At the last moment, you step aside, lurch back and narrowly escape the telepath’s grasp. Being a passerby, he’s contractually obligated to carry on passing by and thus incapable of correcting course. Carried along by his own momentum, he turns to face you and shakes a fist.
Curse you, you hmm-hmming git! you hear him think as he hurtles backward into a distant Banana Republic.
By the way, you think to him as loud as you can, being a telepath makes you a mutant, and technically you’re not even allowed down here. I wonder what the judges, and ultimately the authorities, will make of this information!
Right. Now to execute your plan. Though the telepath did have a point. It was not until well after the time you’d allotted yourself to make a decision that Jim—for that was what you named the part of your mind that finally mustered a preference for the surprise attack (along with another part of your mind called Al, which had long since preferred this option)—made its inclination known. Technically you feel as though you ought to carry on being indecisive in the interest of fairness, but the fact remains that you do now have a preference. A decisive one, no less. Without one, you’d just have to spend another chapter deliberating, which would only delay the inevitable same conclusion, so long as the decision was limited to the same four named-for-some-reason parts of your mind that reached this one.
But there may be a way to carry out your plan and still honor the two choices you suddenly stopped thinking were such great ideas in the first place. You’d grab a quick bite of summer sausage, hurry to the parking deck, circle back in another way, sneak up behind the assassin, quietly watch his Tedious Governmental Survey game from behind a fake plant, then shoot him with whatever these bandoleer thingies were meant to be as soon as he’d won.
You tiptoe into the Burning to the Ground Hickory Farms and approach the glass free sample dome warily, as though you’re committing a priceless art heist. You lift the glass and pluck a sitting-there-at-room-temperature-who-knows-how-long sausage medallion.
Lifting it between the rows of your impatient teeth, you close your eyes and embrace for a deluge of flavor.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” comes a stern booming baritone.
Still holding the sausage, you open your eyes, make a nervous gulping sound and turn toward the voice.
“Not without some of our famous spicy mustard, R with a circle around it! On sale today while supplies last, capital T capital M, real small and superscripted.” It’s a mid-30s sales clerk who smiles as though smiling hurts.
“Hang on,” you say. “You trademarked the phrase, ‘On sale today while supplies last’?”
“Yessiree, and now that you’ve said it, legally we have to sue you, just to set an example. Not to worry, though. We’ve accounted for the expense of our legal team, and it’s included in the price of our mustard, even with the discount, so you’re still getting a great deal, C with a circle around it.”
“Well how much of THAT was copyrighted?”
“Everything. The lot of it. And if you dare repeat any of it back to me, our lawyers will issue a take-down notice.”
“I don’t want to repeat anything back to you. I was just hoping to take a bite of this free sample.”
“Not without some of our famous spicy mustard, U with a circle around it!”
“It was R with a circle around it only a moment ago. Did the nature of the copyright change since we began this conversation?”
“U with a circle around it happens to stand for ‘kosher’, which our famous spicy mustard also happens to be.”
“Why bother making it kosher? The summer sausage isn’t.”
“Sure, but you might want to put the mustard on something else.”
“Like what?”
“Um… Coke with real sugar in it. Here in the post-apocalypse, I realize most Coke is sweetened with Even Higher Fructose Corn-we-found-lying-around-in-a-warehouse Syrup. But every Passover they still manage to trot out the good stuff!”
“Excuse me,” interrupts a man in one of those loose-fitting business suits common in your granddad’s day, “I’m a member of Toxic Waste Coca Cola’s business team, and we object to your use of the phrase, ‘trot out the good stuff’, the patent for which we purchased years ago in hopes someone else would come along one day and say unwittingly so we could turn around and sue them for something in whose creation we never had a hand in to begin with.”
Well, now the author’s just getting shameless with the social commentary. You look directly into the camera and shake your head. This scene has gone on long enough.
Do You:
A. End this ridiculous exchange and get back up to the surface as quickly as possible, understanding that the author will have to gloss over many of the details chronicling just how you get up there, and maybe leave out the fate of the assassin altogether, hoping perhaps he can tie up a few loose ends in a way that doesn’t invalidate your previous decision to circle back around for a surprise attack, but realizing that whatever the case, this option promises to be shoehorned and unsatisfying?
B. Patiently wait things out and trust the author will still make good on his obligation to follow your hard-won decision to surprise attack, understanding how fatigued the whole enterprise has made him, and how these last few chapters have represented something of a recharge, allowing him to rest his storytelling muscles while still maintaining the word count?
C. Devour the sausage medallion and bludgeon these two idiots to death with the mustard jar?
D. Have a brief seizure that completely removes a slice of time and finds you waking up in the parking deck, this conversation behind you and the taste of summer sausage still on your lips?
The voting period for this chapter has ended.
Principle compels me towards C, but my faith in the author is stronger than my ideals. I vote B!
It Can Only Be B! ®️©️™️