Gather enough data about a person and you can manipulate them, guide their choices, get them doing what you want, and they might not even know.

I was woken by a shell-burst in the trench of sleep. Heart skipping, with eyes fighting light, my thoughts sprang up like a field of starlings startled by a farmer's gunshot, a thousand separate, autonomous specks that swirled into a single united black shape.

No one forgot how to play their instrument halfway through. No one ran amok in the audience. Nothing caught fire. Music played and I was so bored that my hair was bored.

The age that had had the confidence and power to smash these lines through its own capital had apparently balked at tweaking God into compliance. Like the Islamic carpets that contain a deliberate flaw, the avenue was disrupted by the Divine.

People are the source of all chaos in life.

Nothing snubs quite like a cat. What evolutionary purpose did it serve, this inherent disdain, this artful blanking?

It was a state of aloneness. It was the kind of place that started shooting political prisoners because it suspected that they would enjoy solitary confinement and internal exile too much.