Big Tony. You are out there on those narrow, misty nighttime, Oregon roads, in this rain, risking your life to feed a nation of fat pigs. You have asked me to finally write the conclusion of The Sunset Saga, and here, where I write my best it seems, I am partially spoiling it before rendering the story ending. So, I leave it up to you—and SS Sam too—as to whether you read on.

-James, Tuesday, 11/9/21

…

The corporate future, ruled by homosexual and bisexual medical experiments, that I developed for The Sunset Saga and Organa, is I think a realistic near future. Far future settings have ages of intervention, where near future is regarded as anything from a few years to a few centuries out, with Orwell's 1984 and Star Trek, for instance, both near future settings. My near future offerings include, Uprising, American Dream Boat, The Consultant, Ghost Snatcher, Ditcher, Beyond Rainbow Bridge and Last Whiteman.

Some classic far futures are Jack Vance's Dying Earth, Poul Anderson's Vault of Ages and Gene Wolf's Book of the New Sun. Far future settings I have made include Prentice Dolphin, Confessor, Supplicant's Song, Reverent Chandler and the base time frame for the Sunset Saga, A.D. 2900 where perverted genetic engineer, world raper, David Bowie-looking Caligula of the future, Hyman Maxim collects genius dinner companions and extinct human races as slaves with which to stock his generation ship for his god flight into the Cosmos. Basically this asshole is like our current infotech moguls with ancient despotic flare.

As the story progresses some inconsistancies in time frames develop as nerd black scientist protagonist Charlie Robinson recedes ever more into the background. However, his brutal semi-retarded action hero buddy, Jay romps from time to time and place to place in service to a genius gimp from another age, Three-Rivers. What is more, there are other handicapped characters, that Bracken will be found avenging, carrying around, rescuing and even wheeling up the street in a wheel chair.

There is Arrow-Holder, the thumb-sucking Algonquian retard who carries an arrow like a scepter and thinks of Bracken as his pet demon.

There is “Da Playa from da Himalaya” Eddie, a hoodrat fuckup from East Baltimore who makes friends with Three-Rivers while Bracken is beaten the dogshit out of a bunch of Baltimore police, and then insinuates himself into the time traveling operation as “Eddie Scientific” a transformative loser.

There is Jay's adopted brother, Randy Sterling Bracken, evil racist who gets involved by chance, kidnaps junkies to use as time travel weight for hauling more gear, and then abandons the poor fucks back in time unconcerned even if they are bringing HIV with them into the past.

Jay comes and goes, is in and out of jail, prison, the stone age, black ops centers, Plantation America, ancient Hellas and the far future what spawned him, going progressively insane, still obsessed with helping little gimps and nerds like he did with Charlie way back when.

It becomes clear after some time, that there is no time travel going on, that the Event Capacitator kills the “traveler” then sends a copy of them elsewhen. So the Bracken brothers, a drug addict and an adrenaline junky, are going insane as they become tenth generation copies of their original selves. It might be of interest to the reader that this is exactly what happens to fighters like Jay and drug addicts like Randy as they age normally in a toxic, therapeutic society.

Back to the ever-diminishing Charlie, based on my sixth grade schoolmate who had no friends and called me an idiot in front of our classmates. Then after I sentenced him to a beating every day after school—like three months—I lost all of my friends and he gained them as he regaled them with tales of my secret punches that left no marks, etc.

I did chase him down the once and hit him and he fell over and refused to fight back, exactly as Jay and Charlie meet in the beginning of Big Water Blood Song. Then, he asked me to come home with him and play with his toys. I did, and as we walked back through the alleys. These two older kids who must have been 16, just like the kids who used to torment me, looked at Charlie as if he owed them something. Charlie just smiled and winked at me as if I were a starship trooper in powered armor. I predictably slathered with a thirst to rip their throats out, such an emotionally wrecked psycho I had become when hitting 120 pounds at 11 years and becoming very athletic and violent over night. It was like being a pitbull walking a mouse home past two cats.

Charlie's mother was very concerned about him making it home, that he insisted on walking even though he was picked on after school. But he assured his mother, as he introduced me as “James West,” actual real life clone of Robert Conrad, action TV star of the adventure series The Wild Wild West, that with a real TV hero besides him, he had nothing to worry about. Charlie had set this whole thing up and recruited me as his bodyguard.

As I began framing the Nestor/Achilles of the same age but relative uneven prowess together, cast forward into our anti-heroic time, I recalled also Jonathan Legate at Trinity high School in Wash. PA, crushed by a school bus that was leaving him behind. I remember those times, when we would cheer on the weaker children and the school bus drivers would callously pull off with the door open and the boys and girls must leap on in at the run.

I recall reliving this as us losers on the back of the #22 Baltimore City MTA bus, going down Highland Avenue towards Edison Highway, cheered on a tall black man who the bus driver would not stop for but determidly ran the bus down and blocked its path, gaining entry a hero and to our applause.

One day, when I was in good fight shape around 2001, I was leaving work at Metro #45 Fort Avenue to catch my bus, when I saw [I can still hear the roar of it shifting into second gear] that bus pass me from two blocks away, out on Fort Avenue. The bus only did about 20 MPH on Fort Avenue that time of morning and stopped every block to pick one or two people up, upscale white office people headed to the Inner Harbor.

On the back of the bus was a little skinny black dude who worked at the Dixie Cup plant down the end of the line. He encouraged me to catch the bus, me assuming he would get the driver to halt, if only I would run. The #1 bus only came once an hour. So, no longer the fastest 13-year-old in Washington, PA, and having been soundly trounced in a foot race against Earl Stackhouse, former Captain of the Lake Clifton High School track team, at age 20, now in my 30s, I yet had that knucklehead notion that I could not lose a race and I tore after that bus, that had a 2.5 block lead.

I had to catch it before it hit Riverside five blocks up Fort Avenue, because then it would coast down hill and all would be lost. I caught that bus in front of Lucky's grocery—across the street from that and Cox's Pub, with two blocks to spare, the driver never having halted a second for me, only letting on one or two at each stop and gunning it. That driver sneered at me in disgust and the white office folks looked away out the window in embarrassment. But the few black dudes on the back of the bus greeted me as one of their lowly own—a hero of the moment having won one tiny victory against the evil world that hated us so for the mere condition of our birth.

Check out the map on Google. I started by the dumpster on the side street by the grocery parking lot and caught that thing at the dogleg two blocks short of Riverside. That is where the character of Eddie Scientific, who oddly takes Charlie's place in Jay Bracken's life just like Three-Rivers did enters the Sunset Saga...

In the beginning of the story, right after the scene based on the event I described happening with my dumb ass and Charlie at age 11 with the teenagers, I wrote the scene where Charlie Robinson was attacked by two big men [he at a tender 15 ears of age] and is brutally rescued by Jay.

Spoiler here:

Recalling that I dedicated this story to Jonathan, who died on the pavement holding his school books under a bus, and that Charlie goes down with his collectible card collection under two big adult thugs [patterned on real 21-year-old thugs I ushered off from the tender necks of 100-pound teen card players near D.C. the year before I began writing Of the Sunset World] it should come as no surprise, that Charlie Robinson never became a scientist or a church founder, that Charlie was stomped into a coma, and after serving time for killing the two tugs, Jay returns guilt ridden over Charlie' plight to hold his hand in the assisted living facility.

Also, Charlie's mother reads adventure stories and history books to her comatose son and asks Jay, in between prison stays and prize fights and such, as he holds Charlie’s shrunken hand, to tell of his misadventures, which she notes bring some signs of cognition to her son's otherwise dead face. Mrs. Robinson is convinced that Charlie can feel Jay's [just as Three-Rivers can in Thunder-boy] unusually strong heart beat, a heart that is trapped in a world for which its cadence is hopelessly out of time.

So, there is an ending to the time wars in which Three-Rivers and Jay join hands one last time against the machine that brought them together—that is one ending.

Then there is the other ending, which I will half-spoil here, in which Jay gets all coked up, beats the shit out of a bunch of pigs after headlining on a fight venue where he was shot up with performance drugs, and, all he wants to do when he knows he is going away to prison forever is to visit Charlie in his coma bed one last time and hold his hand so he can see Mrs. Robinson smile. Jay's last heart beat when his life of adventure catches up with him will have a transformative effect on his bed-ridden friend.

The second half of that last chapter and the epilogue, I will not spoil. But there is no time travel. A comatose boy who never came to manhood but lies in a bed has mixed the tales of adventure and history books read by his mother with the awkward yarns of misadventure related by his loser, prize-fighter friend as he races towards an early end, Achilles-like, against both jealous gods and slavish men.

It was supposed to be a surprise, but it may not be written and will in any case, remain unread.