A Different Alchemy by Chris Dietzel

sand. Sometimes when he brought his son here, Jeffrey had spent the time recounting whatever he knew about the great body of water and the fish it contained, as if it were possible for him to teach his boy about the world. Other times, he was content to sit with his son, without saying anything at all, until Katherine woke from her nap or was ready for dinner.
    Galen had to be home. He had to be safe. He had to be.
    After eating a second plate of steak and fruit, his belly felt like it might burst. He took the dirty plate back to the restaurant’s kitchen even though he could have left it in the dining area and no one would have cared. For his sanity’s sake, he even cleaned it and left it to dry. It was important to keep up habits or else he could lose his mind very quickly. If he left the plate out in the open, he might as well piss on the street too. And if he did that, he might as well do whatever else he wished. It wouldn’t be long before he had no rules to follow and his mind didn’t know the difference between right and wrong.
    He imagined Galen being there with him to see the waves crash one more time. Katherine would have chided him for not putting a stronger suntan lotion on their son before taking him outside.
    The thoughts lingered even as the tank lurched forward and made its way north again.

Chapter 4
    “Flint, Michigan had no issues when they relocated and joined up with Detroit. Why should we be any different?”
    “Flint? Are you serious? Flint?” The Grim Reaper’s laughter got him sitting up straight. “Flint? You really crack me up.”
    “You can laugh,” his adversary said, already beginning to perspire. “But other cities have done it and they haven’t had any problems. We’ll be just fine. There’s nothing to worry about.”
    “Did Flint have as many Blocks as us?”
    “How would I know? I don’t have those numbers.”
    “That’s right, you don’t know.”
    Jeffrey motioned to Katherine. “Turn it off. I can’t listen to these guys today.”
    But instead of turning the TV off, she merely changed the station. An hour-long program was airing that would be translated into twenty different languages and be viewed by more than a billion people around the world. If the population wasn’t in the second phase of decline, the estimated amount of people watching it would have beaten the final Super Bowl.
    On the show, a collection of former spies met in a university auditorium to discuss what they had been doing before the Great De-evolution, confess to what was real and what was fiction, and provide an update on what former spies were doing now that there was no need for intelligence agencies. Seated in an oval, facing the audience, were intelligence officers from England, France, Israel, America, Russia, and China. A man had tried to attend as the official representative from North Korea but no one thought him to be sane, and everyone had a good laugh at the nonsense he might have said if given a microphone.
    Each man attended the symposium with the understanding that they were now retired and, although they had all signed confidentiality agreements with their respective governments saying they would either be executed or spend the rest of their lives in jail if they gave away classified information, that rules of secrecy were no longer necessary by default because there was no need anymore to recruit double agents or disseminate misinformation. And, most importantly, nearly all of the governments they had once collected intelligence for were now defunct.
    None of the men bothered to wear suits. None of them cared enough about ensuring the other men around them, all supposed trained assassins, had been patted down or walked through a metal detector, lest a poison dart launch from the side of a wristwatch or poison gas be released from a belt buckle. If those things had actually ever occurred, they were part of a different life. The moderator was a former college professor who had taught