Penny touched Grim’s stomach, danced her fingertips to the burn scars from when the Maglici family had him in chains, hit him with electricity, and put cigars out on his flesh. She slunk behind him, her hands touching each of the other scars that blossomed on his back, from where he was whipped at that...

Chapter 24: Mariel Barbeau

For over a century, a united humanity’s focus was the construction of a massive alien device: The Lariat. Its blueprints were dreamed by a handful of gifted humans who could hear alien voices as they slept. It is miles long, built in close orbit of the sun, and it promises to be a gate to a vast alien civilization. It promises to end humanity’s galactic isolation.

It will open, and a newly promoted Captain Claire Campana’s ship will be key to the ceremony, once it is repaired in the World Navy’s shipyards near the sun. But there is dissent. A member of the black market mob known as the Boliver family begins to doubt the Lariat’s true purpose. And then there are the fragments in time. The 1960s, the 1990s, 2012, where innocent people oblivious to this future live their lives. They connect, somehow, to each other, to the future, to the Lariat.

Mindframe is a genre bending piece of science fiction that weaves seemingly disconnected people through various time streams into one important moment. The moment that changes all of human destiny. The moment the Lariat closes.