It’s been a mess all week, what with all the different numbers. It’s very chaotic.
What kind of system? He asked.
Computer, of course, she said. There’s all new numbers and codes and we have to look it up every time. It’s a mess. And Margo keeps punching in new numbers and screwing around with the system. She told everyone that she’s in charge of the numbers and the codes. She calls it the system architecture. She’s such a liar.
Lying, he said to himself. False information. Deception. Prevarication. Do we all lie in our own special ways? Is it possible to live without lying?
You can’t tell the truth all the time, he said. Otherwise you’d keep saying the same things over and over.
She said nothing, just stared at the magazine. He thought he saw her lip quiver a bit, more of a smirk than a smile at his peculiar statement.
It would be formulas, he continued, we’d be talking in formulas. F equals MA, C squared equals A squared plus B squared, E equals MC squared.
He smiled and looked at her for a response. Nothing. She turned a page of the magazine.
There was a loud laugh from the sitcom laugh track. He turned and looked intently, curiously at the TV. The electrical lines were even more obvious to him now; they seemed to swallow the dead images. The lines seemed to exist outside the surface of the rectangular screen – superimposed over the images – in an oscillating 3-D universe, like a hovercraft idling and vibrating just above the concave glass surface. What are those lines? He wondered, those electrical lines hovering over