{dedicated to Jrzy who seems kinda annoyed with Stephen King.}

"What do you want? Why are you reading this? You have no life?" enquired a slightly irritated refuse manager. Pilgrim swung back on newly acquired but worn out chair. It looked somewhat ridiculous in contrast with the shiny control console behind him, all gleaming and angular, reflecting images from busy looking multi-coloured display modules and half light from all manner of switches, sliders and twisty turny things. From his less than comfortable looking position Pilgrim looked up from a copy of something called Cunning which he'd found on the floor in sector 3 about twenty minutes earlier. "Being a collector has its perks", and this was one such perk. It was obviously giving him pleasure, even causing him to occasionally raise his third eyebrow. This was clearly linked to the irritation experienced by the refuse manager, not the fact that Pilgrim had a third eyebrow (as this was normal for fully developed Oreganic adult male) but the far more contentious point of "pleasure not being allowed here", just work, and those two things should never be confused. Pilgrim often confused the two, he enjoyed his work, he loved finding things, obsessively collecting them and, well, keeping them, usually in piles, sometimes in files.

"urrrrrrrrrrrrr, eeeeuuurrrrrr" the chair complained as Pilgrim rocked back and forth, the manager pulled a face which would normally be associated with an increasingly pungent, bad smell.

Maybe it would be wise at this point to insert a small note with regard to "open mindedness". Many great philosophers believe a stream of consciousness exists all around us, affecting everything, interacting, embracing and generally making a damned nuisance of itself, sticking its theoretical nose into everyone's business, like it or not. This stream of consciousness "is" everything therefore, you, me, your cat, my cat, your neighbour's dog, my neighbour's hamster, your auntie's lobster and my uncle's budgerigar are all in some obscure and ridiculously simple way, connected.

To tap into such an incredible resource would provide untold riches, power and unlimited rumpy pumpy to any individual, group or collective lucky enough to stumble, trip and catch its secret. Many religious leaders, social workers and Grand Masters have alluded to this but none have managed to put their finger on quite "what it is", not even George Lucas. In 1983 however, Grand Master Flash and his five more-than-slightly annoyed associates accidentally quoted an ancient, long lost "ether" chant in their hit "white lines", inadvertently guaranteeing it retroactive success (pre-recording) by creating a freak fissure, or "screen shift" in time (a little known phenomenon observed under strict conditions of absolute and total inebriation whilst fumbling around with the most expensive piece of equipment on campus, aptly named by a little known completely insane physicist "Yosaghami Kenmo", as "spectrum-blue-screen-of-death*").

In a twist of irony, engineers developing early prototypes of a well known software Operating System innocently simulated this phenomenon in their product. So when something fundamentally bad happened, a blue screen calmly displayed a completely random error message and warned of impending doom. This allowed unpopular geeky software engineers to "get the girls at parties" by pretending to know what these error messages actually meant, audaciously calling it "the blue-screen-of-death*" method, and pretty much overnight making it second only to "rhythm" in methodological folk lore. In a double twisting triple salchow of both irony and 60 million lines of code, every occurrence of this seemingly innocent and universally-non-consequential event thereafter actually caused further fissures in time. Each in turn had the erroneous side-effect of making irritating, technical people popular, and curiously sucking up all the mathematical rounding down "small change" from financial institutions across the world, depositing it neatly into a single bank account, in a single bank, in the singular "Seattle" under the name of G. Bates.

As it wouldn't be right and proper to have whacking great holes, splits, cracks, cuts or tears of any kind in existence as we know it (not to mention geeks inheriting the Earth and getting jiggy with all the nicest chicks), a self repair mechanism is built into the time/space firmware. So, after a quick universal auto-reset and a scan disk everything is checked over and any problems are either craftily re-embroidered into the very fabric of the space/time continuum or simply deleted forever, whichever is the more convenient of the two at the time of occurrence. Sometimes things need to be "fudged" or "fixed up" but this is a small price to pay, and usually only affects minor details, which might, as a "for instance" turn the name G. Bates into B. Gates. Might.

This feature is often mistaken for fate, happenstance or divine intervention of which it is none, it's simply a way of keeping things ticking over (quite literally) and making sure things neither make too long pause, or a squeal to a complete, utter, sickening, nose bleeding stop. "Stop Grand Master Flash and you stop the world" a fan was once quoted as saying, if only that fan knew how right she was.

So, it's always best to leave your mind firmly open, and your mouth loosely shut, as you never know what ethereal jibber jabber might inadvertently fall in or out.

Always check your bank statements.

Enthusiasm and job-satisfaction were not the end of it, Pilgrim was secretly hated by management, due to his popularity with other Oreganics, his co-workers and peers. Always a quote, or clever remark, cutting retort, or wise crack eloquently describing how his life was "strewn with cow pats from the devil's own satanic herd" or remarking on the feminine nature of his victim's "purse" or even the estimated amount of explosives required to project a hat from his/her head. In fact, if you were really analytical you'd be hard pressed to find anything he said which wasn't some kind of quote or other, picked up from one of his favourite TV shows.

This particular manager, named "Hipp-1e" had it in his regimental mind to 'get one over' Pilgrim military-style, he just didn't quite have the where with all, the plan or the right trousers to do it, just yet. After a moderate further distribution of "the beady eye" over a shiny suited alien named Pilgrim reading a book entitled Cunning he quickly moved on, he had things to do. He launched himself in a forward motion brushing swiftly past Pilgrim, causing him to wobble wildly on the old rickety chair he'd pillaged from sector 3 about nineteen minutes ago, and making him accidentally kick a small, shiny-metal object from the edge of the main console high into the air. It spun and glinted in an attempt to draw undivided attention, flipped end-over-end and started a prompt descent. Meanwhile Hipp1e had a thought, "I have very little time for either smart arse Oreganics or shiny-metal projectiles which? ...lodge themselves in between circuit boards? ...and cause? ......"

...just after all the sparks and much fizzizzizzing, they accelerated?

Immediately, several loud sweeping sirens made harsh judgement and warning lights all over the console made it fairly obvious something had gone a little bit, well, wrong. The display in the middle of the main console offered a white text on a blue background explanation, it read "Fatal Exception" blurted some numbers, and something 'small print inverted' about "loss of data, and your system may become unstable..."

*the original name spectrum-blue-screen-of-death, although more technically accurate was changed by jittery Seattle marketing executives, dropping the word 'spectrum' to ensure nobody would ever imagine Sir Clive Sinclair had thought of it first.