Put this in your hand. Fit your fingers into it. Feels good? If you divide all value into two increments, this is the first increment. The second occurs when you squeeze it. 

We’ll play the game for you.

The barrel is 200 acres of non-arable land. The trigger is 120 wind-powered engines and 550 anerobic lagoons. The muzzle is the lake you saw on the way down.

Pick a number. 10? You can get into a lot of trouble with 10. Just ask the empires with their granaries, armadas rotting on the ocean floor.

On squeeze the drones gather. There is a lag before they act, but they cannot be recalled at this point. The system of mirrors and lenses and satellites that brings you this image is a dream that has escaped the world. It is now digesting in the perceivers, those who survive each moment. The gluttony of surviving each moment is total and enrapturing until you fail to survive a moment.

She painted a target on her chest. She has no shading, no texture, no sexual characteristics, body language aggressively crunched out by their filtering eyes.

If the drones do not fire in sufficient heat of concert, the image capture of her brain will experience glitches as it slingshots through the atmospheric plume, or it may not arrive at all. You want her to be at the party, so you line up the drones in careful black crop circles. But we will play the game for you, so it is merely your existence that pulls the trigger, you continuing to observe.

She is gone in the smallest scratch of optical noise. There is no sensation. The drones disappear, some of them falling from signal interference, crashing into trees or breaking the surface of the lake.

At the party the lack of sensation continues. The wine does not even taste like water, and 3 of your 5 taste profiles are blunted. You drop a glass experimentally. The sound is like soggy paper.

You can’t wait to be in the field tomorrow, painting that warm color on your chest, the color which no longer has a name but which is recognized by the drones. No one wears that color anymore, not in sweaters or caps or painting their houses, not in safety signs or flags or the hulls of cars, no matter how fast they may be. In the movies you saw growing up, the blood in action scenes was yellow, edited in post-processing. Even getting flustered feels a little unlucky, and pale foundation is worn by many.

We stop and you start, and when you stop, we start.