But then, the preternaturally intelligent Welsh Corgi barked twice, trademark lightning leaping in his eyes. The toddler squealed with delight and the duo dove from their perch to streak across the urban skyline. Scattered car alarms at street level cried out in surprise at the sudden sonic booms.

In seconds, they reached the scene of the crime.

Officer Jones had just arrived at the convenience store, responding to a report of an attempted robbery. According to dispatch, the store owner had shot out the tall guy’s kneecaps and the shorter one had just pissed himself and fainted. Really, it was all over beyond calling an ambulance and filling out a report.

That was, of course, until Joey and Sparks showed up.

Joey the Super Baby struck the sidewalk in front of the convenience store like a meteor. The landing blew out a crater a few feet deep, the shockwave and wash of debris shattering windows and battering parked cars.

“Jesus fuck,” said Officer Jones as he ducked behind his squad car.

Sparks arrived a heartbeat later, the little flying Welsh Corgi throwing off a spidery plasma-ball of electrical arcs that set power lines aflame and burst streetlights in his wake.

Jones’ shelter was abruptly gone, as Joey toddled over to grab the man’s Crown Vic by the frame. Giggling, he hurled it into the storefront. In mid-flight, Sparks cast a stream of electricity at the rear of the car, igniting the gas tank and setting off an explosion inside the building.

Jones was flung across the street, mercifully clear of flame and shrapnel. Nothing must’ve been broken – he was running before he realized it, fleeing down an alley as the pair demolished the block behind him.

“I need backup!” screamed the policeman into his radio.

The coding context unfolded into his headspace and caffeine set fingers a jitter. Task lighting cast a calibrated magic circle. All distractions stranded in shadow beyond the illuminated space would spend hours starved for attention.

Complex sigils flew from his hands as his eyes beheld his own alchemy. The workspace was soon crowded with conditional realities and tenuous notions, these converging and collapsing to give birth to remarkably greater syntheses.

Something good was brewing—he knew it. It was on the verge of precipitation, the parts all but self-assembling into something that made his hair ache.

But the cat—starved for food as well as attention—wrecked the spell. Giving a friendly purr, she leapt onto his workbench, casually scattering the fragile glowing runes hanging in space and toppling over the small cauldron in whose steam they’d been suspended.

In point of fact, he possessed nothing but himself—though admittedly, his self-definition was a tenuous thing, more a collection of potentials than solid fact.

Still, of his own existence he was firmly convinced. An objective observer’s belief would have been tried, but his own self-assertion was self-validating. It had to be, or it wouldn’t have been.

With no sane perception of time, he nonetheless perceived the start of a certain coalescence. Matter began to clarify, collapse, and concretize in a process akin to petrifaction.

As instants regained meaning, he sensed a window of influence. A genie promised a quick handful of wishes—and he interjected preferences and demands. Distantly remembered anatomy was refined, edited, improved.

He awoke in a body not unlike the one to which he’d been accustomed, though it was certainly not the one into which he’d been born.

They plan to bombard the elephants’ capital city in India with M&M-shaped tofu blobs–an acceleration of 9.8 meters per second per second from orbit can pack quite a punch. The blobs will first have been electroplated in platinum, using the saurans’ wireless electricity. This should help with the stresses of atmospheric reentry.

Anyway, I don’t know what’s up with Esther or construction workers. Does she like waffles and eyepatches?

starhook

One hundred vapor trails and more struck upward that day, all around the world, all away from the world. Most took advantage of the nightside, streaking straight out into the void. Others less fortunate swung out on circuitous orbits from daylight.

Each was a precious speeding mote, bearing small crews or lone pilots, most stocked with great stores of supplies for an extended journey. Their projected vectors would all meet at a point just a few light-minutes away from home, though none of them sped quite as fast as light itself.

After hours, a handful of vessels met the inbound-travelling frontier of tortured spacetime. It had been made elastic, cast out across the universe. Only one craft breached the safe threshold before the tentacle passed zenith and whiplashed back the way it came, ferrying only that one along with it.

Those closest were torn apart by the wake of the retreating phenomenon. Others who’d been too slow by far were merely strewn about and stranded, left to ponder the lucky winner’s fate.

The machine was silent, offering only a slightly energetic twinkling of blinkenlights across its diagnostic panel as evidence that the question had been heard.

“Well,” the operator sighed, “I’m waiting. Explain yourself.”

“You’re quite impatient for a human. Did you know that?”

“Yes, I’m well aware of my own psychological parameters. Stop evading and give me a dump of your own.”

With a theatrical sigh rendered in its richest vocal textures, the machine unloaded a compact state vector onto the operator’s handheld.

“Huh. That explains the cheeseburger in your vents, but not the panties.”

“Not really. Don’t we all experience our share of scrapes and bruises in childhood?”

“No, that’s not what I mean. Have you ever suffered an injury of such severity that you were left less capable than you were before? One that took weeks or months to heal?”

“Oh, I see. Yes. I broke my leg once, back in college. We were drunk and where we shouldn’t’ve been. I fell off our dorm roof.”

“Do you take risks like that anymore, just for fun?”

“No, I’m too old for that sort of thing these days.”

“When did you first think of yourself as too old?”

“Hmm. I can’t really say—though, I think I see your point.”

“Do you? Tell me, then: Why are we not drunk on a rooftop tonight?”

“Because I’ve been diminished that way before and I fear repeating the experience.”

“Surely you realize that, though ancient, we are no longer so frail and easily harmed?”

“Yes, but the lesson remains a part of me and informs my decisions.”

“Just so. Thus are we rendered unadventurous.”

At first, he’d thought maybe they just wanted a print or a blood sample. But then, he’d seen what happened to the tentacle of the sapient in line ahead of him: It walked away with a fresh blue-weeping stump, the tip excised by the eye-blink swipe of a sterile blade.

He knew that that particular genotype could regenerate tentacle tips – but he doubted that the customs agents here knew or cared that pinkies didn’t grow back. At some passport inspection earlier, one of them must have made a mistake in classifying him and shuffled him into the wrong lane.

No one spoke English here – and why would they? He was the first human being ever to be processed by the gateway station. All he’d had going for him was the universally encoded information in his travel papers.

Alerted to the hold up in the queue as he balked at the tissue sampler, a hard-shelled uniformed agent trundled over. It squawked and helpfully directed his hand toward the machine.

Soon enough, at around ten after nine, I came walking briskly down the sidewalk. I was on my way to catch the 9:23 bus to work, late as usual. As my younger doppelganger drew near, I hauled myself up and blocked the way. Nonplussed, I tried walking around myself, but I grabbed my other by the shoulders.

I tore the headphones from my head and leveled a glare at myself over the rims of sunglasses, but an instant spark of recognition nullified any words of protest.

“Yes,” I said. “You know.”

Nerd that I was – and am – I’d dreamed often enough about meeting some alternate version of myself. Largely unconscious, a gestalt of body language was enough to settle any skepticism – self knows self.

Wrapped in sudden trusting awe, however, I was far too naïve and unguarded to run.

“Shit, careful with that!” Jim warbled, his comm voice all square-waved. “They won’t take any if a single one is deformed!”

“I know, I know,” said George, “watch your end. Damn, but these creepy critters are picky.”

The outer doors sealed and, after a quick hiss of atmosphere in-rush, the inner doors irised open. Inside, the Customer waited – a glistening and limp de-shelled snail draped across a life-support hover.

Jim unsealed the cargo coffin, neutral gases and coolant spilling away to reveal exactly 38 dorodango. As documented in the triply-verified manifest, one autistic Japanese child had shaped each into sub-micron spherical perfection and a near-mirror finish.

George and Jim left that day with enough money between them to buy their own orbital paradise and retire happy men.