Early to Mourn

Way after the violent gnashing of hard drives in public oracle dispensers had become a given, even a homey reassurance, sucking on a shivstick, Peg could often be heard to bleat, "Well I don't want to live forever, growing a two-thumbed ombligo. I'd rather keep the process movin, movin."

It was comments like these from the deities that began to lead certain ad-hoc temporal realizers to believe that the entire concept of time itself was a hoax and a fraud developed during early civilization to compensate for setbacks in the arms race. Each side was complicit because the scam functioned to shield corpornents, goverations, philosophers from skeptics, artists, cretins to whom they could easily attribute skepticism, artsiness, hypothyroidosis.

In primitive terms, shivsticks are a time machine. More moving happens, more activity in your cavity. Yet not so much as to create a tragic instant bygone. Your consciousness itself progresses to a level of acceptance it may take others decades to achieve in a "time" paradigm. They, in turn, learn early to mourn.