[austintorn@aol.com]

Fredrick took some overdue leave from the secret TOE Center to travel and broaden his mind, if not his stomach, finding himself among the prodigious Inca ruins with the likes of Indiana Jones, perusing ancient glyphs and drinking-in the scenery.

Back at his hotel, while napping and dreaming in his pool side lounge chair, he chanced to pick up upon several whirlpooling premonitions that had eddied back into a small vortex of the future passed remembered in a vision.

One such concerned a critical and crucial clue concerning his insight of the Theory of Separation of Fundamentals (vs. Unification, the natural inclination, but one that was standing still) that led him onward to thoughts about some relevance of his old and nearly forgotten papers still back at his abandoned apartment/condo complex.

Another, more of a nightmare, showed mushroom clouds.

The third, somehow related to the first, was of some general danger lurking about his vacated residence.

Fredrick was torn, but he needed those documents back… for the TOE Center to refine the Theory of Everything in time to prevent the flooding of the Earth, for now both of the ice caps were one-third melted and gone.

On the spur of the moment, Fredrick flew to Northern California, carrying only his emergency bag. Much of southern California had been ablaze for months now, and recently, a cyclone had killed 150,000 people in Myanmar, and earthquakes many more in China, as well as a record number of tornados sweeping across the central United States.

He waded through the haze of a city that still bustled, even in its wee hours, entering his old complex without much ado, having noted no one about at the rear, and headed for his storage locker near the laundry room, for this is where he kept his vault of information, not trusting it to his apartment or to the internet.

It was all there. He sorted out the important papers and was off, a faint scent of gas quickening his pace away from the danger zone.

Fredrick soon lost himself for concealment in a mini crowd of drunks waltzing down the street, catching a dim vision of a vaguely familiar face quite a ways behind, one that he couldn’t quite place.

Perhaps the street wasn’t the place to be, he wondered, as he headed for the Muddy Waters Cafe. All were startled to hear an explosion about two blocks behind, Fredrick noting that it had centered on his apartment.

Something was certainly not right about this night, but how, who, for he’d used a TOE-approved alias on the flight and had done some plastic surgery on his real credit card, cutting it in half, so he couldn’t possibly use it.

Everyone outside stood and stared while Fredrick entered the cafe and ordered a warm cup of chai to sooth his nerves. What the heck was going on? He placed his papers in a trash can for protection just as the chai arrived. He and the documents should be safe here for a time until the people outside began moving about again.

After drinking of the elixir for a while, he held his head in his hands, not quite knowing what to make of this, for the CIA and the FBI were now on his team’s side and the dwindled Conspiracy had been lying so very low as to perhaps be nonexistent. Plus, there had been his stealth.

What happened next had not been seen in the dream.