[Age of Abundance 01] • Time Bandits

It’s the early days in an Age of Abundance, just decades into the future. Consciousness continues to co-evolve with the self-empowerment technologies at meteoric rates. Still, some would use these gifts to wage evil on the world. One psychopath and his cybernetic creation, a nine-year old girl, are out to save humanity from itself. Clyde Barker is convinced that self-empowerment and self-directed evolution is an affront to God. How could mankind take over his own ascension without bringing down the house that God made? One might think that even a genius in fashioning human upgrades and a cybernetic little girl with a four-digit IQ would be easily neutralized in an Age of Abundance in any event. One would be wrong. You see, Clyde has a rather unique skill. One might say a special power. He can pop in and out of timelines at will, steering them in the direction he wants without anyone being any the wiser.

Of course, nothing comes easy, not even to a clever, highly-manipulative psychopath. Kendra Harding is the detective heading up the hunt for Clyde Barker. Her on-again, off-again lover, Torin Zealton, her partner in crime, is both the coroner and highly psychic. Getting into her mind uninvited as a matter of habit has all but destroyed their relationship. But getting into Clyde’s mind might just save the world. Of course, how does one come up against a time bandit, exactly, particularly one with a cybernetic sidekick that belongs if not to another era, then certainly another decade or so into the Age of Abundance, when minds are closer to Singularity, and evolve at speeds beyond human comprehension?

The four timelines explored, in which Kendra and Torin chase down Clyde Barker and his cybernetic creation, give us four different takes on a near-future Age of Abundance, each more glorious and fantastic than the last. Seeing the romance between the wisecracking protagonist paramours evolve across four different timelines, moreover, replete with its ups and downs, lends the love they share an epic, eternal quality. One that might survive Clyde Barker, even if nothing else does.