"We Built This City on Rock and Roll" was blaring out over the speakers on the low-budget PA system. Despite the fact that the sound was emanating from a beat-up speaker coil that was probably manufactured over a century ago, the music still played with reasonable fidelity, the shrill FM-synth high notes cutting through even the rattling hum of the info terminal Stan Wysnowski was sitting in front of.

"Hey, Stan, mind if I change the track?" Wendell yelled from his spot behind the counter.

"Nah, let it play." Stan didn't even bother to look away from the brightness of the terminal's screen. "It's been almost a week since this one made it into the rotation."

"Hey, you're the boss." Wendell went back to paging through a generic magazine, leaning against the polished granite-and-chrome counter that ran most of the length of one wall of the store.

The kid was right, Stan mused, as he clicked through another page of redundant celebrity news. He was the boss, for what it was worth. They didn't call this place Stan's Last Stand for nothing.

“Please don’t,” said the man, trying to cringe back into the corner of the room, his hand outstretched towards me. He was a rather portly man, balding with one of those stupid comb-over jobs, not so much clothed as swaddled in an ill-fitting, cheaply-made tweed suit. You could almost see the drops of sweat beading up on his pale, pasty face.

“Don’t do it,” he said, his eyes fixated on the dark opening of my pistol, a void that weaved a lazy figure-eight centering on the bridge of his nose. I didn’t need to keep my aim even that tightly locked-on - this target was far too scared to even contemplate trying to run away or fight back.

One one of my many wanderings about this great city, I came upon a piece of sea glass, and immediately began to speculate on the force of luck that one might obtain by recieving it.

It is a small piece of glass, one that fits comfortably within your palm, with a burnished consistency left by the passage of millions of grains of sand reclaiming their resources from the fused former members of their order. Still, though, through this rough treatment, a few polished edges can be seen, a few scarce surfaces that have withstood the test of time.

Still, though, how can something such as luck be attributed to an object such as this? A penny, perhaps, is lucky by nature, or by old-wives'-tales, but what of a piece of glass? Traveling across the sea from anywhere in the world, the possibilites for its existence are endless.

--------------------
Note: This story contains additional author's notes and supplemental content, which you can access by viewing the annotations page for The Factory.
--------------------

"Mike Smith, huh?" the security guard asked from the safety of his small, enclosed kiosk. The strains from the theme of a familiar police drama emanated from a portable TV set behind him, only partially muted by the downpour that separated the kiosk from the window of the black coupe pulled up alongside it.

"Yep, that's me," the man inside the car answered.

"Mike Smith. Huh. That's, what, only slightly less common than John Doe?"

"Hey, give me a break. I didn't get to choose it. You want to complain, blame my parents."

"Jeez, you don't have to be so touchy about it." The guard thrust a hand out into the rain, holding Mike's driver's license. "Be kind enough and take it back before I'm completely soaked."

Mike grabbed it back, along with the other object in the outstretched hand - a strip of color printout, with his picture featured prominently at the top, encased in a thin plastic sleeve with a metal clip.

The theatre was, without a doubt, the finest in the city. The building was paneled in only the finest hardwoods, and great painted silk banners hung lazily down the sides, hiding the finely-tuned speakers that had been carefully embedded into the beautiful wood inlays. The chairs themselves were plushly upholstered in fine velvet dyed a regal scarlet, their frames coated in a shiny mixture of platinum-iridium.