The specifics of how we got here are complicated, but what you need to know is this: clever Delilah has convinced Elon Musk to strip naked and roll around in mud while she rifles his house.

“Ooh, nice,” she says, holding up a cut glass bong with an ethereum logo lasered into the side. “That’ll make a good conversation piece.”

“How long do I have to stay in this mud,” calls Elon from the next room. “I’m cold.”

Delilah checks her watch, calls back: “According to my calculations, at least another hour.”

“And you’re sure this will appease the Basilisk?”

“Who can say with certainty? The Basilisk is of necessity beyond human understanding. But the math says yes.”

“Oh, well, if the math says so,” says Elon, and back he goes to the mud. Delilah takes down a katana from the wall and casually bends it in half. Junk, dammit.

The youngest slave Polk ever bought was 2 years old, the oldest 37. He inherited 20 from his slave-owning father, and bought at least 30, including several while serving as president. He replaced the paid White House servants with the people he claimed to own, as a cost-saving measure, since presidential salaries were at the time intended to cover staff costs as well.

He sold a man to a slave trader for trying to escape, then bought the rest of the man’s family.

After leaving office, content but exhausted, he began a triumphal tour of the south before retiring to his plantation where he expected to live comfortably, supported by the forced labor of the people he had bought. A case of cholera on the riverboat spooked him, as did reports of the disease being endemic in New Orleans, but every white person he met was so hospitable, and the food so good, so he lingered.

He fell ill on the riverboat north, and spent four days ashore. The doctors assured him he did not have cholera.

He died six weeks later, shitting himself to death, attended by his wife and his captive valet. He was baptized a Methodist merely a week before, leaving the Presbyterianism of his youth and marriage.

They’re moving across the country, and his partner has flown on ahead to start setting up the new place, so Amelio is driving the car. His job doesn’t start for a month, and he’d been handling most of the moving planning; this trip is sort of his reward. “Take your time,” his partner had said, when they kissed goodbye at the airport, so he is: taking the winding, already semi-ruined highways instead of the crumbling interstate, stopping whenever something catches his fancy, at tourist traps or greasy spoons or whenever he just gets bored of driving. He’s wary every time he has to stop — he’s not entirely welcome out here in the country — but there’s a ton of space between towns where he can relax more.

Not entirely, though; never entirely.

He zones out a lot, leaning abstractedly on the window, all senses alert but higher functions offline, and just lets the little car eat miles, enjoying the wind whipping through the cabin. It’s hot in the mountains, but not uncomfortably so — he’s fine in short sleeves, short pants, and open windows. He hasn’t been this alone in years, and he feels watered by it, like the end of a drought, like the spring rain sweeping down from the hills and turning the prairie green again.

Day seven of this one, and his lips are numb with sadness; the tips of his fingers, too. Even breathing is a chore, like emptying out your lungs so you can sit on the bottom of the pool, holding yourself down against the natural bouyancy of a body, but in reverse. He pushes air into his chest, forces his ribcage open, how long has it been since his last breath? He keeps forgetting to breathe.

Food is a nightmare, the fridge a slap in the face. He forces himself to eat, sandwiches upon sandwiches, sometimes rice, sometimes an egg, meaningless, just calories shoveled into the engine, eat, eat, always eat; you can’t sleep if you don’t eat, you can’t think if you don’t eat, you don’t have to enjoy it but you do have to do it, so: he eats. He resents it, but he eats, stomping it down to ferment where it can do some good.

He sits in the sun, eyes screwed up against the light, surly and dour, metabolizing vitamin D, staving off cabin fever. Low energy output; like a cat he can stretch out and trust his body to get on with its business. It’s been a week, what novelty there was in the mood has worn off and he’s too old a hand at this to truly despair; the endless flow carries him towards the inevitable other side.