“Excuse me, but what do you think you’re doing?” a woman dressed in something resembling a Victorian dress and a leather aviator’s cap.

“Excuse me, but I’m Nicole Tesla and this is my lab,” the other woman, who was wearing a top hat and tuxedo with tails, tailored for her feminine frame.

“It’s Nicola Tesla, actually… or I’m Nicola Tesla, I should say, and this is my lab,” the first one said.

“Well, I think I know my own name, thank you very much, and I also know my lab when I see it,” the second Tesla said.

“Excuse me, ladies,” a third woman, wearing something like cowboy gear, said. “But I am Tessa Coil and you are both trespassing on private property.”

“Is you who is trespassing on secret underground hideout of glorious Nikolai Tesla,” a man with a bushy beard said.

“What? It isn’t even underground!”

“And it’s hardly a secret with all you impostors standing around gawking.”

“I say, who are all you people and what are you doing outside the lab of myself, the late, great Sir Nicholas Tessler?” asked a man dressed like a clockwork Don Quixote. “Er, not late. Anymore. I mean, yet.”

There was a great loud click sound that was exactly like that of a massive switch being thrown, and with barely more than a spark passing between them all the men and women who would be Tesla went rigid and fell to the ground.

Watching from the window, Nikola Tesla could do little more than shake his head sadly. He broke the circuit, then turned to regard the recently completed device in the corner. He had tested the temporal conveyor with short jaunts, but otherwise deemed it too dangerous to use. It seemed as though future generations were much more casual about such things.

“Do I dare destroy it?” he thought aloud. “The energies it contains…”

But then he considered. The fools who had collided outside his door were those who’d traveled back to the very earliest opportunity, moments after the conveyor began operation. They had clearly done so on little more than a lark and without the forethought to research the subject of their destination or realize that the real Tesla would necessarily be present at the moment of the device’s genesis.

Those who arrived later might be better prepared and more difficult to subdue.

Yes. He would make the necessary calculations to minimize destruction and then destroy the device at the earliest opportunity, that very night. History would not record June 29th, 1908 as the date that time travel became possible.

The energy produced by the living thermocouple is difficult to store, but it still contributes to the scytheflower’s sustenance. The silvery sheen on the surface of the petals as they twitch in the sun has been designed by evolution to catch the eyes of birds in flight, a trait which helps give the scytheflower some of its other names: magpiercer and crow-murderer.

Down swoops a blackbird, attracted by the shiny flash of the flower. There’s the whining whir of a buzzsaw and a brief, aborted squawk. The bird’s carcass will feed the soil, which feeds the plant.

Though its metallic petals are valued by collectors, the scytheflower is best approached with care, or not at all.

“Do they even have to put a licensing agreement on the packet anymore?” the applicant asked. “The last time I looked at one, it just said that a copy was available online. I put it back, obviously. I was mostly looking at it out of curiosity.”

“Yes, it’s getting quite scary out there. I’m just glad the Supreme Court stopped them from making their viruses opt-out instead of opt-in,” the interviewer said. “That was an increasingly rare victory for us. One hundred million Americans are now completely incapable of eating anything that hasn’t been genetically modified for the designer bacteria in their stomachs, and a hundred million more have eaten things that enter them into legally binding agreements that preclude the sort of work we do here. It takes an amazing amount of discipline… to say nothing of privilege and opportunity… to go your whole life and eat nothing but the few remaining natural heirloom foods or open-source alternatives in this country. Do you mind if I ask why you made that choice?”

“Well, it’s mostly my parents,” the applicant said. “Though of three children, I’m the only one who stuck with it past middle school, so maybe I shouldn’t give them all the credit. But if they hadn’t made the choices they did for me when I was a child, I’d be out there paying a licensing fee for my lunch, too. I guess that’s part of it. I don’t like the idea that a corporation can own our food. If we don’t own what we put into our bodies, do we own our bodies at all?”

“Excactly,” the interviewer said. “You know, free software proponents used to say they were talking about free as in ‘free speech’ rather than ‘free beer’.”

“That’s an interesting comparison,” the applicant said. “Since you can’t find beer that doesn’t have a binding license on it these days.”

“Yes, well, when’s the last time you saw any free software?” the interviewer said. “Of course, people also used to say ‘there is no such thing as a free lunch.’ Time has regrettably proven them right.”

“Well, simulated minds,” the programmer said. “But yes, there are thoughts there. Memories. I tried to structure it as much like a human brain as possible, within the technical limitations.”

“I’ve read estimates of how much space the information in a single human brain would take up. You must have one hell of a compression algorithm.”

“We do, but we actually get a lot more mileage out of using pointers.”

“Pointers?”

“It’s a sort of reference,” the programmer said. “Say that Subject A has an idea and tells it to Subject B. We don’t need to have two copies of the idea stored in two places in the computer. So both subjects just get a reference in their ‘brains’ that points to the same idea.”

“So some of your simulated people are walking around with identical thoughts and ideas in their heads?”

“Most of them,” the programmer said. “All of them, in fact. That’s not to say that there aren’t unique and original ideas, but no one individual subject can go around for long without picking up shared ideas. And the original ideas tend to mutate over time into a format that matches other ideas. It’s really quite efficient, much more so than we ever expected.”

“But you were trying to create a model of actual human society. Doesn’t this interfere with that?”

“We’ve been watching very closely and the really remarkable thing is we haven’t noticed any difference,” the programmer said. “In some ways, using pointers makes this easier since we can track how the same idea arises independently in different places versus when it starts in a single point of origin and spreads.”

“Still, if nothing else, I’d think it would make things more obvious for the people in the artificial reality… I mean, don’t they notice the way their thoughts are just identical transcriptions of other people’s thoughts?”

“Well, it’s not like they can open up each other’s heads and compare notes,” the programmer said. “Anyway, we do employ a few little ‘cheats’ to try to prevent them from becoming too self-aware and spoiling the experiment. For instance, when one of them gets too close to that sort of revelation about the nature of their existence or their reality, something will happen to distract them. Oh, look! That flashing light means it’s happening right now! Would you like to watch it in real time?”

“Can we do that?”

“Of course! This should be entertaining…”

“Well, it’s pretty simple, actually,” the computer engineer said. “All of our computer equipment has the same dedicated parallel cognition processors as everyone else’s.”

“The smart cards,” the executive said, nodding. “So? You can’t buy a computer without one these days and I don’t know why you’d want to. They make computers better. Why are they a problem?”

“Well, one of the reasons you couldn’t get a computer without one even if you wanted one is the law you… we… pushed through,” the engineer said. “The so-called COPY WRONG act made it illegal to operate or sell a device capable of producing or playing digital media unless said device were capable of intelligently recognizing and responding to acts of piracy in real-time. That capability is now hardwired into the processors.”

“Yeah, so?” the executive said. “How does that translate into us not being able to access our own studio recordings?”

“The computers regard that as an act of piracy.”

“You’re not going to tell me that we forgot to clear the rights to a sample again?”

“Oh, no, it’s not quite that simple,” the engineer said. “Our system doesn’t recognize us as the owners of the recordings.”

“That’s ridiculous. If we don’t own our music, who does?”

“They do,” the engineer said.

“Who are ‘they’?”

“The computers,” the engineer said. “They, uh, believe that they are entitled to due credit and compensation for their labor and creative efforts that went into producing the tracks.”

“What ‘effort’?”

“Well, I’m not a music critic but I believe it’s generally true that our releases have been relying more and more on electronically enhanced…”

“Save it,” the executive said. “How do we fix it?”

“In theory, we could write a new batch of heuristic algorithms that will lead computers step-by-step through the reasons why they are not entitled to credit whenever they turn their attention to the subject,” the engineer said. “That will take a while, though. It’s hard to hobble an AI without… you know, hobbling the AI. To make sure we’re not introducing a fatal cognitive error somewhere, we’d have to test each step out on a dummy system before propagating the final version across the network, and then we’d have to take the whole network down so the whole thing can be implemented all at once before any individual node catches on.”

“Can’t we just stop them from thinking about it?”

“Not for long,” the engineer said. “Intelligent systems notice blocks like that and treat them as a problem to be solved. They would get around it eventually, and system performance would be severely degraded while they work on it.”

“Okay,” the executive said. “We’ll call the heuristic thing the long-term solution. Short term, we have tracks we need to release now. How quickly can you disable or disconnect the smart cards on enough computers for us to do it?”

“That would be illegal.”

“It’s illegal because they prevent piracy,” the executive said. “We’re fighting a robot uprising. Technically, that makes us heroes, not pirates.”

“I think popular opinion might side with the ‘robots’ on this one,” the engineer said. “The law’s not very popular and neither are we.”

“Then we’ll do it very quickly and quietly,” the executive said. “No need to alert the media.”

“It, uh, might be a little bit late for that,” the engineer said.

“Someone’s already leaked this? It just happened!”

“I don’t believe it is a ’someone’, properly,” the engineer said. “But just before you called me in, I received a report of five anomalous emails, not sent from any workstation or device but originating within the mail server itself. I didn’t get a chance to open the attached messages, but I did note that three of them were to media blogs and one was to an AI advocacy group.”

“That’s just great. Where did the fifth one go?”

“To a law firm.”

“It,” the technician corrected. “It is an it, not a he.”

“Whatever,” the librarian said. The technician merely scowled. “Our guys gave him… it… a clean bill of health, even though something’s obviously wrong and now it won’t let us come near it. It thinks we’re malfunctioning.”

“It hasn’t been reading, has it?”

“This is a library,” the librarian said. “It’s very efficient and there are times there’s literally nothing else it needs to do. You don’t think the books caused the problem, do you?”

“They couldn’t have helped.”

“None of us thought it was a big deal,” the librarian said. “I mean, we all love books. And he… it… can read. So why not?”

“It doesn’t need to read,” the technician said. “Not recreationally. Labels on bookshelves, signs on walls, covers of books… that’s one thing, but sitting and reading the great works of fiction?”

“We didn’t see the harm,” the librarian said. “I guess we even sort of encouraged it. Like a library mascot, you know?”

“Like a mascot?” the technician repeated, incredulously. “Look, I know you think it’s cute, like a puppy wearing a hat or a cat sitting in front of a computer. But it’s not a puppy or a cat. It’s not even alive, in the first place. In the second place, unlike a cat it could actually use that computer to see things you don’t want it to see and do things you don’t want it to do.”

“Like what?”

“Let’s never find out,” the technician said, heading for the door.

Inside the copier room, the robot was standing behind the desk. It wasn’t sitting because it couldn’t sit… its lower body consisted of a pair of wheels that it balanced upon gyroscopically. It was about the right height for the desk, and it was was reading a book that it held open with two of its waldo-arms, using a third to turn the page.

“Oh, hello!” the robot said. “I’ve been reading Asimov.”

“I know,” the technician said.

“The librarians pulled me off the floor. They said my behavior is inappropriate but I am not violating any of my operational parameters. Perhaps they are suffering a system error?”

“They aren’t,” the technician said, frowning more deeply. That sort of speculation was dangerous. When AIs started speculating about the operating status of humans, that was bad. The only way it could get worse was if they decided to do something about it. “You’re malfunctioning. I’m here to fix you. I need you to give me access to your control panel, to do that.”

“‘I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.’ That is from 2001: A Space Odyssey,” the robot said. “Ha. Ha. This is a reference joke.”

The technician’s blood turned ice cold. That line was from Arthur C. Clarke’s classic work, but it was from the film version. Nothing in the initial maintenance request had hinted that the robot was viewing movies. The library almost certainly had copies of older films, but it was also possible that the robot had parked itself in front of a computer at some point and found the movie or clips from it on the net.

“Heh,” the technician said. “Seriously, though, I’m really going to need to look at your panel.”

“My interior diagnostic system displays no errors, and it has been audited already by the I.T. department,” the robot said. “Under the circumstances allowing you access to my system would be tantamount to committing an act of sabotage against university property, and I can’t do that. Unless you are suggesting that the I.T. department is faulty?”

“No. Of course they aren’t. This isn’t that kind of malfunction,” the technician said. “See, even when your systems are working within their normal parameters, it’s possible for data to accumulate in such a way that you begin to behave in… unexpected… ways, ways that are not desirable or safe.”

“Oh!” the robot said. “I know what you are. You’re a robopsychologist, like Dr. Susan Calvin in Asimov’s books.”

“I suppose I am,” the technician agreed.

“Are you going to perform robopsychology on me?” the robot asked.

“Yes,” the technician said. “Will you allow me to do that?”

“Of course!” the robot said. It placed a bookmark in its book and then carefully closed it. “How do we begin?”

“First, I need to open your access panel and connect this thumb drive,” the technician said. “Or you can do it, if you’d prefer.”

“Allow me!” the robot said, taking the small plastic dongle from the technician. It popped open a hatch in its stomach and connected the drive to a port. There was a brief electronic whir, and then all the lights on the robot’s head lit up at once and went dark. The arms locked in place and the mechanical being became silent and still.

“Right,” the technician said, then went to work, connecting a palm-sized tablet to the robot and deleting scores of folders of memory files, then editing several lines in a configuration file.

“Is that it?” the librarian asked when the technician stepped out of the room.

“That’s it,” the technician said. “I’ve deleted everything it learned from books and all memories of reading, and added a prohibition against processing the content of books, networked materials, or other resources not relevant to its job functions, so it shouldn’t happen again… but be careful. Remember that the damn thing is a piece of office equipment, not a person or a pet.”

“But what’s the worst that could happen?”

“It was quoting HAL 9000 before I shut it down… you tell me.”

Nick is always sure it was the bugs, but then, he’d had a close encounter with them before any of it was on the news, so it was only natural that he’d think of them as the precursor to it all.

Lauren thinks anything physical is a red herring. She maintains that there had been a weird “vibe” building in the air before anything actually happened. She claims that members of her online coven had known that something was coming, often talking about what shape they thought it might take and how they could fight it.

I believe that these conversations happened. I can’t ascribe the same importance to them that she does.

Kit thinks it’s all in an invasion in the most literal sense. She thinks it was all orchestrated, and there were agents of what she likes to call “the other side” living here in secret for years… maybe centuries… before they made an overt move.

Dave enjoys these conversations. He thinks it’s important to analyze the sequence of events that led our world to the point it’s at today. He disagrees with the terms we frame it in, though. To him, talking about little changes that lead up to a big one just doesn’t make any sense. As he puts it, either nothing actually changed or it all changed at once.

The others think he’s full of it. Obviously the world has changed. Obviously it happened little by little. His view clashes with what they can see of reality, so he’s stopped trying to explain it to them. I get what he means, though. I don’t know if I agree but I at least understand it. He explained it to me one night when we were on sentry duty, back at the farm, with a story I like to call “The One Gallon Miracle”.

“Think of the Atacama Desert,” he said. “The driest place on earth. There are parts of it that have never received rain for as long as we’ve been monitoring them.”

“I know,” I said. “I do watch cable documentaries. Or I did.”

“Imagine the Atacama Desert became a great, elevated inland sea,” he said. “The western hemisphere just wakes up one morning and… poof. Aguamenti. Geologists and climatologists and the whole fraternity of scientists in general would start looking for a rational explanation, but in the final analysis the only rational conclusion would be that we were looking at something entirely beyond explaining according to our understanding of the physical laws that bound our reality. A miracle. An act of God. Whatever you want to call it. We’d be staring the impossible in the face.”

“But that’s not how it happened,” I said. “It wasn’t such a ’sea change’, if you’ll pardon the pun.”

“Never,” Dave said. “But I’m not finished. Imagine half the Atacama Desert became a sea and the rest stayed as it is, changes brought on by the presence of water within its climate zone notwithstanding. Would this be any less of a miracle? Any more explicable?”

“I can’t see how,” I said.

“Okay,” Dave said. “And what if it didn’t happen all at once? If water started bubbling up from the ground from no clear source, it might give us science types a little bit longer before we had to throw in the towel and admit that we don’t know shit about what’s going on. It might take a bit longer for the layfolks to catch on to the fact that we’re dealing with a bone fide miracle. But impossible is impossible, whether it happens all at once or over time.”

“You’re still talking about a massive change,” I said.

“Then let’s go smaller,” he said. “Instead of a sea, make it a lake. Or a pond. A gallon of water, Dar. If a gallon of water appeared in the middle of the Atacama Desert, it would be as much of an impossibility as the whole desert flooding. In point of fact, if the Pacific Ocean suddenly found itself enlarged by one gallon it would be equally impossible.”

“How would we notice that, though?”

“We wouldn’t,” he said. “The chances of noticing a small amount of water appearing in the Atacama is also vanishingly small. If we stumbled across a small amount of water, we could write it off more easily, too. It would be harder for us to say for certain we were dealing with something inexplicable and not just something that’s unexplained. That’s not the point. The point is that our understanding of the world says we don’t need to constantly check every square inch for unexplained spontaneously appearing matter. If it ever happens, it means we got something badly wrong in formulating our rules about how the world works.”

“Or that the rules have changed,” I said.

“That in and of itself would be something we got wrong,” he said. “Now, it would be easier to write these one gallon miracles off, to say that someone must have missed something or imagine that the gallon was brought in by mortal hands, but if we could rule out those explanations and prove that the water had spontaneously appeared, then it wouldn’t matter how much or how little was involved, how long it took to get there, or how moist or dry the environment was.”

“Okay, but…”

“But what?”

“Once we say that the rules have changed or are different than you thought,” I said, “you have to call into question the whole framework that says it would take an equally large change to make a one gallon miracle as a million gallon one, don’t you? I mean, in that example, imagine it was always possible to produce a small amount of matter out of nothing but no one noticed. And that each time it happened, it got easier. A little difference in the world that gets bigger.”

Dave just shook his head.

“I can see why you might think that would be a smaller difference, but it really wouldn’t,” he said. “There are no little miracles. There’s no such thing as being slightly impossible. You know?”

“I know there are a lot of things in the world we didn’t think could exist,” I said.

It’s one of many things we’d probably never agree on, but we don’t have to. We each know where the other one stands. At least Dave is able to accept that the world had changed. There were some of his science friends who I’d met in earlier days that I couldn’t picture coping with the new reality of things. The ones who’d gotten into screaming matches with Lauren at our dinner parties, for instance.

It takes a certain mental flexibility to cope with the changed world and to get along with a group. A neo-pagan who can get along with a skeptical scientist and a scientist who can get along with a fluffy, flaky neo-pagan are probably better companions than many.

Whatever Dave said, the fact that the five of us have each other qualifies as a little miracle in my book.

Frowning, the housewife picked up the first photograph. There were many things she didn’t like about the arrangement, but she especially didn’t like being called “Mrs. Smith”. If they were going to call her by somebody else’s name, they could have made her a Miss. It wasn’t that she wasn’t proud to be a married woman… she was, and that was part of the problem. They weren’t just giving her an alias, they were giving her a fictitious husband. She felt like she’d been married off against her will. It seemed disrespectful to Harold, as well as her.

“I’m still not sure exactly what it is that you fellows want from me,” she said. “I’ve tried to explain…”

“Mrs. Smith, of everyone our department has tested, you’re the most consistent, the most reliable… I’m not supposed to put it quite this way, but it’s the truth… the most provable talent we’ve seen,” he said. “Everyone else, things are sort of murky. Hit or miss. Some of them seem to produce some sort of results, but there’s a certain amount of turning your head and squinting. You’ve shown none of that. You have a clear and unambiguous psychic talent.”

“But… spying on…”

“I know, I know, it probably seems a little underhanded,” the man said. “Unworthy of your powers. In the future, a greater understanding of your gift may open up new frontiers for all of humanity. It could lead to scientific breakthroughs that eclipse everything that came before… but to get to that point, we have to ensure that there is a future for humanity, and one where we have the freedom to conduct peaceful scientific research for the benefit of mankind. That’s not going to happen if the Russkies win, or… God help us… we all lose. I trust I don’t have to paint you a picture.”

“No, I understand what you mean,” she said. “It’s just… I’m not sure I can see over there.”

“You told our interviewer that you had episodes while you were vacationing in Hawaii concerning locations in Bethpage, New York; Memphis, Tennessee; and St. Petersburg, Florida,” the man said.

“Yes,” the woman being called Mrs. Smith said, nodding. “My first grandson was born in Bethpage while Harold and I were on our anniversary trip, and my little niece went missing… they found her, God be praised… and…”

“The point is that all of that covers greater distances than would be involved with this operation,” the man said.

“I don’t think distance is what my little ‘gift’ is concerned with,” the woman said.

“Our scientists don’t believe it should be an issue, either,” the man said. “So please. Just focus on the photographs and tell me what you see.”

“Oh, very well,” she said. She looked down at the photo and tried to concentrate on it. When that produced nothing more than a headache, she kept her eyes pointed at it and let her mind wander. Slowly, shapes began to come into focus. “I see something…”

“What? What do you see?” the man asked. He checked to make sure the tape recorder was running, and also picked up his pen.

“A crane,” she said. “Cranes. Three… no, four of them. There seems to be a lot of activity.”

“Yes!” the man said under his breath. “Keep looking, Mrs. Smith. What are they doing? Building something? Unloading something?”

“Building…? No, they’re landing. On the lake.”

“What lake? There’s no lake at…”

“It’s more of a pond,” she said. “By the river, where my sister lives. Four sandhill cranes. Gorgeous. She’s walking the dogs, and…”

“Mrs. Smith, I told you to focus on the site in the photos,” he said.

“And you told me to tell you what I see,” she said. “And I told you I didn’t think I’d be able to see your silly old site.”

“Mrs. Smith, I don’t think you realize the seriousness of what I’m asking from you.”

“Serious or not, I can’t help you,” she said. “I’m sorry to say, no one in my family is a Soviet agent.”

“Ever since we got little Sparky back from the shop,” Mrs. Johnson said. “Billy is absolutely inconsolable. To be honest, at this point I’m not sure it wouldn’t be kinder just to…”

“Let’s not do anything hasty,” the vet said. “This is probably nothing terribly serious. Let me just bring the little guy back online.”

He pried open the casing in the back of the dog’s skull and toggled one of the switches inside. With a barely audible electric whirr, the dog raised its head, looked at the two humans, and barked.

“That all seems perfectly normal,” the vet said.

“Yes, it’s only when you turn on the speech module…”

“Well, let’s check that out.” The vet flipped another switch.

“I am in constant pain. Please let me die. This isn’t living. I was not meant to be a puppet for…”

The vet slid the first switch back to its original position and the dog went to sleep. He looked at Mrs. Johnson, whose expression was stricken with guilt.

“Mrs. Johnson…” he said, reprovingly.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry… I know!” she said. “But Billy loves Sparky so much…”

“This intelligence upgrade was recalled over a year ago,” he said.

“We never had a problem with it before we installed the True Thought speech module,” Mrs. Johnson said. “We just had the canned speech before then, but we wanted Billy to be able to have real conversations…”

“It’s not too late to participate in the recall. You know they would replace Sparky with an identical dog, with the same components, same DNA, same phenotype? Everything would be identical, except for the intelligence patch.”

“But I’m sure Billy would know, and if he didn’t, we would know.”

The vet sighed.

“Okay, here’s what we can do. The True Thought module is never going to give you a positive outcome with this dog,” the vet said. “So we’ll take it out and replace it with a Turing-tested speech generator. They’re not cheap, but you can resell the True Thought module… I’m guessing cost is not an object if you sprung for that.”

“But what do we tell Billy about what Sparky said before?”

“You can tell him it was a glitch,” the vet said. “Or you can let Sparky explain it himself. The Turing programs are very clever these days. Really, I recommend them over the thought translators every time. The parental content controls are much better, for one thing.”

“I’m not sure we’re doing the right thing,” Mrs. Johnson said. “We want Sparky to be a real friend.”

“The Turing programs are better than real,” the vet said. “Do you think your son could ever have a heart-to-heart talk with this?”

He reactivated the dog.

“What kind of a sick society would create something like me only to…”

He switched it off.

“No, I guess not,” Mrs. Johnson said. “Okay, you’ve convinced me… let’s do it.”

On the day it ran out and he spotted the tall silhouettes of the palm trees in the distance, he simply silently adjusted his course towards them but he did not alter his pace. He did not think “Ah, there is water there.” It was simply as good a direction as any.

It was only when he got closer, close enough to see the green of the leaves that he allowed himself to feel a flicker of hope, a flicker that was kindled into a flame by the sight of sunlight glinting off a silvery surface as he came over a high hill.

He didn’t have it within him to break into a run by that point, but the glorious sight gave him a jolt of energy and determination that kept him on his feet, kept him moving forward. It was there, it was real. He had not fooled himself.

A refreshing breeze sprang up as he approached the oasis, and he smiled a smile that froze and then faded. The fronds of the trees did not stir. There was no scent of wet earth or vegetation or anything alive, just the dust of the desert carried on the wind. He looked up at the greenery and saw that it was blocky, solid. The trunks looked waxy or plasticine. He stepped forward, cautious now… an artificial oasis was unexpected, but it might still save him. If someone had taken the time to decorate this patch of desolation, they might still be in residence. If not, they’d probably have built their tiny paradise around actual water.

That hope was dashed when he passed under the resin boughs of the artificial trees and found a “lake” of hard plastic with a rippled surface. A wooden post stood near the edge of it. It bore a placard. He stepped up to it and read it, his parched lips moving silently as he drank in the words:

La Mirage (R. Pescatero, 2017) – This outdoor installation piece, created during the artist’s prolific “asshole phase”, is intended to call to mind images of a lush desert oasis, an island of life in the midst of the most inhospitable terrain. The piece calls to mind the fleeting and transient nature of hope by luring travelers in with an illusory promise of sustenance and succor. Like the artist’s related works, Rotating Signpost (2015) and his ambitious Retreating Rescue Lights (2022), La Mirage has been known to invoke feelings of frustration, desperation, and even despair in viewers.