K. A. Bedford

““What about your art?”...“I gave it up.”“Gave it up? How could you give it up?” He was shaken at the news. Molly no longer an artist? He didn’t know artists could even do that; he thought it was a lifetime thing, like a sentence.”

“You going somewhere with this, Spider, or can we just take it as read that you’re a bit cranky today?”

““Spider!” Mr. Patel said, coming up to him, taking his hand, pumping it hard. “You’re a hard man to find!”“Evidently not hard enough.””

““The bloody future,” Spider muttered. “What’s it ever done for us?””

““When Dickhead was a little kid, he had this, hmm, ‘religious experience’, I suppose you’d call it. For all we know his little wee brain might just have had a stroke or some damn thing. Upshot, though, was he thought an actual angel appeared before him, and told him all kinds of neat but apocalyptic stuff about the universe, about God’s decision to start over, and that only the very few, the Chosen, could be part of it, and thus find out about the Final Secret of the Cosmos.”“But that’s bullshit, surely.””

““Okay, then,” Spider said. “I have the D6. I have the wicked power of pseudo-random number generation right here in my hot little hand.””

“Spider had to keep that firmly in his mind. It was a lesson he had learned on the job: things are not always as they seem. Sometimes, even most times, they are far stranger than you’d imagine, and most likely more perverse than you’d care to consider.”

““Spider, please, sit. I will explain everything.”“You’ll explain everything. Fine. Great!” Spider said, but inside, in his mind, he was thinking, Bag and cat have now parted company.”

“The great majority of them came back a week later, complaining that it was all Spider’s fault. Yes, he thought, it was his fault. It was his fault for trying to help idiots.”

“And in that moment, Spider noticed a strange thing. He found to his surprise that he did not dislike Mr. Patel. Which, obviously, was a long way from liking the man, but who knew? Maybe that would come in time.”

“He’d lived with a mad sculptress for long enough that he knew (believed, really) that much of what passed for art these days was bullshit, all naked emperors and nobody commenting on it. In any case, as soon as he registered, “ah, sculpture”, he lost interest and looked away.”

“It was a hard thing to contemplate, even harder to accept, the inevitable tide of technological progress, which even as it created careers for some, also destroyed careers for others.”

“You up for it, or am I going in again? Please note, by the way, there is only one correct answer to this question.”

““So what is this Final Secret? Any Ideas?” Spider asked, trying to sound reasonable.“We don’t know. We just don’t know. All we know is what the Vores have communicated to us so far.”“Right,” Spider said, nodding, hating every moment of this nonsense. “And when you say ‘we’ and ‘us’, what you really mean is ‘you’, yes?”“They communicate through a living channel, yes, and that is, of course, me.””

“The coffee, when he tried it, was strong almost to the point of being unbearable, but not quite. In short, it was divine.”

“It was hard to just sit and relax. Everyone he saw somehow looked suspicious, especially all those people who appeared perfectly innocuous: nobody who looked that innocuous could be anything but guilty, Spider thought.”

“He felt a trickle of cold fear in the depths of his belly, a dread that he was going to get his wish.”

“The future was not what it used to be.”

“He swore, pissed off, trying to keep the past in the past instead of stinking up the present.”

“Maybe he was crazy, he thought. It would explain everything. Insanity was good that way.”