“Ip-swich! Can you hear me?” I’ve been demoted along with my new companion to the mysterious Cleaners. (Said companion’s name is Zuri ‘Zudge’ Jaiden and she’s short, savvy, and subversive – I like her). Sent on a training mission to Ipswich, England in 1984, our mission has been to foil time assassins hired to kill the bass player of a rock group called Kiss. That isn’t the problem. “Ip-swich! It’s time…” With Time Dogz Inc. under attack from its competitors, the Cleaners are now using the ‘Kill Box’ to make our jumps, an experimental time machine discarded years ago because of its unfortunate habit of making its passengers disappear. Where they go, nobody knows. That’s not the problem, either. Not the immediate one, at any rate, because there are a stack of other things waiting to kill me first. “Time to… Lick! It! Uuuuuuup!” At the Kiss concert in 1984, where a million decibels of pure rock ‘n’ roll pulses through my spine, the licking up is nothing to do with the beer spillage in the theater – though that is plentiful. This is the stage banter of the frontman, Paul Stanley. Simmons the bassist is much worse, being positively infectious with the inuendoes. Hang around too long and you start talking like them. Zudge and I certainly have. We can’t help it. That’s not the problem either. Well, maybe a little bit. The purpose of the Cleaners is to mop up other people’s time messes. Unfortunately, they’ve acquired a new recruit with a psychological condition that makes him intolerant of being told what to do. And that difficult individual might have just disobeyed his orders a little bit at the Kiss concert. Consequently, my friends and lovers are now disappearing. Gone. Ripped from the timeline along with the techs I need to operate the time machines to fix my mess. I know I’ve really screwed up this time because weird stuff has started appearing in the late 20th century: nuclear war, norm-eating mutants, and a cult rock