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The Word 8
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The Word 8 (Disk 2 of 2).adf
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11-Harmless_Joke.txt
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11-Harmless_Joke.txt
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1978-03-13
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56 lines
|1-It all started as a harmless joke
By JIPsoft
Darryl was my friend. I had known him since birth. He was exactly the
same age as me, so naturally I was informed of his birth, and he of
mine.
I had always thought there was something very peculiar about Darryl.
Either he was mad or I was. It was only later that I came to the
conclusion that we both were. That served, of course, not only to unite
us, but also to isolate us from anybody else.
One day, when we were pondering about the very essence of truth, things
and stuff like that, I said a fatal thing to him. What I said was
(quite verbatim) "But I don't even know if you exist!"
Darryl's reply was puzzling. He said "I don't!" and vanished. I was
unable to see, hear, touch, taste or smell him, but somehow I was aware
of his constant presence. His thoughts entered my head. At first I
thought mine must have entered his head too, but then I thought it was
false, since I knew there was no head for them to enter.
Darryl existed only in my head. I could not sense him as an external
being, and nobody else even knew there was any Darryl.
I grew worried. Just as vacuum craves air, a sudden discontinuation of
existence attracts existence - matter - to itself. I could already feel
my matter slowly turning into Darryl. He would be all right, physically
existent and all that, but what about me?
I thought about Darryl. In my thoughts I said: "Darryl! Hear me!
Please exist again, I cannot possibly survive turning into you!" And he
answered. He said - thought - "Why did you do this to me?" I was in a
panic. I replied that what I said about his existence back then had
only been a joke, whose point he apparently had failed to get.
"All right", he said, "I will cure your problems." He thought about a
lump of granite exactly of his mass, which took the form of a square
circle. It appeared. It was the first time I had seen a square circle
in my life. It was strangely beautiful, yet I dared not look at it for
a longer time. I knew Darryl had made it - he hadn't created it, he had
just forced it into existence.
But the main thing was that it had stopped the drain of existence
Darryl's disappearance had created. I was no longer turning into
Darryl. I was glad.
But his thoughts were still in my head. He haunted me in a curiously
mad kind of way. "But hey!" I thought. "This will do - it could be
worse!"
End