Focus. Try to remember when you started to buy the lie. Think back to the time that you gave in. No one's blaming you; who can resist? As some android said in some 20th century sci-fi movie, resistance is futile. It's like trying to hold back vomit after the convulsion has already begun - there's no holding back the hurl.

A butterfly landed on the jasmine yesterday. A bright orange monarch with black spots, his little wings flapping slowly in the warm sun, seemingly happy to have a nice break in this peaceful little garden. Perhaps he'd been flying for hours, blown in on a breeze from the North. It amazed me that there were such creatures left in the world. So fragile. How long until they are no more?

Anders checks the guages on the spectrometer, pulling up on the controls. He whispers a communique to HQ before logging off, gazing out the window at the Earth below, rising fast. He was a space trash rig driver, a trash boy, tasked with skimming the perimiter of Earth's orbit to collect the millions of bits of space garbage floating around our planet. Finally, his shift for the day is over.

His ship is standard 43 Q stock loader ship with a cage heat-welded into the flatbed. Basically like a huge, rocket-powered bigrig in space to you 21st century types just tuning in. Yes, hello, I'm addressing you.

The butterfly mentioned above was fluttering about Anders' garden. It was he who started to question reality in that first paragraph, and it was the butterfly that made him do it. For to Anders, and perhaps occasionally to you, the unexplainable and absolutely beautiful wonder that is life on planet Earth is a Mystery, a magical thing of such delight and awe that it only diminishes in description. So let's tune back in to Anders' thoughts, shall we?