I
2050 CE
By an act of the Imperial Congress and the 4th Constitutional Convention, Presidents of the United States are elected for a single 10 year term. Newly elected President, Rose Katenbach is being briefed by her Chief of Staff, General Gregory Precuneus, prior to her first meeting with Galactic Ambassador Pan.

God created Man in his image: what goes around comes around.

BC pressed a fingertip against the porthole and adjusted the sensors within the window. In his quarters, he listened while gruff voices spoke back and forth over the com system.“Pretty hydrogen,” he said, as the spectrum window shaded the element into rich yellow-gold hues.    He liked a lot of colors: gold, reds, greens and blues, rainbows of colors. It wasn’t real, especially, the rainbow part. He’d never seen rain, but Meopes had told him about rainbows.

Tom Harris, Stephen White's best friend and co-worker at Animatec, a startup computer-generated graphics company, in their hometown of Nevada, Missouri, had decided to take the scenic route to the Maifest celebration clear across the state, in the little green hamlet of Hermann.

The room hurt. Reynolds opened his eyes and the light from outside jangled, as it squeezed through the Venetian blind and fell upon a vase of daffodils, whose yellow made him wince with its trill piping. The vase rested upon some sort of trolley, and the angles of this jarred like out-of-tune violins. Where his body and limbs rested against the bed a continual low buzzing sounded. He wondered what had happened.

The Opening

Comrades and enemies stood shoulder to shoulder in truce on the eve of battle, retelling their favorite skirmishes over cocktails in the New York Weston Hotel's lounge. Angelo Torres kept his distance from the pack. He had no interest in bragging. He was better than all of them, and he'd prove it at tomorrow's chess tournament. He was standing at the corner of the bar drinking a Coke hoping to catch sight of the person he did fear, the one who'd mailed him a personal challenge.