Nothing he had said had made any sense to me. You're just free-floating here for a couple of nanoseconds, while we get London processing again." We've got a mirror going of course, and we'll have it all up and running again in no time flat. "Two hundred thousand people, hooked up in parallel, blown to dead meat. "Enemy missile took out a central processing unit," he said. I'm unlikely to see my 40th birthday: people like me die young. I was 19 years old and I was close to seven feet tall. The flickering continued for a few moments, and then resolved itself into a smartly-dressed man in thick horn-rimmed spectacles. The accent was American, although the intonation was odd. In reality, hell, it had happened, and I stared up into the darkness, and then, when nothing happened, I began to walk, splashing through the liquid world, calling out, seeing if anyone was there. In fiction, I think I would have refused to believe it was happening, wonder if I'd been drugged or if I was dreaming. I was standing in the puddle of the world, a weird, brightly coloured thing that oozed and brimmed and didn't cover the tops of my brown leather shoes (I have feet like shoeboxes. I could see the houses and the sky and the clouds and the road behind them, and then that dripped and flowed away, and behind that was blackness. It was like the walls and the ceiling and the rolls of carpet and the News of the World Topless Calendar were all made of wax, and they started to ooze and run, to flow together and to drip. I'd add, subtract, multiply and divide, and was grateful I had no need to cos, sine or find tangents or graph functions or whatever else the gizmo did, because, having been turned down by the RAF, I was working as a bookkeeper for a small discount carpet warehouse in Edgware, in North London, near the top of the Northern Line, and I was sitting at the table at the back of the warehouse that served me as a desk when the world began to melt and drip away. It was 1977, and the nearest I had come to computers was I'd recently bought a big, expensive calculator, and then I'd lost the manual that came with it, so I didn't know what it did any more. They say, here's the truth, and I say, is that all there is? And they say, kind of. Different world, different shoddy, but that's how it feels. And even now that I know the truth, as you will, my love, if you're reading this, the world still seems cheap and shoddy. But I think that's just how the world has always been. Neil Gaiman_I suppose that I could claim that I had always suspected that the world was a cheap and shoddy sham, a bad cover for something deeper and weirder and infinitely more strange, and that, in some way, I already knew the truth.
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