The plan was to place Tanner in the basket of a hot air balloon and drift said balloon out over the hole, whereupon he would be lowered by a rope wrapped about a pulley housed in the basket and running several hundred feet to a hand-operated winch upon the deck of the Fortitude. Tanner would carry on his person a kodak, a waterproof field-book and pencil, a bottle of water, and a bowie knife strapped to his waist. This last his only mandate. Not a fool among this crew had tangled with so much as a cuttlefish.

A crone in black wool dark in the doorway. Zoom in on her hands, knuckles thick with long work and the skin lined as dense as pile knit. She holds antlers worn smooth by years of worry and clicks them together for the bony and rhythmic score as we open, panning slow over the coarse cloth to her face like a severe woodcut in pale driftwood. Yellow-green eyes that might glow lurid in the dark. Carefully, in an angular accent that lives in the throat: “Merry Christmas.”

In dreams, this was not true. In dreams, vases fell at the old 9.8 meters per second squared. The figures moved at his pace and seemed none bothered by it. He dreamt sometimes of being in space, by now well past the sun’s effect. And he dreamt of dogs fetching slobbery sticks down the hillside, or that she’d stayed another summer and in that summer he taught her to chop wood and she taught him to read tarot, and in those dreams he had no recall from the vast tomes of history and he knew in all instances that not one particulate moment was repeated. And, by this very fact, because of it, Everything must be.

Einstein wrote a riddle that only 2% of the population could solve, by his math. This should be even easier. No trick questions, just trickiness:

Five dwellings sit west to east at the outermost fringe of the city. Each Home is unique amongst its neighbors, and each owner has a source of Income, an unshakeable Vice, and a Philosophy they extol or have been influenced by. Each lives in their own coordinate of Love. Answer the final question using the clues available. Write things down. Use Excel on the computer at work and make yourself a table.

The true story of OmniPark’s Realm of Time

Daryl was born blue. His skin a deep lustrous indigo, the palms of his hands and the bottoms of his feet pale grey. He had two faces but only three eyes, the middle one bulging in the center of his broad double-face. He had two mouths to gurgle and two noses to run with mucus. Two arms and two legs. They did not bring him back swaddled and napping to his mother's bed. The doctor had stood with Daryl's father, looking in on the nursery as half of the child cried and the other half slept.

It’s about all the mediocrity that Trevor can bear. He’s twenty-five now, but straight out of high school he was traveling the world as a freelance security expert. Paid by airports and casinos on three continents to hack into their systems, contracted by the paranoid founder of an oil-rig micro-nation to sniff out high tech saboteurs, compensated in kief and disc drives full of music to keep pirates in Scandinavia anonymous. He was going to do this forever. There was nothing about life back home that he missed.

They would never stop asking this question and sometimes a person threw a fancy term at it like Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder or Monomania, but those people were never in Rip's head and they didn't know how it felt when he opened a map. Those strange cities with their unpronounceable names, countries he'd never heard of that made Arkansas look tiny and lost, blank expanses that demanded to be filled with experience.

I took up the vessel slowly, stitching together their questions into a tale. But as in good dramaturgy, my stalling appeared as flair. I tilted my head back and took a long drink of that golden potion. Above us, all the stars of the universe written majestic there. The effects of the drink dropped anchor before I could even wipe my mouth: translucence, transcendence, the epic waiting to be told. The men were waiting on me as they must have once waited hungrily for their mothers to dole out sweets.