Take a Credit and place your PocketBank™ back into its magnetic placeholder on the left side of your belt, then take off your tie. Let it float to the ground slowly before shattering into a miasma of colors on the floor, fading back into the Collective Storage Unit we had installed for you last week as per your request. Check your inventory to help ease the transition of digitized storage.
The Collective Storage Unit now contains:
-
- Red Tie (1)
- Standards and Practice™ #37 Blue Ink Pen (4)
- Outwear Synthol Shoes-Grey (1)
- 2nd Copy Binding Contract
- Error
Make a mental note to inform your attendant of the coffee mug that seems to have merged with the floor on the left interior side of your desk. One day the impact mechanics implemented into the software will work as intended. It will happen because there is no reason to believe differently. One day the floor will obey you, but for now, you are only the master of installation art.
Your jacket will go next, then your overshirt. You should be wearing your undershirt, Professional Work Pants #2, Casual Work Shoes #2, undergarments, and one Credit when you finish.
Exit your office.
Your automated attendant detected the anomaly when the mug hit the floor, but instruct her to schedule a Repair Crew™ for next week during your vacation anyways. You are the master of the choice of their arrival.
When will it be?
9:30 AM?
No?
11:00 AM it is. Congratulations! Continue through the hallway.
You are allowed to think freely in the hallway.
I am formless, the caverns empty and plains wide as I drift through this space aimlessly. I know the fields of my forefathers; long have they been unattended. The responsibilities of those before me mean nothing.
I am nothing. I must be nothing. For if I am to be at peace, I must be nothing, and I must wander through the nothing. For in the nothing, I am satisfied.
Stop.
Please.
Look. Look through me. I am nothing, so look. Look through me as the lens to observe the lands I wander. Tell me what you see.
If your answer is anything more than nothing, I will raze these lands forever.
Stop thinking freely when you reach the end of the hallway. Allow the two detailed security personnel stationed at the Selection Room entrance to search you as a final precaution. Thank them as a formality but do not expect a response.
Enter the Selection Room. The room has been installed with Impact Negation™, SoundProofing™, Non-Stimulating™, TruthTalk™, and DarkThoughts™, which will be activated and dispersed into the room as deemed appropriate by your supervisors. Once you have entered the Selection Room, confirm for your supervisors all inventory, including yourself, that you can observe to be in the room.
The Selection Room inventory contains:
-
- Manson Fledger (Including all items approved by security personnel before entering the Selection Room.)
- Satisfactory Stations’ TRY A PRIZE ™ Vendor (1)
Approach the vendor. Once you are ready, place your credit into the appropriate slot.
You are now cleared to begin the Selection Process. You are now cleared to begin thinking freely for the remainder of the Selection Process.
We are grateful.
I am not in the Selection Room; my body is. It is not my hand pushing the credit down the vendor’s slot; it is yours. Yours by omission, because no matter the intricacies, this is just a room, and this is just a choice that you are not prepared to make.
I am not your lapdog; our interests happened to align to make this transaction possible.
To give up; a coward. To push through; a hero?
Who is the fool?
Who wrote that lie?
Keep Moving Forward
To the author,
tell me,
have you ever sat down in your life?
You wish to wage war, yet you have forgotten how. I shall teach you, in my own way. I am only thirty-five; I have no recollection of war in our perfect society. Yet I wish for it; I dream of it.
I dream that war is the action that leaves nothing behind. I dream of those who wish the opposite, who are so filled with war that they want something. What are their dreams? I wish to know.
So I will take your credit and slide it down your vendor; select a SurprizeBox™ and open it to find the name of the place that will not be named, for there is no need for it. We will bring war to that place. Nothing will be left.
We will create tools to commence war. My imagination and your resources will create economic nothing. It will take time, but you have taken the first step. We have started, and I will not let you stop. The nothing we will create will be great and tragic, only possible through all of the progress you have achieved.
They will ask you, the people you domineer, why have you done this? You will tell them a reason, and they will accept it, but you will not tell them your purpose. You will not tell them that you grew curious. That you wanted to know what it was like to stop in the wake of your progress. To stagnate. To rot. To see nothing before you and to dream of anything else.
I think that I am the child you asked, halfway down the trampled path, why I would not follow?
I think you wanted to run to me when I said, “I thought better of it.”.
I think you are running now.
Chance O’Neal writes in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
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