Corvallis Kawasaki

all he knew was what he saw. He tried to sit up. Nothing happened. He tried to raise his arms.

the spatial lattice on which virtually all of his dreams were constructed. It was the graph paper on which his mind seemed to need to plot things.

He woke up his phone. Its home screen was chicken-poxed with little red dots with accusatory numbers in them, the consequences of having turned a deaf ear to the Din for twelve whole hours.

She was tempted to flip them down and see if they could face-rec this Larry and if so find out who his editor was—or more likely what edit stream he subscribed to and what particular flavor of post-reality it was pumping into his mind.

He went into the building musing on the weird role that his society had picked out for him as a guy who had built, or caused to be built, an imaginary world.

The living stayed home, haunting the world of the dead like ghosts.

In the long meantime Mr. Shepherd was willing to shoulder the burden of being misunderstood.

the brain–body system rebooted itself, like a fucked-up computer that just needs to be unplugged from the wall for ten seconds and restarted in order to come back to life in clean working order.