I know that I should not have done what I just did. I do not understand the madness that made me. I should get on the phone, somehow, call an ambulance, somehow, get these problems dealt with, somehow, but I live in fear of what I will find out if I do manage to stagger into an emergency room and somebody is able to tell me exactly what has become of my left hand.
Rebecca’s eyes inevitably wandered to the wrists, which ended in thick silver bands, a lot like bracelets except for the flat bottoms where arms should have emerged. They, Rebecca knew, contained not just the life support—without which her husband’s hands would just be graying meat—but also his most recent memory backup, without which everything he had ever been, and everything he had ever done, would now be gone.
The gate was an obscene bas-relief in which hundreds of miniature human forms coupled in combinations of two or three, or four, no two positions alike, all possible sexual combinations represented. It was the most intricate work of art Jin had ever seen with his own eyes, and it moved him not at all.
Fortune entered the gaming floor, where instead of heading straight for a table she wandered among them, noting the places where people wept and howled like wolves, emptied but not yet judged broke.
Oblivion is not quite instantaneous; his neurons all fire at the moment his brain goes soggy with blood, giving him, in his last instant, an overwhelming taste of peppermint.
Being the future inventors of time travel wasn’t all bad, of course. It was great to know that we’d never lose anything, never go to a movie that turned out to be a stinker, never buy a book we wouldn’t want to finish…
What did you see on those faces? Was it fear? Resignation? Or apology?
If it helps you to picture the devastation to come, you should imagine an uncontrolled conflagration, incinerating everything in its path and leaving no life behind.
At the end of the hall you find him. He sits slumped on a marble throne in a chamber with more dust than air. He is as old as any human being you have ever seen …
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