Listen Partly
an excerpt

As the film closed, a sudden loneliness set over me. All the age-old clichés were setting in: money does not buy happiness, it's lonely at the top, there is no such thing as a utopia. I had created a paradise but it felt empty, like the glass of orange juice, stained with orange, pulpy residue. Life was hollow, nothing but a fantasy. I had no companions to listen to me, Yes, I had my servants to listen to me, but they only listened partly. I was the single living soul in an ocean of nothingness, like the one life-form on a desolate and lifeless planet.

But maybe those lifeless rocks knew something I didn't.

I pondered for a moment, then decisively removed my breakfast tray from my lap and placed it beside me on the bed. I walked over to the window to my right. I opened it, prepared to jump the equivalent of five stories.

Then, before my eyes rose a steel monster, accompanied by an intense buzzing. An army of ten thousand wasps was poised to attack, it seemed. The wind from the horrible beast's beating propeller swept the palm leaves outside my wide window. How had this bizarre helicopter made it past my anti-aircraft defense system?