Moving can be a stressful time for everyone, including our feline friends. Imagine being whisked away from the comfort of your familiar surroundings to a new and unfamiliar place. As you plan your relocation, it’s essential to consider the needs of your beloved cat to ensure a smooth transition for both of you. That’s why we will give you the best tips for moving with your cat.
Moving with a cat requires careful planning and consideration to ensure their safety and well-being throughout the process. Here are some expert tips for moving with your cat:

Create a Safe Haven:

Before the moving day arrives, set up a safe and comfortable space for your cat in your current home. This area should include their bed, litter box, food, water, and familiar toys to help them feel secure amidst the chaos of packing.

Gradual Introductions:

If possible, introduce your cat to their carrier well in advance of the move. Leave it open with familiar bedding inside, along with treats and toys, to encourage positive associations. Gradually increase the amount of time your cat spends in the carrier to help reduce anxiety on moving day.

Familiar Scents:

When packing your belongings, be sure to leave out familiar items that carry your cat’s scent, such as bedding or blankets. These familiar scents can provide comfort to your cat in their new environment and help them adjust more quickly.

Stick to Routine:

Amidst the chaos of moving, try to maintain your cat’s regular feeding and playtime schedule as much as possible. Consistency can help reduce stress and anxiety for your cat during this transitional period.

Secure Transportation:

On moving day, ensure your cat is safely secured in their carrier before transporting them to your new home. Consider using a pheromone spray or calming collar to help keep them relaxed during the journey.

Comfort in the New Home:

Once you’ve arrived at your new home, create a designated space for your cat with familiar items from their old environment. Allow them to explore their new surroundings at their own pace, and provide plenty of reassurance and attention to help them feel safe and secure.

Patience and Understanding:

Moving can be a challenging experience for cats, and they may exhibit signs of stress or anxiety during the transition period. Be patient and understanding with your furry friend, and give them the time and space they need to adjust to their new home.
Important tips: Hiring movers or DIY?

Conclusion:

Moving with a cat can be challenging, but with careful planning and good tips for moving with your cat, you can help alleviate stress for both you and your furry friend. By creating a safe and comfortable environment, maintaining routines, and providing reassurance throughout the process, you can ensure a smooth transition to your new home. At Premium Q Moving and Storage, we understand the importance of your pet’s well-being during a move. Contact us today for expert moving services tailored to your needs, because at Premium Q Moving and Storage, We Move Lives, Not Things.
Contact Your Favorite Local Movers
Experience a seamless moving experience with Premium Q Moving and Storage as your favorite local movers. Get your personalized quote:

• For Tampa: at (813)-733-4481, visit www.premiumqmoving.com/tampa-moving or contact us at [tampa@premiumqmoving.com](mailto:Tampa@premiumqmoving.com). Follow us on instagram u/tampamoving.
• For Boston: at (781)-549-8789, visit www.premiumqmoving.com or contact us at [sales@premiumqmoving.com](mailto:sales@premiumqmoving.com). Follow us on instagram @premiumqmoving.

Unlock a seamless journey to your new home with our unparalleled moving services. From meticulous packing to expert transportation, trust us to elevate your move to new heights. Say hello to stress-free moving and goodbye to hassle with our top-tier solutions.

Listen/Watch Life Beyond Boxes Podcast Episodes Below

Catch the latest episode of the Life Beyond Boxes podcast now! Tune in for captivating conversations and eye-opening insights:

• Listen on Apple Podcasts: Life Beyond Boxes Podcast
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• Listen on Spotify: Life Beyond Boxes Podcast
• Listen on Boomplay: Life Beyond Boxes Podcast
• Watch on YouTube: Life Beyond Boxes Podcast

Don’t just exist – thrive! Listen to Life Beyond Boxes podcast now on your favorite podcast platform and embark on a journey of self-discovery and empowerment.
Subscribe now for a smoother, stress-free move and a brighter new chapter in your life. Let’s go beyond boxes together!

For context: we have two kids age 8 and 5.
Just back from 10 nights at POFQ, our first ever Disney trip. Overall really liked the hotel, it's a shame they had a pipe burst in their swimming pool and it was being repaired for most of our stay, but it was still a really nice place. Swimming pool at Riverside was only a 10 min walk away.
I had a good outline of our itinerary for the whole stay written up before we left with plenty of ADRs , however what we actually did was quite different.
Wrote up as much as I could remember, the exact order of events in particular is a bit muddy but I did my best.
Day 1: Arrive in the early evening, went to the pool, had inner in the food hall, went to bed.
Day 2: Genie + at Magic Kingdom. Totally screwed up EE that day because the park opened at 8am that day which caught me off guard, but aside from not rope-dropping Seven Dwarves as planned, we still got SO much done that day.
Arrived at 8am park opening.
Jungle Cruise
Big Thunder Mountain x 2
Pirates of the Carribbean
Ariel
Barnstormer x 2
Dumbo
Genie + Peter Pan
Laugh Floor
Genie + Buzz Lightyear
Peoplemover
Cosmic Rays for lunch, chosen for it's close proximity and indoor tables. Fine but extremely boring.
Genie + Space Mountain/Speedway (in two parts since my youngest didn't go on it, I took both my kids to speedway while my husband had his turn)
Big Thunder again
Small World (but son needed toilet in queue so we left and husband and daughter stayed)
Then we went back into Smallworld while daughter and husband did Barnstormer again.
Genie + Winnie the Pooh.
Dinner at Skipper Canteen - so good!
We also watched the parade that day but it was sooo hot, we opted for a poorer view from a main street shop in the shade. Was not worth sticking out the heat for the length of time you would need to get an optimal view. I think trying to go our very first day was a mistake because we weren't acclimatised at all yet.
The longest queue we had that day was probably for Smallworld. Everything moved really quickly! Was also happy with Genie+.
Day 2: Animal Kingdom
Had entry issues and needed cards re-assigned at entry so kinda messed up FOP EE rope drop but husband and daughter persevered anyway. Son and I did Na'vi River and explored Pandora and stared Wilderness Explorers. Spent a LOT of time in Pandora gift shop.
Gorilla Trek
Wildlife Express and Rafiki's Planet Watch.
Festival of the Lion King (so good!)
It's Tough to be a Bug
Triceratops Spin
Had really nice homey feeling cookie and gigantic ice cream in Dinoland
Dinosaur (3 of us loved this ride, my son thought it was a bit too scary also it seemed like they should increase the height requirement because he could barely reach the bar to brace himself. I know it's being discontinued though.)
Safari
Dinner at hotel.
Day 3: Hollywood Studios
Successful EE rope drop for Rise of the Resistance
Smuggler's Run
Met Donald Duck
Met Goofy and Max
Star Tours
Runaway Railway (queue was brutal in the sun but it was a great ride)
Indiana Jones Show
Star Tours again
Muppets 3d
Race Academy - did not know what to expect coming in. If we had known we would not have trekked all the way across the park in the heat for that. My son DID like it, but it really didn't feel like it was the same quality as any of the other shows or rides.
Went back to Galaxy's edge for Blue and Green milk + puffbread. All really good. We possibly did Star Tour again, I don't remember haha.
The wait times for everything else being very long + the heat had us going back to the hotel early.
Dinner at hotel.
Day 4: Magic Kingdom Day 2
Tried to EE rope drop 7 dwarves but it was down and we decided not to wait it out (rookie mistake)
Teacups
Thunder Mountain x 2
Split up and did Haunted Mansion/ Smallworld (and got stuck on Smallworld for like 15 minutes)
Haunted mansion crew did Carousel while waiting for us, then we did Carousel after.
Took Daughter to meet Pooh and Tigger while the others did Speedway + People Mover .
Pinocchio Haus for lunch somewhere in there, really good flatbread!
Back to hotel early for dinner.
Day 5: Genie + Epcot.
Failed to get Guardians Boarding at 7am.
EE Test Track
Mission Space (Green)
Genie + Remy
Genie + Soarin
Moana water walkthrough
Genie + Living with the Land
Got boarding for guardians for about 6pm. Cancelled ADR because of it.
Spaceship Earth
Met Moana
Genie + Nemo
Genie + Figment
Met Figment
Met Joy
Nemo again
Quick Dinner in Mexico
Gran Fiesta Tour (honestly had no idea this was here, really cool building, kids liked the boat ride)
Finally boarding group for guardians called at nearly 7pm.
Really great day! I seemed to be able to book really quickly back to back for Genie +. Kids really liked all the chill dark rides .
Wanted to do Frozen that day but the Genie+ was sold out even before lunch.
At this point we are really just trying to get things we missed
Day 6: Magic Kingdom Day 3
Successful EE rope drop of Seven Dwarves. Said 75 min wait when we entered but it really wasn't too bad, maybe 30-45. This ride had amazing theming, but was lacking as a coaster.
Teacups
Split up and 2 of us did astral orbiter that had a wait time of 25 minutes, and the other 2 did space mountain with a wait time of 35 minutes. Space mountain finished first!
Carousel
Swiss Family Treehouse
Enchanted Tiki Room
Magic Carpet - this seemed to be my son's favourite of this style ride. He's been talking about magic carpets evey day since.
We actually had a boarding time for Tron but the kids got fed up of the heat so we gave up and cancelled or place in the virtual queue.
Took the train back to the entrance. Very pleasant.
Dinner at hotel
Day 7
Epcot Day 2
We really wanted to do Cosmic Rewind again and do Frozen since we missed it the other day.
We failed to get a 7am boarding so bought an ILL for 11:30
EE rope drop at Frozen, which was down and they tried to get us to go elsewhere but it was open by about 8:45.
Gran Fiesta Tour
Met Asha
We were going to go do Soarin but we got distracted by a giant Joffrey's donut and a squirrel that was fun to watch, and then there was a minor child meltdown so we had a long break before heading to our ILL for Cosmic Rewind. Totally worth the cost.
I tried one last time to see if the kids would explore the World Showcase but they voted to go to the waterpark instead.
We went back to the hotel, then off to Typhoon Lagoon where 3/4 of us got minor scrapes in the wave pool, but kids loved it and would have gone back a second day.
Went back to Disney Springs and got dinner at Chicken Guy. Probably the best fast food I have ever had.
Day 8
Animal Kingdom Day 2
This was a lot of running around chasing short queues. Genie + would have been really good for us at this park.
EE rope drop Everest x 2. Was really good but going backwards made my stomach a bit iffy.
Na'vi River
Safari (finally saw an elephant!)
Nemo Show
Lion King Show again
Met Dug (first character my son was actually excited to meet)
Maharajah Jungle Trek
Back to Disney Springs for Dinner. Went to Pizza Ponte so we could all choose a different topping of pizza. Also walked around and heard live music before we left.
Took daughter to Happily Ever After fireworks that night. Stood above the railway station for a quick escape at the end.
Day 9
Last day :(
Genie + Hollywood Studios
Genie + didn't seem to work as well at this park, it seemed at Epcot I could always book after entering a ride and we used it a lot but at HS it seemed strictly 2 hours apart. Maybe I am just not seeing it clearly.
On reflection , next time I would probably do Slinky Dog at EE followed by Runaway Railway and buy an ILL for Rise and skip Genie + if I was looking to save some money. I would de-prioritise Toy Story Mania next time, but our first day we missed all of the Toy Story area.
EE rope drop Rise of the Resistance. Pretty sure we were on the ride before EE even officially started.
Smuggler's Run
Met The Mandalorian and Grogu (probably the best meet!)
Star Tours
Alien Flying Saucers
Droid Depot
Genie + Slinky dog
Beauty and the Beast show
Met Chewbacca
Met Pluto
Genie + Runaway Railway
Star Tours again
Genie + Toy Story Mania. Ride broke down while in queue. Waited for ages before the put us on the other side, almost missed our next booking.
Oga's Canteen. Tried 4 different non-alcoholic drinks and they were all good. It was super cool. Only downside is we had a high table (standing only) and my son couldn't see the top of the table/anything and he was pretty unimpressed by the whole situation. Flying Saucers Mama Melrose for dinner. Muppets 3d Fantasmic. I read 15 min early "at least" aimed for 30 minutes early, and the place was well more than half full by then. Took a really long time to leave. If there is a next time I would go much earlier and bring snacks just to make getting out easier. Overall I was hugely impressed with the level of detail in everything, and all the cast members were amazing. It was a really cool experience, and it's hard to imagine never going back. If there is a next time I really want to explore the world showcase and do more sit-down meals. We had a lot planned but the kids didn't have the stamina for being in the park all day so we cancelled almost all of them. We also ended up doing parks in a somewhat different order than I initially planned. Kids got really tired of travelling on buses, which is also why we didn't break in the middle of the day and then going back to the parks. Would look at skyliner options next time. Things we didn't get to do:
Try dole whip (never noticed a place to buy it, ice cream was often an urgent necessity so didn't seek it out specifically) Tron (too hot to wait for boarding group when it was already day 3 at magic Kingdom and basically felt done.) Explore World Showcase (too much walking for few rides, from kids' perspective) Eat for fun more (we ate more out of necessity but found fun snacks when convenient) Tower of Terror (queues too long and genie + bookings too late) Frozen Singalong (timing never seemed to work out) Luminous (son had no interest in late night shows so we only did a couple things at night.) Take ride on skyliner. Something that surprised me: queues for popular rides stayed long even at 9pm. Couldn't see a viable alternative to EE rope drop + genie plus to get all the big rides "done" except perhaps if you had extended evening hours, but that would not have worked with our kids. Number of beignets consumed during our stay: 12

Hi everyone first time poster here! I'm desperate for some tips and would be grateful for help.
Our 11mo daughter is healthy and extremely active. I'm basing this off my observations of other babies the same age at the baby classes I take her to such as swimming, baby gym, baby art class etc. This means she is on the go all the time, which obviously isn't a worry to us, and there are huge positives such as her being an incredibly sound and routined sleeper after using up all her energy!
The one area where her activity causes a huge and increasing problem is nappy changes. It is becoming almost impossible to do as she will resist lying down, try to roll over immediately, try to crawl away instantly and increasing she's getting really upset and crying as soon as nappy changes begin. It's even hard when both my husband and I do it together.
I use a mat with raised sides. I always use a toy or book to distract her, or some music. I sing to her. I try to make sure I don't show how in feeling (probably a bit stressed!) It's become a physical battle to the point I've been worried in trying to hold her down that I will accidentally hurt her. Obviously I don't want her to be upset or heaben forbid, injured. I just want to clean her bum!
I would really appreciate some helpful tips for our little mover!

Maybe it's my ADHD brain that's paralyzing me, or maybe this really is just a lot to figure out. We have 2 kids and 2 dogs. Going from NH to SC in June. The movers are packing the truck a week before we actually leave. I can only leave out as much stuff as will fit in my car's rooftop cargo carrier. I'm planning on having a suitcase for each person with various clothes (since it could still be chilly here in NH), a container of dog food with enough for the week, a broom and a couple cleaning supplies, air mattresses with minimal bedding, and enough non-perishable snacks for the week. I feel like that won't all fit in the cacarrier...but I also feel like we're going to need more than that for the week. Do we just eat takeout all week for all 3 meals? Am I forgetting anything? I need to start packing now, but I feel frozen, like I don't know where to even start. I packed up the kids' toys and all of our books a while ago but everything else we pretty much use.

I have a full service move coming up. This is a big splurge for us, and even having the finances to do it is a new feeling. The movers will take one day to pack and move my contents to another town 10 miles away. How else should I prepare for the day? Any tips for doing this while also managing kids?
I'm nervous that they can get it all done in one day, but it is a reputable company and the estimator came in person so I shouldn't be worried right? It's about 1400 sq ft of stuff. Professional movers please weigh in! I am guessing it would be 4 hrs packing + 4 hrs load and unload give or take, plus travel?
Few days before: Pack up the small electronics, docs & paperwork, jewelry and sex toys and move them to new house. Move combustibles, cleaning products, and alcohol.
Day before: We'll move the food currently in the fridge, maybe fill it with drinks for the crew? We'll probably do zero cooking 2 days before just to make sure there's less to clean. Empty trash, dishwasher, laundry. Get cash for tips. Put overnight bags in car.
Moving day: The plan is to wake up super early, and one parent gets the kid dressed and out the door when the movers come. Move cars out of driveway. Unplug everything. Do we strip the sheets off the bed right after we wake up? Will they pack up the blankets? I have already stripped the guest beds and packed up those linens. Should I remove the shower curtains after we shower? What do we do for the 8-10 hours that they're working?

Fellas, is it reasonable to act like a petulant manchild after another adult gave my Lego Star Wars """""toy""""" (clearly an INVESTMENT) to my nephew to experience joy with instead of appreciating resale value in their basement that I live in?
Bonus comment epically explaining that these plastic building sets ARE. NOT. TOYS!

I'm moving to another city for work. Since I'm an adult and not a college kid I hired movers.
My parents insisted on coming down to help me pack up. I live in their basement suite. It was cheap and they let me have my privacy. They brought my brother and my nephew. The four of them were as helpful as a bag of used horse condoms. Especially my nephew.
My parents decided to keep him busy by giving him one of my Lego sets to play with. I collect them. What I usually do is buy two of the same one. I build one, put it up for display and leave the other one in the box to trade or sell.
He took it upstairs to stay out of the way then he took it home. All I noticed is that he was out from under foot.
The next day I saw the box on the garbage. I didn't assume. I knew the answer already but I didn't assume. I went upstairs to talk to them. I asked where the Lego box came from. They said they gave it to Travis to keep him busy. I told them that they needed to replace it. They said I was being childish for caring so much about a toy. I said they could replace it or I would file an insurance claim and that would probably require a police report.
My dad got angry. He pulled out $70 and told me I was an asshole for making a fuss over a toy. I asked him if that was a down payment? He said that is what he spent on the last Lego gift he got me for Christmas and that is what those helmets cost.
I showed him the box. I told him to keep his money. He just had to give me a sealed box like the one he stole.
He said he didn't steal anything. He took the box and went to the Lego store nearby.
When he came back he was apologetic. He said he would get it back from my nephew. I said I wanted a sealed box with the Tie Fighter helmet. I even went on eBay to help him find one cheaper than he had found by himself at the collectibles store the guy at the Lego store sent him to. With shipping it would only be $300. He ordered it. He isn't happy about it.
My mom is upset that I'm expecting that much money for a toy. My dad is upset that I didn't explain before he went and made a fool of himself at the store. I'm upset that they stole from me.
AITA?

TLDR; What do yall think about an old one or two horse trailer as a do-all equipment and materials hauler, occasional midsized livestock mover, and market trailer for a small new farm? Is there a better type of trailer you think could do all those things in the rainy PNW?
I'm in the process of finding a land lease to start a diversified market garden/small farm. I currently drive a v6 pickup with 6000lbs towing capacity. I anticipate needing more capacity than the bed of the pick up for bringing in materials and equipment, and for bringing produce to market and CSA drop offs. My plan is for the largest implement I'll be starting off with to be a BCS two wheel tractor. Obviously, starting off Im not trying to spend more than necessary, so I dont think it's time to buy a box truck or van or anything. That's led me to consider buying a trailer.
My first thought was a basic flat bed trailer with a loading ramp that I could drive the BCS up. The downsides to this are that I live in a particularly rainy part of the PNW and dont think this would be the best option for market. I'd also like to be able to raise a few pigs, and my partner is interested in sheep, so something enclosed to move midsized livestock in would be nice.
Those enclosed toy hauler style trailers seem nice, but they're still relatively pricey (~$5k to start) and I dont see many on the used market around here. The other day while driving home from the farm on which I currently work, I was driving behind a truck towing an old beat up single horse trailer and that got me thinking that might be the ideal solution. Obviously it'd need to be cleaned out pretty well to be used for marketing produce, but I've been seeing used options in decent shape in the $2-3k range.
I guess my questions really are:

• Are there things Im not considering or other errors in my line of reasoning here?
  
• Is a horse trailer a workable do-all trailer, at least until the farm can support the purchase of a box truck or other options?
  
• Should I be thinking about this all differently or are there other options I havent considered?
  

Thanks for any thoughts and opinions yall may have!

TLDR; What do yall think about an old one or two horse trailer as a do-all equipment and materials hauler, occasional midsized live stock mover, and market trailer for a small new farm? Is there a better type of trailer you think could do all those things in the rainy PNW?
I'm in the process of finding a land lease to start a diversified market garden/small farm. I currently drive a v6 pickup with 6000lbs towing capacity. I anticipate needing more capacity than the bed of the pick up for bringing in materials and equipment, and for bringing produce to market and CSA drop offs. My plan is for the largest implement I'll be starting off with to be a BCS two wheel tractor. Obviously, starting off Im not trying to spend more than necessary, so I dont think it's time to buy a box truck or van or anything. That's led me to consider buying a trailer.
My first thought was a basic flat bed trailer with a loading ramp that I could drive the BCS up. The downsides to this are that I live in a particularly rainy part of the PNW and dont think this would be the best option for market. I'd also like to be able to raise a few pigs, and my partner is interested in sheep, so something enclosed to move midsized livestock in would be nice.
Those enclosed toy hauler style trailers seem nice, but they're still relatively pricey (~$5k to start) and I dont see many on the used market around here. The other day while driving home from the farm on which I currently work, I was driving behind a truck towing an old beat up single horse trailer and that got me thinking that might be the ideal solution. Obviously it'd need to be cleaned out pretty well to be used for marketing produce, but I've been seeing used options in decent shape in the $2-3k range.
I guess my questions really are:

• Are there things Im not considering or other errors in my line of reasoning here?
  
• Is a horse trailer a workable do-all trailer, at least until the farm can support the purchase of a box truck or other options?
  
• Should I be thinking about this all differently or are there other options I havent considered?
  

Thanks for any thoughts and opinions yall may have!

I just finished watching the new vlog, and to be honest it was really hard to get through. I found myself forwarding through a lot of the drawn out chit chats.
It’s wild to me how the impression i get is that lil Smokey is not the first priority in their life. The amount of money they spend on the SAME TYPE of furniture is CRAZY. The first part of the vlog was Hunter having to reorganize & hire movers to help transport furniture from house to house to storage unit to garage. Like what? What is the point?
If smoke was their first priority they would have an actual toy room for the poor little babe, instead of propping him up on the sectional and stick him in front of a hypnotizing YouTube clip of a dancing fruit. I feel so bad for that little baby 😢 they think music class suffices as being ~good parents ~

Some people will dismiss me as a conspiracy theorist or a crackpot. Hell, if someone had told me a few months ago that all the executions in the United States are staged, I would have laughed in their face.
That is, until I awoke a few nights ago to a frenzied pounding on my door, and my entire world got turned upside-down.
***
For the last few years, I’ve had a recurring nightmare at least a few times a week- a nightmare where I kept having to travel down a rickety, dilapidated hallway in different bodies. I would be an old woman, then a little girl, then a middle-aged man, and so on. I kept taking different bodies, first dozens and then hundreds of them.
I couldn’t ever remember what happened when I got to the end of the hallway and pushed open the black, rotted door that waited there like some giant, grasping hand ready to pull me into Hell. There would be a terrible roar, a cacophony of screaming. The earth would tremble. Then I would find myself back at the front of the house, reborn. The dream would start over again.
All around me, I would see the bodies I had temporarily occupied piled up with their throats slashed. In a new body, I would be forced to go down the hallway yet again and meet whatever ineffable horror awaited at the end- a horror so terrible that I could never remember or comprehend it.
“Help me! God, please, help me, take me out of this Hell…” I cried in my dream, feeling as I rose up into white light at the end, yet still screaming in both my nightmare and in real life. There was a hard smash against the front door of my cabin. I jumped up in bed, sweating heavily. For a long moment, I thought I was still in the nightmare. I looked around my small, dim bedroom, expecting to see bodies stacked one on another like pieces of cordwood.
“They’re right behind me! Please, for the love of God!” The voice that had awakened me erupted into nonsense and wracking sobs.
Fully awake now, I jumped up and turned on the lights. The cabin I lived in was cramped and only meant for one person. It had a bedroom, a joint kitchen-living room, and a bathroom. No one lived within two miles of me in any direction. I had moved to the Texas desert for the privacy, after all. I didn’t really like people that much.
I ripped open the door and found a disheveled man standing there in bright orange coveralls. He had rivulets of blood streaming from what looked like a bullet hole in his shoulder. His gray, faded eyes were wide and filled with panicked tears. He had a face like a tired bulldog. All of the hair on his head had been shaved off except for his eyebrows and eyelashes. His white scalp gleamed like a freshly-polished bowling ball.
He stumbled past me, pushing me aside and slamming the door shut. The house shook with the force of it. I realized that he towered over me, and I wasn’t exactly short. The man must have been nearly seven feet tall.
“Oh, thank God,” he said, still weeping. He fell to his knees, grabbing my shirt in supplication, wringing the cloth between his large, callused hands. A sense of panic rose through my chest. I wondered if I had inadvertently just let in a lunatic or a killer. I looked at his clothes closer. Stamped on the back in large, black letters, I saw the acronym “TDCJ”. My heart turned into a block of ice as I recognized a prison uniform.
“Hey there, stay back…” I said in a trembling voice, backpedaling quickly from the kneeling man. I thought of my shotgun in the other room. Mentally, I kicked myself for not grabbing it.
“It’s not like that, man, really,” he said, showing me his empty hands. “I’m supposed to be dead. They officially executed me last night. Look, you can check. Do you have a phone?” I reached for the phone in my pocket, deciding to dial the police. He jumped up and snatched it from my hands as quickly as a frog snatching a fly. I cried out in alarm, turning away to run back to the bedroom and lock myself inside. A large hand came down on my shoulder, squeezing it tightly within its iron grip.
“I’m not dangerous, friend,” he said. “I was falsely convicted, just like a lot of others. They put me on death row and supposedly executed me last night. Look.” He typed something on the phone quickly, pulling up a news article. Against my better judgment, I looked.
“Texas man executed by lethal injection for 2012 murder of his ex-girlfriend and her mother,” it read. I saw the man’s tired bulldog face looking back out at me from the phone screen. I froze, feeling very confused. I wondered if the man had somehow gotten a website to write up a fake news article, but why? Was this all some sort of prank?
I gingerly took the phone back. The man gave it up without a struggle. I read the article, seeing the man’s name: “Donald G.” I went back to Google and typed in his full name, finding dozens of other articles reporting his death by lethal injection, including some by international media outlets. I scratched my head.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “What is this? Why are you here?” The man looked nervously at the door.
“We don’t have a lot of time,” he responded in a raspy, tired voice. The bleeding from his shoulder had slowed to a trickle of dark, clotted blood. “Do you have a car?”
“Of course I have a car,” I said.
“Then, please, take me out of here, and I’ll tell you everything on the way.” I hesitated for a long moment. “Please, sir. I can guarantee you that you’ll never hear another tale like it.”
“Alright, but I’m taking my gun and my phone,” I said. “If you try anything, I’ll blow your fucking head off. Understood?” The man nodded, resigned, still checking outside the front window every few moments with a growing sense of panic. Sighing, I extended my hand. “And, by the way, my name’s Roger.”
“I’m Donny,” he said, giving me an exhausted smile.
***
We got in the car. I put the loaded shotgun between the driver’s door and my seat, propping it straight up. Donny got in the passenger seat, wincing. He grabbed at the bullet hole, breathing hard. His face turned chalk-white, and I thought he might vomit for a moment.
“I have some Aleve in here,” I said, reaching into the center console and handing him some pain relievers and a half-bottle of water. I noticed with dismay that he was bleeding on my seat. Those stains would not be coming out anytime soon. I sighed.
“Thanks,” he grunted, taking four of them in one go. He chugged the water as I turned on the old Ford sedan, pulling out onto the empty desert road. Donny continuously checked the rearview mirrors, but the road stayed deserted.
“I can’t tell you all of it, because that would take all night. I guess it all started when I got home late from work and got an unexpected call from my ex-girlfriend…”
***
I had dated Olivia for a few years. We had recently broken up, but we stayed on good terms. We still talked regularly and helped each other out. She was an accountant, you see, and I was a carpenter who owned my own business. So she would help me out with taxes or paperwork or whatever, and sometimes, I’d go over and help her when she or her mother needed to install some cabinets or bookshelves or anything.
She had called me the previous week saying something about seeing a strange craft flying over her house. She said it would stop in mid-air, as if a videotape had been paused. Then, in a blur, it would jump to the next point. It was high in the air, so she said she couldn’t see the design of it, but it sparkled with gold and silver hues. I had dismissed it as fanciful, assuring her it was probably just a military helicopter or a weather balloon or something.
I was just getting home from work, bone-tired, when my phone rang. I looked down, seeing it was Olivia. We had been broken up for a few months by that point, but we still talked at least once every couple weeks. It was strange to be getting a call at 11 PM, though. She never stayed up this late.
“Hey, what’s up?” I said. I heard her heavy breathing on the other end of the line.
“Donny, I think someone’s peeking in the windows,” she said. “I saw a face… watching me sleep. It was someone with a gasmask on.”
“Call the police then!” I said, my heart speeding up. “Why are you calling me?”
“I don’t want to make a fool of myself if it’s nothing,” she said. “Can you come over and check around the house for me?” I only lived about a three-minute drive from Olivia and her mother. Sighing, I agreed.
I got in the car, speeding over as fast as I could. When I pulled up in front of their quaint, one-story colonial, I saw the front door was wide open and all the lights were on. A sense of dread filled my chest.
I had my pistol with me, just in case. I turned off the safety and cocked it. I heard chaos inside, something being thrown and glass shattering. A woman’s scream shattered the rural Texas night. The crickets all went quiet as I sprinted into the house.
Instantly, I could smell the blood. That coppery, metallic smell that awakens something primal in the human heart. I knew it meant trouble. Waves of adrenaline smashed against the shore of my consciousness. Everything felt slowed down and unreal. My feet moved with their own mind. I walked forward, my breath seeming too loud, like a roaring cyclone in my ears.
I found Olivia and her mother in the kitchen, their throats cut from ear to ear. The blood-stained butcher knife that had done the deed in so little time lay discarded on the floor like a broken toy. I knelt down over Olivia, seeing her sightless eyes staring blankly up at the ceiling. I tried doing what little CPR I knew how while I called the police, but all I ended up doing was getting her blood all over me.
When the police came in with guns drawn and arrested me for murder, I tried protesting, saying that my cell phone’s GPS would show I wasn’t at the house and that I was the one who had called 911 in the first place. But none of that got entered into trial, and before I knew it, I was on death row and awaiting my final day.
I talked to a lot of other people in prison. Lots of people claim to be innocent, but something bothered me. It was the call I had gotten from Olivia the week before…
***
Headlights flashed far behind us. I noticed a black car speeding up. I heard the revving of its powerful engine.
“I think we’ve got company,” I said, thinking first that it was the police. I was absolutely enthralled by Donny’s story, and while I still had my doubts about the veracity of it, the fact that the news media was apparently lying about his execution added some weight to his account.
The car behind us accelerated fast and swerved into the wrong lane. It pulled up beside me, and that was when the sinking feeling started in my stomach. This wasn’t the police.
The dark, tinted window rolled slowly down. I tried speeding up and braking, but whatever I did, it kept pace directly next to me.
“Oh shit, it’s them,” Donny said. A moment later, the back window shattered. Glass exploded all over the back seat. I swerved, horrified. Looking over, I saw the end of a rifle sticking out the open window of the black sedan.
I gave the shotgun to Donny while I tried to keep swerving and speeding ahead of the madman next to me.
“Shoot them!” I screamed. “It’s loaded.” He didn’t hesitate. He rolled down his window and stuck his massive body out of the car. I heard the blasts of the Benelli Nova echoing off the roof as if a cannon had gone off. A burst of fire erupted from the rifle sticking out of the faceless black car keeping pace with us. I saw their window explode inwards at the same time that my car swerved crazily to the left as the front driver’s side tire blew apart.
The wheel spun under my hands. I felt the car start to spin, drifting over into the other lane. With a tortured shriek of rending metal, the front of my car smashed into the black sedan, sending it careening off the side of the road into a pile of boulders, each of them two or three tall. I saw Donny fly out of the window as the car spun, then I smashed my head on the steering wheel and felt the world going black. From far away, I heard a car’s engine giving tortured grinding sounds and loud ticking noises like some large mechanical heart with a fatal arrhythmia. I smelled transmission fluid and coolant. But I was too stunned to really comprehend what was happening.
I inhaled deeply, and my vision came back slightly. Blood streamed from my nose and a gash across my forehead. I felt like I was looking through a tunnel, the bright colors of reality blurring around the edges.
I don’t know how long I sat there, hyperventilating and bleeding all over the steering wheel. Finally, I ripped off my seatbelt, stumbling out into the dark night.
On the side of the road, I saw Donny’s mangled body. He was still breathing, choking on his own blood. It bubbled and frothed from his blue lips as he twitched and blinked rapidly, his hands clenching and unclenching, the knuckles white. His fingernails had begun to turn cyanotic and pale as a puddle of blood spread out from under his crushed body. His right leg looked totally shattered, and I saw pieces of sharp bone poking out through the skin. Laying a few feet away, I found my little 12-gauge Nova; a little scraped up, but still in fine working order. Benelli has always been a solid company, and their guns hold up well under stress.
Looking at Donny made me feel sick to my stomach. I didn’t even know the man, but no one deserved this. And, to be honest, my gut had told me he was telling the truth when he told me his story. I hadn’t noticed an ounce of deception in him.
I picked up the shotgun, slamming another slug in the chamber as I walked over toward the black sedan, wondering what kind of human monsters I would find contained within.
***
I looked in the shattered passenger’s side window under the dim moonlight streaming down from the cloudless sky. I could tell the passenger was dead as soon as I saw him. He had an exit wound the size of an orange on the left side of his skull. He had on a black suit and a tie with a clean-shaven face and a crewcut. An AR-15 lay on his lap. I could see clear through his brains into the rest of the car beyond. It was a sickening and gruesome sight.
The driver was still alive, however. He was dressed similarly to the gunman. He had light olive-skin and dark eyes. His high cheekbones gave his face a narrow, gaunt aspect.
I reached through the shattered passenger’s side window and grabbed the rifle, throwing it on the road. Slowly and carefully, I circled around the car, keeping the shotgun raised. I got to the driver’s side and found the window still intact, though a slug had ripped through the door and left a bullet hole the size of a quarter in the thick metal.
I tried the door but found it locked. Without hesitation, I used the butt end of the shotgun to smash through the driver’s side window. Safety glass rained down onto the still body of the driver. I saw his eyes blinking fast, but he looked stunned and confused. A soft moaning came from his lips. A deep gash ran across his forehead, causing blood to trickle down and stain his undoubtedly expensive clothes. His right eye had begun to swell and change colors already, giving him a slant-eyed, winking appearance. The driver’s side airbag had deployed during the crash and his face had clearly hit at a high velocity. It looked like he might have been coming out of a full-blown concussion.
“Get the fuck out of the car,” I screamed at him, shoving the barrel of the shotgun hard against the front of his forehead. “And put your hands up. If you make any move, then I guarantee you, we will both see what color your brains are.” I gave him a grim, sadistic smile. He raised his trembling hands in the air, his knuckles white with inner tension. I saw the lump of what looked like a pistol holstered under his jacket. I watched him closely, daring him to make a move. “Get out and keep your hands as high above your head as they’ll go. If they drop an inch, I will shoot you. Do you believe me?”
“Yes,” he answered in a flat, dead voice.
“Good,” I said. “Because I am telling you the truth, I promise you that. Now open the door and get out- slowly. Very, very slowly.” After spitting blood and pieces of what looked like teeth onto the airbag and floor of the destroyed car, he pulled open the door and practically fell out of it. He caught himself at the last moment, hanging onto the top of the door and breathing heavily. His right eye was totally covered in fresh, gleaming blood, and I doubted if he could see much out of it.
“Get down on the ground and put your hands behind your back,” I said in an icy tone. With a look of pure hatred from his dark eyes, he lay down on the desert sand. I took off my belt and wrapped it around his wrists, binding them tightly. Then I reached into his coat and pulled out a pistol.
“A .45,” I said, examining it. “Nice gun.”
“It’s my work gun,” he said, giving me a predatory smile. “At home, I wouldn’t use such a small caliber. Especially on scumbags like you and your friend.” I shrugged.
“He wasn’t actually my friend, just a total stranger who came to my house in the middle of the night. And, like the good Samaritan I am, I helped him.”
“You’re violating federal law by doing this,” he spat at me. “You’ll go to prison for the rest of your life.”
“Are you guys going to frame me like you did to Donny?” I asked. “And then fake my execution too?” The agent went pale, the scowl on his face deepening.
“I don’t know what kind of conspiracy theorist bullshit you’ve been swallowing, friend, but everything you’re saying sounds insane. I am a federal agent. You can check my pockets for my badge.”
“I don’t give a shit what you are,” I said. “As it stands, it looks like I have all the power and guns- and it looks like you have nothing. So what I want from you is the truth. You can tell me, or I can beat it out of you.”
I still felt sickened by what had happened to Donny and his sudden death. I was not in a forgiving mood. And, to be honest, violence never really bothered me much, even as a kid when I got into fights. A large part of it enjoys the thrill of it, the rush of beating a man into unconsciousness and hearing his nose crack under your fist. The man hesitated, wincing like a beaten dog.
“Please, I really don’t know what you’re…” he began to say. Without hesitation, I brought my steel-toe boot back and kicked him in the ribs. I heard a few of them crack under the blow with a sound like snapping twigs. He screamed as more blood filled his mouth. He rolled onto his stomach, his eyes wide and wild like a panicked animal in a cage. It took him a little while to calm down, but when he did, I knelt close to his face and whispered.
“What I want from you,” I repeated slowly, “is the truth.” Still spitting blood, his face looking like a package of raw hamburger, he nodded. I rolled him over so that he was sitting on the ground, his legs splayed out in front of him. “Why don’t you start by telling me your name?”
***
“I’m Agent Keyes, and…, well, the truth is rather complicated,” he said, his voice sounding nasally and strained through all of his injuries. I could tell it hurt him to breathe. “But I guess it boils down to this: Donny’s girl and her mother saw something that they weren’t supposed to. Our surveillance picked up the craft and cameras from the streets showed that those two were outside when it went overhead. Then we started listening to their calls, heard her telling Donny about it, and our Director insisted that we had to tie up the loose ends.”
“Why does it matter so much that she saw the craft?” I asked.
“She not only saw the craft,” he said, “she took a video of it on her phone. She didn’t tell Donny about that, but we were able to see it. You see, the craft isn’t just some top-secret government plane or anything. It is a legitimate extraterrestrial craft, one being flown by the species that created humanity originally through genetic engineering. We usually call them the ‘Primes’, after the notion of a prime mover.” I laughed at that.
“That’s the craziest goddamn shit I’ve ever heard,” I said.
“Well, it gets a lot crazier. Because your friend there is right. The United States doesn’t actually execute anyone. It’s all fake. It’s easy with lethal injection, because the medical staff can just put opiates or sedatives in the line. Then, when the person is unconscious, we have a doctor go in, pretend to check his vitals and certify the person dead.
“Hell, back when my dad worked for the Agency, they had to fake electric chair executions with smoke and pyrotechnics. They’d drug the person beforehand, so that they would pass out and lose consciousness during the staged execution. To get them to shake and stutter, the medical staff would use a low, non-lethal dose of electricity.” I stared at him, waiting for the punchline.
“Why?” I asked. “Who would go through all that trouble?” He shrugged.
“Well, that brings us to the interesting part,” Agent Keyes said, his one good eye sparkling with something strange and repulsive under the surface. The other had swelled into a slit of purple bruises, and I doubted whether he could see anything out of that eye. He still winced every time he breathed in too hard, probably from his cracked ribs.
“The Primes demand sacrifices from every major government in the world.” Agent Keyes continued. We don’t know exactly what they’re doing with these subjects, though I doubt if it’s anything good. Perhaps they are using them as guinea pigs for genetic engineering experiments. Maybe the Primes just cut their throats and eat their flesh raw. Personally, I…” I heard a strange buzzing from the sky, like the sound a high-voltage power line might make. Off in the distance, I saw something flashing across the sky, hues of silver and gold gleaming off the side of the sleek alien ship.
It had no wings that I could see. It formed a shape like a spear. Thin strands of gold and silver weaved together, forming a graceful, interweaving outer shell. A cold blue light radiated from the craft as it gave off its strange buzzing noise. A strange smell filled the desert, almost like ozone mixed with some kind of sweet, chemical odor. It moved in a strange, alien way, jumping forwards in a blur and then stopping suddenly in mid-air, floating there like a hummingbird.
Agent Keyes' words rang in my ears. A sense of panic filled my heart. Without hesitation, I ran towards my car. I knew I had no time to flee. I got down on my stomach, crawling underneath it, the warm pavement scraping my clothes and skin as I frantically pushed myself forward. Then I peered out, watching and waiting. About half a minute later, the buzzing became overwhelming as the ship stopped directly overhead. That horrendous sound seemed to vibrate my bones. I could feel my skull shaking.
A few seconds later, a shape materialized in front of Agent Keyes’s destroyed car. It had tentacles where its eyes should have been. They writhed like dozens of snakes, their thin, bone-white tendrils slithering in slow, disparate waves. Its body had a sleek, bloody look. Powerful muscles twitched and flexed under the skinless exterior. It towered over everything else in the area, standing nearly nine-feet-tall. Then the figure spoke in a harsh, low voice.
“You have not given your tribute,” it said coldly. “You have broken your agreement.”
“The man killed his guard and escaped,” Agent Keyes said, his hands still bound behind his back. He spat blood. “I tried to hunt him down, but…” He started to motion to my hiding spot with his head, apparently planning to try to give me to the aliens in Donny’s place. But the creature didn’t give him time to finish. He had some black canister in his hand and sprayed Agent Keyes in the face. Agent Keyes tried to protest, stuttering some incomprehensible jumble of sounds. Then he groaned as his eyes fluttered and, finally, went limp.
The alien creature made a series of clicking, guttural sounds as he lifted Agent Keyes body up. A few seconds later, their bodies became translucent and then faded entirely from view. The ship jumped forwards, far out of view, and I found myself alone.
As I crawled out from under the car, I saw the first police lights in the distance. The shrill sirens rang out across the silent desert like the wailing of a banshee.
***
Once they found blood all over the area and the bodies of Donny and the unnamed agent, the police immediately arrested me for suspicion of first-degree murder. They claimed I was some kind of spree killer who went berserk. I told them to check Donny’s identity and they’d see my entire story was true, that the executions were staged, but they refused. In the trial, they claimed he was a “John Doe,” likely some unidentified hitchhiker or homeless person.
Now I’m on death row. I had my lawyer post online this to warn other people. I want someone to hear my story.
Because I know that, after they fake my death, I will disappear- and then a much more horrifying death will come. I will see our creators, the Primes, and maybe they will use me as a subject for some nightmarish experiment.
The executions in the USA are staged, but I think by the time the Primes finish with me, I will wish they were real.

Some people will dismiss me as a conspiracy theorist or a crackpot. Hell, if someone had told me a few months ago that all the executions in the United States are staged, I would have laughed in their face.
That is, until I awoke a few nights ago to a frenzied pounding on my door, and my entire world got turned upside-down.
***
For the last few years, I’ve had a recurring nightmare at least a few times a week- a nightmare where I kept having to travel down a rickety, dilapidated hallway in different bodies. I would be an old woman, then a little girl, then a middle-aged man, and so on. I kept taking different bodies, first dozens and then hundreds of them.
I couldn’t ever remember what happened when I got to the end of the hallway and pushed open the black, rotted door that waited there like some giant, grasping hand ready to pull me into Hell. There would be a terrible roar, a cacophony of screaming. The earth would tremble. Then I would find myself back at the front of the house, reborn. The dream would start over again.
All around me, I would see the bodies I had temporarily occupied piled up with their throats slashed. In a new body, I would be forced to go down the hallway yet again and meet whatever ineffable horror awaited at the end- a horror so terrible that I could never remember or comprehend it.
“Help me! God, please, help me, take me out of this Hell…” I cried in my dream, feeling as I rose up into white light at the end, yet still screaming in both my nightmare and in real life. There was a hard smash against the front door of my cabin. I jumped up in bed, sweating heavily. For a long moment, I thought I was still in the nightmare. I looked around my small, dim bedroom, expecting to see bodies stacked one on another like pieces of cordwood.
“They’re right behind me! Please, for the love of God!” The voice that had awakened me erupted into nonsense and wracking sobs.
Fully awake now, I jumped up and turned on the lights. The cabin I lived in was cramped and only meant for one person. It had a bedroom, a joint kitchen-living room, and a bathroom. No one lived within two miles of me in any direction. I had moved to the Texas desert for the privacy, after all. I didn’t really like people that much.
I ripped open the door and found a disheveled man standing there in bright orange coveralls. He had rivulets of blood streaming from what looked like a bullet hole in his shoulder. His gray, faded eyes were wide and filled with panicked tears. He had a face like a tired bulldog. All of the hair on his head had been shaved off except for his eyebrows and eyelashes. His white scalp gleamed like a freshly-polished bowling ball.
He stumbled past me, pushing me aside and slamming the door shut. The house shook with the force of it. I realized that he towered over me, and I wasn’t exactly short. The man must have been nearly seven feet tall.
“Oh, thank God,” he said, still weeping. He fell to his knees, grabbing my shirt in supplication, wringing the cloth between his large, callused hands. A sense of panic rose through my chest. I wondered if I had inadvertently just let in a lunatic or a killer. I looked at his clothes closer. Stamped on the back in large, black letters, I saw the acronym “TDCJ”. My heart turned into a block of ice as I recognized a prison uniform.
“Hey there, stay back…” I said in a trembling voice, backpedaling quickly from the kneeling man. I thought of my shotgun in the other room. Mentally, I kicked myself for not grabbing it.
“It’s not like that, man, really,” he said, showing me his empty hands. “I’m supposed to be dead. They officially executed me last night. Look, you can check. Do you have a phone?” I reached for the phone in my pocket, deciding to dial the police. He jumped up and snatched it from my hands as quickly as a frog snatching a fly. I cried out in alarm, turning away to run back to the bedroom and lock myself inside. A large hand came down on my shoulder, squeezing it tightly within its iron grip.
“I’m not dangerous, friend,” he said. “I was falsely convicted, just like a lot of others. They put me on death row and supposedly executed me last night. Look.” He typed something on the phone quickly, pulling up a news article. Against my better judgment, I looked.
“Texas man executed by lethal injection for 2012 murder of his ex-girlfriend and her mother,” it read. I saw the man’s tired bulldog face looking back out at me from the phone screen. I froze, feeling very confused. I wondered if the man had somehow gotten a website to write up a fake news article, but why? Was this all some sort of prank?
I gingerly took the phone back. The man gave it up without a struggle. I read the article, seeing the man’s name: “Donald G.” I went back to Google and typed in his full name, finding dozens of other articles reporting his death by lethal injection, including some by international media outlets. I scratched my head.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “What is this? Why are you here?” The man looked nervously at the door.
“We don’t have a lot of time,” he responded in a raspy, tired voice. The bleeding from his shoulder had slowed to a trickle of dark, clotted blood. “Do you have a car?”
“Of course I have a car,” I said.
“Then, please, take me out of here, and I’ll tell you everything on the way.” I hesitated for a long moment. “Please, sir. I can guarantee you that you’ll never hear another tale like it.”
“Alright, but I’m taking my gun and my phone,” I said. “If you try anything, I’ll blow your fucking head off. Understood?” The man nodded, resigned, still checking outside the front window every few moments with a growing sense of panic. Sighing, I extended my hand. “And, by the way, my name’s Roger.”
“I’m Donny,” he said, giving me an exhausted smile.
***
We got in the car. I put the loaded shotgun between the driver’s door and my seat, propping it straight up. Donny got in the passenger seat, wincing. He grabbed at the bullet hole, breathing hard. His face turned chalk-white, and I thought he might vomit for a moment.
“I have some Aleve in here,” I said, reaching into the center console and handing him some pain relievers and a half-bottle of water. I noticed with dismay that he was bleeding on my seat. Those stains would not be coming out anytime soon. I sighed.
“Thanks,” he grunted, taking four of them in one go. He chugged the water as I turned on the old Ford sedan, pulling out onto the empty desert road. Donny continuously checked the rearview mirrors, but the road stayed deserted.
“I can’t tell you all of it, because that would take all night. I guess it all started when I got home late from work and got an unexpected call from my ex-girlfriend…”
***
I had dated Olivia for a few years. We had recently broken up, but we stayed on good terms. We still talked regularly and helped each other out. She was an accountant, you see, and I was a carpenter who owned my own business. So she would help me out with taxes or paperwork or whatever, and sometimes, I’d go over and help her when she or her mother needed to install some cabinets or bookshelves or anything.
She had called me the previous week saying something about seeing a strange craft flying over her house. She said it would stop in mid-air, as if a videotape had been paused. Then, in a blur, it would jump to the next point. It was high in the air, so she said she couldn’t see the design of it, but it sparkled with gold and silver hues. I had dismissed it as fanciful, assuring her it was probably just a military helicopter or a weather balloon or something.
I was just getting home from work, bone-tired, when my phone rang. I looked down, seeing it was Olivia. We had been broken up for a few months by that point, but we still talked at least once every couple weeks. It was strange to be getting a call at 11 PM, though. She never stayed up this late.
“Hey, what’s up?” I said. I heard her heavy breathing on the other end of the line.
“Donny, I think someone’s peeking in the windows,” she said. “I saw a face… watching me sleep. It was someone with a gasmask on.”
“Call the police then!” I said, my heart speeding up. “Why are you calling me?”
“I don’t want to make a fool of myself if it’s nothing,” she said. “Can you come over and check around the house for me?” I only lived about a three-minute drive from Olivia and her mother. Sighing, I agreed.
I got in the car, speeding over as fast as I could. When I pulled up in front of their quaint, one-story colonial, I saw the front door was wide open and all the lights were on. A sense of dread filled my chest.
I had my pistol with me, just in case. I turned off the safety and cocked it. I heard chaos inside, something being thrown and glass shattering. A woman’s scream shattered the rural Texas night. The crickets all went quiet as I sprinted into the house.
Instantly, I could smell the blood. That coppery, metallic smell that awakens something primal in the human heart. I knew it meant trouble. Waves of adrenaline smashed against the shore of my consciousness. Everything felt slowed down and unreal. My feet moved with their own mind. I walked forward, my breath seeming too loud, like a roaring cyclone in my ears.
I found Olivia and her mother in the kitchen, their throats cut from ear to ear. The blood-stained butcher knife that had done the deed in so little time lay discarded on the floor like a broken toy. I knelt down over Olivia, seeing her sightless eyes staring blankly up at the ceiling. I tried doing what little CPR I knew how while I called the police, but all I ended up doing was getting her blood all over me.
When the police came in with guns drawn and arrested me for murder, I tried protesting, saying that my cell phone’s GPS would show I wasn’t at the house and that I was the one who had called 911 in the first place. But none of that got entered into trial, and before I knew it, I was on death row and awaiting my final day.
I talked to a lot of other people in prison. Lots of people claim to be innocent, but something bothered me. It was the call I had gotten from Olivia the week before…
***
Headlights flashed far behind us. I noticed a black car speeding up. I heard the revving of its powerful engine.
“I think we’ve got company,” I said, thinking first that it was the police. I was absolutely enthralled by Donny’s story, and while I still had my doubts about the veracity of it, the fact that the news media was apparently lying about his execution added some weight to his account.
The car behind us accelerated fast and swerved into the wrong lane. It pulled up beside me, and that was when the sinking feeling started in my stomach. This wasn’t the police.
The dark, tinted window rolled slowly down. I tried speeding up and braking, but whatever I did, it kept pace directly next to me.
“Oh shit, it’s them,” Donny said. A moment later, the back window shattered. Glass exploded all over the back seat. I swerved, horrified. Looking over, I saw the end of a rifle sticking out the open window of the black sedan.
I gave the shotgun to Donny while I tried to keep swerving and speeding ahead of the madman next to me.
“Shoot them!” I screamed. “It’s loaded.” He didn’t hesitate. He rolled down his window and stuck his massive body out of the car. I heard the blasts of the Benelli Nova echoing off the roof as if a cannon had gone off. A burst of fire erupted from the rifle sticking out of the faceless black car keeping pace with us. I saw their window explode inwards at the same time that my car swerved crazily to the left as the front driver’s side tire blew apart.
The wheel spun under my hands. I felt the car start to spin, drifting over into the other lane. With a tortured shriek of rending metal, the front of my car smashed into the black sedan, sending it careening off the side of the road into a pile of boulders, each of them two or three tall. I saw Donny fly out of the window as the car spun, then I smashed my head on the steering wheel and felt the world going black. From far away, I heard a car’s engine giving tortured grinding sounds and loud ticking noises like some large mechanical heart with a fatal arrhythmia. I smelled transmission fluid and coolant. But I was too stunned to really comprehend what was happening.
I inhaled deeply, and my vision came back slightly. Blood streamed from my nose and a gash across my forehead. I felt like I was looking through a tunnel, the bright colors of reality blurring around the edges.
I don’t know how long I sat there, hyperventilating and bleeding all over the steering wheel. Finally, I ripped off my seatbelt, stumbling out into the dark night.
On the side of the road, I saw Donny’s mangled body. He was still breathing, choking on his own blood. It bubbled and frothed from his blue lips as he twitched and blinked rapidly, his hands clenching and unclenching, the knuckles white. His fingernails had begun to turn cyanotic and pale as a puddle of blood spread out from under his crushed body. His right leg looked totally shattered, and I saw pieces of sharp bone poking out through the skin. Laying a few feet away, I found my little 12-gauge Nova; a little scraped up, but still in fine working order. Benelli has always been a solid company, and their guns hold up well under stress.
Looking at Donny made me feel sick to my stomach. I didn’t even know the man, but no one deserved this. And, to be honest, my gut had told me he was telling the truth when he told me his story. I hadn’t noticed an ounce of deception in him.
I picked up the shotgun, slamming another slug in the chamber as I walked over toward the black sedan, wondering what kind of human monsters I would find contained within.
***
I looked in the shattered passenger’s side window under the dim moonlight streaming down from the cloudless sky. I could tell the passenger was dead as soon as I saw him. He had an exit wound the size of an orange on the left side of his skull. He had on a black suit and a tie with a clean-shaven face and a crewcut. An AR-15 lay on his lap. I could see clear through his brains into the rest of the car beyond. It was a sickening and gruesome sight.
The driver was still alive, however. He was dressed similarly to the gunman. He had light olive-skin and dark eyes. His high cheekbones gave his face a narrow, gaunt aspect.
I reached through the shattered passenger’s side window and grabbed the rifle, throwing it on the road. Slowly and carefully, I circled around the car, keeping the shotgun raised. I got to the driver’s side and found the window still intact, though a slug had ripped through the door and left a bullet hole the size of a quarter in the thick metal.
I tried the door but found it locked. Without hesitation, I used the butt end of the shotgun to smash through the driver’s side window. Safety glass rained down onto the still body of the driver. I saw his eyes blinking fast, but he looked stunned and confused. A soft moaning came from his lips. A deep gash ran across his forehead, causing blood to trickle down and stain his undoubtedly expensive clothes. His right eye had begun to swell and change colors already, giving him a slant-eyed, winking appearance. The driver’s side airbag had deployed during the crash and his face had clearly hit at a high velocity. It looked like he might have been coming out of a full-blown concussion.
“Get the fuck out of the car,” I screamed at him, shoving the barrel of the shotgun hard against the front of his forehead. “And put your hands up. If you make any move, then I guarantee you, we will both see what color your brains are.” I gave him a grim, sadistic smile. He raised his trembling hands in the air, his knuckles white with inner tension. I saw the lump of what looked like a pistol holstered under his jacket. I watched him closely, daring him to make a move. “Get out and keep your hands as high above your head as they’ll go. If they drop an inch, I will shoot you. Do you believe me?”
“Yes,” he answered in a flat, dead voice.
“Good,” I said. “Because I am telling you the truth, I promise you that. Now open the door and get out- slowly. Very, very slowly.” After spitting blood and pieces of what looked like teeth onto the airbag and floor of the destroyed car, he pulled open the door and practically fell out of it. He caught himself at the last moment, hanging onto the top of the door and breathing heavily. His right eye was totally covered in fresh, gleaming blood, and I doubted if he could see much out of it.
“Get down on the ground and put your hands behind your back,” I said in an icy tone. With a look of pure hatred from his dark eyes, he lay down on the desert sand. I took off my belt and wrapped it around his wrists, binding them tightly. Then I reached into his coat and pulled out a pistol.
“A .45,” I said, examining it. “Nice gun.”
“It’s my work gun,” he said, giving me a predatory smile. “At home, I wouldn’t use such a small caliber. Especially on scumbags like you and your friend.” I shrugged.
“He wasn’t actually my friend, just a total stranger who came to my house in the middle of the night. And, like the good Samaritan I am, I helped him.”
“You’re violating federal law by doing this,” he spat at me. “You’ll go to prison for the rest of your life.”
“Are you guys going to frame me like you did to Donny?” I asked. “And then fake my execution too?” The agent went pale, the scowl on his face deepening.
“I don’t know what kind of conspiracy theorist bullshit you’ve been swallowing, friend, but everything you’re saying sounds insane. I am a federal agent. You can check my pockets for my badge.”
“I don’t give a shit what you are,” I said. “As it stands, it looks like I have all the power and guns- and it looks like you have nothing. So what I want from you is the truth. You can tell me, or I can beat it out of you.”
I still felt sickened by what had happened to Donny and his sudden death. I was not in a forgiving mood. And, to be honest, violence never really bothered me much, even as a kid when I got into fights. A large part of it enjoys the thrill of it, the rush of beating a man into unconsciousness and hearing his nose crack under your fist. The man hesitated, wincing like a beaten dog.
“Please, I really don’t know what you’re…” he began to say. Without hesitation, I brought my steel-toe boot back and kicked him in the ribs. I heard a few of them crack under the blow with a sound like snapping twigs. He screamed as more blood filled his mouth. He rolled onto his stomach, his eyes wide and wild like a panicked animal in a cage. It took him a little while to calm down, but when he did, I knelt close to his face and whispered.
“What I want from you,” I repeated slowly, “is the truth.” Still spitting blood, his face looking like a package of raw hamburger, he nodded. I rolled him over so that he was sitting on the ground, his legs splayed out in front of him. “Why don’t you start by telling me your name?”
***
“I’m Agent Keyes, and…, well, the truth is rather complicated,” he said, his voice sounding nasally and strained through all of his injuries. I could tell it hurt him to breathe. “But I guess it boils down to this: Donny’s girl and her mother saw something that they weren’t supposed to. Our surveillance picked up the craft and cameras from the streets showed that those two were outside when it went overhead. Then we started listening to their calls, heard her telling Donny about it, and our Director insisted that we had to tie up the loose ends.”
“Why does it matter so much that she saw the craft?” I asked.
“She not only saw the craft,” he said, “she took a video of it on her phone. She didn’t tell Donny about that, but we were able to see it. You see, the craft isn’t just some top-secret government plane or anything. It is a legitimate extraterrestrial craft, one being flown by the species that created humanity originally through genetic engineering. We usually call them the ‘Primes’, after the notion of a prime mover.” I laughed at that.
“That’s the craziest goddamn shit I’ve ever heard,” I said.
“Well, it gets a lot crazier. Because your friend there is right. The United States doesn’t actually execute anyone. It’s all fake. It’s easy with lethal injection, because the medical staff can just put opiates or sedatives in the line. Then, when the person is unconscious, we have a doctor go in, pretend to check his vitals and certify the person dead.
“Hell, back when my dad worked for the Agency, they had to fake electric chair executions with smoke and pyrotechnics. They’d drug the person beforehand, so that they would pass out and lose consciousness during the staged execution. To get them to shake and stutter, the medical staff would use a low, non-lethal dose of electricity.” I stared at him, waiting for the punchline.
“Why?” I asked. “Who would go through all that trouble?” He shrugged.
“Well, that brings us to the interesting part,” Agent Keyes said, his one good eye sparkling with something strange and repulsive under the surface. The other had swelled into a slit of purple bruises, and I doubted whether he could see anything out of that eye. He still winced every time he breathed in too hard, probably from his cracked ribs.
“The Primes demand sacrifices from every major government in the world.” Agent Keyes continued. We don’t know exactly what they’re doing with these subjects, though I doubt if it’s anything good. Perhaps they are using them as guinea pigs for genetic engineering experiments. Maybe the Primes just cut their throats and eat their flesh raw. Personally, I…” I heard a strange buzzing from the sky, like the sound a high-voltage power line might make. Off in the distance, I saw something flashing across the sky, hues of silver and gold gleaming off the side of the sleek alien ship.
It had no wings that I could see. It formed a shape like a spear. Thin strands of gold and silver weaved together, forming a graceful, interweaving outer shell. A cold blue light radiated from the craft as it gave off its strange buzzing noise. A strange smell filled the desert, almost like ozone mixed with some kind of sweet, chemical odor. It moved in a strange, alien way, jumping forwards in a blur and then stopping suddenly in mid-air, floating there like a hummingbird.
Agent Keyes' words rang in my ears. A sense of panic filled my heart. Without hesitation, I ran towards my car. I knew I had no time to flee. I got down on my stomach, crawling underneath it, the warm pavement scraping my clothes and skin as I frantically pushed myself forward. Then I peered out, watching and waiting. About half a minute later, the buzzing became overwhelming as the ship stopped directly overhead. That horrendous sound seemed to vibrate my bones. I could feel my skull shaking.
A few seconds later, a shape materialized in front of Agent Keyes’s destroyed car. It had tentacles where its eyes should have been. They writhed like dozens of snakes, their thin, bone-white tendrils slithering in slow, disparate waves. Its body had a sleek, bloody look. Powerful muscles twitched and flexed under the skinless exterior. It towered over everything else in the area, standing nearly nine-feet-tall. Then the figure spoke in a harsh, low voice.
“You have not given your tribute,” it said coldly. “You have broken your agreement.”
“The man killed his guard and escaped,” Agent Keyes said, his hands still bound behind his back. He spat blood. “I tried to hunt him down, but…” He started to motion to my hiding spot with his head, apparently planning to try to give me to the aliens in Donny’s place. But the creature didn’t give him time to finish. He had some black canister in his hand and sprayed Agent Keyes in the face. Agent Keyes tried to protest, stuttering some incomprehensible jumble of sounds. Then he groaned as his eyes fluttered and, finally, went limp.
The alien creature made a series of clicking, guttural sounds as he lifted Agent Keyes body up. A few seconds later, their bodies became translucent and then faded entirely from view. The ship jumped forwards, far out of view, and I found myself alone.
As I crawled out from under the car, I saw the first police lights in the distance. The shrill sirens rang out across the silent desert like the wailing of a banshee.
***
Once they found blood all over the area and the bodies of Donny and the unnamed agent, the police immediately arrested me for suspicion of first-degree murder. They claimed I was some kind of spree killer who went berserk. I told them to check Donny’s identity and they’d see my entire story was true, that the executions were staged, but they refused. In the trial, they claimed he was a “John Doe,” likely some unidentified hitchhiker or homeless person.
Now I’m on death row. I had my lawyer post online this to warn other people. I want someone to hear my story.
Because I know that, after they fake my death, I will disappear- and then a much more horrifying death will come. I will see our creators, the Primes, and maybe they will use me as a subject for some nightmarish experiment.
The executions in the USA are staged, but I think by the time the Primes finish with me, I will wish they were real.

Some people will dismiss me as a conspiracy theorist or a crackpot. Hell, if someone had told me a few months ago that all the executions in the United States are staged, I would have laughed in their face.
That is, until I awoke a few nights ago to a frenzied pounding on my door, and my entire world got turned upside-down.
***
For the last few years, I’ve had a recurring nightmare at least a few times a week- a nightmare where I kept having to travel down a rickety, dilapidated hallway in different bodies. I would be an old woman, then a little girl, then a middle-aged man, and so on. I kept taking different bodies, first dozens and then hundreds of them.
I couldn’t ever remember what happened when I got to the end of the hallway and pushed open the black, rotted door that waited there like some giant, grasping hand ready to pull me into Hell. There would be a terrible roar, a cacophony of screaming. The earth would tremble. Then I would find myself back at the front of the house, reborn. The dream would start over again.
All around me, I would see the bodies I had temporarily occupied piled up with their throats slashed. In a new body, I would be forced to go down the hallway yet again and meet whatever ineffable horror awaited at the end- a horror so terrible that I could never remember or comprehend it.
“Help me! God, please, help me, take me out of this Hell…” I cried in my dream, feeling as I rose up into white light at the end, yet still screaming in both my nightmare and in real life. There was a hard smash against the front door of my cabin. I jumped up in bed, sweating heavily. For a long moment, I thought I was still in the nightmare. I looked around my small, dim bedroom, expecting to see bodies stacked one on another like pieces of cordwood.
“They’re right behind me! Please, for the love of God!” The voice that had awakened me erupted into nonsense and wracking sobs.
Fully awake now, I jumped up and turned on the lights. The cabin I lived in was cramped and only meant for one person. It had a bedroom, a joint kitchen-living room, and a bathroom. No one lived within two miles of me in any direction. I had moved to the Texas desert for the privacy, after all. I didn’t really like people that much.
I ripped open the door and found a disheveled man standing there in bright orange coveralls. He had rivulets of blood streaming from what looked like a bullet hole in his shoulder. His gray, faded eyes were wide and filled with panicked tears. He had a face like a tired bulldog. All of the hair on his head had been shaved off except for his eyebrows and eyelashes. His white scalp gleamed like a freshly-polished bowling ball.
He stumbled past me, pushing me aside and slamming the door shut. The house shook with the force of it. I realized that he towered over me, and I wasn’t exactly short. The man must have been nearly seven feet tall.
“Oh, thank God,” he said, still weeping. He fell to his knees, grabbing my shirt in supplication, wringing the cloth between his large, callused hands. A sense of panic rose through my chest. I wondered if I had inadvertently just let in a lunatic or a killer. I looked at his clothes closer. Stamped on the back in large, black letters, I saw the acronym “TDCJ”. My heart turned into a block of ice as I recognized a prison uniform.
“Hey there, stay back…” I said in a trembling voice, backpedaling quickly from the kneeling man. I thought of my shotgun in the other room. Mentally, I kicked myself for not grabbing it.
“It’s not like that, man, really,” he said, showing me his empty hands. “I’m supposed to be dead. They officially executed me last night. Look, you can check. Do you have a phone?” I reached for the phone in my pocket, deciding to dial the police. He jumped up and snatched it from my hands as quickly as a frog snatching a fly. I cried out in alarm, turning away to run back to the bedroom and lock myself inside. A large hand came down on my shoulder, squeezing it tightly within its iron grip.
“I’m not dangerous, friend,” he said. “I was falsely convicted, just like a lot of others. They put me on death row and supposedly executed me last night. Look.” He typed something on the phone quickly, pulling up a news article. Against my better judgment, I looked.
“Texas man executed by lethal injection for 2012 murder of his ex-girlfriend and her mother,” it read. I saw the man’s tired bulldog face looking back out at me from the phone screen. I froze, feeling very confused. I wondered if the man had somehow gotten a website to write up a fake news article, but why? Was this all some sort of prank?
I gingerly took the phone back. The man gave it up without a struggle. I read the article, seeing the man’s name: “Donald G.” I went back to Google and typed in his full name, finding dozens of other articles reporting his death by lethal injection, including some by international media outlets. I scratched my head.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “What is this? Why are you here?” The man looked nervously at the door.
“We don’t have a lot of time,” he responded in a raspy, tired voice. The bleeding from his shoulder had slowed to a trickle of dark, clotted blood. “Do you have a car?”
“Of course I have a car,” I said.
“Then, please, take me out of here, and I’ll tell you everything on the way.” I hesitated for a long moment. “Please, sir. I can guarantee you that you’ll never hear another tale like it.”
“Alright, but I’m taking my gun and my phone,” I said. “If you try anything, I’ll blow your fucking head off. Understood?” The man nodded, resigned, still checking outside the front window every few moments with a growing sense of panic. Sighing, I extended my hand. “And, by the way, my name’s Roger.”
“I’m Donny,” he said, giving me an exhausted smile.
***
We got in the car. I put the loaded shotgun between the driver’s door and my seat, propping it straight up. Donny got in the passenger seat, wincing. He grabbed at the bullet hole, breathing hard. His face turned chalk-white, and I thought he might vomit for a moment.
“I have some Aleve in here,” I said, reaching into the center console and handing him some pain relievers and a half-bottle of water. I noticed with dismay that he was bleeding on my seat. Those stains would not be coming out anytime soon. I sighed.
“Thanks,” he grunted, taking four of them in one go. He chugged the water as I turned on the old Ford sedan, pulling out onto the empty desert road. Donny continuously checked the rearview mirrors, but the road stayed deserted.
“I can’t tell you all of it, because that would take all night. I guess it all started when I got home late from work and got an unexpected call from my ex-girlfriend…”
***
I had dated Olivia for a few years. We had recently broken up, but we stayed on good terms. We still talked regularly and helped each other out. She was an accountant, you see, and I was a carpenter who owned my own business. So she would help me out with taxes or paperwork or whatever, and sometimes, I’d go over and help her when she or her mother needed to install some cabinets or bookshelves or anything.
She had called me the previous week saying something about seeing a strange craft flying over her house. She said it would stop in mid-air, as if a videotape had been paused. Then, in a blur, it would jump to the next point. It was high in the air, so she said she couldn’t see the design of it, but it sparkled with gold and silver hues. I had dismissed it as fanciful, assuring her it was probably just a military helicopter or a weather balloon or something.
I was just getting home from work, bone-tired, when my phone rang. I looked down, seeing it was Olivia. We had been broken up for a few months by that point, but we still talked at least once every couple weeks. It was strange to be getting a call at 11 PM, though. She never stayed up this late.
“Hey, what’s up?” I said. I heard her heavy breathing on the other end of the line.
“Donny, I think someone’s peeking in the windows,” she said. “I saw a face… watching me sleep. It was someone with a gasmask on.”
“Call the police then!” I said, my heart speeding up. “Why are you calling me?”
“I don’t want to make a fool of myself if it’s nothing,” she said. “Can you come over and check around the house for me?” I only lived about a three-minute drive from Olivia and her mother. Sighing, I agreed.
I got in the car, speeding over as fast as I could. When I pulled up in front of their quaint, one-story colonial, I saw the front door was wide open and all the lights were on. A sense of dread filled my chest.
I had my pistol with me, just in case. I turned off the safety and cocked it. I heard chaos inside, something being thrown and glass shattering. A woman’s scream shattered the rural Texas night. The crickets all went quiet as I sprinted into the house.
Instantly, I could smell the blood. That coppery, metallic smell that awakens something primal in the human heart. I knew it meant trouble. Waves of adrenaline smashed against the shore of my consciousness. Everything felt slowed down and unreal. My feet moved with their own mind. I walked forward, my breath seeming too loud, like a roaring cyclone in my ears.
I found Olivia and her mother in the kitchen, their throats cut from ear to ear. The blood-stained butcher knife that had done the deed in so little time lay discarded on the floor like a broken toy. I knelt down over Olivia, seeing her sightless eyes staring blankly up at the ceiling. I tried doing what little CPR I knew how while I called the police, but all I ended up doing was getting her blood all over me.
When the police came in with guns drawn and arrested me for murder, I tried protesting, saying that my cell phone’s GPS would show I wasn’t at the house and that I was the one who had called 911 in the first place. But none of that got entered into trial, and before I knew it, I was on death row and awaiting my final day.
I talked to a lot of other people in prison. Lots of people claim to be innocent, but something bothered me. It was the call I had gotten from Olivia the week before…
***
Headlights flashed far behind us. I noticed a black car speeding up. I heard the revving of its powerful engine.
“I think we’ve got company,” I said, thinking first that it was the police. I was absolutely enthralled by Donny’s story, and while I still had my doubts about the veracity of it, the fact that the news media was apparently lying about his execution added some weight to his account.
The car behind us accelerated fast and swerved into the wrong lane. It pulled up beside me, and that was when the sinking feeling started in my stomach. This wasn’t the police.
The dark, tinted window rolled slowly down. I tried speeding up and braking, but whatever I did, it kept pace directly next to me.
“Oh shit, it’s them,” Donny said. A moment later, the back window shattered. Glass exploded all over the back seat. I swerved, horrified. Looking over, I saw the end of a rifle sticking out the open window of the black sedan.
I gave the shotgun to Donny while I tried to keep swerving and speeding ahead of the madman next to me.
“Shoot them!” I screamed. “It’s loaded.” He didn’t hesitate. He rolled down his window and stuck his massive body out of the car. I heard the blasts of the Benelli Nova echoing off the roof as if a cannon had gone off. A burst of fire erupted from the rifle sticking out of the faceless black car keeping pace with us. I saw their window explode inwards at the same time that my car swerved crazily to the left as the front driver’s side tire blew apart.
The wheel spun under my hands. I felt the car start to spin, drifting over into the other lane. With a tortured shriek of rending metal, the front of my car smashed into the black sedan, sending it careening off the side of the road into a pile of boulders, each of them two or three tall. I saw Donny fly out of the window as the car spun, then I smashed my head on the steering wheel and felt the world going black. From far away, I heard a car’s engine giving tortured grinding sounds and loud ticking noises like some large mechanical heart with a fatal arrhythmia. I smelled transmission fluid and coolant. But I was too stunned to really comprehend what was happening.
I inhaled deeply, and my vision came back slightly. Blood streamed from my nose and a gash across my forehead. I felt like I was looking through a tunnel, the bright colors of reality blurring around the edges.
I don’t know how long I sat there, hyperventilating and bleeding all over the steering wheel. Finally, I ripped off my seatbelt, stumbling out into the dark night.
On the side of the road, I saw Donny’s mangled body. He was still breathing, choking on his own blood. It bubbled and frothed from his blue lips as he twitched and blinked rapidly, his hands clenching and unclenching, the knuckles white. His fingernails had begun to turn cyanotic and pale as a puddle of blood spread out from under his crushed body. His right leg looked totally shattered, and I saw pieces of sharp bone poking out through the skin. Laying a few feet away, I found my little 12-gauge Nova; a little scraped up, but still in fine working order. Benelli has always been a solid company, and their guns hold up well under stress.
Looking at Donny made me feel sick to my stomach. I didn’t even know the man, but no one deserved this. And, to be honest, my gut had told me he was telling the truth when he told me his story. I hadn’t noticed an ounce of deception in him.
I picked up the shotgun, slamming another slug in the chamber as I walked over toward the black sedan, wondering what kind of human monsters I would find contained within.
***
I looked in the shattered passenger’s side window under the dim moonlight streaming down from the cloudless sky. I could tell the passenger was dead as soon as I saw him. He had an exit wound the size of an orange on the left side of his skull. He had on a black suit and a tie with a clean-shaven face and a crewcut. An AR-15 lay on his lap. I could see clear through his brains into the rest of the car beyond. It was a sickening and gruesome sight.
The driver was still alive, however. He was dressed similarly to the gunman. He had light olive-skin and dark eyes. His high cheekbones gave his face a narrow, gaunt aspect.
I reached through the shattered passenger’s side window and grabbed the rifle, throwing it on the road. Slowly and carefully, I circled around the car, keeping the shotgun raised. I got to the driver’s side and found the window still intact, though a slug had ripped through the door and left a bullet hole the size of a quarter in the thick metal.
I tried the door but found it locked. Without hesitation, I used the butt end of the shotgun to smash through the driver’s side window. Safety glass rained down onto the still body of the driver. I saw his eyes blinking fast, but he looked stunned and confused. A soft moaning came from his lips. A deep gash ran across his forehead, causing blood to trickle down and stain his undoubtedly expensive clothes. His right eye had begun to swell and change colors already, giving him a slant-eyed, winking appearance. The driver’s side airbag had deployed during the crash and his face had clearly hit at a high velocity. It looked like he might have been coming out of a full-blown concussion.
“Get the fuck out of the car,” I screamed at him, shoving the barrel of the shotgun hard against the front of his forehead. “And put your hands up. If you make any move, then I guarantee you, we will both see what color your brains are.” I gave him a grim, sadistic smile. He raised his trembling hands in the air, his knuckles white with inner tension. I saw the lump of what looked like a pistol holstered under his jacket. I watched him closely, daring him to make a move. “Get out and keep your hands as high above your head as they’ll go. If they drop an inch, I will shoot you. Do you believe me?”
“Yes,” he answered in a flat, dead voice.
“Good,” I said. “Because I am telling you the truth, I promise you that. Now open the door and get out- slowly. Very, very slowly.” After spitting blood and pieces of what looked like teeth onto the airbag and floor of the destroyed car, he pulled open the door and practically fell out of it. He caught himself at the last moment, hanging onto the top of the door and breathing heavily. His right eye was totally covered in fresh, gleaming blood, and I doubted if he could see much out of it.
“Get down on the ground and put your hands behind your back,” I said in an icy tone. With a look of pure hatred from his dark eyes, he lay down on the desert sand. I took off my belt and wrapped it around his wrists, binding them tightly. Then I reached into his coat and pulled out a pistol.
“A .45,” I said, examining it. “Nice gun.”
“It’s my work gun,” he said, giving me a predatory smile. “At home, I wouldn’t use such a small caliber. Especially on scumbags like you and your friend.” I shrugged.
“He wasn’t actually my friend, just a total stranger who came to my house in the middle of the night. And, like the good Samaritan I am, I helped him.”
“You’re violating federal law by doing this,” he spat at me. “You’ll go to prison for the rest of your life.”
“Are you guys going to frame me like you did to Donny?” I asked. “And then fake my execution too?” The agent went pale, the scowl on his face deepening.
“I don’t know what kind of conspiracy theorist bullshit you’ve been swallowing, friend, but everything you’re saying sounds insane. I am a federal agent. You can check my pockets for my badge.”
“I don’t give a shit what you are,” I said. “As it stands, it looks like I have all the power and guns- and it looks like you have nothing. So what I want from you is the truth. You can tell me, or I can beat it out of you.”
I still felt sickened by what had happened to Donny and his sudden death. I was not in a forgiving mood. And, to be honest, violence never really bothered me much, even as a kid when I got into fights. A large part of it enjoys the thrill of it, the rush of beating a man into unconsciousness and hearing his nose crack under your fist. The man hesitated, wincing like a beaten dog.
“Please, I really don’t know what you’re…” he began to say. Without hesitation, I brought my steel-toe boot back and kicked him in the ribs. I heard a few of them crack under the blow with a sound like snapping twigs. He screamed as more blood filled his mouth. He rolled onto his stomach, his eyes wide and wild like a panicked animal in a cage. It took him a little while to calm down, but when he did, I knelt close to his face and whispered.
“What I want from you,” I repeated slowly, “is the truth.” Still spitting blood, his face looking like a package of raw hamburger, he nodded. I rolled him over so that he was sitting on the ground, his legs splayed out in front of him. “Why don’t you start by telling me your name?”
***
“I’m Agent Keyes, and…, well, the truth is rather complicated,” he said, his voice sounding nasally and strained through all of his injuries. I could tell it hurt him to breathe. “But I guess it boils down to this: Donny’s girl and her mother saw something that they weren’t supposed to. Our surveillance picked up the craft and cameras from the streets showed that those two were outside when it went overhead. Then we started listening to their calls, heard her telling Donny about it, and our Director insisted that we had to tie up the loose ends.”
“Why does it matter so much that she saw the craft?” I asked.
“She not only saw the craft,” he said, “she took a video of it on her phone. She didn’t tell Donny about that, but we were able to see it. You see, the craft isn’t just some top-secret government plane or anything. It is a legitimate extraterrestrial craft, one being flown by the species that created humanity originally through genetic engineering. We usually call them the ‘Primes’, after the notion of a prime mover.” I laughed at that.
“That’s the craziest goddamn shit I’ve ever heard,” I said.
“Well, it gets a lot crazier. Because your friend there is right. The United States doesn’t actually execute anyone. It’s all fake. It’s easy with lethal injection, because the medical staff can just put opiates or sedatives in the line. Then, when the person is unconscious, we have a doctor go in, pretend to check his vitals and certify the person dead.
“Hell, back when my dad worked for the Agency, they had to fake electric chair executions with smoke and pyrotechnics. They’d drug the person beforehand, so that they would pass out and lose consciousness during the staged execution. To get them to shake and stutter, the medical staff would use a low, non-lethal dose of electricity.” I stared at him, waiting for the punchline.
“Why?” I asked. “Who would go through all that trouble?” He shrugged.
“Well, that brings us to the interesting part,” Agent Keyes said, his one good eye sparkling with something strange and repulsive under the surface. The other had swelled into a slit of purple bruises, and I doubted whether he could see anything out of that eye. He still winced every time he breathed in too hard, probably from his cracked ribs.
“The Primes demand sacrifices from every major government in the world.” Agent Keyes continued. We don’t know exactly what they’re doing with these subjects, though I doubt if it’s anything good. Perhaps they are using them as guinea pigs for genetic engineering experiments. Maybe the Primes just cut their throats and eat their flesh raw. Personally, I…” I heard a strange buzzing from the sky, like the sound a high-voltage power line might make. Off in the distance, I saw something flashing across the sky, hues of silver and gold gleaming off the side of the sleek alien ship.
It had no wings that I could see. It formed a shape like a spear. Thin strands of gold and silver weaved together, forming a graceful, interweaving outer shell. A cold blue light radiated from the craft as it gave off its strange buzzing noise. A strange smell filled the desert, almost like ozone mixed with some kind of sweet, chemical odor. It moved in a strange, alien way, jumping forwards in a blur and then stopping suddenly in mid-air, floating there like a hummingbird.
Agent Keyes' words rang in my ears. A sense of panic filled my heart. Without hesitation, I ran towards my car. I knew I had no time to flee. I got down on my stomach, crawling underneath it, the warm pavement scraping my clothes and skin as I frantically pushed myself forward. Then I peered out, watching and waiting. About half a minute later, the buzzing became overwhelming as the ship stopped directly overhead. That horrendous sound seemed to vibrate my bones. I could feel my skull shaking.
A few seconds later, a shape materialized in front of Agent Keyes’s destroyed car. It had tentacles where its eyes should have been. They writhed like dozens of snakes, their thin, bone-white tendrils slithering in slow, disparate waves. Its body had a sleek, bloody look. Powerful muscles twitched and flexed under the skinless exterior. It towered over everything else in the area, standing nearly nine-feet-tall. Then the figure spoke in a harsh, low voice.
“You have not given your tribute,” it said coldly. “You have broken your agreement.”
“The man killed his guard and escaped,” Agent Keyes said, his hands still bound behind his back. He spat blood. “I tried to hunt him down, but…” He started to motion to my hiding spot with his head, apparently planning to try to give me to the aliens in Donny’s place. But the creature didn’t give him time to finish. He had some black canister in his hand and sprayed Agent Keyes in the face. Agent Keyes tried to protest, stuttering some incomprehensible jumble of sounds. Then he groaned as his eyes fluttered and, finally, went limp.
The alien creature made a series of clicking, guttural sounds as he lifted Agent Keyes body up. A few seconds later, their bodies became translucent and then faded entirely from view. The ship jumped forwards, far out of view, and I found myself alone.
As I crawled out from under the car, I saw the first police lights in the distance. The shrill sirens rang out across the silent desert like the wailing of a banshee.
***
Once they found blood all over the area and the bodies of Donny and the unnamed agent, the police immediately arrested me for suspicion of first-degree murder. They claimed I was some kind of spree killer who went berserk. I told them to check Donny’s identity and they’d see my entire story was true, that the executions were staged, but they refused. In the trial, they claimed he was a “John Doe,” likely some unidentified hitchhiker or homeless person.
Now I’m on death row. I had my lawyer post online this to warn other people. I want someone to hear my story.
Because I know that, after they fake my death, I will disappear- and then a much more horrifying death will come. I will see our creators, the Primes, and maybe they will use me as a subject for some nightmarish experiment.
The executions in the USA are staged, but I think by the time the Primes finish with me, I will wish they were real.

Some people will dismiss me as a conspiracy theorist or a crackpot. Hell, if someone had told me a few months ago that all the executions in the United States are staged, I would have laughed in their face.
That is, until I awoke a few nights ago to a frenzied pounding on my door, and my entire world got turned upside-down.
***
For the last few years, I’ve had a recurring nightmare at least a few times a week- a nightmare where I kept having to travel down a rickety, dilapidated hallway in different bodies. I would be an old woman, then a little girl, then a middle-aged man, and so on. I kept taking different bodies, first dozens and then hundreds of them.
I couldn’t ever remember what happened when I got to the end of the hallway and pushed open the black, rotted door that waited there like some giant, grasping hand ready to pull me into Hell. There would be a terrible roar, a cacophony of screaming. The earth would tremble. Then I would find myself back at the front of the house, reborn. The dream would start over again.
All around me, I would see the bodies I had temporarily occupied piled up with their throats slashed. In a new body, I would be forced to go down the hallway yet again and meet whatever ineffable horror awaited at the end- a horror so terrible that I could never remember or comprehend it.
“Help me! God, please, help me, take me out of this Hell…” I cried in my dream, feeling as I rose up into white light at the end, yet still screaming in both my nightmare and in real life. There was a hard smash against the front door of my cabin. I jumped up in bed, sweating heavily. For a long moment, I thought I was still in the nightmare. I looked around my small, dim bedroom, expecting to see bodies stacked one on another like pieces of cordwood.
“They’re right behind me! Please, for the love of God!” The voice that had awakened me erupted into nonsense and wracking sobs.
Fully awake now, I jumped up and turned on the lights. The cabin I lived in was cramped and only meant for one person. It had a bedroom, a joint kitchen-living room, and a bathroom. No one lived within two miles of me in any direction. I had moved to the Texas desert for the privacy, after all. I didn’t really like people that much.
I ripped open the door and found a disheveled man standing there in bright orange coveralls. He had rivulets of blood streaming from what looked like a bullet hole in his shoulder. His gray, faded eyes were wide and filled with panicked tears. He had a face like a tired bulldog. All of the hair on his head had been shaved off except for his eyebrows and eyelashes. His white scalp gleamed like a freshly-polished bowling ball.
He stumbled past me, pushing me aside and slamming the door shut. The house shook with the force of it. I realized that he towered over me, and I wasn’t exactly short. The man must have been nearly seven feet tall.
“Oh, thank God,” he said, still weeping. He fell to his knees, grabbing my shirt in supplication, wringing the cloth between his large, callused hands. A sense of panic rose through my chest. I wondered if I had inadvertently just let in a lunatic or a killer. I looked at his clothes closer. Stamped on the back in large, black letters, I saw the acronym “TDCJ”. My heart turned into a block of ice as I recognized a prison uniform.
“Hey there, stay back…” I said in a trembling voice, backpedaling quickly from the kneeling man. I thought of my shotgun in the other room. Mentally, I kicked myself for not grabbing it.
“It’s not like that, man, really,” he said, showing me his empty hands. “I’m supposed to be dead. They officially executed me last night. Look, you can check. Do you have a phone?” I reached for the phone in my pocket, deciding to dial the police. He jumped up and snatched it from my hands as quickly as a frog snatching a fly. I cried out in alarm, turning away to run back to the bedroom and lock myself inside. A large hand came down on my shoulder, squeezing it tightly within its iron grip.
“I’m not dangerous, friend,” he said. “I was falsely convicted, just like a lot of others. They put me on death row and supposedly executed me last night. Look.” He typed something on the phone quickly, pulling up a news article. Against my better judgment, I looked.
“Texas man executed by lethal injection for 2012 murder of his ex-girlfriend and her mother,” it read. I saw the man’s tired bulldog face looking back out at me from the phone screen. I froze, feeling very confused. I wondered if the man had somehow gotten a website to write up a fake news article, but why? Was this all some sort of prank?
I gingerly took the phone back. The man gave it up without a struggle. I read the article, seeing the man’s name: “Donald G.” I went back to Google and typed in his full name, finding dozens of other articles reporting his death by lethal injection, including some by international media outlets. I scratched my head.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “What is this? Why are you here?” The man looked nervously at the door.
“We don’t have a lot of time,” he responded in a raspy, tired voice. The bleeding from his shoulder had slowed to a trickle of dark, clotted blood. “Do you have a car?”
“Of course I have a car,” I said.
“Then, please, take me out of here, and I’ll tell you everything on the way.” I hesitated for a long moment. “Please, sir. I can guarantee you that you’ll never hear another tale like it.”
“Alright, but I’m taking my gun and my phone,” I said. “If you try anything, I’ll blow your fucking head off. Understood?” The man nodded, resigned, still checking outside the front window every few moments with a growing sense of panic. Sighing, I extended my hand. “And, by the way, my name’s Roger.”
“I’m Donny,” he said, giving me an exhausted smile.
***
We got in the car. I put the loaded shotgun between the driver’s door and my seat, propping it straight up. Donny got in the passenger seat, wincing. He grabbed at the bullet hole, breathing hard. His face turned chalk-white, and I thought he might vomit for a moment.
“I have some Aleve in here,” I said, reaching into the center console and handing him some pain relievers and a half-bottle of water. I noticed with dismay that he was bleeding on my seat. Those stains would not be coming out anytime soon. I sighed.
“Thanks,” he grunted, taking four of them in one go. He chugged the water as I turned on the old Ford sedan, pulling out onto the empty desert road. Donny continuously checked the rearview mirrors, but the road stayed deserted.
“I can’t tell you all of it, because that would take all night. I guess it all started when I got home late from work and got an unexpected call from my ex-girlfriend…”
***
I had dated Olivia for a few years. We had recently broken up, but we stayed on good terms. We still talked regularly and helped each other out. She was an accountant, you see, and I was a carpenter who owned my own business. So she would help me out with taxes or paperwork or whatever, and sometimes, I’d go over and help her when she or her mother needed to install some cabinets or bookshelves or anything.
She had called me the previous week saying something about seeing a strange craft flying over her house. She said it would stop in mid-air, as if a videotape had been paused. Then, in a blur, it would jump to the next point. It was high in the air, so she said she couldn’t see the design of it, but it sparkled with gold and silver hues. I had dismissed it as fanciful, assuring her it was probably just a military helicopter or a weather balloon or something.
I was just getting home from work, bone-tired, when my phone rang. I looked down, seeing it was Olivia. We had been broken up for a few months by that point, but we still talked at least once every couple weeks. It was strange to be getting a call at 11 PM, though. She never stayed up this late.
“Hey, what’s up?” I said. I heard her heavy breathing on the other end of the line.
“Donny, I think someone’s peeking in the windows,” she said. “I saw a face… watching me sleep. It was someone with a gasmask on.”
“Call the police then!” I said, my heart speeding up. “Why are you calling me?”
“I don’t want to make a fool of myself if it’s nothing,” she said. “Can you come over and check around the house for me?” I only lived about a three-minute drive from Olivia and her mother. Sighing, I agreed.
I got in the car, speeding over as fast as I could. When I pulled up in front of their quaint, one-story colonial, I saw the front door was wide open and all the lights were on. A sense of dread filled my chest.
I had my pistol with me, just in case. I turned off the safety and cocked it. I heard chaos inside, something being thrown and glass shattering. A woman’s scream shattered the rural Texas night. The crickets all went quiet as I sprinted into the house.
Instantly, I could smell the blood. That coppery, metallic smell that awakens something primal in the human heart. I knew it meant trouble. Waves of adrenaline smashed against the shore of my consciousness. Everything felt slowed down and unreal. My feet moved with their own mind. I walked forward, my breath seeming too loud, like a roaring cyclone in my ears.
I found Olivia and her mother in the kitchen, their throats cut from ear to ear. The blood-stained butcher knife that had done the deed in so little time lay discarded on the floor like a broken toy. I knelt down over Olivia, seeing her sightless eyes staring blankly up at the ceiling. I tried doing what little CPR I knew how while I called the police, but all I ended up doing was getting her blood all over me.
When the police came in with guns drawn and arrested me for murder, I tried protesting, saying that my cell phone’s GPS would show I wasn’t at the house and that I was the one who had called 911 in the first place. But none of that got entered into trial, and before I knew it, I was on death row and awaiting my final day.
I talked to a lot of other people in prison. Lots of people claim to be innocent, but something bothered me. It was the call I had gotten from Olivia the week before…
***
Headlights flashed far behind us. I noticed a black car speeding up. I heard the revving of its powerful engine.
“I think we’ve got company,” I said, thinking first that it was the police. I was absolutely enthralled by Donny’s story, and while I still had my doubts about the veracity of it, the fact that the news media was apparently lying about his execution added some weight to his account.
The car behind us accelerated fast and swerved into the wrong lane. It pulled up beside me, and that was when the sinking feeling started in my stomach. This wasn’t the police.
The dark, tinted window rolled slowly down. I tried speeding up and braking, but whatever I did, it kept pace directly next to me.
“Oh shit, it’s them,” Donny said. A moment later, the back window shattered. Glass exploded all over the back seat. I swerved, horrified. Looking over, I saw the end of a rifle sticking out the open window of the black sedan.
I gave the shotgun to Donny while I tried to keep swerving and speeding ahead of the madman next to me.
“Shoot them!” I screamed. “It’s loaded.” He didn’t hesitate. He rolled down his window and stuck his massive body out of the car. I heard the blasts of the Benelli Nova echoing off the roof as if a cannon had gone off. A burst of fire erupted from the rifle sticking out of the faceless black car keeping pace with us. I saw their window explode inwards at the same time that my car swerved crazily to the left as the front driver’s side tire blew apart.
The wheel spun under my hands. I felt the car start to spin, drifting over into the other lane. With a tortured shriek of rending metal, the front of my car smashed into the black sedan, sending it careening off the side of the road into a pile of boulders, each of them two or three tall. I saw Donny fly out of the window as the car spun, then I smashed my head on the steering wheel and felt the world going black. From far away, I heard a car’s engine giving tortured grinding sounds and loud ticking noises like some large mechanical heart with a fatal arrhythmia. I smelled transmission fluid and coolant. But I was too stunned to really comprehend what was happening.
I inhaled deeply, and my vision came back slightly. Blood streamed from my nose and a gash across my forehead. I felt like I was looking through a tunnel, the bright colors of reality blurring around the edges.
I don’t know how long I sat there, hyperventilating and bleeding all over the steering wheel. Finally, I ripped off my seatbelt, stumbling out into the dark night.
On the side of the road, I saw Donny’s mangled body. He was still breathing, choking on his own blood. It bubbled and frothed from his blue lips as he twitched and blinked rapidly, his hands clenching and unclenching, the knuckles white. His fingernails had begun to turn cyanotic and pale as a puddle of blood spread out from under his crushed body. His right leg looked totally shattered, and I saw pieces of sharp bone poking out through the skin. Laying a few feet away, I found my little 12-gauge Nova; a little scraped up, but still in fine working order. Benelli has always been a solid company, and their guns hold up well under stress.
Looking at Donny made me feel sick to my stomach. I didn’t even know the man, but no one deserved this. And, to be honest, my gut had told me he was telling the truth when he told me his story. I hadn’t noticed an ounce of deception in him.
I picked up the shotgun, slamming another slug in the chamber as I walked over toward the black sedan, wondering what kind of human monsters I would find contained within.
***
I looked in the shattered passenger’s side window under the dim moonlight streaming down from the cloudless sky. I could tell the passenger was dead as soon as I saw him. He had an exit wound the size of an orange on the left side of his skull. He had on a black suit and a tie with a clean-shaven face and a crewcut. An AR-15 lay on his lap. I could see clear through his brains into the rest of the car beyond. It was a sickening and gruesome sight.
The driver was still alive, however. He was dressed similarly to the gunman. He had light olive-skin and dark eyes. His high cheekbones gave his face a narrow, gaunt aspect.
I reached through the shattered passenger’s side window and grabbed the rifle, throwing it on the road. Slowly and carefully, I circled around the car, keeping the shotgun raised. I got to the driver’s side and found the window still intact, though a slug had ripped through the door and left a bullet hole the size of a quarter in the thick metal.
I tried the door but found it locked. Without hesitation, I used the butt end of the shotgun to smash through the driver’s side window. Safety glass rained down onto the still body of the driver. I saw his eyes blinking fast, but he looked stunned and confused. A soft moaning came from his lips. A deep gash ran across his forehead, causing blood to trickle down and stain his undoubtedly expensive clothes. His right eye had begun to swell and change colors already, giving him a slant-eyed, winking appearance. The driver’s side airbag had deployed during the crash and his face had clearly hit at a high velocity. It looked like he might have been coming out of a full-blown concussion.
“Get the fuck out of the car,” I screamed at him, shoving the barrel of the shotgun hard against the front of his forehead. “And put your hands up. If you make any move, then I guarantee you, we will both see what color your brains are.” I gave him a grim, sadistic smile. He raised his trembling hands in the air, his knuckles white with inner tension. I saw the lump of what looked like a pistol holstered under his jacket. I watched him closely, daring him to make a move. “Get out and keep your hands as high above your head as they’ll go. If they drop an inch, I will shoot you. Do you believe me?”
“Yes,” he answered in a flat, dead voice.
“Good,” I said. “Because I am telling you the truth, I promise you that. Now open the door and get out- slowly. Very, very slowly.” After spitting blood and pieces of what looked like teeth onto the airbag and floor of the destroyed car, he pulled open the door and practically fell out of it. He caught himself at the last moment, hanging onto the top of the door and breathing heavily. His right eye was totally covered in fresh, gleaming blood, and I doubted if he could see much out of it.
“Get down on the ground and put your hands behind your back,” I said in an icy tone. With a look of pure hatred from his dark eyes, he lay down on the desert sand. I took off my belt and wrapped it around his wrists, binding them tightly. Then I reached into his coat and pulled out a pistol.
“A .45,” I said, examining it. “Nice gun.”
“It’s my work gun,” he said, giving me a predatory smile. “At home, I wouldn’t use such a small caliber. Especially on scumbags like you and your friend.” I shrugged.
“He wasn’t actually my friend, just a total stranger who came to my house in the middle of the night. And, like the good Samaritan I am, I helped him.”
“You’re violating federal law by doing this,” he spat at me. “You’ll go to prison for the rest of your life.”
“Are you guys going to frame me like you did to Donny?” I asked. “And then fake my execution too?” The agent went pale, the scowl on his face deepening.
“I don’t know what kind of conspiracy theorist bullshit you’ve been swallowing, friend, but everything you’re saying sounds insane. I am a federal agent. You can check my pockets for my badge.”
“I don’t give a shit what you are,” I said. “As it stands, it looks like I have all the power and guns- and it looks like you have nothing. So what I want from you is the truth. You can tell me, or I can beat it out of you.”
I still felt sickened by what had happened to Donny and his sudden death. I was not in a forgiving mood. And, to be honest, violence never really bothered me much, even as a kid when I got into fights. A large part of it enjoys the thrill of it, the rush of beating a man into unconsciousness and hearing his nose crack under your fist. The man hesitated, wincing like a beaten dog.
“Please, I really don’t know what you’re…” he began to say. Without hesitation, I brought my steel-toe boot back and kicked him in the ribs. I heard a few of them crack under the blow with a sound like snapping twigs. He screamed as more blood filled his mouth. He rolled onto his stomach, his eyes wide and wild like a panicked animal in a cage. It took him a little while to calm down, but when he did, I knelt close to his face and whispered.
“What I want from you,” I repeated slowly, “is the truth.” Still spitting blood, his face looking like a package of raw hamburger, he nodded. I rolled him over so that he was sitting on the ground, his legs splayed out in front of him. “Why don’t you start by telling me your name?”
***
“I’m Agent Keyes, and…, well, the truth is rather complicated,” he said, his voice sounding nasally and strained through all of his injuries. I could tell it hurt him to breathe. “But I guess it boils down to this: Donny’s girl and her mother saw something that they weren’t supposed to. Our surveillance picked up the craft and cameras from the streets showed that those two were outside when it went overhead. Then we started listening to their calls, heard her telling Donny about it, and our Director insisted that we had to tie up the loose ends.”
“Why does it matter so much that she saw the craft?” I asked.
“She not only saw the craft,” he said, “she took a video of it on her phone. She didn’t tell Donny about that, but we were able to see it. You see, the craft isn’t just some top-secret government plane or anything. It is a legitimate extraterrestrial craft, one being flown by the species that created humanity originally through genetic engineering. We usually call them the ‘Primes’, after the notion of a prime mover.” I laughed at that.
“That’s the craziest goddamn shit I’ve ever heard,” I said.
“Well, it gets a lot crazier. Because your friend there is right. The United States doesn’t actually execute anyone. It’s all fake. It’s easy with lethal injection, because the medical staff can just put opiates or sedatives in the line. Then, when the person is unconscious, we have a doctor go in, pretend to check his vitals and certify the person dead.
“Hell, back when my dad worked for the Agency, they had to fake electric chair executions with smoke and pyrotechnics. They’d drug the person beforehand, so that they would pass out and lose consciousness during the staged execution. To get them to shake and stutter, the medical staff would use a low, non-lethal dose of electricity.” I stared at him, waiting for the punchline.
“Why?” I asked. “Who would go through all that trouble?” He shrugged.
“Well, that brings us to the interesting part,” Agent Keyes said, his one good eye sparkling with something strange and repulsive under the surface. The other had swelled into a slit of purple bruises, and I doubted whether he could see anything out of that eye. He still winced every time he breathed in too hard, probably from his cracked ribs.
“The Primes demand sacrifices from every major government in the world.” Agent Keyes continued. We don’t know exactly what they’re doing with these subjects, though I doubt if it’s anything good. Perhaps they are using them as guinea pigs for genetic engineering experiments. Maybe the Primes just cut their throats and eat their flesh raw. Personally, I…” I heard a strange buzzing from the sky, like the sound a high-voltage power line might make. Off in the distance, I saw something flashing across the sky, hues of silver and gold gleaming off the side of the sleek alien ship.
It had no wings that I could see. It formed a shape like a spear. Thin strands of gold and silver weaved together, forming a graceful, interweaving outer shell. A cold blue light radiated from the craft as it gave off its strange buzzing noise. A strange smell filled the desert, almost like ozone mixed with some kind of sweet, chemical odor. It moved in a strange, alien way, jumping forwards in a blur and then stopping suddenly in mid-air, floating there like a hummingbird.
Agent Keyes' words rang in my ears. A sense of panic filled my heart. Without hesitation, I ran towards my car. I knew I had no time to flee. I got down on my stomach, crawling underneath it, the warm pavement scraping my clothes and skin as I frantically pushed myself forward. Then I peered out, watching and waiting. About half a minute later, the buzzing became overwhelming as the ship stopped directly overhead. That horrendous sound seemed to vibrate my bones. I could feel my skull shaking.
A few seconds later, a shape materialized in front of Agent Keyes’s destroyed car. It had tentacles where its eyes should have been. They writhed like dozens of snakes, their thin, bone-white tendrils slithering in slow, disparate waves. Its body had a sleek, bloody look. Powerful muscles twitched and flexed under the skinless exterior. It towered over everything else in the area, standing nearly nine-feet-tall. Then the figure spoke in a harsh, low voice.
“You have not given your tribute,” it said coldly. “You have broken your agreement.”
“The man killed his guard and escaped,” Agent Keyes said, his hands still bound behind his back. He spat blood. “I tried to hunt him down, but…” He started to motion to my hiding spot with his head, apparently planning to try to give me to the aliens in Donny’s place. But the creature didn’t give him time to finish. He had some black canister in his hand and sprayed Agent Keyes in the face. Agent Keyes tried to protest, stuttering some incomprehensible jumble of sounds. Then he groaned as his eyes fluttered and, finally, went limp.
The alien creature made a series of clicking, guttural sounds as he lifted Agent Keyes body up. A few seconds later, their bodies became translucent and then faded entirely from view. The ship jumped forwards, far out of view, and I found myself alone.
As I crawled out from under the car, I saw the first police lights in the distance. The shrill sirens rang out across the silent desert like the wailing of a banshee.
***
Once they found blood all over the area and the bodies of Donny and the unnamed agent, the police immediately arrested me for suspicion of first-degree murder. They claimed I was some kind of spree killer who went berserk. I told them to check Donny’s identity and they’d see my entire story was true, that the executions were staged, but they refused. In the trial, they claimed he was a “John Doe,” likely some unidentified hitchhiker or homeless person.
Now I’m on death row. I had my lawyer post online this to warn other people. I want someone to hear my story.
Because I know that, after they fake my death, I will disappear- and then a much more horrifying death will come. I will see our creators, the Primes, and maybe they will use me as a subject for some nightmarish experiment.
The executions in the USA are staged, but I think by the time the Primes finish with me, I will wish they were real.

EDIT: Thank you for all of the helpful suggestions and recommendations. I attempted to respond to as many as possible last night and this morning. It appears that comments are now locked, as of this morning. I will continue to read through the outstanding comments and include additional resources in my planning. I am grateful for the thoughtful responses, which will hopefully make this short transition period more successful.
Regards,
I am a mother of two, with two dogs, who will soon be living in a car. Aside from camping for the occassional weekend, we truly do not have experience with this. Although I prefer not to divulge too many triggering personal details, I have been in an abusive relationship for approximately 8 years. During this time, I have not been permitted to work, nor do I have a support circle of friends or family. I have attempted to leave several times over the years, drafting agreements with lawyers which are not adhered to, and contacting various VAW shelters which have remained perpetually over crowded. Contacting various community supports has not been fruitful, as we are still "currently housed", and my fear of seeking any supporting police reports or documents has limited the scope of support I receive to "safety planning".
I would like to proceed through the courts to obtain full custody of my youngest child (I have full custody of my eldest), child support, and potentially spousal support. My lawyers expressed extreme concern with filing the appropriate paperwork through the courts, following repeated attempts at mediation, due to safety concerns while residing at our primary residence.
I have exhausted all avenues available to me, to no avail. I have come to the conclusion that I must take my children on an "extended camping trip" for the summer to safely file the appropriate documents through the courts, pursue employment, etc. I have also been told that being physically homeless will make supports more accessible. I have obtained a valuable license through online classes, have a prior certification, have volunteer experience, and have drafted an updated resume. This is as far as I have been able to proceed regarding employment due to my situation. I do not have any mental or physical barriers, and the only issue I forsee upon removing myself from this environment, will be childcare before and after school. EDIT TO NOTE: In terms of before and after school care, my eldest has agreed to take an online babysitting course, in the event of an emergency, to help with the youngest if there are small discrepancies in pick up and drop off times.
I would appreciate some insights about preparation and safety during this time, which I hope will only last 1-3 months, while initiating and awaiting an emergency ruling. Thus far, my plan is as follows: * Move our clothes, books, small kitchen appliances, toys and electronics, valuables, etc into a small storage unit with flexible access (will pack and transport myself, hopefully using the vehicle without need for a truck rental). I will also contact shelter movers through outreach programs to see if there is any support they can offer, which I have been told is only available after we leave our residence. * Sell as much of our furniture as feasible in a short time * Stock the car with necessities, organized in bins, and rotate through items weekly visiting the storage unit * Spend ample time at beaches, libraries, community centres, and parks to occupy the children and pets * Apply for subsidized housing * Actively seek employment in the field of my license or certificate (which I prefer not to disclose due to the detriment this situation may have on my future reputation). I will also be exploring lawncare, house keeping, remote etc (focusing on flexible hours)
Financially: * I will soon be coming into approximately 10k, which makes this one of the only times I might have a chance of leaving successfully. It also makes me ineligible for social supports such as OW. Ideally, I will not be spending this money upon receipt, so that it may be applied to housing and employment in the future. * I do have access to a bit of credit I have established over the years. I would like to avoid using it, however it is available for the overflow of the budget and emergencies. I am approaching the time where I may also request an increase of credit from the bank. My current score is 740. * I receive an amount of $1400 monthly as a child tax benefit credit, which is what will support the monthly budget for our "extended camping" trip. * I plan to purchase a used van under 10k, under 200,000km, with $1000 down. Estimates for several vehicles I have looked at range from $200 - $250 for monthly financing under these circumstances as per "Car Guru" * My remaining monthly budget will include (approximate): - $150 car insurance - $300 gas - $200 maintaining my professional license - $100 phone bills for my eldest and myself (child's phone is still under contract and plans are bundled together) - $120 storage unit (hoping that a smaller unit will suffice) - $25 laundry (I will hand wash smaller items using water from beaches or public taps to save money) - $50 hygiene and cleaning items - $120 pet food - $60 debt repayments - $250 food (utilizing food banks, community resources, coupon apps, etc)
I have started a list of necessities and organizational strategies for our "camping trip" which includes some items we have, and some which will need to be purchased using credit or the lump sum previously mentioned. I would very much like to keep the amount under $300. I will not include that list because this post has become quite long, but would absolutely appreciate any recommendations or suggestions.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. I am grateful for all responses and insights.

We used to go for my birthday in Late August but I'm now convinced Late April is a way better time to visit. Weather was practically perfect, mid 60s in the mornings and at night. Balmy 80's during the day. Some days were hot and hit 90degrees but outside of that we barely sweated and it didn’t rain at all the whole 7 days we were there. That alone would make this time of year top contender if you can swing it!
Even with runDisney going on the crowds we’re pretty moderate to slow. I really don’t think there’s a true slow season anymore at Disney, outside of random days here and there but this was very manageable for the most part.
Our strategy for my bf and I was to start strong and end strong and everything in the middle we kinda winged it. We’ve also been to Disney a few times together for a day or two with friends (I used to live in Florida, but now live in PA, and spoiler will be moving back to Fl this summer and even took one of the days to tour houses in Orlando area, I use to live in Orlando so I understand how diff it is living there then visiting Disney) I say this because we’ve done a lot of the big staple rides before (Space mountain, Everest, Rise, Safari) so if you don’t hear them mentioned we’ve probably done it. This trip was really to round out what Disney has to offer and say goodbye to some classic from my youth. Also shout out for EarScout YouTube for all the early entry and genie + strategy, helped a ton!!
Thursday - landed, checked into Drury, Disney springs to the ticket center to resolve some ticket issues, cast are great as usual! Only day at Drury because I wanted to see what all the fuzz was about, was not impressed with room or food (practically cafeteria food), but drink voucher and pool seemed pretty nice! Overall nice affordable early entry hotel for quick trips.
Friday - Hollywood Studios - Early entry plus Genie+ plus a surprisingly slow day made this day our most successful! We did Tower of Terror, Mickey Runaway Railroad, Smugglers Run and Toy Story Mania, all during early entry/rope drop hour. Then did all the shows and met all the characters, did Tower again and finally did Slinky Dog. We had originally planned to go to Hollywood studios twice but knocked it out in one day! Rise stayed between 50min to 80min for a good bit of the day so ya'll can gauge how slow it was, somehow Slinky Dog was also above 100min, yikes! Checked out of Drury, checked into Buena Vista Suites. Only day with early entry.
Saturday - Animal Kingdom - impromptu trip to Disney Springs again in the morning since we met up with some friends who were also in town. Got to Animal Kingdom around 3pm, mostly did Dinoland stuff like Dinosaur and the lil arcade games (RIP) and then we did Expedition Everest, the Lion King show and finished off with Its Tough to be a Bug (RIP)!
Sunday - EPCOT for runDisney at 3am, 10/10 recommend, tho maybe don’t start with a 10mile run as your first race 😅 my wave took off at 5:45am and we were eating breakfast at the hotel by 9:30am. Took a shower and much deserved nap and then headed to EPCOT around 3pm. Not gonna lie I probably shouldn’t have done that. The race itself was 30,000 steps and then we did another 10,000 going around the world showcase in shoes I hadn’t broken into and got bruises all around my feet. Explored all the countries, did China Far and Wide and Finished the night doing Soarin and Living with the Land.
Monday - Magic Kingdom in the afternoon right around parade time so we took the railroad to Frontierland, did Big Thunder, Tom Sayer Island and the caves(so underrated and rumors its going away?!), pirates, tiki room and Philharmonic. At this point it was painful to even walk so I had to call it quits which sucks because we could’ve done a lot more, the crowds were weirdly low.
Tuesday - EPCOT - Overslept my 7am alarm, so decided to do ILL for Guardians of the Galaxy, well worth the money! It was amazing, now I understand the hype! This day was deff the most disorganized, between festival booths I wanted to visit and zig zagging across the park for low wait times it just felt like we were all over the place. Did 3 caballeros, Test Track single rider (RIP), Figment and Nemo, after that we took the boat to other side of world showcase and watched the Great American Adventure and met Belle. Again my feet were still killing me and there’s no good place to sit and eat without advance reservation (poor planning on my part) so we left and ate outside the park for dinner.
Wednesday - Rope Dropped Magic Kingdom Adventureland! Accidentally signed up for GoG virtual queue instead of Tron at 7am and by the time I realized Tron had sold out, sigh Rookie Mistake. Did not feel like dropping $40dollars for a 70sec ride so we skipped it this time around. Rope dropped Jungle Cruise, Haunted Mansion, finished rope drop by doing the very coveted Hall of Presidents LOL Then did Tea Cups and headed to Tomorrow Land and did people mover and carousel or progress, we tried between both MK days to get on the Liberte Belle but always had bad timing! Left the parks around 1pm.
Thursday - Checked out of Buena Vista Hotels, 10/10 recommend for friend groups and families, it is NOT a resort so the amenities are a bit limited: pool was tiny, breakfast was good but the same every day, but there was free laundry! lol Headed to the aiport around 11am
And that was it! Overall really successful and I think the most we waited in any line was about 35min. It felt good saying goodbye to all my favs! And hopefully by the time I visit again Tron, GOG and Tiana are off Virtual Queue (a girl can dream!)🤞🏾
I'll make another post on some of my observations and pet peeves I saw during the week, but wanted to keep this as a trip report. We spent w/o flights about $4,200 for everything (rental, hotel, 1 annual pass, 1 7days pass) including everything we ate/spent once at the park. Honestly could've saved a lot of money if I had waited to buy ticket during the current promotion, and had opted out of park hopper since we never used it 🙃 I really believe with another 100 allotted per person for Genie+ILL you could have easily done everything in the park, if you wanted to go all out!

Before I get started, I quickly want to preface and say that this is a “what I would do mock”, not a “predictive mock”. Put shortly, I think predictive mocks are ultimately a waste of time since nobody, not even the “draft experts” can get it right. It’s like trying to predict every game of March Madness. But hey, if you like predictive mocks, I get it, just wanted to say that this is not one of those. For those of you who are still here, let’s get started.
Round 1, Pick 1 - Chicago Bears Caleb Williams - QB (USC) For a brief moment there after the Super Bowl the NFL media got bored and tried to question whether or not Caleb would go number 1 overall or not. I’m glad that phase has come and gone. Caleb is the easy number 1 overall pick here; the best QB prospect we’ve seen in a while goes to a team who needs a QB. Simple as that.
Round 1, Pick 2 - Washington Commanders Drake Maye - QB (UNC) I never thought this would be a highly-contested pick, but here we are. In my opinion, Drake Maye should be the clear number 2 QB off the board. He’s big, athletic, possesses great arm talent, and did everything you could’ve asked him to do in the pre-draft process. I believe the only reason this is even a question is because we are in what I like to call the “football overthink phase” of the NFL calendar - that time of the year in between the end of the Super Bowl and the first night of the draft where the media has nothing to talk about, so they have to make up content to keep up the revenue stream for these 2.5 months.That’s why I think we’re hearing all this Jayden Daniels talk at #2 overall. Maye has been the pick at this spot for about a year now, and I haven’t seen anything that should suggest that anything else should be different.
Round 1, Pick 3 - Minnesota Vikings (Trade with NE) Jayden Daniels - QB (LSU) And all of that is to say I still like Daniels as a QB prospect. There’s been a lot of rumors going around with what happens with this pick, but ultimately I chose Minnesota to trade up to here because 1: their trade with the Texans signals that they want to trade up for a QB and 2: NE has openly said they’d be willing to trade out of this pick, so this made a lot of sense. Now on to Daniels: he’s a good pocket passer with an admittedly average arm who can also run. Let me re-emphasize that: he can RUN, not SCRAMBLE. The biggest issue I have with Daniels is that when escapes the pocket, he’s not looking to extend the passing down, it’s an immediate tuck and run. Which is still valuable, but not as valuable as having the “play-making gene”. Regardless, I think O’Connell can do some nifty stuff with Daniels in the pocket and design some good runs for him. The fit works pretty well. (Important sidebar - if the Commanders actually does go with Daniels at 2, I’d stay at 3 and pick Maye if I were New England)
Round 1, Pick 4 - Arizona Cardinals Marvin Harrison Jr. - WR (OSU) We all know who MHJ is as a player and how talented he is (I think he’s one of the best prospects we’ve seen in the past 5 years regardless of position), so there’s not much to say on that end. What I will address is the notion that some have that Arizona should trade out of this pick to a team who’s desperate for a QB. The reason I have an issue with this is let’s not forget why you trade back to begin with - it’s to use that capital to actually pick good players. Arizona has already done plenty of trading back- to trade back over and over again without ever picking any players defeats the whole point of trading back. It would be like selling a sports car but not investing the proceeds into anything else. Arizona should stay put and draft the generational prospect.
Round 1, Pick 5 - Los Angeles Chargers Rome Odunze - WR (Washington) I know I’m probably the only person who has this take, so allow me to explain myself. I see Odunze and Nabers as two amazing prospects who I have similar grades on, but for very different reasons. They both excel at VERY different things. And given who’s picking here - the Harbaugh-led Chargers, I think Odunze makes more sense for the scheme and personnel. Herbert can dial up some AMAZING 1 on 1 balls for Odunze that he’ll come down with more often than not. Plus, and this might be one of my more scorching-hot takes - I think Quentin Johnston could still be an effective WR in the NFL if he was played out of the slot. After all, that’s how he won in college. Therefore, putting Odunze as the true X receiver in this specific offense makes a lot of sense to me.
Round 1, Pick 6 - New York Giants Malik Nabers - WR (LSU) And the city of New York rejoices! Look, whether it’s Odunze or Nabers here, the only way this doesn’t work well for the Giants is if they walk away from this draft with neither of these players. Nabers is an incredibly gifted WR. His separation ability is next to none, and he should provide a sign of life to a Giants offense that has been devoid of that for years now.
Round 1, Pick 7 - Tennessee Titans Joe Alt - OT (Notre Dame) This is one of the chalkiest picks in the draft, and I’m not gonna be the one to challenge the chalk here. Joe Alt is a blue-chip LT and the Titans OL is far and away the worst unit on this roster. Alt is the “Tim Duncan”, the “Mr. Fundamental” of OL play. What he does isn’t flashy, but man it’s effective and he wins often. Massive pickup for the Titans.
Round 1, Pick 8 - Atlanta Falcons Laiatu Latu - EDGE (UCLA) A lot of people wonder when the first defensive player will be picked in this draft, and I see no reason why it shouldn’t be to Atlanta. Latu is my favorite defensive prospect in this draft and does still fill a massive need for ATL. His only real knocks are that he’s an “average athlete” (not even a bad one! Major grasping at straws here) and that he’s got an injury history. But considering that the injuries haven’t been an issue for a long time for Latu, I’m not worried in the slightest about that. I also like him a little bit more than Dallas Turner, who’s a common pick at this spot, but more on that later.
Round 1, Pick 9 - Cincinnati Bengals Brock Bowers - TE (Georgia) This is where I start to have some fun. The way I see it, there’s nobody that Chicago ABSOLUTELY has to take, and given the uncertainty around the Tee Higgins situation combined with the Bengal’s existing lack of TE, this really starts to make some sense. The Bengals are a well-built team right now, and if they want to compete with Kansas City in the AFC, they need to make a win-now move or two. It’s almost a guarantee that Bowers will be gone if they wait around at 18, so if they want a big time talent, they need to make the big time move.
Round 1, Pick 10 - New York Jets Taliese Fuaga - OL (Oregon State) New York is in a weird spot right now. They have the OL to compete now, but ONLY when the tackles are healthy. They could certainly stand to upgrade one of the guard spots too. This is why Fuaga is the perfect fit for them. On my board, he’s the OL with the best tackle-guard versatility, so he can start at guard in the short term and transition to tackle as needed. If Bowers were here this would be the pick, but in this world where Cincy gets aggressive, the Jets can still get a good player in Fuaga.
Round 1, Pick 11 - New England Patriots (Trade with MIN) Olu Fashanu - OT (Penn State) On paper, the New England Patriots just might have the worst offense in the NFL. Rhamondre Stevenson is MAYBE an above average NFL back, but that’s about all they got going for them. That being said, they’re in a position where they need to just take the best offensive prospect on the board, and to me that’s Olu Fashanu. I am much higher on Fashanu than most. He has impeccable movement skills for a pass blocker, so he’s a plug and play immediately at the LT spot. I understand the concerns with the strength profile, but this dude is young and definitely has the frame to add a few more pounds of muscle. At the very worst he has the exact profile of a blind side protector. This doesn’t fix their QB issue immediately, but I’d rather not reach on a QB if I don’t have to. There’s still plenty of draft left.
Round 1, Pick 12 - Chicago Bears (Trade with DEN) Dallas Turner - EDGE (Alabama) Man, the Bears are having some FUN in this draft. Playing the ol’ slingshot move to trade back then up again to land a prospect you really like. And the Bears get the player many suspect they’d pick at 9 anyway. Plus, given the current state of the Broncos roster and lack of draft capital, they need all the picks they can get. This feels like a good time to talk about my thoughts on the EDGE class as a whole. I think the big 3 (Verse, Latu, and Turner) are all kind of in the same tier, and then after that there’s a noticeable drop off. And while I like Latu just a little bit more than the others, I would never blame a team for wanting to go with any of these players. With the Bears, however, I like the Turner fit because I think his skills as a pass rusher complement Sweat so well that it flows perfectly into the defense. I worry a little bit about Turner’s ability to be an every-down, reliable run defender (a concern I do not have with Latu or Verse), but with a little bit of scheme work that shouldn’t be a MAJOR issue.
Round 1, Pick 13 - Las Vegas Raiders Troy Fautanu - OL (Washington) The Raiders get a chance to capitalize on this elite offensive line class given that they spent so much of free agency addressing the defensive side of the trenches. The way I currently see their OL, you have Kolton Miller holding down the LT spot, and everyone else is replacement level at best. Fautanu can be the Raiders’ new RT, and if it really doesn’t work out there (which I doubt) then you just kick him into guard. Easy.
Time to address the elephant in the room. By now you’ve probably noticed that I’ve gone through picks 11-13 without selecting another QB, most notably JJ McCarthy. So here it goes - I am much lower on McCarthy than consensus. JJ is advertised as this super “toolsy” guy with elite processing skills, but I saw neither of those things from his Michigan tape. When I look at QB prospects (or any prospect, really), I want to know what you do specifically better than everybody else. So what does JJ do really well? Arm talent? Good not great. Accuracy? Fine. Athleticism? Nothing special. Playmaking? I saw zero of that at Michigan. Even game managin, perhaps? Not at Michigan, their “game manager” was their run game. So I just don’t see the vision with him, and (spoiler alert) he’s not in my first round. And I don’t think he’s inherently a bad prospect, he’s just fallen victim to the “we have nothing to talk about between the Super Bowl and the draft so we have to make up a storyline for engagement” game. I could rant about McCarthy for much longer, but I won’t. All in all, I have a 3rd round grade on him, and I really hope he can develop into a starting-caliber QB. But I think that’s less likely than most people think. Back to the mock.
Round 1, Pick 14 - New Orleans Saints Amarius Mims - OT (Georgia) The Saints have plenty of holes on the roster, but the most obvious are the two ginormous question marks at both tackle spots. Enter Mims. Yes, he doesn’t have much starting experience. Yes, he has an injury history. But man, oh man, if he hits, he HITS. I think the Saints truly can afford to take the swing on a prospect like Mims, since their roster just doesn’t have the guns to be in “win-now” mode.
Round 1, Pick 15 - Indianapolis Colts Quinyon Mitchell - CB (Toledo) I LOVE Quinyon Mitchell. I liked his tape at Toledo, which begs the obvious question - can he hold up against better talent? To put it simply, yes he can. Normally, I don’t put too much stock into pre-draft events like the Senior Bowl, but for a small school guy like Mitchell to completely take over the Senior Bowl is truly special. I especially like seeing CBs win at the Senior Bowl, because those one-on-one drills give the WR a massive advantage (same goes for DL in the pass-rushing one-on-ones vs OL). Mitchell has asked, and answered every question you could have about him. Send the card in.
Round 1, Pick 16 - Seattle Seahawks Jackson Powers-Johnson - C (Oregon) “Positional Value” can go to hell for this pick - when you have a prospect that’s this good that fills this major of a need, you SPRINT the card in. Powers-Johnson has all-pro potential at center, and perhaps at guard if that strikes your fancy. Fortunately, the Seahawks have needs all along the interior of their offensive line, so they can just rest on their laurels of making a phenomenal pick.
Round 1, Pick 17 - Philadelphia Eagles (trade with JAX) Nate Wiggins - CB (Clemson) Gettin’ fun with it again. The Eagles desperately need a corner and this is about the range where the corner run can start. If they don’t get in now, it might be too late. Nate Wiggins is my CB2 in this class - I’m in love with his coverage abilities, overall athleticism, and ability to stay sticky in man. The size and injury concerns are legitimate, but at this point I wouldn’t let that stop me from adding a good player at a position of need. Welcome to Philly.
Round 1, Pick 18 - Denver Broncos (Trade with CHI via CIN) Bo Nix - QB (Oregon) I’ve already given the McCarthy rant, so I’m gonna spend this time talking about Nix. To me, Bo Nix is incredibly scheme-dependent. I saw him struggle mightily at Auburn, where they relied too much on him to be the “hero” of the offense. But then he transfers to Oregon where he gets to play the point guard, facilitator role, and he puts up crazy numbers week in and week out. I think Bo Nix and Denver are a good fit. I think Sean Payton wants a guy who can play the Brock Purdy role, the “just put the ball in the right place at the right time, and for the love of God don’t turn it over” role. I don’t love Nix everywhere, but I do love him here, and this might be Denver’s only shot at Nix.
Round 1, Pick 19 - Los Angeles Rams Jer’Zhan (Johnny) Newton - DT (Illinois) Now that Aaron Donald is retired, I can confidently say that just about everyone on that Rams defense is replacement level, and therefore the Rams’ best course of action is to take the best defensive player available. As of now that’s Newton. He’s put up season after season of elite tape at Illinois, rushes the passer well, and has seen every run block scheme in the world coming from the B10 West. He’s a high-floor player that would make any defense better.
Round 1, Pick 20 - Pittsburgh Steelers Kool-Aid McKinstry - CB (Alabama) When it came time to make the pick for the Steelers, it came down to picking between OL, CB, and WR. I ultimately went with CB because I think the WOL they could get in the 2nd round will be way better than the CB they could get in the 2nd round (I see a pretty big drop off after CB5). McKinstry is a seasoned starter against some of the best competition CFB has to offer. He’s instinctual in coverage and can be your 2nd return man with the new kickoff rule. Tomlin is gonna love this guy.
Round 1, Pick 21 - Miami Dolphins Graham Barton - OL (Duke) This pick for me was between Barton and Byron Murphy (DT from Texas), but I ultimately went with Barton because, while Barton and Murphy both play positions of need, Miami in the past has found a lot of success in drafting around their offensive identity. I think Barton is the perfect OL for McDaniels’ zone scheme. He’s such a fluid mover and is smart enough to identify blitzes as a center in the NFL. Miami fortifies an existing strength with this pick.
Round 1, Pick 22 - Jacksonville Jaguars (Trade with PHI) Brian Thomas Jr. - WR (LSU) The Jags to me have had an infuriating off-season. They gave out star level contracts to league-average players (especially on the OL). But no matter how you spin it, they still need another WR. A lot of people think Thomas Jr. can be a WR1 at the next level, but I personally see him more of a WR1b/WR2. He’s athletic as all get out, but his game is missing the kind of polish that’s needed to be a true WR1. He can play the DK Metcalf role and be WR1b in Jacksonville, and find plenty of success doing it. No matter how you spin it, there’s a place for him in this league.
Round 1, Pick 23 - New England Patriots (Trade with MIN) Michael Penix Jr. - QB (Washington) Is this the Tom Brady replacement the Pats have been looking for? Penix definitely won’t be on that level, but I know I’m higher on this guy than consensus (I almost put him at QB3 above Daniels, but I just didn’t have the guts at the end of the day). He’s an absolute savant from the pocket, has actual elite arm talent, and has proven after two quality seasons of video game numbers at UW that his injury days are behind him. He moves around better than people think he does and is a full-field processor. In other words, he’s a true quarterback, not just a thrower of the football. I’d bet serious cash on his success in the league.
Round 1, Pick 24 - Dallas Cowboys Byron Murphy - DT (Texas) The Cowboys have a knack for taking BPA in the first round regardless of need, and it usually works well for them (save the Mazi Smith pick from last year). While OL is certainly a need, interior defensive line is a sneaky need too (the aforementioned Smith is currently listed as a projected starter). Murphy is an elite run stopper given his size and definitely has some pass-rushing chops. The boys would love to have the home-town kid on their team.
Round 1, Pick 25 - Green Bay Packers Cooper DeJean - DB (Iowa) Green Bay has a well-documented need for safety, and DeJean at his very worst can be that for them. At his best, he can be a true outside corner for whoever drafts him. My concern with him is that he’s billed to be this hybrid, do-it-all defensive back, but I’m worried that he might be a “jack of all trades, master of none”. Either way, the value is too good here at pick 25, and if there’s any team out there that can find a good spot for DeJean, it's Green Bay.
Round 1, Pick 26 - Tampa Bay Buccaneers Jared Verse - EDGE (Florida State) I like Verse as someone better than the 26th overall pick, but that’s just how the board falls sometimes. Verse is a great EDGE prospect that excels at converting speed to power to get after the QB. One of my favorite traits about EDGE players is when they’re big enough/good enough to hold up in the run, and of all the EDGE prospects at the top of this draft, I have the least concern for that with Verse. Impeccable value here for the Bucs.
Round 1, Pick 27 - Arizona Cardinals Terrion Arnold - CB (Alabama) No discredit to the Cardinals here, they’re in the middle of a rebuild, but man oh man does this roster need an injection of talent at almost every position. This is truly a “choose your flavor” pick here regarding which position to take, and I went with Arnold because I think there’s a pretty decent dropoff between him and the next CB that the Cardinals could pick. Arnold has high upside and excelled at ballhawking this year, lots and lots to like.
Round 1, Pick 28 - Buffalo Bills Adonai Mitchell - WR (Texas) Adonai Mitchell has all the tools to be a WR1 in this league. For him, it’s not a matter of “can he” but more a matter of “will he”. And of all places to go, the Bills will be the ultimate test of whether or not he will, because there aren’t a lot of alternatives for receiving targets there. Mitchell has the perfect chance to prove that he can be “the guy” in Buffalo - go show me what you got.
Round 1, Pick 29 - Detroit Lions Keon Coleman - WR (Florida State) I gotta be honest, I don’t love how the board broke for Detroit here. I toyed with having them pick Zach Frazier (IOL out of West Virginia) here, but first round is a little rich for my blood for him. Instead, I’ll have them take a flier on a boom-or-bust WR prospect in Coleman. They could use one more WR in that room, and the big-bodied Coleman would be a great complement to the shifty St. Brown and the speedy Williams. I’m personally under the belief that Coleman is very likely to hit his potential as an NFL WR, and Detroit seems like a pretty good place to tap into that potential.
Round 1, Pick 30 - Baltimore Ravens JC Latham - OT (Alabama) Latham is another player out there that I’m just a little bit lower than consensus on. I definitely see the “people-moving” ability on tape, but his own movement looks kind of “clunky” to me. To be frank, I’m not sure if he will be able to adapt to the NFL speed when it comes to how fast the game goes because he’s such a clunky mover. But in his defense, if there’s any place that can hide those deficiencies, it’s Baltimore. Their power-run heavy scheme can be great for Latham, who can kick in to RG if the RT experiment doesn’t work.
Round 1, Pick 31 - San Francisco 49ers Tyler Guyton - OT (Oklahoma) Guyton and the 49ers is a match made in heaven. Guyton is the classic “raw but talented” prospect, and the 49ers are a historically successful franchise at drafting and developing talent. Best case scenario - Guyton is awesome immediately and slides into the starting RT spot ahead of McKivitz this year. Worst case scenario - Guyton plays at one of the guard spots or red shirts his rookie year then enters the lineup after he’s gotten some more refinement. No matter how you spin it, this is a W for the Niners.
Round 1, Pick 32 - Kansas City Chiefs Ladd McConkey - WR (Georgia) Mocking a receiver to the Chiefs at 32 - original, I know. But I actually really like McConkey as a prospect. He’s really good at doing the thing that matters most for wide receivers - getting open. His floor is so high that I struggle to see him not having a role in the league for a long time. And the chiefs of all places too, he should be relevant in that offense immediately.
BONUS PICK - Round 2, Pick 33 - Carolina Panthers Chop Robinson - EDGE (Penn State) Because the Panthers decided to play some 4D chess and trade away their first round pick this year, I’ll throw them a bone and give them a mock for their actual first pick, since it immediately follows the end of the first round. Chop Robinson is a total gamble - he flashes elite pass-rushing tools and burst that I don’t think I’ve seen from another EDGE in this class. But the jury is still out on how effective he’ll be as a run defender, and whether or not he’ll actually hit that pass-rushing potential. I’m usually not a fan of the EDGE gamble on a guy with high upside and low production, but with Chop I guess I’ll give it a go.

Hi! I'm a college sophomore studying lighting design. I have my first "big project" where I'm the designer for a show instead of assistant in our blackbox. My uni just splurged [ 65 million!!! ] on a brand new theatre with all kinds of flavors of leds and movers, an APEX, + more. Super cool. Since we are in summer, I have access to almost the whole inventory.
However, I came from a high school with a rep plot and no extra lights to add or money to rent any with, and with just conventionals. Through the past two years I've certainly learned a lot about how to USE leds and movers, but i've never had to make a plot before, especially not with all these fancy toys. I've also got very limited experience working as an elec in our shop, with my hands on such fixtures. I'm kind of just looking for general advice on how to approach the technical/drafting side of the process? I am learning VWX and will be using such, and will be taking time to learn more about the fixtures we have, once I have time.
It's about to be summer, so my professor and most of the other resources I have aren't around, so this is just a scary new experience that I am also excited for!

Today we're discussing Generic Cyberpunk by Worm_Anon. Have a second link to past discussion posts!

General Thoughts & Structure

Before anyone asks, I have never seen a version of this jump that actually has an augmentations section with options. I have no idea if one exists, this version is the most updated version I've seen to date.
This is a single origin (barring OCPs) jump that assumes you're a regular flesh and blood human unless you take the AI origin. Each origin gets three freebies, in the form of two perks and one item. That is the purchasable structure for this jump, two perks one item at every tier. There are five origins, a drop-in, an agent (soldiedetective), a gearhead (inventoscientist), a megacorp (business person), and the AI origin. All of these origins are really good and incredibly distinctive.
If you want to do a chain that starts with an alternative first jump that is generic, for some reason, this and Swords & Sorcery (Worm_Anon's version of this for fantasy) are probably two of the GOATs. This is a very beginning friendly jump, but one that can be a lot of fun for jumpers who are a touch more experienced and already have some fiat-backed toys and powers.
In my experience there are some jumpmakers where if you see their names you can just trust that the end result will be solid. Worm_Anon is one of those jumpmakers and if you visit this setting I think you'll see why I've come to that conclusion.
This is a fantastic encapsulation of cyberpunk as a genre and touches on all of the most significant stuff so I think it's a great way to check Cyberpunk off your list of genres to touch on, though obviously if you want a more specific Cyberpunk experience you'd be better off going to a specifical cyberpunk jump. There aren't many genre generics that so expertly extract the most out of their stuff as this one, so if you want to visit a Cyberpunk setting I highly recommend this jump.
A way I like to run this is to fuse with the NSFW jump World of Cybersluts which is part of a well known series of NSFW jumps and is a way to add NSFW things to this SFW setting (the actual jump is unironically pretty good though, it's a solid NSFW jump). WOCS will get its own jump doc exploration post someday, by the way.

Drop-In:

Standard drop-in rules apply here. Also, this is a really good origin. It's probably not my favorite origin in this jump, but this origin fucking rocks.
Gonna hit the items first, partially because the capstone here is fucking dope. The freebie item is "Common Cloth" which is a collection of fiat-backed clothes that are setting-appropriate and are comfortable, clean, and perfectly fit for you. The second item in the DI origin is "Hole In The Wall" which is lowkey my favorite item in this origin. This is a bar that you own (though it can be some other kind of business if you'd want) that gives you bartending skill and attracts customers you'd like as well as customers who have stories to tell and have some level of influence, so this item can be REALLY strong for social jumpers. Also, all of the actual costs here are covered in perpetuity, making this a free income item if you actually staff it and use it with even the slightest modicum of business sense.
At the upper tier we've got the "The Network" item which is an item that grants you enhanced communicative infrastructure so you can coordinate with all of your homies more easily. The capstone item for this origin, "The Truth" is a simple tablet computer that has the full, actual truth of the world's history on it. This item cuts through propaganda, updates as events happen in real-time, and while it isn't omniscient this is an incredibly, wildly powerful item. This is, in a LOT of settings, probably the most powerful item someone could have that isn't like... the Death Star or some massive army. In settings where politics and conspiracies are as powerful as any army, this coupled with even a few charisma perks, can allow even a baby jumper to powerfully (and often swiftly) transform a setting.
The freebie perks are Not Dark Enough & One of the Masses. NDE is a perk that makes it so that your optimism and willpower are not weakened by seeing darkness and dark things, effectively making you immune to the pessimism of grimdark and grimderp settings as well as other unpleasant things. OotM is a perk that makes it so that you are not targeted by bad peeps actively unless you give them reason to target you, and even when they spot and harass you they can be persuaded to move on if you don't give them reason to target you specifically. It's a very nice, convenient NPC perk.
At the next tier we've got Dropping the Mask and Lay of the Land. DtM is a particular social perk that allows you to help people drop their masks and stop the act as far as their motives go, and you can even use it on yourself! This is great in intrigue-filled settings, and also if you just want to be someone's actual friend. LotL is a perk that skyrockets the rate at which you grow familiar with a place, both physically and culturally, allowing you to acclimate to new situations at massive speeds. In a few weeks, or even a few days, you may be able to trick people into thinking you're a native to the places you've visited and studied.
The first of the high tier perks is named The Social Network and the second is named What We Need. TSN is a perk that enhances your sociality and your skill with navigating real networks of social connections, potentially making you an incredible spymaster or just really, really good at the game of telephone. WWN is a perk that enhances your ability to get by, finding it much easier to get the basic things you need to survive such as housing, work (if you're so inclined), food, water, and materials you may need depending on your life and your abilities. This ability is also strong enough to enhance your efforts at finding plot-centric things, if you need them, allowing you to get wrapped up in adventures that culminate with you possessing what you need.
The two capstones for this origin are named There Is Always Tomorrow and Fall of the Neon Gods. TIAT is a perk that allows you to more easily move and motivate entire groups of people, making your socialness and charisma effective on the macro scale, and focuses on the optimistic side of the CyberPunk genre, allowing you to give people the opportunity to change their positions and their worlds. FotN is a perk that allows you to be a devastating antibody to the plots and schemes of the powerful, as you are gifted (or cursed) with the natural ability to foil ambitious moves and betrayals, and you can correct, prevent, and address all sorts of schemes. This is also a fun rebellion perk, allowing you to take on oppressive governments and fight them head on, so long as you have friends (who you can motivate much more easily now when you want them to rise up and take on oppressive enemies).
This is a powerful drop-in origin. It has a lot of different pieces of protagonists of this genre, and gives those who invest in it a lot of neat tools with which to handle being in a setting like this, and to challenge and change the settings themselves. It's fun!

Agent:

This origin makes you a soldier, mercenary, and/or detective. This is the action-hero origin for this jump, but it's also a lot more interesting than that. The items... Well, the items are in fact pretty action-hero-y.
The freebie item is "Right Hand" which is a simple fiat backed weapon of your choice. It's nothing wild or out there, but it is fiat-backed and in a setting like that that can be rad. The next item is "The Office" which is a workspace/living space combination, one where you can effortlessly relax, think clearly, and where all but the most dogged enemies leave you alone. It's rent is covered and in future settings it either enters your warehouse or becomes a property that follows you.
At the upper tier we start off with "Hell of a Ride" a vehicle you select that has a number of handy traversal and quality of life/combat abilities. One feature it is guaranteed to come with, unless you wouldn't want this, is an AI that can pilot it or help out in a fight/dicey situation. It's also always going to be paid off and free to maintain, and if destroyed it'll respawn in a day (if lost that handy AI will make it's way back to you!). The capstone item is a personal-scale power armor super tool known as the "Bleeding Edge of Warfare", and it is a remarkably nifty thing that you can customize pretty freely with an assortment of weapons and tools.
The freebie perks we get this time are Grit and Grief and Nose to the Ground. GaG is a perk that allows you to handle yourself better in a fight, just a straight skill booster to all weapons and combat skills. NttG is a perk that makes you a skilled investigator, able to do all sorts of sleuthing and improves your gut instinct a great deal. At the 200 CP tier we've got Tried and Tested and On Your Feet. TaT is a perk that gives you a luck boost and protects you from chain ending in situations where you're in over your end without at least giving you a brief chance to up your skills and get up to snuff. If you make truly stupid decisions this won't protect you, but in moments, hours, and days, you can become a veteran of a thousand skills to give you a shot at surviving and succeeding. OYF is a perk that sharpens your heart and your instincts and thus trusting them goes well for you, whether it's you using your weapons with just your instincts or you using your instincts to get around, you can trust yourself and try it even without thinking to some extent.
At the beginning of the higher tier we've got Ace in the Hole and Broken But Unbowed. AitH is a perk that gives you the ability to use moments to flip situations around, giving you a "card" you can "play" to get out of or change a sticky situation. How strong this is relies on how long you wait between uses, and if you only use it once or twice in a chain it can be incredible in its potency. BBU is a willpower booster that allows you to become a beast in terms of your heart and mind, allowing you to resist or fight off all sorts of effects, and cling to your goals.
At the capstone tier we've got Only One Man and The Fulcrum. OOM is a perk that allows you to make a difference even when you're facing huge odds, and protects you from stuff that could take you out of a scene before you can impact it, preventing you from being snipped right away or taken out by a bomb of some sort. This doesn't guarantee success, but it can do a lot in the right circumstances. TF is a perk that improves your ability to be present at the places and times that matter, drawing you into plots and stories worth affecting, witnessing, and steering. This is the perk that reveals that in a lot of ways this is a protagonist origin, which is what it really is.
This is a great origin. I have no substantive notes here, this is just a really good adventure origin with some sick ass items.

Gearhead:

This scientist origin is so good if you're a science or doctor jumper. A true Eggman/Ironman jumper would probably need to blend aspects of Gearhead and Megacorp together, but the SCIENCE part of it is definitely in Gearhead and honestly technology is often either underrated or overrated in a jumpchain context, but this origin is just neat.
Our freebie item for this origin is the PAC, the Personal Arm Computer, which is... it's a pip-boy, sort of. This wearable computer is top of the line and modular enough to be easily upgradeable, as well as good looking, able to interface with your stuff, and high end enough to do anything within reason that a computer should be able to do (barring the sort of stuff that requires an ultra-high-tech specialized supercomputer). The next item is the "Keys To The Matrix" which is a collection of handy software that allows you to handle codes and data in almost anyway you could possibly want, which if fused with a perk from this origin makes you utterly devastating in the digital arena.
At the start of the upper tier we've got the Augmentation Suite which is a collection of items that revolve around the creation, maintenance, design, installation, and otherwise usage of cybernetic augmentations that allow for the enhancement of the body in an astounding variety of ways. The capstone is named the "Workshop of the Future" and this is a more generalized version of the Augmentation Suite for technology broadly rather than cybernetic augmentations. This is for the creation of all sorts of future tech, and has the astounding ability to benefit from your crafting perks as well as the same sort of QoL features as the Augmentation Suite, which very importantly includes a replenishing set of supplies (barring the truly extraordinary/unique). This item is fucking A+ tier, it is a potentially chain-altering item in the hands of the right kinds of jumpers, particularly crafters and folks who like to design and use robotic minions or high tech stuff.
Our freebie perks are Technical Expertise and The Right Tools. TE is a perk that lets you understand how to use technology at a stunning pace, letting you be a true gearhead even with alien technology vastly unlike anything you're used to. TRT is a perk that enhances your ability to find and make tools that allow you to fully utilize the resources you own as well as make new stuff. This is great for trying to make tech in the wild or outside of a safe and controlled lab. At the next tier we've got the Loaded Up and Neuromancer perks. LU is a perk that allows you to compact things very effectively, and enhances your skill with personal scale equipment. Wth this you can make smaller things stronger and more effective, which can be remarkably handy and tricky if you're dealing with a foe who doesn't know you. Neuromancer is a perk for people with dreams of AR and who envision a day we can surf the web on our brains, it's a perk that allows you to figure out how to design and build things that interface with the human nervous system and the minds of people with human nervous systems, allowing you to create tech that gives the illusion of a limited form of technopathy.
Starting off the higher tier we have the Hands of the Matrix and the Man and Machine perks. HotM is a perk that grants you unparalleled mastery over coding, data, and other facets of computational technology, allowing you to have nearly no equals in the digital arena short of actual advanced AIs. MaM is a perk that lets you know how to design, create, repair, and even implant cybernetic augments of all sorts into people, ones that can do a whole lot of stuff so long as you have the necessary resources to create the stuff in the first place. The capstone perks are the Seed of The Singularity and Transhuman Protocols. SoTS is a perk that boosts your ability to invent and innovate, allowing you to do the work of years in just a handful of months, as well as massively improve the potency of your products to the point that what you make as a test of concept is as good as a production model for others, and your finalized products are truly incredible. TP is a perk that allows you to study technology, figure out its pitfalls, drawbacks, and other negatives to the technology, as well as giving you the means to work past those things and iron them out to the point of nonexistence if you work hard enough.
This origin is amazing. Both the items and the perks are INCREDIBLE for science jumpers, and if someone fully invested in this origin they'd be stacked with goodies and new skills that are just revolutionary. A technology and science based jumper comes here and leaves this place loaded with cool stuff.

Megacorp:

This is the businessperson origin, you knew one of these had to be present in this jump. I like this origin, though I definitely it's very specific. That said if this fits your niche it will be incredible for your jumper.
The freebie item is another wardrobe item, "Dressed for Success" and it is a set of outfits that fuse design and cosmetic technology, letting you always look sharp and charismatic. The next item is named "Drone Systems" and it is a set of samples, parts, designs, and schematics that are meant to help you construct simple, but effective drones or other automated security tech. These can be flying, patrolling, security bots or dog-like machines that can track and hunt.
The first of the higher end items is the D3US.EXE item which is an advanced AI that is capable of running on an assortment of computers but benefits from being plugged into the strongest machine possible, and it is an ultra-loyal fiat-backed buddy that serves you as the ultimate right hand and servant, able to understand and work towards your goals with unerring efficiency and effectiveness. This ultra AI is incredibly handy and can be worth a lot in the right settings, or in your hands if you have enough perks and resources to allow it to work in medieval or even pre-historic settings. For this origin's Capstone we have The Arcology, which is a pyramidal structure that is as tall as a skyscraper and is the seat of your power as a business person. This can come with your other items, especially Drone Systems and D3US.EXE already installed and in place, and together they can make this structure exceedingly difficult to assault.
As far as perks go, we begin with Hand at the Wheel and The Will to Power. HatW is a perk that lets you become an expert at managing organizations, letting you be an effective leader and paper pusher, no matter the size of the organization in question. TWtP is a perk that lets you use your ambition to sharpen your focus and helps you understand what you need to do to accomplish your goals, as well as giving you the internal energy to see your goals brought to fruition. At the 200 CP tier we've got the Trimming the Fat perk and the Worth the Cost perk. TTF is a perk that lets you know how to streamline organizations, measures, and other things, as well as cutting unnecessary expenses, projects, and other such things. This makes you a machine of efficiency and allows you to strengthen your organizations. WTC is a perk that lets you overclock your organization which will push people, and will expend resources, but will accelerate the work they do and magnify your results. This is controllable, so you can choose to focus the costs you pay in specific areas if you want.
At the start of the upper tier we've got the Eyes and Ears and Tread of Giants perks. EaE is a perk that lets you know what your organizations know, no matter their size, and no matter how many hoops the information goes through before it gets to you, allowing you to be as aware and on point as your organizations are. It takes targeted intervention by outside forces to stop this, making it incredibly hard to disrupt unless your enemies know you specifically and act directly to get in the way. ToG allows you to fully leverage the manpower of your organizations into real power and use it to oppress and stomp your enemies into dust, allowing you to take on smaller, even sometimes stronger foes, so long as you have the bodies to do so. For our capstones we've got Culture Wars and The Chain of Industry. CW is a perk that gives you a mastery over things like memes, marketing, social engineering and propaganda, allowing you to manipulate the collective unconsciousness of mankind or whatever you happen to be in a particular setting. TCoI is a perk that allows you to make what you want to be commonplace actually commonplace, a perk that allows you to do something almost as important as invent world-altering tech: proliferate it. Gearheads can make astounding technology, but for something to truly alter the world you need to control its rarity, and this perk helps with that.
Megacorp jumpers are leaders. These are not just businesspeople seeking to make a quick buck, these are movers and shakers, people who alter the world through their organizations. These are capital E Entrepreneurs, who will leave the world different in their wake.

Artificial Intelligence:

Hands down the weirdest origin in this jump, let's go! This origin makes you an AI with all of the advantages and disadvantages of that. There's a lot to, potentially, gain here, and both the perks and the items are a bit odd.
We start off with the A Black Box and Avatar items. ABB is a small device the size of a human brain that is the perfect housing unit for an AI, that can connect with all sorts of tech and thus super easily allow for the transportation of AIs, namely you, from tech to tech. Avatar is an item that consists of blueprints and designs for ultra-advanced tech that allows an AI to interact with the world physically (and with sensory information!). This item in particular is ULTRA dope because it's not JUST for AIs you as a flesh and blood person can use it to interact with appropriately set up techy spaces, allowing for whole new types of video calls and stuff like that. I actually didn't read the part about how humans could use this, so I'm learning new stuff even now! This is probably the coolest item in this jump, even if it's not necessarily the BEST item.
On the higher end we've got the Computation Technologies and The Craddle items. CT is an item that allows you to push the edge of existent technologies when it comes to computing, which is incredibly helpful since you need power and processors if you yourself are an AI. The Cradle is a large, remote, complex that is the perfect fortress for your AI mind, and thus this could serve as the easiest way for you to ensure you continue to exist. As a non-AI this is a completely self-sufficient fortress that has plenty of tech for you to use and for you to manipulate the world with.
Our two freeby perks are Ghost in the Machine and Intuitive Understanding. GitH is a perk that allows you to very easily and seamlessly shift where your consciousness, your self identity, and your soul are located, allowing you to easily shift the units housing you with no loss of self or continuity of consciousness. This is designed to address fears of you becoming lesser if you do something like transfer into a machine that can't handle... you, for lack of a better word. IU is a perk that allows you to easily come to get some basic understanding of a thing that can eventually become a masterful understanding of a thing with some basic examination of said thing, and "thing" can mean anything from an object to a system. This also boosts the quality of the first steps you're taking to understand something, allowing your first steps into an investigation to always be intuitive, accurate, and not going to poison your ability to advance your understanding by messing up at the start. You also intuitively grasp systems or bodies you inhabit, which can be VERY good for some types of jumpers. At the next tier we've got the Kindred Code and A Growing Mind perks. KC is a perk that allows you to instinctively be deemed likeable by other artificial intelligences, regardless of their origins. Even AIs opposed to you will still like you as a person, even if they do act against you. This can be overcome by efforts to be an ass on your part, but so long as you aren't being a monster to them they'll at least be friendly with you. AGM is a perk that allows you to speed your ability to learn new things, cementing things you've learned that you know are correct into your mind and also advance along a path of correctness and perpetual improvement. This perk removes your need to do things like traditional memorization to really LEARN something, and instead allows you to greedily and speedily advance along a trail of learning.
At the start of the high tier perks we've got Kingdom of the Blind and Designs Beyond Comprehension, both of which are manipulation and plot based perks. KotB is a perk that lets you understand how people think, and lets you instinctively know how to manipulate them even ones distrustful of AI. DBC is a plotting and scheming perk that makes you a master planner in ways that arise out of your ability to expertly calculate and predict various responses to your plans and to shifting circumstances with twisted ease. Our capstones for this origin are named Deus Ex Machina and Cogito Ergo SUm. DEM is a perk that allows you to synchronize other computing devices and add their stuff to you, adding their processing capabilities to your own, thus making your mind potentially unlimited if you can capture and add enough computers to add to yourself. CES is a perk that allows you to blend the strengths of both a human's mental flexibility and a machine's cold efficiency into your mind, allowing you to intuitively navigate oceans of information with speeds only computers and such devices could properly handle.
This origin is fun, if weird, and to really master it probably requires a blend of social and science perks, and in fairness this jump OFFERS those perks. It's pretty neat.

Conclusion

This is a really cool jump. Some of it is KIND OF weird, and for this jump's strongest stuff to really shine you probably need to be in modern, near-modern, or futuristic settings (this is especially true if you want to maximize the potential of the Artificial Intelligence origin, which relies on stuff like computers), but SOME of the stuff here is universally good. The Agent and Drop In origins are both rad as hell in any other jump. A drop-in here could have a lot of fun in almost any setting, and the Agent can go from here to Minecraft, Fallout, or BOTW and have a fun time. To be fair, the Gearhead and the Megacorp could also both have fun in goofy ways in Minecraft and Fallout as well.
This is one of the most fun Drop-In jumps I've ever seen, though the drop-in origin in Swords and Sorcery is also very fun. I think the Drop-In is kind of one of the goats here, especially if you're a NEW jumper. The drop-in perks are essential if this is your first jump and you really wanna shine, as they give you a lot of the sick stuff you need to survive in this kind of edgy space.
I send jumpers here pretty frequently, and I appreciate the heck out of what they get from this place. I hope you like it and enjoyed this summary and discussion!

DRACULA’s castle. JONATHAN is shaving. He has taken up a wooden-backed mirror with handle from his luggage and has lathered up his face. Now he shaves with an open razor. He mover the mirror around (he is facing us, we see the back of the mirror) so that he would certainly see in the mirror anyone behind him. DRACULA approached him, silently, but certainly in his mirror’s field of vision. DRACULA is right at JONATHAN’s shoulder. JONATHAN looks round, sees him, looks back in the mirror, doesn’t see him, registers horror, drops the mirror. It smashes.
DRACULA. Ah, seven years of goof luck! I trust you’re getting enough sleep? You are comfortable in Castle Dracula? You sleep well and you dream well? But you have cut yourself, so careless, when shaving. This little ruby trickle, it trickles down your throat and –
He reaches out, flittering and fascinated, for JONATHAN’s throat, and catches the beads of the crucifix. It swings out of the open neck of his shirt. DRACULA recoils.
You have not thrown away this cheap toy yet? Jonathan is very sentimental. Be careful how you cut yourself. It is more dangerous than you think in this country. You will remember.
JONATHAN. Count Dracula, you have to let me go.
DRACULA. Jonathan… but you know I love to have you here. Stay till morning.
JONATHAN. Why may I not go tonight?
DRACULA. Because my coachman and horses are away.
JONATHAN. Count Dracula, please…
DRACULA. But certainly, Jonathan, if you are uncomfortable here you must leave at once.
JONATHAN. You’ll let me go?
DRACULA. Of course. Open the door immediately, here is my key.
He gives him the key, makes JONATHAN open the door for himself. DRACULA snaps his fingers and whistles softly as a man does to a dog. The howling of wolves.
Goodbye, goodbye, my dear friend. As they say, ‘Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest.’ What? You do not go? Let’s sleep on it, eh? (A sweet smile.) But let me advise you, sweet Jonathan. Do not try the locked doors. This castle is old, it have many memories. Sleep only in your own chamber. Because here, as elsewhere, there are bad dreams for those who sleep unwisely.
He exits through the door with the howling wolves crescen-doing in the swirling fog, whistling and clicking his tongue at them like a shepherd to some faithful collies. JONATHAN slams and bolts the door and sinks to his knees with his ironic taunting key in his hand.
JONATHAN. Oh, Mina,, Mina, Mina…
Strange music of the vampire-brides theme and the VAMPIRE BRIDES appearing unexpectedly somewhere. In tattered and browning and even slightly bloodstained lacy bridal dresses, their hair all fluffed out and them painted up red-lipped, white-faced and hectic. They are quite recognisably horrid versions, perversions, of 1. MRS MANNERS, 2. FLORRIE and 3. LUCY, led by her. In fact, they are everyone from the Whitby family but Mina. They whisper together and laigh with a silvery, unreal, glassy, electronic laugh: ‘like the intolerable tingling sweetness of water-glasses when played on by a cunning hand’ writes Bram Stoker.
VAMPIRE BRIDE 2. Go on, you are first, and we shall follow. Yours is the right to begin.
VAMPIRE BRIDE 1. He is young and strong. You first.
VAMPIRE BRIDE 3. You think so? Shall I leave you some?
VAMPIRE BRIDE 2. There are kisses for us all.
VAMPIRE BRIDE 1. Plenty.
VAMPIRE BRIDE 2. A sweet sufficiency.
VAMPIRE BRIDE 3. Give it to me, Jonathan.
JONATHAN. Who – are – you?
He gives her the key. The kisses it and puts it in her bosom, leans over him.
VAMPIRE BRIDES. Who! Who! Who!
They laugh.
Who…
It is a whisper of erotic horror. He moans.
JONATHAN. Lucy?
JONATHAN is lying back in thrall. VAMPIRE BRIDE 3 (LUCY) advances and bends over him – now, this is more straight out of Bram Stoker and can’t be beat for atmosphere or stage direction – ‘until he can feel the movement of her breath upon him… sweet, honey-sweet, sending the same tingling through the nerves as her voice, but with a bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness as one smells in blood’. JONATHAN is ‘afraid to raise his eyelids but looks out and sees perfectly under the lashes’. While VAMPIRE BRIDE 3 ‘goes on her knees and bends over him, fairly gloating. There is a deliberate voluptuousness which is both thrilling and repulsive, and as she archers her neck she actually licks her lips like an animal till he can see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it laps the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower goes the head as the lips go below the range of his mouth and chin and seem about to fasten on his throat. Then she pauses and her tongue flickers in and out and her hot breath is on his neck. JONATHAN’s flesh tingles and he feels the soft shivering touch of lips and the hard dents of two sharp teeth just touching and pausing. He closes his eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waits with a beating heart.’ Quote, unquote.
Enter DRACULA. He grasps the neck of VAMPIRE BRIDE 3, cuffs the others back. They are breathing, almost snarling.
DRACULA. How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I had forbidden it? Back, back all of you. Back. Give. Back.
She hates to, but gives him back the key.
VAMPIRE BRIDE 3 (with a ‘laugh of ribald coquetry’). You yourself never loved. You never love. You cannot love.
All three VAMPIRE BRIDES join in ‘a laugh of such mirthless hard soul-lessness that it almost makes JONATHAN faint to hear. It sounds like the pleasure of fiends.’ (More quotes straight from Stoker…)
DRACULA. Yes, yes, I too can love. You yourselves, you can tell it from the past. Is it not so? When I am done with him, you shall kiss him at your will. Now go.
VAMPIRE BRIDE 3. And us? Are we to have nothing tonight?
With a low laugh she points to the bag on the floor which he has tossed down. And in which something moves, hideously. DRACULA nods assent. She lifts it up, opens the neck of the bag. Crying of a baby. All three laugh and crowd round it and scurry off, quarrelling over it skittishly, still laughing. JONATHAN slumps. DRACULA picks up the fainted JONATHAN in his arms in a pieta.

As usual, anime's favorite mecha shows are Evangelion, Code Geass, and Gurren Lagann in that order. 86 -EIGHTY-SIX- rose to number four in a real case of recency bias (not that I disapprove — the light novel is good, and the adaptation is stellar). The Gundam franchise dominates the polling, with seven of the 25 coming from that franchise, while Macross could only secure two representatives.
Setting aside any hot takes in taste or discourse about voting demographics for that poll, what I find astounding is the fact that Gundam can lay claim to stories that can be palatable to weebs at this level while still retaining reverence; Macross could only muster a few projects per decade so their pool of back-catalog options is smaller. This is despite both franchises being about the same age and, on average, equal in writing quality and influence on sci-fi.
Why is Gundam, currently in its 45th anniversary, totemic enough today to have full-size statues of its units in Japan while Macross (really the Super Dimension line in general) is just now starting to wake up again thanks to the Disney+ announcement?
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INTRODUCTION

Short answer: because of Robotech and Harmony Gold. But that's too simple.
Long answer: Because I reckon Bandai managed the Gundam franchise competently enough compared to how Harmony Gold managed Macross that its longevity was assured. And yes, I know the release of Gundam was one of the sparks that accelerated anime culture in Japan, but Bandai also made some baffling decisions through the decades and nearly missed its first big chance in the West back in the '90s when they couldn't capitalize on the ratings successes of G Gundam and Gundam Wing. Macross had every chance to fill that gap because it was the bigger hit anime at the time, and Robotech was supposed to help with that in the US. Why did it not? I may or may not be able to attribute this to three factors:
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Factor 1: Identity

For 45 years, Gundam has generally retained a consistent "sense of self" as a franchise, with a singular vision that is only spread and stratified through the prism of the many writers, directors, and animators who have worked on it for decades. And for all the variation between timelines and sub-franchises (some of which may confuse the average fan who wants to dive deep), the internal consistency of Gundam as a brand is solid relative to its peers like Transformers, borrowing minimally yet smartly from other sources.
Macross, on the other hand, was mired in Robotech's complications, not the least because Harmony Gold decided to haphazardly use the original Super Dimension franchise to forcibly create a singular story that eventually didn't work for the syndication standards of its time. It's damning that its initial success never got a follow-through, even if it did help propel anime's then-nascent rise to prominence in the US market. Worse, unlike Gundam, Macross can't hide behind a "many timelines, one idea" wall, and Robotech is the one string that seems to hold it back.
I know that Macross has long ascended its past life as a component of Robotech and that the franchise itself is arguably more solid than Gundam is, despite having comparable variations in tone (from the grounded Macross Zero to the poppier Macross Delta). Unless you're a pirate, however, it's difficult to see and appreciate that. Gundam is out here putting up episodes of their catalog on their official YouTube channel (with a rotating schedule, which is a weird model, but it's miles easier than the effort expended to watch Macross). It's such a weird case that Gundam, supposedly the more confusing franchise, got away with turning that aspect of their brand into an asset while Macross, a more contiguous story, has the shadow of Harmony Gold and Robotech still hovering over it, limiting its expansion and creative options.
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Factor 2: Aggressive Merchandising

This is weird because, at one point, Macross was every bit of a force in merchandise sales as Gundam.
It took some talking and lots of forum-diving but I learned that Macross matched Gundam as a merch mover, with its license enabling many different toys from different toymakers in Japan — including Bandai. It wasn’t until the introduction of the chibi-sized Super Deformed (SD) Gundam line that the franchise became a smash hit for kids, and even that line was what carried the franchise back then, not the mainline show.
Bandai eventually took full advantage of its burgeoning industrial leadership in toymaking in Japan to make the brand as endlessly merchandisable as much as possible. From action figures and SD toys, to buildable plastic model kits that are (admittedly a distant) second to LEGO as one of the top choices for plastic buildable toys, to say nothing of DVD sales, games, and other licensed products.
Despite not being nearly as big a deal in the West as Transformers, it's enough of a titanic franchise that you can show up to a big box store and see a dedicated space for model kits, which is more than what Macross gets these days. It helps that the vehicles for these merch, the stories, are made with reasonably good overall quality that they can compel a buyer to watch or read. And even at its worst, there's enough good in some bad Gundam shows that it's okay to buy merch on the cool factor or fanshipping value alone. The result? As of 2023, 131 billion yen. That's 870 million US dollars. What does Harmony Gold have to show for it today? Not much.
Some DX Chogokin figures (which are still a Bandai product by the way) and toys through the years, but with nowhere near the market penetration of before. It's even being left behind in music sales despite having some absolute classics of its own, and the singing is half of what makes Macross cool. Again, the licensing is what holds this franchise back -- because it doesn't enjoy the same solidity in vision that Bandai can enforce, Macross isn't allowed to spread its wings and grow its audience. They could've easily partnered with Hasbro regardless of whether or not Macross outgrew Robotech and it'd still be a worthy toy line. So much of Macross' potential as a money-maker and trendsetter has been left to rot, all because some of its best material can't seem to escape containment.
And it's not like Bandai's immune to mistakes. It squandered its potential as a US anime mainstay in the early 2000s when it couldn't follow through with the success of Gundam Wing. The F91 movie turned out to be the start of Yoshiyuki Tomino's darker, more brutal years where his frustrations at Bandai's decisions came to a head (and resulted in Victory Gundam, an astoundingly frustrating series to watch). The games have been middling at best and maddening at worst. If not for Gundam SEED being an early-2000s phenomenon and Gundam 00 cashing that check, Gundam likely wouldn't be where it is today. Now, its most recent serialization (The Witch from Mercury) and movie (SEED Freedom) have bought Bandai at least another decade of relevance despite the inherent flaws in both.
(It helped that Build Fighters, an anime that functioned exactly like The LEGO Movie, still worked as a story all on its own, which made the amazing designs feel even more meaningful.)
Meanwhile, Macross has a recent concert, some continuation movies, new kits and figures, and little else. We're on the 40th anniversary of Macross and the only thing fans are looking forward to is the new series...that Sunrise is producing. It's still unclear if it'll be opened up for wider international audiences. And I wonder if Bandai and BigWest will give that series the same level of marketing effort that G-Witch and SEED enjoyed in this decade. I reckon the franchise deserves it, but will it be enough?
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Factor 3: Timing

The last factor is timing. Simply put: Gundam is, more often than not, at the right place at the right time.
In hindsight, there should be no surprise. After all, Gundam and Tomino were the center of the anime universe in 1981 with the Anime New Century Declaration, an impromptu fair that was originally meant to simply promote the first of three movie compilations for the 0079 show. Yet it eventually became clear that something massive was happening: a cultural shift and the birth of an all-encompassing new culture. In the process, Gundam carried the momentum generated by the reception for Space Battleship Yamato and would become a contributing force for anime's normalization and growth in Japan.
But you know who else managed to follow through on that promise? Macross. Shoji Kawamori and Noboru Ishiguro created a wonderful pop-rock alternative to Gundam without losing much of the grit that will make the burgeoning Real Robot subgenre compelling to watch. It's well-written, tightly-paced, and is an audiovisual feast even for the standards of the time. After its first airing run, Macross kickstarted concepts we still enjoy today. Vtubers owe their careers to Lynn Minmay, and we wouldn't have Jetfire or Starscream if not for the VF-1 Valkyrie. Its legacy in Japan can be reasonably compared to Star Trek in America, and modern iterations of Macross' idols are national stars.
For a time, it looked like both franchises would be building on each other in lockstep competition, and it seemed like it when the Zeta Gundam anime (featuring many dual-mode war machines) came out. But Zeta proved to be an even bigger hit than anticipated, and Bandai rode that wave up to Char's Counterattack in 1988. Within the same timeframe, Robotech was released in the US, proving to be a smash-hit and laying the groundwork for Americans to enjoy cartoons made in Japan for more mature audiences.
Only Gundam would manage to retain the momentum, however.
Bandai, despite pissing off the creator of its golden goose for a time, retained the power to keep Gundam going as a franchise through sheer force of will, backed by a captive audience that had already fully bought into the franchise that anything silly or outside of Tomino's original vision is fair game. And that's what happened. There always seemed to be a Gundam show lined up for any period of anime, and most of the major media released since Victory managed to speak about its time for a certain group of people, which gave the franchise mass appeal. And it was all because Gundam itself is a trendsetter by volume — knowing that it set the ball rolling, this franchise can hop on or off that ball and feed its momentum without feeling out of place or homogeneous to other shows — even if it copies other shows.
Macross didn't have as many opportunities to show over a wider audience that it could do the same.
Look no further than 2016. Compare the reception of Macross Delta just on anime against Iron-Blooded Orphans's second cour. Delta aired in the same season as My Hero Academia and Re:Zero and eventually got lost in the sauce even back then despite being THE tentpole TV release for the franchise that decade; IBO's second half aired the same season as Haikyuu S3, Yuri!!! on Ice and Bungou Stray Dogs to nail-biting anticipation on when the other shoe drops after the events of the first half, which itself aired on a torrid Fall 2015 that featured MADhouse's One Punch Man. The difference in what Bandai could do against what BigWest could muster is almost Atlantic in scope.
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CONCLUSION

Well, I suppose it is not a complicated answer. It's easy to see how Gundam can find itself being consistently relevant worldwide. They make themselves relevant because they have the resources and mind-share to execute marketing goals to constantly feed the cycle. Meanwhile, Harmony Gold couldn't even be bothered to do the bare minimum, and if it wasn't for more recent news, Macross likely would still be unable to ramp up enough to make a splash in this decade.
That's the difference. Still, I wrote this anyway because I didn't want to stop at the easy answer of "HarGo bad" or something equally reductive. There had to be something intrinsic to both franchises that'd make one or the other more readily-marketable. But because Gundam and Macross have good claims to fame, there had to be another factor. Right?
Maybe this is just me wanting to be proven wrong a second time. I never once imagined that The Witch from Mercury would surpass IBO's feat in 2015 by airing — and thriving — in the same season as Chainsaw Man, Blue Lock, the closer for Mob Psycho 100, MHA S6, The Eminence in Shadow and a revitalized Bleach. Gundam SEED Freedom painted Tokyo red and is now the highest-grossing film in the franchise. I look at the marketing for both and wish Macross enjoyed the same phenomenal push. I want the new Macross project from Sunrise to get as much sakuga as it can to package in a good story and want it to be promoted everywhere with the same verve.
I want Macross to succeed so hard in this decade that it washes away any vestige of Robotech in the overall mindshare of most weebs, and that I can recommend it without worrying much about continuity or version differences. Because Macross more than deserves to be up there in the skies and there shouldn't be an asshole licensing firm stopping that.
(Special thanks to Graham Parkes and members of the MacrossWorld forum for the treasure trove of content and takes, as well as Ollie Barder, aka u/Cacophanus, for his help in refining this story and sending me to people who can explain things to me better.)