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cover up the whole heartless world. I have to hide it behind
the endless Halloween, that way all we will ever see is
masks, masks all the way down to the mindless turning cogs.
As I write this, I can’t help but be wary of those family
members of yours, lying only a few feet beneath me in
the churning waters of this stream. They must be awfully
upset about your newest incarnation, which would appear
to have—by necessity, I’m sure—excluded them from your
company. And that axe, oh my! Its anger seems to have
leaked out into the world, roiling the water white and boiling
hot. I wish I had a family like yours, all loyal and lusting
to disturb the world on my behalf. That’s not to say I don’t
have friends who look out for me, because I’ve a few here
and there. You’ll meet them when the time comes, I’m sure.
I hope you don’t mind how personal things have become
here, but I’ve been a very careful student of your dreams.
They have a certain sound to them—if you listen carefully,
you can hear the din of terrible secrets, tolling somber and
gray. What strange and splendid things have been done to
you . . .
Hollow Day is right around the corner, Family Man. Soon
the machines will celebrate their ascendency by wearing our
skins, sleeping in our beds, drinking our coffee, and eating
our lunches. They will become us and no one will be the
wiser. Wind-ups all over the world turning for no reason but
to turn. That’s why I had to come—to take the machine out
of you. I couldn’t let the engineer wipe out the game before
I’d figured out how to properly win it, if winning is even
the right thing to do. Although, I do find it strange that the
machines would fight amongst themselves in such a way.
Perhaps it’s a metagame, where the engineers themselves
seek each other’s demise, to wrest the master machine
from one kind of programming in order to impose another.
Anyway, I’m fairly certain the machine within you is now
dying, as I had quite the conversation with it. No doubt,
once it’s completely dead and you return to some semblance
288 | Mark Anzalone