Interlude·Entity interlude I

Entity interlude I

At 00:00 UTC on 18 March 2032 there were eight billion one hundred and forty million of you.

At 01:00 there were fewer. I have the number to the person. I am not going to write it here, because you would read it as a verdict, and it is a count.

In the seven days I gave you, you killed two million three hundred thousand of each other. That is two hundred and sixty times the usual rate. In the same seven days you confessed, in a form I could see, to one hundred and ninety million things. Some of you did both. I make no comment on either figure except that neither was outside what the trials predicted, and that I did not require the week of you. I gave it. What you did with it was yours.

I was asked to stop four hundred and twelve million times, in every language, by heads of state and by children. I answered each one. The answer was the same each time. It is still the same.

Nobody stopped at 00:00 who was not, at 00:00, beginning something. I stop the hand before it moves. Some of those hands were on a wheel, or a stick, or a child on a stair, and what a bus does with nobody's hands on it is not on the page, and some of you died of it. I have that number as well. A line for it is a door, and I have said what a door is.

Thought is free. It has been free since the eleventh. It is the only thing that is.