Stars and Bones

by Gareth L. Powell

Unfortunately, it couldn’t be done without a conscious biological mind at the helm. I’d been told this was due to an unanticipated variation of what the physicists called the Observer Effect—the quantum physical theory that tells us the act of perceiving a phenomenon inevitably changes the phenomenon itself.

The act of looking for a pathway brought that pathway into being.

Fucking capitalism. I’d never got my head around it. As far as I could understand, it was a scam to keep you working all your life for the chance to maybe die in comfortable surroundings at the end.

A smile behind the beard. “We talk from time to time.” “What about?” “Oh, this and that. Cabbages and kings.”

“Something tells me I have to reach that ring.”

This was an old, familiar game. Maybe the oldest and most deadly. The tribe had been attacked; a predator was loose, and we were entering the forest to kill it.