Started: 2026-05

May 1997. San Francisco behind us, the Blackwelt Exclusion Zone somewhere east. I'm carrying a researcher's work, and somebody has been following me since I took the job. That's how I ended up in a Buick with a man in a dinner jacket, a fifteen-year-old who watches exits, a surgeon who doesn't sleep, a robot that smiles too much, and later a veteran in a balaclava who came at us with his hand on his pistol. The situation found us.

The road out went wrong quickly. A neurocaster roadblock. A battery that died for no good reason. A town called Littleville that had stopped flinching at the footsteps in the night, because something in its church had taught it not to. A woman named Daisy asked us to get her out. We left in a hurry, under fire, and some promises didn't make the trip.

Since then we've traded what we know about the cargo, and it turns out there is more than one copy. We're heading into the mountains now. Something is waiting on the road.

I came out here half hoping to be wrong about people. So far the road keeps finding new ways to test that.

• Happy Hills

  2026-10-07

  A golden angel born in a dying town's sermon, a surgeon who hit bottom and still closed the wound, two copies of a drive carrying a dead researcher's cure. Then, near Buckthorn, rain, a fallen tree, and three lens-faced pack mule robots walking out of the woods.

• The Road Did That

  2026-09-09

  A giant robot's footsteps and Jimmy Shute's glare shatter the party's plan to hit the Church of the Angels; the Buick runs for it under gunfire out of Littleville. Jimmy's truck flips on gravel, killing his crew. Lennie, shot in the shoulder and leaving Daisy behind, wonders whether smashing a server could ever stop the angel.

• Cut the Head of the Snake

  2026-07-15

  A golden angel that programmer George Lopez swears he never built now haunts Father Marcos's neuroscape sermons at the Church of the Angels, and Daisy no longer trusts it. At her house on Ellis Street the party settles on a plan to destroy the server — then steals a battery from a family with kids, a theft that leaves Lennie doubting Dustin.

• The Angel

  2026-06-24

  At 1am in Littleville, the floor trembles and a red glow rises in the west — something large passed through, and its tracks run past the Church of the Angels. By midday the party knows the town isn't abandoned; it's organized around that church. Ramona, the diner owner, wants out and is afraid to say so out loud.

• Dead Battery

  2026-06-10

  Static arrives at the roadblock mid-fight, misreads it, and joins the group anyway. The Buick dies in Littleville — dead battery, possible EMP — and the party shelters in an abandoned house where a neurocaster addict simply never got up. Sergei tries the headset and comes back shaken. The Electric State, seen close, is quieter and uglier.

• The Road Out

  2026-05-27

  Somewhere south of Concord, a Centre van materializes out of ordinary roadside noise and Lennie keeps his voice flat and drives past. Two hours out, a neurocaster roadblock produces worse results: one worker seized on the road, one shoved in a ditch, and a utility man back on his feet and swinging as the afternoon goes out of control.