Netphoria Message Board - Want why know when die net4ia how you will died and what?

Names we didn't know, handles and pseudonyms and what passed in the twenty first century as a nom de plume. The system fan screamed its pallid scream, a feeble imitation of the shuddering storm of nonsense it was slaved to render.

Everything hissed and popped like it had been left sitting a deep fryer by some kitchen hand who had dropped their apron and walked off into the night. They didn't go home, or to a bar, or to a bridge of such an adequate height that potential energy gathered when jumping from it might be sufficient, upon dispersal, to turn off their pilot light. They just crossed the parking lot and trudged off into the corn field in company of a sallow moon, nothing crackling but a mute prayer for the corn field to extend forever so that they could avoid whatever variation lay beyond it.

All the while, we were sitting in the boiling oil; thermal energy thrumming, heaving in violent plumes invisible above the surface, the heating element unflinching in the face of its chaos, unmoved by the clumsy, abject violence it had unwittingly become party to.

Eventually, perhaps, someone would come and find it all and rectify it. Perhaps nobody would come, but eventually up the invisible chain somwhere, some abstract element, perhaps a minute filament forged a world away, by some enumerated individuals each one ignorant of its eventual specific purpose and by extension inculpable in its inevitable failure, would give, and the power supply would stop, and the heating element would fade from its ephemeral perfect white back to a lowly mortal silver, and the violence would dim and then slow and then stop, and we would rest.

But that filament was made perfect, copied from a model meticulously engineered to run a thousand lifetimes before entropy finally popped it, first time every time. The kitchen hand was not coming back. No customers would discover and right this obscenity.

There was nothing to do but wait, and endure, and try to become one, if not in form then at least in spirit, with the writhing oil.