The natives are restful

New acronyms in my neck of the words. BBVA. HSBC. RBC. Stepping on the heels of the previous new kids displaying stock photos. BB&T. CB&S. The definition of community spreads like a broken egg. With nothing to gain or lose, with profits pooling in the corner pocket where offshore accounts are kept, what do I see and hear?

My fingers tingle. My pulse slows down. I am centered and unfocused. Drawn and repelled.

I did not join so that makes me disjointed. I have seen the enemy of seriousness and it is Cartoon.

My life is my own, despite jokes to the contrary.

Historical fact: I chose not to participate. Can I go ahead and cash my check for good behaviour now? Why must I wait? Time buys me nothing. I have no place to go, no one to push around any longer, no reason to barter people into a corner.

I unlocked the door I was told to leave alone only because I was testing a key a stranger handed me for a cup of coffee.

How was I to know that the Perpetual Motion Machine occupied the room? How was I know that the numbers and the graphs and the trends and the surveys and the listening posts and the answers would follow me the rest of my life? That's what they've led themselves to believe.

Thieves will always be thieves. Justice will always be a figure on top of a building, frozen and useless. I am neither borrower nor lender, trader nor miser. Neutral.

The key no longer fits in the lock. The door no longer fits in the wall. The PMM has sprouted feet and has left the building.

No one told me I was the Facilitator. No one said I would be the one who started the Great Purge. The comic books promised someone else was the victim, not me.

Am I the one to suffer for the Great Realization, too? Why did you make me listen to Joseph Campbell, you old fool?

The One outside of time told me the events were credited to '24. But the One also said that time is meaningless, that '24 was just a reference point to one line of history that The Code revealed in retrospective.

I apologize to every one of you. I was just curious. I was bored. I had a piece of notched metal with no markings on it and my training told me it would release a latch. My conditioning told me to put the piece of metal into rectangular holes. That's all I did! I am innocent of what they'll charge me with. It was not my intention to accelerate history.

I am taking a holiday, leaving the place over there alone. Perhaps the PMM will return like a homing pigeon or a lost dog. I will walk away very quietly and leave a bowl of electrical cords by the garage, in case the PMM gets hungry. I won't be returning to find out. I'm moving on. I've performed the task they set before me, earlier than I expected but completed nonetheless and for now none the worse for my troubles.

For now. Speaking of time, if I accelerated the plan, does that mean other portions of the plan won't happen? Can someone else be the scapegoat this time? The One won't say. Destiny's a twisted business, debts having to be paid. The One knows more than the rest of us, of course, being a corpus without a body.