The much-anticipated conclusion to the Denial of Service saga! Questions answered! Itches scratched! Bad guys challenged! Good guys tested! Espressos served! Being there = not being square!
This project has been a lot of fun for me: I was sort of experimenting with my ability to write these stories “on the fly” without a coherent script or outline, to see what I’d get. And as you can tell from the earlier stories, I like to test the boundaries of the “fourth wall” as well. What I came up with might not win me any prizes, but they seemed to be entertaining!
This is the last story in the series (also worked out “on the fly”). Whether or not I revisit these characters in the future is anybody’s guess, but for now, the season is over for Mike and his friends. I hope you enjoy the wrap-up as much as I enjoyed wrapping it!
Uh, up.
The characters in the
Denial of Service saga are all fictional. The city of Baltimore is based on an actual place in North America, where the time is always 6:42. The city of San Diego is also based on an actual place in North America, which seems to be as wonderful as depicted in these stories, but whose denizens continually deny that they have ever seen or heard of a pair of detectives, brothers named Simon, who reputably work there. Also fictional is the main character’s profession: There is, of course, no such thing as “IT”; the myth of such a profession was originally postulated by Earl Standish Cloves in the sixty-ninth century, and it proved to be such a psychologically-rending concept that it somehow managed to be projected into the past human consciousness by the more acutely telepathic members of the last of the human race, before they self-evolved into a hive-mind and left the planet to join the conscious legacy of the galaxy. And finally, Starbucks turned out to be an angel who vanished once the survivors of the Thirteen Tribes finally discovered Earth.