie until the day she dies.”

That was the perfect line at the perfect time. Suddenly, I felt a surge of hope return to my governing body. I almost cried, but I smiled instead—and asked, “What sort of live action tax theme will you write off with that gift?”

“Our common defense theme, of course,” she replied warmly.

“That’s good. I think The Wedding Plot will work.”

“You do?” Patricia sounded surprised.

“You bet. As they say, our plan is crazy enough it just might work,” I laughed nervously. “You’re still here standing your ground, aren’t you?”

“Like I do everyday,” she said proudly. Then she folded her arms quizzically, and asked, “What happened to you, Wylie? You’ve changed.”

I grinned like Olaf and said, “I made some new friends.”

“Do you mean the Brothers Grim?”

“Yes,” I smiled proudly. “They’re my friends.”

“I always knew they were good guys. Do they want bikes?”

“You’ll have to ask them yourself,” I said, suddenly aware that I wasn’t getting any closer to Maggie. “How’s Juan?”

“We make love every time I buy tuna. Why?”

“No reason,” I replied, trailing off silently.

“I have an idea!”

“What’s that?”

“Come here and claim your bike.”

“How’s that going to help me find Maggie?”

“I know her channel’s blocked,” she replied. “That means you’ll have to find her the old-fashioned way, by bike.”

As usual, I couldn’t argue affectively with the youth. I threw back my dish cape, strapped on my meat pack, and ran with a renewed sense of story to the Wonder Bike Shop. A few moments later, I thanked Patricia with a hug and pedaled my new Wonder Bike and Wagon out of her shop in search of Maggie my Love. I took the main throughway that wound away from the rain clouds gathering in our Center’s Weather Bubble. On either side of my bike, I passed the many future employables rushing to close out their storybank accounts like spawning salmon eager to lay their eggs in the riverbed and die. The sun was sinking fast, and Agent Sturgis’s black helicopters were everywhere, gathering information for The Mission. Maggie could be anywhere—fleeing the city with the crowds, or sneaking off with Philoh—but I was betting that Maggie would eventually be in the one place she loved more than any place on earth.

By the time I parked my Wonder Bike and Wagon at the Happy Garden, the lamp at the corner of the plot near Solji’s Gravesight and picnic area was on. It cast a glow in the rising twilight on the scene. The sight of the destruction made my blood boil.

Then I saw it. Under the cover of the plundered corn stalks nearest the street lamp, I spied Maggie’s bike and wagon.

I checked the bike for signs of damage. It looked OK, and so did the wagon, which I discovered was stocked with the food goods and other props Maggie had salvaged from the wreckage of Our Home.

I didn’t know where to look, so I moved my bike and wagon beside Maggie’s in the cover of the corn stalks. Halfway across the garden, I happened to glance down and see a few scrawny, cracked carrots that the bad guys must have felt weren’t worth the effort to steal. I bunched them up, and looked around for other survivors. Then I sat on Solji’s picnic table and I held the bouquet of carrots like a book in my hands.

“I remember the moment like it was yesterday,” I said aloud, almost in a whisper. “I parked my scooter near a parking space hoop house one sunny day in Portland, where the Worshipful Goddess reveled herself, Lady of the Lake style, emerging from her garden with a scepter of carrots bunched and banded in hand… Maggie, you have to know I love you…”

Out of nowhere, I heard a voice say, “Kale.”

“What the hell?” I said, looking around for the voice.

“How many times do I have to tell you?” the voice replied. “I had a bunch of kale in my hands, not carrots.”

I looked under the table and saw a lump of something alive curled under one of the veggie blankets Maggie made from the salvaged, Tyvek house wrap she’d discovered on her junking adventure with Philoh.

“Maggie!” I exclaimed. “What are you doing under there?”

“Composting,” Maggie replied sadly as she poked her head out from under the table. She was wearing her hoodie pulled over a tangled nest of hair that flowed out around her face like she was trying to hide it from the world. It was hard in the fading twilight, but I could see the little river trails her tears had made through the thin layer of earth on her face.   

“How long have you been ‘composting’ under there like that?” I asked the Garden Tender as a rush of love filled my heart.

“Ever since I met you…”   

“I know,” I winced.

“You do?”

“I do…our stories could be better…and I’m sorry,” I said, standing naked with my clothes on. The wind and the shadows cast by the lamplight gave me goosebumps. “Will you please forgive me?”   

Maggie looked calm, but she wasn’t calm. “What’s the point?” she asked—eyes dancing with fire. “Look around. There’s nothing left for me, or you, or Whoever to forgive you for. Have you seen the warships circling our homefronts? We can’t win this. The End of Storysold: City is near.”

Maggie was half right. The old war story forming like a thundercloud outside the city was ominous, but I, Dishmaster Jones had journeyed too far to turn back. I would make Maggie’s dirty dishes clean again, or die trying.

“We can still win this,” I said like I wanted to believe it.

“You’re a fool,” she said as she tucked her head back under the table and curled up in her veggie blanket. “You’ve always been a fool.”

“I’m not a fool,” I said. “I’m Dishmaster Jones.”

“That explains the silly cape,” she sighed.

I knelt beside the table, and said, “I love you Maggie.”

She rested her head on the ground like gravity had become a force to strong to fight. “Well, I hate you,” she said without emotion. “You’re not a good person, Wylie. The only thing you love is your immortal sufferings. You wear them like a shiny sheriff’s badge…because you believe all your precious sacrifices will add up in The End and grant you a golden pass to The Good Guys Club. Well, you know what? It doesn’t add up. Everyone suffers, and charging bravely into more and more suffering for the sake of suffering more…for The Mission, or me….doesn’t make you a hero. The Good Guys I know fight to make good stories, not bad ones. You’re a bad person, Wylie Jones, and I hate you. Now go away and let me compost in peace.”

I sat on the bench and stared into the night for a few moments, trying to think great thoughts that would fix The Problem.

“Do you know what I hate?”

“Go away…”

“I hate seeing you so defeated.”

“You should have thought of that before you burned our invitations and brought the whole fucking world down on us!”

“The President was going to invade the city whether I told him the location of your Father’s Vault, or not.”

“You told him what?”

“I told Agent Sturgis how to get into Weston’s Vault.”

Maggie wrapped her veggie blanket tighter, and said, “That was a good move. Honesty is the best policy. I believe that.”

“We could get lucky…” I said hopefully. “Maybe all they’ll do is storm in, make a show, and liberate us from your Father’s paper fortune.”

“Maybe,” Maggie said in whisper. “Or not.”

“Or not?” I smiled suddenly—dashing on the table, hands on my hips, chin elevated, in the hero stance. “By the power of Dishmaster Jones, we will save Storysold: City even if that means I have to wash every dirty dish in every galley in every warship on the high seas!”

“Oh my god,” Maggie laughed. “You’re such an idiot.”

“Yes,” I said, stepping down off the table. “I am.”   

“Do you really think we can win?”

“No,” I said, “but I’m not ready to surrender my story.”

With that, she opened her blanket like the door to Our Home. I put my body beside hers. And we composted together.

My Storybank Account – Scene Fifty One,

THE PART WHERE OUR HEROES ENGAGE THE CONFLICT IN THE NAME OF STORYSOLD: CITY…

In the morning, we were woke by the sounds of black helicopters and death jet fighters, but we rose in the equatorial sun like Happy Garden veggies rising from under Solji’s table to greet the day. The first action I minted for my account was a kiss for Maggie that quickly became a kissing scene.

In the background, we heard the sound of applause and cheers rise up from a cast of familiar characters. Unbeknown to us Jarl and Olaf had been In Scene since before the dawn, gathering the remains of the Happy Garden in a Viking-style funeral pyre. “Hey guys!” I called out excitedly.

“Hay is for horses, Jones,” a voice replied from behind us.

“Guide!” I exclaimed as we spun around in time to hear the low-but-friendly growl of Fritzee Good Boy.   

“We have a lot of work to do,” Guide said as she planted her hiking poles in the soil beside Solji’s Gravesight, tossed off her pack, unzipped her jacket, and shed her first layer of the day.

“We do?” I asked, inquisitive as usual.

“We do,” Olaf answered from behind us.

“We spoke with our Father,” Jarl explained. “He says the warships are circling, because they’re waiting for their contract fleet of cruise liners to arrive for The Evacuation. We spotted the first of their cruise liners on the horizon a few moments ago. The Invasion will begin any time now.”

Maggie faced the Brothers Grim in person for the first time. They were wearing their usual knee-high buckskin boots and not much else. I knew them enough to know that was the moment they’d been waiting for…

“Maggie,” I introduced, “meet my friends, Olaf the Sharpeyed and Jarl the Uplander, Barbarian Hunters of The Winds, Sports Gardeners of cabbage, makers of Vonderkraut, and producers of fine, factory-free furniture…”

“You have friends?” she asked in disbelief.

“Yes,” Olaf replied. “Meat Packer Jones has friends.”

“Meat Packer Jones?” Maggie smiled. “What the hell happened to the Wylie Jones I used to know?”

“I killed a deer I shouldn’t have,” I replied, “and these dickheads left me to pack it out of The Winds in a storm. I almost died, but I didn’t. Instead I realized how much I hated my Eager Beaver, then I killed him.”

“Wow!” Maggie exclaimed, suddenly looking at me like a dreamy-eyed fan at a rock show. “You’re a storybanker!”

“Yeah,” I said proudly. “It feels great.”     

Then she kissed me—and I turned to the brothers. “Do you want that I should?” I said, nodding my head at Maggie.

“Yes, friend,” Olaf said. “We would be honored.”

“I left out a part of my introduction,” I said, facing Maggie. “Olaf and Jarl are also your Half Brothers. Their mother is Ginger, the friend who helped your mother, Annie, give birth to you in The Winds.”

After a few moments, Jarl turned to Maggie and asked, “Do you want to say a few words to honor The Dead before I light your funeral pyre?”

“Thanks Jarl,” she nodded. “I would…”

We walked to the funeral pyre the Barbarian Hunters had built. On the way, Olaf gave Maggie the short-story version of how she’d come to have Half-Brothers. When he’d finished his story Maggie gathered her head to theirs, and they embraced each other as families sometimes do.

“Here lie the remains of my babies,” Maggie said as our cast gathered around the pyre. “They were taken by villains in this fearful time. I, as Garden Tender, do swear that the lives they lost will be reborn in the soil where they will rest. Through us, my babies will continue to grown in The Earth Show.”

Olaf fed the pyre a few scrapes of magnesium and wood shavings, and then sparked a flame with his flint and steel. The flame grew fast like new life and soon became a fire that consumed the whole pyre. The smoke rose into the morning sky like a beacon, calling all to join The Action.

In mere moments, a cast of familiar characters began to gather around the pyre: Son the Toolmaker arrived in style, driving her veggie-oil-run mud stomper—towing a rototiller behind her like artillery. Cowboy Betty showed up, all smiles, with Half Pint, Stumpy, and Boone. Davy Crocket the King of the Wild Frontier was next to arrive on set, followed by nearly a quarter of the storybankers in the New Market Pioneer theme. Then came Patricia (costumed as the Surgical Ninja) with Juan riding in the sidecar of her Wonder Bike. The youths were followed by Grand Rachna, a small army of her fellow Healthcare Healers, Blue Suit, Riggs the Master Clocktinker, and every pro Clocktinker left in the city. After they settled around our fire, Farmer Oh, Buddha, and Wall the Mart arrived with food and drinks for everyone. Then King Andrew rode in on Squire with his fellow Kings and Queens of Camelot, all of whom wasted no time doing what they did best: demanding tribute for the common themes on The Royal Shopping List. Just when I thought the gathering was complete, Winner filled in our outer limits with a program of his finest Moon Colonists led by the best Gamer of Reality, Yeomatarian the Space Cadet.   

It was a beautiful moment. The storybankers didn’t wait around for a director to emerge and direct them en masse, as an audience. They knew they’d come to bring life back to the Happy Garden, and that’s exactly what they did next: Blue Suit and Riggs discussed something using Blue Suit’s Communicator while they sort of weeded around Solji’s Gravesight and picnic area; Olaf, Jarl, and Wilderness Guide worked to blaze a new bed of cabbage for Vonderkraut; Buddha handed out wisdom and Nirvana Burgers and was able to unenhunger many Buddhists; Olin Wall themed up with the Queens and Kings of Camelot to gather dead plants and heap them on their burn pyre while they performed a signature version of the gravedigger scene from Hamlet—“Doth the knights go willing if they stand before the blade and jump?” Wall mused. “Or must the blade jump at them for The Honor to be?” A nearby community of Space Cadets watched Olin’s dead-plant-gathering scene long enough to program it, and then they began to methodically gather dead plants following the On The Job Training program in their helmets; Patricia, Rachna, and some of the other healers used their surgical new war weapons to cut and remove the Happy Garden’s growth of thistle at its roots while they discussed their impeding operations; Son passed out tools and started a rototilling scene with King Andrew after he harangued her for “wanting to run from Camelot like a turncoat.” The New Market Pioneers worked in Farmer Oh’s plot to pioneer a new frontier for his farm theme; while somewhere in the background, the Clocktinkers hung around an unseen water cooler tucking their goofy ties into their matching grey suits watching everyone work, until Riggs prompted them to check all the A-eyes in the Happy Garden for damaged and repair the ones that had been broken by villains.

Suddenly I realized that I was, once again, the only one In Scene who was not producing any action.

“What do we need?” I asked Maggie.

“We need seeds,” she smiled.

“Thanks for the mission,” I said with a kiss and a wink. Then I threw back my dish cape, and joined The Action in the pursuit of seeds. After I asked everyone I could think to ask, Half Pint piped up.

“You’re going to have to ask the King,” she said. “Our supply of seeds is short now. He has most of the wild varieties you folks will need to regrow the ingredients on your Home Grown Menu.”

“King Andrew?” I asked quizzically.

“No silly,” Half Pint laughed, “the King of the Wild Frontier.”

I found Davy Crockett on the edge of our scene, having what seemed to be an interesting conversation with a disgruntled bear.

“Uh…Davy…” I walked softly into his scene.

“Don’t move,” Davy said, warning me back with his hand.

“Grinning down another bear, huh?”

“Hush! I’m trying to say something to my friend here…”

“I can see that,” I whispered, “but I need to buy some seeds.”

The bear stood on his haunches and growled half-heartedly. I took a big step back, and The King of the Wild Frontier saw it. “I got seeds,” he said as the bear continued his show. “What kinda seed you need?”

“The vegetable kind for Our Home theme.”

“I sorta figured you Greenhorns would need more seed,” he said with a grin. “I have it all right, but I need something from you, Mr. Spy.”

When I tried to talk, the bear dropped down and began to slap the ground with his paws. I didn’t step back this time. “Anything…” I said, looking Davy in his eyes. “I’ll give you anything you want.”

Davy grinned, and said, “I want first pick of that smoked deer meat you humped back from The Epic Hunting Adventure…”   

“Done,” I said, as the bear growled again.

“And I want you to let my good friend Old Bear know he’s welcome in your Wedding Story. He’s feeling a little left out of The Action.”

“You’re going to have to help me with that one…”

“It’s easy,” Davy grinned. “Do what you do to be friendly.”

I could see that the King wasn’t joking, so I did what I imagined Jarl the Uplander would do. I dropped to one knee, lowered my eyes, and waited for the bear to reply. The bear growled, so I rolled over on my back and patted the ground beside me. To my surprise, Old Bear plopped back on his butt and sat like I sit on my couch after a long day of work. I understood that move, so I scooted beside the Old Bear and joined him on The Couch.

After a few friendly back scratches, the bear got to his feet and walked out of our scene nonchalantly like nothing had happened. Davy the King of the Wild Frontier laughed and slapped his knee. “That was a Good One,” he grinned with approval. “I’m ready to fetch those seeds for you.”

A few moments later, I walked back into Maggie’s scene with a bag of seeds in my hand. I was relieved when she didn’t read my signature like I’d just sold my last cow for a handful of magic beans. My blood pumped like drums in my ear when I stood beside my Love and presented the seeds for Our Home. Suddenly, The Action from the scenes around us fell silent. I thought they had grown silent like audiences do before the spotlight hits the stage. I thought they knew what classic scene I was going to mint next. I was about to get down on one knee, but I remembered Old Bear and thought better of it. I took the potato in Maggie’s hands, set it on the ground, and then I put our seeds in her hands and we held them like little baby earths. Then I just did it. I opened my eyes to hers, and said, “I love you Maggie. Will you marry me?”

Then I read her eyes. They weren’t looking at me. They were looking in horror at something behind me. I spun around and I saw why everyone had suddenly grown silent. They were watching a wave of death bombers roar over one of the distant Island Markets dropping a trail of papers behind them. Half a moment later, the same wave of bombers roared over our heads. The papers drifted down on us like dead leaves in the wind. I grabbed a handful of them from the ground. They all had the same words stamped on them:

DEAR VICTIMS OF TERROR BANKING CULT IDEOLOGIES,

YOUR CULT LEADERS: CHESTER WESTON, SAMANTHA CHASE, AND THE BARBARIANS KNOWN AS “THE BROTHERS GRIM” HAVE BEEN CHARGED (UNDER THE UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS LAW #3412E) WITH CONSPIRING TO COMMIT ACTS OF MULTINATIONAL TERRORISM DESIGNED TO CAUSE THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT TO END. THEY HAVE PLOTTED TO NOT ONLY OVERTHROW THE RULE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, BUT THE RULE OF EVERY NATION ON EARTH. WE WANT TO MAKE IT CLEAR THAT PLOTTING TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD IS NOT OKAY. IT IS VERY ILLEGAL!

PLEASE DO NOT PANIC. THOSE WHO ACKNOWLEDGE THEIR VICTIMHOOD WILL BE SAVED IN THE LIBERATION PROCESS. WE ONLY WANT TO ENTER YOUR TERROR BANKING COMPOUND, ARREST YOUR LEADERS, SEIZE THEIR ASSETS AS EVIDENCE, AND THEN LIBERATE YOU FROM THE CITY.

VICTIMS OF THE TERROR BANKING CULT WILL BE SET FREE IN THE NATION OF THEIR CHOOSING AS LONG AS YOU COOPERATE WITH THE LIBERATION PROCESS AND LEAVE THE CITY IN AN ORDERLY MANNER.

HOWEVER, IF YOU STAY AND FAIL TO COMPLY WITH THE ORDERS OF JOINT TASKFORCE COMMANDER GENERAL DAVENPORT YOU WILL BE DETAINED! THE USE OF DEADLY FORCE HAS BEEN AUTHORIZED TO PROTECT THE LIVES OF OUR SOLDIERS, AGENTS, CONTRACT EMPLOYEES, AND THE CULT VICTIMS WHO COOPERATE WILLINGLY!

YOU HAVE UNTIL DAWN TO PACK YOUR PERSONAL EFFECTS AND PREPARE FOR THE LIBERATION OF THE TERROR BANKING COMPOUND! IF YOU CANNOT PROVIDE YOUR OWN TRANSPORTATION, IT WILL BE PROVIDED FOR YOU. TRANSPORT CRUISE SHIPS WILL BE MADE AVAILABLE AT MANY LOCATIONS THROUGHOUT THE TERROR BANKING COMPOUND. THEY WILL BE MARKED BY GREEN SMOKE. IF YOU HAVE TROUBLE MAKING YOUR WAY TO ONE OF THE CRUISE SHIPS, FEEL FREE TO ASK ONE OF OUR FRIENDLY AGENTS, US MARINES, OR BLACKWATER CONTRACT WORKERS FOR DIRECTIONS.

PLEASE REMEMBER: SPACE IS LIMITED. TWO BAGS AND ONE CARRY-ON PER PERSON PLEASE. NO SERVICE ANIMALS OR PETS WILL BE PERMITTED ON THE SHIPS WITHOUT PROPER DOCUMENTATION FROM A LICENSED THERAPIST.

PLEASE REMEMBER: WE ARE NOT YOUR ENEMY.

WE WANT TO HELP YOU MAKE GOOD CHOICES FOR YOUR LIFE AND THE LIVES OF YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY. DO THE RIGHT THING, AND ACKNOWLEDGE YOUR VICTIMHOOD BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE TO REJOIN OUR PERFECT UNION…

SIGNED:

THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Tony Bruce

JOINT TASKFORCE COMMANDER: Randall Davenport 

SPECIAL AGENT IN CHARGE OF THE FBI: KIP STURGIS

The rain of papers was hypnotic. Most of us stared blankly, unsure of what to do next, cast under the terrible spell of The Old War Story.

Then someone finally made a move. Maggie crumpled the paper in her hand, tossed it like trash to the ground, and said, “I’ll do it.”

“You’ll marry me?” I asked. “For real?”

“Yes,” she smiled. “Let’s do this.”

I wasn’t one hundred percent sure what this was, but I knew I liked it because the blood was rising in my veins. “That was hot,” I said, moving closer to Maggie. “Let’s show those Little Green Men out there what a ‘free and more perfect union’ really looks like in The Action!”

“It looks like a marital union,” Maggie said with stars in her eyes.

“Yes,” I laughed. “We can do this, so long as we remember to fortify our more perfect marital union at least once a day.”

“Once a day?” Maggie blushed. “Let’s not make that policy.”

Out of The Blue, Cowboy Betty began to chant—“Fortify! Fortify! Fortify!” Some of our cast members cheered “Fortify!” along with her.

“Don’t be sneaky!” Patricia cheered. “We love fortification!”    

Maggie laughed, and we kissed, and we felt the spell of The Old War Story break the terror in the hearts of those who stood with us. Each in their way, our supporting cast began to sharpen their signatures for war.

We were about to take our fortifications to the next level, when the bark of a strangely familiar hyperactive mutt interrupted us. I bent down beside the dog and rubbed its ears like a good American. “What is it, boy?” I asked National Character. “You look like you want something.”

To our surprise the dog wagged its tail with enthusiasm and replied in textbook American English: “I do.”

“Great Disney!” I cried. “You can talk!”

Then National Character sat pretty, pointed a paw in our general direction, and said, “Uncle Sam wants you to join him on Center Stage.”

“What’s on Center Stage?” Maggie asked while I showed her the spy-sized communication device I found fixed to the dog’s collar.

“Arf-arf, ruff,” it said. “Follow me.”

It was late afternoon, and time wasn’t on our side. We knew our friend Uncle Sam well enough to know he didn’t disappoint, so we followed the All American mutt to Center Stage. Most of our cast followed too. In the distance, General Davenport and Agent Sturgis stood side-by-side on the deck of their aircraft carrier and watched the big guns of a destroyer batter Storysold: City’s Reef Wall. I imagined it pleased them to hear the shells pound our ramparts made of ocean trash while they watched the “victims of the Terror Banking Cult” flee through the Arched Gateways into the ocean, far as possible from the violence of their mechanical storm.

As we approached Center Stage we heard the sound of John Henry’s hammer pounding out a reply to the cannons on his anvil. “Ping, ping, ping, boom!” Together they beat out an eerie rhythm that filled me with the same sense of wild/wondrous dread I felt when I shouldered that deer and felt The Winds crack my mind open to everything all at once. The sound of Henry’s new war song made me smile like Olaf Smiles In the Face of Danger.

We followed NC and the sound of Henry’s hammer through the Wild Garden Arena until the trail ended in the long grasses of the open meadow at the heart of Center Stage. We saw it immediately. A white house stood at the edge of the meadow, glowing like a vision over a battlefield. It was humble: four walls and a roof, a rockstar-stage-sized front porch, and swinging saloon-style doors set between two double-hung windows that looked out like big eyes. It had a traditional suburban-sized yard; which meant that every blade of wild grass within the border of the white picket fence that wrapped around it had been uniformly cut. In front, the fence’s perimeter was broken by an arbor that arched over a stone aisle, which led from the heart of the meadow to the front porch of the White House. It wasn’t until I got a closer read did I discover it was built like a hasty theater prop, from old pallets and cardboard.

Our supporting cast stood on Center Stage a moment, looked around us, and read The Action that surrounded us. Thousands of what Rachna called “new war writers” were cheering, clapping, stomping, hooting, and hollering like their favorite sports team had walked onto the playing field. Their applause sounded more like a prison riot than applause. I’d lived in Storysold: City long enough to know they weren’t our fans. The Riot of Sound wasn’t meant to praise us any more than a general’s bugle call means to celebrate the soldiers as they charge into battle. It was meant to give us courage and remind us of our duty to defend The Good in our lives. And it worked. I felt fired up, ready to engage our Honored Guests and get to The Good Part.

I did my Spyrrator thing again and did a character count. In the high grass side of the meadow, Adom the Butcher and Nancy the Meat Smoker were smoking copious amounts of weed and playing full-contact nude football with their friends. Maggie explained that they were rehearsing for a common defense theme they called, The Naked Brigade. I also recognized a large gathering of Gentle Water Monsters. They were packing coolers, firewood, and spear-like sticks onto a meadow plot they’d staked out near Adom like a front row curb on Parade Day. When Rompasaurus saw me making eyes at them, she roared at me like she was ready for war. I threw my dish cape over my shoulder and roared right back. The only other familiar faces I spied on Stage were John Henry and Rosy the Riveter. The warships had silenced their guns, but Henry was still swinging his hammer. He was making what looked like railroad spikes, while Rosy packed wooden boards onto Babe’s Blue Ox Cart.

The smoke and festivity rising from the hundreds of fires, camps, and makeshift homefronts set along the terraced, elliptical walkway reminded me of what I imagined a medieval army camp looked like. Either that, or something like Woodstock or Burning Man, or maybe even the sprawling Hoovervilles of The Great Depression. Maggie was much better at knowing our neighbors than I, so I listened to her count. She read out the Rubber Monks, Buddhists, Cave Potters, Flesh Magnets, Abominable Icemen, Trash Marauders, Service Zombies, Earth Monsters, New War Photographers, Family Corporations, Mother Scouts, Troll Hobblers, Peanut Butter Ladies, and Live Action Novelists all by name. It was awesome. They were all there for Our Wedding Story.   

My Storybank Account – Scene Fifty Two,

THE PART WHERE OUR HEROES WRITE THE VOWS TO THEIR MARITAL UNION ON THE EVE OF BATTLE…

Maggie and I opened the gate, walked under the arbor, through the yard, and followed the stone aisle that led to the stage-sized front porch of the White House. Maggie walked right inside, but I stood in the doorway with my hands on the saloon-style doors like I had six shooters on my hips. Beside me was my faithful National Character heralding my arrival with a bark.

“Don’t stand there like Ronald Regan,” Sam advised. “Take your dish cape off and make yourself at home.”

I took his advice and looked around. The American Dreamstates Band, plus a few less musically inclined Dreamstates were sitting around a poker table smoking cigars, drinking beer, and playing American Dreamstates Style Poker. Gertel the Governing General of The Needle was there too. She was showing off our wedding costumes. Mine was a hand-me-down tuxedo and the handcrafted sport’s cap with a bouquet of carrots that Gertel had sold me, and Maggie’s was an old tattered wedding gown with an official American flag patch stitched on one shoulder. Apparently, the flag patch was authentic government issued. Gertel animated the story of how she themed up with Captain Nemo and acquired the patch like a monologging rocket to space. “I hopped onboard one of the warships,” she gestured wildly. “I snuck up behind this kid, a soldier named Private First Class Yokum, and captured it…ripped the flag right off his sleeve before he knew what hit him. We escaped over the railing where Captain Nemo was waiting for me in the Nautilus…” I didn’t believe a word of it, but it was hard to argue with the authenticity of the flag patch. Where else could she get a factory-manufactured accouterment such as that?

When Gertel was done telling her story of derring-do, she took aim at me, and hollered, “Wylie, you like my ball hat!”

I tried it on. It fit my head like hats are supposed to fit our heads, like an extra layer of skin. It was love at first sight, and I told Gertel so.

“Is it worth a hug?” she asked with seeming shyness.

I smiled—and that was enough of an invitation for her. She grabbed me by my butt cheeks, and “hugged.”

Honest Abe read our scene and said, “That reminds me of an autumn day I had back in Illinois. It was hot and I was chopping kindling, enjoying the wind whisper through the pines, when my sweetheart at the time…Not Mary Todd mind you…well, anyway. She stopped by and we had ourselves a romp in the hay, as we used to say…”

“I’m going to stop you right there, Abe,” I said, not wishing to put any ideas in Gretel’s already fertile imagination. “I love the hat, but Gertel and I will not be ‘romping in the hay’ anytime soon…”

“Come now, a young buck like you should have a love scene, or two, to spare for a randy old lady like me,” the General laughed and grabbed my ass again. “I’ll bake you cookies!”      

The Band roared with laughter, but not Uncle Sam. He stroked his goatee, and waited for the calamity of stars to settle down. Then he turned to us and asked, “Can I buy you heroes a drink?”

“Of course Sam,” Maggie replied, and we followed the towering icon to the backyard. As always, Sam was everything I’d imagined he’d be—tough as nails and stoic, yet light and unflinchingly optimistic—and at that moment, very drunk. His breath smelled like Ben Franklin’s brewery. He poured us a growler full of beer from one of the many barrels his fellow Dreamstates had staged there; then he described the set of the White House for us. It had a working stove and range, classic three-sink dishwashing station, prep counter, utensils, pots, pans, a large rebuilt food processor from The Atomic Age, silverware, cups, plates, and other dishes all waiting to be used. It took us a few moments, but we finally got it. This was to be Our Home, which we’d defend with the aid and comfort of our cast and extended cast of new war writers. There was a pantry set beside the kitchen that was filled with bins, bottles, and jars filled with an arsenal of ingredients, most of which were ones the Fabulous Food Producer knew well. Someone even filled our bedroom, or what Lady Liberty called “The Ovular Office,” with all our Storysold props: our TV, bank cards, bed and bedding, our costumes, what was left of our food supply, and other props that new war writers felt we might need in the White House.

Maggie turned to Sam and said, “Thanks. This is awesome.”

Uncle Sam took a drink. “It wasn’t built for you,” he said. “As you know, the common defense theme known as The Wedding Plot has had other drafts. When you burned your wedding invitations like a jackass, the Band was the first theme to drop you fast as a bad investment on Wall Street and cast our votes in favor of marrying Gambler and Rosy tomorrow.”

“You did?” Maggie asked. “What about all the ingredients? Were they going to make my signature split pea soup on their wedding day?”

“What can I say?” Uncle Sam smiled. “Most of us agreed that your appetizers can’t be beat and your split pea soup is to die for.”

I took a big gulp from my growler and asked, “Were you were really prepared to marry Gambler and Rosy today?”

“Yes,” Sam said stoically. “Rosy and Gambler were going to defend Storysold: City with Maggie’s Signature Split Pea Soup.”

I was about to laugh, but I thought better of it when I saw that Maggie was glowing like her soup had won first prize at the fair.

“So,” I began cautiously. “Why are you still voting for us?”

“Good question,” Sam replied, more seriously. “I suppose it had a lot to do with the politics of it, as usual. We had managed to gather a small army’s worth of live-action votes in favor of our wedding plot starring the Riveter and Gambler, but we couldn’t persuade the New Market Pioneers to help us with The Reception. Really, the only action-votes we had to work with were American Spirit’s frozen pizzas and Ben’s beer, but they didn’t have near enough of either to feed an entire invasion force of US Marines.”

“So…why did you lose the Pioneer vote?”

“I’ll give you one guess,” Sam said, rolling his eyes.

“Betty!” Maggie cried out like a game show contestant.

“Bingo,” Sam sighed. “She can be very persuasive when she wants to be. Betty convinced them that we, American Dreamstates would bend to the will of the Almighty US Dollar when The Shit Hits the Fan.”

“What happens next?” I said, trying not to fixate on my own moral dilemma. “The clock’s ticking on the big guns of those warships.”

We followed Uncle Sam back into the living room. I hadn’t noticed it before, but Traveler’s Storysold: TV was set beside the saloon doors. Uncle Sam switched it on and showed us the not-so-secret script for The Wedding Plot, which was now in action as Our Wedding Story. The final draft most live action tax payers agreed to perform, read something like this—

OUR WEDDING STORY

• NEW WAR WRITERS USHER THE GUESTS OF HONOR (FROM OUT OF TOWN) TO THE WHITE HOUSE >
• THE GUESTS OF HONOR MINGLE WITH THE OTHER SIDE OF THE FAMILY AND ENJOY AN OPENING ROUND OF DRINKS, APPETIZERS, AND OTHER SNACKS >
• THE AMERICAN DREAMSTATES BAND SETS THE MOOD WITH THE SUPPORT OF THEIR FANS AND GROUPIES >
• THE WEDDING CEREMONY BEGINS WHEN EVERYONE IS READY, ATTENTIVE, AND NOT TOO VIOLENT >
• THE BRIDE AND GROOM ACTIVATE THEIR VOWS AND GIVE BIRTH TO THEIR MORE PERFECT MARITAL UNION >   
• TRAVELER UNVEILS HER BIG SURPRISE > 
• The Wedding Reception begins. Cowboy Betty and THE New Pioneers feed everyone hamburgers with the beef they slaughtered with the help of THEIR HONORED GUESTS THE AMERICAN MARINES >
• A citywide party ensues >
• WE ALL go home fat and happy.

When we were done reading the script/wedding plan for what was to be the world’s first citywide bio-friendly new war story, Maggie and I exchanged a look. She must have read my mind, because she asked, “How do you expect two fuck ups like us to give birth to a ‘more perfect’ union?”

Uncle Sam didn’t pause. “Write your wedding vows like American Dreamstates write our personal constitutions,” he replied.   

“Oh yeah right,” I rubbed my eyes. “What was that again?”

“Didn’t you spend any time spying on us?”

“No,” I said honestly. “I thought you were just musicians who dressed up like American icons, because you did too many drugs, or something.”

“We are on a drug,” Uncle Sam replied. “It’s called America. And we still believe it has some good left in it.”

“I can see that,” I said, trying not to laugh.

“Help us out,” Maggie said seriously. “How do we write our wedding vows like you guys write your personal constitutions?”

“It’s easy,” Founding Father answered for Sam. “All you do is what everyone does every day. Decide what is you, and what is not you. The laws that govern your hearts have no power…they are static inactive words written by inactive hypocrites…unless you, the human host, choose to vote for those laws each and every day of your life. Law enforcement shouldn’t only be about  fueling The Law with fear. It should be about persuading other human hosts to accept the characters, themes, and governing story structures we believe in and hold dear. The Law and Its amendments should always be active, up to speed, and relative to the day-to-day actions of The Earth Show. If not, The Law will become rigid, static, inactive, and rigor mortis will set in. And in time, The Earth Show will purge It in our vast universe of live actions that failed to support The Action of our planet. The Law isn’t generic. At heart, our constitutions aren’t meant for mass production like they were processed in a factory. Constitutions are an inalienable fact of daily life. They’re alive, and they happen whether you, or I, or we want them to happen or not. They’re the living actions we choose to incorporate into our governing bodies with every motion we make…”

The set was silent when Ben ended his speech.

As usual, Maggie got it before I did. She started soaking the peas and shucking the garlic. Then she stared at me, waiting for me to join Our Home routine. Finally, I got it too, and I started chopping up the carrots and onions. We were already well into our first soup-making scene, a beat from starting a scrumptious cheese bread scene, before I turned to my Bride to Be and asked, “In the interest of a better new war story, do you think it might be good to write some old-fashioned vows for our Guests of Honor?”

“Sure,” Maggie replied. “What do you have in mind?”

What followed was fun. Uncle Sam announced to everyone within earshot of his voice (and his channel) that we were having “conflicts” writing Our Vows, and our Storysold: City replied like only a gathering of free, self-governed storybankers could reply. While I prepped the carrots, onions, and other ingredients and Maggie the Fabulous Food Producer orchestrated our food production scenes, a line of new war writers formed. It began at our front doors, trailed through the Wild Garden Arena, and wound around the elliptical walkway. It was an awesome display of demand for Our Home that made me want to be The Best That I Could Be. The best part was the way the writers who entered the White House paid for their appetizers. It reminded me of what can happen, and often does, when The Earth Show suddenly produces an apocalyptic ending (ignited by nature or civilization) and the humans rebel against the usual storyline of “anarchy and lawlessness” and decide instead to form themes and do their best to not kill or loot each other.

Nobody knows who started The Action, but some enterprising new war writer picked up one of the papers the death bombers had dropped from the sky, turned it over, and wrote a promise note to us. By the time the sun was casting the shadows of Antenna Trees across Center Stage, we’d served a lot of pea soup and cheese bread, and we’d had a lot of promise notes on the kitchen counter of the White House, each promising us to cast their live-action votes for their bio-friendly new war scene(s) of choice.

I laughed from sheer nervousness when I felt the inspiration hit. After watching new war writers write their promise notes to support Our Home in a conflict with the most lethal nation in earth’s history, the moments we spent writing Our Vows came with relative ease. We followed the stone aisle out into the moonlit meadow, found a pen and one of Davenport’s papers, sat beside a theme of new war writers sleeping under the cloudless sky, wrapped a comfy blanket around our governing bodies, and wrote Our Vows. I felt like we were participating in democracy for the first time in my life.

My Storybank Account – Scene Fifty Three,

THE PART WHERE THE OLD PREDICTABLE STORM OF BULLETS, BEANS, AND US MARINES HITS STORYSOLD: CITY…

We woke at dawn. The open meadow at the heart of Center Stage was rocking with the energies of new war writers preparing for battle. Not too far away, we saw a family with many children digging intently for some reason. At first, we thought they were digging foxholes in the shallow soil set atop Chester Weston’s Super Massive Vault. Then I saw one of the kids pack a few big clods into a pie tin, add some water from a tall clay jar, and mix well until his mud pie was done. On the far side of the meadow, we spied Jellyfish setting a long table full of her famous Mermen Crab Cakes and Spunk Surprise with the help of the other Sea Hags and Neptune. Beside that scene, Lava Monster, Patricia (as the Surgical Ninja), and Juan were helping O2 the Oxygenator rig as many oxygen masks to his underwater breathing machine as possible. It looked like a giant octopus had roared to life every time O2 turned the machine on, and air came ripping through the hoses. Behind us, Olin Wall and Buddha were talking shop while they helped Fair Atlantis, Puff the Fishing Dragon, and Rompasaurus the Salty Seafaring Kraken roast their supply of fish-on-sticks over a burn barrel. To our left, the Kings and Queens of Camelot were setting up courtly scene with enough royal wine and mead to launch The Next Crusade. Beside them, the Fizzy Pop Family Corporation was opening a makeshift Fizzy Pop distribution stand with the help of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn who were, as usual, each trying to be the smartest character In Scene. And all around us, Puck the Hot Spring Fairy King and his themedom of fairies were dancing, playing their lutes, and spreading Magic, Love, Calm over everyone they touched.

It was a grand scene. I didn’t want to return to our scripted roles in the White House when so much of The Action was live around us. I wanted to help Rompasaurus and Olin Wall roast fish-on-sticks. I could see that Maggie felt the same. She was watching Patricia and Juan laugh as they helped O2 wrestle his mechanical monster into submission.

“Time to put our wedding costumes on,” I said, holding my hand out to Maggie. “Our Guests of Honor will be here soon, and I’m sure they will be wanting some of your outstanding split pea soup to warm their bellies while they mingle with our friends.” Maggie took my hand with a sad smile and we walked down the stone aisle back to our parts in .

Inside, we set Our Vows on the pile of promise notes on our kitchen counter, changed into our new Bride and Groom characters, and then we went to work doing what we did best. While Maggie put a couple of pans full of Sister Lei’s “holy risen, demon-free dough” into the oven, I set our Storysold TV on the counter and tuned it to Olaf’s channel. Then I threw my dish cape over my hand-me-down tuxedo, flipped my ball cap back, and washed last night’s dishes while we watched Our Wedding Story unfold on screen.

The Brothers Grim had themed up with Guide and her small cast of post-antagonists in The Committee for the Preservation of Nations to play the role of Ushers. They were crouched down, trying to breath quietly, and fit in like high school behind a wall of grape vines in a wine plot near Center Stage. The troop transport ships and a few of the battle cruisers with the big guns had already broken off from the circling fleet and were now docked along the boardwalk of Storysold: City’s innermost Hidden Harbor. Guide’s wilderness security theme watched on, in horror, as a convoy of Humvees, armored personnel carriers, and camouflaged five-ton trucks filled with US Marines and FBI Agents armed with shields, body armor, tear gas grenades, bullets (rubber and real), and other riot-control props rumbled awkwardly over a throughway that wasn’t meant for their dinosaur-sized motor vehicles.

The first war cry came from Mother Russia Herself. She stood tall in the grape scene of battle, whooped it up, and led the charge. Most of the other nations, plus Guide and the Brothers, all stood—and they began shooting their large arsenal of non-lethal, sticky-tipped arrows, spears, and bolts at the trucks, helmets, and foreheads of the Marines and Agents rumbling by.

“Medic! I’m hit!” an Agent screamed as he tired unsuccessfully to yank the sticky-tipped arrow from his forehead. The note waving from the shaft of the arrow ripped off easy enough. It was a copy of our wedding script that had been handwritten on the back of another reused propaganda paper. The one that stuck to Joint Taskforce Commander/General Davenport’s Humvee was written and signed by Sweden Klas in both English and Swedish. The one that stuck to the back of Special Agent Sturgis’s blue FBI windbreaker was written and signed in the language of Zulu the Warriors, and the one that hit the five ton truck transporting Private First Class Yokum (who we verified no longer had a flag patch on his flack jacket) and his platoon of Marines was written and signed by Iran, Tanzania, and Nation Heart of Darkness. I was impressed when we watched Lux (Luxemburg) the World’s Largest National Person stand in the midst of the flying scripts and scrambling Marines…and sing the words of our script to an audience of FBI Agents. They froze for a beat, unsure of what to make of the large baritone, before they zip-cuffed his hands behind him and herded him in with the other Ushers they’d managed to round up.

Predictably, General Davenport didn’t believe The Enemy would ever willingly give up their battle plans. He likely took it as our attempt to use what old war fighters call “misinformation” to throw him off The Mission. After he read Sweden’s script he crumbled it in his hands and shouted, “Stay alert! Don’t let your guard down, Marines! Any one of these Terror Banking Fuckers could have a bomb strapped to their chests! Don’t be the first one to go boom in the name of their seventy-two holy fucking virgins!”    

Iran the Man approached one of Davenport’s officers, a burly Captain with the words CHAVEZ written on his name-tag, and did his best to correct the General’s statement. “Not all storybankers are Muslim, and not all Muslims wish for virgins in heaven,” Iran called out to Captain Chavez in English. “And not every storybanker in this city has a bomb strapped to their chest!” Then he smiled, walked towards Chavez, opened his coat, and said, “Only me! I’m the only Bomb-Strapped Muslim here! Long-live Storysold: City!”

The Captain’s eyes widened when he saw the Man reach for a string attached to some kind of device strapped to his chest, and pull: Boom! The device exploded, and chunks of red goo flew everywhere.

“No!” Chavez screamed as he looked down at his arms, chest, and legs covered in red goo. The soldier was almost in tears. Iran smiled, walked over to the weepy-eyed Marine, ran a finger across his face and licked it.

“It’s my signature pomegranate sauce!” he laughed. “Do you like it, Captain Chavez? I have a lot more where that came from.”

Iran was lucky. All his antic earned him was a zip-cuff and a seat in a truck beside Poland. “Why do I always have to be the first country to lose my freedom when The World goes to war?” Poland whined. “Guide! Where are you? We could use some help in here! I’m tired of being invaded!”

It was crack timing. No sooner had Poland called out for help, Jarl and Guide slid out from under the truck, cut two slits in the canvas, yanked Iran and Poland through the slits, and hustled them to the cover of a nearby weedy garden plot before the baffled Marines knew what had happened.

Maggie and I cheered. I was so inspired I poked my head through the saloon doors of the White House, and yelled, “My friend Jarl the Uplander just saved Poland from being occupied again!”

My line was perfectly useless for anyone who hadn’t been watching Guide’s wilderness security scene too, but our friends in the meadow cheered with us anyway. The point was that we’d won, and winning felt good.   

Davenport didn’t appear threatened by our first bio-friendly attack. He ordered a team of Agents to stay, detain the “insurgents,” and escort them to one of the many contracted cruise liners now sailing through the Gateways on their way to the city’s Hidden Harbors. Unbeknown to us, before they left the mainland, the General ordered his contractors to build what he called “holding rooms” from the ships’ entertainment centers in anticipation of detaining those insurgents who refused to acknowledge their victimhood and leave peacefully. It was clear from the beginning that the General and his men didn’t know what to call us. When we were good we were called cult victims, friendlies, civilians, collateral, natives, non-targets, and I even heard one politically sensitive Agent call us “customers,” but the moment we misbehaved (or acted inappropriately) we called everything from enemies, terrorists, insurgents, terror banking cult members, hostiles, criminals, unfriendlies, targets, and the ever popular classic “fuckers.” No matter what our Honored Guests called us, I was pleased that Agent Sturgis had heeded my warnings and made some effort to deal with The Conflict with their brand of non-lethal violence.   

Once the throughway was “secure,” General Davenport ordered the rest of the convoy to move on to the “primary objective,” which of course was Weston’s Super Massive Vault under Center Stage. Maggie and I continued to make Our Home while we watched the convoy roll away on screen. I was a little disappointed when the Brothers Grim didn’t follow the invasion force, and join us in the White House. They stayed In Scene to free as many of their fellow new war writers as they could before the Marines, armed with zip-cuffs, tear gas, and rubber bullets, filled their trucks and rumbled away to deliver their supply of insurgent/criminal/detainees to ships waiting in the Hidden Harbor.   

“Ha!” I exclaimed triumphantly. “I finally caught up!”

“What are you talking about?”

“See?” I presented my drying rack full of clean dishes. “There isn’t a dirty pot, pan, cup, or dish left in our kitchen.”

“I didn’t know this was a competition,” the Fabulous Food Producer winked. “Give me a moment and I’ll have you beat.”

Maggie faced our TV and began switching channels in search of a good scene with The Convoy in it. As she fiddled with the remote, I wrapped my arms around her waist. The flour on her gown mixed with the sudsy wet mess on the front of my hand-me tuxedo like instant biscuit batter.   

“Try our wedding photographers,” I suggested.

“We have photographers?”

“Of course,” I replied with a kiss. “They call themselves New War Photographers. Riggs and Blue Suit themed up with Winner and came up with what they call a ‘rank-breaking’ theme.”

Maggie read me like I was a new man. “Who are you?” She smiled and kissed me. “And what did you do with Wylie Jones?”

“Like I said,” I smiled, “I caught up.”

Then I tuned the TV to Blue Suit’s channel and caught Maggie up on the New War Photographers. I explained, the three tech geniuses developed a shoulder-fired A-eye, or a “first-generation new war weapon,” which could download live-action information in the harshest of war zones. They designed their new war weaponry to be the artificial eyes and ears of what Winner called The Worldwide Info-defense Cloud. The idea was to do what combat journalists have done since The Vietnam War—bring the blood and guts of war into the homes of the people who support them. Their twist on the idea was to arm combat journalists, or New War (Wedding) Photographers with the power to aim their shoulder-fired A-eyes at a given war scene, download that information on their independent web host site/info-defense net, and then receive immediate, real-time feedback from their audience of viewers from around the globe.

When I was done, I saw that—for once—Maggie looked impressed with one of my long-winded briefings. “That was a good one, Jones,” Maggie said with a smile. “Don’t let it go to your head.” Then she swaggered onto the porch, cupped her hands to her mouth, and announced, “Breakfast’s up! Come and get it!” A moment later, I was swimming in a sink full of dirty dishes—no longer winning our little equality war. Head buried in the suds, I knew I had to push the Groom aside for this scene and be the hero I knew I could be, so I punched my hands through the armholes of my dish cape, plunged my fist into the sink, felt the suds froth around my arm, and let the suds fly. “By the power of Our Home…I am Dishmaster Jones!” I cried aloud. “Filth, grease, grime, and food-born communicable diseases learn to fear my wrath!”

My Storybank Account – Scene Fifty Four,

THE PART WHERE THE NEW WAR PHOTOGRAPHERS CAST A LIGHT ON WINNER’S GAMING CHAMBER…

We tuned into Winner’s channel and found Blue Suit, Riggs, Winner, and a few hundred Level Ten Gamers and Clocktinkers gathered in a large, cave-like space that looked like a domed Roman coliseum. Outside, the dome was covered by thousands of solar panels. Inside, the only light was supplied by the wall-sized, 360 wrap-around screens of Winner’s Supervision. Neither Maggie nor I had seen the set before. Apparently, we weren’t alone. Until now, Winner had kept the A-eyes in his Private Gaming Chamber blocked from Reality and every other storybanker in Storysold: City.

Winner was making motions, gestures, and full-blown dance moves to communicate with the Supervision and use it to project the General’s Old War Story on his mega screen in full, living color. He was wearing his white skintight action suit like the ones he costumed his Gamers in, except his bulges were in different places. On screen, The Convoy was now rumbling in sight of Center Stage. Davenport was standing in his Humvee like Patton with his head held high, riding crop in hand, barking orders and cutting salutes to “his men.”

“Yeomatarian!” Winner called for his best Level Ten Gamer.

“Yes sir!” she replied and stepped up to her programmer.

“Is The Worldwide Info-defense Net fully operational?”

“Yes sir!” she beamed proudly. “It’s good to go!”

“Outstanding, Cadet.” Winner stretched like a runner. “Who’s our most literarily tolerant New War Photographer in the forward position?”

“That would be Upsolve Chi the Moon Hippie who you codenamed ‘Photo Op’ for Our Wedding Story, sir!”

Winner stretched his arms out, leapt, and spun like a top, landing on bended knee with his eyes cast downward. “Does he understand what to do if he makes first contact with the Space Invaders in the green suits and helmets?” Winner asked. The Supervision responded to his motion command by showing The Convoy from a third person perspective shot taken from an A-eye that was set atop Center Stage beside a grove of Antenna Trees.

“Oh, yes sir!” she replied. “The Moon Hippie’s smoked enough dope to be tolerant of almost anything at this point!”

“Super good,” Winner said dramatically as he returned to his primary rest position: feet spread shoulders’ length apart, fists cocked on his hips, and his chin pointed confidently up. “Order him forward.”

“But, sir?” Yeomatarian paused. “I thought we were going to wait for the Space Invaders to make first contact with us?”

“Not today, Cadet!” he cried with a mighty war cry. “Today Reality will take its rightful place as the richest theme in Storysold: City by showing these Invaders that Winner the Gamemaster means business!”

Yeomatarian looked unhappy, but she snapped the shield of her Moon Helmet down anyway. Then she did a shimmy shuffle step, stopped, and threw her arms forward, fingers outstretched like she was throwing a lightning bolt. The Supervision replied by downloading an on-the-job-training program into the flash screen of Photo Op’s Moon Helmet. It showed him an animated CG version of his signature making first contact with the Space Invaders.

Photo Op watched the brief training video and jolted into motion like a robot. Upsolve snapped the safety-strap of his Moon Helmet on, aimed his shoulder-fired A-eye, and advanced towards the first soldier in green he saw. A few clips later, Photo Op was zip-cuffed in the back of a truck, doing a great job of being literarily tolerant of the stories the Marines told him. The soldiers all thought it was hilarious when the Moon Hippie told them his level ten plot to defend their utopian moon colony with lasers, and they thought it was even funnier when he told them, “You’re going to lose this game.”

Back in Winner’s Gaming Chamber the cast was silent, waiting for The Worldwide Info-defense Net to stream its first viewer. Nothing, nothing, and more nothings, until the pressure of nothings were too much for Winner to take in stride. “Bleep!” he cried, pounding his fist in the air. “Fucking bleep!”

Blue Suit approached the enraged Winner and showed him an image he’d programmed into his Light Being Communicator.

Winner read it and nodded. “You couldn’t be more right,” Winner agreed coolly. “If you want something done…”

“…do it yourself,” Blue Suit said aloud, to all our amazement.

Charles Roth-Thompson walked with purpose over to a Doric column that held his Supervision’s only control. He rested a finger on the OFF button. Then he turned to Yeomatarian and said, “When I do this, I need you to stay here…in the Chamber. Someone has to turn Reality back ON and supervise The Worldwide Info-defense Net while I’m gone.” Yeomatarian lifted the shield of her Moon Helmet and looked upon her programmer with her own eyes.

“But…” she looked confused “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to get everyone’s attention.”

“Don’t do it,” she said, reaching out to pull her programmer’s hand away from the OFF button. “Life will be total madness. Reality will never be the same again if you shut it down…even once…”

Winner put his hand in hers and said, “Reality is never the same. It’s always changing. And this will be no different.”

“But…” she pleaded, “I can’t stay…I’m not you.”

“Sure you can,” Winner encouraged his best Gamer.

“But I don’t know Reality like you do. I’m not Winner.”

Winner looked into her fear-filled eyes and said, “I’m going to let you in on a little secret about Reality.”

“What?” she looked up hopefully.

“There is a Winner in the heart of every Gamer.” He paused to pull off her helmet. “I couldn’t have conquered Reality without you,” he said, as he brushed her hair back in place. “When my heart program falters, you are the Winner I look to…for courage…and companionship…”   

Then for the first time since he built and tested it, Charles pressed the OFF button. Reality faded from the screens and helmets of Reality the Gaming Community, leaving the Gamers to face their own minds unsupervised for the first time in a long time. Then Winner grabbed a shoulder-fired A-eye from his stock of new war weaponry, parted the crowd of ogle-eyed Gamers gathered around him, walked to the wall of his Gaming Chamber, and Winner started to kick. His walls were made of a thin aluminum skin. It only took him a few good kicks to break into the light of Reality the Reality.

The rising mid-morning sun hit Winner and his Gaming Chamber like a spotlight. At first it blinded him. He reacted like a troll who’d been under his bridge too long. But then he regained his will to win. He threw his weapon skyward and cried, “What are you all staring at? There’s a war on! Let’s get out there and show them what winning looks like!”

Instead of the “1” Winner expected he hit a “0.” At first, eerie silence was the reply to his call-to-arms speech. Then we heard the gaming community groan like an old ship in a storm and rise slowly to The Action. They cheered when Yeomatarian cheered, and then they grabbed their shoulder-fired A-eyes and tore through aluminum skin of the Gaming Chamber like it was The Fourth Wall itself. Blue Suit, Riggs, and the Clocktinkers followed the first wave through the breach, and they were followed by every Gamer in all ten levels of the Residential Shopping Center. Outside, Winner continued to charge over the bridge that spanned the Canal, through the Garden Surface on a direct route to The Convoy, and the Gamers followed his trail like ants after enough pheromone had been individually applied to produce a group foraging trail.

When she was alone, Yeomatarian brought Reality back online with the push of a button. Wasting no time, she released Winner’s new war scene for live streaming on The Worldwide Info-defense Net. She packaged and named their first scene, Winner Breaks the Fourth Wall of Reality. Yeomatarian held her breath as she waited for signs of action from the net. After a few long moments, hits began to trickle in from viewers around the world, popping onto what was left of the Supervision slowly at first like popcorn. Soon the whole screen was alive with hits and comments from viewers watching The Action streamed live from the shoulder-fired A-eyes shining their lights on The Conflict. Hands high, with her body in full communication with the Supervision, Yeomatarian transferred emails and messages from concerned viewers to the New War Photographers on the front lines of Our Wedding Story—programming her Reality in whatever order she wanted to, like she’d been Winner from day one.

My Storybank Account – Scene Fifty Five,

THE PART WHERE THE USHERS BUILD A BRIDGE OF SUPPORT FOR THEIR GUESTS OF HONOR…

John Henry—Hammer Swinger, Blacksmith, and Percussionist for the American Dreamstates Band—was John Henry for a reason. From a youthful age John hated machines, especially war machines. After years of trying and failing to win in a world run by and for the people with machines, John learned that the only way to beat a machine was to do something it couldn’t do. Today, that thing that he could do and General Davenport’s war machines couldn’t do was cross any of Storysold: City’s arched cobblestone bridges. The bridges and throughways had been built for walkers, bikers, and small motorized vehicles, because gasoline was too expensive to build roads full of boat-sized Cadillacs and Dodge Rams on the ocean. John was so happy he’d found Storysold: City  he never told anyone his backstory—and nobody cared enough to ask. He was as much the Hammer Swinger as any person had ever been.

So it came be that John Henry was the first new war writer General Davenport saw standing on the far side of the arched cobblestone bridge when the convoy rumbled into view of Center Stage. He stood, long hammer in hand like a stone sentinel, blocking one of Center Stage’s many tunnel entrances; and Rosy the Riveter, Noble Savage, Founding Father, Honest Abe, Paul and Babe the Ox, and National Character stood with him. Founding Father was casting his live-action tax votes for Our Wedding Story in the role of our Officiant since our Ship’s Captain, Mr. Chester Weston, disappeared from view the moment the warships appeared on our horizon. The rest of the American Dreamstates were casting theirs as Ushers for our Honored Guests.

When the convoy rolled into the long morning shadow of Center Stage, John swung his hammer across his shoulders, and said, “Time to get to work, and show this Old War Machine who’s Boss!”

Founding Father slugged back his jug of Hundred Proof Hops, laughed aloud, and said, “It’s like I always say…be civil to all, sociable to many, familiar with few, friend to one; enemy of none…”

John turned to Rosy, Paul, and Babe and asked, “Can you folks get to your positions without the old war soldiers capturing you?”

“No doubt,” Rosy replied confidently. Then she checked her tool belt, cinched her scarf, threw her rope around her shoulders, and said, “Are you ready boys?” Babe pawed the ground, Paul sort of grunted, and they followed their friend Rosy back into the dimly lit tunnel.

When they were gone, Honest Abe presented Noble Savage with a pair of Tinker Glasses, and said, “Will you scout out the temperament of our Guest’s old war scene for us?” Noble Savage stared at the Emancipator and the Tinker Glasses in his hand like Abe had just asked him to cut his own throat and bleed for the benefit of White Man’s Great Spirit the Government.

Founding Father tipped his jug back, down to its last droplet, and snatched the Glasses from Abe. “Give me those things,” Ben said as he put the Glasses on and flashed Abe a hard look. “I’ll scout the scene.”

“No,” Abe protested. “Our Wedding Story can’t afford to lose your live-action votes. You’re acting Officiant now…that our mysterious President has seemed to, as the young ones say now, ghosted us…”

Founding Father laughed. “Then it’s your turn to go.”

“I, uh, I can’t go,” Abe stammered. “I have to stay here and swing my ax beside the Hammer Swinger.”

Ben roared with laughter. “Do you know why Turkeys are smarter than Eagles?” He asked as he walked across the bridge.

“No,” Abe asked warily. “Why?”

“How should I know?” He laughed. “I was asking you!”

A few beats later, the Ushers were gathered around Savage’s handheld Storysold: TV watching Founding Father. Ben bellied up to the first platoon of heavily armed Marines he found on the other side. They were practicing their tactical walking skills (featuring hand-and-arm signals) a short distance in front of the rest of the convoy. Behind them, General Davenport and Agent Sturgis were standing beside the General’s command Humvee.

Davenport grabbed a handset from his Radio Operator’s hand, put it to his mouth, and hollered, “What’s the holdup, Captain?”

“Corporal Northup is talking to, uh, a Terror Cultist who looks a lot like Benjamin Franklin,” Chavez replied, glancing down at all the blemishes on his uniform where he’d tried to wash Iran the Man’s sauce off.

“I don’t care if he’s talking to God,” the General bellowed. “I told you to keep this convoy rolling! Understand that, Captain?”

“But, sir,” Chavez pleaded. “Northup reports that the man wants to help us move our convoy into the central compound.”

“But, but, but,” Davenport mocked, “We don’t want their help Captain! Is that clear?”

“Yes sir,” Chavez replied. “But…”

“But what?”

“But the bridges leading into the Central Compound are too small for our vehicles to cross over,” the Captain reported, “and the uh…imposter has offered to build a bigger bridge for us.”

By that time, Agent Sturgis had already left the General’s side. He was now In Scene standing behind Corporal Northup while the youth attempted to get a word in edgewise in the midst of Ben’s slick sales oration on the benefits of marital unions. Sturgis took one look at Northup’s Humvee and the narrow bridge, and then he chuckled to himself—no doubt remembering the report I sent him about how all the throughways of the city were “unAmerican.” As I reported, the fact that narrow throughways hold a special strategic value was a mere coincidence. If I had the story right, it was Riggs who convinced Weston that Storysold: City should never have roads wide enough for a fleet of green curbside recycling robot trucks to operate on. It was Malcolm’s way of giving the little red wagon entrepreneurs of the city an economic edge.

Sturgis stepped forward, looked Ben in the eyes, and asked, “Why would you build us a new bridge?”

“Why, of course!” Ben beamed. “We want to build it because we want you, The People, our fellow Americans, to join Our Wedding Story.”

“And why would you want us to do that?”

“Because you’re family.”

“No, we aren’t.”

“Of course you are,” Ben laughed and slapped Corporal Northup on the back like they were old frat buddies. “You raised Wylie and Maggie in the bosom of your bloody old union. Without you they would have never met, or fallen in love. You are our Guests of Honor.”

“And who are you supposed to be?”

“I’m your Founding Father,” Ben chuckled. “I’m here to represent our side of the family in the role of Wedding Officiant.”

“This is fucking nuts,” Sturgis laughed as General Davenport suddenly appeared In Scene like a hot wind blasted from a big gun.

“Zip-cuff that silly fucker,” he ordered, “and find me a way across that canal ASAP before I lose it and start kicking ass!”   

Cool as a cantaloupe, Ben stepped up, toe-to-toe, with the General and declared, “I know a Salty-Seafaring Kraken you should meet. You’d make a great duo. Two peas in a small pod.” Then Ben reached in his vest pocket and fished around for his brew flask. The sound of bullets sliding into their firing chambers filled the air. “Freeze!” a Marine ordered and pointed his service rifle at Ben while another Marine pulled his hand away from his vest and zip-cuffed it behind his back. A third soldier then reached into Ben’s vest, found the flask he was fishing for, and handed it to his superior. Davenport sniffed the brew cautiously and poured it out.

“My dear boy—that took me one hundred and fifty-seven monetary moments to produce!” Ben cried, horrified at the sight of such waste. Then he called across the bridge to his friends. “Gobble, gobble!” he called, making eye contact with John Henry. “The Turkey’s thirsty!”

John Henry took his cue. He strolled across the bridge, long hammer in hand, and stared at the scene of old war soldiers for a beat. Then he looked General Davenport square in his eyes, and said, “I’m going to build you men a better bridge. Do any of you have a problem with that?”

Every Marine In Scene turned their heads to see how Davenport would react. The General paused long enough for everyone to know he was stunned by the offer. He was about to speak, when Henry added, “What are you going to do, General? Air lift all your old war machines onto Center Stage so you can accomplish your mission to ‘seize’ Weston’s assets?”

The Hammer Swinger didn’t wait for a reply. He turned his back to the soldiers, sauntered to the edge of the bridge, and raised his hammer to the sky. Ping, ping, ping, ping, and splash! It only took John Henry four hammer blows to send the cobblestone bridge to the bottom of the ocean. “Now stand back and let us do our work,” Henry said, turning to the Marines. “We’ll have you folks rolling faster than you can sing Jimmy Crack Corn.”

Blank faced, our Honored Guests played Audience as they watched a blue box and a burly lumberjack wearing a plaid flannel and a red stocking cap appear in the opening of the tunnel on the other side of the canal. Babe was pulling his Ox Cart full of the boards Rosy loaded earlier, while Paul used his signature skid jack and a rope to haul in the waterlogged timbers they salvaged from the North Pacific Gyre. Paul chuckled to himself when he saw he had an Audience. Davenport stood, drop-jawed, still watching as Babe and Paul threw the rope across the canal, where John Henry gripped it tight in hand and pulled it, with a mighty effort, across the Canal and set in it place.

“Watch what happens next, General,” Ben prompted, speaking to the General in a soothing tone. “This is The Good Part.”

Unbeknownst to their Honored Guests, Henry’s theme had rehearsed the building of that bridge five times. One by one Paul, Abe, and Babe sent the logs over to Noble Savage, who’d joined John on the other side. Seemingly out of nowhere, Rosy repelled down from an open window halfway up the exterior wall of Center Stage. She landed beside the Ox Cart, where she moved her rope to the other side of her climbing harness and began to put the boards into their places perpendicular to the support logs. She worked fast, tacking the boards in place with her power driver, balancing like a construction pro walking on the girders of a job site set thirty floors in the sky. Once the boards were set, John and Rosy grabbed their hammers and drove spikes through them.

It took the Ushers exactly—$1.35 mms—to build the bridge. It even came complete with a ramp for their oversized government vehicles.

“Now that’s a bridge!” John Henry declared triumphantly, wiping the sweat from his brow, beaming at their work with pride.

When Davenport finally picked his rank off the ground, he turned to Captain Chavez and said, “Once the convoy is clear, I want you to set up a perimeter checkpoint here.” Then he took a long look at Rosy. She was fully amped, cheering, giving high-fives to everyone, even his troops. “If the Cultists do not follow your orders and relocate to the cruise liners, arrest them. If they resist, you are authorized to use lethal force if necessary. Do I make myself clear, Captain Chavez? No one gets through.” Then the General stood in a way that made his signature known, and bellowed, “Foo-ward!” And his old war soldiers rumbled across the bridge like it had always been there.   

As the convoy rolled into the tunnel, the American Dreamstates could hear Davenport barking orders, deploying his Marines to set up checkpoints at every tunnel entrance around the perimeter of Center Stage.

The Ushers grabbed their instruments (their new war weapons of choice) they’d stashed out of sight in a nearby garden plot, and tried to file in rank alongside the old war soldiers marching through the tunnel.

The first to be arrested was Paul and Babe, followed by Savage, and then John Henry, who was almost shot for “resisting arrest” after he tried to pound a new door through the thick wall beside the newly formed war theme the Marines called, “Checkpoint Alpha.” The only American Dreamstate in the Band who made it through the tunnel onto the Stage was Founding Father. He   was so obnoxious they zip-cuffed his legs, gagged him, and tossed him like a human doll into one of the big green trucks rumbling in.    

Outside, Honest Abe and Rosy watched the Marines of Checkpoint Alpha arrest their friends and herd them in a makeshift staging area just inside of the tunnel, where Rosy surmised the “detainees” would sit and wait for a big green truck to transport them to one of the cruise liners. The Ancient turned to Rosy and said, “We should cut this scene.” Abe shook his head sadly. “They’ve drawn the lines of their union around Center Stage.”

“But who will Usher our Guests into Our Wedding Story?”

“Some brave new war writers will receive The Word that Our Wedding Story is now in heroic need of Ushers,” Abe paused thoughtfully. “They will finish The Good Fight that we’ve begun here.”

“That’s not very Abe Lincoln of you,” Rosy shot back.

“How’s that Rosy dear?” He straightened up and put his thumbs in his jacket. “As you know, I stand in favor of birthing new marital unions.”

“I see where you’re standing,” Rosy said. “But I’m not going to stand with you when our friends are casting their votes in there without us.”

“Where?” Abe asked, pretending not to know.

“On Center Stage, Lost One!”

“What do you propose we do,” he chuckled, “talk your way through a checkpoint? Our Yankee friends weren’t trained as diplomats.”

“Hey you, soldiers over there!” Rosy called across the canal.

Captain Chavez and his platoon of Marines, which Sergeant Wood ran with the aid of Corporal Northup, were too busy setting up props on the other side of the bridge to take much note of Rosy.

“Hey you guys!” she called again, and then she whistled at them like a foreman. “I got something to say!”

One of the Marines—whose nametag read BUXMAN—snickered, cupped his hands to his mouth, and said, “Well then, say it already!”

“OK!” she called back. “Release my friends, or I’ll…”

“Or, a, you’ll do what?” Buxman taunted.

“Or I’ll…come over there…and I’ll…” Rosy stammered.

“No,” Buxman said, cutting her off. “You’ll do nana, because you got nothing, and because you got nothing, you have nothing to say.”

“Yeah,” another Marine joined in. “What are you going to do, little woman, dance your way through our checkpoint?”

Everyone at Checkpoint Alpha laughed except Captain Chavez and Sergeant Wood, who stood by his Captain looking not too unlike a tree: lean, tall, and upright with a frazzled mustache branching from his lip. No doubt, he had great expectations of one day reaching the light of a higher rank.

Rosy was about to hurl a vicious string of insults at the Marines when Abe tapped Rosy on her shoulder. A massive assembly of Clocktinkers and Gamers had arrived, led by Winner, who was aiming his shoulder-fired A-eye at the old war characters of Checkpoint Alpha like a film director.

“What are you doing here?” Rosy asked Winner.

Winner replied, “I think the correct reply to the youthful Marine’s taunt is, ‘If you don’t release our friends, we’re going to tell your mothers that they raised their sons to be Space Invaders.’”

“Seriously?” Rosy asked, taking a long look back at Reality.

“Seriously,” he replied. “Yeomatarian has informed me that she’s already located several of their mothers online. Private Buxman’s mother was the third mother to reply to our call. Her name is Fidelia.”

“Awesome,” Rosy smiled when she Got It. Then she raised her voice to address the Marines again. “If you don’t step aside and let my friends and me attend Our Wedding Story,” she demanded. “I’ll tell your mothers what you’re doing here, and we’ll let them sort this mess out!”

Buxman didn’t reply. Captain Chavez did. Chavez repeated The Order Davenport had given him: “The United States Government does not negotiate with Terror Banking Cultists, period. No one gets through.” When the Man in Charge of them was done, the Marines spit their tobacco chew on the ground and returned to their posts guarding the detainees in the tunnel. Meanwhile, Yeomatarian was catching all their mothers up on The Action.      

My Storybank Account – Scene Fifty Six,

THE PART WHERE A THEME OF FAIRIES USHERS THE OLD WAR SOLDIERS THROUGH THE WILD GARDEN ARENA…

When Davenport cleared the tunnel, the mid-morning sun was shining through the canopy of green games pieces in the Wild Garden Arena. In a rage he turned to Agent Sturgis and said, “I thought you said I’d have ‘no problem’ establishing a Landing Zone. It’s a fucking jungle in here.”

“My Intel says there are trails that lead to the open meadow on the other side of this garden,” Sturgis replied confidently. “We should stage the trucks here, along the base of the Terror Compound’s walkway, and hump the rest of the way in. We’ll need the space for the helicopters in the open meadow once we clear the Compound.”

“We’ll need the space!” Davenport thundered. “Have you thought that we might need the trucks to clear the Compound?”

Sturgis squared his shoulders to the Joint Taskforce Commander. “My intelligence reports indicate that it will only take a brief show of force to clear this Compound of Weston’s Terror Banking Cultists. They will run like rats to the cruise liners once we establish Our Presence.”

Davenport stared hard at Sturgis. “As I understand it, the man who wrote your reports is planning to marry his former Asset today in a grand fucking orgy of hate for everything America stands for.”

“I know. I never liked the guy,” Sturgis replied, “but I didn’t have a choice. Jackson was the best I had at the time.”

The General put his hands on his hips and cast his eyes downward in a mix of frustration and shame to be working with the Agent in Charge of the FBI. Then he kicked the dirt with the shiny toe of his boot, made eye contact with Sturgis, and calmly said, “I want my trucks in the Compound. Burn this mother fucker down if you have to, but make it happen now.”     

No sooner had the General issued The Order, Puck and a theme of woodland pixies, fairies, gnomes, and nymphs answered the call for new Ushers at the edge of the Wild Garden Arena. They were armed with crosscut saws, axes, and gardening tools. The pixies, fairies, and nymphs danced and played as close to the old war soldiers as they dared, sprinkling their joy and pixie dust everywhere. The gnomes, on the other hand, stood at the edge of the green wall with flaming torches in their hands, looking stoic like a posse of cops out for justice. Puck the Hot Springs Fairy King was wearing nothing but wings and underwear. Davenport dropped his eyes to the dirt, once again working hard to maintain his cool, calm, collected, state of mind.

“Careful what you wish for General!” Puck called out. “This is a magic city, where wishes do come true…”

The Fairy King reached a hand out, into the air, waiting for something we did not know. Looking around, he repeated his cue—reaching his hand into air like Luke Skywalker waiting for his lightsaber. Finally he signed, snapped his fingers at his nearest nymph, pointed to his ax leaning against a tree, and waited once again, fingers straining like a Jedi, for the ax to appear. “Zup!” the nymph said with a laugh when she put the ax in Puck’s hand.

After a long, artful demonstration of his skills, the Hot Springs Fairy King plunged his ax into the base of nearby aspen. By this time, every Marine In Scene with a rifle had it aimed at the handsome, ax dancing man. It didn’t take long for the Ushers to clear enough of the Wild Garden for the trucks to start down the aisle like tense wedding guests in search of their seats.

Once again, the Marines and Agents looked to see what the General would do next. Davenport stood tall above the windshield of his Humvee as it led the convoy down the aisle. In the seat beside him, his personal Radioman Corporal Smithberg sat awaiting his next order like a pet. The General’s reply to the Ushers’ road-building scene was to take his helmet off, hand it to his Radioman, put his favorite LA Raiders hat on, light a cigar, and smoke it like he had Won the Day. “Foo-ward!” he ordered his troops into the Wild Garden. As the convoy crept forward onto the new road—over stumps, through the flames being controlled by the Ushers with garden hoses—the General barked orders to the humans he decided were now under his command.

“Hey you! Fairy with the purple wings,” Davenport barked. “Cut that god-damned bush too! And you! Gnome in the pointy fucking hat…Pull those weeds like you got a pair! If you want to join my Precious Corps you will learn to pull my mother-loving weeds like a man!”

The Gnome face dropped sadly as he stared at the fistful of weeds in his hand. “But…” the creature said. “I’m a Gnome.”

“I don’t care if you’re Mary fucking Poppins!” General Davenport thundered. “You will pick my little green weeds with speed and intensity like you’ve got a big, fucking, gnome-gobbling troll after you.” The Gnome did his best to explain that the Trolls he knew in the city only ate goats, but the Man in Charge of Men wasn’t listening. He ordered his Marines to arrest the Gnome for “insubordination,” and that’s what they did. They zip-cuffed the humanoid and tossed him in the back of the truck with Ben Franklin.

The old war soldiers followed their leader. They began to bark orders at the Ushers too. Most storybankers didn’t fall for the bait. They kept their eyes on their scripts and worked to make our Honored Guests feel welcome, but some of the Ushers talked back, trying to dialogue with the soldiers, and they were quickly rewarded with a zip cuff and a seat on a truck.

The mood shifted when the soldiers marched into the meadow. The Ushers had performed their roles well. Now it was time for our out-of-town Guests to meet The Other Side of The Family. Awkward doesn’t begin to describe the interactions. The Water Monsters offered up fried fish on long sticks. The Kings and Queens of Camelot tried to share their mead with our Guests. They filled their glasses and toasted to the future happiness of the Bride and Groom, but the Guests rejected Camelot’s many efforts to extend The Honorable Rights of Hospitality with bad manners and scorn. Guinevere feigned sorrow, eyes all awash in tears, when a squad of young Marines refused to drink the mead-making scene she minted for them. One Agent with a soft heart for weeping maidens agreed to drink “just one drink” with Arthur Guinevere. As soon as he swallowed, out of nowhere, Don Quixote charged in (like you’d expect) and challenged the baffled Agent to a “duel to The Demon.” Arthur threw her arms around the Agent and cried, “No! He’s so nice!” The objective of the new war maneuver—codenamed The Medieval Love Triangle—was to bind the Guest in their love drama long enough to prove they weren’t the Enemy. Needless to say, it was not easy for the Agent to return to duty with Arthur screaming and clinging to his arms and Don threatening to exorcise his demons.   

“Turn those goddamned trucks around and line them up along the edge of the meadow!” Davenport barked at Sergeant Major Clark, a man the troops called “Chesty” reverently behind his back. Nobody knew why exactly. Some thought it was because he sounded like a throaty cancer smoke, while others thought he looked like Chesty Puller, a famous Marine general from The Korean War. No matter, they all called him Chesty reverently anyway. They said he opened his beer bottles with his teeth.

When Sergeant Major Clark heard the General he smirked (as he often did for no discernible reason), and then he repeated The Order word for word, cut a lazy salute, and ended it with a “Yes, sir!”

“And Sergeant Major,” the General said. “I want to make this very clear. I don’t give two shits about what these people do or say. I’m making you personally responsible for packing every last one of these Anti-Americans into those trucks, and delivering them into the plush, politically correct holding cells we reserved for them aboard one of the cruise liners paid for by the tax dollars of my fellow Americans. Are we on the same page, Sergeant Major?”

The salty Sergeant Major shrugged his shoulders and cleaned out the wad of chew he’d had in since dawn, and said, “Yeah…Yes, sir.”

“Out with it. What’s wrong?”

“I need to know,” Chesty replied. “If push comes to shove, can I use live rounds on these hippies without worrying about ramifications?”   

“Isn’t that what I just said?”

“No, I’m going to need you to use your words on this one.”

“Okay I’m saying it now…” Davenport took a long look at his Sergeant Major. Then he added, “Just do me a favor…don’t kill too many.”

“How many is too many?”

“Our collateral damage report can’t read more than a thousand,” the General replied. “Any more than that I will answer to The Committee.”

Chesty saluted smartly, and said, “Yes, sir!”

The first thing he did was walk up to Neptune, God of Sea Salt, rip his triton (with its prongs full of fish sticks) from his hands and break it over his knee. Then he broke Neptune, zip-cuffed him, and threw him in the back of the truck with Gnome and Founding Father. In the distance, Juan the Great White Tuna Hunter and Patricia the Surgical Ninja were doing their best to keep Rompasaurus calm. The Gentle Water Monster had seen what Chesty was doing to her friends and she was growing madder by the moment.

My Storybank Account – Scene Fifty Seven,

THE PART WHERE THE GUESTS ATTENDING OUR WEDDING STORY GET TO KNOW EACH OTHER BETTER…

The next order the General gave was to Agent Sturgis. The Mission was to locate the Super Massive Vault, open it, and pack Weston’s assets up to the open meadow where they could airlift it off Center Stage.   

From the living room of the White House, Uncle Sam peeked through the curtains and saw Agent Sturgis and his crack team of Super-Massive Vault Breakers. The team was heading for Westonton Headquarters fighting through the new war themes now in production on Stage like a line of security guards, or police, fighting through a rowdy crowd at a rock show.    

Sam let the curtains fall, faced his friends, and said, “There they go. As predicted, they’re off after Weston’s funny papers.”

Gambler peeked out of the kitchen window. “I better round up my theme…and get us in the mood for an old-fashioned Saloon-Style Fist Fight,” he said, and then he stepped into The Action without another word.

A moment of silence followed while American Spirit, Uncle Sam, Lady Liberty, and Captain Nemo used the Projectavisions hung in the living room to check in with their Fans and Groupies. The Band’s Mosh Pit Defense Theme was hiding behind the roll up, garage-style storm doors of the stage shops set along the elliptical walkway that spiraled up the many levels of Center Stage. They were all primed to rush The Stage when the Dreamstates began to set the rocking mood for The Wedding Ceremony. They were ready, but American Spirit was the only one who didn’t look like they were going to puke.

In the kitchen, Maggie and I watched Chief Moyniham (the only man  still paid in dollars) on our TV while my Dishmaster scrubbed the burns off the soup pots and Maggie the Fabulous Food Producer kneaded her eighty-five percent demon-free dough. Chief Moyniham was preparing his vast arsenal of death-dealing weapons to meet Agent Sturgis’s team of Vault Breakers behind the sandbagged security counter he’d built like The Fourth Wall in front of the   revolving door of Westonton Corporate Headquarters. His combat boots were laced tightly. His blue and black urban camouflage uniform was pressed neatly. His security badge shone in the noontime sun, and his face was painted like a savage creature from a horror film. When Bradley saw the first soldier walk into the clearing between him and the Wild Garden Arena he cranked his stereo up to MAX, flipped off the SAFETY of his automatic assault rife, and pumped himself up with the driving post metal beats of The 90s.

“Get in here now!” Maggie screamed into the living room.

The Band rushed into the kitchen. “Our old buddy Bradley’s ramping up to defend his Counter like it’s The Alamo,” I pointed at the nightmare now unfolding a neighborhood walk from where we stood. Liberty tried to use her handheld to contact him on his device, but he didn’t answer.

“No!” Maggie screamed at the screen. “It’s not worth it, Bradley! Let them have the goddamned papers!”

“He swore to defend his employer’s property,” I said quietly, “and it seems that he’s a man of his word…”

“Yeah, but,” Maggie watched on in a panic. “Does he really believe he can stop them all? Even if he stops the first wave, there’s an entire army full of young, gun-toting cowboys on those warships waiting in line to play The Ritual Revenge Plot. He’s committing suicide!”   

Suddenly the back door swung open. “What in larval stage are you all waiting for in here?” the Surgical Ninja gasped, out of breath.

I dropped the pot and my scrubby in the sink full of suds, pointed to Uncle Sam, and said, “We’re waiting for them to cue The Ceremony.”

Patricia turned to Sam. “And what are you waiting for?”

Uncle Sam froze like a husband who was used to letting his wife talk for him. Lady Liberty bailed him out. “We’re waiting for more members of The Band to arrive,” she said like she was addressing The Huddled Masses.     

“I don’t think they’re going to make it,” the Surgical Ninja replied as coolly as she was able. “They have John Henry and Savage tied up on the other side of the tunnel our Honored Guests entered in.”

Sam studied the nightmare unfolding at the security counter for a few beats, then he said, “I think we should give them a few more moments…”

“We can’t wait one!” Patricia shot back angrily. “Juan and I have been doing our best to keep her calm, but Rompasaurus is getting madder by the moment. She won’t be able to hold out much longer without our help.”

“Well, then,” Nemo said. “Get out there and help her.”

“We’ve been trying!” she shot back angrily.

“Give us one more moment,” Liberty said. “Then we’ll go.”

Patricia turned to Maggie and I with The Fear in her eyes. “We have to go now,” she pled. “I’m afraid of what might happen if we don’t…”

The youth was raised in a family where The Fear wasn’t employed in a hundred ways everyday. It terrified me to see The Fear in her, because I knew it wasn’t without reason. “Don’t worry,” I said as we gave our friend a hug. “If we have to, Maggie and I will sing The Rompasaurus Theme Song with you…”

“Yes,” Maggie agreed, searching my eyes for lies. “We will.”

“You will?” Patricia asked hopefully.

“Yes, we will,” I said. “We’re both right behind you.”

“Great,” she smiled as she ran for the door. “I love you…both…”

“We love you too,” I yelled behind her, “so please be careful!”

The door slammed shut and I tuned to Patricia’s channel to watch her run back into the meadow where the tension was building with every passing beat. Our Family Members were assaulting our Guests of Honor from every direction with offers of homemade apple pies, crab cakes, munchies, wedding drinks, and other signature goods and actions designed to make the Guests feel welcome in Our Wedding Story—but the new war maneuver was only making the General madder. I switched to Rompasaurus’s channel in time to see her lift Juan in the air, spin him around, and throw him at a nearby Agent.

Maggie turned to the American Dreamstates and said, “I’m going out there to sing The Rompasaurus Theme Song. Who’s with me?”

Lady Liberty took our remote, pointed it at our TV, and tuned to the scene at Checkpoint Alpha. The New War Photographers were making it very clear to Captain Chavez and the other Marines blocking their access to “the wedding zone” that The Great Eye of the World—including a few friends and family members of the Marines—were watching their parts in Our Wedding Story unfold online. Judging by the worried looks in the faces of the Marines, they were getting the message that the people of earth cared about how the soldiers conducted themselves. Yet, the checkpoint was still impassable.

“Let’s wait a few more moments,” Uncle Sam replied. “The missing members of our Band all voted to try and rank break that checkpoint when the Winner’s Worldwide Info-defense Net gathers a half a million hits. It reached four hundred thousand a few clips ago…”

American Spirit was uncharacteristically quiet.   

“Our guests aren’t happy. The Conflict is growing too violent,” our Bride reported calmly. “I’m going out now. Who’s with me?”

“You have my scrubbies!” I replied, trying to be upbeat. In an attempt to rally The Band, I slammed into American Spirit and punched her playfully in the arm, but she remained uncharacteristically quiet.

“I’d go,” Nemo replied, “but I’m afraid that if we start playing now we will inspire our Fans and Groupies to mosh the Stage.”

“So?” Maggie challenged. “Isn’t that what you want to do?”

“Yes,” Uncle Sam agreed. “But we’ll be more effective if we rock our Guests with the full force of the American Dreamstates Band.”

Maggie read their faces and saw that they agreed with Nemo. Maggie grew silent, but I knew her signature well enough to know that didn’t mean she was surrendering anything. I was a real professional when it came to pissing my former Asset off. Maggie stood—eye-to-eye with The Band—and said, “More effective bullshit maybe! I think you’re all just too frightened to get on Stage and rock this party like true Americans.” Then Maggie rolled the sleeves of her gown to her elbows, leaving the flag patch visible on her shoulder, and walked out the front door. “Wait!” Lady Liberty called behind her.

I didn’t hesitate. I changed back into Groom and followed her.

Maggie stood on the expansive porch of the White House, surveying the battlefield of conflicts that raged beyond Our Home. Maggie saw the flames and smoke rising from the Wild Garden. She saw the clouds of tear gas drifting through the themes of fairies, monsters, and gnomes. She saw the helicopters circling overhead like vultures waiting to land and feed, and she saw the old war soldiers armed in their riot gear shooting rubber bullets at her friends, hitting them with batons behind their shields, and throwing them into their trucks like garbage men dump cans of trash. Maggie saw all this, and she hated the way it made The Fear in her swell, so she decided to do something about it.

She studied the new war weapons on the porch. She walked past Lady Liberty’s bass guitar, Henry’s anvil and drums, Spirit’s electric guitar, Nemo’s organ, Abe’s fiddle, and Uncle Sam’s banjo, and faced the microphone that had been set in the center of it all. Then she wrapped her fingers around it gingerly like the trigger of a bomb, put her lips to the steel, and sang The Rompasaurus Theme Song loud and proud like she sang at our Shop Warming Party. Her voice wavered when Maggie realized that the microphone was not connected, as one might expect, to some kind of mega-rock-stadium speaker system. Instead, her voice rattled from the speaker of the lone amplifier on the porch. I did my best to sing beside her, but that only made the futility of our efforts clearer.

Then the music played. We heard The Weight of Captain Nemo’s organ fill the porch—followed the hypnotic power of one of Lady Liberty’s signature bass lines. Sam and Spirit let the haunting groove ride for a few beats before they armed themselves with their new war weapons of choice, took their parts in the song beside Maggie, and let their signatures wail.

Maggie turned American Spirit and asked, “What’s wrong with the sound system? Doesn’t The Band have any bigger speakers?”

American Spirit just grinned and pointed to Wall the Mart’s stage shop door. It was at least two football fields away from us, but I could see Gertel the Governing General standing in front of Wall the Mart’s rolled open door with    her hands on her hips and her Day-Glo muumuu blowing behind her in the wind like some sort of superhero. The Band stopped playing, and we watched awestruck as Gertel slid a small speaker in the band of her helmet, fit it snugly on her head, and then rattled her armor. “Testing,” she knocked the side of her helmet. “Testing, three, two, one…” It was hard to hear her, until she opened her pipes and cried, “Release the Fans!”

In one motion hundreds of stage shop doors were rolled open and the terraced levels of Center Stage sprang to life. The horde of Fans and Groupies that had been hiding in their dark shops suddenly screamed in union, cheering mad like teenyboppers, all holding the speakers of their handheld devices over their heads to pump up the volume. The screams of The Rock and Roll Show boomed from every corner of the stage in full, three hundred and sixty degree surround sound. Gertel adjusted the mic strapped to her battle bra, aimed her speaker at the battle below, and cried, “Rock and Roll!”

And we rocked like our lives depended on it, because they did. In all the times I’ve seen the Rogue Captain play his organ, I’ve never seen his eyes light up like they did when he played that next major cord and heard the low groan of his organ echo back to him from the hundred of speakers held by his Fans and Groupies. The feedback was empowering, and it feed us the courage we needed to rock The Rompasaurus Theme Song with all our might. The unholy sight of all those Fans and Groupies screaming down from the terraced levels along the elliptical walkway was enough to inspire even me. I picked up Rosy’s cowbell and gave a good ring every time I heard General Davenport yell at his men. No doubt, a mob of rock-crazed Fans overrunning his “precious fucking Landing Zone” must have struck a note. Who knows, maybe it reminded him of the helplessness he felt when his teenager asked him for twenty bucks and the keys to the family wagon? Whether he gave his blessing of money and keys or not, he knew deep down that his baby was going to some ungodly rock show and there was nothing he could do about it.

The Fans and Groupies rushed the meadow in force and fanned out in front of the White House, creating a screaming wall of sweaty Groupie bodies that kept the General and his troops at bay. Maggie smiled when she heard The Rompasaurus Theme Song grow louder with each Fan or Groupie who arrived in our yard. She smiled, because that was Storysold: City in a nutshell. Each one of the Fans voted to create the new war rock scene with a decision to play our song on their speakers. The old war soldiers in shields and riot gear did their best to kill the music. They lobbed gas grenades and shot rubber bullets into The Mosh Pits, but the new war writers found ways to adapt and overcome the tired old war strategies. O2 the Oxygenator set up his octopus-armed breathing machine in our front yard and supplied the Groupies with much needed relief from the tear gas while the Fans in The Pits danced and slammed against their shields and pushed the soldiers further and further out of range.

In retaliation to The Mosh Pit Defense, Davenport sent a platoon to flank the White House. They were met by an elite force of the Band’s most dedicated Groupies who were used to jockeying for attention at the “back door” of their favorite band’s shows. The Groupies welcomed the soldiers in. They told jokes and buddied up, and they laughed every time the platoon leader ordered them to “disperse.” Faced with the decision to club, arrest, and zip tie each and every one of the hundred or more Groupies at the Back Door, or lock and load live ammunition and start killing unarmed rock enthusiasts, the leader chose option three: retreat back into the smoldering apple tree stumps and burning bushes of the Wild Garden Arena, practice their tactical walking skills, and wait for their leader to radio Corporal Smithberg and confirm their orders.

In the meantime, by some miracle the New War Photographers broke the ranks of the Marines guarding Checkpoint Alpha long enough to free Henry, Savage, Paul, and Babe. Once free, they met Rosy and Abe and all six of them strolled through the tunnel under the protection of Winner and his New War Photographer’s Info-Defense Net without a drop of blood sacrificed in the name of preserving the union of General Davenport’s perimeter. Once they were on the other side of the tunnel, they skirted the Gnome Road (which Puck named in honor of their road-building scene) and they eventually arrived at the Back Door in time to watch the flanking platoon retreat back into the cover of the Garden’s burning bushes. The Groupies cheered wildly when they saw the missing Band members. They immediately formed a crowd-surfing theme and passed Rosy, Abe, Henry, and Savage hand-over-hand over their heads through the back door. Paul and Babe were way too heavy for crowd surfing, and they worried that the Marines would follow them if they cut a path through the Groupie’s Back Door Defense—so they hung back and Paul showed the soldiers the best way to fall timbers. “I bet most of you have never seen an ax swung properly,” the Living Legend demonstrated with a mighty swing that dropped a few small trees. “The power of a good swing comes from the hips.”        

It was a big win. The Band left Maggie and I on the porch stage to do our best (which sounded worse) while the American Dreamstates reunited with their friends. After they downed a few glasses of Ben’s brew, they clasped their hands and put their heads together like a huddle—before Uncle Sam broke the circle, slung the strap of his banjo over his shoulder like a warrior, slid a pair of gold rimmed Elvis glasses on, stuck his thumbs in his red, white, and blue suit jacket, smiled big for his Fans, and said, “OK, now I’m ready to rock.”

Thunder doesn’t describe the sounds that rose from the storybankers of Storysold: City when they saw the full American Dreamstates Band swagger back on Stage. “It’s high time we put this war machine in its place,” Henry said almost to himself. Then he raised his long hammer and laid a beat down on his anvil—ping, ping, ping—for Liberty to follow with a funky bass-line. Next to weigh in was Nemo with his haunting organ sounds followed by Abe with his fast fiddle playing, Spirit rocking her electric guitar, Sam strumming his banjo, while Rosy rocked the vocals with her cowbell. In the background, Maggie and I joined Savage in his musical dance parade of romps, hoots, birdcalls, howls, growls, and soul-splitting screams. Badass doesn’t begin to explain the show we put on. I’ve never heard Fans scream as loud as they did when Gertel brought her newest friend, a skinny Marine named Yokum whose uniform was missing an American flag patch, onto the porch with The Band for an unforgettable performance of Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA.

As the Band rocked on, storybankers all over Storysold: City felt the waves of gas, rubber bullets, and clubs subside and roll back like the tide. And for one beautiful moment there, we were winning The New War for The Hearts and Minds of the Old War American Soldiers. Then the shots from Security Chief Moyniham’s automatic rifle rang out. And everyone felt them. The good mood we’d worked so hard to build died in a single beat. Liberty cued the Band to play a rocking version of The Marine Corps Hymn in a frantic attempt to lighten the mood, but the sounds of gunfire and explosions rocking in from Weston’s Corporate Headquarters now dominated the scene.

Davenport grabbed Corporal Smithberg by the radio strapped to his back and ripped the handset from the man’s hands. Then the General marched through the clash of scenes and themes in the meadow, dragging this personal radio operator like a thing in tow behind him. Smithberg was smart enough to put his gas mask on (or at least try to) when the General marched him through the clouds of tear gas around Westonton Headquarters, but not the old school Marine. He breathed the tear gas like it was pure, alpine oxygen.

“What the hell is happening there, Sturgis?” Davenport barked into the handset. “I heard automatic gunfire.”

“He has us pinned down…” Sturgis replied.

The sound of an explosion was heard at Bradley’s Counter. The blast was followed by a young Marine rifleman crying, “Medic! Medic! Dear God, Medic! Come quick! Taylor’s been hit!”   

“I say again,” Davenport yelled over the chaos around him. “What the hell are you doing with my men, Sturgis?”

“I need a medivac, pronto,” Sturgis replied. “I have seven wounded and three KIAs. We’re taking heavy fire.”

“Heavy fire from who?” Davenport barked.

“Based on My Intel,” Sturgis paused, “it’s Weston’s only employee who is still paid in cash, Bradley Moyniham. He’s set up a defensive position behind his Security Counter, and he’s armed to the teeth…with everything from rocket launchers to machine guns. He even has a semi-automatic shotgun that he’s using to repel the grenades my men tried to lob in.”

“Your men!” Davenport screamed. “Let there be no doubt in that bean-counting civilian mind of yours! Those are my men! My men! And you’re killing them, as we speak, with your total fucking lack of leadership!”

Special Agent in Charge Sturgis wasn’t used to taking orders from any man. He had to take a quick self-managed time out before he made eye contact with the General again, and asked, “What do you suggest we do?”

Davenport burned a hole through Sturgis with his eyes. “I want you to do you fucking job!” the General ordered. “Kill that motherfucker! And I mean like now. Before any more of my men die for this bullshit.”

Then the General did an about face and marched back down the trail leading to the White House with his radio operator in tow. No sooner had he reached the open meadow (and the stone aisle beneath his feet) he happened to look out, across The Feld of Battle, and see John Henry freely rocking his drums on the porch of the White House. “What in All That’s Holy?” Davenport said as he yanked Smithberg to his side. “How did that devil get free? I thought we left those, those, fucking traitors to my Blessed Union outside the Compound with Captain Chavez!” Smithberg watched in horror as his commander unsnapped the straps on his Patton-style pearl handled six shooters and began to point his barrels downrange in the direction of The Band’s star drummer.

Anticipating the General’s next move, Smithberg keyed his handset and tried to contact Captain Chavez. “Oscar Three Charlie,” Smithberg called hard and fast. “This is Echo Two Sierra. What is your status over?”

There was no reply from Checkpoint Alpha.

The General holstered his six shooters and ripped the handset from Smithberg’s hands. “Chavez!” he barked at the handset. “I know you can hear me, goddamn you! I thought I gave you a direct order to secure the perimeter and keep the Bad Guys out of my holy fucking Landing Zone?”

On the other side of Center Stage, Private Buxman was holding the radio in his lap like a puppy. He heard all the squawking, but he didn’t know how to reply. Captain Chavez was, at present, slumped down on the side of the tunnel beside him, watching a circus of new war writers—including a lion and an old grizzly bear—stroll through Checkpoint Alpha like they owned it. Buxman was clearly not happy with his commander’s decisions. “Sir!” he kept on saying to his Captain. “General Davenport’s on the horn!”

Wood took a long look at his Captain. Then he took a long look in the wandering eyes of his fellow Marines, and he decided it was time to act. Wood grabbed the handset from Buxman, keyed it, and said, “General Davenport, sir. This is Sergeant Wood speaking. Our position has been overrun.”

“Why, goddamn it?” Davenport barked. “What happened?”

Wood took a deep breath and said, “Captain Chavez ordered us to stand down and let The Enemy through our defensive perimeter.”

“Say again? I don’t think I heard that right…”   

“Yes, sir,” Wood said solemnly. “The Captain let The Enemy through because they aimed their cameras at him and he couldn’t stomach the thought of his family watching him shoot Honest Abe Lincoln.”

There was a pause. Then the General asked, “What about you? Do you have a stomach problem too?”

“No sir!” Wood replied with gusto.

“Are you prepared to gun down Mother fucking Teresa if you need to, to defend my precious fucking perimeter Sergeant Wood?”

“Yes sir!” he replied without hesitation.

“Outstanding,” Davenport said through gritted teeth. “Then you’re in charge. Tell Chavez to report to me, pronto. And I shit you not, if I see or hear about another Terrorist beat-bopping through your position I will make it my fucking mission in life to see that you and all your men spend the rest of your lives doing art therapy with a prison therapist. Is that clear?”

Davenport didn’t wait for Wood’s reply. He tossed the handset back at his Radioman. Before the General had a moment to reorient himself to The Action, the radio squawked again. “What now?” he gritted his teeth again like he was Clint Eastwood staring down three shooters in a town square.

Smithberg listened to the Marine at the other end of his radio, then he turned to Davenport. “Sir,” Smithberg began. “We have a problem.”

“Well, no fucking shit!” he shot back. “I can see that!”

“Apparently…” Smithberg fumbled his words.

“Sound off Marine! What’s the problem?”

“There’s an angry dinosaur trying to free the Officiant.”

“That drunken windbag should have been escorted to the cruise ships an hour ago!” he barked. “What is he still doing in here?”

“The security detail waited until their truck was full…as the Sergeant Major ordered…then the truck tried to leave the Compound…”

“Spit it out, soldier. What happened next?”

“The truck transporting the Ben Franklin lookalike was attacked by a large football team of…uh…pot-smoking nudists…”   

Davenport didn’t react. All he asked was, “Where?”

Corporal Smithberg pointed to one of the high rising gas clouds along the Gnome Road. Without a word, Davenport drew a pearl-handed pistol from its holster and marched—with his radioman in his other hand—like a man possessed in the direction of his Sergeant Major’s security detail.

When the General arrived In Scene the Man in Charge couldn’t believe what he saw. Adom the Butcher, Nancy the Meat Smoker, and the other sixty or so members of The Naked Brigade were playing a rough game of fully contact, naked football on the Gnome Road. Their game had been effectively blocking the truck full of “detainees” from rolling into the tunnel. When Adom saw the General he handed the football to Nancy, walked over to the “sidelines” where he adjusted his shoulder pads and helmet (the only items of clothing Adom was wearing) and he took the biggest hit from his handcrafted “super bowl” I’ve ever seen. Then Adom grinned like a mad man and blew his smoke in the General’s general direction. Davenport turned away from The Naked Brigade with a blush in his face, and tried to focus his attention on the scene at the truck.

Adom stayed calm, but Rompasaurus was not. She was fighting every Marine in her path to the truck where her friends Jellyfish, Neptune, Ben, and the Gnomes sat bound by zip-cuffs. The Land Mob of America had invaded and taken the freedom of her friends, and she was not happy about it.

“Romp-a-romp-a-Rompasaurus Raar!” she roared through the hole in her kraken suit. “Sea-Harvesting with Gentle Water Monsters: Until Land Mob Marines make Monsters Mad—and Monsters Snap, Go Blank in a Fit of Madness, and then Romp-a-Stomp and Smash Marines!” And that’s exactly what the Water Monster was doing—punching, kicking, twirling, and smashing every Land Mob Marine within reach of her rubber claws. And it seemed that, with a lot of help from Puff and Lava Monster, the Salty Seafaring Kraken was winning…

Patricia and Juan, on the other hand, were still trying to win the new war to calm the Rompasaurus down. “I’m sorry Rompa attacked you, Dude,” Juan said as he helped Sergeant Major Clark to his feet. “Our Monster friend is having an allergic reaction to some bad seafood she ate…”

“Don’t lie to that man,” Patricia scolded as she helped another pride-wounded Marine to his feet. “This stupid story of theirs is making our friend mad. The only way to calm her down is to sing with all our hearts.”

By this time, The Band had already played The Rompasaurus Theme Song twice, Born in the USA, Break on Through by the Door, Gimme Some Lovin’ by the Spencer Davis Group, Know Your Enemy by Rage, and they were bringing the mood down with classic wedding songs like Romeo and Juliet by Dire Straits and Annie’s Song by John Denver.

The Tuna Hunter, the Surgical Ninja, and the truckload of new war writers were singing with all their hearts, like a prayer, in the hope it would calm Rompasaurus down. “Don’t you dare pretend you don’t know the words of this song,” Jellyfish prompted the Marines. “Join in!” Patricia didn’t know the words, but she hummed along with her friends anyway.

Davenport heard what Jellyfish said, and he heard their singing, and he heard his prisoners doing their best to calm the Kraken, but he was not able to listen. The sight of a Monster tossing his men from his truck, naked football stars, and a bearded woman in a bearskin bikini running around freeing all his prized prisoners was too much inappropriate behavior for him to tolerate. The Salty Seafaring Kraken had tossed every Marine from the back of the truck save one, a mammoth Private by the name of Rafferty who’d locked arms with the Monster and was now pinning her back against the cab.

The General took a firm grip on his pearl-handled six shooters and turned to his Sergeant Major. Chesty already had his sidearm cocked by his side. Davenport nodded at his man and said, “Do it.”

“About fucking time,” Chesty said under his breath.

“Rompa-rompa-roar!” Rompasaurus roared and threw Rafferty back through the truck full of prisoners, and then she stomped him to the edge and kicked him to the ground beside Chesty. The old war soldier didn’t hesitate. As soon as his man was clear, the Sergeant Major aimed his sidearm and pulled the trigger. Rompasaurus roared in pain when the bullet struck her shoulder, but it didn’t stop her. She knelt on the edge of the truck beside Jellyfish and tried to cut her friend’s plastic zip cuffs with her real teeth.

Chesty fired again. Rompasaurus roared and fell off the truck, leaving the Monster staring up into the blue sky that was soon eclipsed by the cold eyes of Sergeant Major Clark. When Rafferty stood beside Clark and saw the blood streaming from the eyeholes of the Monster’s rubber kraken suit, he tried not to cry. Rompasaurus wasn’t dead. She was still moving when Chesty stood over her like a wounded horse and pulled his trigger, twice to be sure.

Jellyfish screamed. Then we watched in horror as she threw herself off the truck, legs and arms still bound by cuffs, and inched her way to her friend’s side. Jellyfish threw her arms over the lifeless Monster’s head and held her close to her heart, rocking her gently, as she screamed in pain. Patricia stepped in and used a scalpel to free Jellyfish, who pulled her friend’s mask off and stroked the Gentle Monster’s long, wild, beautiful hair.

A long moment of silence passed—then Jellyfish began to sing The Rompasaurus Theme Song with tears in her eyes and rage in her heart. Rafferty couldn’t stop himself. When he heard his enemies singing their friend’s song he disobeyed the oldest, unspoken order of Man and Marines. He cried.

Davenport heard the song, but he still refused to listen. He ordered his men to stuff “all these Anti-Americans” into the truck. Chesty moved to make the General’s order happen, but Rafferty grabbed his Sergeant my his shoulder and simply shook his head “no.” The other Marines backed the Private’s move and stood fast, refusing to stuff anyone anywhere.

Juan and Patricia didn’t waste any time. They jumped on the truck and freed the Gnomes, Ben, Neptune, and the other new war writers they found in there. Then they lifted Rompasaurus on their shoulders and walked as a theme into Wild Garden. Rafferty and a few of his fellow Marines brought up the rear of the procession, leaving Chesty with a strict order not to follow them. When they were free of the long arms of the General, Jellyfish and Neptune held a gathering in a quiet setting of the Wild Garden Arena that hadn’t been touched by the battle raging around it, and they gave their friend an ending to her story they would never forget. No one at the gathering paid much attention to the presence of a New War Photographer. They were used to seeing Space Cadets exploring new scenes through the glass of their Moon Helmets. But, back in the Gaming Chamber, Yeomatarian was glad the Gamer was there.

She was able to upload the entire funeral scene from the New War Photographer’s shoulder-fired A-eye to The Worldwide Info-Defense Net. A few short beats later, A Monster’s Funeral, went viral with over a million hits from viewers around the world who now knew the nightly news story—The Terror Banking Cult Uprising on the High Seas—had a great many more sides.

The General said nothing to his men when the Monster was slain. The victory was empty as his soul as he turned away and walked back into the high grasses of the meadow. The sounds of Bradley’s grenade launcher followed by the screams of soldiers crying “Medic!” reminded him that he was not winning the battle. And that reminded him of his mission to eliminate the threat, do his sworn duty, and destroy The Storysold Exchange system in its infancy, before it had enough users to challenge The American Way of Life. Davenport knew he had to do something to turn the tide, but what?

It was then that he felt a tug on his pant leg. He looked down and saw a boy standing beside a large dog. The boy was armored in cardboard and he held a shield with the signature image of a roaring mouse on it.

King Andrew knew what the General should do.

My Storybank Account – Scene Fifty Eight,

THE PART WHERE THE BRIDE AND GROOM FIGHT TO KEEP THEIR HOME ALIVE…

In the moments that followed the deaths of Rompasaurus and the Agents and Marines killed by Security Chief Moyniham, our Guests of Honor doubled their efforts to clear Center Stage. The Band and their theme fought valiantly to keep The Rock and Roll Show from breaking up, rocking through the gas clouds, rubber bullets, but the Marines eventually broke through The Mosh Pit Defense to our scene on the other side. They stormed onto the stage porch and began dragging American Dreamstates away in zip-cuffs.

The Band played “bye-bye American Pie” after they hauled off Lady Liberty, and Abe played an angry fiddle solo and did his best to whistle like Savage after they hit him with a Thorazine dart, and Uncle Sam fought the Marines rushing the stage, struggling to sing, “When the Music’s Over…turn out the lights! Music is your only friend, until the end!” after they marched off with his Organist. Uncle Sam never finished that song. The Rock Show broke up and the music died at the White House, but a few of the Dreamstates rallied with an elite throng of Groupies and Fans to form a new rocking theme they called, The Band on the Run, playing their hit-and-run concerts whenever they could find an open set to play that was free of “bummers.” Before they pulled Liberty off the porch kicking and screaming, she made it clear to Maggie and I that she would stuff us in a truck if we abandoned the White House and tried to help them. Before Uncle Sam fled with Rosy and Henry to find their Roadies and form The Band on the Run he told us it was bad luck for the Bride and Groom to show their signatures to their casts before The Ceremony, so we respected our friends’ wishes and continued to make Our Home inside while our cast fought outside to keep The Conflict and its horrors from reaching our front door. How we managed to do anything in that plaster and cardboard box home without losing our freedoms that day was a mystery. It was as if that something grander I’d always wanted to be a part of had finally become real.

My Groom hired Dishmaster Jones to suds-bust the dirties in the sink while Maggie’s Bride incorporated the skills of her Fabulous Food Producer to fill Our Home with pea soup and mouth-watering cheese bread. We worked our theme in silence with our eyed glued to The Action. It hurt my heart to watch the screen, but I couldn’t turn away. I struggled to focus—scraping fried black chunks of cheese off the sheet pans in the sink wasn’t doing it. I needed a shot of victory to help my story make sense again, so I dried my hands and surfed the channels of The Storysold Exchange looking for a win.

I didn’t find one. Instead, we watched a squad of Davenport’s Marines bust through the garage-style door of Buddha’s Nirvana Burgers. The soldiers walked tactically through the Eight Fold Aisles with service rifles pointed ahead looking for targets. I laughed when one of the Marines pushed a button on the Bun Aisle and American Spirit’s signature appeared on the screen with her pet chimpanzee Donald and did their bun-making scene. The Marine laughed along with The Action, but his leader was not amused. He told the Marine to “get back in formation.” I was hoping for another laugh, but neither of us laughed at what happened next. The Marines found Buddha, as he was often, asleep in the back room. When they were not able to wake him from his meditative slumber, they trashed his shop. The Eight Fold Aisles filled with the Fat Man’s groceries crashed down like dominoes on the stage shop floor. When that failed to wake Buddha, the squad leader rolled the grocer on a blanket like a piece of furniture and proceeded to drag him out of his own shop. Buddha screamed when he saw the smoke rising from Center Stage. “Oh I’m so hungry!” he cried when he felt the unenhungerment of his Nirvana Burgers leave him. I tried to scrub the pots again, but it was hard. Buddha refused to move, so the Marines dragged him down all sixteen terraced levels, screaming for unenhungerment.

Maggie switched the channel, hoping Gambler was having better luck with the Saloon-Style Fist Fight he’d been producing with his saloon buddies for sometime now. They’d been starting fistfights in the General’s ranks in order to “rank break” their Chain of Command. The objective of the new war maneuver was to prompt the soldiers to fight Gambler’s cast of seasoned Saloon Fighters “human to human” and make The Fight personal, not professional. The point was, no army could maintain their Chain of Command if all their soldiers began to fight their fights like heroes do. Gambler believed that the key to winning was being the Good Guy, and the good guys always fought fair. When we tuned to his channel, Gambler was in a circle of Saloon Fighters a few feet beyond our yard. His eyes were black and blue and he’d torn his shirt somewhere along the way, but he was still smiling, looking confident about his chances of beating the burly Marine bleeding in the circle with him. Gambler was winning, until the landed a punch that knocked the Marine out cold. Then his luck changed. The Corps of soldiers who had been watching didn’t like that The Fight ended with their buddy being beat by a slick-talking dude who wore a man brooch. They outnumbered Gambler’s theme of Saloon Fighters five to one, and this time they were all in. What began as a fair fight was now a gang-style beating, which ended when the Marines threw our friend’s limp body in a truck.

“What the hell are we doing in here, playing house?” I screamed and punched the wall. “Our friends are getting killed out there!”   

“We’re defending Our Home,” Maggie replied.

“No,” I said as I walked toward the door. “We’re not.”

“We are,” Maggie said as she sprinkled cheese on her freshest tray of mostly demon-free bread. “But not if you walk out that door.”

“What if ‘Our Honored Guests’ never get to that part in Our Wedding Story where we’re able to cue The Ceremony?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “I have to believe it will happen.”   

I saw Maggie in that moment, sliding her Scrumptious Cheese Bread trays into the oven, still stubbornly refusing to surrender. “Oh wow,” I said, crossing the line back to our union. “I Get It…I really do.”

“What do you get?” Maggie asked, as I wrapped my arms around her waist and kissed the sweat on the back of her neck.

“I get you,” I smiled.

“No,” she smiled. “We both do.”

We were about to kiss…when we heard the General. “Former Agent Jeff Jackson!” he boomed through a bullhorn. “You have to the count of ten to come out with your hands up!” He was standing beside Agent Oates.

“Who’s Jeff Jackson?” Maggie asked, pulling away.

“Don’t you remember?” I laughed nervously, suddenly afraid. “Jeff is my old employable name…the one I had before I met you…”

“Oh,” she said, trying to remember. “I knew that, right…?”

“Ten, nine, eight…” Davenport began his countdown.

I kissed Maggie, then I asked, “Should we do as the Man says?”

“Yes, but…” Maggie said as she lifted her gown over her head. “We should ‘come out with our hands up’ like this…”

Maggie tossed her gown aside, stripped off her socks and underwear, and held her hands high like she’d just robbed a bank. I liked what I saw, so I tossed off my hat and tuxedo and joined her naked in theme. Then we stood in the kitchen with our hands held high, laughing hysterically.

“…one…zero!” the General’s voice boomed through the wall. “This is your last chance, Jackson. Acknowledge your victimhood and join your friends on the transport ships. Come out with your hands held high!”

“Shall we?’ Maggie laughed and stepped towards the door.

“I’m not sure this is a good idea,” I said, taking Maggie by the hand gently. “I know those Assholes out there…I’m one of them…”

“They wouldn’t gun down a couple of naked lovers, would they?”

“They might,” I replied thoughtfully. “There’s nothing an Agent hates more than paperwork, and there’s less of that if we die tragically.”

“Fuck those guys,” Maggie said as she pulled our bodies closer. “I’m tried of worrying about how they think we should run Our Home.”

“You know…you’re right,” I said, between our kisses. “As long as we own the land beneath our feet, this will be Our Home! So let them come!”

Maggie brushed her lips against mine, and said—“Me first.”

And so began the fortification of our more perfect union on the floor of our kitchen. For a moment there, we forgot about the cheese bread in the oven and the squad of heavily armed Agents standing on our porch. The leader of the squad was Agent Oates, the same Agent who briefed me on The Mission when I was going to meet Maggie, and she hadn’t forgotten about us. “Go, go, go, go,” we heard Oates give the order a beat before we heard the front door bust open. “Last warning! Acknowledge your victimhood now, Jackson, or we will be forced to charge you…” Oates stopped in mid sentence when he saw that we were busy, making sweet love with The Lights on in Our Home.

“Oh Jeff,” she said, shaking her head. “I told you no! Don’t fall in love with your official US Government Asset!”

“Unbelievable,” said the next Agent. “This city is fucking nuts.”

The squad retreated back into the meadow, where Oates reported to her Commander. “We have a situation here,” he reported. “The targets are uh, busy…making love…without their clothes on…”

The General cast a cold stare at the Agents of the FBI. Chesty knew what that meant. He took his cue and rounded up his Marines. Then he and his Marines walked by the Agents and said, “What’s wrong guys, don’t you want to arrest your poker buddy? God, I hate you fucking civilians.”

Chesty laughed—and then he marched his squad, guns up, across the porch, through our door, across the living room, and into the kitchen where he expected to find our governing bodies passing commerce across our personal state lines. Instead, he found a tray of slightly burned cheese bread waiting for him on the counter of Our Home, fresh from the oven.

My Storybank Account – Scene Fifty Nine,

THE PART WHERE THE BRIDE, GROOM, AND FATHER OF THE BRIDE SIT AND WATCH THE NEW WAR WRITERS FIGHT TO MAKE OUR WEDDING STORY HAPPEN…

It never occurred to either of us that the American Dreamstates who built the White House built it where they built it for a reason. Surprise doesn’t begin to describe the way we felt when our kitchen floor suddenly sprang to life and the Father of the Bride appeared from the trap door at the top of his Super Massive Vault. “Ta-da,” Weston announced when he popped through the floor like a creepy Jack-in-a-box. “Oh, I see,” was what he said next. “I can return in a few moments if you wish?”

Naturally, we were glad to see him. 

After we grabbed our costumes and hustled down the ladder into the dim-lit man cave, Chester locked the door to his Vault behind us.

“There’s something different about his place,” Maggie said as we put our costumes back on. “I can’t quite put my finger on it…”

I looked around, still fumbling with my tuxedo. Weston was wearing his usual costume. His plush man cave—couch, recliner, mini-fridge, shelves lined with food widgets, and big screen Storysold: TV—were set like I’d seen them before. That wasn’t it. Then I looked again.

“Oh shit!” I exclaimed. “Your Vault’s empty!”

“So it is,” Weston nodded sadly at all the empty space. “Can I get you a bottled water, or a snack perhaps? You must be famished.”

We shook our heads “no.” Weston grabbled a bottled water and a bag of chips from his stash. Then he kicked his feet up in his recliner and used his remote control to turn his big screen Storysold: TV ON. Maggie stood behind the couch, looking a little unsure of her Father’s cozy cave scene.

“What’s wrong, Daughter?” Weston asked. “Today’s your wedding day. Aren’t you supposed to be happy?”

“How can I be happy? My friends are dying up there.”   

He winked like he’d tossed me a football. “What changed?” he asked almost curiously. “You seemed like you were in a good mood before I rushed in and saved you from that scene you were about to do with that Sergeant they call Chesty. That guy’s the prize all right. The one at the bottom of the box you can’t identify and toss out when you do. 100% pure crackerjack.”   

Maggie didn’t reply. She sat on the couch, put her hands in her head, and she began to cry. I sat next to her, wanting to comfort her—but not really knowing how. I thought about Rompasaurus and I cried too.

“Great!” Weston thundered. “All hope is lost.”

Weston popped his chips (never more than one chip at a time) into his mouth as he surfed the channels of the new war writers fighting the battle for Our Wedding Story above us like he was searching for something good to watch on mainland TV. I reached across his lap, dug my hand in his bag of chips, stuffed a handful of salty grease into my mouth, and then I said, “Correct me if I’m missing something here…”

“Don’t worry,” Weston said. “I will…” Then he stood and threw the half-eaten bag of chips in the trash and opened a new one. “For one,” he said as he sat back down. “Don’t ever do that again.”

Once again, the Great Capitalist found a way to do That Thing he did so well. He made me feel like I owed him; like I was a walking, talking liability that he had benevolently decided to accept as his own. “What I want to know is,” I said, feeling the anger welling up. “How you can sit here, munching your chips in this dim cave, when we’re losing the war up there?”

“Wasn’t that what you recently asked your Bride to Be?”

“That’s not…that’s different,” I stammered. “You don’t seem to care how Our Wedding Story ends…like it’s all the same to you.”

The President of Westonton Corporation popped a chip in his mouth. “I care,” Weston said as he cracked his water bottle open. “In fact, I’m greatly heartened my that love scene you did. The way you threw your young flesh in The Breach of Impending Doom and all—makes me feel much better about your chances of living happily ever after like Ozzie and Harriet.”

“Happily ever after?” Maggie chewed his words like raw meat.    

“Yes,” he replied and tuned to King Andrew’s channel. “Now will you please stop talking and watch the TV screen? You need to see this. Andrew has charged my Headquarters no fewer than a hundred and fifty-nine times. As you know, he has never won. My Security Chief has either subdued him with his characters Charlie Horse, Commander Night-Night, or Knuckles McRibbins, or my Chief’s newest weapon—Thorazine—which the Good General is using on my star employees as we speak.” Weston paused to make sure we were paying attention. “I’m not sure how the boy did it, but he has convinced Davenport to let him to lead the Vault Breakers’ next charge at the Counter, granting Andrew another shot at taking his Old Nemesis out…”    

Weston was right. We did need to watch this…

King Andrew did his usual weapon’s check. “Rotten fruit bombs, check,” he said as the Marines watched in disbelief. “Roaring Mouse Shield of Invincibility, check…Whacker Sword the Great Enforcer of ungoverned kingdoms, check…Secret Weapon that was given to me by the ungoverned kingdom of one ‘General,’ check…Squire my Faithful Squire, check.” The boy then faced the General and his Marines and gave them a hard look, mounted Squire, and the friends trotted into the clearing and stood before the Security Counter that was bathed in more blood than an old god’s altar.

“Watch,” Weston said again with a grin. “This will be good.”

King Andrew lifted the visor of his cardboard helmet, cleared his throat, and announced, “I, King Andrew, sovereign ruler of My Kingdom and no other…call my old adversary, Bradley, to rule his kingdom like a true King of Camelot and face me, man to boy, in single combat for the right to pass to the great beyond of Weston’s Headquarters!”   

Bradley had been fighting the old war soldiers for some time and he had taken a number of hits. The right side of his body was bleeding from skull to toe from a grenade that he hadn’t been able blast in the air before it landed near him. “What are you doing here, boy?” Bradley screamed over his Security Counter. “Shouldn’t you be back in Camelot…helping your mother polish her mirror?” The Chief laughed like he’d said something funny, until he began to cough up blood. Andrew was the only one In Scene who got the joke.

But he didn’t laugh. He smirked a little, and cried, “Charge!” Then he began to pummel Bradley with rotten fruit bombs, as usual. When he’d tossed his last rotten fruit bomb—Andrew dismounted his faithful Squire, raised Whacker Sword the Great Enforcer, and walked bravely towards the Security Counter. The audience of Marines held their breath as the King cried, “Out with you Villain! You are vanquished! Surrender your ungoverned kingdom, or face the wrath of my Whacker Sword!”

“Get the hell out of here, Little Buddy!” Bradley whispered from behind his Security Counter. “These boys mean business.”

Andrew didn’t blink an eye. “Here me now, Villain!” he sounded off for the benefit of their audience. “You have chosen to live without honor and rule the kingdoms of others before yourself. For that you will be shown no mercy from King Andrew of Camelot. Charge!”

Then we watched in disbelief as the King charged the Counter and began to whack Bradley with the Great Enforcer without mercy.

“Stop damn it!” Bradley screamed. “I swear, those War Dogs out there will kill us both if you don’t stop now!”

Andrew didn’t relent. He kept whacking with all his might.

“OK!” Bradley screamed again. “You asked for it!”

Before Bradley could bust out Knuckles McRibbins, King Andrew pulled a syringe loaded with Thorazine from his satchel and stuck it in the arm of his Old Nemesis. “Be calm and sleep,” Andrew spoke softly into Bradley’s ear. “Do what you do best. Be ungoverned.”

“I’m not ungoverned,” Bradley chuckled with a big smile as his mind began to drift away. “You’re ungoverned…”

“Be the kind man I know you are, and allow me to care for you for once,” Andrew whispered. “I swear you will live through this, friend.”

Then the Security Chief let go, and the Marines rushed in. As they did Medicine Man, Doctor Jekyll, and Grand Rachna rushed in too. They quickly cornered the market on Bradley’s wounds before any of the Americans could use their strange impersonal sciences on him, while the Men in Charge of the Men there patted King Andrew on the back like teachers do their pupils. I was weird to see how the soldiers reacted to Grand Rachna. Her authenticity in the scene was not questioned. They saw, at a glance, that she was rich.

To our surprise, Weston stood and cheered like Andrew and Rachna had scored the winning touchdown. He even gave me a big high five.

“How did you know Andrew would win?” Maggie asked her Father.

Weston laughed and replied, “Because I’m the President and CEO of Westonton Corporation. It’s my job to be a step ahead of the rest, and know all my super stars, maybe better than they know themselves.”

That line had Maggie reaching for the chips too. She dug her hand in Chester’s bag and pulled out one, perfectly unbroken potato chip. I felt insulted when he didn’t throw his bag out and replace it with a fresh, new one.

“So, what’s going to happen next?” she asked Weston curiosity.

Naturally, he had an answer. He tuned to Wilderness Security Guide’s channel and said, “Now that our Guests of Honor have showed themselves to have no honor, Our Side of The Family will fight the good fight to break the land-body perimeter the General has drawn around Center Stage.”

Maggie read her Father, once again, as if for the first time. Then she said in a whisper, “It almost seems like you’re with us…”

Weston leaned forward in his recliner, faced his Long Lost Daughter, and said, “Don’t you see, I’ve cared all along? I sold you storybank accounts for less than the going rate. I allowed Wylie to continue to play James Bond after he reveled that he was working for a hostile government that wanted, in every way, to put my corporation out of business. I even backed my Lover’s Captain Chaos plan for supporting your wedding story. Do we need to do that tired old—‘Oh Horrible Father, why don’t you care?’—scene again, for all the saps? I couldn’t care more about winning today if I tried.”

“Yes,” Maggie said plain as day. “I want you to do it again.”

“Do what again?” Weston asked like he’d lost his lines.

“I want you, Oh Horrible Father, to tell me why you ran away to built this beautiful city, all by yourself, without my help…”

“You were so small…and fragile…” Weston began. Then he stopped and stared, misty-eyed into his empty Vault, breathing heavily, trying to regain his stature. “This city is beautiful, isn’t it?” he said finally.   

“Yes,” Maggie replied. “I’ve never loved anything more.”

“Good,” Weston said with pained eyes. “Then be happy in your love for our city and close your eyes while I watch this next scene.”     

“Close my eyes?” Maggie asked. “Why?”

“Because it will break your heart.”     

My Storybank Account – Scene Sixty,

THE PART WHERE THE NEW PIONEERS AND COWBOY BETTY MAKE HAMBURGERS OUT OF MR. PERIMETER…

Guide and Fritzee were standing in front of the Bridge of Support that The Band had built, with their backs to Checkpoint Alpha, facing the dozens of shoulder-fired A-eyes Winner and the New War Photographers were aiming at them. Wooden microphone in hand, Guide was reporting The Earth Show News as usual, but this time she was reporting The Action for the benefit of the super massive audience they’d gained thanks to Winner’s Worldwide Info-defense Net. “This is The Moment of Truth we’ve dreaded since Storysold: City set sail for a new horizon,” Guide reported with a heavy heart. “The General, wielding all the ghastly powers of your civilization, has stormed in with his life tamers and forced us from the light of Our Wedding Story.” Guide paused to watch The Action. Behind her, the battle-weary members of The Band on the Run were now repelling to safety, outside Center Stage, on Rosy’s handcrafted rope. In the sky above them, a swarm of helicopters were descending on the meadow they were  now calling The Landing Zone. “As you can see,” Guide continued, “aside from Adom and a few surviving members of The Naked Brigade, the General and his bulldog Sergeant Major have successfully cut our stories from Center Stage in preparation of the scene where they plan to blow the door off Weston’s Vault and haul his collection of antiquated pressed and dyed fibers into the sky like lazy, plundering eagles.” Fritzee barked, as if to punctuate her words. “If that news wasn’t bad enough for you, no one has seen or heard from our Bride and Groom since Liberty was cuffed and hauled from the White House.”

Guide was about to say more, but she stopped short when she saw a big green truck roll through Checkpoint Alpha from Center Stage. No sooner had it crossed the Bridge of Support, than Buddha ripped through the side of the truck. Somehow, even with his hands still zip-cuffed, he managed to hit the ground running for the freedom of his friends like a spring bear in search of wild berries. It only took a slight pull of Sergeant Wood’s rifle to end Buddha’s dreams of ever staging Nirvana Burgers again.

I felt horror, rage, sorrow, and then numbness, all at once. I turned my head, afraid to watch the screen, until Maggie put her hands in mine and held me closer. In the recliner beside us, Weston finished his second bottle of Fizzy Pop, belched, and pointed at the screen. “Here’s my boys,” he beamed with pride. “I bet you didn’t know they make furniture too?”

“Well yes,” I lied, yet again. “I remember they said something about making furniture from the offerings of their wilderness friends.”

Chester replied with a half smile, eyes still glued to his screen.

The Brothers Grim arrived In Scene packing one of their signature elk-skull couches. Stretched out on the couch—like a customer—was Gertel the Governing General of The Needle. The Brothers set their couch down in front of Guide. Gertel jumped up and put her signature performance within range of the nearest shoulder-fired A-eye she saw. Then she began to tell the “folks back home” how Olaf and Jarl had saved her, and a full truckload of other new war writers, from certain employment. She told her war story passionately like her heart was still pumping The Action. She used lots of hand gestures, and she had an odd way of adjusting her war bra every time she said Jarl’s name.

Other new war writers (storybankers who hadn’t fled the city) began to rally and join The Action at the Bridge of Support too, including Patricia and Juan. After the battle-hardened theme arrived on set and delivered their quick introductions to the New War Photographers, Guide greeted the youths. “In your opinion, Patricia, as a Ninja of Rachna’s Working Healthcare System,” Guide held her wooden prop out, “why are so many war writers gathering here at the Hammer Swinger’s Bridge of Support? Especially now, when the future of Our Wedding Story looks so grim?”

“Don’t you know?” Patricia replied, looking surprised.

“No,” Guide said, wondering what news she might have missed.

“Cowboy Betty’s coming,” she said hopefully, “and she’s bringing the entire cast of The Wedding Reception with her.”

“And how, exactly, does my old antagonist Betty plan to produce a wedding reception…without a wedding show?”

Patricia was about to reply, when they heard, “Yippee, yip, yahoo!”

They looked out, and saw Cowboy Betty riding in, like a storm, on the first cow she raised since The Bio-Friendly Range War on Cowboy Betty. Behind her trailed a small herd of cattle and a long wagon train of New Pioneers.

“Hey ya!” Cowboy hollered, pulling her reins when she reached their Bridge of Support. “What’re you suckers waiting for? Fucking Superman? We have a wedding in there that needs attending to!”

Half Pint sauntered In Scene beside Betty. “I hope you’re hungry!” she called across to the soldiers. “Because we brought plenty of food!”

“Know that!” Betty hollered and gave Half Pint a high five.

The Pioneers gathered around as the cattle mooed. Half Pint wasn’t fooling; they had plenty of food. They had spent the last week cooking, rustling up tasty fixings, and preparing for The Wedding Reception.

Betty turned to Half Pint. “The Band hasn’t played anything in way too long! And all I smell is tear gas! If we don’t hit Center Stage now—and I mean pronto—there won’t be no joyful union for us to celebrate!” Half Pint nodded her agreement while her theme of New Market Pioneers rallied around them and their cows. The air smelled of fresh, steamed vegetables.

Guide liked The Story she saw, but she still wasn’t sold on any plot with Betty’s signature on it. After she fought through the gathering of Pioneers and new war writers around the Cowboy, Guide aimed her wooden prop at her old antagonist, and asked, “So, Betty! All of the world’s tame civilization wants to know…what’s your action plan here? Do you truly believe the super soldiers of Checkpoint Alpha will kowtow to anything less than an atom bomb?’

Betty nodded at Guide like she’d said nothing, clearly betraying some old wounds still left from their very personal war. “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about what I’m going do today, Guide,” Betty shot back. “Run off and report The News. That’s what you do best.”

Guide’s face melted with realization. She dropped her wooden prop and held her hands to Betty’s thigh. “Don’t do this,” Guide said. “I’ve been tracking these Assholes. It’s not going to work.”

The Cowboy’s reply was a Cowboy’s reply. She pulled out the bottle of whiskey she’d been saving for The Wedding Reception; broke it open, and Betty tipped it back. Then she passed her whiskey to Half Pint with a sadness in her voice like she knew what had to happen next…

“Pass it around The Horn,” Betty said, passing the bottle.    

The Horn was Betty’s crack defense theme that included Stumpy, Dan, Davy, Half Pint, and Patricia, who was standing by as a Special Guest Star in case someone got hurt. When the bottle was empty, Betty whooped it up, and hollered, “Ya all ready to go to The Wedding?”

Her cast cheered and whooped it up, and most of the new war writers gathered there whooped it up too. Guide and the Brothers Grim did not cheer. They looked like they were watching Custer’s Last Stand in action.

“Ya!” Betty cried and dug in her spurs. The cow under her let out a low groan and lumbered towards the Bridge of Support. Half Pint, Davy, and Dan took their positions at the rear of the small herd while the Surgical Ninja followed Stumpy through a wild park to the edge of the canal. Once they were far enough upstream, where the Marines of Checkpoint Alpha couldn’t see them, the burly one-armed man stripped down to his cut-offs, wrapped a bright pink bandana around his head, and slipped silently into the canal. A short beat later, Patricia threw her healer bag full of flesh-slicers, grabbers, stitchers, bandages, and little plastic bandage aids over her shoulders, put her Surgical Ninja mask on, and joined Stumpy in the salty water flowing through the canalway.    

“Halt!” Sergeant Wood ordered when he saw Betty and her cow trot across the bridge. “You are not authorized to go into the Compound! Follow the green smoke to the cruise liners, and you will not be harmed!”

“I’m Cowboy Betty!” she hollered as she wound the reins around her hands. “For the first time in my life, I’m gonna to do what I was born to do! So fuck you! This Cowboy’s gonna drive our cows to market.”

There was no reply from Checkpoint Alpha.

“No! Don’t go!” Jarl cried out suddenly, rushing through the herd of cows to Betty. “Don’t go! Those are professional soldiers, bound to The Orders of their masters! They’re slaves! They know no honor!”

Dan Boone and Half Pint caught up with him and struggled to hold the Uplander back. “Listen,” Dan explained calmly. “We know all that…but we have to give those green savages a fighting chance to do right.”

“Stop!” Wood cried again. “Or I’ll shoot!” 

“Fire at will, Boss!” Betty hollered back. “We need a few good old boys, like you, to help us slaughter our cows! So let’s get cracking, this cow won’t magically turn itself into our barbecuing beef on its own.” Then Cowboy Betty winked at Stumpy, who was now floating out of sight, up to his ears in saltwater, a hundred feet or so from the bridge. When he saw Betty’s signal he pulled himself on shore, quiet as a crocodile, and took his position on the ledge a few steps from the opening of the tunnel. He stood, back against the outer wall of Center Stage, and winked back at the Cowboy.   

“Ya, cow!” Betty hollered. “Ya!”

The cow groaned and trotted over the bridge where the Marines were guarding the invisible line they’d drawn in the world. Half Pint, Dan, and Davy whooped it up, and began to herd the rest of the cows onto the bridge behind Betty. Sergeant Wood’s eyes grew wide with fear when saw the herd of cows advancing on his position. “Hold your positions Marines!” Wood’s ordered his men. “They’re bluffing! The cows won’t force their way through…”

He might have been right if it wasn’t for Stumpy.

“Ya!” the Cowboy said again, as Stumpy stepped into the scene and gave her cow a sharp slap on the ass. “Ya cow! Ya!” he yelled. “Round em’ up, and move em’ out!” In the chaos, the cows began to run as they would run into a slaughter chute. And the soldiers in pressed green uniforms ran too. Corporal Northup, Private Buxman, and their buddies lowered their rifles and scattered to the sides of the tunnel. Before Sergeant Wood could react half the herd was already through his checkpoint, mooing loudly in the tunnel.

It didn’t take long for the Sergeant to regain his composure. He aimed his M-16A2 service rifle at the cow nearest to him—and shouted, “Shoot the cows!” He ordered, and then he pulled his trigger and put the cow down. “Kill them all,” he yelled at his men, who were still standing frozen on the sidelines of The Action. It didn’t take much to trigger The Fear. In seconds, all the Marines were firing their weapons wildly into the tunnel.

The Marines emptied their magazines and clipped in new ones, filling the tunnel that was once full of cows with meat. Betty hollered, “Ya!” and felt the legs of her cow buckle under her. Betty dropped to the floor and rolled to the side of the tunnel. Gunfire echoed from every direction. Betty watched the rifles flash thunder and light from their muzzles like she was watching kids light off rockets on The 4^th of July. She turned away from the gunfire, and faced the bright lights of Center Stage. She wasn’t about to surrender now, when victory was so near. The Cowboy stood with pride, took hold of one of the last cows still standing, swung up on its back, and dug in her spurs.

She faced the Stage and whopped, “Yippee, yip, yahoo!”    

That was when the bullets the old war soldiers were firing wildly into the tunnel cut Betty down like the rest of the cattle.

The adrenaline was flowing. Sergeant Wood gave his men the order to ceasefire after he realized that nothing was moving in the tunnel. Silence filled the scene. Young Private Buxman walked slowly to where Betty lay, and knelt beside her. There was a long pause as he checked her pulse.

“Oh my God, Sergeant,” he said. “She’s dead.”

“Of course she’s dead!” Stumpy screamed. “You shot her!”

“Sir,” Wood spoke to Stumpy diplomatically, holding his hand up to block him and the stream of New War Photographers and Pioneers gathering along the edge of their perimeter. “We warned her,” Wood said as Winner aimed his shoulder-fired A-eye at his face. “She disobeyed my order to halt and rode into the firefight…and got caught in the crossfire.”

“Into The Firefight?” Stumpy cried in pain.

“Who were you fighting?” Winner called out. “The cows?”

Back in Winner’s Gaming Chamber, Yeomatarian was searching The Info-defense Net for “direct hits” from the old war soldiers’ friends and family members. “Bingo!” she cheered, and beamed the information to the Remote Projectavision hooked to Winner’s action suit.

Winner saw the incoming message and read it. “You’re not going to like this, Mr. Jeremy Wood,” he stated dramatically. “Your High School Math Teacher, a Mr. Ronald Dennett has cast an on-line vote against your actions here. He writes…” Then Winner read Ronald’s heartfelt letter about the many horrible things he did for America during its first war with Iraq.

Winner read, but Wood was not listening. He had already radioed the General for support, and was now zip-cuffing Stumpy and barking at his men. “I want this checkpoint secure now,” Wood ordered and pushed Stumpy down against the wall. “Corporal Northup, I want your team of Marines to confiscate the cameras of anyone who isn’t a registered Member of The Press, starting with Captain Picard over there!” He aimed a finger at the Gamemaster. “Do it now, Corporal, before I put my boot up your ass!”

As Wood and his Marines struggled to hold the line on Checkpoint Alpha at the Bridge of Support, Patricia was still floating under it with one arm clinging to the shore. With the other she buried her sobs in the mask she’d long since taken off. She’d heard everything—and the youth born in Storysold: City —without cop shows, horror films, or action flicks that normalized the act of killing humans—wanted to climb ashore and be In Scene with her friends, but she was too terrified to produce The Action.

A short distance away, Guide was standing toe-to-toe with Olaf the Sharpeyed. They’d been arguing about what they should do next, but Olaf was done talking now. He brushed by his old friend, walked to the elk-skull couch, pulled a cushion up, and ripped it open. The couch was meant to be a wedding gift, but we could see that they hadn’t packed it all that way just because they liked us. Hidden inside were a pair of knives and a bone saw wrapped in a blanket that Olaf tied across his chest like a bandoleer.

Jarl didn’t say a word. He followed his older Brother. They started to walk away from the gathering at the bridge in the same direction Stumpy and Patricia took to sneak into the canalway. Guide crossed her arms and stood in their path. Fritzee growled, and Jarl growled back. “I love you guys,” Guide said like they were tearing her heart out. “I can’t let you go in there.”

“We’ll be OK,” Olaf grinned. “The Winds are with us.”

Jarl didn’t look as confident. “Maybe we should assault them with a hoard of Vonderkraut instead?” he suggested.

“We’re Hunters first,” Olaf asserted. “Besides, I will not stand by and let the scene Betty began pass without a proper ending.”

Jarl read his Brother’s face and knew he was serious. “Let’s go then,” Jarl said, and they brushed by their friend again.

They hadn’t walked more than a few steps before Wilderness Security Guide tackled Olaf from behind—Catch and Release Style—like she’d tackled his Brother many times before, long ago, when Jarl the Uplander was more of a threat to the wilderness security of Storysold: City.

She wasn’t playing, and neither was Olaf. The scene started to turn ugly when Jarl stepped in, pinned Guide to the earth, and said, “I love you too. I am better, because of you. But my Brother is right. We have to write this scene, or Cowboy Betty’s end will be in vain.”

Then Guide watched the Brothers Grim fade into the canalway. The Action was more than she could handle. Guide felt The Fear grow, but she said nothing to the new war writers around her. She ran as fast as she could in the direction of the only theme of storybankers she knew could help.

My Storybank Account – Scene Sixty One,

THE PART WHERE THE BRIDE GIVES HER FATHER AWAY AND THE BEST MAN SAVES THE WEDDING FROM DOOM…

In the moments that followed the King’s dramatic breach of Bradley’s Security Counter, Andrew ushered the Vault Breakers through the revolving door of Westonton Corporate Headquarters. While they walked to the elevator, King Andrew did what he did best—his job. He demanded tribute from the “ungoverned kingdom of Sturgis” and called the Vault Breakers to “behave honorably” like Guests of Honor do in wedding stories around the world. That didn’t go over well with the Man in Charge. He rewarded Andrew’s help with a pair of zip-cuffs and a thick strip of tape to silence his kingdom. Sturgis left the boy in the lobby, and then he and his Vault Breakers used the code I gave them to take the elevator down to the underwater passageway leading to the Super Massive Vault. What Sturgis didn’t know (and soon learned) was that Weston hadn’t changed the code to all his Vault doors, except two: the code to the trap door and the last door leading into the Vault. I asked Weston why. All he said was, “I didn’t want our guests to feel too welcomed.”

Moments later, we heard the whirring sounds of the Vault Breakers’ giant techy drill coming from the underwater passageway. Safe on the other side of the last door, Chester was still munching chips while we watched the big screen in horror: we’d just watched Buddha and Cowboy Betty die, and Winner and his theme of New War Photographers were doing their best to use The Info-defense Net to soften Sergeant Wood and the other Marines of Checkpoint Alpha up. Seemingly unmoved by The Action, Chester aimed his remote at the screen and tuned to Sister Lei’s channel…

The Good Nun was standing on the crowded deck of New Ark IV with the First Congregational Army of Christ. The Christian Soldiers had on their full Armor of God. Greeters had on their Sunday Best. Demon Fighters were armed to the hilt with their nearly demon-free weapons of choice, and the Spiritual Warriors stood ready to battle evil spirits with the apple pies, puppies, lemonade, squirt guns, balloons, and joke books in their hands. Suddenly Guide and Fritzee ran onto the boardwalk below the towering supertanker.   

“What are you waiting for?” Guide shouted as she pounded the side of the Ark with her fists. “We’re dying out here. We need your help!”

Sister Lei tucked God’s Holy Script under her arm and she walked to the edge of the New Ark, where she peered down at Guide and replied, “We’re waiting for God to speak to our hearts, and He’s not in a hurry.”   

Guide was exhausted and The Fear had found its way into her heart. “While you’re waiting for God to speak,” she screamed in a rage, “two friends of mine named Jarl the Uplander and Olaf the Sharpeyed are preparing to rank-break the ‘demon’ Mr. Perimeter on their own!”

“We know of the Barbarian Hunters,” Sister Lei spoke. “Your friend Jarl wooed the heart of Ruth the Milkmaid of Canaan, if I remember. Then he beat Centurion, very badly, when the Christian Soldier tried to save Ruth from a life of barbarism by spiriting Jarl with some marriage counsel…”

Guide sort of winced up at Sister Lei, and asked, “If I remember right Ruth and Centurion got hitched soon after Jarl left her story…?”

“Yes,” Sister Lei called back down. “They’re standing here with us today with a host of nearly demon-free children.”

“Nearly…? Were they ‘spirited’ with Ruth’s temper too?”

Lei laughed, then said, “Wait there, friend. I’m going to find out how God feels about Barbarian Hunters.”

The Good Nun vanished into The Heart of the First Congregational Army, leaving Guide alone to wait and worry. Guide reached down to her half-wild friend and rubbed him behind the ears. “They’re not going for it,” she said sadly. “I should’ve told them a sad story about kids caught in poverty stricken stories, or some bullshit about saving the souls of godless savages.”

Fritzee barked agreeably and wagged his tail.

“No shit,” she smiled sadly. “I wish I could lie to her.”

Guide was about to run back to the Bridge of Support and help her friends on her own, when she heard the rusty cargo bay door of the New Ark slowly creak open. A moment later, in all their glory, The Congregational Army marched out, in step, onto the boardwalk with Sister Lei leading them in a rousing performance of Onward Christian Soldier.

“Badass!” Guide cheered—and then thought better of it when she watched an Angel walk by. “What I meant to say was…god be praised!” Guide smiled. “Does anyone have a tambourine I can borrow?”

Guide watched the Army march by like a parade. Then she stretched her legs and caught up with Sister Lei. “What was it that made God decide to move the whole Army?” she asked as she shook her tambourine.

“Oh,” Lei replied. “He was just waiting for someone to knock.”

I was glad the First Congregational Army was joining The Action, but I was still worried about my friends. “I want to see how the brothers are doing at the bridge,” I said and grabbed the remote from Weston’s recliner. Chester did not reply. He continued to act like we were watching movies in a theater. I was about to tune to Olaf’s channel, when an explosion rocked the Vault.

Maggie and I couched down and covered our ears from the deafening blast. “Oh shit!” Maggie exclaimed. “What was that?”

“That was General Davenport knocking,” Weston said as he shooed us off the couch. “The White House your friends built is no longer there.” We stood stunned for a few beats watching as Weston single-handedly dragged the couch towards the whirring of the Vault Breakers’ drill before we snapped out of it, and helped him prop it, lengthwise, against the door. When we returned to the big screen, Maggie tuned to one of the A-eyes that looked down into the open meadow at the heart of Center Stage. Sure enough, there was a large circle of flaming debris where the White House used to be. A swarm of black helicopters were busily shipping load after load of captive storybankers off Center Stage. The General and his men were standing around the now visible shiny steel roof of the Vault. Chesty was ordering his combat engineers to set more explosives around the trap door.

“How are you so calm?” Maggie asked her Long Lost Father as I took the remote from her hand and tuned to Jarl’s channel.

“I know what’s going to happen next…”

Maggie laughed nervously. “How do you know so much?”

“It’s my job,” Weston said as he sat back down in his recliner. “I have to know everything if I want to stay a step ahead of The Action.”

Maggie wanted to understand what her Father was saying, but she felt like he was more of a stranger now in person, than he was before, when he was still a Long Lost Figment of her imagination. “Traveler was right,” she said as she grabbed a water from the fridge. “You are sick.”

“That’s what they always say,” Weston smiled slyly and walked over to his money shelves where he’d staged a long rope. Then he sat back down in his recliner and held the rope out to Maggie. “Do your Old Man a favor and tie me to my recliner,” he said. “Our Guests will be arriving any time now.”

“Why should I?” Maggie asked defensively.

“Because in spite of what you may believe,” her Long Lost Father replied, “I do love you…and I need you to trust me on this one.”

I missed the rest of their conversation. I was watching the Brothers Grim tread water under the Bridge of Support with Patricia. The Surgical Ninja was holding onto Olaf, who was holding onto the shore. “Those men killed Betty,” the youth said in disbelief. “And they didn’t even know her.”

“I know,” Olaf nodded sadly. “It wasn’t right.”

“If we’re going to do this, we should go now,” Jarl said suddenly. “The Info-defense Net is beginning to kick in and call them to conscience.”

Olaf kissed Patricia on the cheek. “Please stay here. This will only take us a moment, super star,” he said with a big Olaf grin.

Then they went in. The Brothers Grim climbed onshore and met the Marines of Checkpoint Alpha in the field of combat with the same lightning-quick speed they displayed in The Winds hunting deer. Jarl released a mighty roar as Olaf laughed, a deep belly laugh that filled the hearts and minds of their prey with awe. Like the young bull Jarl caught in the creek, the soldiers didn’t react to The Action fast enough to defend themselves. Jarl grounded the biggest man first with one blow to his jaw. Olaf spread his arms like claws and tackled Sergeant Wood, then relieved him of the service rifle in his command. Shots were fired, but most of them hit the roof. The Hunters had read their marks well. They stayed as close to their prey as possible, and they covered the ground between one soldier and the next efficiently as wolves.

“A rifle is only of service to you if you can get a clear line of sight on The Enemy without seeing your buddy in your gun’s sight down range,” Olaf the Sharpeyed said, narrating his actions for Sergeant Wood. The Barbarians were blurring The Old Line between Us and Them intentionally, and their strategy was working: The Hunters moved like rushing water—washing away the lines in the sand faster than the Marines could draw and fire from them.

It was hard to track The Action from Olaf’s channel, so I tuned to the Governing General’s channel. Gertel was still standing on the Garden Surface side of the Bridge of Support facing the Marines of Checkpoint Alpha blocking the tunnel entrance to Center Stage. From her perspective, The Action looked almost cartoonish. I heard growls, grunts, groans, and gunshots coming from the darkness of the tunnel, and then I saw service rifles, grenades, knives, and handguns flying into canal. Then suddenly the tunnel fell silent.

There was a beat, and then another…

Then there was Jarl the Uplander. He emerged from the battle scene smiling like I’ve never seen him smile. The Hunter was pleased with his hunting scene, holding the severed head of the cow Betty had ridden in on.

“Yippee, yip, yahoo!” he hollered as the first Marine—gagged and zip-tied with his own war props—crossed the Bridge of Support into the viewing range of the New War Photographers’ shoulder-fired A-eyes. Four more of the Marines followed. The last two men in line were Corporal Northup and Young Private Buxman, who Gertel took an immediate liking to.

“They’re all yours, General,” Jarl smiled knowingly as his fellow war writers gave him a riotous, standing ovation.

I wasn’t ready to cheer yet. I waited, but Sergeant Wood didn’t emerge from the tunnel. And neither did Olaf. By this time, Maggie had tied her father to his recliner (as requested) and we were all watching the Brothers’ hunting scene unfold on the big screen. We tuned to Winner’s shoulder-fired A-eye for a better view. Winner was creeping slowly into the dim lights of the tunnel. In the distance, we saw Olaf crouching over a dead cow—whispering a few words of thanks before he unsheathed his knife and began to gut it. No sooner had he began to cut, Patricia overcame her fear of Marines, climbed ashore and rushed to Olaf’s side. “Where’s Betty?” she asked, looking around.

“They took the end of her story away,” Olaf answered.

“Why would they do that?” she asked, confused.

“I don’t know…but I do know she didn’t die in vain. Cowboy Betty may be gone, but her story continues, here with us,” Olaf pointed his knife at his heart. “Now, stop standing there like a bump on a log and help me honor her story. We have to get this meat ready for market. The Meat Packer and my Sister Maggie are getting married today!”

Patricia didn’t reply. She stood, frozen by a shadowy figure at the other end of the tunnel. Wood had returned to the scene with more Marines. On the other side of the tunnel, the New Pioneers were walking into the scene too, prepared to help Olaf prepare the meat for The Reception. Like Patricia, they stopped in their tracks when they saw the new Marines. I watched the shot from Winner’s A-eye fade back like he’d pushed—ZOOM OUT—for effect, but it was no effect. He was backing out of the tunnel.

“What’s wrong, friend?” Olaf asked as he followed his friend’s gaze and turned to face the Marines.

Patricia was unable to move or speak.

“Get down behind that cow there,” Olaf instructed, “and don’t get up until I say so. Can you do that for me, super star?”

“I thought you said this scene was only going to take a moment.”

“Oops, I guess I was wrong about that one,” Olaf chuckled as he put his head down calmly and went back to carving The Reception meat.

“Drop the knife!” Sergeant Wood ordered. “Now!”

Olaf kept his head down and continued his work like he was as free as he would be in The Winds or Storysold: City.

“I said, drop the knife!” Wood screamed. “Or I’ll drop you.”

He heard what the old war soldier said, but Olaf the Sharpeyed, Brother to Jarl the Uplander, Hunter, Sky Pilot, and Maker of Vonderkraut and elk hide couches—chose not to listen. Olaf adjusted his glasses, grinned, and refused to let the men with guns run his story.

Jarl saw the flashes from Wood’s gun from the bridge.

He wiped the victory smile from his face and staggered into the dark tunnel, knowing The World As He Knew It had been destroyed. The death dealer at the other side of their conflict had ripped his only Brother’s living signature from his heart, and Jarl could feel it. He continued to stagger, as if dead, into the daylight at the far end of the tunnel. Jarl the Uplander felt no fear of death, or Marines with their guns, but he felt The Fear. He was terrified of living in a world without his older brother Olaf by his side.

“Never fear The Light!” Jarl called out to the Marines boldly as he walked to the end of his Brother’s story.

“Get on the ground,” Sergeant Wood ordered, pointing his gun at the ground. The Man in Charge of Men was trembling. Wood had spent the better part of his life training to kill The Enemy. He expected The Enemy to obey the golden rule of Civilization itself. He expected The Enemy to kill or be killed. He expected The Enemy to conquer, or be conquered—and accept the enslavement of debts incurred, as punishment, for trying and failing to win. The last thing he expected from The Enemy was disobedience. It wasn’t civilized to refuse to play by the rules of The Great Game and disobey the order to kill or be killed; but Jarl was far from civilized. Jarl was a Barbarian from The Winds.

“Never fear The Light,” Jarl said again, crouching down to pick up his Brother’s knife and continue the work he had begun.

“Very well,” Wood said. He cocked the hammer of his gun back, and aimed it at Jarl. “Have it your way.”

Patricia jumped up from behind the cow. “Stop!” she yelled. “Jarl is my friend! And I don’t want to live in a world without him, so stop, just stop, and find something better to do with your story…Jarl’s only picking up where his Brother’s story left off before you ended it for no good reason at all.”

Winner heard that and found his courage. He aimed his shoulder-fired A-eye and walked back into the scene. “Hey, big man with a gun,” he called to Wood. “We received a message from your wife Heather in Chicago. She said she’ll bake you a fresh apple pie if you don’t kill any more people.”

Wood glanced down at Jarl. The Hunter was carving the meat with his eyes cast down, growling softly like a cornered beast with every deep release of air. The Sergeant put the barrel of his gun to Jarl’s head and said, “Enough of this happy horseshit! Everyone out of the tunnel—now!—or your buddy the barbarian gets it. Don’t test me. You know I will.”

“That dumb prop in your hand doesn’t mean you have the right to rule our stories,” Patricia spoke from her heart. “We were doing great owning our own stories before you cut in!”

“I’m not OK with standing on the sidelines of this scene,” Half Pint said to then Pioneers outside the tunnel. “It’s time to circle the wagons.”

“Ya!” she cried and the Pioneers followed her into the tunnel to do what they came there to do. They started gutting, carving, and turning the cows into meat. The King of the Wild Frontier cocked his raccoon hat to one side of his head, threw his chest out, and walked to where Jarl was working and stared at the Marines like they were bears. Then he held his hand out to the Barbarian and said, “I don’t think we’ve met—name’s Crockett.”

Jarl shook his hand, and said, “Mine’s Jarl.”

Davy pulled a bowl and a bladder bag from his pack, poured a gooey substance from the bag into the bowl, and handed the bowl to Jarl. Jarl didn’t know what to do with it, but he accepted the gift anyway.

“That there’s a Crockett family secret.” Davy grinned. “Dip your meat in that sauce, and I guarantee your pecker will stay rock hard all winter.”

“Rock hard, huh?” Jarl replied, not sure how to read the scene.

Davy Crockett gave Jarl a wink, and said, “I’d show you…right here and now…but there’s ladies present…”

The Marines looked at Patricia; she looked back at the Marines. “Oh please, Davy,” Patricia grinned. “I hope you don’t mean me? Everyone in Storysold: City knows you can’t watch your channel two moments without hearing you ramble on about dipping your meat in the family sauce!”

“He means them,” Jarl nodded at the soldiers.

Patricia marched right up to the soldiers, stared them in the eyes, and asked, “Do you scary assholes care if Crockett whips his meat out and shows Jarl how to dip it in his family’s secret sauce?”

Davy liked that one. “Nailed that one,” Crockett roared with laughter. “They’re not ladies. They’re definitely more like scary assholes.”

Patricia turned to their captivated audience of Marines. “No,” she said and read their signatures again. “They’re obviously not used to doing real work for a living, but they’re not ladies. They’re not wearing frilly dresses.”

In spite of themselves, most of the Marines laughed. Wood did not laugh. He stood trembling as he kept his gun aimed at Jarl’s head.

“Back away,” Wood ordered. “Or I will shoot!”

Davey ignored Wood, and faced the other soldiers. “I’m not messing with you Marines,” Davy continued to ramble on. “I wouldn’t be standing here today if Great Granddad Crockett hadn’t dipped his meat in this sauce. City folk always say weird shit about weathering the winter. They think it’s fun and games, snuggling beside the fire with your sweetie all winter, but it’s not. Cabin fever will make you want to tear the head off a bear. Contrasted with a bear, taking The Fever out on your mate’s a lot easier. Know what I mean? Hurting folks for no good reason, other than the fact that you’ve got The Fever? I’d hate to be That Guy. That’s why I dip my meat in the Crockett Family Sauce. Trust me. It’ll keep your peckers rock hard all winter…”

“Just do it, Davy,” Jarl’s face lit up for a half-a-hot moment like his brother. “Anything’s better than listening to you talk about doing it.”

Crockett fiddled with his pants, then he crouched down in Jarl’s meat-carving scene, and took a knee. Davy was about to whip it out when one of the Marines suddenly cried, “Yeah, OK!” He laughed. “We get the idea. Now get the hell out of here, before something bad happens.”

Davy grinned a big Olaf grin, and then he grabbed a handful of Jarl’s freshly cut meat and dropped it in the bowl. Then he stood and walked back to where Half Pint and the other Pioneers were carving meat. “I’m going now, but we’re gonna set up our bbq pit on the north side of the meadow. Hope to see you Marines there…and you too Jarl…I can’t wait to see your face when you sink your chompers in the Crockett Family Sauce.”

“Thanks for The Sauce,” Jarl called after him.

“Think nothing of it,” he smiled. “Good luck, my friend.”

Jarl looked down at the bowl full of beef marinating in his hands for a long beat before he stood and faced the Marines. “Don’t touch my brother Olaf the Sharpeyed,” Jarl stated clearly. “I will be back for him.”

Wood blocked the Barbarian’s path to Center Stage. “You’re not going anywhere. I’m under orders. No one gets through this tunnel.”

“Never fear The Light,” Jarl said. He growled and took a step forward into the gun. As he did he heard the call of trumpets, and the joyful sounds of Sister Lei and the Congregational Army, along with Guide and Fritzee (who was howling like the moon was rising), all of them were marching around the General’s checkpoints like they were The Walls of Jericho.   

“Don’t shoot,” a Marine said suddenly.

Wood spun around. “Excuse me?” he thundered.

“I mean, please don’t shoot our prisoner, Sergeant!”   

“I agree,” a second Marine joined in. “This isn’t right.” 

“The only thing that isn’t right here, Marine, is this gun. I wish I had a Howitzer.” He turned back to Jarl, who now was walking towards the light of Center Stage holding his bowl of meat in both hands.

Wood took aim at Jarl and pulled the trigger. Snap, crack, a round ripped through Jarl’s leg and brought the man to his knees. Everyone In Scene froze like time itself had stopped, and we watched Jarl the Uplander, Barbarian Hunter of The Winds, right his body, and walk on, taller than before.

“Sergeant,” the first Marine said. “That man isn’t The Enemy.”

“That man is a Terrorist!” Wood shot back, trembling. He’d hit his mark, but he didn’t feel the sweet rush of glory. There were no victory cheers from his buddies. There was no round of applause from the people he’d fought so bravely to set free. All the man heard was the cold, hard, unbearable sound of silence The Wilderness makes when death is present.

Sgt. Wood was weak. He didn’t know how to govern The Fear in his heart. All knew was his training, and the training he played host to had taught him to put rounds down range. So that’s what he did.

The second round tore through Jarl’s side. Limping, the Barbarian took a hand off the bowl and held his side. But he didn’t stop. Like a wounded animal running for its life, Jarl refused to surrender the storyline Betty and his brother Olaf had fought and died for. He was going to get his bowl of meat to The Wedding Reception, or die trying to make The Action happen.

The second Marine took a long look at Jarl; then he turned to the Man in Charge of Him. In one swift motion, he passed an executive order through his governing body and relieved Sergeant Wood of his gun. Every storybanker in the tunnel cheered for the Marine’s brave action.

“You’re a punk,” the first Marine said to Wood. Then he turned to Jarl and yelled, “Hey you! Conan the Barbarian!”

Jarl had just limped into fading light of day on Center Stage when he heard the Marine. He turned his broken body around slowly, bowl in hand, and faced the Marine who’d called out to him. The Marine locked his body, tall and proud, squared himself to The Light, and saluted Jarl.

“All clear, soldier,” he smiled. “Carry on.”

Jarl nodded his thanks. Then he growled and he fell to his knees as the bowl fell from his hands. His mind swirled with thoughts of surrender, but he looked up and saw his friends rushing through the tunnel towards him. Patricia put his arms around her shoulders. “Hello, Jarl,” she said as she reached into her healer bag and pulled out a flask of Yalp. “I found it in your couch,” she said, handing him the flask. “I thought you could use a good Yalping.”

“You first,” Jarl grinned and coughed up blood.

That’s when I noticed that the whirring of the Vault Breaker’s drill had stopped. Boom! The walls of the Vault shook. Agent Sturgis stepped through the cloud of smoke at the door like Darth Vader followed by his men.

None of us moved. Jarl was not Out of The Woods yet…

My former boss walked through the empty Vault, scratching his head in disbelief, not sure of he should laugh or cry. Finally, he joined us by the big screen, pointed to Jarl’s signature, and asked, “Who’s the big guy?”

I beamed with pride and replied, “His name is Jarl the Uplander of The Winds. He’s a Barbarian Hunter, maker of Vonderkraut and Elk-skull Couches, and he is the Best Man I’ve had the honor to call my friend.”

I couldn’t talk about Jarl without thinking about Olaf. It hurt to know that my new friend was gone, forever. The tears fell from my eyes without my permission. I looked at Maggie and Weston and saw that I wasn’t alone.

“Fucking Christ, Jackson, you’re crying,” Sturgis said, pointing at my face. “I should have known you’d take The Mission personally.”

Above us, our Wedding Guests were streaming through the opening the Brothers Grim had carved in the immaterial body of Mr. Perimeter. In spite of the hardened faces of the Agents standing behind us, I cheered when I saw Grand Rachna and her theme of Working Healthcare Healers arrive on the set, armed with the best props in their healthcare arsenal, ready to help the Surgical Ninja through her first Life-Saving Surgical Scene. Off Stage, the blasting trumpets and jubilation from the First Congregational Army were growing louder by the moment. Suddenly I felt my heart flicker with a new hope.

Sturgis looked down at the older man in the banker’s suit tied badly to his recliner. “You must be the infamous Mr. Chester Weston,” the Agent said as he grabbed the half-eaten bag of greasy chips on his lap.

“Help,” he cried half-heartedly. “They took my money.”

“They who?” Sturgis laughed and helped himself to the chips.

“The Bad Guys,” Weston replied as he eyed his chips hungrily.

“I’m going to let you in on a secret,” Agent Sturgis said, walking close enough to Weston to whisper. “You’re the Bad Guy.”

I stood emboldened by Jarl’s scene, prepared to fight every Agent and Marine in the Vault if needed, and then I heard Weston’s reply. “What is this, Amateur Hour? I’m the victim here!” he thundered. “Special Agent in Charge, whatever your name is, I want you to arrest those conspiring terrorists now!” He nodded his head at us. “They conspired with the villainous Captain Chaos and stole my beloved treasure!” Weston paused to take a deep breath. No one In Scene felt compelled to untie him. We were enjoying the show, watching him struggle dramatically to free himself. “See…?” he roared some more. “My Long Lost, Hopelessly Brainwashed Daughter tied me to this chair!”

Sturgis dumped the rest of the chips in his mouth and munched loudly as he studied the scene. Finally, he turned to me and said, “So, Ex-Agent Jackson—Terror Banking Cultist and Traitor to The American Way of Life—do you want to do the honor of opening that Trap Door for us?” He pointed to the ladder leading up to the plot of scorched earth where The White House had been. He paused to see if I’d spring into action. When I didn’t—he added, “Or should I radio the General and tell him to blow the roof off this can.”   

“The code for the trap door and the main Vault door you spent a lot of time drilling through is 123456,” Weston piped up.

Sturgis stared at him in disbelief. “Seriously?”

Weston looked embarrassed. “I can’t remember numbers for shit,” he offered. “I mean…I don’t count my money all the time because I’m greedy. It’s just difficult to remember so much money.”

I stood tall like Jarl and aimed my eyes at the Man Formerly in Charge of Me. “Now you have the code,” I said. “All you have to do is open it.”

“Oh no,” he sneered. “I want you to open it.”

Maggie faced the Special Agent in Charge. “My Father wasn’t lying to you,” she said, and stood by her Father. “Captain Chaos, also known as the Traveler, brought us here so I would fall in love with Dishmaster Jones and marry him in a wedding plot designed to keep my father’s money safe.” Maggie could see the Man in Charge didn’t know how to respond to her story, so she continued, “You see, Agent Sturgis…My father suffers from a serious literary disorder known as ‘dope currency addiction,’ which—as any profitable Healer in Storysold: City will tell you—causes a Cancerous Irresponsibility to grow like a weed in the governing body of its host. Untreated, my father’s addiction to his collection of pressed and dyed fibers will overthrow his ability to govern this life. Untreated, my father will die alone in this vault, watching that big screen like a spy, everyday, trying to stay a few steps ahead of the bad guys plotting to take his precious green fibers.” Then the Bride leaned forward and kissed her Long Lost Father tenderly on his cheek, and said, “Thank you for sharing your city with us, Chester. It’s beautiful, and weird, like you.”

Weston watched awestruck as the Bride and Groom joined hands and walked across the Vault. When we reached the ladder, Maggie asked, “Are you ready for our big scene, my loving Dishmaster?”

I wasn’t ready. I was speechless, but she was right: I was her loving Dishmaster and I followed her up the ladder.

“You heard her confess, same as I did,” Weston said to the Agents standing around his recliner. “Now would be the opportune moment for you to arrest them. Everything your American Way of Life stands for will be cast into a black hole of dead memories if you allow those lovebirds to say their vows on Center Stage today. The Wedding Story will fortify their marital union—and they will become indivisible, beyond your power to employ them.”

“My Father’s right,” Maggie said as she reached the trap door. “You can try to break our union, Agent Sturgis, but you will not win…not today, not ever, because you’ve already lost. You just don’t know it yet.”

When Sturgis saw us climb As One up the ladder, the Man in Charge began to feel, for the first time in a long time, that maybe he wasn’t as much in charge as he thought he was. He was about to retaliate and show us how much love his men had for him by ordering them to arrest us, but that wasn’t what happened. He stood alone in the Vault surrounded by his men, while we stood hand-in-hand in the meadow, surveying the wreckage of Our Home. The old war soldiers—with their tear gas, guns, and black helicopters—swarmed around us like angry hornets at a picnic. Sergeant Major Clark was the first one to note the significance of our reappearance at the head of the stone aisle.

Chesty didn’t hesitate. “Arrest them!” he ordered his Marines.

We held each other and braced for impact—with only love to defend us. Luckily, we weren’t the only ones who loved Our Home.

My Storybank Account – Scene Sixty Two,

THE PART WHERE MR. PERIMETER BREAKS AND STORYSOLD: CITY GIVES BIRTH TO A MORE PERFECT UNION…

Gertel was the first to charge—muumuu flowing behind her like a cape—into madness that erupted in the meadow to give some kind of thematic order to our wedding scene. “Use your gifts to build a new home around our Bride and Groom! Quick, quick, before those helicopters return!” the General cried into the chaos.  “And will someone do something about that sunset? It’s going to be darker than a cave in winter in here if we don’t get our lamplights up and operational. Move people, move! We don’t have a moment to lose! Our Guests of Honor are growing restless!”

Gertel didn’t know it, but Blue Suit, Riggs, and the surviving members of his Clocktinkers had themed up with a ragtag cast of Moon Colonists, Acid-Gulping Moon Hippies, and Space Cadets. They’d been working on their plan to light up Our Wedding Story for sometime now.

Meanwhile, at the edge of the tunnel, the Surgical Ninja was struggling to keep her barbarian friend pinned to their field-expedient operating table. He had already finished his flask full of Yalp, and the drug was having its effect. “You there, Hipster in the T-shirt!” Patricia called to a nearby Groupie. “Take your shirt off and give it here. I need fresh bandages now!”

Jarl groaned. “Is that singing I hear?” he asked dreamily.

Patricia had heard the Congregational Army marching and singing and blasting their trumpets around Mr. Perimeter too, but the young surgeon didn’t like the uncharacteristic way Jarl delivered his line.

“It sounds like Angels…” Jarl smiled.

“Oh, that’s not a good sign!” Patricia cried, trying not to panic.

“What’s not a good sign?” Rachna asked as she threaded a needle and sterilized it in the flames of the fire she’d built to boil water.

“I think he is starting to get delirious.”

“What makes you say that?” Rachna asked calmly.

Patricia shredded the Groupie’s shirt and pressed a fresh bandage to Jarl’s wounds. “He’s smiling…and he says he hears angels,” she replied with a worried look. “Jarl’s a Barbarian; he doesn’t do angels.”

“Of course dear,” Rachna nodded. “But those are the Angels of the First Congregational Army. He knows they’re on our side.”

“Are they?” Patricia screamed angrily. “Sounds to me like they’re doing a lot of nothing while we’re in here fighting for our lives!”

Grand Rachna took the Young Healer by the hands, looked in her eyes, and said, “Take a deep breath. The last thing any of us needs is for you to lose your narrative nerve.”

The Surgical Ninja took a deep breath and said, “Sorry.”

“You have nothing to apologize for,” Rachna spoke gently. “We all know you love our friend Jarl. Now focus. You can do this.”

Suddenly Farmer Oh walked through the tunnel hauling a wagon full of lumber he’d torn from his Barn. He stood and watched the surgery scene for a few beats before he pulled his wagon aside to make room for our Wedding Guests to walk by. “I found these bags in the Happy Garden,” Oh said, as he presented my scooter bags. “I think they’re Wylie’s…there’s a bottle of Assah in here…I’m sure Wylie wouldn’t mind if Jarl used it…”     

“No,” Jarl winced painfully. “Save it for The Reception.”

“Here, it’s yours,” he said, handing the bottle to Rachna. Then Farmer Oh walked on Stage into the chaos of Our Wedding Story. He didn’t know, as I knew, that was the last bottle of Solji’s Assah left in the city.

“I don’t hear the Angels,” Jarl growled. “What are those lily-livered Christian Soldiers waiting for, a personal invitation to hit the Stage? I better see Centurion at The Ceremony, or I’ll kick his ass again!”

Patricia smiled and said, “I think he’s getting better!”

One of the Working Healthcare Healers supporting the surgery scene was once a Spiritual Warrior, who thrived in the holy congregational theme for many years until Joan of Arc demonized him and he was cast out. “Seven times,” Neuromancer narrated dramatically. “The First Congregational Army will circle the Dark Lord Satan’s position seven times blowing their trumpets, giving thanks to God and his great goodness, before they lift their veils and crush the Dark Lord’s forces with the presence of God’s almighty love.”     

“Bloody Christ!” Jarl growled in pain. “This isn’t a parade! Why do they have to march around seven times?”

“Hell if I know,” he laughed. “God has a thing for sevens.”

“Got it!” the Surgical Ninja cheered suddenly as she pulled the foreign thing from Jarl’s leg and showed it to him. Jarl tried to cheer too while Patricia bandaged his leg and side. When she was done, the Uplander tried to rise from the table—and fell back with a groan. “My friends’ need me,” Jarl said, almost in tears. “I can’t stay here…I need to be where The Action is.”

Patricia turned to Rachna for support. The Healer only shrugged her shoulders and said, “He’s your patient Healer.”

“No,” the young healer gritted her teeth. “He’s my friend.”

Grand Rachna beamed proudly as her understudy wrapped Jarl with another layer of bandages and plastic bandage aids and put her arm under his shoulders. “Ready?” Patricia said, preparing Jarl to stand.

Neuromancer stepped In Scene to lend a hand. Their eyes met, and he began the countdown: “Three, two, one…walk!” And Jarl walked, one step at a time into the battle for Our Wedding Story with the help of his new friends.    

Back in the meadow, new war writers from every walk of story in Storysold: City continued to surround us with support. Gertel called our new white house, “The Crooked House.” It was a monstrous, asymmetrical creation that even made its makers cringe. Trash Marauders produced my new dish pit from their collection of salvaged plastic buckets and irrigation hoses, Maggie’s new Paleolithic open flame stove was set in place by Cave Dwellers, and our walls were made from the pallets Olin Wall used to pack his groceries up the walkway to his shop. The war writers building The House kept asking us when we were going to cue The Ceremony—and we kept on replying, “Wait until the chaos on Stage dies down a little more.” In that way, Our Wedding Story was like any other. Bride and Groom were standing by, waiting for their Guests to fight through the many family dramas stoked by the liquor and pharmaceuticals they took before they arrived on set. We didn’t want to tell them the real reason why. We were waiting, because we didn’t know if, or when, the Congregational Army would blast their trumpets and join The Action.

I was working with Maggie to nail Farmer Oh’s lumber to Olin’s wall of pallets, when a canister landed at my feet and I doubled over coughing in a cloud of tear gas. The sun was fading fast behind the Antenna Trees that lined the rim of Center Stage. The few lamplights left standing in the Wild Garden Arena began to flicker on, but the light didn’t help. It only served to fill the set with an eerie atmosphere that was anything but joyful.

I cleared my lungs and read the scene. This isn’t a wedding, I thought. It’s a massacre waiting to happen. The war writers were still fighting to own the ground beneath their feet, refusing to be occupied by The Fear that would take their living stories. And the General had a nation’s worth of death dealing war products that said the writers would learn who really owned The Ground, not them. Then, as I stood and stared through the gas and chaos and imagined The Massacre to come, I saw Jarl limping into the scene with Patricia and another storybankers supporting him. When Maggie saw them she dropped the board she was nailing to the House, and we ran to greet our friends. The first thing my friend said was, “I thought you might want this…for our victory celebration.” And he handed the bottle of Assah to Maggie.    

She gave Jarl a hug, and said, “Thanks Bro.”

In the distance, we heard a mighty blow of trumpets followed by the sound of gunfire. The First Congregational Army of Christ had honored their commandment. They had marched around Center Stage seven times while they blasted their seven golden trumpets played by seven golden Christian Soldiers. As promised, when they’d closed The Seventh Circle, God spoke to the hearts of Sister Lei, Fryer Tuck, St. Elizabeth, Centurion, Plowman, Wilma and Richard the Virgin Greeters, the Angels of the Lord, Joan of Arc, the Beekeepers and Milkmaids of Canaan, and all the other Christian Soldiers, Spiritual Warriors, and Demon Fighters who stood with them. They now knew, without fear or doubt, it was time to slay the demon they called, “Mr. Perimeter.”   

The Army blasted their trumpets, played their lutes, strummed their harps, banged their drums, shook their tambourines, waved their branches, and danced and praised their God, singing, “Hosanna in the highest!” The soldiers didn’t know what hit them. They were awestruck. They beheld the Army of God, and The Chains that had bound them to their command broke and burst like sunlight piercing through doom. They were freed in heart and mind of The Fear that bound them to The Mission. The arms of the men at the checkpoints fell to their sides, and they failed to do their duty to kill or be killed. They didn’t have enough narrative strength to hold The Imaginary Line they drew in the earth when the Good Nun led the Army of Christ across that threshold like she was bringing joy to the hardened heart of the Dark Lord Himself.

When the Army broke through the Wild Garden into the meadow, we heard the ping, ping, ping of John Henry’s hammer join the rhythm of their spiritual attack. The Band on The Run filed in behind the Congregational Army like sinners on Sunday, adding a rocking edge to their militant gospel. Standing calm like a statue of Mary in the chaos of the meadow, Sister Lei waited for her Heavenly Husband to pass her The Word to go. When she felt The Spirit of her Loving Husband touch her, she used her Ram’s Horn to cue the spiritual-attack formation they called: The Meet and Greet. “The Congregational Army of Christ may now rise!” she called, blowing her Horn across the meadow. “Meet and greet your future friends! Turn, shake their hands, and let The Love of God shine through you in all you do!” Then she pulled her worn Bible from her habit, and cried, “Hosanna—Christ is risen!” To which the First Congregational Army of Christ thundered back, “He is risen indeed!”

So began The Meet and Greet. The maneuver was weirder than nerds on motorbikes, but it worked. The tactic was to outnumber the “demon-infected bodies” with at least three Congregational Army Members to every one old war soldier—and then use their “spiritual superiority” to rank-break The Chain of Command. Which, in part, looked like a wave of overjoyed Greeters moving through the squads and platoons of soldiers in the meadow on a mission to preach The Word of God to the demons in the evil-infected bodies of otherwise innocent men. Only a minority of Christian Soldiers went about The Meet and Greet expecting the soldiers to throw down their arms and make miraculous transformations. For most of the Congregation, the point was to preach The Word of God so hard and fast, so passionately, that the demons ruling the infected bodies couldn’t sass back, or launch a verbal retaliation of any kind. It was inspired by the old war tactic of using machine guns to keep the enemy pinned down. It was also inspired by the many holy men who discovered the power of The Sermon, the part of The Earth Show where they talk and talk and keep everyone’s head down in their suppressive line of fire.

The Meet and Greet wasn’t a standalone. It was a set-up maneuver for their next spiritual attack, The Group Hug. Once our fidgety Honored Guests were pinned down by hard-hitting wisdoms, Sister Lei cued The Group Hug: “If your enemy hungers, feed him. If he thirsts, give him drink. For when you do this, you shall heap coals of fire on his head. Hosanna—Christ is risen!” To which the Army thundered back, “He is risen indeed!” Then they hugged their nearest Marine, and held them in a tight hug. When any of the old war soldiers tried to escape, or “return their demon-infected bodies to their leaders,” or “let their demons out,” then one of the members of the First Congregational Army would sound off: “Demon on the loose in the spiritual battle-grid, pew-point thirty-two, row fifty-nine! We need more Demon Fighters over here on the double! Now spirit yourself! Like the Almighty Himself shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace!” What was so devastating to The Chain of Command was the Congregation’s ability to be fully coordinated one moment and seemingly in chaotic disarray the next. In other words, God and Sister Lei were better at creating order from the chaos of the battlefield than General Davenport. As a result, after a long day of friendly fighting by action writers the Congregational Army finally won the battle for the hearts, minds, and souls of our Honored Guests. It wasn’t anything Davenport did. He didn’t order his men to surrender their hearts to their better natures. The victory was something that happened naturally like trees sprouting from seeds.

By the time Our Wedding Story reached the part where our Guests were attentive, relatively calm, and sort of ready for The Ceremony to begin—The Sun had left us to write its warmth on another part of the world. The moon was rising over the ocean, and the General stood by his radioman and received The Word, one by one, that all his checkpoints had been overrun.

The General could have stayed the night. He and his men had tents, sleeping bags, extra socks and underwear, and enough plastified food widgets to feed an army for a week. But he didn’t stay. He gazed sadly out over the field of battle. He saw smiles flash across the faces of his men. He heard the laughter and jubilee of The Enemy, and the Man in Charge of Men felt like an evil god had plucked his manhood from him, one man at a time.

He turned to his faithful Sergeant Major. “Load up the trucks and choppers,” the General spoke solemnly. “We’re pulling out.”

In moments, the air was beat with the whining engines of helicopters and the rumble of trucks. Chesty sat beside his General on the edge of their command chopper, raised his bullhorn, and gave the order. “Fall in!” he cried into the air. He watched his men fall into formation like he’d watched them fall thousands of times before. Most of them looked eager to leave the Stage, but not all of them. As the trucks began to roll out and the choppers began to lift off, the General saw something that horrified them. Clustered throughout the meadow, pockets of “his men” were standing side by side with The Enemy, and they looked like they were enjoying themselves.

When the salty old war commander saw that he grabbed the bullhorn from Chesty and roared, “Any Marine or Agent who is found in the Terror Banking Compound in the morning will be arrested and tried as a Terrorist!” Then lowered his bullhorn, ordered his pilot to return to the carrier, and we cheered as we watched him fly away.

A moment of silence followed. It felt like every eye and A-eye in Storysold: City was aimed at us. Maggie playing the Bride and I, the Groom, stood in front of the crooked door of our Crooked House and we looked out into the sea of familiar faces. I saw Gambler. He was sharing his poncho with Rosy and Henry; Half Pint was teasing Private Buxman; Northup was drinking Firewater with Iraq the Man, Huck Finn, and Mother Russia; Chavez was wrestling with National Character; The Fizzy Pop Family Corporation were drinking Fizzy Pop and swapping parental war stories with Agent Oates; the Governing General was having her way with PFC Yokum again, Puck and his exhausted fairy friend were unenthusiastically throwing rice and pixie dust everywhere, and our Best Barbarian and Ninja of Honor were standing by our sides watching as Our Wedding Story climaxed and became real.

When the Band hit the first note of their adaptation of Here Comes the Bride (which they called, Here Come the Good Guys), Blue Suit and Riggs held their fists together like the Wonder Twins and cried, “The time has come to defend the Moon Colony with lasers!” The Moon Colonists and Gamers standing high on the rim of Center Stage didn’t receive their programming through the OJT training system in their helmets. Not this time. This time, they picked up on the social cues from our wedding scene below, and The Lights from their mighty “laser” spotlights beamed down on us. Somewhere on Stage, we heard Fritzee and Guide howl a howl that cued the hoots, coos, chatters, yowls, and tweets from their wild creature friends who’d joined our ceremony.

Maggie began to cry. Then I cried, and Jarl cried, and our Guests cried, all of us for the joy, and sacrifice, and relief, at the sight of a beautiful dream becoming true. Then a character most of us had written off as dead or captured moved into the limelight. Founding Father staggered in and tipped a hat of his own imagination as he faced the cast of Our Wedding Story. Then he took a deep breath, puffed his chest out, stuck his thumbs in his vest like he was preparing to address Congress, breathed again, and said, “Is this thing on?”

“Is this thing on?” we heard his voice boom back at us—amplified by hundreds of handheld Storyclocks all tuned to his channel.

Ben turned and gave us a wink. Then he cleared his throat—with more drama than was necessary—and began, “Four score and seven years ago, my Fathers and I bought forth on this continent, a new nation…”

“Cut!” Honest Abe called out, stepping into The Lights.

“What do you want?” Ben asked with sneaky grin.   

“That’s my line,” Abe protested.    

“It’s a good one,” Ben nodded. “Do you mind if I use it?”

“Surely,” Abe corrected. “As long as you understand that it hasn’t been ‘four score and seven years ago’ since I first said it.”

“Whatever you say Fiddler,” Ben laughed and drank deep from the bottle of gin he’d nabbed from The Reception. “What I was trying to say before I was interrupted…was that I…I was there when the mighty nation body we call ‘America’ was born. It was a great time to be alive. We dueled with pistols, powdered our noses, and wore pretty wigs. It was a time when honest leaders and other drunkards were known and respected by their communities. We were a strange bunch by any standard, especially Old George. He insisted that we call him ‘Son of the Republic,’ and his legislation was often inspired by an Angelic Tart none of us ever met; but we liked Old George like we like Old Weston. Which is to say…not at all!” The gathering laughed and cheered as Founding Father continued, “That brings me to my point…as I remember it was…I was there when America was born. I was there when the thing rose kicking and screaming from the bloody bowels of The Revolutionary War looking not too unlike a hideous one-eyed turkey vulture…”

“Wrap it up you old windbag!” Huck yelled. “We’re hungry!”

“Oh suck it up!” Ben chuckled and snuck a drink. “I’m the Wedding Officiant! I’m supposed to be a windbag! Now where was I? Oh yes…I was there when America was born; and it gives me great pleasure to be here, in all my fatherly glory, today to witness the birth of our planet’s newest union. We, the storybankers of Storysold: City, know that powerful action as our scenes, stories, and themes, but our friends the Bride and Groom here have decided to be dramatic, as usual! And call their theme a marital union.”

“Stop talking and skip to The Good Part!” shouted a loudmouth Road Warrior as she stepped into The Lights with her friends. Their faces were black and blue and bloody, but they were smiling and still drinking whiskey.

“Alice!” I jumped with joy and ran to where Alice, Rooster Bait, and Hell Cracker were standing beside Gambler. I was about to give her a hug, but that didn’t happen. She cold cocked me between the eyes. Then she picked me off the ground, put a dusty brown bottle in my hand, and said, “That’s from my private stock. It’s from Olaf. I owed him one.”

“They saved my ass,” Gambler said, wincing with pain. “Alice reminds me of another hell raiser we all knew…and will miss dearly…”

The Bikers walked off to greet Jarl. Maggie and I watched Alice walk by and Maggie said, “Weird; she even walks like Betty.”   

“OK, OK, calm down,” Ben addressed The Ceremony again. “As I was saying, I’m proud to play a part in the birth of this new union. I did my best to raise Old Glory right, but—as we’ve witnessed today, dogs are never as cute as puppies, and bloody one-eyed turkey vultures aren’t eagles…”

Jarl had heard enough jibber jabber. “Grrrr,” he growled.

“OK, OK,” Founding Father smiled devilishly. “All I’m saying is that America was my child, and once the Officiant shuts up and Maggie and Wylie form their more perfect marital union…I will be able to claim the glorious title of Founding Grandfather!” With that Old Ben clapped his hands and cheered for himself. “Now, without further ado, I give you the infamous Wylie Jones and the beautiful Maggie Weston-Stone, our Bride and Groom. Assah!”

When Ben finally stepped out of The Lights, Maggie put her hands in mine. The scene was like something out of a fairytale. We faced our signatures and everything else faded from our view. Jarl limped over, handed us a familiar prop, and said, “We all went in on this one…”

I took the Scepter of Kale and Carrots from Jarl and we held it in our hands. Then I thought about it and whispered, “Who’s we?”

“Ask Andrew,” Jarl replied loudly with a knowing chuckle. “He said it was balanced by the ‘tribute of many kingdoms.’ I think that kid’s wound a little too tight for his own good…I hope he accepts my offer to join The Action of our next hunting adventure. Olaf would agree. He’s one of us.”

“Where is the end of our Brother’s story?” Maggie asked Jarl.

“While my new friend was saving my life,” Jarl turned to Patricia with a smile. “Dan and Davy built a funeral pyre for him. They plan to join me, after The Wedding Reception, to welcome my brother to The Action.”

We gave Jarl a hug. Then Maggie and I faced The Lights like it was our last scene together, because it very well could have been. The warships had not returned home. If the bombs suddenly dropped and we died in that moment, I would have died happy. Maggie eyes were hard and patient (as always), loving, and open like the sky, and I was ready, “beyond a shadow of a doubt” to sign My Personal Constitution to hers and form a more perfect marital union. Standing As One before our casts, we signed these lines with our hearts:

Our Vows

Maggie: Do you remember Our First Date when I made you tofu tacos, and you told me the truth about how you liked to wash dishes?

Wylie: I do. Do you remember when I wanted you to be my Water Bunny Girlfriend and you kicked me in the groin?

Maggie: I do. Do you remember the good days when we were on script arrest working, as a homemaking theme, in the Happy Garden?

Wylie: I do. Do you remember the first time we produced a love scene with The Lights of Storysold: City turned ON?

Maggie: I do. Do you remember when you burned our wedding invitations and went hunting with my Barbarian Brothers with no intention of returning to Our Home, only to return and become Dishmaster Jones?

Wylie: I do. Do you remember when I found you hiding under Solji’s picnic table after the looters raided the Happy Garden and we inspired you to keep on fighting for Our Home?

Maggie: I do. And I want to remember a lifetime of adventures with you in pursuit of a better Earth Show, including the next scene I’d like to produce with you tonight under the stars of Storysold: City.

Wylie: And I want to remember a lifetime of suds-busting your dirty dishes and making Our Home a place for good food, good stories, and love.

Maggie: And I want to remember a lifetime of facing our conflicts head on, and never again bend our hearts and home to the lies of cover stories.

Wylie: And I want to remember a lifetime of levity, working to live happily ever after, and not grinding our stories into missions.

Maggie: And I want to remember the time we stood in front of Storysold: City and said, “I love you Wylie, and I always will.”

Wylie: And I said, “I love you Maggie, and I always will.”

Then our Founding Grandfather had us sign a piece of paper (for the cost of the ink and paper), rattled turkey bones over our heads, and presented  our new marital union to the rest of Storysold: City.

We kissed, and I scooped Maggie up in my arms and carried her to the doorway of Our Crooked House. I was about to do that thing I thought I was supposed to do when Maggie suddenly said, “No, wait.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked and set her down.

She eyed our house like a bad painting and said, “I don’t like it.”

“What’s not to like about our Crooked House?” I laughed, and so did our Wedding Guests who were sharing our moment with us.

Maggie laughed and said, “We can do better.”

I smiled. “So…let’s do better!”

Maggie pressed her hands against the Crooked House and she waited for me to stand beside her. I pressed my hands against the wall and we waited for our cast to join us. When our union had enough live-action votes to get the job done, I cried—“And one, and two, and three!”—and our supporting cast of Revolutionary Home Wreckers reduced the prop to rubble.

We cheered and Maggie turned to me. “How should we begin our beautiful new home?” she asked with stars in her eyes.

“How about the bed?” I said—pointing to the storybed Paul Bunyan built for our wedding set. It looked like an angry dragon had roasted it, but it was still standing in spite of General Davenport’s efforts. I took a knee beside its frame and brushed away the ashes. I laughed when I saw a carving of the scene where I ran off to “find a rototiller” and Olaf’s seaplane.

“Yes, I agree,” Maggie bit her lip, smiled, and nodded, “our new home should begin with this bed. Before we knew it, our cast had fit the bed with an old worn (but not bombed) mattress and some brand new bedding from Wall the Mart. When it was ready, Maggie lowered her head like Gertel and tackled me, and we began our new home wrestling each other with kisses.

“To the bed!” King Andrew cried. “Charge!”

The Angels blew their trumpets, and our cast lifted our wedding bed over their shoulders and carried us down the stone aisle to The Reception. Davy, Stumpy, and the New Pioneers had themed up with the Kings and Queens of Camelot, Jellyfish, Lava Monster, Neptune, the Sea Hags, and Fryer Tuck and his new “merry band” of not-nearly-demon-free-enough Marines who were helping him (with the aid of his Holy Spirits) to produce a reception feast from the meat that their fellow Marines had helped to slaughter.

“Where’s Traveler?” Maggie asked as we held on tight like our bed was Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. “I haven’t seen any of her characters all day.”

“Don’t you remember?” I replied boldly, taking a measure of pride in being the one to remember. “She’s been working on her Big Surprise.”

“Oh yeah.” She paused. “Who’s in her cast again?”

“How should I know?” I shrugged. “It’s her Big Surprise.”

Our Movers set us down at the center of the party. We sat, side-by-side, and opened the last bottle of Assah. “Here’s to my Homemaking Hero, Maggie ‘Garden Tender’ Weston-Stone.” Maggie smiled knowingly. “Here’s to Storysold: City,” she said—and we toasted our union and celebrated the stars twinkling above, beside, and all around us…

Then we kissed, and kissed again—and right on cue Riggs, Blue Suit, and the Gamers cued The Big Surprise when they lit the night sky above Center Stage with their laser spotlights. The party stopped, and we heard the signature roar of Olaf’s seaplane overhead a beat before it came into view. As soon as we saw Captain Chaos—head hanging from her window, banging her sword on the side of the seaplane, Rompasaurus-roaring at the top of her lung—everyone cheered like we were watching a victory day parade. We cheered until Captain Chaos roared overhead again, and the seaplane was followed by the scream of a death jet fighter. We held our breath, hoping Chaos would make it around for another pass. Even Davy’s bear friends were silent. I was about to breathe again, when the seaplane roared into view. The Moon Colonists lit The Earth Show with their laser spotlights in time to watch a parachute popped from the seaplane’s open bay door and pull a string of nets into the air, flooding the sky above Center Stage with the billions of pressed and dyed fibers Mr. Chester Weston had collected from his conquests around the world.

Somewhere in the darkness, the jet fighter fired a rocket that wound its way to its target. The seaplane exploded, blowing the rest of the pressed and dyed fibers from its body, a beat before its pilot parachuted out. The sight of Chaos parachuting into The Reception, swearing like a seaman, as her Lover’s fortune fluttered down around them, was one I’ll never forget.

Weston saw the whole scene. He’d been standing beside Agent Sturgis spying on The Wedding Reception from the towering window-lined saucer of his headquarters. The deal was simple. Sturgis had freed the Great Capitalist from his recliner in exchange for his cooperation and willingness to “acknowledge his victimhood,” as Agent Sturgis put it. When the CEO of Westonton saw his billions of dyed fibers fall in chaos, the only thing he had to say was—“I hope you don’t mind picking all that up, because I’ll never win enough live action votes to make That Action Plan happen.”

My Storybank Account, Scene Sixty Three, 

THE PART WHERE THE MAN IN CHARGE OF MEN CLOSES THE CURTAIN ON STORYSOLD: CITY…   

Boom! I felt Storysold: City tremble as I opened my eyes and sat up in bed. Maggie was already awake—wild-eyed with our covers wrapped around her body—staring at a man in a blue jacket approaching our storybed from the edge of the meadow. The man appeared cool, calm, and collected as he walked through the aftermath of Our Wedding Story. He stepped lightly over the empty jugs of Slow Play Ale and Hundred Proof Hops, danced around the plates of half-eaten Pioneer Burgers, Betty Memorial Steaks, and Merman Crab Cakes and Spunk Surprise, and seemed to not see the naked and nearly naked old war soldiers and storybankers sleeping side-by-side. He must have seen the uniforms scattered everywhere, and all the cash still whirling around in the wind like confetti, but he didn’t show it. He stepped over a Marine spooning with a Queen, crept up beside our bed, and said, “Good morning, Former Agent Jackson.”

I rubbed my eyes like I was rubbing out a bad dream.

“What do you want?” I asked The Nightmare.

No sooner had I spoken, than a sky full of death fighters screamed by. A chain of explosions followed, rocking Storysold: City. If the soldiers and storybankers in the meadow weren’t wake already, they were now.

“Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Jackson,” Sturgis said as he leered over our union. “I see now that you were serious about marrying the Daughter of the Terror Banking Cult Leader I sent you to spy on.”

Neither of us responded. Sturgis continued to speak as I put on my tuxedo and Maggie slipped on her wedding gown. Clearly he wasn’t there to congratulate us on the birth of our marital union.

“I’m going to do you a favor, Jackson, because I once went native like you.” He waited for us to grasp the weight of his words. “We were in the coldest part of The Cold War, when I fell in love with a Russian who made the best borscht you will ever eat. I didn’t contact the Bureau for months. We ran off to her cousin’s vacation home. We ate borscht and made love everyday. To this day, I have never been so happy.”

He pulled back his blue FBI jacket enough to show off his golden FBI badge. “Ah,” he sighed. “This job is an adventure, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said as I watched the jets. “Life is an adventure.”

Sturgis licked his teeth, bit his fingernails, and gave us a half-hearted customer service smile. “I’m here this morning,” he stated, “because I want to give you lovable fuck ups another chance to rejoin the winning team.”   

“You’re wasting your time,” I said. “You should go home, see your wife and kids for once, and barbecue your own backyard.”   

He kicked our bed lightly, and said, “I see.”

“You should go home,” Maggie agreed. “And we’ll do the same.”

“So be it,” Sturgis shrugged. “General Davenport was relieved of his command last night. I’m in charge now…and I’ve decided that, by no later than eighteen hundred hours, or as you people would say, ‘twenty five moments after noon’…moments before sunset this bizarre—but oddly beautiful—Storysold: City of yours will be underwater.” As he began to walk off, he added, “Best of luck to you and your ‘marital union,’ Mr. and Mrs. Jackson. I’m sure we’ll meet again someday, sooner or later. I hope later, but I doubt it.”   

We stood speechless for a few beats watching the Joint Taskforce Commander make his exit across the open meadow.

Then Maggie called to him. “What did you do with my father?”

“Since when do you care?” Sturgis called back.

“I care,” she said. “He’s my father.”

“Well, if you must know…” Sturgis sort of smiled. “After a short deliberation, this morning the President accepted your father’s Deal. It seems that it’s in everyone’s best interest to replace the ‘damaged cash’ your father lost yesterday in his heroic effort to fight The War on Banking Terror.”

“Say again?” I exclaimed. “I thought Weston was your target?”

“He was…but he acknowledge his victimhood,” Sturgis replied, more than happy to share the story. “You see, Weston one of us. Our Great American Economy can’t afford to lose his business. Your father in law will continue the work he’s started here under another brand…as long as he continues to pay his taxes to the United States. And promise to be good.”

“But he tried to destroy you!” Maggie exclaimed.

“Or so it seems,” Sturgis chuckled. “America is always looking for good men who are willing to invest in The Mission.” Then he reached into his pocket. “Your Father is a persuasive man. One of the stipulations of The Deal was that I give you this. It’s the key to your ‘dowry’ as he put it.” Sturgis pulled out a manila envelope and tossed it on the ground. “He told me to tell you to use it to stay a step head of everyone, but him. He says he can’t be a winner if his Long Lost Daughter and her Idiot Husband become losers.”

After we watched Agent Sturgis fade into the nearest dark tunnel like a cartoon rabbit, I saw Maggie sneak a smile.

“What’s so funny?” I asked as another blast shook the city.

“Oh, nothing,” Maggie smiled, as a squadron of jet fighters screamed overhead. “Chester is just so Chester. Do you know what I mean?”

That was the last smile I saw from anyone that day.

My Storybank Account – Scene Sixty Four,

THE PART WHERE AMERICA DOES WHAT ALL GENERICS DO TO ANY CHARACTER WHO COMPETES WITH THEM…

We sat on our bed and read the scene. Power to Center Stage had long since been cut and the thick smoke from the bombings was rising up all around us. Once The Reality of What Was Happening sunk in and we realized that we’d been stripped of our choices, reduced to playing the Audience for yet another show of violence, our battle weary wedding guests began to form hasty themes and make evasive plans to escape the warships.

Maggie didn’t make any plans. She quietly packed a dirty tablecloth full of our wedding gifts, threw it over her shoulder, and she ran like she’d run her whole life. I grabbed my carrot-bouquet sport’s cap, and I ran with her through the charred remains of the Wild Garden Arena, through the tunnel, until we reached the Bridge of Support. The scene we saw there, as we looked out over the Garden Surface, stopped Maggie cold. She fell to her knees and cried when we saw the Garden Surface with its lovingly plotted wood groves, grain fields, fruit orchards, goat pastures, vegetable plots, hunting grounds, and first-come-first-served wild berry parks—all drowning in flames.

Heartbreak is the word that comes to mind to describe the way I felt in that moment. Maggie and I stood side by side, but we were alone. The Fear had divided our hearts. We watched the destruction like an audience in theater seats, facing the screen…as our Weather Bubbles exploded, our Hollow Cores filled with water, and our Residential Shopping Centers—our homes—began to sink into the ocean. The gunfire, both distant and near, hit our ears like periods at the end of every bad sentence, one after the next.

I’m responsible for this, I thought, feeling afraid to turn to Maggie and the other storybankers beside me. It was easier to surrender to The Fear and its old war script and watch The Fantastic Horror like the audience.

Maggie must have read my mind. “We did our best,” she said and reached out for my hand. “It’s not our fault the world’s a hateful place.”

“But I could’ve been better,” I said, gritting my teeth as I continued to watch flames. “I could have been better.”

When we touched, I felt The Action of our stories return.

“Come on, my loving Dishmaster,” she said as she pulled me from my mental theater seat. “Let’s get our bikes and wagons.”

The Commander was destroying the city as planned. After he bombed the Weather Bubbles and cut the power, he was detonating charges at the bases of the Hollow Cores to let the ocean water in without blowing anyone up. The Residential Shopping Centers were built well. It took a few long moments for them to sink—like the Titanic must have sunk—slow enough for everyone on them to panic and run for the safety and security of Sturgis’s green smoke and transport ships. Marines were sent into the Centers to make sure no “innocent victims” were left behind. But, once the Commander received The Word that a Center was “cleared,” Sturgis ordered the death jet fighters to finish the job. By the time we had reached the Happy Garden, six of the eight Island Markets bordering the Reef Wall were sinking into the ocean.

We found our Wonder Bikes and Wagons in Farmer Oh’s cornstalks where we left them. They were still stocked with all the props we’d salvaged from our shop. Without a word between us, we spread our gifts and props on the ground and repacked our wagons like backpackers planning to leave the comforts of civilization. Maggie had pushed her bike and wagon out of the garden plot, onto the nearby throughway, before she realized that I wasn’t following her. I felt like I did at that airport in Utah, when I had my chance to jumped out of Olaf’s seaplane and run for civilization, and my body couldn’t produce the live action votes I needed to move. I stood in the Happy Garden staring at the tiny plot of land beneath my feet like a carrot at harvest-time, not wanting to surrender the good ground we’d grown there.

As usual, Maggie got it. She walked back into her plot, and kissed me like it was our last time. Then the Garden Tender said, “It’s time to go and say goodbye. We’ve reached The End of our stories here.”

Moments later, we stood with Traveler and the other refugees on the deck of the Storytime Machine. They couldn’t watch Storysold: City burn any more than most of us. They played her roles flat without theatrics. Mainstay the Deckhand set the sails, Seawoman Second Class tended to our needs, and our friend Captain Chaos turned us away from the Hidden Harbor, steered us into the Canals, through the Arched Gateway, beyond the Reef Wall, and changed our future-like course to the old way of life we knew all too well.

We heard the city groan and scream before it sank. Its tangle of steel, earth, and glass called for us to never forget. We stood side by side and watched the end of Storysold: City—I didn’t Get It.

Was it all for nothing?

My Storybank Account – The End,

THE PART WHERE A HERO RETURNS HOME AND KNOWS WHY IT NO LONGER FEELS LIKE HOME…

Under the cover of night, Traveler piloted their Storytime Machine up the Willamette River and docked along the high wall of Waterfront Park beside fancy cruiser named The Spirit of Portland, and then lowered her boarding plank in the same spot where our adventure began not so long ago.

“What now?” Maggie asked as our old cast members gathered in the dark, waiting for the sun.

“I have to find Weston,” Traveler reported. “I miss him.”

No one in her cast replied to that line, but I imagine we were thinking the same thing. What did she see in that guy?

Samantha Chase wrung her hands like she was trying to squeeze her Lover from her governing body. “He’s my constant,” they offered. “I mean, if we’re peaking now, in this storytime…he’s It in spades.”

We knew they well. We knew what they were saying. We hugged them and extended sympathetic looks and hand holds like Traveler just shared that they were losing their battle with cancer.

“I’m returning to The Winds,” Jarl reported.

“I want to write a book,” Bookmaker reported.

“I’m embodying The American Spirit,” Spirit reported.

“I want to transform the pest control industry,” Guide reported, “and mold it into what the healthcare industry should be.”

“I going to write an algorithm for The Action,” Blue Suit reported like he’d been speaking all along. “That way, we don’t have to depend on Generics to produce The Earth Show. I think it’s going to be a reader of some kind. I’m not sure. I might call it a ‘LANE Reader.’ Or something like that.”

“Live, action, narrative, environment,” Maggie smiled. “I like it.”

“Bingo,” Blue Suit gave Maggie a big high five.

“I want to see if its possible to own and operate an Old McDonald farm in America,” Farmer Oh reported. “I’m not hopeful. Land body prices are crazier now then they were when I sailed for Storysold: City.”

“I want to grow veggies,” Maggie reported.

“I hunt bedbugs,” Predator reported.

“We’re going to use our vast cash stash to open the first mainland storybank,” Alice and Rooster Bait reported.

“I’m joining Bill the Bum,” Gertel reported. “And I’m going to open a factory free sewing factory theme in Portland called The Brass Needle.”

When everyone was done speaking, the spotlight hit me.

“What about you?” Asked the silence.

“I’m going to become the homemaking hero of our new home,” I said with a moderate degree of confidence. “I mean, co-hero.”

After a run of intense dialogue, the only members who decided to join Maggie and I in the production of our new home was Wilderness Security Guide, her friend Pest Predator, and Ole Bookmaker. Our plan was to hire an employable human host (or take them like The Fourth Wall) and form a wilder theme—STORYSOLD: Pest Control—that would support Maggie’s local farm theme, Full Cellar Farm. Why Maggie decided in that moment to change her name to Farmer Emily was beyond me. She’s weird.

When our plotting scene had concluded, we pushed our bike-drawn covered wagons over the plank to Waterfront Park. Then I leaned on the bars of my black mountain bike and Maggie stood astride her rusted red, blue-fendered, banana-seat road bike, while we watched Captain Chaos turn the ship around and make way, once again, for the open ocean.

Maggie closed her eyes. She remembered the steam that gathered in the glass domes. She remembered the rain that fell into its reservoirs and ran like streams down a mountain, through the aqueducts, onto the Garden Surface where she used the water to give life to her babies. She remembered everything about the Storysold: City we built with our stories.

When her eyes were open again, I offered her a piece of our smoked elk meat for breakfast. I was glad she accepted it.

We stood as a theme and stared at the river—like a great hope that time always flowed in one direction—until we gathered the strength we needed to make the turn and face the land body of America that we once called our home. We read the cityscape with its traffic-choked streets and smoggy sky full of lonely towers, and I wondered why I didn’t feel at home. I stood there, newlywed and full of youth, in conflict with everything I saw. Maggie’s eyes  read the same. Her eyes were wide with terror as we faced The Same Old Story of Portland, Oregon, USA, where it always rains, natives never buy umbrellas, and the bike lanes are painted in green.

For a long breathless moment, I felt that doomed reality. Then Guide spoke as she does, at the right moment.

“It might take a few hundred years,” Guide smiled, “but we can break The Wall and heal The Earth Show.”

“Is that so?” I asked, rubbing my eyes like an old man.

“Yes,” Guide smiled again. “Nothing can stop us now that we know a better story about an unlikely couple of regular homemaking heroes who built a better home in a better city. No bombs can beat that.”

Guide is still our favorite character.

BONUS MATERIAL: The Part Where You Can Read Even More of These Dead Word Prop Things…

A) – THE IMPOSSIBLE SALES PITCH: The Part Where We Try Imperfectly to Introduce The Fourth Wall and Its Presentation of The Same Old Story…

Hi there, future cast members! How are you today?

My name is Jake Cooper-Wasson. I am the host of Storysold, a legal (state of Oregon) business entity that I own and produce action for in my heart like a hero every day. Storysold identifies as “we,” because we host many he, she, they, and it (alien and insect) characters in the many incorporations of The Earth Show we write and perform with our family, friends, and supporting cast members sun up to sun down every day. At Storysold, our stories are the only “goods and products” we buy and sell for profit, because our stories matter at Storysold and we value them more than gold.

The book in your hands isn’t another novel for you humans buy to do whatever it is that novels do. We produced this book in the hope that, once you reach The End, you will join us in The Action of The Earth Show and value your story, and the stories of your co-workers, employees, family, friends, neighbors, and strangers, more than any other natural resource on the planet. In that way, this book is a novel length advertisement, invitation, or classic call to adventure like the part where Gandalf invited Frodo to join The Action of an adventure to toss The Ring of Power into Mt. Doom. The difference is, we’re not shitting you. The Earth Show really has adventures for you to join.

Yeah I know. We didn’t Get It at first read either. It’s weird (maybe even unnatural) to imagine a city where The Action of our stories is a resource that’s more precious than shiny things, big clean trucks, and homes we buy to sell as real estate. Yet it happened. Storysold: City was real.

And we’re real. Storysold is currently breaking trail for a new Action Industry that will change everything we humans think we know about stories, money, and “waking up to go to work on Monday morning.” In the future, our home economics will be much easier to account for. You won’t need to go to school for twelve years to Get It. It’ll be very convenient. In our new Action Industry there will only be one story you will have to worry about producing sun up to sun down, all the products in the story will become props and all the services you’re used to buying for your home will become actions. We call the story that’s going to streamline our home economics and make our stories a lot more valuable, The Earth Show.

Our competitors don’t agree, but we believe the best part of The Earth Show is how unknowable it is. No one human, small group of humans, or even an entire corporate person can host The Earth Show in the classic way; where we memorize It All like a school subject beginning, middle, and end, then do our best to past Its tests to prove we Get It. A human could spend their life, cradle to grave, trying to host It All—studying books, watching screens, and learning all the parts by heart—and still die tragically unaware of The Earth Show and the many human and non-human stories it hosts on The World Stage. No, the only way to know The Earth Show is engaging The Action, feeling The Action, digesting The Action, then hosting The Action in our bodies. In fact, that’s a decent way to describe humans. We are our parts we play in The Earth Show. It’s All About the personal relationships we have with The Action.

Trouble is, we don’t like relationships that don’t have a clear narrative arch for us to follow each step of the way. Humans fear The Earth Show because it’s wild, mysterious, and unknowable. It’s a question without an answer that we can get in The End. Actually it’s an understatement to say that we fear The Earth Show, especially these days. Humans are terrified of anything that’s wild and not in their control, and the fear rises in us when we see the ants march across our kitchen counter, when the kid screams in the grocery line, when the toothless man begs for food outside our automobile—the fear rises anytime we can’t be one hundred percent sure of What Happens Next.

There is no Us and Them here. All humans fear The Earth Show, and that’s why our competitors have been successfully selling their generic knock off version of The Earth Show to humans for centuries. We could write about these Things all day, but we’re going to try to keep this short. Our competitors aren’t humans. They are earth’s apex predators, an inhuman race of generically engineered characters we call the Generics. Humans don’t host these leviathans like guests in their homes. Humans receive and save Generics undigested like Jeopardy trivia as members of their audiences. Some of earth’s most massive Generics can captivate billions of audience members, using each human in Its audience to save Its governing body of information forever. Immortality is the goal of all Generics. Since the dawn of history, these illusive beings have been building a global literary device—called The Fourth Wall—for one purpose and one purpose only. The Fourth Wall is how they host their mass produced knock off of The Earth Show, all the generic information they want us to save for them forever. Generics like to slap all kinds of labels on The Fourth Wall. It’s called a temple, a theater, a theme park, a marketplace, the internet, but we don’t know what They call their vast web-like cannon of information. We call it, The Same Old Story. Not that it matters much what we call it. They don’t care in the least what humans think. What matters is, like The Earth Show, the generic stories at Its center are too large, too “go big or go home,” for any of us to control at this point. It’s like a blackhole, but it has no mass. It’s “mass” is entirely made up of actions. In that way, it’s more of a super massive suckhole. That’s why we also call The Same Old Story, The Suck.

And It sucks more than the feeling we get after we watch the newest Marvel movie. The Fourth Wall’s presentation of The Same Old Story has literally sucked all the value from any other story that shares Its market. As a result, we humans have no market for our stories. By “no market” we mean, our stories are worthless. There is no marketplace, no store, no online shopsite, to buy and sell and my story, your story, your co-worker’s story, your mother’s story, your children’s story, and sell them for a profit. In other words, there’s no way we humans can become rich selling our live action stories anywhere on The World Stage. That’s a sad thought. So yeah, to recap, we’re saying: A) there’s a super massive story that’s monopolizing The Action (earth’s valuable resource); B) the thing is so huge that no one human, groups of humans, or even governments run by humans can control It; and B) It totally sucks.

No, this is not a joke. Its f*ing terrifying on a level we can’t express in words. We’re sure this sales pitch must be easy to deny, ignore, punch holes in, or write off as hack fiction. It sure seems like humans have plenty of stories to choose from! New TV streaming shows, movies, and You Tube videos hit the market all the time. Trouble is, none of them are ours. That’s what makes this The Impossible Sales Pitch. What we’re really trying to do here is sell you your own story, which most humans have been trained since birth to dutifully repress like a “good girl,” sacrifice like an offering to a god (or like a soldier for freedom), “leave at home” during team meetings, celebrate at designated family times that also always seem to celebrate a national character or culture, and generally learn to confuse with whatever brand you chose to be you instead.

You’d think The Same Old Story was one of The Great Books (or at least a movie based on one of great builders of civilization): The Bible, The Quran, The Vedas, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, or some other book filled with truth that humans can follow like a script forever—but The Wall doesn’t care much about selling The Great Books. The Generics know, at the end of the day, words always follow The Action. That’s why The Same Old Story is an unnamed action sequence that gets repeated again and again, then again like an elegant little virus. Here’s our rough draft of that action sequence…   

THE SAME OLD STORY

ACT 1: SIT PRETTY, STAND AT ATTENTION (LIKE IN A LINE) AND OR REST IN A SUBMISSIVE WAY, AND THEN MAKE THE BLANK FACE LOOK FOR THE FOURTH WALL. Common options for Fourth Wall delivery systems include: iPhones, books, magazines, televisions, movie theaters, laptops, radio devices, and live action performance options like stages, game boards, podiums, pulpits, desks, and customer service counters.

ACT 4: CHOOSE A BRAND OF SAME OLD STORY THAT YOU FEEL REPRESENTS YOU BEST.  Common options for It include: sports fandoms, church groups, corporate families/teams, national characters, military-like rank structures, patriarchal kingdoms, tribal collectives, celebrity role models, classic  and modern gender roles, incorporated consumer brands, and other cultural and counter-cultural identities.

ACT 3: ACCEPT YOUR REPRESENTATIVE BRAND IN YOUR BODY LIKE JESUS AND BECOME A GENERIC HOST OF THE SAME OLD STORY. Common ways to host a brand include: wearing uniforms (or a similar style) as other humans who host same brand, having something to say in team meetings, feeling strong urges to vote (or cheer during sports), working to force your immediate environment to reflect your chosen brand back to you (like an old song you love so much), seek comfort at all costs, and fear/hate anything that’s not the brand that you feel best represents The Same Old Story.

ACT 4: SAVE YOUR BRAND IN YOUR BODY, LIKE DATA, BY NOT DIGESTING ANY OF ITS INFORMATION. Common ways to save your brand in your body include: memorize everything, get good grades in school, only follow roles outlined in your brand’s generic scripted storylines, flee from or fight roles not scripted by your brand, sell the brand to everyone (because It needs as many hosts as possible in order to live forever), only report or receive information (think mansplaining), and only feel comfortable, or normal, when you’re either receiving or giving good customer service.

ACT 5: CONGRATS YOU’RE HOOKED! YOU’RE NOW A LIFETIME MEMBER OF ITS AUDIENCE (THE PART WHERE YOU SIT PRETTY AND WAIT FOR THE UPDATES). Common symptoms of lifetime audience membership include: inability to make your own choices, mania when you work too hard to make The Same Old Story come true like a movie, depression when It doesn’t come true, psychotic breaks when your life as an audience member and generic host of The Same Old Story becomes more real than The Action of your home, and generally feel strong urges to escape The Earth Show.

THE END: THE PART WHERE YOU’RE SITTING ON THE EDGE OF YOUR SEAT READY TO BE BORN AGAIN IN ACT ONE…

We imagine there was a time, long ago, when we had a choice.

The Fourth Wall is everywhere and most days (especially the bad ones) it’s difficult to know where we end and It begins.

For that purpose, we stock a “trigger character.” It’s how we’re able to track The Action on the bad days, when we’ve fallen deep into The Suck, so we don’t make the blank face look before The Wall for too long, and become so  hooked we forget our story forever on a random Friday. Our trigger character is definitely a he, and we stock other characters who are similar to him like our narrator Wylie Jones and Bookmaker Jake, but we know our Asshole when we see him. He isolates our story from other human hosts—playing all our favorite man classics: The Stranger in A Strange Land (I call Home), The One Man Army (I Don’t Need Your Help!), The Selfless (and Whiny) Martyr, Johnny Marches Off to Work (and Thank God! Kids Are Super Annoying!), Alack! (I’m Alone in A Crowded Room Again), The One Act Wonder (The Mansplaining Monologue Machine), The Erotic Buddy Cop Comedy (Why Don’t I Have Any Friends Anymore?), and Superman Flies With His Cape Afire (The Superman Story)—and we become a part of The Wall emulating the relationship we know best, retreating into our body like our flesh was a heavenly fortress made of golden walls. The reason why our Asshole exists isn’t because we watch our screens every day like a well-trained wallbot or because our body landed on The Spectrum of Disorders when we were born, Asshole exists for one reason and one reason only. Asshole is Asshole because believes he knows It All (or can know It All from his personal relationship with The Wall) without any call-and-response dialogue with The Action. He feels he doesn’t need to participate in The Earth Show. He loves the comfort and security of The Fourth Wall and Its presentation of The Same Old Story. He’s afraid to break It and discover the wildside of The Acton beyond It, because our Asshole doesn’t see the value in any story that’s not branded by a Generic.

Let’s take our relationship for example. If Asshole was our character in charge of selling the book in your hands, he would “sell The Brand” like our competitors and write an action sequence for our sales pitch that would play something like: A) Asshole would target his market/audience. By that we mean, he would do what Assholes do. He would use his intelligence to decide if you humans are with us or against us, using creepy tests he enacts in secret at a safe distance from any engagement with your story; B) He would then develop his market/audience by choosing a binary (like men vs. women gender roles, left vs. right politics, or hero vs. villain character traits, whatever), because selling a product and or service by making its story about a binary/duality is one of the oldest marketing tricks known to humans. For instructional purposes only, let’s say our Asshole decides to use the traditional good vs. bad marketing hustle; C) Asshole culls his market/audience by applying pressure (i.e. taunting you like a bully) to force you to decide if you’re “with us” or “against us,” prompting you to either flee or join our newly formed audience; and D) In The End (see Act 5 of The Same Old Story) our Asshole can pretty much sell you anything he wants to sell you, because we’re the good guys and you’re with us.

Our Asshole knows selling The Brand vs. selling The Story of our book   would work like a charm. It’s easier to sell a story if the only reason why you buy it is, because it fits into whatever generic brand, group, identity, or culture you call your own. Selling The Brand is indistinguishable from magic, a classic hypnotic brainwashing tactic, a spell for marketing wizards to use to captivate audiences and herd them into markets like cattle. If we didn’t check our trigger character that Asshole would sell the book in your hand The Right Way (like any other Future Famous “Asshole” Author would sell their book), writing our sales pitch like they do in Hollywood. Hollywood calls it The Elevator Pitch, because they believe that our stories should be able to be pitched and sold in the time it takes humans to ride an elevator. And The Elevator Pitch works, because humans should already know what story we’re going to buy next. We should know it in an instant. The Same Old Story is love at first sight. It’s the bad guy we know is bad from scene one. It’s the good guy hero we know is good before we buy the movie ticket. It’s the woman we know is hot at a glance. It’s the man we know we want to please from the way he leads his men. It’s the politician we vote for because he looks and talks like us. And The Elevator Pitch works, because we’ve already been sold on The Same Old Story we’ve bought a thousand times. We’re  geniuses. We know It All in an instant. That’s why no one expects anyone who’s selling a Generic’s good or service like a waiter, mechanic, clerk, grocer, doctor, contractor, repairperson, or rat catcher to answer the question—“How are you today?—with a genuine story. The answer is the brand posted on their uniform, the logo embroidered on their scrubs, the legal business cartoon trademarked on their service vehicle, the answer is always the code branded like a magic spell somewhere on or near a Generic’s host body. There is no getting to know you today. We as buyers expect our wallbots to stay in character, read the script, and perform their customer service without breaking The Wall. That’s also why no one really cares how their shoes were manufactured, or where the arugula in their salad was grown, or how many different ranches raised the pork in their sausage, or what their surgeon does on his days off to keep his hands steady when he cuts into their chest cavity. All questions are answered by the brands, the labels, the culture, the market, the history, the audience the human choses to be in The Same Old Story. The shoes say Adidas, the arugula says Organic, the sausage says Jimmy Dean, the surgeon says Providence Healthcare; the tires say Firestone, the cat food says Friskies, the peanut butter says Jiffy, the drink says Coke. The list of Generics is endless and The Brands get more general as the Generic grows in mass: the nation says the soldiers died for Freedom, the state says the kid in school is a Student, the woman in the home is a Housewife, the man beside her is a Husband, the kids and wife in the photo on the man’s desk are a Family, the man we see on the street looks like this or that culture because we know That Culture in an instant, and there’s no need to engage The Action and ask, listen, or invest any of our time exploring, reading, and digesting the stories hosted by other humans. We have personal relationships with brands, gods, TV characters, sports heroes, and the priests, authors, politicians, and sportscasters who manage and sell those Generics. We don’t have live action relationships with humans, because our stories—my story, your story, your co-worker’s story, your employee’s story—have no meaningful market value. We’re expected to write and perform our stories in the evenings and weekends after our accounts with The Same Old Story are paid in full.

The Fourth Wall doesn’t need a sales pitch that’s longer than most articles in The New Yorker to sell The Same Old Story. “Long is wrong,” is the line my editor has been delivering like mantric running gag for years. I don’t try to argue that fact anymore. Instead I quietly remind myself that, “Any story that we can pitch to humans in the time it takes to ride an elevator is definitely The Same Old Story.” No one needs to know much about any new twist The Wall  might adds to The Same Old Story. A few spells spun into a trailer, teaser, or a blurb will do, because all it takes to sell The Same Old Story is recognition. “Yeah that one [of whatever] is one of us!” We suppose we’re not much different. We believe that any human host who’s still here reading The Impossible Sales Pitch (at page eight) is naturally “one of us.” How’s that for a creepy test?

Please don’t take that seriously. This isn’t a test. We have no plans to launch you into space. This is our story, and we don’t know any shorter way to get to The Good Part where we try to sell you a story that’s not The Same Old Story (without using The Same Old Story to sell it to you). We needed you to get to the part where you, at least, understand that we believe that The Brands and other  generically engineered super massive suckholes we buy every day have an action sequence similar to The Same Old Story. Our story about a World Stage where humans are free to host their parts in The Earth Show won’t make much sense if you aren’t open to the idea that the pit parts you play before The Fourth Wall at home, at school, at work, at church, at the stadium, at the store—may not actually be your story. Because our stories—my story, your story, your friend’s story, your daughter’s son’s story—that’s the story that’s not The Same Old Story we want to sell you in this novel-length advertisement.

For shits and giggles, you can call that our “mission statement.” Just don’t use the word “mission” too often around our narrator. Wylie’s in recovery from a lifetime of government training to be a mission-oriented character, and he has a tendency to take his duty to accomplish missions way too seriously. We tease him and say he’s a “recovering super hero,” which is mean and we know it hurts his feelings, but that’s because it’s true.

In any case, do you remember the part in the beginning where we said that our stories matter and we value them more than gold?

We weren’t exaggerating. Saying our stories matter is easy and generic we could print it on a sticker and put it on our work vehicle and all humans we pass would nod along like a radio song. On the other hand, to say that we value our stories more than gold is not easy. Once that statement makes sense it will blow your mind. We cannot put that line on a bumper sticker and all humans we pass would know immediately how they feel about that. When we began our journey to Storysold: City we didn’t Get It. We couldn’t imagine working in a city where our stories had become the new gold standard. Not at all. We began this journey in our early twenties with a hazy notion about a place where we’d love to go to work like we loved to go to work with our Grandmother the Original, Original Tough Mother who ran a character-driven sewing business out of her home in NE Portland before the last chapter of The Californian Invasion, and we ended that journey in our 40s with the book in your hands. In the decades in between we discovered that it is possible to run a city on a new “storybanking system” that does more than value our stories more than gold. Our rad theory for “waking up on Monday morning without a hangover with love for our work like grandma” uses our live action stories as a keystone commodity to value all other goods and services, which naturally includes gold, healthcare, land, and homes. In Storysold: City, our stories aren’t worthless—because it’s possible to make a good living buying and selling our stories. In our city, The Action of our stories is the most valuable resource in The Earth Show and every good and service that’s bought and sold there is sold with its producer’s story. In other words, our stories are the only good or service that’s bought and sold in Storysold: City period. What you call “goods” or “products” in your cities we called “props,” and what you call “services” are known as “actions.” That’s the game-changing discovery we want to sell you today. Breaking free of The Suck is easy. All we do is break The Wall and pack our stories with action.

When you invite Storysold to support your story (aka hire us or buy our props) that’s what we do. We break The Fourth Wall and Its presentation of The Same Old Story and pack our prop production and service stories with one-hundred percent pure, all natural, organic action. Our competitors sell us their action simulations (aka fictions) all the time. It’s the salve they sell like charity to compensate for the bit parts we play in The Same Old Story each day. Generics sell them, but they sell them with strict warnings labels. CAUTION: DO NOT PACK YOUR DREAM CHARACTERS WITH ACTION! The Fourth Wall is clear about that. Its host bodies (aka wallbots) must maintain the separation between Its Words and The Action. “Do what I say not what I do.” Dreams are dreams, fantasies are fantasies, and fictions are fictions. Living in The Suck is like living in a school lunchroom. All our stories are grouped “like with like” in isolated social herds we chose for ourselves. Hospitals and prisons are full of humans who try to pack their dreams of becoming a princess, hero, genius, prophet, or whatever (even the rare non-generic original character) with actions that cross them over to The Action beyond The Fourth Wall. That scene rarely plays out well, because our stories are worthless. The only way to become a princess (aka Disney Woman) or hero (aka Disney Man) is performing those roles for profit in the ways The Wall scripts for us. That’s what makes any true fourth wall break (no, not like wall breaks in action simulations like Deadpool or Ferris Bueller when a character switches to the second person) so difficult. It’s near impossible to break The Wall all day, every day, year in and year out, without a fortune (or government aid) to support those stories. That’s why rich people are eccentric and poor people are crazy.

We’re not eccentric yet. We’re still crazy—but Storysold is becoming more profitable by the day. The secret to our success has been a slight shift in our book production goal. Somewhere along the way we realized that the story of making the “product” in your hands was by far more interesting than The Words we were attempting to chisel into stone. Somewhere along the way we gave ourselves permission to break The Same Old Story of our own fiction, and we began to put our fiction to work (like corporate persons do): using Storysold: City like a trail map to explore, discover, and build The Action of our story in the wilderness beyond The Fourth Wall, refusing to indulge the age old systemic separation between Words and The Action. We still have our Asshole days, but most days Storysold’s in the wall-breaking/action packing business. It’s hard to say when we successfully failed to be an author, artist, or some other generic hero specialist who invests their storytime in the manufacturing of lifeless dead bricks meant for mass production, but we did it. We’ve taken charge of owning and operating our story, writing our signature work scenes, packing them with action, and publishing them in The Earth Show for our cast to enjoy.

Our first big crossover happened in the summer of 2011 when I was still only using the first person perspective “I” to produce my story (and not yet identifying as a legal business entity). I was in my second season working with Bob the Indie Crystal Miner at Spruce (the name of Bob’s story) deep in the Northern Cascades when I decided to use my many hours of “free time” after the day’s mining duties were done to develop my first live action character Bookmaker Jake. I made about eighty books that summer, each one made in The Action of the wilderness: on a mountaintop, naked in a hot spring, in the middle of a river, on the porch of my rustic living shack; in town at bars, city parks, and laundry mats; with Bob at his mine. As Ole Bookmaker would do in Storysold: City, each book Bookmaker made was made (and later sold at tabling events like Bumpershoot and Wordstock) with its own handwritten “making of” prop production stories. I gave Bookmaker my best shot, but Bookmaker’s wild live action bookmaking adventures eventually fizzled out years later when it became clear that he wasn’t profitable. It’s easy to blame that boom and bust on Bookmaker’s love of beer, but I also learned that it’s hard to pay The Bills making local, story sold, factory-free books. At the end of the day, making and selling books like Bookmaker mades and sells books runs against almost every normal “smart” way normal humans make money. There’s a lot more to that part of our story, but I’ll spare you the drama. All I’m saying is, Bookmaker is no longer my rising star. Now he’s the character I become when I drink beers and make books alone listening to The Wall with my headphones on.

Our second big crossover happened in August 2019, when we legally became a “we,” when I began to host—Storysold: Pest Control—featuring a wildlife evicting and excluding, “pest control operator” I named Wilderness Security Guide. In Storysold: City, the pest at the top of Guide’s list wasn’t rats, roaches, or bedbugs. Guide specialized in the control of infested characters that had become unprofitable. One of the ways she did that was working with her supporting cast members to dig in and draw fiercer territorial lines around their homes like all her wild creature friends do. Minus the part where we put human characters on the list of pests we control, our Storysold: Pest Control theme starring Wilderness Security Guide and her bedbug-destroying friend The Pest Predator (also from Storysold: City) does exactly that. We dig in and draw better “Homefronts” around our customer’s homes to make The Earth Show more secure for our wild creature friends. You know, so the rats don’t find an entry hole in your Homefront and read that as a sign you’re inviting them in. After all it makes no sense to waste our time and money killing the wild creatures (and or human) who infested our homes because our homes were weak and ripe for infestation. In The Earth Show, escorting dying creatures like trees home to the earth is what most “pests” do. In any case, Wilderness Guide is still one of my favorite characters from Storysold: City.

To our surprise, we discovered that Storysold: Pest Control was also profitable in the same old way owning and operating classic business entities are profitable. After three years in business and over 150 reviews, Storysold: Pest Control had a five star rating on Thumbtack, Google, Angie’s List, and Yelp. Even better, after three years our word of mouth referrals freed us from our dependency on vampiric care providators like Thumbtack, Google, Angie’s List, and Yelp. It was easy to applaud Storysold: Pest Control (and its drunken side business Storysold: Publications) as a success, even if Bookmaker Jake was inactive most of the time due to our episodic Adventures in Sobriety. Our theme made a lot of money. Or at least it felt like a lot of money to me. After I returned from teaching American to South Korean children in 2002, I spent three years, off and on, suds busting under the assumed character title of “pro dishwasher” and or “dishmaster,” so any rise of income above the empoyable minimum wage seems like a lot of money to me.

We believe Storysold: Pest Control has promise, but I often perform our action-packed theme and realize how much we don’t “mint our moments” like Wilderness Security Guide would in Storysold: City. It doesn’t help when our customers ask, “Storysold? That’s a very interesting name. Where did it come from?” Then we hit them with The Impossible Sales Pitch. We always try to be good about it and imagine that we’re riding in an elevator with them while we deliver our lines, but The Impossible Sales Pitch rarely leads to the part where we engage in a call-and-response dialogue about Storysold: City. Usually they either politely change the subject, or they make the rooster ready blank face look, like good members of an audience, and then wait for me to say the correct magic words that trigger their recognition of The Same Old Story, which (as you might imagine) never comes, because Storysold isn’t a recognized generic brand that The Wall has mass produced for years. I usually end the scene by saying, “You’ll have to read Storysold: City to really Get It.” It’s a copout, but I also think that’s how this goes. It’s a classic catch 22. You need to read Storysold: City to know why buying Storysold: City is so rad. Disney sells novel-length advertisements for its brand every day, but we’re not selling you another Star Wars or Marvel story in Our Universe. We’re trying to sell you a story about a city where our stories matter and we value them more than gold.

Most days, we’re happy to be producing a better service story than The Same Old Story the Generics in The Industry like Orkin, Western, Terminix, and Axiom sell their many customers. We’re also proud to claim the title of “fully embodied business entity,” which means we’re not employed or own employees like the “unemployables” who live and work in Storysold: City. All in all, I’d say we’ve done a “good job” breaking new trails beyond The Wall—but most days I can’t say with gusto that we’re doing a “good job” producing our parts in The Earth Show. We still buy The Same Old Story like humans do. We eat our frozen meals and watch the boob tube after our work is done too. Nevertheless, we continued to make efforts to crossover.

In 2023 we began our most ambitious wall break yet—buying a small farm in Gresham, Oregon with our homemaking hero (aka wife/life partner) Emily. She doesn’t identify as a “we,” but she hosts a legal business entity—Full Cellar Farm—like we do. Unlike Storysold, Farmer Emily’s business Full Cellar Farm employs host bodies (including our Farm Helper character) in order to do the backbreaking work that’s needed to supply her 200+ member CSA with local organic vegetables. On paper we “bought the farm,” but the land body we own has been branded with a strict easement that rules The Action of its story reducing our roles as the owners to something more akin to “farm managers” for the governmental Generic that controls the easement. It calls Its story a “forever farm.” We call It a reboot of The Classic Farmer Story. We still live in a world where things like land can be owned with words without action, and land is a very expensive “thing,” especially for a host farmer who makes their money selling food in an economic system where food is made profitable by mass production and government subsidies. In any case, we’re not here to deep dive The Suck of hosting a local organic farm character. We’re at the part where we tell you how buying Full Cellar Farm breaks The Wall.

Emily has always played a big part of our crossing over. We know she struggles with this reading, but (as we read The Earth Show) Emily is the co-star Storysold: City. We gave her a fictional name. We called her Maggie instead of Emily, but the actions of Maggie’s character were mostly inspired by Emily’s on-going quest to own an organic farmer. Loving Emily and supporting her personal story has long been our biggest Wall break. I often struggle with this reading too. It’s a hard reading to digest, but I believe our actions as Storysold show that it’s true. Emily’s story matters more to us than our efforts to break Storysold: City into the light of action, because her adventure to become a local organic farmer naturally crosses over. Emily does what we want to do without the theatrics of “making art.” Her story battles The Same Old Story of mass food production on The World Stage at every turn. We only wish we could persuade her to rename her farm and call it “Storysold: Local Organic Farm,” or in keeping with the narrative in your hands “Storysold: Our Home”—because building better homes with better stories is what The Earth Show is “all about,” and we like to believe that’s what Storysold: City is “all about” too. 

I suppose that’s why I feel it’s so important to show you, in words and action, a part of The Earth Show where our stories matter. We called our fiction Storysold: City, but really Storysold: City is anyplace where humans can host their stories in full and pay The Bills too. The book in your hands isn’t a perfect brick of literature. It’s an imperfect novel-length advertisement for our parts in The Earth Show. We’re still working on our parts, but this isn’t fiction. You can buy Farmer Emily’s beautiful veggies and Storysold: Pest Control’s live action non-generic service storylines. Our stories are real. They are the stories we can sell our fellow human hosts that’s not The Same Old Story.

No joke! Seriously check us out—

www.storybank.live 💚 www.fullcellarfarmoregon.com

So without further ado, I give you our co-star and narrator Wylie “Dishmaster” Jones. We hope you enjoy the show.

#2 – HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN HOMEMADE CURRENCY >>

Every storybanker and theme of storybankers in Storysold: City had their own ways of minting their homemade currency, but The Storybank Exchange system had constants. The maximum value for a day’s work was always $100:00mms, because our earth can’t spin around in space any faster or slower than it does…

A typical daily pop-making scene for The Fizzy Pop Family Corporation showed: (1) the family washing bottles after breakfast using the high-heat bottle washing machine Ernesto and his friend Son the Tool Maker had produced from trash they’d salvaged in the Pacific Gyre (2) the family mixing ingredients they’d already balanced (bought) from their corporate cast members (3) the family bottling their pop with caps made by a storybanker named Ninki (4) the family rotating their new supply in the backstage of their shop (4) the family minting their currencies, sitting around their boardroom table, using their storyclock and its remotes to edit the day’s pop-making scene.

The minting began by linking the storybank accounts of the family members present like this:

ernestovilla1564@storyexchange.tlc(241$36:23-73:12(-$4.78)), mercedesvilla1563@storyexchange.tlc(241$36:23-73:12(-$2.75)), patriciavilla1312@storyexchange.tlc(241$36:23-54:87(-$0.54)).

The first part of the line gave their user name and their super star employee number (Ernesto was the 1,564^th employee to give everything he owned to Weston for a storybank account). Next came the name of their network—The Storybank Exchange—and then the numbers: First came the calendar day, which in this case was the 241st calendar day of the year. Second came the moments of the day ($100:00 = one day, $50:00 = noon, $75:00 = six o’ clock PM, $25:00 = six o’ clock AM, etc.). Finally, the line showed the number of moments that were edited out of the total scene for any unprofitable, non-working breaks in the day’s action. Usually, storybankers don’t edit piss breaks and or breaks in The Action that make less than a quarter moment.

Next, with a few clicks of their remotes, they strung their individual lines together to form what Mercedes called an “incorporated sentence,” or what other storybankers called a “title.” The point of creating that sentence (see below) was to value a scene like “FizzyPop(popscene321)” in a real way none of the classic forms of currency in history have been able to do. The @ sign after the (popscene321) balances the generalized value assigned to the work scene (321) with the specific monetary moments earned by Ernesto, Mercedes, and Patricia like an algebra equation. It looks like this:

FizzyPop(popscene321)@ernestovilla1564@storyexchange.tlc(241$36:23-73:12(-$4.78)), mercedesvilla1563@storyexchange.tlc(241$36:23-73:12(-$2.75)), patriciavilla1312@storyexchange.tlc(241$36:23-54:87(-$0.54)).

From there they could click on the title (or incorporated sentence) displayed above and read the scene in depth, or add capital investments the family invested to make their Fizzy Pop happen. I don’t remember the specific values Tim showed Maggie, but I got to know The Family Corporation well enough to know that a capital investment might include a yeast-making scene from Yeasty Beasty, or a capital investment scene they’d balanced with a glass-blowing robot named Yammi the Manbot. Next they might add the capital from the extract-making scene they’d made, usually once a month, on Extract Family Day, which Patricia enjoyed because it was a break from their usual plot and they often used their time together to retell their “greatest hits” for the month. Finally the family might add a sugar-making scene from the New Pioneers, which usually starred Stumpy and Half Pint.

As a family, they minimized the complexities inherent in governing their theme by remembering to add all their capital investment scenes to their daily pop-making scenes, which they sold. For example, a capital investment sentence for Fizzy Pop might look like this:

Capitalinvestment@yeastybeasty1784@storyexchange.tlc(201$34:23-84:35(-$1.64))/52, manrobot104@storyexchange.tlc(154$55:34-91.88(-$0.02))/10, FizzyPop(extractscene123)@ernestovilla1564@storyexchange.tlc(221$25:12-83:45(-$6.98)), mercedesvilla1563@storyexchange.tlc(221$25:12-83:45)), patriciavilla1312@storyexchange.tlc(221$25:89-75:87(-$2.34)), the new Pioneers(sugarscene645)@halfpint@storyexchange.145(184$24:34-45:89;185$34:72-89:23(-$7.86))/23.

Written in “long hand,” the complete pop-making scene might look like:

FizzyPop(popscene321)@ernestovilla1564@storyexchange.tlc(241$36:23-73:12(-$4.78)), mercedesvilla1563@storyexchange.tlc(241$36:23-73:12(-$2.75)), patriciavilla1312@storyexchange.tlc(241$36:23-54:87(-$0.54)). Capitalinvestment@yeastybeasty1784@storyexchange.tlc(201$34:23-84:35(-$1.64))/52, giantrobot104@storyexchange.tlc(154$55:34-91.88(-$0.02))/10; FizzyPop(extractscene123)@ernestovilla1564@storyexchange.tlc(221$25:12-83:45(-$6.98)), mercedesvilla1563@storyexchange.tlc(221$25:12-83:45)), patriciavilla1312@storyexchange.tlc(221$25:89-75:87(-$2.34)); TheNew Pioneers(sugarscene645)@halfpint@storyexchange.145(184$24:34-45:89;185$34:72-89:23(-$7.86))/23 = Tim(12of54)

The last line after the = sign meant that 12 bottles of the total 54 bottles canonized in the pop-making scene now belonged to Tim the Templar Knight of the First Congregational Army of Christ…as soon as he balanced their accounts. The family never had to worry about Tim. He was a pop junkie, and Fizzy Pop had the best “demon-free rating” in the city.

#3 – (JUST SO YOU KNOW) HERE’S THE LEVELS OF REALITY >>

Level One – Amoebic Commanders Invading Complex Gaming Personalities…

New Gamers enter Reality the Gaming Community as amoebic commanders who invade the lives of other amoebic commanders in the race for survival, which ends and progresses to the next level when a winner, or winners, invade and program the lives of enough of their fellow Gamers to create a complex gaming personality, or a group that functions a lot like a tribe.

Level Two – Complex Gaming Personalities Fashion Gods for Personal Use…

Gamers develop their complex gaming personalities (or CGPs) and work together to create a fictional character that represents their CGPs symbolically. The character doesn’t have to be an original—just believable—so all of the Gamers in the CGP can relate to it in meaningful ways. For example, some CGPs use characters from the past like Vishnu, Nike, Atticus Finch, Gatorade, Nebraska, Illuminati, Howitzer, Shadow Moon, Smog Accounting Dragon, or more current original characters like Hash Tag, Sky Pilot, and the Holy Ephernipple.

Level Three – Genocidal Empire Building Begins…

CGPs pit the power of their characters against each other in a simulated war—using foam swords, rubber cannonballs, and wands—until one CGP beats the level, becomes a superpower, and wins enough moments from other CGPs to advance to the next level.

Level Four – Benevolently Ruling Like You Didn’t Just Kill Everyone…

CGPs rest and are kind to each other—making cheese, making bread, brewing beer, making love scenes—and benevolently rule their gaming/storybank accounts with the other Gamers who somehow survived levels one through four. Note: This level is less strict about the need to conform to the collective needs of a CGP. This level was programmed to grant Gamers some well-deserved individual playtime.

Level Five – Manic/Melancholy in Pursuit of Structured Fun/Happiness… 

The best Reality Gamers from level four are hand picked by Winner to become artful, introspective, wise, and expressive with paints! Among other things, they produce a supply of music that ranges from marching tunes to battle rap to Sounds of The Ocean. The programming encourages these Gamers to spend many moments mastering the art of snacking with real winners, conversing politely about the programming, and generating new rules for the lower levels. The Level 5 Gamers who sell the most culture to the lower levels advance to the next level.

Level Six – Run Your Old CGPs Through the Gears of Your New Factory…

Gamers are told that the characters of their old CGPs were never “really real” in spite of many years spent in devoted service to their cause. Winner then gives his Level Six Gamers the “wink, love, and nod” to run their Old CGPs though the gears of their very own factory. The programming allows for one product and one factory space for every “Old CGP supporting cast.” The best factories in this level win by “making first contact” and selling their goods (like Projectavisions and cards) to the storybankers outside Island Market Nine.

Level Seven – Raining Death Down On Every Factory within Range… 

The programming of this level is simple: “If you’re not with us, you’re against us.” Casts form alliances to protect their interests and rain hell down on the factory casts that aren’t their allies. This often includes the simulated launch of a classic all-out near-nuclear old war, which would no doubt use a ton of protective gear and foam rubber to dramatize the slaughter of enemies, animals, and innocents.

Level Eight – Dreamy Nineteen Fifties Pre-Fabricated Suburban Lifestyle…

Charles created a level where his close friends and family and other favorable Gamers in The Winner’s Circle live lavishly in posh comfort without having to beat any levels to get there. Thus, Level Eight is a favoritism/nepotism-fed “warp-zone” of sorts, a duty-free level where Gamers can wake up, watch their storyclock TVs, eat Level Six factory-processed Breakfast Cereal, smoke a Level Six Pipe, dress in Level Six Pumps, Lipstick, Necktie, and Cologne, and generally play pre-fabricated suburban household all day, every day, without any real conflict.

Level Nine – Global Meltdown Causes Dreamy Gamers to Be Aware…

Bio-friendly raids by Lava Monster, Rompasaurus, Neptune, Captain Nemo, O2, Jellyfish, and other Antagonists of Reality “stir up trouble” and cause Reality Gamers to be aware of the seemingly basic fact that no matter how hard he tries, the Gamemaster can’t account for all the variables, sanitize their lives of all non-gamers, and completely corner the market on reality.

Level Ten – Utopian Moon Colony Defended by Lasers… 

The Best of the Best Reality Gamers are introduced to their signature programmer, Winner the Gamemaster of Reality, who addresses them in somber tones dressed in his costume: wizard-style robe, mirror-like sunglasses, and pointy hat, which he sometimes exchanges for a skintight bodysuit. The latter “action suit” (as he calls it) is meant to prove that he isn’t limited to the classic administrative inaction of old-market wizards. Winner then instructs his Gamers to “make haste to the moon” and create a “Reality Moon Colony” of literarily tolerant, hyper-friendly Space Cadets and Acid-Gulping Moon Hippies. His mission: explore, spread peace, love, and Reality to the many “less developmentally programmed storybankers” of the city (through the glass of their helmets), and then lead The Programmable Ones to discover the structured joy of Reality the Gaming Community. And if that didn’t work, Winner was prepared to defend their Utopian Moon Colony from the many (growing number) of foreign Space Invaders with “lasers” if necessary.

Level Zero – Winner the Gamemaster’s Private Gaming Chamber…

Only the best of the best of the best Level Ten Gamers have seen Winner’s Private Gaming Chamber. In fact, it’s A Thing to discuss whether or not certain Gamers had seen inside it, or not. It’s a mystery, which Winner set where the Common Areas were set in other Residential Shopping Centers, under the Reservoir that collects freshwater from the Weather Bubble. Unlike the other Areas, Winner’s Chamber had no access to light. In keeping with his character, Winner walled his Chamber with aluminum panels that reflect sunlight on the outside, while they double as screens inside. He calls his interconnected grid of super-sized Projectavisions the “Supervision.”

#4 – KING ANDREW’S ROYAL SHOPPING LIST >>

COMMON WELFARE – YOU WILL cast your live action votes for thematic storylines that empower the sovereign self-government of indivisible human hosts in the pursuit of the general welfare and happiness for all.

EDUCATION – YOU WILL cast your live action votes for your favorite education scenes that pass on high quality signatures and characters to others.   

COMMON PROPS – YOU WILL cast your live action votes for public prop production scenes, which benefit everyone.

NATURAL DISASTERS – YOU WILL cast your live action votes for the emergency evacuation rehearsals and plots that you feel work best.

COMMON HEALTHCARE – YOU WILL cast your live action votes for working plots that help the poor in story and the poor in health. Help the needy find casts, or help them develop a cast that can meet their daily healthcare needs.

THE STORYBANK EXCHANGE SYSTEM – YOU WILL cast your live action votes for the upkeep and production of A-eyes, antenna trees, storybank accounts, and other thematically owned props needed for The Storybank Exchange.

BEAUTY – YOU WILL cast your live action votes for beautiful art themes!

SELF-GOVERNANCE – YOU WILL cast your live action votes for the hosting of personal constitutions and or other forms of conscience-based personal laws that encourage self-representation, and actively discourages the hosting of super massive generically engineered characters.

COMMON GOVERNANCE – YOU WILL cast your live action votes for plots in group/themes that balance out the accounts of individual storybankers.

COMMON DEFENSE – YOU WILL cast your live action votes for the development of tactics that give aid and comfort to the bad guys, zombies, flesh-eating space Nazis, unhappy employables, and other villains—and keep them from becoming so hungry they feel the need to feed on us.

LIVE-ACTION VOTING – YOU WILL cast you live action votes for the plots that promote the day-to-day action of voting for and paying the goods and services that most accurately represent your signature.

WILDERNESS – YOU WILL cast your live action votes for wild garden themes and wilderness that balance out the diverse sovereignty of human and non-human life alike. Without our local food systems we are nothing!

STORYTIME SECURITIES – YOU WILL cast your live action votes for the past-like, present-like, and future-life theaters that new storytime courses.