You took all that the greatest generation gave you and rigged it in your favor so that no one who wanted to play the game could. You didn’t just move the goalposts; you tore down the fucking stadium. Frankly, I’m amazed how you went from peace and love to greed and shove in a matter of only a few decades. From celebrating love for everyone to hoarding everything you could get your hands on out of the fear that someone somewhere might actually succeed more than you.

The old man watched the sand castles, saturated by the incoming tide, crumble into softened heaps. His grandchildren danced on the beach, running from the waves as they broke on the sand. He closed his notebook, using his pen to hold his place, and took in the scene. His youngest granddaughter came running up to him with a shell in her hand.

“You’ll find this first painting unpleasant,” the tour guide, who’d given his one syllable name to the group of which all but two had promptly forgotten it, said walking backwards and stopping before a crushed velvet rope in faded white.

Heather Feather’s favorite time of day was when the sun set and the sky turned from orange to pink to purple. As a firefly, it was the best time for her family to leave their home, blink, and dance above the grass.

Wars were over in the blink of an eye. Populations could cough and find themselves members of a new country. While this proved to be a dramatic reduction in wartime violence, it also meant that the government now owned all computing power.

Five miles north of Barstow, there is nothing. An emptiness that stretches past the horizon and into oblivion. A few crumbling mountains that were once held under and pounded by the risen ocean. And a chemical taste that rides on the air currents and sticks to the back of your tongue existing somewhere between salt and sulphur.

The valley sunk lower and lower between the hills with each passing year. Weighed down by the gnarled oak trees with black leaves that seemed to absorb the wind, the river valley between Mount Tom and Leesville Hill was known by the indigenous people as "Machimoodus" or "the place of bad noises."

John Haysmith is not what I expected. The tall and lean man enjoying a coffee in a diner booth in front of me and not far from his home in suburban Austin, is a contradiction. He's a far cry from the overweight hunched man sitting in his darkened basement, wiping Cheeto dust off his fingers and onto his pizza grease-stained shirt that I assumed he was. It's his hobby that instantly filled in the blanks of who I assumed he would be, but like most things on the internet, the truth is always different.

Alleys are hard to find in Manhattan. Sure, Hollywood would have you believe they’re filled with dumpsters, Spidermen, and homeless people, but usually they're just an alley in New Orleans, Toronto, or Vancouver made to look like the Big Apple. This thought sparked through Ben’s mind briefly as he stumbled into just such an alley. A real alley. In real Manhattan. Without the benefit of a director to lead him through the next couple minutes.

When the water gets low, the spire of the church pokes out. A few hundred yards to the south, the smokestacks of the old forge begin to show. The crumbling roads that once led into the old valley wander off into the abyss. The foundations of the small town crumble under the weight of the water, and deep in the murky darkness of the reservoir, a secret's heart still beats.

The pirate outfit was entirely unnecessary, but it made Digby Marks laugh. Procured from a custom shop in Denver, he'd taken the extra step of adding a parrot, formerly alive, currently taxidermied, and attaching it to the silk left shoulder of the billowy shirt. In his pockets, he kept a few fake, though heavy, Spanish doubloons. And as he looked out over the white peaks edging the Foxraven Valley, he often imagined they were gargantuan waves, ready to splinter his ship.

If you'd have been on the water that day, you would have heard it before you saw it.

The clank came first. An auditory signal that the ocean depths were exploring the structural vulnerabilities of the unmanned underwater vehicle.

The clouds always seem bigger in Italy. They have more weight, more texture, and seem to pull you with their movement. Davidson watched as they rippled over Rome, turning the city into a patchwork of sun and shadow. He poured himself another glass from the bottle of 2003 Château Latour Grand Vin, and smiled at the silent disgust the waiter had shared as he brought a non-Italian wine for this strange American.

McIntyre didn't take the subway home. Like all the other higher ups, he took one of the black cars that waited outside the building like a herd of idling buffalo. While they whisked the important people to exotic locations like Scarsdale or Darien, Palmer had to take the F train - God's rattling underground dumpster - home to a studio apartment in an unnamed corner of Brooklyn.