HE SPOKE INTO THE microphone, comfortable with the intent but uneasy with the delivery. Rick knew he was boring and was reminded of that fact every time he talked with Sofia.

“Within ten seconds, she’ll yawn unconsciously,” he mused, “like every other person I’ve known. My God, my dear sisters did the same, bless their souls. Even now in 2075, thirty-eight years since their deaths in the Debacle, I still remember their instinctive yawning at my fragile ego’s expense. Even Rodney often yawned, and he was my best friend.”

“Was it the topical content? I doubt that, since what I discuss excites me greatly. And I’m not that odd, am I?”

“How the hell can I be captivating or interesting for unknown, unseen friends who can’t truly appreciate the language and its nuances? Huh,” he chuckled. “Perhaps they won’t recognize how boring I am. Perhaps my plan will wither and die, and Sofia and me and the dogs along with it. If so, these aliens will never get to listen to the world’s most effective sleep aid.”

He peered into the wood-framed oval mirror on the wall above his desk, its gold leaf peeling in sheets. “Then again, it might be my drab appearance combined with the monotone rhythm and droning tempo. Ah, so nice to have my hair back, though. Too bad those anti-aging shots couldn’t make me a more vivacious and interesting speaker. No tech for that, not yet.”

Rick was uncomfortable that his first recorded message was intentionally unscripted. Such lack of planning was very unlike the engineer in him.

“From buckets of scraps, I created a dozen high powered laser arrays in the space of a barn, constructed the power plant and cabling, and executed a plan to inform future unseen worlds about humanity’s flawed evolution. I did this surreptitiously, avoiding the prying eyes of the oligarchs. Funny, though, I never wrote a damn outline for my doctoral thesis, so it never got written.”

He tapped his desk nervously. “Hell, I’ll wing-it for most of this, because it’s the only way I know how. Whoever they are, somewhere out there, perhaps many billions of years from now, I hope they capture my momentary burst of light. It will be as bright as a thousand suns.”

Sitting back on his chair, he imagined again for the umpteenth time what the signal might look like at a planet a million light years from Earth. “They won’t care if I was Shakespeare or an ignorant street urchin. I sure as hell won’t care unless I’m wrong about my concepts of a Supreme Being. Hmm, Supreme Creator, possibly, since the word ‘Being’ personifies something that exhibits power or control over us.”

“I don’t believe there’s an external controller in this life. Not the lives of humans. Not the one I’ve lived, given what we’ve done with what was available to us in the first place. Now, shut up, Rick, and proceed with this next step that took you both a decade to develop.”

He began the first of his recordings.

* * *

“For my unseen friends across the vastness of space. I only wish someone sent us this same communication long ago. They either failed to or we were not listening. Perhaps we were too presumptuous about how we might hear from you. Did we not care enough to discover your message? Conversely, perhaps every sentient race failed like us, and I’m the only being in this infinite universe of infinite planets who has tried such an ambitious but likely unfruitful thing. I believe in infinity, so I seriously doubt it.”

“We must have overlooked the obvious, like how you played with spectrum or photons. Some way you found to communicate that we never understood. Gravity waves. Short EM bursts. Whatever. Either way, humanity didn’t observe any messages. However, you will discover what I am transmitting in a momentary flash of visual brilliance, assuming you have eyes to see.”

“By the way, I don’t intend to fail. Failing is not in my fiber. Commitment is. Perseverance is. Horsepower and energy is. Disgust and distain for human ignorance is. Freaking, head-rattling cynicism is. I endured far too much in the last decade to flub this now. It has been my entire focus and purpose. But I digress. I have much to share with you, and this is my beginning.”

“Allow me to explain the format, for a second, since it may not be obvious. I will speak to you as if you were sitting here with me. I am vexed that we can’t engage in face-to-face conversation. As a result, this is less of a conversation and more of a narrative, a playing-out of the recent, disturbing, and declining story of the human race.”

“While I speak into this microphone, I am watching the words fly across my screen. This means I’m doing occasional editing on my keyboard in real-time, so you will notice some naturally unnatural pauses.”

“Please forgive the lack of excitement and intrigue you might find in an action novel. This is no hero’s journey. It’s not even an interesting story or adventure, unless you consider the birth and death of a sentient species such a thing. An adventure develops a plot line and characters, tying you emotionally to protagonists and antagonists. To your misfortune, however, I’m the driest character on the planet Earth and a Stoic to boot, so I am riled nominally by the emotions of humankind.”

“In my life, emotions are for the careless. Emotions are the nectar of manipulation for the ruthless and hateful. Thus, don’t look for much excitement in what I impart.”

“It’s sad we weren’t granted emotions once our psyches were capable of tolerating them. Instead, humans are birthed with emotions, first and foremost. By some effort, a fatally small number of humans eventually grow to manage them. Too few. I sincerely hope your species is more disciplined than ours in this regard.”

“Please be aware. I intend to describe key characteristics of humanity and the missteps we took leading to the demise of our species for reasons you’ll find within. My monologue will cover roughly twenty-five categories using ‘on this’ or ‘on that’ set of topics. I’ll try to be brief, hitting what I perceive as my biased high points. I’ll attempt to avoid the incessant chatter and repeats my wife always chides me about.”

“I don’t claim to know it all and, by God, I know very little,” he admitted. “If I’m able to complete this as planned, you will receive these bright laser microbursts of my thoughts along with a comprehensive, albeit brief, history of humankind.”

“Humans were smart in certain ways, but they were also dumb-ass, butt-ugly, pig-suckle stupid in many others. We had no ability to extricate ourselves from our unimportant daily lives and develop, either as individuals or as groups, a long-term direction for our species. As a result, we are now in the death throes of our civilization.”

“It is too late for us now. Anything we might do to stop the inevitable cascade of folly, to allay or even reverse the damages, we will not do. We lack the motivation and have given up hope. The psyche of our causal purpose is flushed down the proverbial toilet, devoured by the ravenous vermin in the societal gutter of birth and death that is the universal, entropic constant.”

“You might wonder why I am doing this when I have no assurance you exist. Let me restate what I just said. We could find no evidence of intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe willing to provide us guidelines for long-term sustainability. As humans, our species, we had proven ourselves wholly incompetent to do this ourselves. Worse yet, we were so incompetent that we didn’t even recognize the requirement for such a thing.”

“You might think us lazy, stupid, and short-sighted, and that’s on target. But there is much more to the story that I will broadcast to you, out there in space and time. I’m hoping you will capture this photonic transmission, contemplate it, and even implement a few learnings.”

“Consider that I am compelled to do this. I must execute my plan or die trying to explain how we humans thought so little of these wonders gifted to us by God or nature. Will I catch you in enough time for you to do something about your own societal misdirections? I’m grasping here, praying someone may use this rise and fall of humanity, this utter desolation into which we are headed, for their own benefit.”

“In our waning days as a species on this planet, I am comforted that I may have helped you understand how societies rise and fall, how swiftly technological prowess can advance compared to societal progress, and how the growing mismatch and imbalance of those two elements, at least in our case, greatly accelerated our demise.”

“When the end days come for me, and I expect that to be far less than a full rotation of this planet around our star, I will be glad on that day. Glad that I attempted to expose and broadcast to you our frailties and idiocies, our entitlements, our fears. Those are the things that contributed to our self-inflicted march to annihilation. I say ‘contributed’ to denote that it wasn’t just one existential risk of our own creation that consumed us. It was multiples, and the multiples were simultaneous and compounding.”

“Our many peoples on the planet did not agree on a single thing. Not a single thing. Not a common wish for the Earth, our planet. Not a hope or plan for humankind’s livelihood through the decades or centuries. Not a collective hope for our children or their progeny.”

“But I digress, as I will do many times. I am without an outline, and my brain will repeat these key considerations for you. Please don’t get upset by the repetition. It’s an unplanned discourse, but well-intended.”

“On a good day for you, in the very distant future from this date of my recording, I hope you visit what remains of our planet. You will dig up the bones of our destruction, the sinews of our desecration, the muscles of our distractions, and the organs of our debasement. You will find our detritus buried in the sediment. Only then will you understand the full picture, as there is just so much I can impart to you in this forced brevity of the medium.”

“If your arrival should happen on that good day, please visit my Northern Arizona and New Mexico and whatever remains of these lands. You’ll find the evidence of animals come and gone through the millennia. You’ll imagine what it was like to live in this arid place of beauty and color. You’ll gain an appreciation of the natural wonders I have known and the majesty of this land, should they survive our cataclysms.”

“And if, in some spiritual way, I survive beyond this flesh and can perceive your activities, I shall look upon your arrival on Earth as a small vindication of my minimal, pathetic efforts at nudging your species the way I wish we had been nudged by others more contemplative than ourselves.”

“I mean, it wasn’t enough that we had holy books suggesting how we might treat each other well. No, there was too much doubt, I suppose, that those were books written by men. Had the lessons fallen from the sky, from a society deemed viable and long-lived, maybe then we’d have taken the words to heart, as no words attributed to our God, our presumed creator, or to ourselves, seemed to work effectively across the members of our species.”

“So where should I start? How we destroyed the ecosystems on our planet? The rise and dangers of AI, sentient or not? Our grotesque political misdirections and calamities? Societal inequities and biases? Our persistent and pervasive lack of care and concern for each other? I have stories upon stories and will gladly share with you the multi-level ignorance of humanity.”

“I am filled with sadness, disgust, and cynicism, yet those emotions are essential to impart my calm but burning anger at our species. Beyond my opinions, I mentioned that I am also sending separate bursts of data in these brief but powerful laser transmissions that include thoughtful, well-analyzed views of our human activities over the last few thousand years. It’s a history of humanity, humankind, mankind, our species.”

“Please note that those historical ramblings are not mine. No, scribes much more learned than me created them, imbued with finding the truth in the histories of our species, as much as that was possible. They depict multiple viewpoints and opinions on the same topics.”

“However, what most of them don’t impart is that which I intend to amplify for you. Better yet, I hope to consolidate and summarize our missteps rather than force you to deduce them from those historical facts. This should help guide you, as we say, to separate the wheat from the chaff.”

“In other words, scribes often look at history and describe what happened. Unfortunately, this is done with the expectation that you will learn ethical and behavioral lessons by absorption. There is no absorption in my words. I will tell you directly.”

“I will speak to you openly and without fear of retribution, something I cannot do in my own society. You will hear the voice of a logical being. A frustrated human.”

“We were given this great planet with its many gifts, and we mistreated it, despoiled it, and despoiled each other. Most of what we discovered along the way we despoiled as well. We felt entitled and believed the Earth and our fellow humans were God-given for us to abuse and that our own genetic makeup was God-granted for the same purpose. We might have done so much good here, so much good. But we were lazy, undisciplined, and short-sighted, among many of the other vile attributes that we allowed to poison, corrupt, and obscure our sensibilities.”

“Lacking courage, we used the written words we attributed to our God to do terrible things to each other. Why? Because we needed an excuse, a scapegoat, a silent, effulgent being who could not speak or respond for itself. Then, we’d use that same divine being to hand-off responsibility for our evil and entitled ways.”

“I must catch myself, as here I am, already stepping down the path of my favorite topic of entitlement. Should I save that for last, that human condition which has fomented humanity’s downfall? Or should I start with its fraternal twin – fear?”

“Fear is always a good one. For a long, long time, I thought fear was humanity’s singular proto-evil. I wanted to believe all evils and vices like greed, avarice and bias started with fear as the base proto-evil. Later, I realized certain people are immune or insensitive to fear. What they are not immune to, however, is entitlement.”

“Either way, multiple times along the discussion, you’ll find I speak of both fear and entitlement as humanity’s two proto-evils. There are no others; not that I have found. Of the bad things we’ve done to our planet and each other, one or both proto-evils are always at the root of the deadly weed that consumes and corrupts the good fruits of humankind.”

“As you listen to me, I ask for your forbearance. I’m no wizard, no genius, and no educated philosopher. For God’s sake, I’m an unremarkable photonic science engineer.”

“I observe, however. Observe and assess. Because of this, people find me boring. I spend much of my time listening and evaluating that which is beyond the words, or the meaning behind them. And I’m not accustomed to speaking this way, not into a microphone, so I must imagine that I’m speaking to you here, in the room with me.”

Rick peered at the top of his desk where the microphone, pop filter, and mixer sat on his writing pad. Diffused, reflected sunlight illuminated the otherwise windowless room; his bunker.

“Be aware that I will keep apologizing for my poor planning and delivery. I will not disgorge this content like a Hemingway or a Chaucer. I’m no writer and no speaker. I am a thinker, though, and one who determines when to act, as I did in this case. My efforts are not to beguile or impress you. They’re to educate and inform, so deal with that, okay?”

“I hope to God you don’t let expectations for excitement or an interesting story line obscure my larger message. As mentioned previously, there is no intended entertainment in my words, only the harsh, dry reality of our existence, our inadequacies, our inborn laziness, and our lack of foresight.”

Rick turned the mic off and stopped recording for a minute. The vision of his laser arrays captured his mind. His efforts to record these sessions for unknown beneficiaries would be futile if his arrays, hidden beneath the barn, were discovered by the authorities before he transmitted his signal.

Every so often during the day and evening, he’d send poor Sofia outdoors as if she were again checking on the dogs or the gardens. She always performed a visual check of the barn doors to ensure they were locked and that no human or hybrid or drone had discovered their little secret. Little, but so important to his efforts.

He recalled his years in the service as a laser technician. Nothing special. It was not unusual for a person like him to be allowed to tinker with electronics. Those types of freedoms were still not prohibited, perhaps perceived by the AI-driven, oligarchic overlords as low risk. It was the other prohibitions that incessantly poked at him.

Westrich, as it was now called after the great rift in the United States, was like the other nation-state technocracies that had developed across the globe during the four decades since the Great Debacle. The first few of those decades were turbulent, with humanity adrift in a frothy sea of political and technological overload.

Governments were always collapsing or teetering on the edge. Media networks would claim they had the singular truth. Profit drove every decision, and every decision seemed to have an incrementally negative effect on Earth and its inhabitants. In these years of disarray and delusion, someone had to take control.

Why the world’s trillionaires, now oligarchs? Because it was pragmatic. They had the resources, whether legitimate or ill-gotten, to seize control of the various warring factions within each country. At a critical stage of societal anarchy, the trillionaires decided to stop warring and split the booty among themselves as inequitably as possible.

Taking a cue from the crime organizations of the twentieth century, they met in secret, finding contentment and consolation with each other despite their warring. Sure, they had lined the pockets of many politicians and influence organizations, and they controlled wide swaths of industry. They had used their algorithms to sway public opinion their way, and they controlled many of the financial systems and mechanisms of exchange.

After their meeting, the few hundred consortiums of families, business, and government ministers took control. By then, most humans had tired of the post-Debacle warring, the risks, the disinformation. Nobody knew what to believe. Political voting and elections were beyond the status of being shams, diminishing the role of representative forms of government. Their progress in limiting any semblance of old constitutional rights was simply a formalization of what was already transpiring in Earth’s disrupted societies.

The trillionaires fixed all of that. Most of the global technocracies now operated similarly, irrespective of the family and friends communities in charge. A bastardization of the word ‘demagogues,’ these “demigods”, as they were often called in dark corners of bars and gene parlors, deployed similar technologies to keep their citizenry in line, relatively secure, effectively managed, consistently fed, and even hopeful for the future.

“Indeed,” Rick considered, “we’re lucky that the cartel of plutocrats running Westrich are generally aligned to be forward-thinking, even though our domain of Vista suffers woefully from a wholly incompetent and dangerous oligarch. And total control by these oligarchies has now become perennial given the widespread use of anti-aging technology in the upper castes. It doesn’t matter who they are. They’re in control and always will be throughout time, pending unforeseen disaster.”

He closed his eyes and envisioned this remote corner of Northeast Arizona, the terrain he loved so dearly. The ruling oligarch in Vista cared nothing for the native tribes that lived there, beyond the rent-free acquisition of their land for the occasional wind or solar farm.

Governmental treatment of native peoples was no different than how they were treated in the prior centuries. It was just a new set of faces who occasionally harassed them and utterly abused what once belonged only to them. The land and its resources.

This was why the reservation was the perfect spot to execute his plan. Using the gardens business as the foil, he and Sofia could quietly and covertly acquire or construct equipment to build his laser arrays and energy infrastructure, deploying them into the barn and underground. This would occur over multiple years to avoid suspicion from the omnipresent AI or snooping transhuman.

They’d use cash and barter wherever possible to avoid leaving traceable records of related transactions. Steered clear of drones. Stayed far away from cameras on the streets, and avoided centers of towns and traffic lights. Traveled and performed transactions at night. Used various forms of transportation, including mule, horse, wagons, autos, even the undersides of trains. Stuffed their clothing. Applied face putty, shoe inserts, and fake fingerprint tech. Avoided spreading skin cells anywhere they might be collected. There were so many ways to evade the broadly deployed, AI-enabled sensors and identification technologies, but also as many ways to get caught.

But that time he pondered was long ago, when he officially went missing. It had now been five years since he’d returned in the stealth of night. Five years since he had been outdoors to see the real sun, to feel its heat, grasp the high desert gravel in his hands, and view the stunning beauty of the mountains. This desert was still with him, beyond the walls of his bunker, but the constancy of the surveillance state and the advancements to technology prevented him from ever going outside again.

He sat back in his chair and spoke aloud, “I’m doing the best I can with what I’ve got, folks. This cannot be Orwell’s dystopia come to life without a shout out to anyone else, anywhere else, that they will suffer the same fate if they allow it. I won’t let it happen. I’ll warn them, whoever they may be.”

He turned the mic back on. “Forgive me,” he pleaded, “and I hope you stay awake long enough to hear me out.” His head wavered back and forth. “I’m angry, you know. Angry. We let this happen to us. We let it get this far, increment by increment. It was our own ignorant, moronic, and perhaps even demonic stupidity and victimhood that got us here.”

“God, assuming there is one, gave us this huge brain to think, but he didn’t tell us how to think. We fumbled along and survived a number of years, many decades even, where we had many chances to fully annihilate ourselves, yet we did not.”

“Maybe it was a sense of self-preservation. Nuclear? Well, it had its minutes of destruction. Yeah, World War II. You’ll read about that in what I’m sending you. Then there was that skirmish, not to belittle what happened in Asia a few years back that killed a few hundred million of us. You’ll hear about that, too, in the history.”

“We went through multiple instances where we collectively thought ‘yep, this is the end; go hug your kids and family and say your goodbyes.’ But we didn’t reach an end state, not even during the Great Debacle. Oh, and you’ll learn that the word ‘great’ does not always mean ‘good.’”

“Self-annihilation didn’t happen then. Things are different now, way different. We are facing cascade upon cascade upon cascade, a kujenga of existential risks. I doubt we’ll duck out of this by the grace of God or whatever deities you may believe in, if at all.”

“You’ll hear more on deities and incrementalism later, the tick of time, the drop by drop, persistent tearing at social norms. How we should have treated each other. How we failed. How our technology allowed us to exact revenge on each other or carry out our anger publicly and loudly at times, but silently and anonymously at others. How we almost always took the cowardly, easy path that required little thinking or long-term effort at repairing and building human society.”

He needed a drink of water before going much further. “So nice,” he thought, “not to have that nagging back pain. The science we have today is wonderful, or most of it should have been.”

Rick had taken his first anti-aging shot ten years prior when he arrived in Bolivar at sixty-five linear years. His long, brown hair had turned to gray earlier in his life, and he hated having to dye it brown to appear more like the age he felt. That was his vanity reason for taking the shots. Indeed, his hair was a unique kernel of vanity in an otherwise unexcitable sense of self.

The series of three shots did amazing things for him. It enlivened failing hair follicles and brought most of his original hair color back. His skin blotches disappeared, and the daily aches and pains that he felt he’d live with until death had mostly subsided. Muscle mass returned to his body, and his eyesight was much improved.

In those ten years, he had reverse-aged ten years. Rather than feeling like seventy-five, his chronological age, his body functioned as it did in his early fifties with the added benefit of twenty more years of experience. He thought this positive – less of that old-age, stuck-in-your-ways mentality and more physical flexibility, coupled with improved mental acuity.

The flip side of these benefits, however, was seeing Sofia age as he got younger. They had been together for forty years, having met in 2035 at a musical event in Taos. And now, despite his lasting love for her, she seemed more like a mother to him.

Sofia had considered doing the same. She knew there were few downside risks, and the technology was available to anybody who had garnered enough social credits and money to purchase the series of shots. But she was tired of the constant press of the oligarchy and how it intruded into her life. The thought of living longer under such circumstances was no thought to her at all.

She experienced directly the widespread devastation of human and animal life during the Great Debacle. Upon reflection of that event and those whom she and Rick lost, she felt as if she had already cheated death. That it needed to take her in its own time, not in a distant future contrived by the preternatural workings of mankind.

Despite her valiant attempts, she was unable to fully extricate her memories of the Debacle they both suffered through; often apart, sometimes together. Rick and Sofia were camping in the Colorado Rockies when it happened. The virus, manmade and highly transmittable, was designed with a limited, five-day window of viability. To their benefit at the time, they were a long distance away from the major population centers.

Most who survived the Great Debacle resided in small towns and rural areas. This was true for the United States and the world. Roughly three billion people died in the week as a direct cause of the virus and related plagues, primarily in the cities, and another billion-plus perished from nuclear detonations and plant meltdowns as well as deadly, post-Debacle wars and other repercussions of the event.

Though the virus persisted for five days as planned by its deranged creators, its effects were still being felt thirty-eight years later in 2075. Sofia certainly felt them. She had suffered the miserable years of anarchy and societal disarray. Blame. Persecutions. Irrationality and hatreds. Earth was a place of hell, and they both went through things she preferred not to recall.

The reign of the demigods finally brought the disarray to an end by forcing order and discipline, although to a heightened degree. For Sofia, it was enough to have lived through it. She wanted no more of what humanity inflicted upon itself in its reckless quest for species disintegration. Seventy-five years was more than enough. She preferred as natural a death as she could hope to have.

* * *

Sofia opened the heavy wooden door to Rick’s bunker with a glass of water in hand.

“I thought you might want this, considering how you’ll blather on.”

He laughed and held his hand out. “Thanks. You read my mind, as usual.”

The six dogs remained on the other side of the bunker door, barking and scratching. “Shall I let them in?” he requested.

“No, they’re okay for now. Besides, how could any external monitor pick up our conversation with the racket they’re making? No, we’re good, but I need to let you know that I just received an inquiry.”

“What?” he grumbled, surprised at this news.

She spread her hands out, palms down, attempting to calm his concerns. “It appears to be a friendly one. The local authority is wondering why our speakers are not plugged in and active. Basically, they’re wondering why I’m not reliant upon them. They must be assuming I’m doing nefarious things with the neighbors, or abusing the dogs, or cursing the oligarchs. I’m not worried.”

“Did you reply?”

“Not yet. It came across as an email, and I expect a text soon to my mobile to back that up.”

“Any ideas about how to respond?”

Sofia frowned with uncertainty. “I’ll tell them I did it on their behalf so they don’t have to hear the dogs bark all the time, as if they do that much anyway. Then I’ll plug one of them in for a short period so they can do their typical AI snooping of my activities. I find it hard to believe they want to harass a poor seventy-five-year-old lady with six dogs just for kicks. Could be it was a directive from the oligarchs and the typical dog shit is rolling down the chain to these local guys.”

“Anything else?”

She shook her head. “The jerk offered to come out and assist me, if required. As if I don’t know how to plug in an intercom unit! He even used the old line ‘It’s for your own safety. What if you fell? What if severe weather was heading your way? We need to stay in touch with you.’”

Rick looked more vexed. “How did you respond with that?”

“Said ‘thanks, but no thanks’ and I’d get to it. Told him I was a busy woman tending to the gardens, the business, and the house. It wasn’t like I was ignoring their mandate on purpose.”

She laughed. “I’m sure they’ll be fine if I activate one of them. I’m thinking the one in the kitchen. It’s farthest away from your bunker so won’t pick up any ambient noise you might make. Plus, the kitchen is the noisiest place given the dogs and my cooking. I’ll put a rotating fan nearby and let it run day and night. They’ll love that.”

Rick took a deep breath. “God, honey, I’m at the very start of this recording process and was hoping to have at least a few months to get my thoughts out. And the array is just about ready to rock. I hate to think we’re suddenly on their radar after all this time with no prior red or yellow flags, and not even a simple inquiry like this.”

“Don’t worry, big boy. It was the local enforcement dupes, not a higher level. Might even be someone who knows me, though he didn’t identify himself or herself. Let me try the simple method I just mentioned, and we’ll see if it settles the kettle of the controlling AI godheads. I’m sure you’ll have time to complete your mission. Our mission.”

He sighed. “Worrisome.”

“Please set worries aside and get your work done. Let me handle the interface to the outside, earthly world while you manage the interstellar, okay? I have considered multiple other options to placate the requirements. Besides, everyone else I know has had an inquiry or two the last few years. Maybe certain risks are growing. It’s been a full decade since the Trillionaire’s Massacre that killed so many, and they might be flexing muscle to keep us peons in line.”

Rick sat up from his chair and strode to where Sofia was, sitting next to her. “Where’s your comb?” he inquired.

“Pocket, as usual.”

He began combing her long, gray hair. “Guess I’ll think of it like a tax audit. It just so happened that our audit came right at the time I started recording,” he quipped. “Dumb luck. I’ve seen no evidence of intrusion in the house, barn, or otherwise on the grounds. Besides, who’d want to hassle a beautiful woman who can hold her own? Not me,” he proclaimed, kissing her neck.