Trouble comes looking for you if you’re a fool. - Gregory Benford

They had a legend about a Chemical pinned to a piece of dead matter and allowed to die that way—Diminished to extinction! Apparently a commonplace among Chemicals. Yet after this fearsome loss, the identity emerged from its full subtraction—to claim life again. Such a desperate story! Elementary knowledge tells us that such things do not happen, of course.

As a political commentator of the time put it, most real-world people she knew thought of Washington, D.C., as a whorehouse where every four years ordinary folk got to elect a new piano player.

They will do anything for the worker, except become one.