2022/152: Silver Skin — Joan Lennon

2022/152: Silver Skin — Joan Lennon

He tried to imagine what it would be like to actually believe this stuff. To feel invisible danger all around. To not know if the next person you met was human or something else entirely that was out to get you, one way or another. When they’d studied the superstitions of early cultures it had never occurred to him just how stressful it would be, just how paranoid it must make you feel. [loc. 942]

Rab lives in Stack 367-74, Delta Grid, Northwest Europasia. It's far in the future, after the Catastrophe Ages -- the Nadir, the Flood and the Bulge, the latter an immense population explosion which led to the Alexander Decision and antaphrodisiacs in the drinking water. Rab wants to be an archaeologist, and his mother is keen for him to move ahead, move out: she buys him a Retro-Dimensional Time Wender with Full Cloaking Capability, a wearable time-machine which will transport Rab to a different time while keeping him in the same geographical location.( Read more... )