Tuesday, June 23, 2009

-Mancy

None for me, thanks. Cartomancy, aeromancy, ornithomancy-apparently. Goddamn Queen of Diamonds appears on my floor one day, the Ace of Spades the next. Lemmy and Angela Lansbury, pentacles and swords (pronounce the "w"). Mind control and death. Cedar waxwings in the holly bush, bald eagles pounding their way out of the air above my neighborhood. Does the neighborhood persist upwards? Where's the boundary? The tropopause? The orbit of the moon? That'd make sense-crystal spheres make for clear lines of terminus.

I have no truck with oneiromancy, as I rarely dream. This is true.

I have a bit about children, raised in creche, deposited at...oh I don't know, six? Deposited in tunnels beneath major cities and raised remotely in a series of calculated social/physical/logical labyrinths. Terminals where math problems solved or well-written essays garner the child food, or weapons. Or love.

Do this for ten years, then draft the ones that survive (the lethality of the process could be adjusted for demographic purposes). Everyone does their time in national service. The talented and gifted could find themselves as paramedics, police, soldiers, teachers. The best and the brightest. Everyone else does customer service. Waiting tables, jockying a register, working the counter at a department store. Two years of this, until you get out and take up the post-morlock education that will lead to your permanent career. But everyone has to do customer service, so that they'll be a little more civilized once they've become middle class. And everyone was raised in deadly tunnels.

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