Chapter Text
There I am, reading today's newspaper, when “legs” walks in. She starts telling me this rambling story, nuttier than a fruitcake in the middle of summer. The dame is smoking, but wants to hire me to find her world.
I look out the window at the city, the grand canal, the telluric-aether condensing pyramid, the soaring multi-kiloton poured-geopolymeric basalt statues — bigger than buildings — at aesthetically pleasing intervals; I listen to her talk about murders and wars, a world filled with insane violence that's as casual about it as picking a piece of fruit from the municipal trees lining the walkways. A world where every business, every citizen, spews caustic waste into the air and water, knowingly destroying the land and ecology with chemicals that will live for a thousand years.
Her story goes on in detail, a bizarre delusion, but with only normal inconsistencies. I still don't see her angle here; she's gotta be one of Delaney's boys here to put in a fix, but somehow I don't see it. It's like her story holds water, and some level of my gut knows it. It's an interesting spiel, I have to give her that. She says she'd thought it was a joke when others claimed it, or were simply lying when they'd said the same of their spouses they'd called “walk ins.” That they'd been Mandected — Mandela Affected, whatever that is — and how maybe sometimes people got Mandected but didn't realize it.
That gets my attention. I've seen a couple of cases like that; damnedest things.
Reflecting on this as I wiggle the tip of my pinky around in one ear I realize that it's tinnitus. Never noticed that before.
I still don't see how anyone could somehow not notice they're in the wrong world, but...
I look out the window again, thinking how things could be different... our skyscrapers no longer crumbling, all the crime in the city and political scandals gone, air that didn't kill you in a few decades, water that fell from the sky and wasn't rationed and put through a dozen purification processes before you could touch it safely... a world where people just get along?
Damnedest thing.
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