A hundred kilometers outside of the range of the orbital defense ring, thirty Sherman MkIII remote infantry vehicles, cocooned in their drop capsules but not yet separated for insertion, began the automated process of activating onboard power and generating crypto keys for the local networks using white noise from the auxiliary antennae on each entry vehicle.

Operators on the other side of the world keyed into their stations, bodies going slack with the cocktail of muscle relaxants, mental stimulants, and tuned impulses sent along the jacks and transdermal receivers surgically implanted in each of their bodies.

Soon, the capsules would detach, each entry vehicle arming the onboard payloads to both function as hypersonic ballistics, and to disguise the Shermans as part of the launch debris from such. With any luck, the time it took for the enemy defenses to calculate the yield of the ballistics and conclude that they weren't the expected size…

Entering my father’s small assisted living apartment, emotionally armored up to prepare for the experience, I am derailed from my scripted visit by the sight of several pages of typewriting, with tortured but legible pen edits all over them. This is a sight familiar from my childhood, when most of our house was covered in such sheets; my father, a freelance writer and author, was constantly surrounded by a minimum of five to eight projects in various…

I just found this interview, which I had forgotten I'd even done. It's now longer between when it went up and now than when E2 started and it went up. It is the year 2023 now.

My E2 username, Milen, is a name I haven't used online for decades, a handle on the ancient virtual world WorldsAway Dreamscape, which is only a couple of years younger than the World Wide Web itself. I still remember a handful of people from back then: Ivanova, Kethery, Aule, Gib, NoNoBadKitty, Spellbinder, Zippy, Indigo,…