Episode 23

Woody Woodhed's quarters at eastern Megalopolis University bore more of a resemblance to a computer warehouse than a dorm room. The other students liked to joke that Woody's roommate had gotten lost in the maze of harddrives, disc drives, monitors and satellite receivers that reached from floor to ceiling in many parts of the room. Campus authorities had ordered him to clear away his cache three times, but Woody had always appealed the order to his father who, of course, always carried the day. Maybe this had something to do with the federal subsidies that the president channeled to his son's school.

Woody did, in fact, have a roommate, but it wasn't the roommate who had originally come to live in the room. That roommate had dropped out after the first week of classes in September. Woody's girl friend, Prairie Flower, was the one who actually lived there with him. Prairie Flower, a sophomore, had a double major in computers and literature of the Plains Indians. In later years, Woody would tell anyone who would listen that the Nebraska abduction had all been Prairie Flower's idea. And Prairie Flower would vehemently deny responsibility. The only area in which both students would see eye to eye was that of motive. They claimed that the whole thing had been an innocent, though large-scale, prank designed to annoy Woody's father but not cause any lasting harm.

Of all the computers in Woody's overcrowded room, his favorite was the one that contained information from the Deus ex Machina's model that had briefly and unexpectedly materialized in the room during Emily's visit in early September. The design was close enough to Woody's computers that he was able to shift large quantities of data from it to his own before it disappeared.

It had taken a few weeks for Woody to explore some of the alternative universes and dimensions for which coordinates were available, and even longer to recognize their potential. Dimension 666 had seemed a complete waste of time at first. Hardly any advanced lifeforms were able to thrive there. All the topsoil had been stripped away to a depth of 2,000 feet. All the action was on Mars, where a thriving community of lifeforms had plundered Earth for its farmland, minerals, and precious metals.

Paulh

17.06.24 Front Page

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