During the latter years of the Postdigital Age, discorporeal Klaatu artist Iyl Rayn attempted to enhance her status within the Cluster by conceiving an unconventional entertainment. She contracted the services of certain Boggsian corporeals to construct a network of portals, or as she called them, diskos.
The diskos were designed to transport small quantities of coherent information from one geotemporal location to another. In short, they allowed any discorporeal being to displace itself in time and space.
The inspiration for Iyl Rayn’s effort was an ancient and largely discredited discipline once known as History. Each of her diskos led to one or more specific events that she deemed relevant. Iyl Rayn hoped that her portals would convince other Klaatu to share her fascination with corporeal human accomplishments such as the ascent of Mount Everest, the invention of movable type, and the construction of the Lah Sept pyramid at Romelas. She also found cause for fascination in disasters such as the bombing of Hiroshima, the onset of the Digital Plague, and the Martian Biocide.
Most Klaatu considered themselves to be above showing interest in such trivialities. However, they were not immune to novelty’s lure, and Iyl Rayn’s efforts enjoyed an intense, though brief, period of popularity.
It was soon discovered that a design flaw in the Boggsian-built diskos permitted their use by corporeal entities, thus introducing physical anachronisms into the time streams. The majority of Klaatu, who regarded corporeals as lesser creatures, abandoned the diskos and turned to more refined perceptual manipulations, leaving Iyl Rayn to contemplate the consequences of her creation.
The diskos themselves remained in place, unused except by those hapless creatures who stumbled into them by chance and so found themselves transported.
— E3
THE FIRST TIME HIS FATHER DISAPPEARED, TUCKER FEYE had only just turned thirteen.
That morning, he had been amusing himself by building a simple catapult — a wooden plank balanced across an old cinder block — in the backyard. He placed a stone at one end of the plank, climbed onto the seat of his dad’s lawn tractor, and jumped down onto the other end of the plank.
The stone hopped vigorously from the far end, but not very high. Thinking maybe he wasn’t jumping hard enough, Tucker moved the catapult over by the garden shed. He found an old toy metal fire truck he would never play with again and set it on the end of the plank.
A fire truck needed a fireman. Tucker went into the house to find one of his old toy soldiers, but then he remembered he’d given them away for the spring rummage sale at his dad’s church. All he could find was a six-inch-tall wooden troll that his dad had carved as a boy. The troll had been standing guard over the bookcase in the living room ever since Tucker could remember. He took the figurine outside and wedged it into the fire truck. He then climbed onto the roof of the shed.
It took him a few moments to gather his courage. Finally, after a few false starts, he jumped. His feet struck the end of the plank perfectly. The fire truck leaped from the end of the plank, flew through the air, and landed on the house, tearing loose a shingle as it tumbled down the steep roof.
