"Right now," I said to the Big Five in their cushy, ultra-swank lounge, "your security people are leaving the building, thinking they can go home to their families. And you know what? They actually can."

The five old businessmen didn't look perturbed. Why would they? I was just a dumb kid, someone of mixed race, oh no. Someone without a business suit, or a shirt, even. No problem here, not for them.

Jeff Harrigan, however, wasn't doing so well. "This is a lie," he said.

He looked somewhat like I remembered him, which meant he'd been making use of whatever anti-aging technology the wealthy had allowed. Tall, thin head. Middle-aged white guy, gray teeth, very low-caliber blue eyes, intense and cold. He wasn't wearing his white lab coat, just a boxy business suit. I liked the lab coat better.

He want on…"Impossible, absurd, a lie. I've always been straight with you, Owen, even when I was trying to kill you and your animals. I never lied." He sounded disgusted.

"You still have electricity," I said. "Have you got access to news? However you get it here in the future, you know what I mean."

The five old men looked at one another. They were oddly robust, wearing suits that didn't look so different from the ones I remember fancy guys wearing when I was on Earth. Broad shoulders, taut facial skin, absolutely zero gray hair.

There were telltales here and there, however: their hands had delicate hydraulics amplifying and steadying the movements of fingers that might have otherwise quivered. The suits emitted hisses of machinery when they moved. And I need to be clear: these men stank. Incontinent.

One of them did something, looked at a screen in an odd way, and the thing blipped to life. And I was given a crash-course on Earth in the year 2070.

The whole place was trashed, burning, polluted, starving, fighting. All four horsemen having a rave.

What a dump.

There were no newscasters, not that I could tell, anyway. They were talking icons, or text that formed into images, or vice versa. The news itself was blindingly short and concise, consisting of single sentences packed with information. Each word accompanied by a moving hieroglyph, a video supporting the statement.

"NIGHT INTO DAY FLAT EARTH."

"POLAR ICE CAPS TROPICAL."

"NEW OCEAN, NEW SKY."

"A lie," Harrigan said despondently. "You're rigging the news, I don't know how but I'll figure it out."

The building shuddered as more fighting went on nearby. I hoped Taylor and Schmendrick would meet up on their own.

I went on. "Right now, the Feast of Fools is over this base in Nevada. But the Feast never actually moved. Nevada did."

And blip, one of them, whichever had the remote, changed the channel. And there was the Feast of Fools, hovering resolutely over the desert near Las Vegas. Its huge shadow slowly passed over the scrub, and it was being followed by odd-looking cars on the ground.

"Check it out," I said to Harrigan. "Your guns don't work, but internal combustion does. Nice, right? Craftsmanship right there, man."

"Fake," he sneered.

The shadow of the Feast of Fools actually darkened the big window in this lounge. It was outside, clearly where we could see it, trailing its plants, Gardeners and Big Smart Bees, in my bumble opinion.

"Right now," I said, "The Undine is working on something special for Earth deserts. She's actually installing aquifers. She's going to irrigate everything for the new crops coming in. She's also cleaning up the atmosphere. Way to ruin that, by the way."

"How," said one of the five. He was old, but seemed familiar to me. The son of a president, perhaps. "How did you do it?"

"Magic. Literally; the physical laws here are just much more user-friendly. Anything you can't explain scientifically is just called Magic until we figure it out."

"Magic." His eyes lost focus; I wasn't talking about him. "Here in Las Vegas."

"No, Here in the Slice. The Earth is part of the Slice now."

"You moved it," Harrigan said loudly. "You can't just move the surface of the Earth!"

"You can. I mean, sure, it wasn't easy, Doctor, but here we are. Anyway, right now, seeds of a new kind of crop are spreading. We're deploying them all over the Earth. I brought some with me myself. We're boosting their growth and speeding up the harvest."

"What kind of crop," said one of the five, the one with the lizard eyes. I suspected his money was tied up in agriculture.

"A crop that can feed any Human person, and many other kinds of animals. It's nutritionally complete, grows almost anywhere and it's almost got its first yield as we speak."

Lizard eyes: "All one crop."

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"And it's free," I said.

All five of them snapped to attention, boring into me with those shrewd, calculating gazes.

Lizard eyes again: "Free food for everyone. That's not possible."

"Plus you can live in it," I told him proudly. "It's a big hollow tree, and they can grow in colonies, forming houses that feed you."

"Not possible."

"It wasn't," I said. "But we have Magic here. Right now there's a virus spreading among the people of Earth. Care to guess what happens when you catch it?"

"Souls," Harrigan said dully. "Souls, everyone will have them."

"Everyone," I said. "Not just you guys, the way you wanted. Everyone. In fact, feel anything yet?"

They looked at one another. Shook their heads.

"Don't worry, a soul for everyone here today. You'll be able to use Magic yourselves, your own personal style of it. Schmendrick taught people how. You know, your hostage."

"Magic," said the President's Son. "Doctor?"

The five aimed their falcon gazes at Harrigan. "Souls," he said. "They're how Owen can do what he's doing. How I did what I did. It gives you more control over reality, so you can use Magic, or as I called it, the Harrigan Force, or Cognitive Manifestation Energy."

"What if," said Lizard Eyes carefully, "What if we forbade people from using Magic?"

"You'll just die," I said. "Nobody would put up with that."

"What do you want," said President's Son, leaning forwards. "What do you bring to the table, what do you want in return?"

"Who, me? I want to go surfing."

"What are you trying to get from us, that's what I'm asking. You wouldn't do this if you didn't want to negotiate."

I was genuinely confused by this; perhaps my Human readers think I'm foolish for it. "You stole her. What did you think would happen?"

Harrigan started laughing. There was a brittle edge to it.

President's Son looked amused and patient with my silliness, but there was a sheen of sweat on him in the air conditioned room. "But what do you want? You're in the right room to get what you want."

"This isn't a negotiation, shithead. It's already done. Anyway where was I…Right now firearms and explosive devices are disabled worldwide. I'm not going to enable them again; that stuff causes too much trouble."

"I need to know your demands," President's Son said grimly. "What happens next?"

"No demands whatsoever. Everyone's going to be okay, I think. It'll be wild for a bit, but in my experience people have a hard time hurting one another when they get souls."

"Everyone," said Lizard Eyes. "Free food and housing. Water. Magic."

President's Son: "What do you want to make it go back to the way it was?"

"Good lord, do you know how much work we put into this? You think this is a supervillain plot from Marvel? This is just how things are now, okay?" I glared at his perplexed old-guy face under all of its cosmetics. "Guys like you give Humans a bad name, seriously."

"They won't understand for a little while,' said Harrigan. "They're transactional, all the way down. You're removing most of their power by doing this."

"Yeah," I said. "Sorry, amigos, things had to change. Got your souls yet?"

"Why do you keep askeeEEEEEE–" President's Son, screaming, rolling on the floor. His hands clawed at his face, then clutched his belly, the suit whirring to support his movements. The odor of adult diaper intensified. "OH MY GOD!"

All of them took it in different ways; two of these guys seemed genuinely tough and simply looked irritated. The other three wailed and cried and screamed. One vomited. The room smelled even worse.

"Your souls are here. You're feeling the pain of everyone connected to you. I'm not, thankfully. I don't even know your names. But all your 'helpers,' your employees, the billions of people who are aware of you around the world…I imagine it adds up."

Harrigan wasn't reacting at all to the misery of the Human world that was tormenting his masters; either he was used to it from his earlier run or he just didn't have the notoriety these other ones did. "This is … a lot," he said. He looked like he was in shock.

"Price of fame," I said. "They'll toughen up or they won't. I'm sure they'll find a way around it, but right now they're feeling the pain of all those people they want to love them."

Doctor Harrigan found himself acting as advocate for the wealthy. He didn't like it, I could tell, but the man knew who wrote his checks. "Owen…I…understand that we were the aggressors here. But there's such a thing as proportionate response, yeah?" He gazed at me with his ice-chip eyes, lost and confused. "This is the end of the world."

"Don't be such a baby, Doctor Jeff. Earth will still want to have its leaders, it's just Human nature. At the moment, anyway; Human nature will change awfully fast after this."

"You…these men…I assume you think this will help them be better leaders until they're no longer required."

"Had to be done. And they want love, don't they? You said it yourself. They need love. Worship. Now I know what you're thinking, Doctor Jeff: if all of Humanity is causing such pain to these powerful men, what's stopping them from just killing all of Humanity? Turn off the pain hose?"

He looked at me, and I could easily see he'd been thinking that exact thing. "Then nobody will love them," he said slowly. "They want that. Social engineering. That's what you're doing here."

"Engineering implies I could have stopped it from happening. No way."

"You didn't have to move the entire Earth!"

"You didn't have to take her, Doctor."

"The animal? You did this for… you…" He started breathing in short gasps. And then, again, laughing. "Too much for us, that's what you said in the beginning…we should have listened…"

And as the cries of the powerful men faded, as they got accustomed to the way of things a bit at a time, there was a knock at the door.

"Come in," Harrigan called wearily.

The door creaked open. Schmendrick stepped in. At first I thought she was wearing her The Thing From Another World costume from Cassie's play, the sparkly red one covered with guts and tentacles.

But she wasn't wearing a costume. She was covered in blood. None of it, I was sure, belonged to her.

"Hi everyone!" she said.

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