Come on a mindblowing journey. From a feast in imperial Rome whose ripples will be felt across the ages, to a desperate space mission that hopes to find salvation for a broken human race. From a meeting in bleak 1930s Ireland that plots the plunder of an entire nation, to the first-hand experience of a New Yorker during the horror of September 11, 2001. From a lonely and confused seeker of the Holy Grail, to a detached society that feeds its troubled youngsters to the wolves. This thrilling collection of stunning short fiction will force you to challenge every assumption, to question everything, to conclude that your influence on the development of human civilisation is as critical as anybody else's. Ever. Human society has always been controlled and manipulated by the few, but can the many fight back? Sometimes an idea gets into my head and it just won't go away until I write it down. Sometimes it becomes a novel, sometimes a tweet or a blog post, sometimes a short story. This is my first complete collection of all the short stories I've created since I started writing fiction in 2002. The stories are arranged chronologically by setting, as opposed to by when I wrote them. I want to discover if a thread, however tenuous, unites them over the thousands of years that they span. And what is that thread? You read. You decide. You tell me. In my opinion, humans are easily-led, easily-manipulated, easily-fooled. Religions, dictatorships and con artists have thrived because of this unfortunate reality. But we're smarter than that. Will it require a great event to shake us from our slumber or will it require just one great person? All the stories, including those that have been widely-read as part of 9/11 Trilogy and Ireland Trilogy, have been improved as no story I write is ever truly finished. Most of these stories are published here for the very first time. I hope that they give you as much pleasure in the reading as they gave to me in the writing. Gary J Byrnes, Epic Fiction