A library.
“Do you play?” Henry asked.
“No,” lied the young woman.
“Nice.”
The answer pleased Henry immensely. Inexperience with Saana was the top-ranked trait he’d been seeking in an ordinary girlfriend, who, after his exposure, could retain a normal conception of him. Someone who didn’t play at all was exceedingly rare amongst youths their age, but hold-outs existed, wise individuals who avoided entanglement in the web of virtual time-theft.
This was perfect.
“Still,” he said, “you should consider buying a unit. Not for the game itself, but for its most valuable feature: time dilation. Each hour stretched into four - those are three extra hours in which you can be researching, brainstorming, plotting, drafting, refining. Pushed to the very limit, you can pack an extra day and a half into every day, more than doubling your maximum writing time, your Books-per-Month. Don’t worry. None of that gift has to be paid for by LARPing as a hero; Saana has a unique Class dedicated to scholarship with magical functions like translating your thoughts directly into prose. By careful avoidance of using those functions for their intended in-game purposes and sticking to writing real-life literature, the efficiency of this methodology surpasses any conventional alternative. An author would be insane to neglect this opportunity.”
The young woman chose not to respond, recognising his monologuing as the blatant preamble of a trap.
“There are a handful of limitations,” Henry continued the one-sided conversation. “The general internet’s inaccessible from in-game for research into modern subjects or events. Also, most of the available reading material is schlocky lore, crafting or kung-fu manuals, with the rare exception of imported real-life books. The last issue, though, I’ve solved.”
He slid the book he’d taken back onto the shelf above. As he did so, from his e-assistant, the angle and size calculated flawlessly, an image was projected across the aisle onto the page of the book the beauty had been pretending to read.
It was a group photo of three hundred or so people jammed before a bookshelf. A third of Henry was visible to one side of the photo, Henry having positioned himself discreetly on the edge.
The young woman lowered her book, but the photo continued to shine on the spines of the row on the shelf ahead.
“That’s me,” Henry explained, “far left, and that’s my in-game bookstore, stocked with tens of thousands of real-life titles and a back catalogue of hundreds of thousands more. It’s also where I host a small writing circle, Stratford-on-Saana.”
The young woman switched to pretending not to hear.
“We’re Saana’s premier writing group. Young-Jae, the Korean kid you met briefly, penned Two Steps Beyond The Jungle, a best-seller soon-turned blockbuster. Most of the other kids write similar lightweight stuff for public consumption, but a few of us from the old guard keep our devotion to the heavy-hitters. No matter the persuasion, there’s room for it. You're into literature, right? You should consider sending in an application. Join the team.”
The young woman struggled to maintain her deafness. What a sleezebag...
“The vetting process should be a breeze with me on your side.” Henry covertly surveyed their surroundings for eavesdroppers, noticing a cleaning robot wheeling down the aisle towards them; he shut off his e-assistant’s projection, and the robot reversed away. “I’m the group’s founder.”
The young woman snapped around. “No, you’re not.”
Henry, detecting the turn in the rustling of fabric, smiled with a smug grin. “Officially, I’m not. Officially, it’s Milo. However, that’s because I asked him to deal with the tedium of group management, fame, etc. In reality, the circle has always been my brainchild. It’s not coincidental that we’re based out of my bookstore.”
“Is that...true?” The young woman frowned, her head tipping to one side as this revelation unbalanced several memories.
Henry savoured the first taste in the beauty’s voice of genuine interest. “Mhm.”
As with his other climbs, he’d kept his full involvement in the writing circle scheme anonymous.
For the conquest of literature, his main plan had been to exploit the power of the collective. It wasn’t simply a banal anime truism that people working together could surpass the sum of their individual parts.
His guild had been a prime demonstration of the group-bonus effect. The talents, including himself, who’d been gathered by Alex—a genius in organisational management, raised in this art since childhood by a CEO father in China's cut-throat economy—had been able to achieve impossible feats. Through the balancing of each other’s weaknesses, through the rapid exchange and refinement of ideas, through the fusion of the struggle with the socio-emotional identity and the subsequent increase in motivation, they’d spurred each other to hone their individual crafts and, together, attained unreached heights. That's how they, a bunch of kids, had conquered a planet. Henry had only been one piece.
When later taking on literature, Henry, inspired by the example of his guild—realising the presence of the group-bonus in art history, most remembered artists being the cream of a broader movement—had sought to recreate the effect. Thus, he’d founded his writing circle, Stratford-on-Saana. It was named in homage to Stratford-on-Odeon, a 1920s Parisian circle of British and American modernists like Joyce, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound. In place of these historical titans, he’d brought together a collective of contemporary prodigies.
Obviously, he possessed neither the aptitude for administration nor the interest in squandering his energy doing so. Most of the scouting and management of the circle had been handled by a partner – a high social IQ Alex-type without the obnoxiousness. Such characters, despite their insufferable tendencies, were vital to a venture. And as with guild, the personnel issues being handled by another allowed Henry to focus instead on the one job he did best, killin—writing.
This backstory of his, he would never have divulged to a stranger in the past. He’d even tried to keep it secret from his guildmates, the writing circle in his quaint little bookstore being a private, sequestered space where he could unwind between campaigns. At this point, however, Henry gained nothing by withholding his history further; much as the earth must one day be swallowed by the expanding sun, this trifling piece of himself would be rendered meaningless soon by the revelation of larger matters.
At another level, he had a strange sense of security chatting with this patrician lass. Such beautiful lips would never profane themselves with idle gossip.
Henry, turning to finally face the beauty, proceeded to happily elaborate about his literature scheme. He outlined his conception of art as an emergent group phenomenon, listed organic historical examples from literary movements, and riffed on the logistical challenges of artificially recreating that magic. The beauty ended up being so impressed by his scheme that, for the very first time today, she even encouraged him to share more.
Nice!
“…And it was all progressing splendidly until some idiot made the dire mistake of inviting into our clan a hostile pup, Silver Wolf, whose corrupting influence led my genius affiliates astray from the shining light of Post-Maximalism.”
The young woman couldn’t let that last remark slip. “Silver Wolf…isn't she the highest-selling author this year? She must have some talent.”
Henry snorted in amusement. “Yeah, a talent at appealing to the lowest common denominator. Hahahaha.”
The young woman pursed her lips hatefully.
Henry misread her expression as the innate prejudice of the patrician against the pleb. “Mhm. Modern lit’s in an abysmal state. To be honest, though, I can’t claim to have always been entirely on the side of good. There’s a small secret in regards to Silver, although this one…” He stopped to reconsider the dangers.
“I won’t tell anyone," assured the young woman.
“Hmm…well…my reputation…this one’s potentially ruinous…”
The young woman’s eyes behind the sunglasses sparkled. “You can trust me.”
Henry surveyed the surroundings for danger again, then crossed the aisle and whispered into the beauty’s beautiful ear. “The wolf, Homo plebeissimus, the idiot who invited her in was actually me.”
“Huh?”
Henry snickered evilly. “Well, in the end, the group-bonus effect of the circle was too powerful. With the writing constantly growing and improving in the mutual transmission between us literati, our prose became so patrician as to be unreadable, as was exemplified by the poor reception of my magnum opus, Infinite Leaves. That’s when I decided to adjust our doomed course. I devised the brilliant plan of injecting fresh blood: pleb blood. By recruiting writers of more 'accessible' fiction, we could counter-balance our high art with their low, diluting it, if you will, as one does a potent spirit with a cheap mixer for those whose stomachs can’t handle the good stuff raw.”
The young woman groaned. Even during a shocking confession, he found a way to ruin the mood by being pretentious…
Henry nodded with her disgust at his betrayal of literature. “So I sponsored the search: thousands of scouts and thousands of competitions spread around the globe, invading any space where the literary instinct might dwell. In time, my behemoth had whittled down the mass of garbage to the choicest trash, the top plebs, including the top of the top of the plebs, the alpha-pleb - that's my epithet for Silver Wolf.”
The young woman, her anger rising, focused on the fact he was holding a sleeping toddler.
“The ends will justify the means," Henry promised to the beauty and his forebearers. "Anyway, I invited the newbies into the fold, gathered them in one place, situated around them miscellaneous staff that’d ‘coincidentally’ bump into them and give them whatever support was needed to get them into fighting-shape: industry veterans, performance psychologists, research assistants, managers, publicity agents, life coaches, and so on.”
“Huh.” The young woman was smacked out of her fury by a flood of uncanny memories.
“What can I say? I’m a humanist. To be forthright, though, the bulk of this part has been Milo’s efforts. Lacking the time myself, I simply laid out the skeleton of the scheme and bankrolled it.” (By this point in his life, he’d already firmly returned to his guild duties.) “For a select group of members, though, I did manage to get hands-on with editing.” (And thereby stole their techniques to build his knowledgebase of pleberature, identifying the factors that appealed to the masses, developing the bridges that would be incorporated into his ultimate pleb-bait.) Omitting certain unappetizing parts, Henry pulled a copy of one of Silver’s novels from his daycare bag and pointed to an acknowledgement in the back to an unnamed editor. “That's me, the unnamed editor. What the Silver swine doesn’t have a clue about is that I’m also,” he snapped the book to the copyright page in a practised motion, “this guy, this chick, this chick, and this guy. Not literally, of course. I’m only one person, beholden to the conventional restrictions of space-time." (Before The Cap.) "But, if one traces the connections back far enough, it all eventually leads to me. From a certain causal framework, ‘Silver Wolf’, the number one writer of this generation according to public opinion - she was my creation, my personal project.”
“Huh.”
“I’m basically the daddy-long-legs of her story.”
“Huh…”
The young woman, having been walloped by one revelation after another, was truly speechless.
She would need a good while to digest, to separate the confessions from the lies and pretentions.
What was she supposed to make of all this? There were past mysteries that—
The Silver Wolf Finisher (Ultimate Variation)
Henry, catching the beauty off-guard, hit her with the one-two finisher. “So what do you say, Candace, why not join me? Why not become the next Silver Wolf?”
The young woman blanked out.
Henry read this as his finisher knocking the beauty dead flat - romantically-speaking.
Lights out; game over.
The Silver Wolf Finisher (Ultimate Variation): The crucial alteration was in the delivery vehicle. His target might have been unpersuaded by his previous proposition of editing. That, however, had been before he’d revealed his power level, before the offer had been couched within a greater offer of giga-wealth, industry connections, world-wide recognition and, most importantly, a horde of fanatical readers. This was an irresistible enticement, one for which countless authors would sign away their soul. Such a juicy bait, the beauty could not possibly refuse to bite; and once she’d been hooked, he’d do her editing and, bam, love.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Good game.
Mount Romance, climbed; doubters, in the morgue after jealousy-induced aneurisms.
This is what it meant to be an ascendant intellect. Even when Henry’d been stranded on this hostile, alien planet of love, even when he’d been given only foreign material and the most broken of mental tools to shape it, he’d nevertheless crafted a first-class rocketship, which he'd launched straight past the summit and beyond into the stratosphere. Through the galactic tapestry of romance, he was speeding now. Pew! Pew! He was shooting laser-beams and blowing up the pesky stars that would dare to cross his fate. Pew! Pew! Pew! Pew! Pew!
While Henry gloated, the young woman, baffled and offended at this ridiculous offer to become herself, stared hard at his smug disloyal, shameless, ‘daddy-long-legs’ mug. As she registered more and more of the meaning, from the perimeter of her sunglasses, wrinkles of anger began to radiate outwards, seizing the terrain of her face.
Henry came down from his internal celebration when he noticed the growing hatred. “Oh, no, I wasn’t suggesting to become a pleb. It’s more the deeper notion of having the backing of a one-in-a-billion, filthy rich megabrain with an ability—as you’ve witnessed today from my relentless hitting on you—to rapidly move a mass of resources towards a singular goal, a supporter extraordinaire with a track record of industry-proven success. The genre or form of writing - irrelevant. The accessible literature of Silver’s? I’m done with it. Non-fiction, philosophy, history, I’m ready to revel in it all. Any field or school whatsoever, you name it, let’s climb it. Together. Candace, take my hand. Become the next Silver Wolf!”
Later that afternoon in the same city, an Egyptian restaurant with a picturesque view of a lake.
The venue wasn’t regularly open at these hours, but three dozen literary-types had managed to score the place for themselves. While they engorged on charcoal-grilled lamb, buffalo-milk cheeses, baked sea-bass, and Alexandrian wines, a band of familiar musicians in the background jammed out a set of intimate tunes. Like the wind billowing in the sails of the boats gliding across the lake, the mood amongst the diners was light, breezy, and a touch romantic. It was a befitting the closure to the day’s strange tour.
The university chancellor tapped his fork to a glass and stood up for a speech. “Everyone, everyone, I want to share a few words. Today, we’ve taken many odd detours and collected many unexpected friends, but I’m glad we did. Isn’t this spontaneity a sign of the brilliant future ahead? Next year, when our academic community formally welcomes in these two promising representatives of their generation, we…”
Henry, not hearing the speech, was idly picking flakes of meat off the bone of a fish and feeding them to Little Liu standing in his lap.
In his, the would-be Romeo's, the aspiring Don Juan's, expression, all his prior lust-for-love, all his delusions of cosmic density, all the dynamism intended for this segment of the campaign, all was gone. In their absence, he'd been left an ordinary, deflated teen.
The Silver Wolf Finisher had succeeded as a finisher alright…finishing off whatever shreds of hope he might have had. To his invitation to sculpt her into the next Silver Wolf, the patrician beauty’d stormed off angrily - but not before calling him a pleb.
Devastating...absolutely devastating...
Afterwards, no matter how many attempts he made to defend himself, no matter the reattempts he made at The Provocation, she stonewalled him completely. The battlements of the beauty's castle raised twice the height, she uttered no multi-sentence rejections, no one-word rejections, nothing. One bout after another, she simply stayed inside and ignored his romantic assault.
Sigh.
At the outset of this love campaign, he’d envisioned that by this meal closing off the tour, with his self-tarnished image redeemed, he would have isolated the beauty to an intimate corner. The two of them, communicating on a basis of heavy flirtation and light touch, would soon be sneaking out for the thrilling adventures of his late-afternoon itinerary.
To survey the current situation, though, there was no trace of this fantasy in action. When he'd tried to steal a seat beside her, she’d moved to the opposite side of the table. She did that four times in a row.
Henry'd been rejected decisively.
Figures, he thought. That Silver Wolf Finisher had, in retrospect, been a risky manoeuvre. What might be a blessing for most could be an unforgivable insult for the few. For a patrician, a suggestion to take the pleb pill was no different than suggesting they catapult their newborn baby into a pile of razor-blades set on fire. Henry, by daring to make that moronic offer, by sharing his guilty involvement in the advent of the Silver Wolf, he'd irreparably ruined his standing in the patrician beauty's eyes. He himself might have reacted with similar repulsion in the younger years of his youth before attaining his present humility, back when his idealistic heart had not yet been seduced by the allures of the accessible path, not yet succumbed to the pain of no-one reading his incomprehensible masterpieces.
Was this an accurate postmortem of his failure?
Honestly, it felt 100% wrong to him. However, the same instinct that warned him of this had been giving him the green light throughout today’s chase. On and on, it'd encouraged him to strive harder. On and on, it'd reassured him that his extravagant gestures, which any rational observer would deem insane, were neither unjustified nor inappropriate but roughly in line with the depth of feeling between himself and this beauty – and that had included the marriage proposals. Alas, the compass of his heart seemed to be misaligned.
So what must one do when the heart can’t be trusted? Listen to the data.
Tallying up all the rejections, the data was declaring a thousand defeats.
A message buzzed his e-assistant from the chef who owned this restaurant, the popcorn lady puppet. She wanted to confirm whether to bring out the sorbet.
The Hail Mary Sorbet Proposal Fini—
Henry, raising the white flag before the suicidal last clash, informed the chef she could keep the cursed ring or sell it.
No, he hadn’t been destined to seduce this beauty. If a deity had been orchestrating this encounter, it must have been for no reason other than to taunt him. By presenting him an ideal love in his final hour of anonymity, it’d stripped him of any remaining psychological refuge. In the coming days, as the dream of a mundane youth fizzled out, he would no longer have recourse to blame this part of his tragedy on circumstance, on unfateful timings, on incompatibilities. He’d been presented a chance with a match that fit his criteria, and he’d tried to woo her earnestly. He’d bombed. The explosive failure had ripped away the wardrobe of excuses, exposing his naked truth: he wasn’t ordinary, and an ordinary love hadn’t been in his cards.
Maybe.
He did still have 56 dates lined up for when he flew back home, and the lessons acquired by today’s failures could prove useful then.
But he would think about that later. For now, he wanted to introspect and wallow in the gutter of rejection for a couple minutes longer. Grieving over something as trivial as a failed love, this was another ordinary teenage rite of passage he’d never permitted himself to experience.
Henry, a youth in mourning, flicked a fish flake past Little Liu’s reaching hands, back at his face. Without angling his head, he popped open his mouth, and the fish glided over his teeth.
A student with oil dribbling down his chin rubbed his pot-belly in satisfaction. “Ah, so full yet so hungry…isn’t this joy and sadness of making love? Henry, how’d you convince the kitchen to open up so early?”
“The chef’s a business acquaintance,” Henry replied.
“Ah, that’d explain the connection with Young-Jae,” said a theology student. “Are you steeped in the rays of the sun or the dark of the shadow?”
“He’s Flaming Sun,” answered a drunken linguist, who proceeded to snicker about being hired through their bounty system to set up the earlier multi-lingual roast.
“Flaming Sun?" A professor perked up. "HL, you play Saana? What class?”
Henry refused. “I’m not talking about that trash game. This is my day off.”
Oh, right, there were tons of other people around him, had been this whole time. Throughout the phases of hitting on the beauty, he’d picked up a litter of stray Australian grad-students. He'd suppressed his instinct to eject them in order to maintain the charade of sociability. Ignored by him, they’d been observing his heroic campaign in the background, sometimes being utilised for a role.
“Why the tragic tone?” inquired another student.
“HL’s heard the ticking of the cogs.” A morose kid who wrote Neo-Techno-Gothic fiction flicked his fringe out of his glitter-shadowed eyes. “We were the prologue to the machines, and now they’re awakening.”
Henry waved in dismissal – he was, in fact, pro-technology, as evidenced by him accepting to become a cyborg. “My demeanour is usually flat. I was pretending to be more positive while trying to hook up with the patrician cutie."
The young woman across the table almost drinking her fourth glass of water glared hatefully.
The other students broke into a round of laughter, causing the chancellor to fluster and the minimalist professor to shout at them.
Amidst the commotion, a female philosopher on exchange from a French college sidled up to Henry to console him. “In time, the desired goes, and the face of the desired will no longer be invoked by its name, but the desire itself lives on eternally. The transformative yearning to love is reborn again and again, and, like the verse of a song, the unique contents of the latest adored are composed to fit within the familiar lines and metre.”
“Not interested.” He rejected her. “Not now.”
“What’s the harm? The role of the desired can be reinhabited ad infinitum, as much by a writer as a philosopher, by the quiet and the brazen. It is the health and form of the persistent structure doing the receiving that should be the sole focus of our scrutinisation. Do it. Do the receiving.”
He still wasn't interested. “The harm is my loss of pride. In this moment…it feels like a pathetic downgrade.”
“Dog %@%*!” The philosopher swore with Australian slang she’d picked up, then, reaching into a pocket of her trousers, pulled out a sheet of paper and shoved it at him. “I accept no apology until it’s inscribed in music!”
The paper contained a list of aphorisms scribbled during the previous improv concert. She’d just wanted him to write a song for her.
Another round of laughter followed, which the jazz-band amplified with a comedic measure. The chancellor concluded his speech with an abrupt toast.
And there was further revelry.
Henry didn’t participate in any of it. That had been the maximum extent to which he would allow the cast of this tour to encroach into his mind-space.
Allowing the sorrow of rejection to carry him deeper into himself, he supposed, analysing his resistance to these people, that this was fundamentally the same resistance behind his vehement refusal to attend this university - the actual one, not the veneer of avoiding wasting his time.
These days, it was just kind of hard for him to care about people, about 'community', about the acquisition of more companions. He’d already been given enough of this stuff for this lifetime by his guild.
Over the span of conquering a digital planet, twice, a lot tended to happen. Sitting together on conspiracies for months…galloping together on camelback across deserts…crouching together in trenches while missiles exploded overhead…balancing together on the decks of ships assailed by leviathans…marching together with their heads hung down after defeats…celebrating together in the wake of victories…
In this joint adventure, one would be exposed to a profundity of fraternal intimacy far surpassing that available to most of the modern, socially-alienated Roboboomers. The resulting attachment, in its potency, could rival the feeling for one’s own mother who’d carried one in the womb and soothed one through the vulnerable beginnings. At moments, this comradery could dwarf the maternal bond; at others, in a strange paradox, it grew it. Friendship to this extent was transformative. After one experienced others this closely, the gravitation of prior civilisations towards notions of immortal souls became obvious; the language of the material world lacked the strength to capture the intensity of this bond, which breathed into the dust and digits of man something that felt transcendent, something that was deeply painful to imagine being otherwise.
Pain…for what joys this more profound grade of friendship might bring, it had its downsides. So far as one accepted another’s happiness, one accepted their misery. There was also the magnitude of the thing, a pathology in its own respect; a comradery this toweringly tall cast a lengthy shadow, which had a way of blotting out whatever might follow.
The devastation of this final fact had already been made evident to Henry with the writing circle. After its creation, he’d watched the fraternity blossom amongst these ambitious authors striving on the path of their literary actualisation. Book by book, the budding artists had been drawn ever close in the fusion of their dreams and struggles. For Henry, however, the interactions between these writers, when contrasted with those in his guild, struck him as superficial, vacuous, infantile. Any urge he might have had to participate on an interpersonal level withered up. It felt pointless consorting with these blemishless babies. Hence, with his literary acquaintances, he’d kept it pure business, kept them locked out of his internal life.
Browse a thousand pages of his inner thoughts, and you might not catch a single mention of them.
While Henry snacked on a piece of fish, he searched through a wall of missed messages on his e-assistant.
Amongst the spam from his grandmother was one from Cathy inviting him to a Team Friendship Forever real-life sleepover. Since this evening in Saana had been slated to be uneventful, Byzantium preparing for tomorrow’s community event, his schoolmates were pulling an all-nighter after the session and marathoning movies. They’d invited Dan, but the meathead’s parents wisely deemed it dangerous to let a minor stay with older online strangers. Brian was cooking Mexican.
Henry seemed to have forgotten to inform them that he’d flown overseas.
This negligence, he supposed, was another symptom of the general affliction, one of the spots made blind by his guild’s shadow.
His schoolmates…to be frank, he didn't feel a significant bond with them. Throughout his trials in Suchi, they had been little but wraiths in the rear of his awareness, barely visible to him behind the issues with The Slums and his personal ambitions with the tournament. They drifted into his conscious only on the rare occasion when he was called upon directly by them to answer, when, driven by a vague sorrow and reluctance to close the eyelids on the corpse of the him that’d been their friend, he allowed himself to be possessed by the past’s ghost.
Had they ever been friends, though? He wasn’t sure about that anymore. They had almost nothing in common. Tying them together was merely the happenstance event of having shared a few classes and the fading memories that’d followed. Crossing paths with Cathy and the rest today as strangers in The Slums, wouldn't he have the same repulsion for them as he did for every other Villager? They had no special qualities that should spare them of his contempt for the rest playing Hogwarts amongst the horror, competing over house-points by rounding up the framed for execution, partying while pre-teens got dismembered and eaten in nearby shacks, laughing at the ‘pranks’ of a deranged incarnation of The Cycle’s unstoppable inclination to chaos.
This uncomfortable recognition…that, too, was how far the shadow of his guild’s comradery extended. Even back into the past, it went, blotting out those friendships preceding it. These kids from his school, like the writing circle, like the community in Suchi, like the people of this university, were made meagre by comparison. Having stood at the peak of brotherhood, all that lay around him now had become tiny and flat. These stunted, aimless repetitions of what he’d done before could leave no more permanent impression on the senses than a couple grains of salt dissolving on the tongue.
But.
But this sulky analysis was just a teenage romanticisation of his plight, another flawed veneer.
In a rather jarring act of self-exposure, his digital twin, while calculating threats in Suchi, had coldly dissected their joint psychology much like Karnon's. Digital Henry's appraisal would be much more boring. This numbness of the tongue was yet another ugly correspondence between himself, The Laughing Man, and the son who’d—
He snipped that intruding tangent.
He would end the ruminations there, too. Being able to retain your silly pretences, not being obliged to scrutinise your every vulnerabilty...these were also part of the ordinary teenage experience, weren't they?
Henry focused on composing a reply to the sleepover invitation from his schoolmate. Being too exhausted for an all-nighter would have been the optimal excuse – valid, vague, honest.
-Henry Lee: Can’t, sorry. In Australia!
Irrationality, too.
Slotting in a pair of earphones, he accepted a call from Cathy an instant later, leaned back, and let the world, the beauty, and the rest of it vanish within the flood of white noise.