“One to Spare” by Jason Andrew is another story of possibilities. Race is a motorcycle courier in the Emerald Metroplex approached for a particularly lucrative, but illegal, job and forced by circumstances to take it.  What follows is a fairly mundane motorcycle chase as Race seeks to deliver her package. What piques one’s interest in this story are the background elements: Race’s father and his fate, Race’s client and how he came to his end, Race’s daughter. all dropped in as background, but more intriguing than the actual story. It would’ve been great to see this background world expanded upon. “One to Spare” is okay, but amounts mostly to a motorcycle chase through crowded streets—something more interesting as a movie than a short story.

Rebecca S. W. Bates’s “Running Down on a Thousand” is also about a courier.  The narrator is a “prophecy courier,” a time traveler who delivers hallucinogenic payloads keyed to provide the receiver with a message. Our protagonist makes a jump for one of her fellows, who requires extra downtime, but it doesn’t go as expected, and she finds herself confronted with a woman who is both from a lower tech and is rather more aggressive than the courier is able to handle.

“Running Down on a Thousand” can be taken as both a serious and comic work. The confrontation between the advanced but passive courier and her lower tech captor is a long explored topic. The keys are the realizations the courier experiences in this uncontrolled environment.

Hentor Briggs is yet another kind of courier in J Alan Erwine’s “A Torturous Wrong Turn,” an unlucky smuggler. He’s caught, and the government that caught him really wants his information. One of the shortest stories in Future Syndicate, it’s a straightforward tale of a man caught by a government that will stop at nothing to learn what he knows. In essence, it questions what the greater crime is: smuggling or the lengths the regime will go to in the name of the law.