Tips for Tailoring Spacetime Fabric

I don’t like Jackson’s cyberspace office. It’s severely formal, a place that conceals more than reveals. I don’t like Jackson, either. His image is bland: A bald man sitting behind a large desk positioned in front of his diplomas. The side walls are bookshelves filled with scholarly works, all by dead authors long beyond controversy. Around the reality room are potted plants, no endangered species, and pictures of colorful birds and butterflies—only still pictures, Christ! The desk is the nearest brush with controversy. It’s a lushly finished rosewood, and rosewood is extinct, but it’s been extinct for so long that no pressure group has figured out how to blame the living for its demise.

Yet this person with the blandest of cyber offices is heading up the Methuselah Project. There must be strength in those hands flipping over the dossier and cunning under that chrome-dome cranium cover, but what sort of strength is it?

I know my strength. I’m here now because I know how to make people happy to see me, women mostly. As a matter of fact, I’m a bit tuckered out from all the Thank You’s I was delivering last night to those who helped me get this plum assignment.