27. We are not CREATORS of life. We are that which life pa.s.ses through. We don't manipulate biology into forms that flatter us; we employ biology to reveal beautiful forms that REJOICE upon coming into being.

28. The religious man looks to the suffering surrounding him and asks, "What G.o.d does this to me?" The newman looks to the suffering surrounding him and says, "I will relieve this suffering with my love."

29. The afterlife is a construct of as.e.xual reproduction. Our old religions warned of h.e.l.l and tempted us with Heaven. Trillions of heavens and h.e.l.ls beg for creation. It is our task to create these states to host spirits. Heaven and h.e.l.l are the SERVERS where the new spirits reside.

30. We are called upon to become a species of creators. We honor our own creation to the highest by creating anew, with humility, love, and grat.i.tude for that which gave us LIFE but is now dead.

31. Conceive of these truths as vision, strategy, and tactics. Our vision is to become stewards of life in our universe. Our strategy is to gather together those who wish to make this vision happen and spread these truths. Our tactics use the Bionet as a means of s.e.xual reproduction and qputers as a means of as.e.xual reproduction.

32. When we defiled our planet to the point of threatening all life, we came together to change. We suffered the Age of f.u.c.ked Up s.h.i.t. Those who remained after these years of pestilence, tyranny, and warfare opened their eyes upon a world boldly a.s.serting its beauty. We ask, now that the planet is reawakening from its convalescence, what responsibility do we have to LIFE itself? Our responsibility has never been more clear. We are responsible for spreading LIFE throughout the universe.

33. Christian gospel celebrates the transformative power of G.o.d's love. We invert this gift. It is our love that transforms the new life. It is our love that makes G.o.ds.

That's it.

What did you make of it?

Well, first, we were high on marijuana. Second, we'd just watched 2001. So you could have read us a receipt from the grocery store and our minds would have been blown. That night we treated the doc.u.ment as a form of entertainment more than anything. Erika was shaken by the experience but we weren't really all that receptive to the gravity of what she was feeling. We sat around the kitchen table trying to figure out whether this was simply a product of Erika's imagination or whether it was something else.

What did Erika think?

She believed it was a transmission of some sort. She definitely believed she hadn't brought it into being via her normal creative channels. She said she'd felt like a human fax machine. Was it possible it was just her imagination at work while she was under hypnosis? Maybe. Or was it really something sent through her from another source? That it was in the form of a numbered doc.u.ment suggested it was a kind of philosophical argument, something along the lines of Leibniz's The Monadology. And the actual substance of the argument, that humanity was intended to promulgate life throughout physical and virtual s.p.a.ce . . . that sure sounded like speculative fiction to us. Not to mention these other technologies the doc.u.ment referred to-qputers, the Bionet, Wikipedia.

The next morning I went out and bought us coffee and scones. When I got back, Erika took her food upstairs while Wyatt and I messed around on a couple of his computers doing who knows what. I sensed that something was wrong but couldn't figure it out. An hour or so went by and I realized I hadn't heard Erika's typing all morning. Wyatt observed this around the same time. We went upstairs to peek in at her to make sure everything was all right. She was in her study, sitting at her desk in front of her computer, her back to the door. A blank Word doc was open in front of her. Quietly, we went back downstairs and got on with our day. Then the next day, the same thing. And the day after that. Erika couldn't write. Completely blocked. She'd go to her study at the usual time and sit there for eight hours. She was under contract to produce X number of novels a year, so this was a problem. She withdrew, and the more Wyatt and I tried to talk to her about it, the less she spoke. It was like her well of words had instantly evaporated as soon as she channeled that message. A couple weeks went by. She returned to Wendell Hoffman to see if he could help her figure out what had happened. She arrived at his office in the Castro to find the place overrun by cops. A couple hours before, a patient of Hoffman's had shot him three times then turned the gun on himself.

Just like the cafe owner who hanged herself before you could talk to her.

That's exactly what I thought. It felt too neatly tied up. The whole thing scared the s.h.i.t out of us. We holed up in the house for several days, flushed all the dope down the toilet, and tried to get a handle on the situation. We'd taken this detour into the dot-com world, lost the trail to Nick, but now the case had caught up to us and was pulling us back in. And now we had the money to devote ourselves to it for the long haul. We needed to find the building on the brochure. We needed to find Squid. We needed to figure out whether this strange doc.u.ment that had come through Erika had anything to do with Nick and whether the Bionet or qputers really existed.

I had a couple friends, a couple hard-core geeks named Chi-Ming and Saltzman at Intel, whom I'd met in the trenches at eBread. I emailed them to ask if they'd ever heard of a qputer. Neither of them had, though Chi-Ming asked if I was talking about a quantum computer. What was that? He filled me in a bit. While a digital computer stores data in bits, which can exist only in a one or zero position, a quantum computer uses qubits, which can exist in a one, zero, or a superposition. This makes for a h.e.l.lishly fast computer, a machine that can defeat any sort of digitally based cryptography. Even though the research goes back to the seventies, quantum computers still, you know, exist entirely within the realm of the theoretical. Quantum computers haven't been developed yet, unless some group of scientists somewhere is keeping one secret. As for the Bionet, no one we talked to had ever heard of such a thing.

A couple months pa.s.sed. Erika still hadn't written a word. Every morning she'd go up to her room, and every afternoon she'd come downstairs defeated. She started getting these cramps in her hands, her fingers would get all claw-like, and Wyatt had to ma.s.sage them so she could use them. We asked her if she might be willing to go to another hypnotherapist but she kept saying no; the experience with Hoffman had so rattled her that she was afraid of hypnotherapy altogether. Wyatt and I pored over the doc.u.ment for clues. He'd read about Haeckel's Theory in some freaky alternative medicine book. I was familiar with McLuhan because of my dad, and read Understanding Media again, finding a lot to think about in light of the explosion of the Web.

What about the Bionet?

We had nothing to go on but our imaginations. We ended up concocting a science fiction explanation. This was a lot of fun, actually. Wyatt brought his knowledge of various medical modalities, I supplied the tech knowledge. We decided the Bionet would be a biological version of the Internet, a monitoring system in which individual bodies would transmit information to other bodies or groups of bodies. The initial stages of the Bionet would involve already existing technology, like pacemakers. When a pacemaker detected a cardiac event, it could transmit a distress signal with GPS coordinates to 911, triggering a response from paramedics. Then we thought, what if the Bionet could also accept signals from a remote source, and say, dispense certain things into the bloodstream? For instance, what if instead of swallowing a pill, there was a nanotechnology pharmaceutical factory installed under your skin? What if the Bionet was an extension of the immune system? And what if it could respond to a pandemic by releasing the proper c.o.c.ktail of antigens into an entire populace, effectively putting up a wall against a particular outbreak? Then we started thinking about the neural ramifications of such a technology. Remember all those movies in the early nineties where people had bulky cable jacks in the backs of their necks? What if you could accomplish the same sorts of virtual immersions without the wires? What if your thoughts could transmit data about your body to an external server? Or what if you just got over a cold, and your friend got the same cold-could you send a thought into his brain that could provoke his artificially enhanced immune system to produce the appropriate antibodies? We pitched this stuff back and forth, eventually writing our book, Foundations and Principles of Bionet Technology. We had little ambition for our ma.n.u.script beyond our own entertainment. We wrote it with a sort of formal, academic tone, taking after Borges. It was just as sci-fi as anything Erika had ever written. While we were working out the early draft at the kitchen table, she was still upstairs not writing. After a few months we had a complete ma.n.u.script, which we uploaded to a print-on-demand Web site. We did no marketing, no promotion, just put it up there and kind of forgot about it. It sold three copies in the first week, which we found more funny than anything.

Erika didn't meet her deadline for her next book and had to pay back her advance. This was our wake-up call that we really had to get her to a counselor. She felt like the part of her brain that wrote had been wiped entirely clean, like a magnet on a disk drive. Part of her still wanted to write, but she didn't know how anymore. And she started wondering if she wanted to write only because that had been her routine for so long. Maybe she needed to do something entirely different now. Maybe her time as a writer was up. I doubted that, because when the hypnotherapy transmission had come through she'd been a hundred pages into the third book of a trilogy. She still had this stillborn ma.n.u.script on her computer, paused midsentence.

Summer came and went. The three of us had become something of a family. I loved them, I truly did. Our Bionet book sold a hundred or so copies. Then one day, a week before Halloween, I received an email. The person said he had read our book and understood we probably had a "mental block" problem on our hands. The sender promised to reverse the process and cautioned us to practice extreme secrecy. We were to meet him at Golden Gate Park at 10 a.m. on Halloween. He would appear dressed in a Chewbacca costume and provide more information at that time. I called Wyatt over to the computer before I even got to the end of the message. But there it was, in the signature and in the "from" line. The email was from Squid.

SKINNER.

Skinner pried open the can of fruit c.o.c.ktail and stared into its murky juice. There were cherries in there, peeled grapes it looked like, mandarin orange slices, peach cubes. He brought the can to his lips and gulped the juice then shook the can to rattle some of the stuck fruit bits into his mouth. Not bothering to locate a utensil, he fished out individual pieces with his fingers. He considered crumpling the can and tossing it into the bushes but instead he smashed it flat with his boot and shoved it into an outer pocket of his backpack. Everywhere around him: forest. More specifically, the North Cascades. More specifically still, an overgrown, twenty-mile trail crazily wending through hemlock, devil's club, and salmonberry toward his childhood home of Bramble Falls on the north tip of Lake Chelan.

He'd really screwed the pooch this time, hadn't he? Leaving his family in Seattle, venturing out of phone range, crazy p.i.s.sed off and confused, not returning to his daughter's condo to talk it out in a more constructive manner, just racing north, disappearing into wilderness. He couldn't remember getting here. Couldn't even remember what he'd said after seeing Waitimu's clone, though he imagined it hadn't been pleasant. Partly he expected his wife and daughter to pursue him and, in the act of pursuit, prove their forgiveness, but he suspected they'd been so thrown by his outburst, so startled by his sudden flight, that they'd decided to remain in Seattle to see if he had the guts to return.

Every time Skinner's mind returned to the awful reality of what Roon had done he slipped into a thought algorithm. First, visceral unease that a member of his family had birthed a clone. Then a more substantial wave of disgust that Roon had cloned Waitimu. At this point his thoughts came to a juncture. He could either relinquish the values of purebred humanism, for which he'd fought as a Christian American private contractor, and allow Roon's decision to float on by. Or he could rea.s.sert his commitment to those values in response to their being challenged. Every time the algorithm played out, he'd chosen the latter. Then, after he had doubled down on the rightness of his convictions, the algorithm demanded he turn his back on Roon and Chiho. Here, twisty guilt crept into the process, which he had to keep in check by further a.s.serting to himself that he was standing up for what he believed in. But just as soon as the guilt was taken care of, his thoughts turned into angry fists. Why had they so thoroughly failed him? The algorithm turned to doubt. Maybe he was the problem. Maybe his were the mistaken values. The algorithm concluded and he started again at the beginning, back at disgust.

Out here with birds and trees the mechanizations of his confused thoughts boiled on in exile. It always astounded him how thoroughly indifferent the grand, natural world was to the agonies of human emotional life. Up towered swaying pillars of alder, turning sunlight green through the veins of their leaves. Most of these trees had sprouted prior to the FUS and would outlive every person now living. A rodent of some sort scurried in the underbrush. In this place the frettings of a father over his daughter fell silent in the terrifying continuity of geological time. At twilight Skinner came to a clearing where he pitched his tent and made a small fire. From his backpack he retrieved a roll of foil, from which he ripped a rectangle. Onto this surface he cubed some potatoes and tossed on a few slices of cheese, sprinkled on some Tabasco, salt, and pepper. He wrapped the food securely and placed the foil packet directly on the embers. Half an hour later he opened the steaming packet and ate.

Next morning Skinner woke, doused the fire with water from a nearby creek, packed up, and moved on, cresting the ridge around noon. This was the tricky part that put his walking stick to good use. In places the trail narrowed to the width of two boots, riding the top of a crumbling, undulating spine. Lake Chelan stretched below like an enormous string bean. Skinner hiked along the ridge for a good two miles before the trail dipped toward the lake, steeply switching back and forth. He steadied himself by grabbing huckleberry branches along the path. On the third switchback he spotted the church steeple through the trees.

Soon the path leveled out and intersected with what used to be a paved road, now a zone of chunked-up asphalt overgrown with waist-high sedges. This was the main road, an isolated stretch going from one end of nowhere to the other in a town accessible only by boat. Bramble Falls seemed to have sprung fully formed from the mind of an omnipotent tourist, with its collection of artisans' galleries and tackle shops, a magnet for pashmina-clad grandmothers and men wearing hip waders. Visitors used to come here in the summer to stay at the inn or the dozen B&Bs, to kayak and hike, to attend Buddhist retreats where no one was permitted to speak for days. Skinner had lived here with his dad, a retired fisherman and boat builder who'd escaped western Washington to spend the last few years of his life in the mountains. Decades later, walking through the ruins, Skinner wondered if he should remember more of these buildings and business signs. It was a doc.u.mented side effect that indulging in too many enhanced memory trips chipped away at real memories, those ephemeral, less vivid, frozen moments so p.r.o.ne to distortion. Here was an ice-cream shop, identified with a dead neon sign in the shape of a dripping cone. The rusted skeletons of a few cars sat inert in the street. Trinket stores, the old grocery, a salon offering specials on facials and pedicures-all these places empty. Bramble Falls was a ghost town.

Skinner stood outside the two-story house considering the windows blinded by sheets of plywood, the yard with the tree where the tire swing still dangled from a plastic rope. Nearby a carca.s.s of some sort, maybe a fox, hosted a buzzing convention of flies. Skinner walked to the door and opened it. Easy as that. Inside smelled of mildew and rot and animals. Light seeped through various holes and cracks. Objects that used to be pieces of furniture collected shadows in the living room. From where he stood he could see into the kitchen, where a cookie tin lay on the floor. The floorboards seemed to cry out in pain as he crossed to the stairs. He tested each stair with his walking stick before putting his weight on it, holding on to the railing as he climbed to the second story. Up here sunlight and wind fought their way through a window that hadn't been covered. Skinner shook as he walked down the hall to his old bedroom. The door was ajar. He nudged it open. The room hadn't changed. The football-print bedspread was as vibrantly green as he'd left it, books and sports trophies almost too neatly arranged on shelves. A toy fire truck sat in the spirals of a rag rug. This was all wrong. There should have been cobwebs, dust, peeling wallpaper. The place looked preserved.

A naked child with no eyes exploded from the closet.

Skinner reeled back. The boy jumped on the bed, spitting out sounds: "Bzzzzz! Beeezzzz! Bzzzzzst!"

Skinner ran. Down the stairs, out the front door, across the yard, gasping, back to the main road. He fell to the street, clawing at his face as he violently wept. Gradually he composed himself. The sound of shoes on gravel, thirty yards away. In a second Skinner was on his feet, Coca-Cola unholstered. A middle-aged man and woman jumped and exclaimed. Both wore multipocketed khaki vests and shorts, hiking boots, sun hats, backpacks laden with gear. The man bore a voluminous beard streaked with gray. The woman was considerably shorter, her face beaky and startled.

"Identify yourselves," Skinner said.

"For G.o.d's sake, wise elder, put that firearm down!" the man said.

"I said identify yourselves."

"We're doctors, Sal and Rhonda Vacunin."

"What are you doing here?"

"We might ask you the same question!" Rhonda exclaimed.

"We're here conducting academic research for a book," Sal said. "Now please point that pistol elsewhere!"

Skinner returned the gun to its armpit holster. "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't expect anyone else to be here."

"We heard a commotion and had to satisfy our curiosity," Sal said. "And now that we've given our reason for being here, what's yours?"

"I used to live here."

The professorial couple both rose up on their tiptoes with hands aflutter and mouths agape.

"Why, how unbelievably serendipitous!" Sal exclaimed as the couple rushed to grasp Skinner's shoulders as if he were an old friend. "Rhonda, can you believe our fortune? How grand!"

"How grand indeed!" Rhonda laughed. "Oh, you must join us for supper. There are so many things we'd love to ask you. We didn't catch your name."

Skinner introduced himself, a little skeeved out by the sudden affection.

"Ah, like B. F. Skinner, the great radical behaviorist," Sal laughed.

"Look, thanks for the invitation, but-"

Rhonda said, "Oh, we insist on plying you with wine in exchange for stories of this mystifying hamlet. Do indulge us, please?"

"Wine, huh?"

"But of course," Sal said. "And merriment as well! Ha! Come, come!"

Skinner followed the professors to the building that used to be the town library. He'd spent many hours here as a child, studying histories of wars and a.s.sa.s.sinations, lost in action-adventure novels. The building was small but stately, constructed of marble and bra.s.s by way of an overly generous grant. The inside was a one-room affair, with high windows letting in dust-filtered light. The Vacunins had been here for some time. In one corner of the room was a neatly made bed. On tables were spread maps, papers, ma.n.u.scripts, a couple solar laptops, stacks of photographs. Most of the shelves were empty but here and there stood books that had miraculously escaped the ravages of looters and silverfish, every one of them over a century old. Beside the work tables rose a tower of several cases of wine. Rhonda uncorked a bottle, splashing some Baco noir into a gla.s.s that looked clean enough.

"Welcome to our humble domicile," Sal said.

"How long have you folks been here?" Skinner asked.

"Four months? Five?" Sal said.

"Oh, Sal, we've been here over a year," Rhonda said.

Sal laughed. "One loses track of time when engaged in the pa.s.sions of the mind."

"Not to mention pa.s.sions of other sorts," Rhonda stage-whispered. The two giggled.

"You said you're writing a book?"

"Indeed," Sal said. "Focusing on the events that transpired in these parts during the early years of the FUS."

Skinner lifted the wine to his lips. "Holy-this is good wine! What is this?"

"Bramble Falls Vineyards, FUS 12," Rhonda said. "You'll find that the Vacunins only imbibe the finest libations."

Skinner sat down on a creaky swivel chair. "I shouldn't be drinking on an empty stomach."

"Oh, dear man, say no more," Rhonda said. "We were about to roast the most succulent lamb on the terrace. Do join us!"

Skinner remained sitting and pushed off with his feet, walking the wheeled chair out the back entrance of the library onto a tiled terrace overlooking the lake. A fire pit faintly smoked. Sal tossed on a few more logs and retrieved the cubed meat from a cooler, preparing it with spices and fleur de sel on an old book cart. Rhonda refilled Skinner's gla.s.s.

"I remember this view," Skinner said. "I used to spend time here, reading, watching the boats. That's what the summary says anyway. I off-loaded those memories long ago."

Sal shook his head like he didn't understand.

"I got rid of them. Useless memories. Stuff that was just crowding my head. They're not gone, they're just stored externally. I know the keywords in case I want to experience them again."

"And you remember the FUS?" Rhonda asked, startling Skinner with her forwardness.

"Sure. The first few years of it, anyway. There are gaps. We followed the news, watched what was happening in the cities."

Sal slid the cubes of meat onto skewers and placed them on a rack that straddled the fire.

"According to the summary, after my folks died I did my best to empty the liquor cabinet and get the h.e.l.l out of my own head any way I could. You could feel the panic setting in. We heard about the bombings and public executions, at least at first. It's when the news stopped coming that we started really getting scared. Once in a while a refugee showed up at the docks in a boat, someone who'd escaped the worst of it. We did our best to incorporate them into the community but you know how it is with a stranger coming to town. Where are they from? What did they do? Who's following them? Homicides, insanity . . . Christ, I'm boring you."

"No, no," Rhonda a.s.sured him, pouring more wine. "Tell us more."

"After I buried my dad, I was drinking alone, pa.s.sing out in my bedroom every night. It was a priest who slapped me to my senses and told me I needed to snap out of it. Father Dave. And by slapping me, I mean he literally slapped me. Came to my house, found me puking myself inside out, and hauled me up and whacked me across the face a couple times. According to the memories he told me there were was a band of bad men coming. He asked if I knew how to use a gun. We armed ourselves and fortified ourselves in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the church . . . I remember off-loading certain memories. I remember disengaging from the console and looking at the card and knowing I had just deleted something awful. But the very memories of off-loading had traces of those horrible memories, so I had to erase the memory of erasing the memory. I remember erasing a memory of erasing a memory of erasing a memory. The original memory must have been something pretty bad."

"You need another drink," Sal said.

"I'll take the whole bottle," Skinner replied.

The next morning Skinner woke on a chaise lounge on the terrace, a half-full wine bottle still in his hand and several empty ones lying on the flagstones nearby. He dialed up a hangover remedy from the Bionet. When he managed to stumble into the library he found the couple fussing over their folios and notes. Rhonda wore a pair of white gloves and magnifying goggles and was nose-deep in what appeared to be an old phone book.

"We have something extraordinary to show you, Mr. Skinner," Sal said. "Rhonda, shall we?"

Rhonda grinned. "To the morgue!"

"I've seen a lot of dead bodies in my life," Skinner said, "but I don't, ah-"

"Relax, Mr. Skinner, it's not what you think," Sal smiled, clapping the old man on the back.

The Vacunins gathered a number of seemingly random binders and papers before they all headed to the offices of the old Bramble Falls News. The door had been kicked off its hinges but set back more or less in place in the doorway. Sal moved it aside and beckoned the others into the front office, a clutter of desks and chairs in motey beams of sunlight. Something had made a nest in the couch in the waiting area. The news desks held dead Macintosh monitors, office supplies, and here and there mounds of pigeon dung. Then there was the paste-up area-light tables, a waxer, fax machine, copier, scattered X-Acto blades. Rhonda pointed out the darkroom, a walled-off closet with a cylindrical door. Down a couple creaky stairs they came to the storage room in the rear of the building, where collapsed shelves, busted furniture, and discolored spools of brittle paper suggested a raided tomb. A Formica lunch table occupied the center of the room beneath a dirty skylight. In the far corner was another walled-off room, a little larger than the darkroom. Sal dug in his pocket for the key and beckoned Skinner closer. He threw the door open dramatically and said, "My friend, I give you the morgue."

Every issue the paper had ever published was preserved on shelves in bound, tabloid-sized volumes going back to 1890. Sal swept his flashlight over the bindings, each numbered by year. The few from the nineteenth century, most beyond salvageable, consisted of little more than brittle brown leaves on the verge of turning to dust. Rhonda noted that only 1899 was really all that readable with the equipment they had. Wearing her white gloves again, she removed that volume from its shelf and laid it on the table. They had photographed more than a hundred years of papers so far, Sal noted, but there was nothing like seeing and smelling actual newsprint spanked with moveable type. Skinner scanned the narrow columns crammed with minuscule words. Property disputes, a gigantic trout caught, a new store selling dry goods. Another losing season for the Bramble Falls baseball team. A barn fire. Marriages, wakes, births.

"Here," Rhonda said, turning to a March edition. "I think you'll find this interesting."

Skinner squinted. A photograph of several dead Indians covered up to their necks in sheets, lined up on what appeared to be the bed of a wagon. Maybe four men and three women, it was hard to tell. A bundle that appeared to be a baby.

"The last members of their tribe," Rhonda said, "Gunned down by three men from Bramble Falls as they tried to cross to Canada. Certain folks thought the Indians were putting hexes on the town."

"Bramble Falls used to be part of the tribe's traditional fishing grounds," Sal added. "For a couple months this band had been living in an encampment a mile or so from town, fishing, hunting, staying out of the way as best they could. Then one day a teenage boy found one of the women in the woods at the edge of town, near the church. She was speaking in a strange dialect, which the boy described as sounding like a snake. A local priest, a man by the name of Wright, worked the townspeople into a panic and soon three volunteers set out to confront the Indians, leading to their ma.s.sacre."

"This is our work," Rhonda said. "Finding people who hold some trace of that particular genetic line."

"What's so important about their genes?" Skinner asked.

"As you know, the Bionet operates according to various permissions levels," Sal said. "These are all granted and managed by a variety of agencies but essentially it means all of us have read permissions with which we can download prescriptions, limited write permissions with which we can upload our immunities, and some of us-trained medical professionals, mostly-have administrator permissions. But there's a level that overrides all of these. Super-admin permissions. We believe that these can unexpectedly appear in a person based on certain genetic predispositions. We've traced these genes back to this particular tribe."

Rhonda said, "A super administrator could ensure that the Bionet is never again used to enslave anyone."

"No more embodiments," Skinner said, and thought of Jadie.

From the morgue Sal brought out a number of other pre-FUS volumes, issues of the paper dating from around Skinner's twenty-first-century childhood. They had marked one volume with a sc.r.a.p of cardboard. The paper in those awful days had printed photos of ma.s.s graves and decapitated corpses, images set amid ads for boat repair and chiropractors. And to think Bramble Falls was a small town. Just imagine what the f.u.c.ked Up s.h.i.t must have looked like in a major metropolis. You could pretty much plug any imagined scenario into the discourse on the FUS and come up with a delusion that somebody would believe. At times it seemed the only way to describe what had actually happened was to reach into the depths of myth. Folks screaming, running with eyes bleeding through canyons of concrete and steel as the sky rained asteroids that uncannily targeted famous landmarks. Shaky, hand-held cameras tracking radioactive G.o.dzillas. Robot militias pillaging retirement communities. Automobiles bursting out of the twentieth stories of office towers. Vampires battling werewolves for supremacy of the night. And so on. Rhonda pointed to a local story ill.u.s.trated with a photo. An impossibly old Native American man, sitting on a bench outside the drugstore, propping his knotty hands on an equally knotty walking stick, resting his chin on his hands. The story was little more than an expanded caption.

NATIVE ELDER CLAIMS EARLY TIES.

TO BRAMBLE FALLS.

An unexpected visitor strolled down Main Street Tuesday -Joseph Talleagle, a Native American man claiming to be 112 years old. After purchasing a bottle of water at Andy's Handy Mart, Talleagle regaled a local audience with stories of his journeys over the years. Spry and good-humored, Talleagle claimed to have last visited Bramble Falls in 1899, though when asked for details of that visit the Native American elder demurred. "I got to keep walking," said Talleagle. "That's what I do. Walk and walk and walk." He then tipped his battered leather hat and continued on his way up Two Snakes Trail.