Jake stood and stared at this marvelous, malevolent female poised in his shower stall. She looked like Athena bathing in the mists as the swirling little showerheads surrounded her voluptuous form with hot steam and water. Realizing she was mesmerizing him, *again*, he abruptly turned away and strode into the bedroom. He stopped, trying to think what to do next.

‘I can’t think with her here!’ he realized frantically. ‘She’ll make me forget anything I try to figure out. I’ve got to get away!’

He remembered that he always kept his flyer equipped for backpacking. There was a tent, a bedroll and canned supplies for several days. He took the stairs down two and three at a time, jumping over the final railing. Opening what looked like a closet door under the stairwell, he trotted down the next set of stairs into the underground garage where he kept his vehicles.

Currently, he only had two; a two-wheeled old-style two-cycle combustion engine motorcycle of unknown vintage and the Mitsui Mach II flyer he’d received as part of his retirement package along with the cabin. It wasn’t a top-of-the-line model; it’s altitude ceiling was eight thousand feet and it would only do twenty two hundred kph. It was also a real gas hog, being equipped with only a turbine and not the much more efficient turbo-ramjet stutter combination that was just beginning to become popular when he retired.

Jake checked his flyer, quickly. It was fueled and ready to go. He climbed in and fired it up. The automatic doorway to the ramp opened up, revealing a sharply angled exit ramp leading to the desert surface. Bright sunlight lit up the ramp as the outside doors raised to clear a pathway for the flyer. The floor quickly lined Jake’s flyer up with the exit ramp and began moving it through.

When the flyer was halfway up the ramp, Jake pushed the throttle forward and was airborne, shooting into the sky. He pressed ‘Auto Location #1’. This set the autopilot to take him approximately fifty miles north of Bozeman to the town where he grew up and connected his vehicle and flight path into the nationwide flight grid.

He changed his mind and pressed ‘Auto Location #2’. This took him another five minutes north to the mesa near where Béla’s cabin used to be. That was the most solitary place he could think of now that Alicia had pre-empted his living space.

He sat back and watched the scenery on the horizon as it quickly grew, then flashed beneath him. The first few minutes of his flight were noisy and irritating. Then, with a slight feeling of being pressed back into his seat, the little flyer passed through the sound barrier and settled into the quiet, monotonous sound of air passing smoothly over the outside hull, a comforting sound familiar to all air travelers.

“Uncle Jake,” the speaker in the instrument panel squeaked. “Uncle Jake, I know you can hear me. Please come back.”

It was Alicia’s voice, pleading for him to return to her. It sounded tinny and artificial coming from the tiny speaker. He clicked off the speaker box.

Twenty-five minutes later, he passed over Bozeman. He didn’t like big cities, and, although he knew Bozeman wasn’t big, compared to New York or Chicago, it had done its share of urban sprawling in the last century. Skyscrapers, shopping malls and housing developments swallowed up the forests and farmlands that once separated Bozeman from his hometown.

The console beeped twice. Jake looked at the display. It was requesting a landing site. On ‘Auto Location #2’, there were three selections that he had input when he created the program. He chose number three. It was the most desolate place he knew of, and, to him, the most precious piece of real estate on the planet.

The console immediately beeped again. He looked at it, wondering what was wrong now. Jake read the display and laughed. He thought that was a pretty good idea.

‘Admin code required.’

‘Delete VR Alicia.’

He punched his admin code into the console.

‘Admin code confirmed.’

The screen went dark. Jake suddenly realized he wanted to know what Alicia was doing behind his back. The console lit up again when he touched it.

“Monitor Alicia,” he told it.

The display brightened into an image showing Alicia in her tight fitting red flight suit carrying her bags through the front door toward her flitter. Even in the tiny monitor, her rear end looked delicious.

‘I hope she didn’t take anything of mine,’ he thought to himself, annoyed that he was still attracted to her.

Jake watched the desolate landscape grow as the little craft descended toward the top of the mesa where he and Béla had fallen in love.