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Showing posts from 2006

Join Maxwell's Cleaners - Your Universe Needs You!

People of the universe, your help is needed. Would you give a little time every day to protect the life you've come to know, and to prevent countless deaths in the future? It has come to our attention that entropy increases every day, and that the ultimate fate of the universe is to die in the roiling chaos of heat death. We may have only 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,

The Tower: The Banker

At ten I have a meeting scheduled with my brother, Luis. He's an analyst for a branch of the military that doesn't hire analysts, which I assume means that he is an analyst, but works for some other branch of the government. Perhaps he's a spy. I don't know, and I am too polite to ask. He is coming to see me to discuss some details of our father's estate. At eleven we are going to have breakfast with his fiance, at which he is going to tell me that they are finally engaged. I already know this, because he told me on the phone last week, too drunk to keep his secret. I am pleased, though, because mother is secretly annoyed at having a bastard grandchild, but her sense of fair play towards her children means that she can only complain to me, not to him. The meeting is businesslike, as it must be - I am seeing him in work hours, as a client - and when it is over I walk him back to the lifts. A workman is standing there, puzzling over some wires inside the panel where t

On The Secret Religion of Dogs

There is a corner of my heaven that I dread, and I stand in it now. This is the corner from which you can sometimes see me. The fur on your neck rises, you smell my ghostly scent, and you bark. Will you understand my words? I cannot come any closer, but I will try to sing to you across the years, through the fog that enshrouds you. Where should I start? Let me tell you this: religion is for children. No, that is wrong. It is for those races that are themselves children. Perhaps that is too difficult for you to see yet. I shall tell you something about this place, then. My heaven is in two parts. The first extends from the wooden fence at the back of the garden out to the road in front of the house. At the back it is two gardens wide, because once I managed to dig under the fence and get into the garden where the rabbits lived. It stretches forward through the one house, then out onto the pavement at the front, and the road. The second part is the park, connected to the first by a thin