My favorite pass-time as Management Coordinator

My favorite pass-time as Management Coordinator was to pair up two pain-in-the-butt Techs with each other on an impossible task with urgent deadline. I'd give clients their cell #

the coffee cup turned out to be a phaser and obliterated the stubby but charming

DJ who was going all ablaze at the brand new Trance Techno Commercial house he was playing. All the enthusiasm, and he was soon whooping around the dance floor with his phase gun

and pulping every third dancer with military efficiency. "He's a mole," screamed a half-naked waif who a moment later was but a red puddle on the rotating platform. A panic

swept across the dance floor. The waif looked up to the balcony and spotted the sniper. He grabbed his dinner and headed for the back door. At the door, he found

a pile of ash that someone had banged out from their pipe. The sniper? The waif inspected the little pile. Prince Florizel of Bohemia arrived and helped the waif identify

the markings from the weapon used, if any at all. It wasn't as though it was going to be difficult to find him, as the ash could only have been from one dimension in the multiverse

And it was a dimension I was intimately familiar with having narrowly escaped there with my life. But enough ruminating. I had a job to do and the ash was telling me where

and why. It had no voice, yet it communicated by tickling my nostrils repeatedly; morse code rendered in a sequence of sneezes. "I am you, the cremated you" it said. "We are dead."