DATE: Year 486-B, Sol 668

  LOCATION: Hotel Florida Bar

  The trader across from Talcot Poe was just telling him that on his last trip to Titan, he had seen an alien. It’d been a profitable trip, and he had been paid in tea bricks. The bar at the Hotel Florida had a very favorable exchange rate between tea bricks and alcohol. The bricks were used in several of the drink recipes.

  -And it looked just like you? Poe asked. He’d heard stories before, and he knew this trader, who’s name he hadn’t even caught, had had a lot of the drinks his bricks, in tiny slivers, help to make.

  -Well, let me start earlier, the trader said, stumbling over his words as he poured another drink in his mouth.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  -No, I don’t like that. You said you saw an alien and it looked just like you. Okay, that’s a hook. Don’t go backwards now.

  The trader looked at him and laughed.

  -What’s the rush? Where’d you say you were headed anyway?

  -I’m a local.

  -I meant after the bar.

  -I didn’t say, Poe responded. And what did you say your name was?

  -Kitchen Lister. Like the warship. He smiled.

  Poe remembered his name now, he’d thought of the warship when he heard the trader said the name, but then started remembering the stories of the war and forgot how he had gotten there.

  After the bar, Poe was headed to the top floor of the hotel. He stayed at the Hotel Florida, but only for six or seven days out of the week. He spent one or two every week traveling to Ganymede to visit his daughter, one of just three children under ten in her mother’s domed settlement of three thousand. The human population across the solar system was plummeting, under two million at the last census, and children, whether natural born, assisted, or cloned, were getting even harder to come by.

  -Do you want to hear the story? About the alien?

  -Yes.