My most recent post, “The Age of Abundant Communication and the Decline of Privacy,” was picked up in the newest edition of the BoBo Carnival of Politics. The carvival’s compiler had the following to say:

Hey Aaron, I might consider picking up that book. While I have several opinions on what you wrote – given that I haven’t read The Age of Abundance by Brink Lindsey – I really can’t say anything.

Which has me curious what the “several opinions” are.

Brink Lindey’s* The Age of Abundance elegantly poses a plausible answer to the question of American political division. Lindsey argues that the split between red state voters (who he calls “evangelicals”) and those in blue states (who he calls “Aquarians”) is a result of different cultural reactions to the end of scarcity and the age of abundance that became an American reality in the post-World War II era. For most of our history, humans have been preoccupied by the hunt for necessities, worrying about having enough food to eat, having warm clothing to wear, and having roofs over our heads. But capitalism and the division of labor did away with such scarcity in America. Few of us today lose much sleep fretting about where our next meal will come from. Even the poor face primarily the threat of obesity, not hunger.

According to Lindsey, the right–the evangelicals–reacted by embracing the capitalist work ethic and the economic individualism it required. The left–the Aquarians–instead embraced the cultural individualism made possible by the freedom suddenly available to become one’s self. The trouble is that the right rejected that cultural freedom, while the left rejected the very economic system and work ethic that provided them with the material abundance to become hippies and drop outs and New Age spiritualists.

Much of the book is Lindsey’s attempt to deal with this split–a feat he accomplishes with great skill–but I want to expand his analysis to an area he doesn’t address in the book. The Age of Abundance is primarily concerned with the shift in culture between the Great Depression/World War II generation and the Baby Boomers. But the book got me thinking, too, about the generation gap between the Boomers and their children, those who grew up firmly in the Information Age. It seems that split is isn’t about the use of resources or a middle class work ethic and is, instead, about privacy.

One of the few ongoing arguments I’ve had with my father that I’d term “generational” (as opposed to ideological) has to do with me putting content on the net. Namely, any person googling “Aaron Ross Powell” turns up, among things like my short fiction and my novel, a host of pro-atheism pieces, articles my father assured me threatened to cost me any job I sought post-graduation (thankfully, I found employment with the same organization that awarded adjunct scholarships to Penn & Teller, so this turned out to be a false alarm). His concern is like, though in some ways a good deal removed from, the hand wringing about photographs on Facebook and the Boomers’ eye rolling at their kids blogging instead of reading. “Why are kids writing all that crap and posting videos of themselves skateboarding when they could be reading Worldbook encyclopedia?” Of course, my generational split was not a result of there being better things to do with my time but, rather, with the danger what I chose to do with my time posed to my reputation, should the results be made public. But, at its core, my disagreement with my father and the apoplexy of parents when their children use MySpace “inappropriately” is one of how much personal identity should be broadcast to the world.

Looking at this generational divide within the framework of The Age of Abundance, I wonder if it is driven by notions of scarcity of communication resources. The Boomers grew up in a time when mass communication was expensive. You could call someone on the phone, sure, or send a letter, but those are one-to-one mediums. If you wanted to engage in one-to-many, you needed significant economic wherewithal to buy a printing press or a TV or radio station. Thus whatever you said in those costly one-to-many mediums better have been important. To waste it telling your friends about what you did last night was just, well, wasting it.

But today one-to-many communication is, effectively, free. A blog costs nothing. Twitter costs nothing. Even printing a book and making it available for sale to the world on Amazon.com costs nothing if you use print-on-demand services. Creating TV shows can be done with the Mac your parents bought you for Christmas and a $179 HD camcorder. And you can distribute the result, no matter how facile, via YouTube, for free.

Because a price means making a decision about paying it–and the greater the price, the harder and often more considered the decision–the Boomers thought more about what they broadcast to the world. The Internet generation doesn’t have to make a price decision so they don’t consider what they’re communicating to quite the same degree. And that lack of consideration means more communication, which means more communication of the sort–of the content–the Boomers find objectionable: drunk photos, tweets about crushes, or my atheist essays.

The unintended upshot, I believe, is an increasing willingness by the generation brought up in this age of abundance of communication to be open about themselves–because everyone else is doing the same. The Boomers typically see this openness as a bad thing and a scary outing of personal information. But I find it rather liberating.

*I should note that Brink is my colleague at the Cato Institute, but that in no way artificially inflated my opinion of his book. I’d have loved it even if the author worked at the Center for American Progress.

Chris Anderson’s new book, Free, is a concise and articulate packaging of ideas that will be prosaic to anyone who’s paid attention to the economics of the web.  Which means that, for most folks out there, it’s an excellent and insightful read.  While not as exciting as his earlier work, The Long Tail, the book does offer interesting food for thought for fiction writers looking to use the web to reach an audience and, hopefully, earn a little money.

Before exploring how Free applies to fiction writing, though, I should mention that Anderson has been nice enough to practice his own message and so is giving the book away for free in a variety of formats.  I listened to the audiobook version, which was of excellent quality.

The key idea in Anderson’s book is that the technology of the Internet drives the marginal cost of content to zero. Each print copy of my novel The Hole will, when the book is published, cost a dollar or two to produce. Paper is physical stuff and physical stuff has to be paid for.  But each web based copy costs me effectively nothing.  While I pay twenty dollars a month for web hosting, having you click through to the novel’s online serial edition doesn’t drive up that cost.  Each new reader of the online edition, in other words, is free to me. So, while I can’t afford to give away free copies of The Hole in print to anyone who might want one, I can afford to give it away without charge in an electronic format.  The trick–and the topic of much of Anderson’s book–is how to make money doing so.

A handful of business models exist.  I can go the traditional web publisher route and place advertisements alongside the novel’s text.  But that doesn’t produce much income because the traffic to even a hugely successful writer’s home page is tiny compared to the New York Times or ESPN. I probably won’t earn even a livable wage with banner ads.

I could adopt a “freemium” model, where a limited version of the service is given away for free in the hopes of attracting some users to a paid, premium version. This is the method most authors who’ve given away their works use.  Cory Doctorow, for instance, posts Creative Commons licensed electronic editions of all his novels for free download on his website. Readers are free to consume them without charge–but have to pay for a bound copy in a bookstore or from Amazon.com.  Chris Anderson does exactly the same with Free itself. And this is the method I’ve used for The Hole. Throughout the composition of the first draft, I serialized the chapters and let the world access them for free through my website.  The revised edition, however, will be a paid product, both in print and ebook.  This “freemium” model had the added benefit of landing me a publishing contract.  My publisher, Permuted Press, found The Hole through my webpage and offered to publish it partly because of the readers it had attracted.

The benefit of free is that it allows for a large audience.  People don’t have to give up anything except their time to use the product–in this case, to read the author’s book–so they’re more willing to give it a chance.  The key is turning that larger audience into cash. Besides the two methods outlined above, another possibility is granting early access to paid readers.  Subscribe and you can get the book in electronic format months before it hits stores.  The trouble here is that it reverses one of the key equations in the free ecosystem.  Namely, having a large audience of non-paying readers creates buzz, which attracts more readers, some of whom may pay. By limiting the initial audience to paid subscribers, the author forgoes that early buzz.

Or an author might front load the freemium model by using a bounty system.  I could post a one paragraph overview of a book idea I have, along with a free first chapter.  Readers could pledge to buy the print edition when the book is published and, if a certain threshold of pledges is met, I get to work writing and serializing (for free) the results. The trouble here is that it demands a sizable base of fans before any hope of meeting even a modest threshold can exist.

What’s important for fiction writers is not the specific business model each uses.  What’s important is understanding what free does to publishing.  Chris Anderson’s book provides a great starting point for the conversation.  It’s up to the market and the ingenuity of individual writers to take it from there.

While going through my editor’s comments on the manuscript of THE HOLE, I kept coming back to the same conclusion: I’m just not that happy with the way the book begins.  Aside from a handful of awkward moments, most of the plot problems throughout the novel are a direct result of things that are said or events that occur in the first twenty or thirty pages.  So I made the decision to rewrite them.  In doing so, I get to tweak some stuff that’s bothered me about the book, such as the status of Elliot and Evajean’s relationship and their motivation for setting out on their quest.

It’s something of an adventure plugging a new section into a completed manuscript.  Matching the language, for one, is interesting.  THE HOLE is written is a spare, crime fiction inspired style, and it’s a little different from the short fiction I’ve worked on recently.  So I’m having to rewire brain to get back in that flow.

Below is a taste of what I’ve come up with.  For the rest, you’ll just have to wait until the book is released by Permuted Press.  Still no date set for that happy day, but I’ll post here as soon as there is.

And now, the new first two-hundred words of THE HOLE:

Elliot sat on the front steps of his house and sipped a warm Dr. Pepper as he watched his neighbor drag her husband’s corpse to the curb.

He hadn’t realized the woman was still alive.

Elliot set the can down and stood up.  He walked across the lawn toward her.  “Need help?” he called.

She turned her head.  She stared at him.  Elliot smiled and lifted his arm in a half-hearted wave.  He said, “You want me to help you?”  He’d kept walking and she was now only a handful of paces away.  He said, “Evajean, right?  Your name’s Evajean?”

She nodded.  The dead man’s wrists looked huge in her small hands.

“I’m Elliot,” he said.  “I live next door.”  He looked down at the body.  “Where are you taking him?”

“Away,” she said.

Elliot said, “Okay.  I’ll help.  If he’s too heavy for you, I’ll help carry him.”

She nodded.  “Yeah,” she said.  “Okay.”

So Elliot took the large man’s ankles and, together, they moved him to an old Subaru parked in front of Evajean’s house.  She pulled keys from her pocket, unlocked the car, and lifted hatchback.  “In here,” she said.

This post continues my journal of impressions and thoughts as I read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged for the first time.

I have to give Ayn Rand credit for knowing how to make a collectivist look foolish.  While her writing is generally pretty bland and her dialog stiff, the novel comes to life–in a peculiar, risen dead sort of way–when she portrays the upper class academics and hangers on of the collectivist variety: the college professors and politicians who claim everyone should live for the good of everyone else and all personal earnings are to be tolerated only insofar as they can be used to improve the lot of “society.”

The passages remind me of the scene in Cryptonomicon when Neal Stepenson so skillfully pokes fun at liberal arts scholars by comparing them to Tolkien’s hobbits.  I imagine that, if it weren’t for the give away of Ayn Rand’s name on the spine and cover, many of the intellectuals I’ve met would nod along with these characters, feeling right at home in their banter.  There’s clever pseudo-profundity in what they have to say.

So, while the discussions between her businessmen characters don’t do a lot for me–not because they’re outright wrong but because they just aren’t terribly interesting–the party scenes are a hoot.

Sans its message, sans its historical significance, sans its ability to turn young people into libertarians, the first thing one picks up on when starting Atlas Shrugged is the poverty of the prose. Ayn Rand, no matter her or her followers’ opinion otherwise, just isn’t a very good writer. The language is plodding, non-lyrical, and often often awkward. For example, in one scene she writes, “He stood slouching against the bar.” To my knowledge, one stands against a bar or one slouches against a bar–but one does not stand slouching. An editor would’ve fixed that, but I was told once–and maybe this is apocryphal–that Rand refused such editing, asking, “Would you edit the Bible” Ignoring that the Bible was, in fact, edited through countless revisions and translations over thousands of years, Atlas Shrugged is not the Bible.  It is not scripture, nor does it benefit from the myth of a divine author whose original manuscript is lost in prehistory.

What else comes to mind, a mere 200 pages into this monstrous novel? Well, I can’t imagine wanting to hang out with any of these people. Her good guys are, without exception, awful human beings. They display no compassion and evidence no empathy. A world filled with such super men would be a terrible place, indeed. Her bad guys, on the other hand–her collectivists and leftists and academics–are ugly little toads who snivel and beg from the arch-capitalists we’re all supposed to look up to when we aren’t looking for an excuse to leave. Objectivism, at least as presented in this seminal text, affords no nuance.

None of this precludes the worthiness of Rand’s ideas, however. I have not encountered enough of those in the fist sixth of the book to adequately judge them, so such critique will have to wait until future posts.  While I imagine there will be a great deal throughout Atlas Shrugged I disagree with, and a great deal I am sympathetic towards, the fact remains that, except for my knowledge that this is a novel of ideas, one read for its philosophy and arguments and intellectual importance, I’d have put it down long ago.

Writing a novel is terrific fun. Editing it isn’t. But that’s the predicament I find myself in, as I’ve received the first round of extensive feedback from my wonderful new editor, and I’m slowly digging in for the long haul. The good news is, THE HOLE will be a much better novel as a result. The bad news is that it means my other writing projects must be a little backburnered so I can get the book on store shelves in a reasonable time.

I’ll try to post my thoughts as I go through this first experience editing a lengthy work. Words of encouragement are great, too, however…

None of them had an idea of what might have caused all this, but Danny was okay with that.  It was his curiosity about the words on his computer and the colors in his head that got him kidnapped in the first place and right now all he wanted was to get out of these tunnels and go home.

Jimmy and Alex argued about it for a bit.  Danny paid no attention, and instead focused on walking.  The staff continued to glow whenever it was within a foot of him.  That close, however, and his skin tingled, the hairs moving like they were caught in an electric field.  He rubbed his arms, but it didn’t do any good.

They’d walked for half an hour or more when he saw the first sign of light from somewhere other than the staff.

“Hey,” he said, interrupting Jimmy talking about how he never trusted Africans to begin with and sure as hell wouldn’t now.  “You guys see that?”

“What?” Jimmy said.

“See what?” Alex said.

Danny pointed.  Ahead of them, a good distance away, there’d been a flash of light—only once and then gone, but Danny was sure he hadn’t imagined it.

Jimmy put his hand on Danny’s shoulder.  “Sure you ain’t still messed up in the head from getting stuck to that stick earlier?”

“No,” Danny said, “I saw it.”

“Sure thing,” Jimmy said.  “Just want to be positive, you know?”

“It was there,” Danny said.  “A light.”

Alex pulled the staff away from Danny.  Its glow ceased.  “Be quiet,” he said.

They waited—seconds then minutes and then, as Jimmy began to fidget, the light came again.

“There,” Alex said.

Danny nodded.  It was a flash along the stone, like the reflection off a source moving outside their field of vision.

“That’s firelight,” Alex said.

“You’re right,” Danny said.

“You can tell that?” Jimmy said.  “You can tell that’s fire?”

“Come on,” Alex said.

They stayed close to the wall as they made their way along the tunnel in the direction the light had come from.  Alex held the staff far away from Danny, making sure it didn’t start glowing again and give them away.

“Maybe we’re in a mine,” Danny whispered.

Alex hushed him.

“Who the hell still uses torches?” Jimmy said.  “Miners sure don’t.”

“Be quiet,” Alex said.  He stopped.  “Wait here.  I’ll go on ahead and see if I can see anything.”

“Right, boss,” Jimmy said.  When Alex tried to hand him the staff, he said, “Keep it.  In case you need to hit something.”

“I have a gun,” Alex said.

“Oh, yeah,” Jimmy said, and took the staff.

“Keep that away from Danny,” Alex said, and left them.

Without the light from the staff, Danny couldn’t see Alex.  The detective moved silently.  Even with Jimmy there, Danny felt alone.

“What do you think it is?” Jimmy said into his ear.

“Don’t know,” Danny whispered back.  “Miners, maybe, like I said.”

“Can’t be.”

“What do you think it was?”

Jimmy was quiet a moment.  “You know, kid?  After the shit I’ve seen over the years, I don’t even want to guess.”

“Over the years?”

“Don’t worry about it, not—”

“What other stuff have you seen?”

“I’ll tell you later,” Jimmy said.

But Danny didn’t want him to wait until later.  He pressed the subject, asking Jimmy to elaborate, but it was like trying to get directions from a dead dog.  Jimmy just kept saying, “Nope, not now,” or “You’re gonna have to wait, kid, okay,” and Danny thought he could hear nervousness in the dismissals.  Jimmy hadn’t meant to bring the topic up and was now kicking himself for having done so.

Eventually, Danny let it drop.  He leaned against the tunnel wall and stared in the direction Alex had gone.  Quiet, and dark, and without the chatter of his two new companions, the insanity of the last day settled into Danny’s awareness.  He’d managed to forget about the culture box and the thing in his computer, but now they both returned, along with flashes of the awful man on the bus and the chrome tools he’d pulled from his bag.  Danny wanted to go home, to go to sleep and wake up and attend classes, like he was a regular college kid again.  He was even willing to deal with the headaches if it meant getting out of this tunnel.

The world isn’t supposed to work like this, he thought.  Danny was trying to figure out whether he could trust Jimmy Pete and Alex Dale when he heard the shot.

It was too far away, around a curve in the tunnel, for Danny to see the muzzle flash, but he knew immediately the loud pop was a gunshot.  He jumped and Jimmy did the same.  They collided, the staff in Jimmy’s hand swinging past Danny’s arm, erupting light.  In that brief illumination, Danny saw Jimmy’s wide eyes and, beyond him, Alex running toward them out of the dark.

“Keep it lit,” Alex shouted.

Jimmy didn’t hear or wasn’t paying attention, but Danny moved closer to the staff, coaxing it back to life.

No longer blind, Alex covered the distance between them quickly.  He had his pistol in his hand.  “There’s something up there,” he said, hands on his knees, panting.

“What’d you shoot at?” Jimmy said.

Alex shook his head.  “I don’t know.”

Jimmy said, “What do you—”

But Alex cut him off.  “I don’t have a goddamn clue.  I was walking and then there was this thing in front of me.”

“Did you find the light?” Danny asked.  “Is that how you saw it?”

Alex shook his head again.  “It was dark.  The thing was dark.”

“So how’d—” Danny began.

“It was darker than everything else,” Alex said.  “That’s how I saw it.  A black shape standing there in front of me.”

“Shape of what?” Jimmy said.

“A man, I think.  A large man.”

“You killed it?” Jimmy said.

“I shot it.  I think I hit it.”

“But you don’t know if it’s dead?” Danny said.

“No.”

“What about the torch?” Jimmy said.

Alex stared at him.  “The what?”

“Did the thing you shot have a torch?”

“Was it what made the light?” Danny said.

“I didn’t see one,” Alex said.  “If it had one, it wasn’t lit.”

“Let’s go have a look,” Jimmy said.

“Wait—” Danny said.  His stomach ached.  Far away, but close enough to tingle along his arms and spine, he could feel the pull of the staff.  And he knew—somehow he knew—that getting near that thing Alex had shot would only make it worse.

But Jimmy was already walking further along the tunnel and Danny had to run after him before the glow of the staff went out.  Alex followed.

The thing Alex had shot lay on the floor of the tunnel, its head propped up by the rock wall rising from the dirt.  Danny stared at it as Alex and Jimmy poked around the body.  Alex was right: the thing—or creature, or man, Danny wasn’t sure—was blacker than even the absence of light marking the continuing path of the cave tunnel.  It reminded him of a wooden artist’s doll, the kind with joints that could be posed in all sorts of ways: featureless, the basic shape of a man, but without any characteristics to make it human.

“That’s some crazy shit,” Jimmy said.

Alex crouched and poked at it.  “It’s dead.”

“You sure?” Danny said.  He stood next to Jimmy, who held the staff between them.

“Yes.”

Jimmy hunkered down next to Alex.  “Is it some kind of suit?” he said.

Alex shrugged.  “Maybe, but I don’t think so.”

“It’s a goddamn alien, then,” Jimmy said.

“Could be,” Alex said.

Danny said, “Let’s just leave it, okay?  Let’s keep going, see if we can find a way out of here.”  He’d been right about the tingling.  Up close, near the body, the tug of the staff was awful.  His arms felt like they’d gone to sleep and his stomach was writhing.

Alex was pulling at the thing’s face.  He’d grabbed it under the chin and now yanked up on its jaw.  The head rocked back and banged against stone and dirt.  “It’s not coming off,” he said.

“Maybe it’s a tattoo,” Danny said.

Jimmy stared at him.  “You ever seen a tattoo like that?”

“No.”

“You even think they make tattoos like that?”

Danny shook his head.

“An alien,” Jimmy said.

Alex stood up.  “It’s dead,” he said, “and we can’t learn anything more about it here.  We should keep moving.”

“That’s what I was saying,” Danny said.

“We’re not going to at least take a piece of it?” Jimmy said.

This time Danny stared at him.

Alex shrugged, took a pocket knife out of his jacket, and cut away a sugar cube sized chunk of the thing’s arm.  Danny felt sick.

“We keep going,” Alex said and put the piece of flesh in the pocket of his pants.

Jimmy spit dirt from his mouth.  His left arm hurt like hell, but it didn’t feel broken.  He tried to stand and couldn’t: a weight held him down, pressed across his lower back.  Jimmy rolled to his right, looking up.

The hole they were in was dark.  Far above—it was impossible to judge the distance—faint starlight glowed, streaming through the opening of the pit into which they’d fallen.  If there’s light coming through, Jimmy thought, it must mean the cabin isn’t there anymore. That was a comforting idea: if those goddamn thugs hadn’t kidnapped him, he wouldn’t be here lying on the dirt floor wherever here was—but at least their stupid little house had been smashed in return.

Jimmy pushed up with his hands.  Behind and above him, someone moaned.  “Oh, God,” the voice said.  “Oh, God.”

“Get the hell off me,” Jimmy said, twisting hard, trying to shake the weight loose.

The voice moaned again, but the weight fell away and Jimmy was able to pull himself to his feet.  “Who is that?” he said.

“Danny.”

“You still got that staff?  You’re not glowing,” Jimmy said.

“I don’t know,” Danny said.

From a few feet away, Dale said, “Is everyone okay?”

Jimmy laughed.  What did the bastard think?  They fell down a goddamn hole and here he was asking if everyone was okay?

“Yeah,” Jimmy said.  “I ain’t too busted up.”

“I feel sick,” Danny said, “but I think I’m okay.”

“Nothing’s broken?” Dale asked.  “On either of you?”

“We’re damn peachy,” Jimmy said.  He stared up at the mouth of the pit.  “Which, if you think about it, we really shouldn’t be.”

Dale came up beside him.  Jimmy could see his shape, but couldn’t make out any of his features.  “That must be fifty feet or more,” Dale said.  “How’d we survive it?”

“Fuck if I know.”

Dale crouched next to Danny.  “Can you stand up?”

“I think so.”

Dale helped him to his feet.

Jimmy said, “Could be, whatever it was tore that place apart, it brought us down here nice and gentle.”

All three stood together, staring up.  “What do we do now?” Danny said.

“This tunnel continues on for a while,” Dale said.  “We can follow it, see if we can find a way out.”

“Anyone got a light?” Jimmy said.

“Matches,” Dale said.

“Nothing,” Danny said.  “Sorry.”

Jimmy looked at him.  “What about that staff?  It’s gotta be around here somewhere, right?  You were still attached to it when we fell.”

“No…” Danny said.

Jimmy continued, “I mean, if you pick it up again, might be the thing starts glowing again, too.  That’d give us plenty of light.”

“No,” Danny said.

“We’ll try it carefully,” Dale said.  “If it hurts, if you don’t like anything about it, we’ll stop.”

“No,” Danny said.  “What if it gets stuck to me again?”

“We won’t let it,” Dale said.

“Yeah,” Jimmy said.  “We’ll break you free this time.”

Danny unenthusiastically agreed.  The three of them wandered around near where they’d landed, feeling out with their hands, looking for the staff.  After some minutes, Dale called out, “I have it,” and held the staff out to Danny.  Danny looked at it.  Even with the time for his eyes to adjust, there still wasn’t enough light for Jimmy to make out Danny’s expression, but he figured the kid still wasn’t liking the idea.

“It’ll be okay, Danny,” Dale said.

“Yeah,” Jimmy said.  “Just give it a touch and see.”

Danny did.  He reached his hand tenderly toward the staff.  When his fingers were six inches away from the wood, it began to glow—faintly at first, then stronger.

“Stop,” Jimmy said.

“Why?” Danny said, but he stopped.

“I got an idea.  Alex, you hold the thing.  Danny, you stand close to Alex.  Maybe we can get it to glow enough to see by without you having to touch it.  And that should keep it from sticking to you like before.”

Jimmy’s plan worked.  They had to move slowly, Danny and Alex maintaining the cumbersome equilibrium of not so close together they were bumping, but not so far apart that the staff lost its light.  But they were able to walk along the tunnel with plenty of illumination to keep from slamming into anything.

Later, Danny said, “How’d you get in that house with me?  Was it the strange man?  The one with the tools?”

“No,” Jimmy said.  “Just a couple of black dudes with this goddamn staff.  They jumped me.  At a bus stop, can you believe it?  Drove right up in a van and tossed me in, drove me up into the mountains, and then you know the rest.”

“How about you?” Danny said to Alex.

“I was on a job.”

“What kind of job?” Jimmy said.

“I’m a detective.  Private.  I was hired to find something.  I had a lead, some people who seemed to know about what I was looking for.  I followed them from a bar.  The cabin’s where they came to.”

“Where they black?” Jimmy asked.

“Just one.  The other was white.”

“Was the black one African?  I mean with an accent?”

“No.”

“So the way I understand it,” Jimmy said, “is we got the three of us all ending up in this crappy cabin at the same time, except that I’m shanghaied by a couple of Africans who drive me up here, our detective follows some good old Americans, and the kid is grabbed by a dude with tools.  That all right?”

“Uh huh,” Danny said.

“Yes,” Alex said.

“And then we all fall through the floor.”  He was quite for a moment.  “So anyone here have any goddamn idea what’s going on?”

She stared out the window the city lights and cars and rain.  Her breath fogged against the glass.  Behind her, Tedrow said, “Ms. DePaulo, I have word from the scouts.”

She turned her head to look at his reflection in the window.  “Yes?” she said.

“The beetle is gone.  We don’t know how he managed to get it but we have a lead on who he gave it to.”

“Who he gave it to?”

“Yes, ma’am.  Our sources indicate Ellison gave the beetle away shortly after gaining possession of it.”

“Why?”

“We don’t know.”

She looked back at the city.  “And the staff?”

“Missing, too.”

Earlene spun to face him.  “Missing?  The beetle and the staff are both missing?”

Tedrow nodded.

Earlene pulled out the chair behind her desk and sat down.  She stared at the glass trophy next to a picture of her husband and one of her dog.  Entrepreneur of the Year, she thought.  Jesus.

She stared up at Tedrow.  “Jamie,” she said, “You must—in fact, I know you recognize the importance of those two items.”

“Ma’am?”

“Their importance to me.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I need them, Jamie.  They are crucial—the beetle, most of all.  Find them.”

“Yes, ma’am.”  Tedrow left her, closing the office door softly as he did.

Earlene DePaulo leaned back.  She didn’t have long now.

I TRUST YOU WILL NOT FAIL IN OUR AGREEMENT?

The voice came from in front of her, but the room was empty.  Earlene swiveled her chair until she was again facing the window.  Casting an indistinct reflection in the glass was a human shape, masculine, but without texture or definite form.  She could see that the figure was standing in the center of her office.

“We’ll recover them,” she said.

I DO HOPE SO.

“This is only temporary.  We have a lead.”

I HEARD.

“We’ll find them.”

The figure took a step toward her.  THE DESH GROW IMPATIENT, it said.  WE LONG TO FEEL AGAIN.

We all do, Earlene thought.  She said, “You have my word.”

THAT IS NOT WHY I CAME, HOWEVER, the creature said.

“Oh?”

WE HAVE IDENTIFIED A NEW THREAT.

Earlene rubbed her eyes.  Is there anyone who isn’t opposed to us? she thought.

TWO GIRLS.

“Girls?”

CHILDREN. THEY SEEK THE SAME AS WE DO.  AS YOU DO.

“Tell me more,” she said.

The Desh did.  Earlene listened, processing this new information, fitting it in to her existing understanding of the conspiracy she’d become involved in.

Earlene DePaulo hated all of it—but the allure of power was too great not to proceed.