Cadence

Open mouths, empty heads, big bytes.

The truck belongs to a man in Tiffin who thinks I'm buying it, and the corn belongs to a holding company I founded, so neither of us is technically trespassing.

Forty kilometers outside Iowa City, a stone dated 1790 marks the place my company has been telling me to find: the Cradle. There's no barn. There's a substation. And every door built to SKELM standard opens to my palm and rings a bell somewhere underneath.

Seventeen corporations are sharing hosts. Two hundred children are being seeded with the years I've lost. Dorothy is a copy with weeks to live. Ban is carrying a passenger behind her eyes. And Katherine doesn't know what I found in a jar.

In my coat is the charter I wrote by hand in a freezing cellar, and item three: If the founder judges that this house has outlived its purpose, he may end it.

I'm four hundred years old. People round down. That's a long time to put off a decision.