Please note: This story was originally written as an entry in the 2001 International Mark Twain Writing Competition sponsored by the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library. The contest organizers posted the first two chapters of Twain's previously unpublished story "A Murder, a Mystery and a Marriage" on the web, and challenged entrants to finish it. In the end, they received over 700 entries from all over the world. Twain's complete original story was later published in hardcover by W.W. Norton & Company and became a New York Times bestseller.
My entry finished in the top ten, and was later published as "The Break Inspector" in the online historical science fiction magazine Would That It Were, edited by Don Muchow. Sadly, Would That It Were ceased operations and went offline in late 2005, so I am re-presenting "The Break Inspector" on my own website.
Because Twain's original story went unpublished until 2001, it's still protected by copyright, so I can't publish the first two chapters here. However, you can read them on the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library's website.
John Gray had never regretted a kind act in his life, although truth be told, he would have had little enough to regret in any one of his fifty-five years; but oh how he wished the milk of human kindness had been completely drained from him that terrible, cursed night. With every fiber of his being, with every drop of blood in his body, John Gray wished he had never found the mysterious stranger on his prairie.
How he railed and yowled at perfidious fate and his own naïve stupidity. Why had he not simply left the interloper exactly where he found him? Merciful Nature would have taken care of the rest; by morning the stranger would have been frozen as solid as iron. Dash it all to blazes, why could he have not left well enough alone?
For the devil had come to Deer Lick and was living under John Gray's roof, or so he heartily believed.
For three days the stranger lay feverish and delirious in John Gray's bed, and responded neither to the remedies the doctor forced past his teeth nor to the entreaties of John Gray's wife and daughter. Sally and Mary both had become enthralled in the mystery of the stranger's appearance and his bizarre babblings. The village medical man, Dr. Hastings, was likewise fascinated and rode all the way to Brighton to cable his colleagues across the county asking for advice about the stranger's odd symptoms.
"Never seen a fever like it," he confided to John Gray on the third day after the stranger's arrival. "It spikes way up to a hunnert-and-five, then drops to normal and then back up again, all in less than a quarter hour. A child can handle fever like that for a day, maybe two, but a grown man? Never seen it. He should be dead, by all rights. Or if not dead, then all bunged up in the brain for sure."
"Well maybe he is," replied John Gray, "maybe that's why he yammers and jabbers in them heathen tongues all day and all night."
Dr. Hastings smiled and shook his head slowly. He chose his words carefully to avoid giving offense, but not so carefully that John Gray would forget who was the educated man and who was the dirt farmer. "He may be jabbering, John, but it's perfectly respectable Christian jabber in French and German and Eye-talian. Spanish, too. And one or two lingoes I never heard before, maybe Russian or Bohemian."
John Gray shrugged and said, "If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for me, I reckon. Don't need any of this silly foreign jibber-jabber."
At this, Dr. Hastings' lips began to twitch uncontrollably and he quickly excused himself to take his supper at home.
With the exception of the great unpleasantness some called a Civil War and some called a War Between the States, John Gray had never experienced a significant change or surprise in his life. To have so many thrust upon him in so short a time created an almost unbearable tension in the man. He barked orders and insults and fairly turned purple in the face when Mary fell at his feet sobbing, begging him again to reverse his ban on Hugh Gregory.
"Don't backtalk me, missy!" John Gray yelled, lifting his hand menacingly. "I am your father and you'll just obey me!" Mary flinched in surprise. For all his gruffness, her father had never raised his hand in anger against her in all her twenty years.
"Yes, father," she replied in a tone that would have broken John Gray's heart a mere three days earlier.
"Interesting," came a soft voice from behind John Gray as his daughter sobbed. "Nicht wahr? Très intéressant."
The farmer whirled. Standing at the entranceway to the room, the picture of unconcern, was the stranger, dressed only in the spare, tattered nightshirt the old farmer had donated for the purpose. "La société patriarcale," he continued to mutter. "My, oh my. It is one thing to read about something, and another thing again to experience it in the flesh."
John Gray stared dumbstruck as the stranger wandered into the room and began circling father and daughter, examining them as if they were some rare species of fish or fowl. "You're up and about!" John Gray finally barked.
"Certainly," sniffed the man. "I cannot stay in bed indefinitely. I need to understand the whys and whens and wherefores. Otherwise there's no reason for me to be here at all."
"Don't give me none of your foreign fancy talk!" John Gray shouted. "Not two hours ago you were a'burnin' up, on death's doorstep. Now here you are, healthy as a horse..."
"SchrÖdinger's Fever," interrupted the stranger with a casual shrug. "It will continue to wax and wane for some time. It is uncomfortable but harmless. Do not fret about it."
"Fret about your own self," replied John Gray, neither knowing nor caring who SchrÖdinger was, nor why the poor devil would have a malady named after him. "At least have the decency to put on proper clothes if you're a'gonna wander about the house!" Understanding dawned in the stranger's eyes. "Ah. Dress code taboos," he muttered.
Twenty minutes later, John Gray found himself in his kitchen, observing the stranger consume a heaping plate of Sally's cooking. It was like watching a dull plow being pulled by a drunk ox through a muddy field. The man was dressed again in his fancy, oddly cut shirt and trousers, and both of his wrists were adorned with slim, silver-white trinkets. He clutched knife and fork as if they were unfamiliar tools from some exotic trade, and fairly shoveled food into his mouth with whichever implement struck his fancy at that instant, stopping only occasionally to chew or to offer Sally an encouraging smile. "I feel ath if I have not eathen in weeks," he lisped through a mouthful of potatoes.
"Days, at least," said Mary, offering a cloth napkin. He stared at it in incomprehension until Sally pantomimed the act of wiping his mouth. "Ah," he said, "Eating morays and manners. Yes. Je comprends." Sally stood and asked, "Can I brew you up some coffee, Mister...?"
There was a pause. "Mister?" He replied blankly.
"O for gosh sakes!" John Gray exploded. "Your name, man! Why do you constantly make such a fearful fuss over the simplest questions?"
"Of course," said the stranger, standing and bowing elegantly. "I beg your pardon. My name is Raincross. Sebastian T. Raincross, esquire."
"John Gray," replied the farmer, standing and sticking out his hand. Sebastian T. Raincross looked down at the proffered hand and up again, puzzled.
"Shake his hand," said Mary, her voice full of wonderment, as if she were instructing the man in the operation of his lungs or kidneys. Sebastian T. Raincross did as instructed, but it was like no handshake ever shook in the state of Missouri. He gripped the back of John Gray's proffered hand and proceeded to vibrate like a man in a carriage going over rough terrain. The farmer snatched his hand from the stranger's grip as if it were red-hot.
"You're a queer one, ain't you?" he asked as the stranger dropped back into his chair.
"So I have been told," agreed Sebastian T. Raincross, liberally spearing ham with both fork and knife and putting both utensils into his mouth simultaneously. "So," he said with a loud belch as he finished his meal, "please explain why you are forbidding your daughter from bedding the young man of her choice."
Mary and Sally gasped. John Gray seized Sebastian Raincross by the front of his shirt, and screamed, "You take that back! Ain't none of that ever gone on under this roof!"
"Non, nyet, nem!" shouted Raincross. "I used an incorrect word. I meant to say... c'est quoi le maudit mot... wedding. Yes, that's it! Why will you not permit your daughter's wedding to the young man of her choice?"
"Question ain't no better with the right word," spat John Gray, releasing his grip on the stranger's shirt. Sebastian Raincross stumbled backwards a pace before he recovered his balance.
"My humblest apologies, I meant no offense," he muttered. This time, however, John Gray sensed something in the stranger other than genteel befuddlement. There was now a hard look in his eyes, and more than a hint of untruth and even menace in his words. John Gray shuddered. Bad enough to have a madman in the house, now he had gone and made him angry.
And so it went for almost six months. Sebastian Raincross would experience brief oases of lucidity which alternated with much longer periods of fever and delusional rambling. Dr. Hastings frankly admitted his helplessness in the face of a malady that did not behave as a proper malady should, though Sebastian Raincross seemed unperturbed and settled comfortably into the Gray household as if he were long-lost kin. Hints and even outright suggestions that he move along were neatly sidestepped, turned back upon themselves and finally, utterly ignored, often with the connivance of John Gray's own wife and daughter. Without once opposing his wishes in word or deed, they still managed to quietly delay and undo every eviction notice he decreed.
John Gray was sorely vexed. Day by day he felt the mastery of his household slipping from his grasp as the stranger plied his wife and daughter with fantastic tales and odd notions -- the word "suffrage" was being whispered less and less furtively, for one. John Gray didn't know what it meant, but it sounded new and radical and dangerous. In Missouri, men with dangerous ideas usually found themselves swinging from trees. John Gray wanted no part of it.
Worst of all, the mystery of Sebastian Raincross did nothing to alleviate John Gray's original problem. Hugh Gregory was handsome, kind and popular in Deer Lick, and his troubles with Dave Gray already elicited considerable local sympathy. Inconsolable at the loss of his love, Hugh slipped into a terrible melancholia. One night, after a particularly enthusiastic round of imbibing at the saloon, he declared publicly that the men of the Gray family were a race of monsters. I'm better off!" he slurred in a loud bellow. "I don' need their p'isen'd blood 'n my children!"
"You take that back!" boomed a loud voice from the back of the saloon.
"That goes double for me!" bellowed a similar voice by the door.
Dave Gray staggered from the darkened, smoky rear of the saloon. Big and bluff, his face was flushed with drink and anger. He bit down on his foul-smelling cigar and stared pure hatred at Hugh Gregory. His older brother John Gray, still clear-eyed and ramrod straight, stood by the front entrance, fists clenching and unclenching. A bemused and healthy Sebastian Raincross sat at the bar, surveying the unfolding scene like an enthusiast waiting for a wrestling match to begin.
Hugh Gregory laughed a bitter laugh. "I see Beelzebub and Lucifer are on speaking terms once again."
John and Dave Gray eyed each other and nodded, curtly. "Call us what you will, we are still Grays," announced John Gray, "You done insulted the family name and we're callin' you out."
"Come on the both of you!" shouted Hugh Gregory, slipping into a sloppy, two-fisted boxing stance. "I can lick two sour old buggers like you with one hand tied behind my back!"
"Fine by me," said Dave Gray, rubbing his hands together in glee. "Let's us take it outside."
"Two against one," cried a voice from the back of the saloon. "Is that what the Grays think are fair odds?"
"He called it," replied Dave Gray, staggering through the saloon gates. "And we're just two sour old buggers, right? A strapping young fella oughta be able to lick us both with one hand tied behind his back."
John Gray found it strange that the three men exited the saloon accompanied only by Sebastian Raincross. Too drunk and riled up to care, Hugh Gregory and Dave Gray staggered their way into a tiny alleyway between the blacksmith's shop and the general store. "Come on then!" said Hugh Gregory as he dropped once again into a drunken imitation of a prizefighter's stance. "Put up your dukes and fight!"
"Yes, by all means fight," encouraged Sebastian Raincross. "This is all so horribly overdue."
"You stay out of this!" roared John Gray again. "You've been nothing but a thorn in my side since the day you got here!"
"I beg to differ," replied the odd man, pointing at Dave Gray. "I would say that he is your thorn. Perhaps he is the entire rose bush."
Dave Gray turned even redder than he was before. "Are you looking for a thrashing too?" he demanded. "Because when I'm done with this young pup I can break your head too, right and proper!"
"I believe you could," said Sebastian Raincross, and once again John Gray saw him transformed. His eyes went cold and hard and they almost glinted with their own illumination in the dark alleyway. Suddenly, John Gray was afraid.
"Look here, people," he said hastily. "Mebbe this has all been a big cock-up. What say we go back to the saloon and have a round on me?"
"No," said Sebastian T. Raincross in tones of doom and finality. "No, it all ends here. As it was supposed to."
"What d' you mean?" asked Hugh Gregory.
No answer ever came to Hugh Gregory's question. In fact, no one in Deer Lick was ever able to agree about what happened next. The saloon crowd was still milling about in confusion, and some later said they heard the sounds of flesh battering flesh and horrible cries for mercy. Others reported a droning like a hive of angry bees or multiple popping noises like a thousand corks coming out of a thousand bottles of fancy French wine. When at last they warily entered the alleyway, they were greeted with a bizarre spectacle.
All four men were on the ground, eyes closed, limbs splayed this way and that. George Carver, the local veterinarian, was first on the scene and immediately determined that John Gray, Hugh Gregory and Sebastian Raincross were still breathing. In fact, at the veterinarian's first touch, Sebastian Raincross sat bolt upright, an insolent smile playing briefly across his features. When George Carver put his fingers on Dave Gray's neck, however, the color drained from his face.
"He ain't got a pulse," he said in sad resignation just as John Gray's eyes fluttered open. Instantly, multiple cries of "Murder!" and "Get the Sheriff!" went up.
"Wha? Murder?" grunted the farmer as he staggered to his feet. "Whose murder?"
There was a moment of terrible silence as John Gray suddenly spied his brother's lifeless body, whereupon he turned to Sebastian T. Raincross and bellowed, "I hold you responsible for this!" Sebastian Raincross did not reply but merely shrugged in a helpless way.
Before John Gray could collect himself to lunge at the strange man's throat, the Sheriff arrived. Fending off a dozen people with a dozen different versions of the night's events, the lawman finally achieved a modicum of order by firing his pistol into the air. "That's better!" he said. "Fer now, let's take the body to the undertaker..."
John seized the Sheriff's arm and pointed balefully at Sebastian Raincross. "Arrest that man, Sheriff!" He shouted. "He killed my brother!"
"What?" exclaimed Hugh Gregory groggily. "Dave is dead?"
"Yeah, and you killed him!" cried out an anonymous voice from the crowd. "Everybody knows you hated him like p'isen!"
"So did John!" responded another voice. "They haven't talked in ten years!"
The Sheriff took in the scene with an exasperated air. "I can see this whole thing is going to get right complicated," he said. Waving at all three men, he turned to his deputy and ordered "Arrest the lot of 'em! We'll sort it out in the morning."
"No!" shouted John Gray, gesticulating wildly at Sebastian Raincross. "It's him, I tell you! Him!"
The Sheriff let his hand casually fall near his holstered gun. "So you say, John, but I say that murders usually happen among people what knows each other."
"If there's even been a murder," added the veterinarian. "I can't find a mark on him."
"Reckon that's why we got people doctors and animal doctors," responded the Sheriff. "We'll let a real doctor take a look at him tomorrow. Until then, I don't want any more trouble from anyone! Understood?"
The three men nodded, two more sullenly than the third, and followed the Sheriff to the local jailhouse. When the deputy unlocked the single tiny jail cell, John Gray balked.
"I'm not going in there with 'em!" he said, planting his feet. "They're both crazy men! My life wouldn't be worth a plugged nickel!"
"You'll get in there and you'll like it!" ordered the Sheriff. "The next man to go whinin' and complainin' gets slapped in irons! Comprende?"
"Comprendo," replied Sebastian Raincross.
"Will you just shut your mouth for Jesus' sake!" yelled John Gray, as the Sheriff closed the cell door with a clank and the screech of metal on metal.
John Gray's life had never been easy, but his night in Deer Lick's jailhouse was the worst in all his days. He dozed fitfully, cramped up on the cell's cold and dirty floor without so much as a blanket, trying to keep as far away as possible from his cellmates. Though the good times he had shared with his brother were few enough and far between, John Gray dreamed of them. He dreamed of the time he and Dave stole apples from the Pomeroy Orchard and gorged themselves to sickness. He dreamed of the look of joy on Dave's face when he held his newborn niece in his arms and was told that he was to be her godfather.
John Gray awoke the next morning with tears on his face, and his younger brother's name on his lips.
"I'm sorry," came a quiet whisper from behind him. John Gray turned, and found Sebastian Raincross observing him. To his shock, the little man was also shedding tears, wiping them away with the cuff of his odd shirt.
"What would you know about it?" grunted the farmer.
"Everything," said the little man.
Before John Gray could frame a reply, the Sheriff and his deputy entered the jailhouse. "Okay Hugh," he shouted, "wake up!" With a moan, the young man rose from the floor of the cell and looked around in confusion.
"Oh, my head," he groaned.
"Tell it to the distiller, I ain't interested," said the Sheriff, unlocking the door. "Out with you."
"What about me?" demanded John Gray.
"We're still looking into your brother's death," said the Sheriff. "We'll be letting you out one way or t'other, by and by."
"Then why are you letting Hugh go?" demanded John Gray. "If I mighta done it, Hugh might have done it just as easy, and with better cause."
For a single brief moment, a look of confusion crossed the Sheriff's face. He started to reply and then stopped, his mouth moving in perplexity with no sound issuing forth. An instant later, his expression set itself again, cold and hard. "I don't need no dirt farmer telling me the law," he snapped.
"Don't you worry yourself, John," said Hugh Gregory in a nasty sing-song. "I'll tell Mary and Mother Sally that you're well."
"You stay away from my daughter!" John Gray shouted, his hands thrust desperately between the bars of the cell. "Do you hear me, Hugh Gregory? Stay away from my Mary!"
"I hear you old man," Hugh Gregory shot back over his shoulder as he exited the jailhouse. "I'm just all done listenin'."
John Gray sank to the cell's metal bench, his hands covering his face. "Why me, Lord?"
"Weren't you perfectly happy to have Hugh Gregory wed your daughter six months ago?" asked Sebastian Raincross.
"Poor Dave was right," said the farmer, ignoring the odd man's question. "The Gregory clan is pure p'isen."
"Is it the Gregorys who are poisoned, or you?" asked the stranger.
John Gray whirled on Sebastian Raincross, red fury in his eyes. "Little man, you are pushing me too far. They can only hang me once, for one murder or two!"
"Don't be silly," said the stranger in his hard and dangerous voice. John Gray's heart skipped a beat and he felt his fists unballing of their own volition. His hands fell to his sides and his red rage subsided into a kind of terrified calm. Turning away, he whispered in a voice barely audible, "Are you the devil?"
"I'm afraid not," replied the odd man. "For that would be much easier on you."
Mary and Sally and Tom came to the jailhouse later that day with Hugh Gregory. It was like no conversation John Gray had ever had with members of his family, for he was not barking orders but listening and pleading.
"Father," sobbed Mary into her handkerchief, "how could you do it? We all know that Uncle Dave was a disagreeable man, but to kill him in cold blood!"
"Listen to me child, I would never do such a thing! You must know that!"
Incredibly, Sally shook her head. "I know no such thing, old father. You hated your brother like nothing else, and maybe when you heard about his lies and treachery, you lost your head."
"What lies? What treachery? Make sense, old woman!"
"Don't play dumb, John," said Hugh Gregory. "We all know that Dave told the padre tales about leaving his fortune to Mary, hoping that you'd hear about it and put a stop to our nuptuals! And it worked, old man, because he knew you cared about nobody and nothing except cold hard cash."
"He wasn't leaving Mary his money?"
"Never," replied Hugh. "All his money goes to his own son in Kansas City."
"Dave doesn't... didn't have no son," protested the farmer.
"That you knew about," said Sebastian Raincross, from behind him.
The world swam about John Gray. He stumbled and half-fell to the floor, shaking off Sebastian Raincross' supporting hand.
"We've come to say goodbye, old father," said Sally very matter-of-factly. "Hugh and Mary are getting married and they're taking me and Tom east with them."
"NO!" John Gray roared. "Mary, I absolutely forbid this! You are not to marry Hugh or anyone without my permission!"
Mary regarded him coolly through the bars of the jail cell door. "My happiness may just be a matter of dollars and cents to you, father, but you do not own me."
"That's not true," wailed John Gray, "I swear that's not true!"
"It is, father. You know it in your heart."
John Gray wept bitter tears and shook his head slowly, back and forth. "What's gotten into you, girl? What's gotten into all of you?"
"The truth," said Mary, flicking her eyes over her father's shoulder at Sebastian Raincross. Without another word she turned her back and marched purposefully from the jailhouse.
"So long John," said Hugh Gregory. "Good luck to you."
"Go to blazes," said John Gray. "And you too," he said, staring at his wife's familiar face.
"That's where I'm a'comin' from," Sally responded. "Where I'm a' headed is another sort of question." And then they were gone, and John Gray was alone in his cell with Sebastian Raincross.
"I'm ruined," whispered John Gray through his tears. "Completely ruined."
"I'm afraid so," said Sebastian Raincross, nodding sympathetically.
"Are they gonna hang me now?" John asked, looking up at the ridiculous, terrifying little man. "Are you gonna do your hocus pocus and put me on trial? Shaw! Maybe we just skip the courthouse and go straight to the gallows!"
Sebastian Raincross shook his head. "No gallows, John. No trial. You'll just stay here for a little while until Mary and Hugh are safely married and away, and then it will all go away as if it had never happened."
"You are the devil," spat John Gray.
"No," replied Sebastian Raincross, shaking his head again. "No, I'm just the Break Inspector, doing my job, as distasteful as it may be."
John Gray snorted. "There ain't no railroad and no brakes within a hundred miles of here."
"B-R-E-A-K," said Sebastian Raincross. "I inspect and fix breaks, not brakes."
"Make sense man," John Gray said. "Breaks in what?"
"In time."
"No," said John Gray, shaking his head. "Not 'in time.' Tell me now!"
"Do you know the word 'vandal?'" asked the odd little man. "I'm very proud of myself, I looked it up. A vandal is a miscreant or criminal who breaks things for no apparent reason."
"Sounds like someone I'm lookin' at right now," replied John Gray.
Sebastian Raincross flinched and cleared his throat. "In your great-great-great grandchildren's generation, they will face another kind of vandal called a 'hacker.' Five generations later the name will be 'fieldbaby,' and five generations after that, an 'enswarm.' Five times five times five generations after that, we will call them 'timebreakers.' In the end, they are all the same: Immature, unconcerned with the general welfare, ready to break things that do not belong to them for the sheer joy of destruction. The only thing that ever changes is the scale of the destruction they can wreak."
"My wife and my precious babies are gone," John Gray sobbed, "and here you are, just yammering foolishness."
"Your brother was supposed to die, John," said Sebastian Raincross in a soothing, sympathetic tone, "but it was on a different day in a different manner, back when he insulted Hugh Gregory at the boarding house. Hugh was supposed to lose his temper and come after Dave with his dander up and his fists raised, and Dave was supposed to drop dead of a heart attack out of sheer fright."
"Dave wasn't afraid of nothing or nobody. You saw him at the saloon!"
"Dave was afraid of everyone and everything when he was sober," replied the little man. "Why do you think he was such a mean cuss half the time and drunk the other half?"
John Gray continued to shake his head and mutter, "not afraid of nobody and nothing."
"Dave was supposed to die that day, and the Sheriff was supposed to say that it was a sad deal but nobody's fault, and Mary and Hugh were supposed to get married four months later while you played proud papa. You were never, ever, ever supposed to hear anything about Dave leaving his money to Mary. It was a lie and a wrongness and a timebreak. It was a crime against you and every living thing in the world."
"You're a madman," John Gray repeated.
"I'm from the future," responded Sebastian Raincross. "From so far in the future that your age is more remote and mysterious to us than the ancient Pyramid-builders are to you. That may be why my manner seemed a little strange at first. Imagine how you would have fared at dinner with the Pharaoh."
"You're a lunatic!" screamed John Gray. "Nobody can travel back and forth in time like it was a river!"
"Your great-grandfather couldn't travel on a steel rail at 40 miles per hour," said Sebastian Raincross. "You can't fly through the air at one hundred miles per hour, but your grandson will. He will be a great hero in a terrible war, an ace of the air. He must be born. Him and his brothers and sisters and cousins. History requires them, craves them, begs for them, and your stubbornness was strangling them all in their cradles."
"Are you saying that this is all my fault?"
"Vandals always look for the weakest link, John. A blank wall just crying out for vulgar graffiti, badly written code full of security holes, fieldvels with overlapping harmonics..."
John Gray sighed like a punctured bladder. "…And nasty old men who love money more than life itself?" he asked.
Sebastian Raincross nodded reluctantly. "We protect the big and obvious places, John, but we can't be everywhere and everywhen. Sometimes they get past us. They look for backwater towns and simple yes or no situations that can be swayed with a single change, one kick at a can of cheap whitewash that defaces a precious work of art."
"So now you up and leave for your wonderful home in the future and leave me here to rot?"
"Oh dear no," said the little man, shaking his head. "I have no home to return to. It was gone the instant you had your conversation with the Reverend Hurley."
John Gray scowled through his tears. "I thought all the rack and ruin you visited upon me was to fix what was broke."
"Fix," replied Sebastian Raincross, "not restore. If a house burns down, and you build a replacement, is it the same house? Even the most exact copy will have discrepancies. I will be going back to a world that will look something like the one I left, but the ceiling beams and roof shingles will have been switched around. Those I love may never have been born. The dwelling I live in may never have been built. A tyrant may rule my... my land, for want of a better word."
"Then why do it at all?"
"Because the alternative was worse. Because time was broken and we needed to fix it before the bone set wrong. Before the whole human race was burned from the surface of the planet like so many twigs in a bonfire."
John Gray's head fell into a position that almost looked like prayer. "I'm a simple, greedy, mean old cuss of a dirt farmer," he whispered in a voice almost too low to be heard. "I don't understand your fancy talk and your fancy ideas. But just tell me… Why do you do it?"
Sebastian Raincross sighed again. His own tone dropped to match John Gray's. "I have... call them daughters, though that is not exactly what they are, and they were the love of my life. But I indulged them too much and did not watch over them properly and did not raise them with proper values, and they slipped away from me. They began to break things that did not belong to them."
John Gray's eyes grew wide.
"In my world, if you leave a warehouse unguarded or write security holes into your source code, you are just as responsible as the vandal for the vandalism that naturally results. I was a bad father to my not-daughters, and I have spent what seems like an eternity cleaning up after them."
Sebastian Raincross raised his arms and crossed them in front of his face. The silver-white trinkets on his wrists touched with a clinking sound and began to glow, first red, then white.
"In fact," said Sebastian T. Raincross, "that is exactly what I have done."
And he was gone.
