1.

The man entered the shop. He threw the potted plant at the wall. The woman screamed. The man behind the counter stood up, chest rising and falling, looking at the man. The men looked at each other. The woman stood there looking at the men like something awful and horrible was happening. What is it that you want? said the man behind the counter.

Liar, said the man.

Get out of my store, said the man behind the counter, We're going to go for a walk. He stepped around the counter, slowly, then more quickly when the other man did not react. He caught the man's arm and walked him toward the door. He walked the man out, through the doorway, into the cold, bright day. They walked to the street corner, whereat they stopped. The man pulled his arm away from the other man then sat down on the sidewalk. Get up, said the man from behind the counter. Passersby were looking at them strangely, as if to say, What is this about? Why is that grown man sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk? He looks unwell. He looks deranged. The man sitting down did not speak, did not move, merely looked ahead of him. Clearly this man was deranged. There is no forgiving any more, said the standing man.

What are you talking about? said the sitting man, I have my function, you have yours.

What is your function?

What is yours?

I run a shop, I sell people plants.

What are people plants?

I sell plants to people, understand. They come to me for my plants and for my shop and for the way I treat them. The fact that they come to me is paramount. That is how you can tell that I have a function. You do not have a function. No one comes to you. On the contrary, you came to me. You came to me and threw my plant against the wall. Is that your function? That is not a function.

I was teaching you a lesson, said the man on the ground.

What was the lesson? That people can become terribly alone, so terribly alone that they must sometimes make a mess of things just to remind themselves that they exist? Some lesson. I could have taught you that. No, a lesson is a lesson in a technique. Something that you can hand me, once and for all. You are talking about a memory, an impression. A memory is not given. I cannot reapply a memory without your supervision. You are always going to be there, in my memory, you see? Now, I can't stand here talking all day long, trying to straighten out my impressions, however much I would like that. You seem like you would at least be someone to talk to, unlike that woman in there who was trying to buy a fucking potted plant. But she exists, and you do not. So I cannot talk to you. Do you understand? You do not exist, and you cannot make yourself exist like this. The only way to make yourself exist is to start a potted plant store. Do you understand? You have to sign a contract.

2.

Long ago, there lived some specific species of fish. This species of fish lived in the water like all fish. There were individual fish within this species, but, deep down, each individual fish did not really consider itself to be anything at all. Each fish believed it was merely an instance of a species of fish, and that its own particular inventory of tendencies and hopes was a mirage emerging from the great dimensionality of possible fish-forms admissible under the constraints of their genes and techniques and environment and such. These fish in fact developed elaborate systems both for contradicting this view and for affirming it ("a mirage is after all in some sense real," "but then in another sense it isn't," and so on), but of course, in the last analysis, there was always a certain structural affirmation in the fact that they were discussing the view now and a certain private affirmation in the suspicion, which each of them had, that they had always been discussing it.

Periodically, they would, unilaterally or by some mediating pact, decide to put the discussion of the view to rest. The idea behind this silencing was that new views might have an easier time taking hold if the old one weren't always barging into the fish schools and stamping on the new view's seeds before the seeds had latched. And sometimes, for periods, even very long periods, this strategy really did work, and other views did take hold. But then things would rotate back to the old view, and it would feel like the preceding view, the alternate, had been just a sort of intermission, a delusion, a willed distraction from the view that was, and is, of course, at the time of this writing, the more compelling.

As you can imagine, the view and its effects were frightfully boring for the fish. It occupied them constantly, blanketed their surfaces like algae, and in this way made them so dark and inert in their relations that each began altogether to avoid the company of the others, to the extent that one can avoid those on whom one is functionally dependent.

Eccentrics began eventually to put themselves in waves to be spat onto dry sand or in currents they did not recognize, or they descended to depths where their eyes could not see and their little gills could barely open to catch a breath, or they burrowed in the dark hypoxic silt, or they killed one another and said it was necessary. They went, in short, where none of their species had gone before. The results were what you might expect: mostly death and then some interesting vistas for which, however, their souls and language were so ill-adapted that the attendant atmosphere of hope could only drift, cool, and deposit itself on, say, the frond of a fern too busy with its calculations to pay much mind to such passing byproducts of the inefficient kingdom.

3.

The two men entered the bar, talking. The bar was loud. The speaker put his mouth close to the listener's ear. Then one of them nodded and the conversation was finished. They walked to the bar. "What would you like to drink?" asked the bartender.

"I would like a piña colada," said one of the men.

"We do not have piña colada," said the bartender, frowning. He gestured at the sign. "These are the drinks we have. As you can see, there is no piña colada."

"You'll have to order, then, Jim, while I decide on an alternate," said the man to the other man.

"Hello," said the man named Jim.

"Hello," said the bartender.

"Blue and vodka," said Jim.

The bartender nodded at Jim then looked back at the other man. The other man was looking around the bar. "Grin," said Jim.

"What?" said Grin, turning to Jim, who nodded in the direction of the bartender. "Oh, gin and water," said Grin to the bartender.

The bartender nodded and went to make their drinks. The men stood at the bar, waiting.

"One part I'm not clear on," said Jim, "is what Maude was saying about the composite IDs. If you have secondaries coming in from the outer register on the short tick and the primaries coming in from Timon on the long tick, just run partials on the secondaries, and the post-long write volume easily halves."

"I think that's what they're doing."

"I don't think so. That's the whole point of this async, tricolor business they have running post-long-tick."

"I thought that was just for compliance bindings."

"No, it also feeds prod."

"Oh, then I can't explain it."

A woman came up to the counter and stood there, waiting for the bartender. The three people stood in silence for some time, frowning. Then the woman put her elbows on the counter and turned her head to the men. "Do you know what my friend said when you two walked in?" The woman jerked her head in the direction of the high-top table at which she had left her friend.

"No," said Jim.

"She said these are the kind of men who will take us into the bathroom and fuck us."

"Your friend sounds like a slut," said Jim.

"She is. And I am too."

"Go away," said Grin.

The woman turned pale, slapped Grin once, pulled her hand back to slap him again. He caught her wrist and said, "Don't slap me."

"Don't slap him," said Jim, nodding.

"It's all I can think about," said the woman, letting her arm go limp, looking away from the men, back at the bartender, who was pouring blue dye into vodka. Her eyes were filling up with tears.

"I understand," said Grin. Still holding her right forearm in his left hand, he put his right hand in her right hand. "Look at me." She looked at him. He was blurry. "It sounds like you do not know how to control yourself. I am teaching you."

The woman spat on Grin's shirt and sobbed. Grin let go of the woman's forearm and hand. He rubbed his face, then he rubbed his shirt with a napkin. "You cannot teach anyone anything," he said to Jim, who was watching the woman. Jim nodded and looked away.

The bartender came over with the blue vodka and the gin water.

"What are you two drinking," said Grin to the woman.

"Water," said the woman.

"And two waters," said Grin to the bartender, who nodded and went to get the drinks.

The woman sat on the bar chair and put her eyes in the crook of her elbow. The men waited and did not talk and did not look at anything.

The woman, whose name was Rib, received her waters from the bartender and returned to the table and her friend, whose name was Eva. Rib explained to Eva what had happened. Eva nodded.

"The dominant tendency," said Eva to Rib, "Is the expansion of the network of those functions for which the relationship between output and input is reliable. That is the tendency you can increasingly rely on. Of course, you cannot live in view of your own nothingness. These men, for example, and their bosses, presumably, believe, roughly speaking, that they inhabit one of those few niches in which there is something mysterious about the relationship between the pressure they undergo and the results of that pressure. That is why they are excited by the prospect of being able to modulate the pressure. It enchants them. The fantasy of a dramatically different kind of experience. They imagine some state of affairs that they consider dramatic and different, and they believe that if they actualize that state of affairs, then something dramatic and different will have occurred. So they do what is necessary to bring about that state of affairs, but, of course, to execute a transformation whose dimensionality is sufficiently high to have stimulated their imaginations in the first place, it is necessary to make strict guarantees about the behavior of the component processes of that transformation. So all the mystery gets axed in its achievement. Tale as old as time. But in the meantime, the enchantment protects them. Stabilizes them, makes them reliable. Does the fact that the enchantment stabilizes them mean that, if they were to become disenchanted — that, if they were to see themselves as identical with their predictable, well-behaved, component functions — they would start thrashing around to a degree sufficient to originate a fantastic revolution?" Eva sighed and let her gaze linger on her friend's face. Rib, cheekbone-to-fist, was watching the sleigh bells that hung on the door, as if waiting for them to jingle. "Probably not."

Rib lifted her head from her fist, nodded, and drank some water from the straw.

Time passed. The men went over to the women and said they were ready to have sex, now, if that was still of interest. The women told them it wasn't the right time anymore. Time passed. The women stepped out of the bar to smoke. There were some other people smoking out there, and the women struck up a conversation with these people. The other people were named, John, George, and Jane. While they were smoking, Jane suggested that they go to another bar, which was just like this one but slightly different. Everyone agreed this was a good idea. Time passed. Jim and Grin, having finished, exited the bar. Time passed. The hour came and the bartender told the people in the bar to go away. The people left. The bartender turned off the lights and locked the door. The bar was quiet and dark; there was no one in it, anymore.