Arcana 99: Stage One

Revatti paced around the empty conference room. The meeting was supposed to have started ten minutes ago, but Samuel hadn't shown up and Madden had yet to return from getting lunch. Like the rest of the time machine, the room was barren and industrial. Undecorated metal walls painted a pathetic hue of bluish-gray with a single table and three chairs within. One wall had a large screen mounted on it for visual aids during presentations. Or—as she did whenever Samuel was using the larger screen in the lounge—for viewing ancient cinema. Beyond the walls of the room was a circular hallway connecting every part of the vessel. In clockwise order from the vessel's entrance, there was: the robot maintenance bay, Samuel's room, Madden's room, the kitchen, the lounge, the conference room, the recording studio, and Revatti's room. At the core of the circle was the vessel's central computer and the titular portion of the machine.

Out of patience, Revatti walked around the hallway to the exit and stepped outside. Thanks to the Euclidian Shifters the vessel appeared to be an ordinary van on the surface. The exterior had been painstakingly recreated from ancient records to appear as a completely ordinary mid-twentieth century 8-door Ford Econoline. They had even painted flames across the vehicle's front half as was customary in amateur racing, or hot rodding, groups at the time. To any person from the period, the van would look like any other vehicle owned by a "gear head" or "hippie" as automobile racing enthusiasts referred to themselves.

Across the overflowing parking lot, Revatti could see Madden waiting at the counter of the busy diner. Around Madden was a diverse array of people either waiting for their orders or waiting to make them. Less than half of those present spoke any English; all but eight of them were participants in the Grenfell-Maxwell Marathon. Madden had taken great pains in scheduling the Auto-Drive to get them to follow along with the largest concentration of competitors. An act that had caused all of their meals to be slow. Even establishments prideful of their swiftness over their quality saw hour waits whenever her crew grew tired of the Hyperfood rations the studio provided. Not that Hyperfood was bad mind you. It was actually the perfect food according to both branding and all forms of science except astro-geology. The problem was, they ate it every day back home. It was thousands of times better than anything they could find on 1950s Earth. The finest of contemporary meals was like a piece of alleyway sushi plated on a slice of landfill when compared to a burnt (a physically impossible state for Hyperfood, but let the hypothetical continue a moment) piece of Hyperfood, but even perfection grows tiresome. Revatti's mouth watered in anticipation of the reminder for why Hyperfood was better as Madden finally retrieved their food.

"Golly!" Said a grown man with the vocabulary and inflection of a six-year-old. The shock of his arrival forced Revatti to swallow and choke a bit on her spitle, "Your van's mighty impressive. I ain't ever seen one like it. Is it a custom model?"

Custom? This thing was supposed to look ordinary! I told them to hire historians to double-check the disguise, but noooo, that's "out of budget" and "within un-core scope."

"Yessir," It had been decades since her last big role, but it takes little to chip the rust off experience. Revatti put on her best drawl and pretended to misinterpret the man, "We painted it day before the race started. Mighty fine job we did. Without stencils either mind you."

The man nodded before attempting to clarify, but Madden's arrival cut him short.

"It's a new model Ford, sir," Madden failed to copy Revatti's accent, instead landing somewhere between chainsmoker and pixie, "We're test dry-vin' it for the company y'all see. It be'll available sometime next year we hope." Revatti stifled a cringe at "y'all" being used for the singular, but no one was strong enough to resist "be'll."

"That's right sir," Revatti said, desperately motioning Madden into the back of the van, "But we need to get eatin' so we can get back onta the road."

The man waved his goodbye and Revatti closed the door before deactivating the hologram masking the van's real interior.

"Next time, don't do an accent." She said as they made their way back to the meeting room.

"I thought it was fine. Did you hear my y'all? That's classic twentieth-century right there."

Revatti rolled her eyes and opened the door to the meeting room. Samuel was already sitting at the table, a look of abject boredom on his face, "There you guys are. This was supposed to start twelve minutes ago!"

Madden set the bag of food on the table, "And I'm sure you were in here for all twelve minutes."

Samuel pulled a hamburger out of the bag, noticed the cheese, and handed it to Revatti. Madden grabbed his barbecue sandwich and began to eat in silence. Revatti and Samuel spoke about work, while Madden thought about the restaurant. It was impressive, not in regards to the food which was hardly anything to write home about. Madden was impressed that he had been able to purchase three meals and a milkshake for less than five dollars, an amount that would barely net you a slice of bread in Madden's present.

While none of the executives would ever admit it, Madden believed stretching money to be a leading cause in the prevalence of time-travel documentaries over the past half-century. Sending back a single day's wages could cover living in the past for months. Meanwhile, the company in the present would be able to write it off as "wages weighed for deflation" and pay their film crews less. Well, it was that and the runaway success of the first time-umentary: The Second Greatest Story Ever Told: The Making of The Making of Dan Goes to Mars. Madden thought the film was derivative trash that spat upon the perfection of the original. The studios saw dollar signs and instantly queued up a sequel and a series of daily documentaries on other historical events.

"So," Samuel began, interrupting every word with a straw-crushing drink of his peanut butter milkshake, "what did you want to talk to us about Revatti?"

Revatti put down her sandwich. She had only taken a single bite while Samuel and Madden were both finished with their meals, "Yes, I wanted to discuss your opinion on the ice cream you insist on ordering at every diner." Before Samuel could tell her he liked yesterday's chocolate strawberry the most, Revatti silenced him, "It's the magic, Samuel! It's the fucking magic you caught on camera." Revatti used the silence to compose herself. Preparing her role, or genuinely troubled. No one in the room knew for certain, "I went over every record on this race and everywhere within fifty miles of Montezuma Castle, and I found nothing on our monster."

"That's good news. The first documentation of an unknown cryptid and Grenfell's strange abilities should net us good residuals." Samuel said between loud slurps of the final remains of his dessert.

Madden remained silent. Work was work. Describing the race's winners or the biology of the beast, their audio files both looked the same in the mixer.

"Maybe we should have our meeting a few days early. We could use some extra hands to document this magic."

Ugh, the damned meetings. Madden thought.

The meetings were a by-product of the first fundamental law of time travel: you can only return to the exact instant you left the present. This made early time-umentaries quick to produce as months of work could be sent back in a day. Many film crews abused this, living entire lives in the past long after they had completed their film. The studios tolerated it at first, as it allowed them to edit their checks for the period in which the work was done. A life in the past was less than a month's wages. However, as twenty-year-old up-and-comings started returning as forty-five-year has-beens the studios began to require weekly meetings with the crews. If the crew missed a meeting, a retrieval team was sent to bring them back to the present. If the studio found the footage personally unsatisfying or unlikely to resonate with target audiences, the plan was scrapped and a new team was sent in their stead. Yesterday's episode, "Ferris' Wheel Part 36: Cooling the Axle" proved particularly divisive and had gone through nine different teams.

The final episode was a four-hour epic of workers at the Bethlehem Iron Company, having forged the axle and removed it from the kiln in the previous two episodes, watching the seventy-one-ton piece of steel cool in the Winter air. It was a surprise hit thanks to the final cut containing bonus footage of the first crew harassing—and assaulting—the following seven crews. Footage starring Madden as the first crew's furious audio engineer. Not assaulting anyone; he was too busy protecting the equipment and trying to salvage the shoot.

The assault was the result of the second fundamental law of time travel, that you cannot change the past. From the studio's perspective, they saw one crew produce their film before being rejected and sending the next. From the first crew's perspective, a second crew appeared twelve seconds into their shoot claiming the film they hadn't made yet was terrible and the new team was there to do it right. From there, a sequence of a half-dozen teams arrived each with the same story: the film the last people hadn't yet made was unpleasant and they should feel inadequate. The barrage of insults—particularly 'inadequate' which had become a heinous curse by the twenty-fourth century—led to Madden's commentator to start hostilities. As he told Madden and his lawyer, he had done so to "make sure no one gets the job done but us." In the ensuing scuffle, all of their footage became unusable, surprising everyone on his crew but Madden. The ninth crew only succeeded by a chance encounter with the eighth. Knowing that the battle ruined everyone's footage and no one saw their team, the ninth crew stayed a hundred kilometers away and used telescope lenses to record the entire debacle.

Revatti spent a minute to construct and rehearse her reply to Samuel's suggestion, "I don't think we should send that footage back just yet."

"You want to wait 'till the week's done? Or give a few days for a better pitch?" Samuel asked, reaching the bottom of his cup.

"We shouldn't send it back at all."

"What?" Samuel put down his cup, "Documentation of literal magic and you want to hide it from the world? Revatti, don't you want your work to mean something? The point of the show is to document history and share it with the world. To teach people about our past."

It had been decades since Madden had believed the propaganda Samuel was spewing. This was a job to nowhere. Episode fourteen thousand of a show that only exists because they can pay their workers pennies and non-fiction can't be compared to Dan Goes to Mars. Without that footage, all of their careers would continue to stagnate and they'd spend the rest of their lives recording the lives of more interesting people.

"We aren't making art Samuel. We're making slop." Revatti spoke Madden's thoughts into reality before heel-turning it into more hopeful nonsense, "We're here because we aren't the best; because we couldn't get work anywhere else. If we send that back, they'll get a different team to cover it—a 'better' team."

Madden spoke up, "What then? We stop sending them review footage and hope they don't fire us?"

"Absolutely not! I need this job," Revatti caught herself, "We need this job. We send the film they hired us for, but we omit the supernatural. Make it everything they expect it to be. We then make a second film with the strange footage in secret. That way, when we get back we'll have a doc lined up. They wouldn't dare spend more money sending 'A-listers' to do work that's already been made."

"So you want us to work twice as much for the same pay?" Madden continued as he stood from the table.

Samuel gave his straw one last slurp before finally giving up on his dessert, "I'm on board. Sounds more fun than recording pole positions."

"Are you-" Madden sighed, "Fine. I won't stop either of you, but the only work I'm doing is what I signed on for."

Revatti's first chance at getting out of her rut was fading, "Please, Madden. We can't send in footage that sounds—I hate to use coarse language here—inadequate. If we aren't all together on this it won't work."

"Then it won't work," Madden said before leaving the room. He couldn't stand to hear more pointless optimism.

"Don't be too mad at him, Revatti. Ever since the debacle at the Ferris' Wheel shoot a few weeks ago he's been extra grumpy." Samuel said after the door closed and the silence had become too awkward.

"You were there for that shoot? I heard it was a nasty one." Revatti resumed her meal, slowly appreciating each bite of her sandwich.

"Yeah, I was on the ninth crew. Got a real good shot of someone clocking Madden's jaw that didn't make the final cut."

Revatti sipped her drink. Time had melted the ice, and numbed the flavor of the soda. Just the way she liked it, stronger than the ones back home, but not overwhelming, "Can I see it?"

***

It was another two hours before their van approached the Mexican border. To avoid a traffic jam along the roads from Tucson to Nogales that the influx of racers caused later in the day, Madaden had reprogrammed the auto-drive to get them a few hours ahead of the crowd. The marathon's border bypass lane had such lax security the guard failed to even notice the van's driver was littler more than an inflated balloon with a human projected onto it. Official time travel regulations required that all interactions must be done with real humans to prevent discovery. In reality, only the strictest of policy pedants bothered since the second law of time travel assured the past was concrete. Since there hasn't been a recorded instance of people discovering time travelers, time travelers were effectively allowed to do whatever they wanted since their ruses never failed. At least, not in any meaningful way. The guard said something about them being the tenth team to cross into Mexico. A statement that fell upon the vinyl ears of the balloon.

Revatti passed the time writing the script for the night's record. She had been stuck on Urho's encounter with the monster all day. She couldn't bring herself to blame Urho's injury on an accident and keep tight on the creature. The secret documentary on magic was her ticket out of her slump, but without Madden, there was no hope of getting it done. Should she risk the remains of her career on changing his mind? Could it be changed?

It has to. Revatti assured herself as she put lie to paper. She described the incident as one that their cameras missed due to the poor early morning light. Their driver accidentally veered off the road and overcorrected. Sending Urho out of the Jeep's open seat and directly onto a bush where the branches gouged his eyes. An unbelievable coincidence, but infinitely more so than "monster did it."

A call from Samuel interrupted her midway through, "Revatti, get the eradication kit. I think we've got a tail."

She swore and made her way to the armory inside the meeting room. Samuel sent a video stream to the walls as she passed by, giving her peripheral vision the situation. The image that followed her as she walked depicted a grey car approaching them from behind. A digital box was drawn around the car with reading depicting their distance (five kilometers), how long they've been following (two hours), their last three thoughts (kill, murder, lunch), and the probability of them being a threat (3-70%).

"Three percent?" She asked Samuel as she fiddled with the armory lock, "That's pretty high, how'd the computer get that?"

"Scanned a machine gun in their vehicle with bore patterns matching the holes in eight cars we've passed over the past half-mile stretch of road."

Revatti opened the armory. It was little more than a drawer containing a single Problem Removal Device, or "Go-Away Gun" as it was often called. The weapon looked like a standard ray gun covered in discs, fins, lights, and greebles, "Let me guess, other racers?"

"Yup. All of 'em declared missing."

"Good to know someone's going to clean this up for us."

"Nothing's on the radar; we should play it safe."

Revatti stopped at the van's entrance, "You're still new to this Samuel," The lights around the door flared red as the attackers outside opened fire; their bullets harmlessly bouncing off the van's Steel IV hull. It would be a century before any weapon on the planet had the power to dent it, "The fact that we aren't doing anything is enough to ensure something gets done. Quit thinking like the theorists and execs. Not being able to change the past doesn't mean that their policies and regulations worked. It means we never got caught." The lights changed to a mellow green hue as the men outside reloaded their weapons. Revatti opened the door in absolute safety and aimed her PRD at the car. Four men were inside it, all of them angry and astonished that their guns hadn't done anything. Revatti pulled the trigger, a fine stream of invisible, calibrated time particles flew from her weapon, and the men and their vehicle vanished.

Time particles were discovered in the 2160s, leading to a boom in the development of time machines. The particles trivialized their development, but all the early attempts ran into the same problem: things move. The Earth rotates at 1,660 kilometers per hour at the equator and orbits the Sun at a rate of 107,000 kilometers per hour. The Solar System races through the galaxy at 700,000 kilometers per hour; a galaxy that is itself moving 2.2 million kilometers per hour relative to the Universe's background radiation. The first fifty years of pioneering time travel resulted in the greatest minds of a generation sending themselves back minutes and appearing in the void of space or the Earth's mantle. It wasn't until the world was reduced to their third greatest minds that they realized the issue. The first portable teleporters were completed with a century of effort. These teleporters filled a room and interfaced with the century-old handheld time travel devices to allow for survivable time travel. After seventy years, teleporters have only grown larger as further safety systems were introduced. The most prominent of which is the space-checking system. It was invented after the leaders of two warring nations teleported into each other. The resulting fusion of the two called for peace and the two nations immediately began cooperating to separate them and get back to the proper business of combat. Teleporters still account for ninety-nine percent of the total mass in a time machine's engine room.

By once again removing the time machine from the teleporter, the powerful Go-Away Gun was created. A fine stream of time particles set to a default dilation of forty-nine minutes ensured anything hit by the beam was sent directly to space before being left behind in the vast, empty cosmos. There they would drift alone for eternity, or until the 2250 boom of space archaeology began to investigate the millennia-long trail of detritus and relics as proof of eventual time travel.

Revatti called back to Samuel before closing the doors, "Are there any more?"

"Did a brain scan of everyone inside. They were the second of two teams sent to kill racers ahead of the team they bet on."

"Two teams?" Revatti paused before placing the PRD back into the armory drawer.

"No need to worry, they lost the first one an hour ago. And you wouldn't guess who did it."

"Urho?"

". . . How did you know?"

"They were one of the first teams to cross the border, and they got fourth place. Hard to do that when you're dead."

"Why'd you spoil it! I told you I wanted to experience this thing like I was there!"

"You are there," Revatti could hear Samuel's furrowed brow.

"You know what I mean. Tell me where, when, and who I need to record, but don't say a word about what it is."

Revatti promised and returned to her room. She had only been on three shoots with Samuel; he had made the same request for ignorance each time. Once more in silence, Revatti trudged through the final portion of her story. When she finished her work, she began to write down the actual events that had transpired since the race began. The monster invisible to everything but cameras, Sheri's teleportation, Grenfell finding their camera, the hijacking and crashing of Dumont's plane, and the massacre on the Copper Canyon railway. The words poured out of her as she retold all of these fantastical events and what they could mean for the world of 1954 and her world of 2385. She stayed up into the deep hours of the night writing dozens of variations of monologues and narration for each event. When she had finished, one thought crept back into her mind and gave her pause: How will I get Madden on board?

***

Having napped through the assault earlier that day, Madden awoke at a leisurely 5 P.M. Decades spent working with studios and hundreds of meetings with their executives had taught him exactly which transitions, effects, and tone of narration they wanted. He boosted Revatti's narration to a level he had labeled "perfect" years ago. He had spent his earlier works experimenting with styles, but they were often shut down or met with middling acceptance. Eventually, he found the one his employers liked the most, and he has been using it ever since:

Put three sound effects within every five minutes of footage, one of those must be placed during a moment of silence in the narration, the others must be placed beneath the vocals.

For every fifteen minutes of footage, place one pop song from the era the footage was recorded in; only use two minutes and fourteen seconds of the song or licensing fees double.

Any specific event must be completely described in under four minutes, the threshold for average attention spans among the target audience.

Every fifty seconds (offset by 1-5 seconds in either direction) boost the narration by 50% for one syllable. This ensures people on the fringes of the target audience remain alert and focused while ensuring those paying attention don't notice.

For scenes of interest to the target audience use the most emotional take to increase the audience's reaction to the footage.

For scenes not within the target audience's interest use the most direct and commanding take to provide a sense of the audience being lectured for their disinterest.

For tragic scenes likely to cause discomfort or negative feelings in the audience, use the least emotional take to provide distance between the audience and the people involved and decrease their reaction to the footage

Following these and his other fifty guidelines, Madden was able to consistently craft the perfect audio experience for the film in half the time. Within five hours, he had finished all of the audio they had recorded the previous day except for one clip, Revatti discussing Mr. Grenfell capturing the camera. No matter how many times he told her, she kept excitedly raving about the event for longer than four minutes. After two dozen takes, none of them fit within his checklist. Some passed the four-minute limit, others had too much emotion for such a frightening scene. The threats toward Karin alone were enough to push them to a PG-14.25 rating, and the film had a strict PG-16.66 maximum. They couldn't afford to bring attention and emotion to the scene without going over it. He had no choice but to remove the scene from the final cut or make Revatti re-record it. It was the obvious step according to his guidelines and the film he had been hired to make, yet he couldn't bring himself to click delete. He knew the studio wouldn't accept any of the takes for the final cut, but he kept going back to how elated she sounded recording it and how excited Samuel was to show the footage to him. Suddenly feeling the emptiness in his stomach, Madden took a break and left his room.

He moved one door down to the kitchen. As he entered the room lights in the floor rose to greet him. He squeezed around one near the doorway and began his search. He opened the refrigerator. Canned drinks and an assortment of cheesecakes and pies; both too sweet for this late at night. He was doubtful the freezer's contents of TV Dinners and ice cream had changed since lunch. The single cabinet that made up their pantry housed dozens of Hyperfood packages. The cabinet was stuffed to the point its doors would struggle to close if they weren't pneumatically sealed.

Hyperfood was an invention beyond even his father's years. Created in the Mercury colonies after settlers realized plants struggled to grow in the unfavorable climate of 420°C daytime lows and scarce rainfall. The colonists found that a rare mineral, unique to the planet, could be combined with wheat and made into Hyperfood. It quickly spread across the planet before making its way to Earth aboard their refugee ships. The delicacy was branded as the perfect food and mining the required mineral was the leading cause behind retrieving bodies for return trips to the Mercury ruins. As mining operations ramped up, the food became a staple on Earth. Cheap and quick to produce, nigh-infinite shelf-life, the exact nutrients needed to sustain a healthy human body regardless of their metabolism or lifestyle, and it tasted delicious to boot. Rigorous scientific testing later proved the branding true. Its flavor profile was perfection, everyone who ate one considered it the best-tasting meal they'd ever had. The only scare happened a few years after Madden was born when the last of the mineral had been excavated. Given that Hyperfood accounted for 68% of everyone's diet at the time, society would have collapsed without it. Immediately, expeditions were sent back in time to resume the mining operations before the mineral had been discovered. The second law of time travel ensured that no matter how much the teams mined, there would always be enough left over for the mineral to be discovered in the future.

Madden had to agree with the branding. Frozen, cold, hot, warm, room. It didn't matter how it was served, Hyperfood was better than anything else. Sweet enough for dessert, savory enough for a meal, soft enough for when you're sick, chewy enough for when you're bored. It was perfection, but Madden wasn't in the mood for perfection. He pushed a few boxes out of the way until he found the blueberry muffin he had hidden from breakfast. He set it on the counter before placing the Hyperfood packages back into the cabinet. As the pneumatic pistons fired and sealed the pantry door with a hiss, Madden began to unwrap his pastry. The dry bread droughted his mouth as the sparse berries gave subtle bursts of flavor. Baked mediocrity. The floor properly crumbed and his hunger sated, Madden left the kitchen to return to his room. Remembering his remaining work, he took his time on the return seven feet. The kitchen door slid closed, and as he basked in the silence of the night Madden could hear a faint sound coming from the next door down, the lounge. He feared it was another infestation of cyber-rats and was returning to the kitchen to put keypad locks on the food when he made out the words. They were grainy and muddied through the wall, but were distinctly human. Madden sighed in relief and made his way into the lounge.

Inside was a pair of standing tables set behind a large "T" shaped couch facing a larger screen. The design encouraged the formation of small groups during cocktail mingles while still feeling like a cohesive area to promote camaraderie with those beyond your group. The tables were empty, and Revatti sat on one of the corners of the couch while an ancient movie played on the screen. Madden stepped past the dusty tables and leaned over the couch on the opposite corner to Revatti. Before him, the screen displayed—with all the glory 480p could muster—a stop-motion gorilla saving clay children from a superimposed fire. Everything about it was amateur. The gorilla's animations looked robotic and lacked finesse while the fire behind him clearly existed within another plane of reality. The audio experience was even worse, consisting of violins challenging the screaming child for microphone-peaking supremacy.

"What's this?"

Revatti noticed his intrusion and looked to him, "Mighty Joe Young. It came out a few years ago. Before now, I mean."

An image of a pile of wood collapsing floated above a police car on screen.

Combining those two shots must have been a pain. Hours wasted on an effect which convinces no one.

"I figured you were speaking of now. We'd never make something like this later." Madden said.

"We never make anything." Madden nodded. How many years had it been since something other than Dan Goes to Mars had played in any theater? How long had it been since any new movie had been made?

"Can you believe movies used to be so different? This one's about a couple who kidnaps a big gorilla to show it off for money before having to hide it from the violent populace. Gorilla saves an orphanage, people stop trying to kill it, everyone wins. Then there's King Kong, made by the same people, and it was about a couple who kidnap a big gorilla to show it off for money before having to kill it alongside the violent populace."

"Two big gorilla movies?"

"Two different perspectives Madden. Both are misunderstood animals. One is saved by those who understood him, and the other killed by those who didn't."

Madden nodded along as the film stumbled to a close, "Eloquent. Would it kill you to use those words on a good movie?"

"You only caught the last ten minutes! Watch from the start before you complain."

"I doubt it's any more complex than how you describe it. Monkey goes to New Jersey,"

"York."

"Really? For show business?" Revatti nodded, "Goes to New York, has an episode, leaves, climbs tree, saves kid. Not exactly Twain."

"Complain all you want, it's better than another rerun of Dan Goes to Mars."

"Hey, I like Dan Goes to Mars."

"Everyone likes Dan Goes to Mars! But would it kill them to make a new movie? Sixty years and not even an attempt! Why bother? We already made the 'perfect' movie!"

Madden was thankful there weren't any cameras in the room. The last thing Revatti needed was another hit in her career, "They're right. No matter what you do, no matter what you make, it won't beat Dan. How many studies have they done? Twenty? Fifty? And all of them reached the same conclusion. Every metric, every way of ranking. With and without the hot dad coefficient. Dan is mathematically and cinematically perfection."

"Perfection?" Madden could feel her gaze sarcastically circle the dark room, "That's the problem. Everyone wants perfection. We make the perfect food and push everything else to the side. Millennia of culinary arts forced into obscurity by a loaf better than them all. We make the perfect movie and shut everything else down. Centuries of art forgotten and their form abandoned. What's the point of perfection if all it can do is kill its predecessors? Perfection is the problem, nothing needs to be perfect. It needs to be human."

Madden's silence left the swelling credits of the movie the only sound in the room. The camera on the screen panned to the sky before the message "Goodbye from Joe Young" splashed onto the screen in a font that made Comic Sans feel professional. The room faded to darkness as Madden thought back to his snack earlier. To the dry, bland muffin he had eaten instead of the perfect Hyperfood.

"About your offer from earlier, the secret documentary. I. . . might have a few hours I can spare for it. Only as a hobby, of course," He stared blankly ahead, avoiding Revatti's gleeful gaze, "When I'm not working, and not relaxing I'll see what I can do."

Revatti thanked him, "I've got one more in me before bed. You're free to stay here if you want. Beats working."

"Depends on if it's good. What is it?"

"Them. It's about giant ants that eat a bunch of people."

Madden stayed.