Status Updates From The Machine's Child (The Co...

Meekly he poles back to the landing and ties up his gondola. Glaring at him, the Englishman steps out and extends his hand to the lady, who leaps up gracefully despite her billowing skirts; as she passes Vittorio she advises him, in flawless idiomatic Venetian and in no uncertain terms, just exactly what he can do with his pole. They don't tip.

The young man, with his wild hair and loud shirt, is holding up two gallon jugs of Captain Morgan Spiced Rum like trophies. The girl, in simple Levis and a Giants T-shirt, is brandishing a box of Rice-a-Roni in one hand and a box of gloriously Technicolor breakfast cereal in the other. They are both, the boy and the girl, grinning like loons.

His name, actually, is Joseph, and on this particular day in the year 2317 he's just over twenty thousand four hundred years old, and he never, ever started out to be a Rogue Cyborg, but, well--shit happens.