I stared up at the board, looking at the different times available.  How long did I want to enter the chamber for?  An hour?  A day?  Maybe even longer?

The robot attendant, a faceless white automaton, was somehow still watching me.  I could feel its gaze on me, that kind of implacable patience that can only be fueled by silicon circuits.  I ignored it.  I was used to being watched by robots.  They were only there to serve, after all.

I knew that some people went in longer.  My friend Lev had once entered the chamber for an entire week.  When he had staggered out, limping and bloody, he insisted deliriously that it was the best experience of his life.  But he also had to get immediate attention from the med-bots, fixing up his injuries before he bled out.

Lev was hardcore, there was no doubt about it.  I knew that, deep down, I aspired to be like him, but there was no way that I could manage to survive an entire week.

I stepped up to the counter, finally making up my mind as much as I knew I ever would.  The robot had its face on me.  “Have you made up your mind, sir?”  it asked.

All of the robots had a slight but unmistakable British accent.  No one really knew why; Lev insisted that it was the quirk of a long-dead programmer.  It was a quirk that we were prepared to live with.  No one was able to fix it. No one made things any more.

Lev insisted that this was the problem.  I didn’t know.  I didn’t think that I was ready to make any decisions like that.

“I have,” I replied to the attendant.  “One day, please.”

The robot didn’t respond, but there was a slight clicking from behind it, as the electronic circuits in the chamber rerouted themselves to the new pattern.  A few second later, the heavy, pressure-sealed door beside the attendant slowly opened with a hiss of released piston steam.

I took a deep breath.  The location and the time was always randomized; there was no way to tell where I would pop up.  I quickly ran through my preparations, my skills that I had mastered, hoping that they would be enough.

Lev’s lessons once again rang in my head.  We realized too late that we were stagnating, he insisted.  He loved to give these sermons, stomping around and waving his arms.  We didn’t know that, by giving ourselves everything that we wanted, we were stopping our forward momentum!

I wasn’t quite sure what this meant, but Lev was really insistent on this part.  We had lost our innovation, he claimed.  We were content, and so here we stopped.

And this, he went on, was why our ancestors had built the chambers.  It was a way to escape, to get to a time and place where we were no longer protected, no longer cushioned by attendants to provide whatever we needed.  It was a chance to return to the fire, the crucible in which we had been forged.  I didn’t know what this meant, but Lev loved to repeat it.

I could almost hear his voice now, as I stepped up to the huge, heavy door of the chamber.  “Return to the crucible,” he would say, his aged voice cracking slightly.  I was returning now, as I had done so many times.

My heart in my throat, I stepped through the door.  There was a hiss immediately behind me as it closed.  No retreating.

I stared around at my new surroundings.  I was on a beach, I saw.  There was no sign of man.  The surf was gently lapping at the sand, and I could see palm trees nearby.  The air smelled of fresh salt.

I grinned.  This, I could deal with.

Remember, I thought to myself as I picked up a stick and began sharpening it on a rock.  No safety net here.  No med-bots.  No one to help if I got into trouble.

This made me feel alive in a way that I’d never felt before.  And I couldn’t get enough.

Sure, I’ll admit it.  The car is a gift to myself.  It’s not a necessary component of my daily life.  No, it’s a moving declaration of my mid-life crisis.

And hey, I deserve a mid-life crisis!  Come with me.  As I roll down the streets of my memory, let’s examine all the places that I’ve royally botched things up.

Ah, here’s college.  The good ol’ alma mater, where I spent every night partying.  Which, as it turns out, probably wasn’t the best idea.  My grades were all right, sure, but I still lagged behind my classmates, and not just from the resulting hangover.  They went off and got jobs at fancy law firms.  I ended up back home, pulling double shifts to afford my crappy apartment.  Hah.  More like compartment, if you managed to squeeze inside.

Of course, then I met Jill.  Love of my life, from the moment I laid eyes on her.  If I hadn’t been back at my home town, back working at the front counter of that little shop, I never would have met her when she came strolling in.

I can see that some of you in the audience are perking up.  “Maybe this is a love story,” you say.

“Maybe this will all turn out smiles and happiness in the end,” you whisper to each other.

“Perhaps he’s just showing us how far he fell so that we can see how high he rose,” you exclaim hopefully.

Sorry, folks, no such luck.  We’re still dropping.

Of course, it wasn’t all descent for a while.  Somehow, my bone-brained humor was enough to make Jill laugh.  And what a laugh, man!  Some girls do that little tinkle, a fake little giggle that makes you wonder whether you’re actually dating someone old enough to be legal.

Jill didn’t laugh like that.  When Jill laughed, it came bursting up out of her, rising like a bubble to overwhelm her in a tidal wave.  You couldn’t help but be swept along with her.  Some people write about a contagious laugh.  Jill actually possessed one.

So there I was, somehow making this angel laugh along with my dumb jokes.  I don’t know how I overcame my natural shyness, how I managed to do it, but I asked her out.  And she said yes.

Stop awwing in the audience!  I can hear you, you know.  And it’s not gonna end well.  Just want to make that clear up front.  We’re about to switch over to straight tragedy.

Things went well at first.  Really well.  We connected like, well, like a love story.  We were totally in tune, in sync.  She brought out the best in me, encouraged me to apply for a promotion.  And I got it!  I remember coming home with a huge double handful of flowers, flowers I could actually afford to buy for her, and telling her it was all because of her encouragement.  And she laughed, and swept up the flowers in her arms, and I told her she was beautiful, and we fell together on the couch.

And things were great.  I remember they were great.  In fact, they were great for a long time – right up until they weren’t.

I still don’t know what triggered it.  Nothing seemed to change, there was nothing different.  And maybe that’s the trouble, right there.  Maybe the stagnation was building up, and this was when it finally chose to blow, with no warnings to signal what was about to hit me.

I came home, just like any other day.  Unlocked the door, already shrugging out of my coat, and set my briefcase down inside the front hall.

But my briefcase bumped up against a suitcase that was already there.

That was when I looked up and saw her.  She had her coat on.  There were tears in her eyes.  She didn’t want to leave, didn’t want to go.  But she went.

I told you folks that it was a tragedy, didn’t I?

Sure, she said things to me, things I barely heard.  How she was comfortable with me, maybe too comfortable, how that scared her.  How she was worried she had lost that sensation of new, of being in giddy, head-over-heels love, how she needed to go out and find herself.  How it wasn’t my fault, how I shouldn’t blame myself for this, how she just needed some time alone, she didn’t know how long.

She said a lot.  I really didn’t hear most of it.

That kind of brings us up to now, doesn’t it?  Sure, I’m skipping over a lot of crying and moping and eating crappy food and feeling sorry for myself in my boxers on the couch, but I know you don’t want to hear about that.  And finally, after the millionth luxury car commercial, I went out and bought one for myself, a vain attempt to cheer myself up out of this depression.

Of course, even with the promotion, I couldn’t just stroll into the auto dealership.  So I went to one of those used places instead.  Found a nice ride, arranged to have it checked out, then delivered right to my door.  Nice service.

And the car’s still pretty new, see?  Still got the sticker on the rear view mirror.  Says “Events in mirror are closer than they appear.”

What?  Huh, that’s odd.  Isn’t it supposed to say something else?

Anyway, the seat feels nice.  Leather, hardly scratched.  Turn the key, the engine rumbles right to life.  Sounds good.  The thing’s gonna chew through gas, but oh well.  Maybe Jill was right.  Maybe I’m also doing my thing to search for that spark.

Okay, let’s see.  Hmm, mirror’s off.  Let’s just adjust that-

That’s really weird.

Hold on.  Look at that, in the mirror.  You can see my hand, right?  See the wrinkles on the fingers, how the skin’s a little bunched up around the wedding band.  Gold’s a little scratched, but it still looks nice.

Except I’m not wearing a wedding band.

Never did.

I was thinking about it, you know.  Thinking about proposing to her.  That had been my approach to spicing things up, to getting that spark back.  I thought she was just a little down because I hadn’t proposed yet.  Maybe if I had beaten her to the punch, she wouldn’t have left.

But she did leave.  I never got a chance to show her the ring in my pocket.

But now, in the mirror… there, see?  It’s still there, in the reflection.  Not a trick of the eye at all – there’s a wedding band wrapped around my ring finger there.

“Events in mirror are closer than they appear,” huh?  Well.  I’ve never been much of one for flights of fancy, wild imaginations, any of that.  But this seems promising.

Let’s take this baby out for a spin.

My first thought was “oh, that’s weird.”

The offending fruit was sitting in front of me, still on my cutting board.  The knife I had used to slice it in half lay beside it, set aside as I examined what had been originally slated to be my breakfast.

The whole thing is because of that darn newspaper article.  “Eating a half of a grapefruit for breakfast is only ninety calories, and gives you a burst of vitamins to start the day off right!”  It had popped into my mind as I wandered up and down the aisles of my corner supermarket, and I figured it was worth a shot.

The article had included a lovely picture of half of a grapefruit, sliced open.  The thousands of little tiny packets of juice inside the open grapefruit had seemed to glitter in the picture beneath the headline of the article.

And I had to admit, I’d been looking forward when I woke up this morning to taking a big spoonful of that grapefruit in my fridge.

I leaned forward, poking at the two pieces of fruit on my cutting board.  I was cautious, worried that something would happen to my finger.  The outside of the grapefruit had looked totally normal – yellow-pink, covered in little dimples, slightly squishy beneath my fingers.

The inside of this fruit, however, did not look like the picture in the article.

It looked like some sort of black and white mesh.

And it got worse.  As I tilted the fruit back and forth, rolling it around on the cutting board, that mesh shifted, and I realized that the whole fruit was hollow; that mesh was curved to the inside of the two hemispheres.  There was literally nothing inside this grapefruit.

But it had felt right!  It had been heavy, cold, a little wet with condensation!  What in the world was going on?

I picked up the knife, slowly lowering it down into the open grapefruit half.  The knife didn’t seem to encounter any resistance as it entered, no pressure as it slid into what should be the interior of the grapefruit.  I kept on lowering the blade, closer and closer to that stark black and white mesh.

The tip of the knife touched the mesh.  And then the whole knife flashed into nothing but an outline of white lines.

I dropped it with a gasp.  The thing still felt like a knife in my hand, still hit the cutting board with a clatter.  But it no longer looked like a knife.  It looked like a knife-shaped black hole in the world, outlined by lines of white that showed its curves and ridges.  And it wasn’t changing back.

Over the next half hour, my work forgotten, I cautiously touched other things to the inside of the grapefruit.  Car keys.  A carton of nearly expired half and half.  A rather rusty whisk that I had managed to free from where it was holding a drawer shut.  My refrigerator.

Each item instantly blinked into a black-and-white frame.

I sat back on the kitchen table, staring down at the half of a fruit that was causing me so much consternation.  I had set it on a plate, perhaps in a vain hope that it would transform back.  It wasn’t doing so.  I reached up and scratched at the back of my head.

My thoughts were interrupted by a meowing sound.  I glanced up, and cursed under my breath.  The neighbor’s damn orange tabby had somehow climbed into my apartment again!  The dang thing kept on sneaking in, where it would go running around knocking over all my things.  I would have to catch it, probably enduring several scratches in the process, and then would haul it back upstairs, where I wouldn’t even receive a thank-you for my actions.

My eyes flicked from the cat, to the grapefruit, and back.  An idea began to form in my mind.  A wicked, brilliant idea.

“Here, kitty kitty kitty…”

Captain Stupendous came bursting in through the front doors of the lair like a wrecking ball.  Although the superhero was dressed in tight, form-fitting clothing, however, he was definitely male – and his muscles bulged as he sent the three-inch thick steel door cartwheeling across the interior chamber.

The man went rolling across the floor, popping up on his toes, ready to spring.  And it was fortunate that he did so, as the Battle-Bots standing inside the chamber immediately came to life as their sensors detected an intruder.

The two machines, one on either side of the Captain, slowly advanced as the gatling guns on their shoulders began to spin.  In under a second, hundreds of depleted uranium rounds were in the air – all flying straight towards the intruder at over a thousand feet per second.

At least, they were flying towards the superhero – until he moved.

Captain Stupendous broke into a straight sprint, dodging aside as the bullets cut through the air like angry supersonic bumblebees.  He sprinted towards the nearer Battle-Bot, ducking and weaving to keep out of the line of fire.  His strong legs rapidly closed the distance between him and the assaulting machine.

The Battle-Bot was equipped with titanium fists and electro-twitch muscles, but it still couldn’t match the Captain’s speed.  He leapt up, slamming into the robot’s chest, his fist cutting in through hardened armor like it was butter.  His hand closed around a handful of sparking wires.

“These seem important!” Captain Stupendous announced as he yanked the wires out of the robot’s chest.  And indeed they were, as the machine’s legs immediately gave way, and the construction went crashing down heavily to the floor.

One bot incapacitated, one to go.  The other Battle-Bot was now charging forward, fists raised, the entire floor of the chamber shaking from its weight as it lumbered towards its enemy.  It was still firing off bursts from its shoulder mounted cannon, shredding the corpse of its companion with rounds.

Once again, Captain Stupendous was faster – if just barely.  He dodged aside as the second Battle-Bot’s fist came down, and the robot’s attack pulverized the head of its former companion.

The Captain’s hand came sweeping around like a karate chop, slicing through the bot’s leg at the knee.  As it came crashing down, he brought his other fist around in an uppercut, and connected strongly with the monster’s jaw.

Captain Stupendous watched, pleased, as the head of the second Battle-Bot was literally torn from its shoulders and sent flying up into the ceiling.  The rest of the bot crumpled down to the ground, its gun still choking out a few more rounds into the floor before dying.

With the bots destroyed, Captain Stupendous advanced towards the interior of the chamber, where he knew the central command console stood.  “Give it up, Fang!” he called out, his booming voice echoing around the chamber.  “It’s all over – and as we speak, my companions are knocking out the last of your nerve gas missiles before your satellites can deploy them!  Just come quietly!”

As he advanced further, his super-eyes adjusting to the interior dimness, the Captain spotted a high-backed chair at the heart of the semicircular control panel.  He had never laid eyes on this supervillain before, but he knew that he had this opponent cornered.  “Turn around slowly, Fang!” he shouted.

The chair rotated around.  And the Captain’s mouth dropped open.

There, sitting in the chair, where he had expected to see some sort of masked man, sat a small puppy!  The Captain wasn’t especially familiar with dog breeds, but this one looked like one of those weiner dogs with the long bodies and stubby little legs.  There was a metal box mounted on the dog’s head, a short wire sticking up like an antenna, but other than that, the dog looked disturbing normal.

“Er, Fang?” Captain Stupendous repeated, a note of unsure confusion now entering his voice.

“Ugh, yes.”  The voice seemed to come from the dog, but the little puppy’s lips never moved.  “Great job, Captain.  You’ve caught me.  I can at least admit when I’ve been outmaneuvered.”

The Captain’s fists had been up in preparation of a final fight, but he lowered them now, instead scratching at his head.  “Um, are you…” he began, but then stopped.  How do you ask a supervillain if he’s a canine?

The puppy glanced down at itself, and then started licking its front legs, making soft slurping noises.  “Yes, Captain, I am currently in the body of a dog,” Fang replied.  “A dachshund puppy, to be exact.”

This time, the Captain realized that he wasn’t actually hearing the voice through his ears – it was speaking directly into his head.  “I don’t understand,” he confessed.

The puppy, apparently now feeling that its feet were sufficiently clean, climbed out of the chair.  The Captain had to stifle an audible “aww” as it struggled to reach the floor with its stubby feet and nearly collapsed as it fell.  It managed to finally get to the ground, however, and sat up with a happy, dopey smile on its face.

“Trust me, Captain, this is not exactly how I intended to meet you,” Fang beamed into his head.  “Let’s just say that there was an accident with a brain upload to give those Battle-Bots better intelligence, and there was a shortage of available donors.  I needed a body rapidly, and my niece had brought by this ridiculous animal, and well…”

The dachshund had waddled over to Captain Stupendous’s feet, where it had collapsed down on his boots, apparently exhausted by the effort.  Captain Stupendous lowered a fist, ready to grab at the beast in case it tried some sort of venomous bite, but the dog simply began licking at his fingers.

Inside his head, the Captain heard Fang sigh again.  Even without breath, the emotion was clear.  “Listen, this is really embarrassing,” Fang said, “but before you haul me in, do you think you could let me step out the back for a minute?  This stupid creature has a bladder the size of its brain – so, in other words, miniscule.  Otherwise, you may end up with an accident on the floor of your HyperJet.”

The Captain considered the image, and then shuddered.  Cleaning up dog wee was definitely not in his duties as a superhero.  “Yeah, go ahead,” he commented.  He turned his attention to the control panel.  He could at least make sure that the nerve gas missiles were all disabled.

“Thanks, Captain,” Fang told him as the dog padded off towards a small doggy door cut in the back of the lair, its stubby little tail flicking back and forth.  “Give me a few minutes.  This body apparently has to smell every single square inch before it’s ready to release.”

“Sure thing,” Captain Stupendous said absent-mindedly as he stepped closer to the control panel.  The dog had vanished out the back, but he was focused more on a single red button that was blinking on the panel.  There was a small display next to it.  The Captain bent forward to get a closer look.

The display was showing numbers – counting down!  And it was going very rapidly.  Captain Stupendous spun around to stare after the doggy door, but he could already hear a rumble from the far side.  The Captain’s super-hearing told him that the rumble sounded suspiciously like the rocket engine of an escape pod.

With a curse, the muscled man sprinted for the exit.  Behind him, a mushroom of red and orange began to blossom up as the numbers hit zero…

One day, the mountains awoke.

We still don’t know what triggered them to come alive.  There must have been some signal, however, given how coordinated everything was.  Maybe they have some way of communicating with each other.  Or maybe, somewhere in the world, someone just did the wrong thing.

They awoke on June 29, 2014.

All across the world, the mountains began to shift, to rise.  Legs emerged, huge pillars of stone, each one miles across.  Slowly, ponderously, unstoppably, they began to advance across the world.  Belching smoke and spewing lava, they began to bring about our extinction.

Surprisingly, Australia did the best initially, not counting the loss of New Zealand.  It turns out that New Zealand was basically just a bunch of these creatures sitting in the sea, and they decided that it was time to submerge.  A few thousand survivors were pulled out of the ocean with rescue choppers, or managed to make it to boats in time and escape being sucked down, but the rest of them were wiped off the map, along with the country.

Second best was probably America.  The rural South was trampled by the Appalachians, but they’re fairly small as far as these mountains go.  The East Coast and Midwest did all right – they got to sit and listen to the tragedies on the news as California was steamrolled.

The worst faring were probably the Chinese and most of the Europeans.  Between the Alps and the Himalayas, they didn’t stand a chance.  Half a billion people probably died in the first day.

It only took two hours for the President of the US to get an executive order out, although the jets weren’t scrambled for another couple hours.  The generals were experiencing a bit of consternation, it seemed.  How did you kill a mountain?  And most of the US weapons weren’t pointed in towards our own heartland.

Incredibly, it was Pakistan that was the first to bring one of the monsters down.  Satellite surveillance captured the attempt.  Despite the dubious honor of getting the first kill, they didn’t make a good job of it.  It took six hits, and they managed to vaporize most of their defensive forces as well.  But they eventually managed to pierce the abomination’s stony hide, and thermal imaging picked up the subsequent meltdown as the beast literally exploded.

After being briefed, it took six hours more before the President cleared the US arsenal of ICBMs to launch.  Unfortunately, the monsters had already begun to trample across the Midwest, where many of the launch silos were located, putting them out of commission.  Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming was wiped off the map when one of the ICBMs detonated prematurely, still inside its silo.

Still, with over 5,000 nuclear weapons at its disposal, most of the Rockies fell in that initial wave of firepower.  Nuclear submarines turned out to be most effective, as they were relatively protected from the monsters and could move into location.

By the end of June, over a thousand nuclear weapons had been detonated.  The United Kingdom was heavily crippled, and most of central Europe had gone dark.  The Middle East was, for the first time in history, actively requesting the help of Israel, which had finally confirmed rumors that it was a major nuclear power.  Most of Western China had been wiped off the map.  India claimed that it was holding its northern mountains at bay, although satellite images revealed a different story.

Conservative estimates put the count of the dead at between 1.5 and 2.5 billion.

In the next week, the various nations did their best to counterattack.  The United States was momentarily clear, thanks to its massive arsenal, but there were new threats moving up from South America, the Bajas, and down from Canada.  Military engineers began stripping the nuclear power plants of all fissile material to replenish their depleted arsenal.

After days of silence, France suddenly erupted spectacularly.  Experts knew that they had been sitting on a nuclear arsenal, but it was believed that they hadn’t had time to launch.  Surveillance showed that they crippled several of the larger Alps, as well as some of the Pyrenees, but the collateral damage was estimated to be immense.

By a month later, most of the beasts had been brought down.  Scientists were already bemoaning the fallout effects from the sheer number of nukes deployed, but they were being largely pushed aside by the sheer scale of the rebuilding movement.  It turned out that, inside these gigantic moving mountains, huge deposits of rare and valuable ores were hidden.  Even in the wreckage of great cities, new companies were springing up, workers in armored radiation-resistant suits harvesting these great sources of new wealth.

The final kicker, almost an ironic announcement, came from NASA, of all places.  They revealed that they had detected movement on the moon, shortly before the initial movement on June 29th.  It was believed that the awakening signal had come from there.

A new chapter in the space race was opened.  In a matter of days, Congress, acting proactively for the first time in decades, voted to divert huge levels of funding into space travel.  We had been attacked, crippled, but we weren’t out yet.

We were headed back to the moon.  But this time, we’d be armed.

Continued from Part I, here.

“Hello there, Sampson,” Carson greeted me, grinning broadly as he ushered me inside.

“Sammy, please,” I responded automatically.  I was talking on autopilot.  The rest of my brain was busy trying to absorb him through my nose.  It was unbelievable.

By this point, smell was an integral part of who a person was.  I could recognize most of my mechanics who worked for me before they even entered the room, just from their odor.  Terry was very earthy, mainly from his work with farm equipment.  Calvin dealt with small motors, so he always had that hint of oil.  Bob was a deft hand with plumbing… let’s just say that I preferred to eat lunch at the opposite end of the room from Bob.

But Carson’s smell was unlike anything else, anyone else.  Aside from a slight hint of flowers, it was, well, absent.  He was a man who didn’t smell.  It felt like an impossibility.  But no matter how my nostrils strained, I just couldn’t pick anything up.

“Ah, so you’ve noticed!” Carson commented, watching with a smile as my nostrils flared.  “Yes, it’s quite unique.  And that’s why I invited you here.”

My brain finally managed to catch up with my nose.  “You don’t smell!” I commented, rather stupidly.  Okay, maybe my brain hadn’t caught up all the way.

“No,” Carson responded, “I don’t.  And I want to show you why.”

As I stared at him, Carson closed the door behind me.  For a moment, we were in pitch blackness.  And then I heard the click of a light switch, and the room was illuminated.

We were standing in a large warehouse, surrounded by shelves holding large cardboard boxes.  Carson reached out and pulled the nearest one off the shelf.  “Do you know what these are?” he asked.

I shook my head, and the other man popped the box open.  From inside, he withdrew a plastic tube, rather flattened, with a cap on one end and a little knob at the other.  He popped off the cap, twisted the knob a few times, and a white rubbery substance began to rise up from inside the tube.  “This,” Carson revealed, “is my secret.”

He held it out to me, in front of my nose, and I took a sniff.  Sure enough, it had that same faint scent as Carson.  “What is it?” I asked.

Carson grinned.  “Deodorant!”

We talked a bit longer there, Carson still holding that tube.  It turns out that he had purchased this whole warehouse at a steal, as it was rumored to be near a hot zone and possibly contaminated.  That rumor proved to be false, but the deodorant had been a much greater find.  Carson knew that I was a gifted tinkerer, and he wanted me to try and reproduce the formula of this substance, to try and make more.

“I’ll do my best,” I promised, “but no guarantees.”

Carson looped an arm around my shoulders.  “Just think of it,” he said, spreading out his other arm in front of us.  “If we can sell this stuff, no one will smell any more!  We’ll put those rubber scraper folks out of business in weeks.”

As I walked home that evening, holding the two tubes that Carson had given me as a gift, my thoughts were a jumble of ideas and disbelief.  I had to keep on uncapping one of the tubes and sniffing it to convince myself that this meeting had actually happened.  It was unbelievable.

A world where people didn’t smell.  It was almost too much to believe.

I coughed, anxious, as I approached the door at the back of the alley, featureless gray and unmarked by any sign.  In my hand, I held the gold-embossed card that had summoned me here.  But even though I held an invitation, I couldn’t stop myself from trembling.

We all knew him, of course – his name was famous.  Carson Stone, the man who didn’t smell!  He had appeared on Letterman, once.  I had watched that episode, and still remembered vividly the contrast between Carson and the joking host.

Carson had strode confidently onto the stage.  That confidence wasn’t unusual, but his appearance was.  Somehow, his skin was free of grime, as though he’d spent hours running a rubber scraper over his skin.  His clothes appeared similarly clean, free of the stains of sweat – they must have been brand new.

Even more than that, the audience responded to him instantly, leaning forward with their nostrils dilating.  Most times, people maintained their own personal space to avoid too much stench, and indeed, the audience members were well dispersed.  But Carson was different.  There was no bubble around him, and the host and audience seemed almost eager to draw close.

We all knew the secret to attraction, of course.  Smell good.  Hence the booming business of rubber scrapers, “guaranteed to wipe away all dirt and grime from the skin, taking off those pesky odor particles!”.  But they never worked as well as the commercials and ads promised – and after just a day, sometimes even only a few hours, a new layer of dirt would take its place on my skin.

Of course, there was always the wild tale of an untainted spring.  Someone was always claiming that they’d found the “pure source”, water that hadn’t been contaminated, water that didn’t make skin burst into painful boils and weeping sores.  But it was always a hoax.  Most of the time, the braggers were scammers, looking for an easy bit of money before they’d inevitably vanish.

Reaching the door, I lifted my hand and gave a tentative knock.  I had to admit, if pressed, that I had some value as well.  Ever since I was young, I’d been good at fiddling, tinkering, and I’d help get many machines from the olden ages working again.  I ran quite a successful business as a mechanic, fixing televisions, screens, cooking appliances, and vehicles.  I was one of the few people who could get a motorcycle working again, and I didn’t know of anyone else who had successfully converted one to run on alcohol.  I had even managed to make a small improvement to the solar stills that pulled water out of the air, a few meager drops at a time.

But still, receiving this invitation from Carson had been unexpected.

I lifted my hand to knock again, but the door sprang open before my fist could land.  And there, larger than life before my eyes, stood Carson.

He was clean, immaculate, his teeth gleaming.  But that wasn’t what nearly knocked me off my feet.

He smelled . . . amazing.

To be continued!