My short story “The Undertow Jackpot” is currently available in Issue 3 of Compelling Science Fiction! I’m proud of this story and very proud and excited to have it appear in Compelling!
“The Undertow Jackpot”
Once he caught the scent, it didn’t take long for Ralph Bowdrie, who was smarter than the average bear even if he said so himself, to figure out what the government was up to.
Later he reflected that this was due to three reasons: first, because he was an inquisitive teleporter technician, whose main duty in his large warehouse of an office in Waco, Texas was to receive and safely dispose of old-generation teleporters; second, he had mad Google-fu skills, which had helped him get through most of the theoretical classes at school, including at the technical institute in Boulder that had certified him for maintenance and repair of teleporters from first to fourth generation, particularly since he had even trained himself to search his phone one-handed and to glean the information he needed with a single glance; and the third reason was luck, in the form of a passing comment made by someone in the frozen foods aisle at the Walmart on Franklin, pushing and pulling a gaggle of unruly kids and yelling at one of them, a boy who looked about his own son’s age, that you better start behaving and setting a good example, because there’s four more where you came from.
