The Gift

futuristic sci-fi by Dennis M. Kohler

I appreciate the patience as I am settling into my new life in a new state. Hoping soon we can get back on our regular schedule!

Summer is in full swing outside, but here in the Underside, we are venturing out into space. Give a warm welcome to Dennis and his story about a kid with a gift in another time, another place.

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Photo by Bastien Jaillot on Unsplash

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The Gift

by Dennis M. Kohler

Gordon McMillian was five years old.

He was born on 2020 XC Sub2 Base, as was all of his generation, with a gift.

Scientists first noticed the strange abilities six years before Gordon’s birth. The first, quite by accident, was Dr. Maxwell Samuels. During one of his mandatory crèche details, he stumbled upon a problem with the daughter of Olaf Blick, a secondary foreman for mining, and Catherine Carl, one of the entertainment girls from the tail.

The doctor’s rotations in the crèche were as important as his rotations in the trauma centers. The owners of the operation had been the first on the rim to allow families to stay on station. One of their egghead psychologists suggested men and women would work harder if their reason for working was waiting for them when they got home.

As Dr. Max related it, he had been filling out the weight and height charts for the entire complement of seventeen children when he noticed Kitty had lost three grams.

He checked and double-checked the scales and discovered nothing wrong. He opened a four-way video communication between the mining foreman, the head of medicine, and the head of physics. Each of them, in turn, told him to quit worrying.

Luckily for the youth of the station, he didn’t take them seriously. He took it upon himself instead to discover the root of the problem.

Young Kitty showed no signs of malnutrition. Her arms and legs measured within the norms for a child her age, and showed no distension of the abdomen. She ate as much or more than any of the other children. On the outside, she looked just like her crèche mates, but every single time he put her on the scale, he discovered she had gained no weight at all.

Even when he wasn’t on baby-doc detail, Dr. Max made a special point of monitoring Kitty’s progress. Every day for three months, he checked on her. It wasn’t until one morning making his rounds that the rest of the story emerged.

A sixteen-year-old volunteer, tasked to help with the children, was giving Kitty a bottle when one of the other children bumped her elbow. As young Kitty fell toward the floor, Dr. Max tried to get himself untangled from his own child to catch her. The baby hovered in midair then slowly floated back toward her nursemaid.

If not for the video system the miners used to check in on their children, nobody would have believed Dr. Max and the young volunteer.

Kitty’s was the first gift. But over the next year, one by one, each of the other children joined Kitty. Dr. Max, by popular demand or a very abbreviated process of elimination, became head of pediatrics research.

His department consisted of himself and the young volunteer, who later became his wife. Together, they discovered everything they could about the gifts. The cause, however, escaped them.

Whatever was causing the changes was environmental, but it only affected children in utero.

Somehow, something was changing the children on a molecular level, but they never learned what. Bina, Max’s young bride, believed it was something in the ore, while Max put the blame on deep space radiation. The whole debate made for interesting conversation.

It was an exciting and rewarding time for both researchers who always approached their work with positive optimism. This was even true on the day one of the youngsters shut down the life support systems. The child’s gift turned out to be a curse. He robbed energy from anything that touched his skin. Like all the adults at the station, Max and Bina were ready for the failure—they had learned to keep their p-suits at hand. It was, however, a close call getting all the children into life pods. After that incident, the director made it his personal responsibility to learn about every gift the moment the children presented.

When Max and Bina discovered her pregnancy, it was cause for both concern and celebration. At almost sixty years of age, Max had given up on children, but Bina, after all her time in the nursery, wanted a family.

It was the closest-watched and most-analyzed pregnancy the station, if not mankind, had ever known. When the twin girls were born, both Bina and Max anxiously awaited the day when they would present their gifts.

Gordon McMillian was born on the same day as the twins. Gordon’s birth was a sad tale. After the cave-in, Dr. Max tried desperately but failed to save the life of Gordon’s father. Two days later he worked with equal vigor but equal failure to save Gordon’s mother. The only wisp of hope was that Gordon was born beautiful and healthy, as had been Bina and Max’s own twins. They knew raising three was little more work than raising two so they took in the orphan.

Max heard Bina discover Gordon’s gift. It was a sound with which he was familiar. He never expected to hear that familiar sound of passion come from the opposite side of a closed door, but the culture of the station was open about sex, and she was so much younger than him. He was resigned to do what was in the best interest of the community.

Bina came out on hands and knees.

“Are you OK?” Max asked.

She had a hard time speaking but when the words came, she was smiling.

“Better than OK,” she said.

Max searched the room with his eyes and found nothing but the sleeping children.

“What happened?”

“I am not entirely sure,” she said and then was fast asleep.

Their tests revealed the extent of Gordon’s gift.

The real nature of his gift was written on a single index card and locked away in the deepest recesses of Max’s file cabinet. Of the eighteen children of the first generation born on station, his gift was the only kept secret. Dr. Max knew about drugs, and his adopted son was one of the strongest he had ever seen.

Bina and Max debated long and hard on the benefits of staying on station with Gordon. In the end, they had more faith in themselves than they should have. They both thought they could protect their son.

They were wrong.

#

The trip like all trips to the rim shook Dohman’s bones.

In the first five years of his career, Walt Dohman made the trip seven times. After his promotion, he thought his encounters with rock rats were over.

They were, up until he reached twenty-five years, and the job told him they had no room for an old sergeant with no aspirations. Twenty-five years, a nice racket filled with booze and dancing girls, and then they forgot another dinosaur.

It took only six months pretend-fishing to decide retirement wasn’t for him. Dohman put himself back on the market and caught more job offers than he ever did fish. Friends from the old days each knew somebody who knew somebody else. When the chance to return to the belt came, he took it. He accepted the offer of special investigator, whatever the hell that meant. It wasn’t the best offer, but it promised some distance from his past.

He didn’t regret his decision until the ship made its landing approach. Evasive maneuvers to get into orbit, and the constant hammering of the brake-jets were bad at twenty, but now at fifty, he longed only for solid ground and a place to relieve himself.

At the quarantine ring, he reminded himself accidents could happen to anyone, but the warmth in his suit that seeped around a poorly-fitted collection tube was unpleasant.

The artificial cheer of the station’s automated system added to his irritation. Outside the observation window, he saw the automated in-situ propulsion generation plant give off steam. It was no proof the station was inhabited, but he keyed the ship to ground frequency anyway.

“2020 XC Sub2 Base, this is quarantine ring, over.”

Dohman repeated himself three times, then waited.

Nothing. He felt as stupid as the first time he came out to the belt, a wild-eyed kid thinking it was some kind of dense, impossible-to-navigate ribbon.

The subcutaneous insert on the back of his hand read a series of numbers counting backwards to zero which signified the end of his short return window. Five days if he left before zero, or a year plus slingshot trip around planetary gravity wells. His tight schedule made the seventeen-hour mandatory Q procedure painful.

He dogged the door and waved his implant over the admin console. He had protested the implant at first. He escaped his term in the forces without getting an implant, but when his new employers offered it to him as an “or else,” he protested only a little.

He would never say it, but the damned thing was convenient. After twenty years of wearing a bracelet, however, he found himself reaching for it constantly.

Dohman used his time in Q and his new access codes to work backwards through thirteen years of personal logs since communication to the station had stopped.

He caught himself thinking of his first conversation with Universal Ore. Not a daydream as much as a vivid memory.

“How could you lose a multi-billion dollar rim station?”

“Launch windows, elliptical orbits.”

“How then can you just now remember it after ten years?”

“A death in the family.”

The mining station missed its three-year report, but soon after, the company had changed hands.

The son of the previous owner spent his fortune on fast ships and expensive companions until the stockholders managed to legally wrest control from him. By then, the second communication window had passed.

“We just want our money back.”

He slept and listened to the monotonous droning of the station manager. The station had taken the missed communication window fairly easily. The types of people stationed in these places wanted to be left alone. They were loners with pasts to escape, just like him. Every time they tried to communicate and failed, the community grew stronger. Life on the station seemed a serene island compared to the panic that that plagued Earth.

He found nothing interesting in the logs until a fleeting mention of children being born with gifts.

#

Photo by Vadim Sadovski on Unsplash

Dohman stepped onto the lift that took him from the synchronous orbital ring down to the quiet station.

He checked and rechecked his suit. Station gravity wasn’t enough to hold atmosphere, so a series of artificial environments had been constructed.

He walked to the airlock and wished for a partner like in the old days. Out here alone, very bad things could happen. He remembered the first time he hit hard vacuum and renewed his promise to keep within arms reach of his helmet.

One of the constantly-visible station status panels showed, environmental-green, structure-green, production-green. The last caught him short. Next to the green light was a date of last run, yesterday. He tapped the external monitor and saw mine cars, filled with ore, exiting the shafts.

Inside, Dohman heard only silence, and with it, a deep sense of comfort he hadn’t felt in many years.

The doors to the crèche hissed open to his access code. He looked past the rows of neatly made beds, into the play room, and found no sign of life. The toys, however, bothered him. It was as if there were dust on the top of some of them but not others, an impossibility in the highly-controlled artificial pressure. Then he realized they looked as if they had been washed by a caregiver. He reached out and touched the side of a block that held a picture of an apple.

A blood-curdling scream, then another, and he froze with sidearm in hand for a danger that never appeared. He was halfway down the corridor before he realized he had forgotten his helmet.

The third scream drove him forward. Dohman was breathing heavily as the door obligingly opened.

Inside, two young women engaged in battle. Each used the other’s braids as a grappling hold. He looked for a bucket of water to throw over the kicking, clawing, and biting mass. When it was clear to him that there was going to be no clear winner, he shouted in his best command voice.

“Stop it this instant!”

He was half-surprised when it worked.

“Stand up.”

They did, and he saw that they were identical twins.

“Tell me the meaning of this.”

They looked at him as if he were a ghost.

He walked closer and spoke again. “Tell me, what is the meaning of this?”

“I caught her with him,” the girl on the left said and pointed.

It was an age-old problem, and one with which he was too familiar.

“With whom did you catch her?” he asked.

“With Gordy.”

“And who, might I ask, is Gordy?”

He heard the scuffling of feet behind him.

“Me,” the voice said.

He turned and saw a well-muscled 16 year old.

“They’re fighting over me,” he said. “Please put away your”—the boy tried to find the word—“pistol. You have no need for it here.”

Dohman holstered his weapon.

“I am a representative of the mining company,” the older man said.

It was instantly clear that Gordy and the twins may have had their differences, but disliking the company was something about which they all agreed.

“I wish you would tell me the meaning of this.”

“It’s difficult to explain, but perhaps if you would let us make you a cup of tea, we could talk.”

The two girls took the mention of tea as a reason for a truce, and raced to the kitchen.

Dohman followed behind the boy.

“You will have to forgive Sita and Gemma. They have reached an age when, trust me, I am happy to meet you.”

“I left my helmet in the nursery,” Dohman said abruptly. “I would feel better if I retrieved it.”

“I will see that it is brought to us,” Gordy answered. As the young women brought the tea, the young man said with an inviting pause, “So you know my name...”

“Of course, I forget my manners. My name is Walter Dohman, but my friends call me Walt.”

“Or sometimes Geezer,” one of the twins said.

“That’s correct, sometimes Geezer.”

“And you say you work for Univor,” Gordy dripped the word, full of bile, out of his mouth.

“I said that I represent Universal Ore,” Dohman said. “I am a contractor who has been hired to determine what happened here on the station. They say I am a special investigator, but I am Walt.”

“You mean why everyone is missing?”

“I mean why is it that Univor has lost contact. And as I can see in front of me, not everyone is missing.”

“You are right. There are seventeen of us left.”

“Why seventeen?”

“Because there were eighteen of us who were young enough to survive the troubles, and since that day, there has been only one”—he hesitated—“accident.”

“What do you mean by accident?”

“One of us was murdered by another.”

Gordy said it without the usual moral underpinnings, but he had hesitated. In all his years as a detective, Dohman had learned to read a person who was hiding something.

He decided that he could wait to know. “These others. Do you think I might get a chance to meet them?”

“You can meet everyone on station tonight when we have our dinner, but for now, you can meet Zara.”

He turned, but instead of another young person, he met his own helmet sailing through the air at eye level.

“Zara, you know it isn’t polite to use your gift among strangers before introducing yourself.”

Dohman wondered how many times Zara had a chance to meet strangers, as a thin outline of a girl whose age he guessed at twelve came into view.

“That’s better,” Gordy said.

The young girl handed Dohman his helmet.

“Thank you,” he said and took it.

“Zara is in charge of the housekeeping and as such is responsible for the air you are breathing,” Gordon said. “Zara, this is Special Investigator Dohman.”

The young girl held out her hand.

“Pleasure to meet you, Zara. You may call me Walt, or Geezer if you like,” he said and winked at the twin he thought had revealed the nickname.

Zara disappeared.

“She does that when she is nervous,” said Gordy.

“I gather a lot of you do things like that,” Dohman said.

“True. You’ll get a chance to see them show off tonight. What I would most like to talk about is the delivery of the product.”

The statement surprised Dohman.

“What product?”

“We need to finish the job that we came here to do,” Gordy said.

“You were born here, were you not?”

“I was, but now, by the traditions of the group, I am the manager, and we have all worked very hard to make the dream our parents started a reality. They died to bring the ore back to Earth, and all of us would like to see their goals realized.”

“How much ore do you have to transport?” Dohman asked.

“We have no ore at all,” Gordon smiled. “Come, I will show you.”

The statement was not exactly correct. The mine had ore, plenty of it, but what Gordon meant was that the mine had no ore to export. They instead had refined mineral.

Dohman looked at the warehouse and saw rows and rows of neatly-ordered ingots—enough wealth to buy an entire country.

“I would say that the company will be very interested in taking delivery of this,” he said.

At the briefing, the fact that there was no In Situ Extraction facilities for anything but oxy fuel hadn’t seemed too important. Now, looking at the refined metals, it made no sense at all.

“How did you manage this?” he asked, picking up a single kilo platinum ingot. “This bar alone could buy a bungalow dirt side.”

“There aren’t any bungalow earthside. It is a shithole,” Zara’s voice came from the air.

There were hundreds of ingots in stacks.

“What all do you have here?” Dohman asked.

“There is nickel mostly, but we have managed to get a fair amount of gold, silver, and platinum. We even found a small amount of palladium. One of us has a gift for metal.”

That evening, he learned that metallurgy wasn’t the only gift they had. All told, the gifts of the children ranged from levitation to generating heat to reading minds. Each of the children had a gift, and each of them used the gift to benefit the group.

When they had all, one at a time, finished showing him their gifts, he turned to Gordy. “My count may be off, but I didn’t count seventeen of you.”

“Correct. This is everyone on station.”

“And the others?”

“I will show you tomorrow.” Gordy regarded Dohman with an unreadable face, and not the expression of one withholding information.

Dohman returned the look. “So what do you do?” Dohman asked in turn.

“I am sorry, Walt, I’m the only one of us who does not have a gift.”

“My apologies,” Dohman said. “That was insensitive of me.”

“You had no way of knowing, besides, now there are two of us. Unless you’re hiding a gift as well.”

“I’m afraid not, unless napping in the afternoon counts. Soon enough, you can be in a place where nobody has gifts.”

The members of the small society used their talents to entertain him with stories from their past and feats of skill.

As soon as socially acceptable, Dohman returned to his quarters with a promise to Gordy that they would discuss the mineral transport in the morning. He was not, however, as tired as he pretended. He knew once the company saw that massive pile of metal, it would make no difference to them what the children had done. When their bottom line stood to be improved by billions, things tended to be swept under the rug.

Dohman, however, had a mystery to solve. From the moment he heard the word “murder,” he wanted answers, but he also respected his contract. Hours into the records, he surrendered, packaged a vanilla mission report, set an alarm, then tried to get some sleep.

One hour before sunrise, he slipped on his boots and walked back to the crèche. When he was convinced nobody followed him, he began his search. That he found a box hidden almost two decades ago was a product of his experience.

But when he put his thumb to the DNA reader, it glowed a dull red, denying his pattern. Whoever had closed the box was long dead. He took the box back to his quarters and placed it in his pack. It would take a much better code-cracker than himself to get to the contents without destroying them. He wanted to know the secrets that it held, but he resigned himself to patience.

A commotion in the common area of the station drew him to investigate. The twins were at each other again.

Zara materialized at his elbow.

“Do they do this often?” he asked.

“They never used to. Now they do it almost every day, but only when Gordy is around.”

Gordy was doing his best to break up the fight without actually touching the girls. It was the pained look in his eyes that made Dohman wade into the fray. With one girl in each large hand, he placed one first and then the other in chairs on opposite sides of the room.

He looked at Gordy, who said nothing.

“Tell me the meaning of this.” Dohman insisted, turning to the first girl.

“She tried to take him.”

“You mean Gordy?” Dohman asked.

“Yes, she tried to take Gordy.”

The girl pointed and gave her twin sister a look of pure hate.

Dohman had never had children of his own, but he had spent enough time dealing with the feral children of Earth to know the strength of jealousy.

“Gordon, if you wouldn’t mind a chat?” Dohman walked back towards his room.

He was relieved at the silence behind him.

“I don’t mean to subvert your authority here,” Dohman said, “but you are going to have a bloodbath on your hands if you aren’t careful.”

“I know, but I don’t know what to do.”

“What you need to do is get your people off this rock and the hell away from each other.”

Gordon nodded.

“I imagined it would come to this after the last time.”

“What do you mean, the last time?”

“The last time it came down to fighting and killing. That was when Kitty was killed.”

“Killed by whom?”

“Killed by the second, Julie O’Reilly.”

“Who is where now?”

“It’s as I told you yesterday.” There was that blank look again. “She is in isolation with three other women who have shown similar behavior, Special Investigator Dohman. She works the mines, but she is not allowed to come to the main compound. I am told that she has never returned to her ways of violence, but I have no firsthand verification.”

“I would like to talk with them,” Dohman said.

“I can arrange for Hal to take you, but I cannot make the trip.”

“Why is that?” Dohman asked.

There was a pause.

“Because I am needed here.”

“Do what you need to do to get your people ready to lift. I’ll need to look at the ore carriers before they’re loaded.”

Dohman knew nothing about how to inspect an ore carrier for space fitness. He only hoped that someone from Univor realized it.

“Hal will meet you at the Green Two airlock,” Gordon said. “Now if you’ll excuse me.”

#

Photo by Juan Encalada on Unsplash

Hal showed him how to hop onto one of the empty cars as it rattled into the mine. After several kilometers, Hal touched his helmet to Dohman’s.

“Get ready to jump,” he said. “You don’t want to be in this car when it gets to the hoppers.”

Dohman aped Hal’s motions up until the point where Hal bounced and landed gracefully. At that point, Dohman caught his foot and ended up in a pile on the ground.

Hal extended a hand to help Dohman to his feet. The opaqueness of the helmet face-shield did not hide the fact that he was laughing.

Dohman could feel his suit adjust to the pressure as Hal keyed the communicator to announce their presence in the pressure. There were three women and two men standing ready to greet them.

“This is Walt Dohman,” Hal said. “He is a representative of Univor. We’re returning to Earth.”

Dohman didn’t expect waves of jubilation from a group of people who had always lived on station, but the look of disappointment in their eyes came as a surprise.

“Walt needs to ask you some questions first,” Hal said, then walked over and took the place of the woman at the operations console.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Dohman said and extended his hand for each of them to shake.

Only one of the men refused. “Energy stealer,” the man said as if it required no explanation.

“I just have a few questions before we can arrange transport.”

He saw the first hint of excitement from the youngest of the males.

“Which of you is Julie?”

The thinnest whitest arm he had ever seen in his life raised itself up above a brush of red curly hair.

“Could we have a minute alone?” Dohman asked.

She nodded as Dohman pushed two of the chairs on rollers to a corner.

“I want to ask you about what happened to Kitty Blick.”

“I killed her.”

“Why?”

“Because she was going to take Gordy.”

Dohman had always found more solace in the discovery of patterns than exceptions. When she said Gordon’s name, her eyes rolled back in her head. It was something he had seen before with recovering heroin addicts.

“So it was jealousy?”

“In the years since it happened,” she said, “I’ve given that much thought. I’d say it wasn’t jealousy as much as it was needed. I think I might kill again to be with him.”

Dohman thought about the new cults. It was familiar ground.

“He is your Messiah?” he asked.

He was greeted with high-pitched melodic laughter.

“What is it?”

“Gordy isn’t a God; he is a drug. It is the way he makes you feel. Nothing comes close. He is an addiction.”

“So you killed Kitty to feed your addiction?”

“Yes, and a fear that she would kill him.”

“You think you are capable of doing it again?”

“I didn’t think I was capable of doing it the first time, but now I think yes, I am capable of doing it again, but only for Gordy,” she purred.

The others, when he asked, said Julie was a model member of their community. Her ability to refine the minerals gave her status.

The trip back to the main environment was lengthened considerably by full ore cars. Hal passed the time by explaining to Dohman how they had improved the mining operation.

The children’s gifts were highly beneficial. There was no sickness once they discovered one of them could heal, no fear of hunger when one of them showed an affinity toward plants. At each stop Hal pointed out how the colony worked in near perfect symbiosis.

When they finally arrived, Dohman learned that the orbital transports had been given wake commands. Gordy happily announced that all but one of them were healthy.

“We won’t even need all the ships now that we have refined product. The total tonnage is a fraction of what our parents planned,” Gordy said.

“How did you come to know so much about mining?” Dohman asked.

“The education video system.”

Gordy tapped the screen and a ghostly figure filled the room. He was a replica of a short gray-haired professor that fit every stereotype Dohman knew right down to the tweed jacket.

“Good morning, Gordon,” the image said. “Would you care for a refresher geology course, or perhaps some Chinese?”

Gordon tapped again and the image disappeared.

“Our parents planned everything.”

Everything but a good logging system, Dohman thought.

He looked at the back of his hand. The return launch window was less than two days away.

It was a busy two days, and while they loaded the bullion, the mine continued to pour out more ore.

They finished loading in eight hours, a speed made possible only by the gravity fountain system and the gifts.

Dohman realized his inexperience made him a hazard and returned to the job he had come to do.

There was no mention in personal logs about the children being born with gifts. It was as if history since the director’s first entry reporting the gifts had been erased.

He discovered that Dr. Max Samuels’ professional logs were excised back even further. There was an entry predating the director’s mention of the gifts by three weeks, then nothing. On a whim, he checked his wife’s logs. The same held.

It was the biggest mystery of all, but Dohman realized that it was going to have to stay unsolved. Perhaps in another five years, the company would be willing to make another trip, but for now, he would bet the dollar signs in their eyes would make them more happy than the truth.

#

Dohman watched from his cabin on the command ship as the cargo barges pulled away from the station. He felt a small bit of sadness at how pathetic the little ship that had brought him looked against the backdrop of the orbital ring. She had been a faithful little craft, but he was happy to have the larger dampening units on the big cargo train.

He opened up a channel to Gordon, who was alone in his own cabin.

“Everyone made it aboard OK?” he asked.

“Everyone is safe.”

“Your sisters and the older women are all on the other ship?”

“They are. They are,” Gordon said in a jerky manner.

“Are you OK?” Dohman asked him, then watched as Gordon dissolved before his very eyes.

“Gordy!” Dohman yelled into the video phone, but there was no response.

When Dohman kicked Gordon’s door open, he was nowhere to be found.

On the bed was a small display generator and the box that Dohman had recovered from the crèche.

As he picked up the box, the lid turned green and popped open.

Inside was a data cube and a small folded piece of paper.

Dohman felt the cube attach itself to his implant and the generator activated again.

Gordy’s image reappeared.

“Hello, Walt. I am sorry to say goodbye like this, but once you see what I am about to show you, you’ll understand.”

Gordon’s image was replaced with a 2D screen.

Dohman watched in horror as the story unfolded. It started with several explosions on the station and ended with each and every female member of the crew lying dead in a pool of blood. By that time, all the men were dead.

Bina activated the bomb. It was her last option to keep the mob of women from ripping her adopted son to pieces. She had known it would be five more years until they had a chance of rescue if ever at all.

Then she turned the gun on herself.

Luckily for young Gordon, he didn’t have to see it.

She coded the box to Gordon’s DNA so he would know the truth.

“Now you see why I needed to stay behind,” Gordon said, and his image disappeared.

Dohman opened the piece of paper that had yellowed with age and began to read.

SUBJECT INTERACTS DIRECTLY WITH NEUROTRANSMITTERS IN MATURE HUMAN FEMALES TO PRODUCE FEELINGS OF INTENSE SEXUAL AROUSAL AND RELEASE. EFFECT INCREASES WITH LONGER CONTACT.

Gordon was one of the strongest drugs Dr. Max had ever seen.

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

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Meet the author:

Dennis M. Kohler is a native of Northern Utah with his wife, Patti; sons Theo and Oliver; and three cats called Daisy, Babou, and Lavender. He spent 30 years teaching philosophy, linguistics, and English as a second language at universities in the United States, Kuwait, and Korea. Dennis has, at some time or another, worked as a rugby coach, carpenter, painter, armored car driver, cook, bartender, teacher, firefighter, newspaper reporter, and babysitter. Mostly, Dennis is an optimist.

He has been published in Freedom Fiction Journal, Literally Stories, Metaphorosis, New Myths, Pulp Adventures, and Schlock! Webzine, with work forthcoming in Amazing Stories, Dark Horses, and Whistling Shade.

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