MindFrame Podcast

Misty's shoulders slumped, and she said, “Everyone points to Christmas as the most wonderful day of the year. But you know what I think, Claire? I think Christmas eve is probably more powerful than Christmas. It is the moment before Schrödinger's box opens. The cat is dead alive. Your binary human existence hasn't forced it...

C “Cargo ship Lam Tin. Make no further course adjustments, kill your thrust, and prepare for boarding. You will be fired upon for failure to comply.” Desi saw the threat indicator and saw no fewer than four Trickster-Class fighter craft, her own type of craft, and two assault vehicles packed with Marines heading in their direction...

“Across all of Japan, The Samurai sought his prey. This Ronin, this masterless cur who threated the security of the very Empire with his deviant ways, magical powers, and the demons at his command. The Samurai would have leapt from earth and followed the scourge to the heavens—from the sun to the stars, if that...

Suddenly, there was a deep rumble that felt like an earthquake or an explosion. He heard no sound but felt the bass deep in his chest. The salt vibrated in a circular pattern from the center of the room…His mind turned to the recent Deviant bombings on a flight school in Prague. The academy here...

The smell of burnt and burning meat filled the halls, as did smoke from what had to be dozens of small fires all around the ship. The new Deviant weapon was said to only light living beings on fire (what a horror show), but they were told small flames would pop up everywhere based on...

“Waves of commerce are far more rare, important, and beautiful in this universe than waves of water mindlessly battering the rocks…There are no worlds containing sentience that exist without commerce. I promise you that. Trade? Goods and logistics? Regardless of the world or the race, that shit right there is universal and magnificent.”   –Yale Boliver In...

Chapter 27 “This is not that, Clarabelle. I am truly sorry for what you're about to see, though I am happy to welcome you away from the world of black and of white and into the world of gray.” The Alpha boarded the lift, indicating his work here was done. Claire locked all the recent...

Admiral Oshiro was focused on Arnez. Oshiro said, “Arnez, stop what you're doing and surrender. I don't know how you're doing this, nor can I fathom why, but you're never going to get off of this station. This is not a request. You have five seconds to comply.” Oshiro was not bluffing or playing at...

“And just now, he stood on all sides of Josephine. All six of him were dressed in slightly different, trashy clothes. All six held different blades, and all six advanced with the will to cut her, smash her face, make her bleed. Josephine filled her breast with fire that spawned in the base of her...

“It was hard for me to remember my life before the Mindframe. Or to be honest, it was hard to forget the Mindframe itself. Every boom I heard was a gunshot. And realized I didn't ever want to go back. I was tired of combat…and The Delta Messenger agreed.” On this episode of Mindframe, we return...

On this episode of Mindframe, we revisit Mariel Barbeau (previously known as Josephine). She is close to a full repair and relaunch of the Old Dame Hotel, and she's eager for Uncle Alphie to get there. She doesn't expect the what happens to her reality as a result–both her and her chapters will never be the...

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...

The air smelled of smoke mixed with rainy air seeping in through the back doors, but tainted by the scent of iron and spilled life. Marcellus lay still, legs tucked in a strange angle nobody could ever maintain. Blood pooled under him. It was starting to drip off the edge of the spotlight walkway like...

“Using this practice, we enter the dreams of a subject. The reason for this Dream Tap is to assist in especially difficult or tricky investigations. People’s memories are faulty at best. Witnesses lie, or are scared, or were so traumatized by what they witnessed that they can’t accurately recall things. In forensic dreaming, none of...

New Character !!! New Chapter !!!

This darkness would drift over Desi lately. She was hiding something, keeping an emotion deep inside of her like she did. She paused and shifted to her back and stared up into the darkness. Marcellus laid his head against her breast, the perfect place, and heard her heart beat. It was a heavier sound than...

Grim knew that only the individual person made an area dangerous. He also knew that he was the only person here in danger, based on his isolated location and lack of guards or surveillance. This type of mistake was how he got caught by the Maglichi’s in Italy before he was tortured. In Chapter 19...

Josephine was Claire’s Framer. Her father’s second widow. This woman watched him die and had spent the past year and a half mourning his loss. That was more than Claire ever did for the man. She went on with training, fired a gun at the man’s funeral in salute, and eagerly got upvoted to become...

“The seamless perfection of the white shell of the Framing Chamber looked as if an egg suddenly had a crack in it. The crack widened, moved with a purpose and shape. The portal appeared, and the thing was seamless no more. There was a pop and a hiss of air exchanging, and it slid open.  Inside,...

Just ahead in the wide lawn between the tree line and the Old Dame was the Framing Chamber. It’s pure white walls were seamless, no hint at a door. The purity of the thing made the fresh white snow seem like a muddy track on a construction site. There were eight more marines surrounding it....

“You and me, we aren’t like regular women. You are trained to be here, to do this very important job. I have been equally trained. You are uncertain you’re right for this job anymore. I’m uncertain I’ve ever been right for mine. And we both think everyone else is waiting for us to fail. But...

By twenty, his momentum, his power, and his cognition were granted so much potency that he lost any sense of being something called a human. His neurons were no longer him. It was then that he would dance the world, taking leaps as grand as a continent, touching the hundred now and again with a graceful,...

As Grim approached The Plaza, the sky grew alive with electricity. Arcs of silent lightning and pure blue-white energy cascaded to and from a central point in the sky above the shopping center. The Mò Yú had powered up. A Mò Yú’s energy would tear cars and homes and people in half if so directed,...

Chapter 14 Marcellus Ball.

She wore the breezy, loose pants and shirt that were the official uniform of a Framer. Above her head floated one of her attendants, those visual horror shows that looked like enormous insects and would kill you for coming too close to their charge…Campana was confused as to why this woman wasn’t in a Chamber....

“Come with me to St. Louis. Be my number one on the Arch project. It’s going to be a hell of a sight. It’ll beat most of the monuments in Washington when it’s done. A giant arch, a heaving metal goliath that will serve as the gateway to the west, a gateway to the future...

The lights flickered on and off suddenly as if there were a power surge, and in the pulses of light, her dogs weren’t dogs. They were some horrible chitonous thing. Their bodies were segmented like a pill bug, but shiny black like a new car or an inverted storm trooper. Up their back was a...

Merry Christmas. “And you have a choice to make, Josephine. That is ultimately the point of this. A terrible moment from your life yet to come where your decision and the decision of one other human eing will utterly rewrite the flow of your entire species. No pressure, though…” –The Sender Now that Josephine has...

“And do you think the Alpha is actually sane still? Do you think any of the Messengers went through contact without being irrevocably changed?”             “No. No, not a one. The messages change a person to their core, Josephine. It isn’t just that the alien dreams are incessant. It isn’t the things being sent down, the...

– The whip and sting of Poseidon’s cold barbs pulled Grim from his philosophic musings, straight down the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid. He was cold and needed shelter. His face burned and fingers had gone from feeling that his whiskey glass was cold to not feeling the glass at all. Grim dumped the last of the...

-As he looked up, someone sat on his lap, a warm behind against his cold skinny legs, an arm slung around his neck, a smell of musky oil and vanilla. It was Desi. The anger vanished, as he saw her nibble a small bite from the tip of the hash brown…She was wearing jeans and...

– “That file is directly from Alpha’s desk. It has all of your orders. Though I am delivering them, they do not come from me or the Navy. This is his mission. And, this is of course very sensitive information. Captain Campana, you are now the ninth living person in the entire human race to...

– He slid his hand over the hand railing; it was a pure, snow white, and it seemed to anchor The Dame to the whole frosted world around her. Teddy did that. And he would do so much more. He wanted to quit his other projects in the suburbs and stay here in The Dame...

– The plane careened, engine on fire, and it ducked behind the endless maze of towers. There was a rumble in the ground, a horrible sound, a ball of fire in the distance as the jet crashed into something, likely a building, some blocks away. Then a new thing appeared in the sky. A craft,...

This is not that. – On this episode of Mindframe, we have the first of several interludes to the main five stories being told. In it, we follow a woman named Josephine as she drifts through a strange dream labyrinth of time. In this liminal space, she meets Alpha, her mentor. He questions her about the...

– But his family was not a family of sincerity. The Boliver family was not one of straight lines, but of crooked angles, ever askew, always hiding the true intersection of purposes. Grim knew to look for the angle, the grift, the obfuscated manipulation in every situation, even one conspired by his darling niece… –...

– This was a place of tricks of light and illusion; a fourth wall was a delicate thing, easily broken by the crush of the real world, just on the other side of the veil. – Chapter 4 of Mindframe is the beginning of the story arc of Marcellus Ball. Marcellus is the stage manager of a...

Give nothing to anybody. See, instead, how they earn it. It was a slogan as old as WorldGov, and one she lead by.  In Chapter three of Mindframe, we start to follow the story of Claire Campana, a newly promoted captain in the World Navy. The World Vote pushed her up in rank, and she has...

On this episode of Mindframe, we have another unique Sit Down, where you get the inside scoop on the show in a way you can’t get it from anyone else! As always, you’ll hear your host with the most, Zach Smith, ask questions of Dave and Brent. This time about Chapter 2. If you’re listening,...

Teddy went back to his rooms behind the house. He knew he wouldn’t sleep tonight; the bad dreams from the war were sailing off his bow after the sky had been filled with fire all night long. He took up a bottle of Canadian Club and poured two fingers of it, then a third, and...

On this “Sit Down” episode of the Mindframe Podcast, we relax and talk shop about Chapter One and the life of Josephine. As always, the Sit Down episodes are where our host Zach asks questions of Dave and Brent. The point is to help reveal some of the mysteries of the narrative as well as...

A coat of paint hid burn marks. Makeup hid frown lines. The light of noon hid terrible moon lit shadows. Josephine had to move on. On this episode of Mindframe, we get to chapter one, the first of the chapters about Josephine. She is a widow, grieving the loss of her husband to a horrible fire...

This episode of the Mindframe Podcast is another of our “Sit Downs.” This time, we focus on the space opera action of the show’s Prologue. In these episodes, our host Zach Smith sits down with the author of Mindframe, David Moton, and the producer, Brent Van Tassel. We have a casual, often funny, conversation about...

Childhood is gone. Illusion is abolished. The world is laid bare, full of unpolished people and unfulfilled destiny. But that is not your concern. Because on your piece of paper there will always be written orders. There are only the orders and the following of the orders. There is only the Lariat, and its closing,...

Welcome to our very first “Sit Down” episode of the Mindframe Podcast. In this episode, we focus on the show’s Prelude. These unique episodes are not part of the primary story line. Instead, they are a casual conversation between our host Zach Smith, the author David Moton, and the producer Brent Van Tassel. Zach asks...

The old man lingered in the liminal place that presaged sleep, that space where reality had variable density and fluctuating tactile strength. Moments of clarity, of skies with a blue so sharp they caused him to ache, were interspersed with vagaries, memories, haunting scars and echoes of the psyche in which he was intruding. This...