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When they take the god out of you, you wonder at first if you’ve been killed, but it wasn’t very well done, and you wish someone would hurry up and finish the job. You were strapped down and touched with fire from shoulder to hip.
The good news is, we have no intention of killing you. We know that this is no relief to you. The inherent feature of a position that begins with, “The good news,” is that the bad news is coming and that it usually possesses sufficient substance to be a fool counterweight.
The beautiful princess was cursed by a wicked fairy to sleep for a hundred years. She slumbered in a bed of silk in the golden castle surrounded by tangles of briars and roses on the top of the hill. Nobody much cared. Why should the villagers have felt bad for the magically slumbering princess?
On the high plains of Kansas in a tiny town worn down by drought, I stop at a roadside diner. When I ask for water, the waitress pours me a glass of ice water, presenting it with obvious pride. “We have our own well,” she says. “And the wind turbine on the roof keeps the freezer going.”
So I guess if I’m gonna tell you about the ghost, first I have to tell you why I had to go all the way to Mama Tee’s house in the first place. Basically, this one day last summer me and my boys were just chillin in the parking lot of the rec center. We […]
This is the eighth floor of the Al-Ahli Memorial Library, my favorite place in the building. When the elevator door opens, it’s like walking into a quiet circle of glass. So, as we walk, I’m going to whisper. People are reading, writing, drawing—it’s such a beautiful place to work.
They come on trains; they come on buses; they come on planes to our municipal airport. A handful even arrive on foot, having walked the whole distance to our City with what scant possessions they could carry on their backs—only a few, to be sure. But more than have ever walked away.
It is 3024, and there are no longer shrines. They long since washed away by nature’s fury in the form of quakes that split across continents, countries, cities, down schools, fields, homes neatly in two. You are to receive the memories of a late mother, a late father.
I am running out of Words. I stumble down the temple steps, clutching my wounded side. I had been too slow to use my fourth Word and the prison guard’s spear had drawn blood before he choked to death under the weight of my suffocation spell.
The pratikriti squats beside him on the terrace. Now that he is able to see again through his borrowed eyes, Neel is surprised at how obviously inhuman it looks. Then he remembers a briefing from a long time ago: the AI implants filter the appearance of artificials.
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