Phoenix, Arizona, March, 2078, Friday…

Phil Jackson loved Arizona. Sedona plus cacti plus heat - they all seemed to go together. The whole package appealed to him.

Five years ago he had been CEO of a new bioengineering startup in Portland and hating every minute of it. Privately owned, it had been bought by some Chinese investors. He had made his fortune and retired. He was not greedy.

His second profession was now oil painting. Once a hobby, his art now appeared in Boston, New York, Seattle, and San Francisco. A large painting of his adorned one wall of a conference room at the UN, another the office of Arizona's senior Senator.

He was amazed at his good luck. Or skill. The painting he was working on was turning out damn well, even if he said so himself. His colors were always bold, as bold as the Sedona Desert itself. This one he was calling Eagle's Run. It was supposed to be the bird's-eye view as the eagle came sweeping in over the desert, landscape blurred by the speed of the flight. The whole painting screamed motion.

Some of his more negative critics complained of his realism. He didn't consider himself to be into realism. This whole painting, for example, was an abstract view of the bird's world. At the upper right you could see a blur of gray and white as the bird looked along his wing. But the feathers were only suggested. You just knew that they were there. The bird didn't focus on them, so the viewer couldn't be allowed to either.