Blithe always thought of Darryl as a contemporary manifestation of the Buddha, free of ego.

With coffee in hand, Blithe got on the elevator to the tenth floor, nodded to some of the beta writers, checked to see if Marcus was in yet (he wasn’t), and settled into the room with a wall-sized screen. He needed inspiration.

He turned on the aromatherapy jets and leaned back against the massage pillow. He pulled up wild horses, Hemingway at a Desk Overlooking the Azure Sea, obelisks, a jungle rustling at night—and still his biodata didn’t spike to the crest of exhilaration. He went to the bathroom, then got another shot from Darryl, went to the eleventh floor, and entered The Fort, a series of whimsical soundproofed cubbies that str8 people were always screwing in.

He found an unoccupied nook where he could curl up on a windowsill and look idly out over the back lot, while dreaming of his Arrow-Line.

Here comes Margaret riding into the Sonoran dressed as a man, in a hat and chaps and a suede vest.

He made a note to research hat shapes of the 1890s. That was the key to fantasy, Marcus said. As long as you assembled enough of a solid foundation for the mind to relinquish control, you could take people anywhere.

She would fall for an engineer measuring the Salton Sea levels, but as a man or as a woman?

Saguaro, boojum, javelina, he typed, to invoke the place.

His pad was set to private, so he did not receive input from the beta writers.

Traipsing through the thick marshes of his mind, he didn’t want to deal with the betas’ quotidian concerns about continuity, convolution, and plausibility.

Someone has lit a woodstove. The crack of a whip, or gun, echoes in the distance. She will find an abandoned cabin, bury the gem behind a loose brick inside the chimney, sleep with a knife in her hand, and dream of the Eight Gems of Catalpa.

The rough trailer opens in a dazzling pan across the 1890s Sonoran, an Afro-futurist eco-civilization in 2100, a 1980s South Korean coastal city, the markets of 1919 Cairo, and an undated empty space galaxy with a single child in a spaceship.

The narration begins. “Eight gems have been scattered across time and space. If all eight are unearthed and returned back to their settings on an ancient wall, the goddess Oshun will return to heal the world.”

Of course, treachery is more entertaining than the repair of the world, and so the show opens as Lucretine, a time-traveling seductress and thief, gathers an army to steal all the gems, melt them into primordial power, and re-create the world in her own image.

Blithe put down his pad and crawled out of his nook. Stretched. His colleague Cooper hadn’t closed his nook-shade. Blithe watched him watching something on his pad. He used his key card to open a door to a deserted balcony and then shivered, thinking of the bulge between the two legs of the engineer’s leather chaps.