Glasshouse

In my experience, the best way to deal with such people is to politely agree with everything they say, then ignore them.

I’m trapped in a fun-house mirror reflection of a historical society where everyone was crazy by default, driven mad by irrational laws and meaningless customs.

If I forget, then it might as well never have happened. Memory is liberty.

You know, if I tried to change the minds of everyone who I thought needed changing, I’d never have time to do anything else.

The idea of Curious Yellow, of surrender to a higher cause, seems to appeal to a certain small subset of humanity. These people manipulate the worm, customizing its payload to establish quisling dictatorships in its shadow, and the horrors these gauleiters invent in its service are far worse than the crude but direct tactics the original worm used.

Can I remember— “I remember lots,” I say. How much of what I remember is true is another matter.

Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything.

Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life. But forgetting is a fraught process, one that is prone to transcription errors and personality flaws. Delete the wrong pattern, and you can end up becoming someone else. Memories exhibit dependencies, and their management is one of the highest medical art forms.

“Bad day at the office?”

“It’s always a bad day at the office, insofar as the office exists in the first place.”

I killed you! And you didn’t even notice!

I’m wearing black leggings and a loose top festooned with a Menger sponge of empty pockets stitched out of smaller pockets and smaller still, almost down to the limits of visibility—woven in freefall by hordes of tiny otaku spiders, I’m told, their genes programmed by an obsessive-compulsive sartorial topologist.

A dark-skinned human with four arms walks toward me across the floor of the club, clad only in a belt strung with human skulls.