The Karma Machine
Glen Nyborg
(2002)
At five-thirty nine the morning of April fourth, a man in the Nevada desert got shot in the head by a mail order delivery from outer space.
That’s where the story ought to start. But there are a few introductions and rules and theories to go through in order to proceed from that point and make any sense.
First a description, just to set the scene.
The sun made its sharp divide between land and sky at five thirty eight in the a.m. At five thirty nine, the horizon was apparent to all but the blind and the dead thanks to sunlight a tender six minutes old.
There’s the setting, part of it. Now for an introduction.
The first human face in Garden Springs, Nevada to receive its sun’s circa half dozen minute ago luminance made its home beneath a shock of brown hair and atop a six foot caucasian body, six feet tall when standing shoeless and sockless. That body was not standing when the first photons of daybreak slammed into it at high velocity. Nor was it standing when its head was shot a minute later. It was sitting Indian style on a forty foot artificial mountain painted red in honor of Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect.
The body belonged to Eustice Siggle. It was pink and gangly and compelled to climb up the mountain every morning so that its brain could experience nothingness for an hour or two. The brain loved to explore nothingness. Nothingness is what the brain lived for.
“Why?” do you ask?
Well, just because.
There was no real reason to explore nothing. Nothing couldn’t make any money for Eustice Siggle. It couldn’t get him any food to eat. The brain, being a pattern making machine, just liked the infinite it was able to periodically invent for itself.
The brain did its best to convince the rest of the body, the arms, legs, heart, liver etc...that they would get something out of nothingness as well.
The brain made some very good arguments, saying nothingness would eliminate stress and tension, helping out the heart by not forcing it to work as hard, helping out the kidneys by maintaining even circulation. The brain gave every body part a good reason for the dawn exertions.
The pancreas and the left arm’s bicep had the best arguments to use against the brain, arguments pertaining to the earliness and frigidity of the hour. As good as their arguements were, they didn’t stand a jello salad’s chance in hell. The brain was the only one of the whole group that knew how to think. The pancreas plopped out bile and insulin like nobody’s business. The bicep made physically climbing the mountain very easy. It was a great bicep as biceps went. But the brain could think circles around both of them.
Now comes the science fiction part, the rules and theories that have to be pointed out in order for this story to make sense.
I need to direct your attention to outer space, to a point that lies along a line created by the rising sun and Eustice Siggle’s brain. Do you see the line I’m talking about? Do you have it in mind?
Now you have to follow that line a long way. You have to start at the sun, go through the front of Eustice just between the eyes and then back and back and back.
You have to follow that line out of the galaxy. But then you have to go even farther, through other galaxies, lots of them, all in that direct line I’m telling you about.
Finally you’ll get to the planet Choboskyu, that’s the end. You need go no farther than that. This planet orbits a medium sized star in the M-64 galaxy. People on the planet Earth who can see this galaxy have called it “The Black Eye”. This is because of a large dust cloud that partially obscures its bottom side, making a dark crescent through it’s southern spiral arms. It is all too easy to imagine this star cluster as cosmic inspiration for the “I’d rather fight than switch” slogan used by a very famous cigarette company in the 1970’s. It is a shiner, a beaut of the highest magnitude.
The inhabitants of this planet in this galaxy possess the ability to make something out of nothing. It is a process involving very complicated principles of quantum mechanics and conservation of energy. But they don’t think they’re very clever to be able to do this, they just do it like you tie your shoes or make yourself a sandwich.
Here’s what a Chososkyuan would tell you if you asked them how to do it;
You must first take an empty chunk of space. It is almost impossible to find one completely empty. You just have to do the best you can.
Next, you separate the chunk of nothing into a chunk of positive stuff and negative stuff, or rather stuff and anti-stuff. The people of Choboskyu can do this the same way an Earthling balances a bank account. Zero magically turns into two huge equal but opposite amounts, one positive and one negative, resulting again, providing no creative accountant fudges the books, in zero funds when all the paper work goes through.
The Choboskyuans can make positive stuff appear close by, say a couple of feet away, say a hair’s width, thus enabling negative stuff to appear somewhere else in the universe. That’s the neat part about the trick. The negative stuff can appear anywhere, anywhere at all. Or vise versa. Negative here, positive there. It doesn’t matter which goes where. The only thing that really matters when dealing with a positive and a negative is the size of the package you pull from nothing, from the great zero.
Something as small as an electron can produce a positron a whole universe away in an instant. A rock the size of a small golden retriever might take several thousand decades to produce an anti-rock even a few galaxies away. That’s the way the universe is, the bigger you are, the harder it is to get from place to place.
At this point, although seemingly unrelated to any of the preceding paragraphs, it would be a good time to tell you that every single, living, thinking being in the universe has a brain that, to some degree, uses electricity to put two and two together and make four.
It should also be pointed out that a number of physicists on the planet Earth think the opposite of an electron is a positron. There is another number of physicists who believe the only reason positrons exist is because they are simply electrons going backwards in time. The Choboskyuans would tell these physicists that they were getting very warm. They might say the physicists were burning up.
The largest mail order supply company in the known universe is on Choboskyu. This is because one particular Choboskyuan named kLootz had two really good ideas due mostly to the electrical paths in his brain.
The first idea was to start a mail order supply company. What could be better than that? You order something and few days later you get it in the mail. Like a Christmas present chosen from the very top of your wish list.
The second idea this kLootz had was to not actually send anything through the mail at all. There were customers on other planets, other solar systems, other galaxies to be had for sure. But running merchandise at a couple times light speed, a dozen times, even a hundred times, could take a million years to reach their destination. The “something from nothing” techniques would take just as long for anything larger than a molecule. A million year turn-over time was agreed upon by Mail Order House executives to be a bad PR move for the company.
The Choboskyuans instead did all their business through memories, patterns of electrons moving through brains. Memories can be sent from one end of the universe to the other in no time by the aforementioned “something from nothing” process.
Here are the steps to Choboskyu memory shopping by mail as per kLootz.
It starts with you ordering something. You do this by remembering that you already ordered it. But you have to remember the exact opposite of the thing you’re actually ordering. If you wanted a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, for example, you would have to remember that you ordered a reproduction facing slightly to your right instead of the way she normally faces.
This isn’t exactly creating something from nothing because you, as a human, or any other non-Choboskyuan species for that matter, don’t have the ability to do perform that particular trick on a physical plain. But the Choboskyuans appreciate the effort and the custom. kLootz, being the consummate businessman, accepts your quantum fumbling with a smile and takes it as an order for delivery.
A Customer Service Representative receives your memory and recalls an order being placed. It is processed immediately and a product number heads towards one of four billion factory workers that creates, from nothing, a memory of the order, a couple of electrons trained to go along certain paths, to appear in the your head wherever it may be in the galaxy. The resulting anti-memory, positrons trudging the same but opposite path, is sent back in time as a receipt.
The moment your order is processed and shipped, you will remember the Mona Lisa. Not only that, but you’ll remember everything about it, even the brush strokes Leonardo used to pull the mystic smile from thin air. You think that with such detailed knowledge of the masterpiece, you must have actually painted it at one time, that you don’t remember ever throwing it away and that it would probably turn up if you just conducted a thorough search. You think to yourself you don’t need to buy the memory of Mona Lisa when you’ve already created Mona Lisa, a damn good one, too. But you go ahead and paint it anyway because now you’re stuck with the bill and the Choboskyuans have a no-return policy.
Between each thing and each anti-thing, there is a thin line of connection, similar to the line of saliva that forms when you pull away from that special someone, saliva having just been mixed thoroughly because of the tongue jousts occurring since you shifted the car into PARK. Just as the tether of glisteny spit between you two carries both your DNA, this other line, just as glisteny but at an inconceivably basic level, contains all the information of a plus and minus, enabling them to exist in synchronicity with each other across a universe. At present, on the planet Earth, no scientific test for this connective line can be performed. There is no way to prove it exists or doesn’t exist. This is because the line, the thread, runs in and out of too many spatial dimensions to be measured accurately in any one; ours for example, the third. Not that it can’t be felt or experienced in three dimensions, because it can. I’ve told you about one person who felt it. I’m about to tell you some more about him.
One particular line, a connection between two somethings that had been one nothing, shot straight through the head of Eustice Siggle at five thirty nine in the morning, right along that path you your very self followed not a thousand words ago.
This is where the story begins. I would have begun here in the first place but like I told you before, I needed a little description time.
This line hooked up the memory and the anti-memory of a Zerkupran Multi-Dimensional radiation shield. The order had been placed by the Qlagulavon Spaceship Works on the planet Vlantipale in galaxy M31, known to Earth astronomers as the Whirlpool.
The shield was designed to work in all the dimensions a spaceship needs to duck into, mostly the fifth, to maintain profitable shipping schedules across a dozen galaxies. The third dimension’s relativity laws had a way of slowing the streams of commerce. The fourth dimension’s Principle of Particle Velocity to Volume Transfer was just plain hazardous.
If one travels light speed in the third dimension, time slows down for the ship’s crew. Everybody who’s not on the ship gets old and dies like THAT. If you travel at light speed in the fourth dimension, you and your fellow travellers get very big until your sub-atomic particles are so far apart you can no longer stay together. You just drift away from yourself.
Eustice Siggle recollected how to build the multi-dimensional radiation shield. He was the only person on the planet Earth to do so. He was the only one in a direct line between Choboskyu’s anti-memory half of the nothing chunk and Vlantipale’s memory portion.
Eustice Siggle climbed down from his Wright red mountain a half hour after sunrise, just as he always did. The mountain doubled as the highest point in Garden Springs and the 13th hole of a miniature golf course. He had very strange words floating around in his skull. The ideas formed by some of the words were stranger still. By eleven a.m. he’d made the shield out of a pie plate, a couple of quartz crystals, some aluminum foil, duct tape and a four D batteries.
The next day was the first of Eustice Siggle’s two days off. He worked at the Garden Springs Casino counting money in a room the size of a closet with twelve video cameras trained on him. If he wanted to scratch his bottom or adjust his genitalia or pick his nose like most of us do at one time or another, he had to tell the security guards to unlock the door and let him out. Eustice couldn’t think of anyone willing to be videotaped while they do those things. Neither can I.
Eustice climbed the red mountain with his new radiation shield in a backpack. He was going to test it out. If memory served, the device’s shielding attributes would keep him from getting sunburned. He stayed on the mountain all day, sitting Indian style, as miniature golfers putted away.
The miniature golf course in Garden Springs was a monument to the great architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. The owner of the course, the artist, Norman Aguayo, designed each hole around one of Wright’s creations. The fifth hole was a tribute to Falling Water, the amazing cantilevered construction in Pennsylvania. Hole five was completely cantilevered, ten and fifteen feet above the ground. You had to putt through a waterfall.
The 15th hole was in the style of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. You started at the top of a spiral and worked your way down. One putt was usually all it took to make the hole’s green.
The 13th hole, the one on which Eustice said “Good morning, sunshine,” most days, had for its theme, Taliesin West, the architectural institute outside of Phoenix, Arizona. There was a little wedge shaped main building that you had to get the ball up and onto a green that looked like a squarish snail shell, the symbol Wright chose to represent the institute. Eustice’s meditation platform was built to resemble one small expanse of the McDowell Mountains which the real Taliesin West sits at the base of. Wright had owned a little roadster when he was at Taliesin West and painted it bright red, the same red Norman Aguayo painted Eustice’s forty foot chaise de dawn.
Eustice stayed on the mountain top almost until sunset, his mind having attained Enlightenment, then leaving it for awhile to think about girls, then cars, then God and the universe, then Garden Springs, then the characteristics of five dimensional radiation, and then back around to Enlightenment again. Truth be told, it had taken him a full two hours to get the word “zerkupran” out of his head. He finally dismounted after eleven hours and went home for the evening news.
While walking through the casino parking lot, the most direct route to his digs, he found two one hundred dollar bills, no doubt the result of a lucky winner with a hole in their money clip. He looked around the lot, trying to spot a possible frantic candidate for the two bills’ return. There was no one. He picked up the bills and walked home with an angelic countenance on his face. Now he had not only attained Enlightenment, he had attained two hundred bucks.
When he got to his apartment, he sidestepped to the bathroom and took a good look at himself in the mirror. Normally, after a sunbath session like the one he’d just completed, he would be dark red, the color of a strawberry or a pomegranate seed. But he was whitish-pink as they come, no more sunburned than a Swede baby fresh from its mother’s loins.
Several runs of good luck later, Eustice was convinced his backpacked device was a charm, a good luck machine. There was something in the back of his mind, a distant memory, about radiation unique to the fifth dimension trickling down to become the thing that caused distraction, ugliness and generally bad karma in the third. Had he heard that in science class? A tele-psychic infomercial?
By the evening of his second day off, there had been the two hundred dollars, a free meal at the Burger Mart, a tank of gas he ended up paying fifteen cents a gallon for, and two months of electricity for free.
He decided to see to what limits a shield against bad luck could be pushed.
Eustice jumped off his mountain one morning, back pack firmly attached to his dorsal aspect, and flew forty feet downward, breaking his left tibia and fibula, a fine example of the inherent design flaws in homo sapien-shaped flying machines. These two bones Eustice broke can be used interchangeably between the knee bone and the ankle bone if you happen to be singing the song. He also fractured the neck of his right femur, referred to as the “hip bone” in the verse just before. Sometimes the above mentioned bones are all in the same verse. It just depends on how often you hit the chorus, “I hear de word of de Lawd”. Some folks sing the whole inventory, all the way from the head to the toe and back up again without a break. I can’t do that. “I hear de word of de Lawd” is my favorite part. I sing it after every one or two bones.
Eustice lay on the sloped roof of the little Taliesin’s main building, sliding down a leisurely inch at a time until his mouth rested on the green outdoor carpeting of hole thirteen. He left just a bit of a blood trail, the result of a nasty tongue bite. His nose dug down into the area of play, giving him a whiff of the three or four thousand shoes that had traversed his present location on their way from hole 12, the Tokyo Imperial Hotel, to hole 14, the S. C. Johnson building.
“That didn’t work very well,” he thought to himself. His next thought had to do with the rest of his life spent paying hospital bills, owning up for his ten seconds worth of self-inflicted mangling. He was oddly cheery about the whole thing. He didn’t feel as if he should have been, but he was.
When he tried to retrieve his cell phone from the backpack, he noticed he was unable to move his left arm. When he tried to sit up or roll over, a hundred golfers and football players, anyone with spikes on the soles of their shoes, maybe a dominatrix or two, stomped on Eustice’s leg and pelvis and shoulder. They jumped and then playfully bounced, nailing themselves to the broken bones. When the spikes had been firmly embedded, they grew tired of the bunny hop and started to do the twist.
He bit the bullet, getting a mouthful of the 13th green’s Evertread fiber in the process. He positioned himself just corkscrewed enough to reach his connection to the outside world.
He called his friend, Chad, the ambulance driver, announcing that his was about to make his 911 cry for help. Chad appreciated the heads up because he hated not having time to shower before work. Eustice heard the water running just as Chad clicked good-bye.
He dialed 911 and put his face back down on the fake mountain green, peering into Taliesin West’s main building. It was empty, of course. No drafting tables, no computer graphic displays, no signs on the windows telling tourists not to disturb the architects and students. There was no wildly silver haired man meandering about, head so full of genius that it threatened to pop his wide brimmed pork pie a foot or two in the air.
But there was no nest of rats or snakes either. Thank God for that.
Rather than throw another pain party for his leg, Eustice decided to just stay put, hang onto the phone, and become another architectural accoutrement of the course. But he knew to truly fit in, he would have to adapt some sort of long, low profile, lose his corners, adapt a function over form philosophy.
“If I take care of the luxuries, the essentials will take care of themselves,” he said. This was the saying Wright used to justify his extravagance when he was a t-square’s height away from being penniless. Eustice said this out loud, knowing no one would hear, getting another mouthful of Evertread in the process.
Chad immobilized his friend about thirty minutes later and, with the help of Sheldon, the other Emergency Medical Technician/ Ambulance Driver, got him to the Garden Springs Urgent Care.
X-rays were taken, none of which turned out until the tech decided to put Eustice’s backpack outside the room. The leg was splinted and the shoulder coaxed back into its socket. As for the pelvis and a cast for the leg, Eustice was strapped to a plastic board with aluminum rods down the middle of it and sent off to Vegas. There an orthopedic surgeon could wash his hands for about fifteen minutes, don some plastic gloves and a paper mask, then have a crack at the damage.
Once in Las Vegas, Eustice refused to let go of his cell phone with the one hand or his back pack with the other. He didn’t know why he was going to so much trouble to do this, normally he would have given them both up in a hot pair of seconds. But he’d fixated on the two objects for the time being, they were parts A and B of a security blanket, his promise of deliverance.
He managed to keep both until, again, the x-rays and this time a CAT scan of his pelvis, refused to produce any sort of image what so ever. The films turned out as clear as a showroom window, not a trace of exposure, not a hint.
It should come as a surprise to no one that a Zerkupran multi-dimensional radiation shield would deflect the gamma rays hospitals use to see broken bones. Eustice Siggle knew this, he remembered it right away. He just didn’t want to let go of the back pack.
One hour after the x-rays were taken, Eustice was wheeled to pre-op where nurses and doctors prepared him for surgery. He had his backpack and his cell phone on the gurney with him. It is against the rules to have a cell phone turned on in a hospital unless you’ve gotten approval to do so. Eustice asked the nurse in his most pathetic voice if he could hang onto the items until the anesthesiologist put him to sleep. The nurse agreed to this after a brief eye roll and a shoo-now-get with the hands, as if his request carried a stink she was trying to fan away.
The surgeon came into to the pre-op area and was about to introduce himself. That’s when Eustice got a phone call from the President of the United States.
You and everybody you know with phone service has a close relationship with possibly twenty two people. Those are the twenty two people who’s phone numbers are just one off from yours.
Eustice Siggle had this relationship with fifteen people because seven of the numbers one-off from his were not in service.
One of the numbers missing Eustice Siggle’s by a digit belonged to another Siggle. This Siggle was a pilot in the U.S. Air Force who had just returned home to his wife and children.
Lieutenant Roscoe Siggle, Ross for short, was shot down by a North Korean missile right where the Yellow Sea meets Korea Bay. He’d been rescued by two North Korean soldiers anxious for a taste of U.S. capitalism and superfluous packaging. Everything about the downing had been very secret. The missile, the jet, the rescue, the defections, the negotiations with the North Koreans, were all kept highly classified and so tight lipped it could produce an embouchure capable of hitting triple high C on a flugelhorn. It was the second best kept secret in the U.S. Government after the true purpose of bar codes.
The only part of the entire ordeal that ventured out of an “eyes only” area was a scheduled phone call from the U.S. President to the Lieutenant at his home one digit off of Eustice Siggle’s. The number which caused the wrong phone to ring was in the area code’s solar plexus, its bread basket.
Eustice answered his phone.
“Siggle?” It was a gruff voice.
“Yes.”
“This is General Murdock.” He sounded almost like George C. Scott but more breathy, like his nose was doing as much of the talking as his mouth. “You ready? He’ll be on the line in a minute. You nervous?”
“Nervous?” Maybe it was Chad playing a practical joke. But being a “General Murdock” sounded a little too creative for Chad. Siggle was confused.
Wouldn’t you be?
“Good boy. Now remember, no details. Just “Thank you, sir” and that’s it. Got it? Good.”
There was a click and then another voice. This time it was a woman’s.
“Major Siggle?”
“Major?”
“I’m sorry. Lieutenant Siggle. Please hold for the President.”
“What?...”
“Lieutenant Siggle? This is Harris Beckwith.”
“Hello?” Then he remembered. “Thank you, Sir.”
“Well, that was quite an ordeal you went through. I’m just glad to see everything worked out. We’re proud of you.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Yessir, my boy. Mighty proud indeed. Well, it was nice talking to you. I’m going to go run the country for a while. America needs more heros like you, Lieutenant. You’re what make this country great.”
“Thank you, sir.”
And that would have been that if it weren’t for the orthopedic surgeon. The surgeon was not one to be kept waiting, especially if it involved putting his entire life saving personage on hold so his patient could take a phone call. He grabbed the phone away from Eustice.
“I’m sorry. No calls. We’re taking him to surgery.”
Eustice, now three feet from the phone, could hear the President’s shout. “SURGERY?!” The doctor pulled the phone away to avoid damage to all the tiny bones between where he normally stuck the Q-Tip and the place he did all his thinking.
The surgeon put the phone back to his ear and was quiet for a moment. “He broke his leg and pelvis.....yes, he’ll be fine.....yessir, we’ll take good care of...yessir, nobody will know about....thank you... yes...thank....” More silence on the part of the surgeon, ten seconds worth. He then handed the phone back to Eustice and walked to the OR, hitting the swinging doors so hard they hit him back.
“Yessir,” said Eustice.
“Well, you take care of yourself. Isn’t that the damnedest thing? You manage to go through all that without a scratch and first thing you do when you get home is break some bones.”
“Yessir.”
Well, you be sure to take care.”
“Yessir.” Eustice heard a click and he hit the phone’s off button. He handed it to the nurse who’s attention was still on the double doors. She turned to Eustice, the smirk borne of the doctor’s exit still raging across her face like fire across dry prairie. She put the phone in his backpack and locked them safely away.
As the nurse and tech wheeled a sedated Eustice Siggle into the OR, there was an earthquake in San Francisco measuring 5.9 on the Richter scale. Its epicenter was off the coast about five miles due west of the Golden Gate Bridge. There was damage to a hotel (an extremely non-aerodynamic awning, designed by the artist, Norman Aguayo, had collapsed injuring several. No deaths.)and a few office buildings, one of which electronically housed the Las Vegas hospital’s insurance transactions and records.
The time of the quake was called at two minutes after twelve noon.
Two mainframe computers fell through the twenty seventh floor of the Northern Vigor Insurance Building in the Embarcadero, not stopping until they’d reached the twenty third floor. What was left of the data stored within them couldn’t have produced a decent “one” to accompany a badly shaken “zero”. A service technician fell with them but was uninjured except for a few minor cuts. Those, by the way, are very good examples of poor aerodynamics. Boxy computers and people tend to fly like pigs.
While we’re on the subject of aerodynamics, here is one example each of how useless it is to try flying a tea cup and a wrench.
Across town from the flying mainframes, a ninety three year old lady had an incapacitating stroke when she saw her favorite tea cup, a gift from Margaret Truman, wife of the thirty third President of the United States, jiggle off her quaking end table and into thirty one pieces. The loss of blood to the important parts of her brain effectively cut off the thinking part from the rest of her body. She fell onto the floor beside her fractionated cup, unable to move, counting the broken pieces over and over and over. She couldn’t see four of the pieces from where she was so she kept silently counting, “...twenty five, twenty six, twenty seven, one, two, three.....”.
She was found two days after that when her landlord came around for the rent. She was still counting the pieces of cup as if it were a mantra. And it was a mantra, truth be told. The still functioning albeit momentarily isolated part of her brain, a substantial part (she was up and around within two months) was enjoying the infinite it had created for itself and enjoying it immensely.
This is what the brain of the old lady was thinking ten minutes before she was discovered; “The body doesn’t seem to be complaining at all. That’s unusual. Usually they would be in quite a snit after two days in the same position, without food, without water,” thought the brain. “Oh, well. I’m sure they’re fine. I’d have heard something by now. Back to infinite. One, two, three, four, five...”
Two miles away from the ninety three year old, a man hit his head on a kitchen shelf while trying to unclog his sink. While falling, he knocked over an open bottle of Drano, creating a puddle where the left side of his cranium finally came to a rest. He lay there, knocked silly from the shelf, the logical side of his noggin melting away in the miracle declogger. The acidic content of the puddle worked its way through two plastic jugs very close by, eating into membranes which had kept the ammonia and the bleach from joining Drano’s party.
Chloroamines began to fly into the air like gnats at sunset. They were inhaled by the sleeping desolvee, unintentionally hitting the shut down switches in his lungs and brain. It was just about then that the sudden shift of tectonic plates began to animate his house. The gentle rocking motion caused him to roll onto his back, resting both cowlick and a platoon of six puka shells in the increasingly rosy muck. The quake caused his property no damage what-so-ever except for a wrench that fell off the man’s counter top, hitting his gooey, left-ish forehead, knocking him conscious with a thunk. He winced first at the pain of the wrench hitting him, then at the acid eating away at his skull, then at the smell assaulting his olfactory aesthetics as well as his bronchial tubes and tube-ettes. No, that’s not quite right. The sound concluding the wrench’s flight was more a squish than a thunk.
Had the earthquake occurred thirty minutes later, the man surely would have been making his way towards the light at the end of the tunnel instead of outside for some fresh air.
Given their aerodynamics, there’s no reason to think either tea cup or wrench would have gone in any direction but down.
Eustice took a few weeks to recover, receiving visitors from the casino and the miniature golf course. Chad stopped in to see him when he made one of his Vegas runs.
According to Chad, talking to the President of the United States had shaken the orthopedic surgeon like a James Bond martini. The good Doctor had the staff keep a special eye on Eustice should there be any complications worth relaying to our Commander-in-Chief. He’d been in several times to check on his patient personally. Each time they met, Eustice nearly slipped out of the handshake due to sweat the Doctor’s palm gushed and profused.
Eustice Siggle was released, having signed only one form and told that due to the earthquake, there had been a disruption in the computer records. The bill would have to be settled some time in the future. He waited for it a long time, dreading the number of figures at the bottom of its last page, the lesson’s sum total, the cost of testing his good luck generator’s effectiveness and his person’s aerodynamic design.
The bill never came. He waited two weeks, three weeks, a month, six months. He’s still waiting for it.
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Last modified: June 8, 2002