Introduction

This is what we call a distressed economy. I just said that because I wanted to use italics, but it's true anyway. The tundra whistled with a very cold wind and everybody stood around blinking for a while.

Then slowly, like some smelly mollusk slipping into an abandoned shell, little businesses started appearing. Auto-body shops and light manufacturing appeared in the abandoned storage bays, built to withstand a direct hit from a scud missle.

Somebody got a bunch of barbed wire and turned the barracks into prisions. Bartenders and bouncers became prison guards.

In one of these concrete tupperware buildings, I personally crouched next to a bomb-making machine in a pyrotechnics factory, nervously dropping closure disks onto impulse cartridges. I flinched every time the crimping machine at my right elbow mangled one of these powder- laden horrors. I bolted each time one blew prematurely and coated the lexan shields surrounding it with a black greasy stain.

Then one day, They hung out the sign. The Olive Factory in big green letters.