It had been a good seven years since Darius ("Weasel") Wheeler III had heard from his erstwhile employer and bar owner, Norman the Neck; seven years worth of working a straight job. He's finally fully invested in the straight world, and like so many such, often finds it a wretched, but viable, charade. So when he is suddenly awakened on a Monday morning to hear Norm's voice urgently telling him to meet him in a teal Mercedes parked in front, he has the gut wrenching sense that the wrong side of the law will probably be the only side of the law.
Norman seems to have some bootlegged Space-Time travel technology, apparently from the future, barely understood by him and its own practitioners, which allows them to experience travel in time. But this technology does have a couple of morally ambiguous requirements.
Employing positrons as a combination lubricant and fuel, it turns out that the easiest source of the positron equivalent of a bolt of lightning is found by exploiting the yearnings of outstanding people at their moments of death. This provides Norman with the energy necessary for the essence of his personality to be able to borrow the dermis of his own past bodies by extracting a temporal quantum of the space time fragment, a three dimensional "slice" of their skin at that moment. Theoretically, there as an almost infinite number of these slices, allowing the personality to live eternally, its experience bounded only by the human space-time fabric's totality from the first human to the final generation of the extinct species.
Norman needs Weasel to commit his body to this process because he has discovered that one of the unintended consequences of this technology is that he and his ilk have been irreversibly shortening the total available time for the human species, rather like a law of the conservation of space-time and matter. The species as a whole just lost a hundred years of total space-time existence, and those who started this whole thing, way back in the far distant future, are starting to disappear because there is no space-time fabric for them to exist. Weasel's body, not being dead yet, has a future and with that its virtually infinite future slices.
Of course, none of these large issues concern Weasel, who only wants to get the winning numbers for the next Lottery, quit the straight job he hates, and thereby maintain his complex love life with the lovely Monica!, a part time high-end escort, and the only woman in the world who has had her name legally changed to include an exclamation point.
Darius doesn't know it yet, but he may already be dead; although if so, he may very well be the first human being who will have to miss his own funeral. There will be no available body.
