Chance went inside and checked his social media. The phone created its own light, its own color, its own time. It did not follow the law of gravity that forever bent all living things downward. Everything on his phone was tangled and mixed and yet smoothed out; night and day, big and small, tough and brittle, soft and rough, hot and cold, near and far.

His followers would never know how real he was, since he thinking could not be downloaded. And to him, the followers existed only as projections of his own thoughts, as images. He would never know how real they were, since he had never met them and did not know what they thought.*

*Adapted from pages 5 & 65 of Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There.