For scientists:
Bolster our fitness, O Lord, and for these individuals of lower tropic levels, which we shall consume to maintain our fitness, we thank you.  Through Darwin our prophet and evolutionary biology, Amen.

For atheists:
God may exist, or God may not exist, but as a self-aware species we are grateful for our highly evolved consciousness nonetheless.  If there is an invisible, all-powerful deity, we thank him for our food, drink, comfort, and not putting our noses on our backsides as a practical joke.

For single, lonely comic book nerds:
Our lord Superman, son of Jor-El, we thank you for the (relative) peace on Earth.  For defending us from Braniac and Darkseid, for keeping the capitalist takeover of Wall Street by Lex Luthor in check, and for using your jealousy-inspiring powers for good.  But most of all, for those we love, unless we’re talking about Lois Lane, who was totally into us in college, but then you had to come on the scene, with all your powers, showing off and totally cockblocking us, you total jerk.  Just kidding.  Please don’t burn us with your not-at-all-overpowered laser vision.

For a family fallen on hard times:
O Lord, we thank you for the gifts of your bounty which we enjoy at this table, even though most of it is generic label.  As you have provided for us in the past, so may you continue to sustain us, even if we have to stop eating out and start teaching our kids to enjoy Ramen for every meal.  We know you will not forget the needy, which kind of includes us at the moment, ever since John lost his job and Sarah and Joey have had to start taking the bus and bringing bagged lunches instead of buying them at school.  We know that your love is infinite, and maybe if some of that could take the form of a shower of gold, it would be greatly appreciated.

For after a recent breakup:
Our God, who both gives and takes away that perfect angel Lana, with her golden hair and most beautiful face ever, please bless this meal, even though everything tastes like dust without her.  Please, O Lord, grant us peace and serenity in our coming days, and take away these feelings that I want to curl up and eat ice cream for the rest of my life.

Part I can be found here.  Note that there’s some strong language in this story.


That shaking wasn’t just from the people jumping to the beat.  Thirty seconds into the song, I realized that I could feel it coursing up through my fingers.  My computer was hopping slightly on the table, dancing around in little circles from the vibrations coursing through the club.  “Tear the roof off!” broke in the chorus, and I actually looked upward.  Even as the song switched to the bridge, the vibrations weren’t dying off.

The door to my booth was thrown open, and I turned to see Titian, his perfect hair mussed for the first time and his eyes wide.  “Kill it!” he screamed at me.

I stared back, uncomprehending.  I had never seen a single hair of Titian’s out of place, and now they were all askew.  The world had to be ending.  “What?” I stammered stupidly.

“The song!” he yelled back at me.  “Something’s going wrong!  The whole place is cracking up!”  One of his hands stabbed accusingly at the ceiling.  Following the finger, I looked up, and was shocked to see bits of sand falling down, raining on the unaware crowd below.

I threw my hands on the master switch, the one that I never touched, the switch that I usually had a piece of duct tape over so the newbie DJs wouldn’t completely drop the music by mistake while they were cavorting around in the booth.  With a swift yank, I pulled the switch all the way to the bottom of the board.  The music cut out with a shrill screech.

Down below the booth, the crowd came to a confused halt, conscious thought returning to the throng with an unwelcome jerk.  Almost immediately, cries of dismay began filtering up to the booth.  I knew that bottles would soon follow.  I looked back at Titian, not sure what to do next.  Both of our eyes tracked upward to the ceiling.

Unfortunately, TItian’s alert had come too late.  More sand was falling down, now with increasing frequency.  I looked back at my boss, and in a flash of insight realized that he was just as lost as I was.  “We have to get people out of here,” I said hoarsely.  “If it falls, it will take them all out with it.”

Titian nodded, seeing the problem, but he still stood motionless.  I yanked off the headphones and shoved past him.  Outside the booth was an old fire alarm.  I had always scoffed at it, claiming that it was probably just a prop put up by the owners to make us feel more at ease.  As I yanked down on the handle with all my strength, I prayed that my jokes weren’t true.

For a split second, nothing happened, and my heart leapt into my throat.  Oh god, I’m going to die in a shitty nightclub.  But then, the shrill alarms cut through the silence, and the old, rusty sprinklers on the ceiling erupted into showers of water, pouring down on the screaming and indignant crowd.

Titian and I stood on the stairs, he hiding inside the booth to protect his damn hair and me out under the pouring water, uncaring.  We watched the patrons stream out of the club.  “Well, tonight’s a bust,” he commented.

I wasn’t really listening.  My eyes were on the ceiling.  “Does it look like it’s still cracking?” I asked, staring upward.  Before Titian could answer, the question was resolved; a large chunk of concrete, the size of a watermelon, landed two feet away from me on the stairs.

“Shit!” I cursed, and sprinted for the door myself.  I didn’t look back; if Titian had any sense, he would get out, and if he didn’t, it really wouldn’t be too big of a loss.  As I stepped outside, however, I turned to see him behind me.  I guess that his legs can move when he really needs to, the roach.

We stood on the sidewalk, surrounded by complaining clubgoers, and stared up at the building.  From the outside, several large cracks were evident, and I could see them slowly growing and spiderwebbing by the minute.  I don’t know if it was the near-death experience, the slowly growing realization that I was about to become jobless, or just the humor of the situation, but I all of a sudden couldn’t hold in my laughter.  It came out in an unattractive snort, bursting through my nose as I doubled over.

Titian glared at me.  “What’s so funny, shithead?  There goes our jobs!”

I smiled back at him through the laughter, tears eking out of my eyes.  “Tear the roof off!” I gasped out.  “That song was a warning!”

I slowly managed to regain control, but as we waited for the fire trucks to arrive, TItian silently fuming and me still stifling the occasional giggle, we watched as the roof of the building slowly caved in.

Warning: there’s some strong language in this one.  

“Yo, DJ!”  The call rang out from the door of my makeshift office.  “New track in for ya!”

I winced internally at the sound of that grating, obnoxious voice.  Titian, the club’s manager, sounded like someone had shoved a harmonica up his ass.  The joke being, of course, that he only talked out his ass.  The hushed rumor around the club was that he had blown out his nasal passages from all the blow, back in the day, and that horrible nasal overtone came from his ruined respiratory passages.

All that was before my time, though, and all I knew is that I hated the guy.  He treated me with the slightest modicum of respect, since I could drive out the patrons with a badly picked song or two, but he was merciless on the waitstaff.  The female bartenders and waitresses complained regularly about him whenever he was out of earshot.  But here he was, leaning against the frame of the modified closet that had been turned into my workspace, waving a CD in the air.

“What’s this one?” I asked.  “Nicki Minaj?  David Guetta?”  It had to be some big-name club beat producer, paying us to blast the song at least eight times a night, boost the promotion.  Nothing else would have Titian so excited.

Titian shook his head, the long, unnaturally straight blonde hair waving back and forth.  “Nope, some new label, out of South Beach.  ‘Destructus’, I think he said.  His money’s as green as anyone else’s, though, so we don’t discriminate!”  He tossed the disc at my head.

My hands were tangled up in the cords of my computer, laptop, and sound controls, but I managed to awkwardly field the projectile.  Titian smirked at me as he walked away.  Asshole.  Who decides to call himself something like Titian anyway?

I looked sourly down at the disc now in my lap.  I hated when we were given club tracks that we had to promote.  I might not be allowed to talk about selling out or integrity, with my high school GED so proudly displayed in my bedroom at home under my bed, but I had always had a feel for good music.  Back in high school, I had thrown together all the mixes for the popular kids’ parties, the rich kids’ parties, so they’d let me in.  Pretty soon, it came to be a thing.  If you were throwing a party, you had to get Alex to do the music, otherwise no one would bother showing up.  And with the dance clubs just a few blocks away, it wasn’t long until one of those mixes I did fell into the hands of a club owner.

I popped the disc into the reader, cued up the first few seconds of the song.  A synthesized voice broke in over the opening beat.  “We’re going to tear the roof off!” it cried with computer-manufactured enthusiasm.  I rolled my eyes and killed the track.  This was amateur hour.  Some idiot with an expensive synthesizer and a rich daddy had decided that they wanted to become the next music star, and daddy, if you don’t give it to me I won’t be happy, daddy, I’m going to scream, daddy, I want it, get it for me, you have to buy it for me, daddy, please, daddy, I want it.

Despite this, though, I knew better than to cross Titian’s desires openly, especially when it came to club profits.  That was one area where anybody was replaceable.  We could screw around as much as we wanted, as long as we didn’t hurt that bottom line.  I flipped the case over.  The sticky note on the back said “5X AT LEAST” in Titian’s childish block scrawl.

Man, when they first hired me, I thought it was the best job in the world.  They were talking about paying me thousands of dollars!  Thousands!  For a kid growing up with tattered clothes and hand-me-downs, this was wealth.  I hadn’t hesitated in dropping out of school, throwing away the Cs and Ds in favor of a pair of oversized headphones and a snazzy new computer, one that could handle a thousand tracks and splice them all together.  The first year had lived up to all my expectations, but then the shine had started to wear off, and I realized just for what I’d sold my soul.

I saw a few slots in my current lineup for the evening where I could slip the song in.  Places just after a heavy hitter, a big song that everyone knew, one that even the rich older dudes who were just there to keep a jealous eye on their younger gold-digging pieces of ass would recognize, ones that had such a strong bass beat that even the totally untalented white boys could grind their junk back and forth to it.  After those songs finished, it didn’t matter what came on next, everyone needed a break anyway.  And those breaks were important.  The DJs that thought they had to keep the energy at 10 for the whole night never lasted long.  That’s not what people want.

With the damnable “Tear the Roof Off” worked into my tracklist, I had the list set for the evening.  I threw the top down on my computer and headed out to find some food before my shift started.

Strolling out into the club before it heated up was always such a striking image.  The walls, normally shrouded in darkness and lit by colored spotlights from above during the night, were dingy and stained during the day.  The benches looked utilitarian, the bar looked burned-out and overexposed, and the gleaming chrome on the rails looked fake and shabby in the fading sunlight pouring in through the skylights.  The place was probably a metaphor for my life, I thought sourly, although how that works exactly I couldn’t tell you with a gun to my head.

Flash forward to a couple hours later, as the club was starting to heat up.  Sure, I could go back over how I got a burrito from one of the carts, shot the shit for a while with one of the newer bartenders at the club next block over, but that doesn’t matter.  It’s just filler, just passing the time until work, until I’m off, until I’m back at work, and so on for the rest of my life, or until I got too old to do it any more.  I don’t know what I’ll do then.

I was up at my booth, nodding my head in time to the beats, my insulated headphones blocking out the rumble of the club, streaming pure music into my head.  I have to admit, there’s a rush that comes with the booth.  Watching everyone down below me gyrating to my beats, seeing them speed up as I cranked up the speed, nodding in time with the sea of hands and heads, knowing that they were all moving to the sounds coming from the electronics below my hands… It’s a rush.  Right now, Rihanna was pumping out from my booth at a hundred and forty decibels, drowning out any effort at conscious thought.  All that was left in the bodies below me was an animalistic hunger, an addiction that brought them back night after night.  This was my tribe.

Rihanna was coming to an end; after thousands of plays, I know every beat in the song.  Up next was this new track, and I began to crank down the beat slightly to adjust.  Had to make the transitions smooth.  That synthesized voice broke in once more: “We’re going to tear the roof off!”, and the new track’s beat took over.  Whoever this Destructus is, they at least had the decency to pick up a top-of-the-line system, I noted.  That wasn’t the standard beat churned out by every aftermarket synthesizer.  It was shining through, well picked for the high-power club speakers, and was really making the club shake.  Maybe this wasn’t such a bad song after all.

And that, of course, is when it all went to hell.

As I entered the building, I always take note of the guard’s tone.  It is perfectly neutral, with no hint of any feeling behind it.  “Morning, Inspector,” he comments, his eyes making contact with mine for the very briefest of instants.

I give him a nod in return, stamping my feet inside the entrance and brushing the small piles of snow from my lapels.  After sucking in a couple of mercifully warm breaths, I make my way inside.

From my briefcase, I withdraw my clipboard, noting the date and time at the top of the form.  I scroll down the form to the man I was here to consult.  “Jauffe,” I pronounce the name aloud.  It’s vaguely familiar to me, but I can’t put a face to the emotion.

A young woman walks past in her uniform, her hair cut short to hang above her shoulders.  “Excuse me,” I interject, stepping ever so slightly into her path.  “Where can I find Dr. Jauffe?”

My eyes are on her eyes.  The flash of irritation, of anger at being interrupted in her work, is only present for a fraction of a second, but I still catch it.  There’s a reason I’m the head inspector.  “He’s already in one of the interrogation rooms,” she replies, pointing back down the hallway.  “He’s with the fractal guy.”

“Fractal guy?” I repeat back blankly.

She nods.  “Crazy one.  Well, that’s a given.  But this loony made over a hundred million on the stock market in the last six months, making wild bets on the futures.  A few days ago, he comes down here, insists on turning himself in.  Says he’s a danger to society, that he’ll lose control and destroy us all.”  Her eyes briefly unfocus.  “Man, a hundred million and he’s locked up in here.”

“What a world,” I reply back sympathetically.  The words don’t mean anything, but the tone is one of comforting agreement, and it serves its purpose.  She nods and continues on her errand.  I set off down the hallway, looking for Dr. Jauffe.

I find the room quickly enough – it’s not my first time here.  “Cold Harbor – Room 2B”, reads the sign.  I push down on the handle and step inside.

Inside the darkened room, I move to the large window that makes up the majority of one wall, looking down at the back of a man in a white coat.  Dr. Jauffe is talking to the man sitting across from him.  I briefly size up the subject.  He’s wearing a very expensive suit, clearly custom tailored, but it’s disheveled and dirty.  One of the sleeves is torn.  His hair is trimmed but mussed, and his eyes hold the slightest hint of panic.

“Now, you tell us that you’re afraid you will destroy the world,” the doctor says in a soothing, comforting tone.  I hate that tone.  It means he’s trying to play nice with the subject.  I can’t imagine that it would work on anyone but a head case.

The man nods, the hint of panic never leaving his eyes.  “Not destroy it, per se,” he corrects.  “Watch it destroy itself.  I mean, it’s pretty much inevitable at this point, the iterations just folding in on themselves.  We’ve already set the large strokes, now we’re just filling in the details.”

“The details of what?” presses Dr. Jauffe.  I approvingly note how he remains calm, despite the man’s disagreement with his statement, and make a corresponding note on the form.  Behind the glass, I am a silent observer.

In response, the man waves his hands around wildly.  “Fractals!” he states emphatically.  “I told this to the man at the front desk!  Fractals constantly form by folding in on themselves, growing ever smaller, each second adding more definition, making hypotheticals more real.  Once you can see them, you realize that all the big decisions are already made, we’re just debating over minutiae.  With each second, Mandlebrot grows more real, we can’t escape!”

I see the man change themes.  “That’s how I made all my money, you know,” he says.  “Once I realized that the fractals were fairly easy to trace, I saw how to take advantage of them.  Knowing the path made my bets a sure thing.  Money wasn’t a problem.  But then I realized that I’m making money off of our race’s destruction, and I just couldn’t stand it any more!”

The man’s finger stabs across the table at the doctor, who, to his credit, barely flinches.  I make another approving note.  “Your life is already decided,” he decrees.  “You may not have made all the little decisions yet, like whether you’ll have coffee or tea in the morning, but these aren’t of any consequence.  This is all predetermined!”

The doctor opens his mouth to ask another question, still calm and collected, but I feel my phone vibrate in my pocket.  I step out into the hallway to answer it.  “Yes, I’m already at the mental institution,” I tell the voice on the other end of the line.  “Yes, he’s checked in.”

I wait for a minute, listening to my instructions.  “Yes, sir,” I reply crisply.  “I’m inspecting his doctor today.  I’ll make sure that he’s steered towards a heavy medication dose.”

I hang up and walk back inside, waiting for the doctor to finish his interview.  So far, Dr. Jauffe is doing well on his inspection, I think to myself.  Calm, collected – and obedient.