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- Friday 21st April 1995
- (C) JIPsoft
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- It all started as a harmless joke
-
-
- Darryl was my friend. I had known him since birth. He was exactly the same age
- as me, so naturally I was informed of his birth, and he of mine.
- I had always thought there was something very peculiar about Darryl. Either
- he was mad or I was. It was only later that I came to the conclusion that we
- both were. That served, of course, not only to unite us, but also to isolate us
- from anybody else.
-
- One day, when we were pondering about the very essence of truth, things and
- stuff like that, I said a fatal thing to him. What I said was (quite verbatim)
- "But I don't even know if you exist!"
- Darryl's reply was puzzling. He said "I don't!" and vanished. I was unable to
- see, hear, touch, taste or smell him, but somehow I was aware of his constant
- presence. His thoughts entered my head. At first I thought mine must have
- entered his head too, but then I thought it was false, since I knew there was
- no head for them to enter.
- Darryl existed only in my head. I could not sense him as an external being,
- and nobody else even knew there was any Darryl.
-
- I grew worried. Just as vacuum craves air, a sudden discontinuation of
- existence attracts existence - matter - to itself. I could already feel my
- matter slowly turning into Darryl. He would be all right, physically existent
- and all that, but what about me?
- I thought about Darryl. In my thoughts I said: "Darryl! Hear me! Please exist
- again, I cannot possibly survive turning into you!" And he answered. He said -
- thought - "Why did you do this to me?" I was in a panic. I replied that what I
- said about his existence back then had only been a joke, whose point he
- apparently had failed to get.
-
- "All right", he said, "I will cure your problems." He thought about a lump of
- granite exactly of his mass, which took the form of a square circle. It
- appeared. It was the first time I had seen a square circle in my life. It was
- strangely beautiful, yet I dared not look at it for a longer time. I knew
- Darryl had made it - he hadn't created it, he had just forced it into
- existence.
- But the main thing was that it had stopped the drain of existence Darryl's
- disappearance had created. I was no longer turning into Darryl. I was glad.
- But his thoughts were still in my head. He haunted me in a curiously mad kind
- of way. "But hey!" I thought. "This will do - it could be worse!"
-