Just by the way the envelope felt in his hand, Lawrence Breton knew what it contained.

“Another rejection letter, of course,” he said, tossing it unopened into the fire. This was not the fireplace with the white brick, the medieval logs, the eloquent wrought-iron grate, and the Kodiak rug: that was the one he thought he’d have by now. It wasn’t that he couldn’t afford it, but that he only wanted to buy it with book royalties. Lawrence Breton was arriving at the opinion that all publishers were soulless reptiles whose categorical genocide of science fiction writers was the greatest literary misunderstanding of the century.

If he tried hard enough, he could make sense of it all. Everything except the monkey. He was stark naked. That–he was sure—was something that happened quite regularly. The guy to his right saluting him with one arm, the other arm trying to hold his guts in place—he was sure he had seen him before in some kind of movie or something. And the guy in front of him, he was sure his name was Dennis or Donald.

“He’s clean,” Dennis or Donald said over a walkie-talkie.

The other man stopped saluting him and said, “It’s good to have you back, sir.”

There was a woman. Seemed nice. A bit too friendly and eager to please. That phony off-putting demeanor so many adopt nowadays. Heavy-set. Hair in curls like my mother wore in the 1980s. Came to see me because she wanted to patent an invention: a surfboard with wings and wheels. The Urban Surfboard™ she called it. I watched her prototype and plans as one would watch a carefully curled piece of shit on a dinner plate.

Despite my great desire, I could not have biological children. I lacked an available uterus to inseminate, so I downloaded an app. For a while, my daughter and I were happy. I would feed her lettuce when needed, as indicated by an alarm trigged by her digital algorithm. I brought her to the zoo, etc. and she was bewildered, etc. at the vast diversity of animals, etc. in this amazing world.

No one had made the connection before. But, faced with the facts, the correlation could not be ignored.

“25 Major Cities. 339 Murders. 4 weeks. 1 Common Element: Andrew.”

The front page headline of the Times on June 20, 2010 was viewed by most with an appropriate vein of skepticism. But it was the Times, so surely the facts had been checked and re-checked. And after reading the article, all of us could see that the case was air-tight. Something had gone awry with men named Andrew.