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Jingling Dancer
28802c
Why is it that when we are slaves we hunger most for freedom, yet when we are freedmen and women we seek to make ourselves slaves?
You lie here, on the stone floor of some damp cave on this godforsaken planet, asking this very question of yourself and whatever forms of civilisation self-identifiable. You know that this hard, sharp and frigidly wet surface will soon serve as your deathbed. Against this knowledge and the current of your many responsibilities that plead and beg with you or command you in authoritative, self-righteous tones about the moral supremacy you cannot fail to represent, you have the audacity to be philosophical about death as it crawls up your feeble legs. You cannot laugh at her face, but you have at least enough courage to share with her a pleasantly academic conversation. An old dodger like you had it coming, no doubt, yet it still surprises you. ...'Old?' You hear yourself think. Hah! Despite the visible age that has creased your face, deafened your ears, bleached your hair, hunched your posture and dulled your eyes you are still considered quite young for your race. 'Inside every elderly person is a young person who wonders what happened.' you've once heard it said. With regret you cannot say the same applies to you for you know exactly what happened. You've committed more murders with your lying tongue than have ever a blade laid bare a pair of shoulders. You've damned numberless species to extinction, all in the name of 'reason and unanimity.' You are that blackhearted, immortal fiend they call Professor Nobody.
And you are about to breathe your last.
In this last, desperate moment of mortal horror, self hatred and tearful misery masked by contemplative repose... what do you do?
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