"Itztrong, It's Strong, Itztrong".

Big cheesy grin, then a swig. It was one of the best ligs of my life. Two thousand credits for drinking beer and smiling. Jobs like that don't come every day!

It's a sign of where we were; perhaps of what the World of Progress was. Honest brand names sold by simple endorsement. If I'd carried on the same way, a few years later I'd have been standing in the studio holding a syringe and listening to "Fuxuwupinthehed, Fucks you up in the head, Fuxuwupinthehed". Hell, maybe there's a brand name in that. But it's too late to make a profit off it now. Way too late.

It's very strange to be asked to record myself in five and a half thousand characters including spaces. Back then, I'd have expected implants, digital recordings of my mind. Cryogenic freezing. But now, we've been given five and a half kilobytes each to write a letter home, and because I have no family or friends left, I am writing to space. I want my data allowance. I want to write down what I have seen and done in the last two hundred years, the thoughts I have had and thought I should have had, but I get this. It will be sent back to the ruins of Mort and maybe archived. Maybe, one day, retrieved.

I was born with a spiteful name, an unsightly brainwaster to employee ebon parents. They looked after me until I was old enough to threaten them, then fostered me off to a human household. Strangely, I recall more of my own parents than the humans. They were just faceless food machines. I don't think I tortured them as much as I did my own family, perhaps because they provided a less stimulating audience, but more likely because experienced fosterers as they were, they knew how to keep me in line. It's a fact that all children must one day wake up to: adults really do know better. It's at that point that childhood ends and adolescence begins. That's where we are at now. We have moved on from ruthless marketing and capitalism. Not to something better that it, just something more. We have moved on from the early saturday morning kids' TV, and now we are watching the late-morning topical discussion, thinking to ourselves how intelligent and wordly we must be to be watching this sort of programme. Later, I suspect, we will see the gritty evening drama, and later, a scary movie. But before all that will come what I fear the most. The afternoon sports programme.

That was a joke.

I graduated from Meny (having attended it) and mindlessly entered the operative world. As I laughed at the employees, with their sleep-work-sleep-work-die lives (or worse, the unemployed with their sleep-sleep-die lives), I lived out my own sleep-shoot-endorse-die life. I collected SCLs like bubblegum cards, content with the arrival of each one, reading off the words on the back until I saw how many more cards there were to collect and set off on more prostitutions of my ability to kill. I see it all so dimly now. It was a blur. I remember a few moments, a few faces. I remember falling in love once. No, twice. Or once, really. And once, another time, in another way. I can't even remember their names, or what they smelled of, or if we went out for a long time.

I'm sorry, I'm Listing Things. And Using Short Sentences. It's all a ploy to make you think I'm feeling deeply reflective at the moment, which I can honestly say I'm not, because I learned a long time ago that conclusions reached while under the influence of nostalgia are liable to be terrible ones. The past is over, and while I would certainly give credence to the hypothesis of the recurrent, fractal nature of existence I would suggest that its patterns are too great to be seen in one lifetime. Even mine.

Too many long words? A childish habit of mine. A stupid hang-over from a former party. A Freudian slip just passed through my fingers, there. As I typed "party", I failed to type the "p". Remarkably applicable. Hah! Arty farty party. That's me.

So. I've told you where I started, where I went. Now, what happened when I got there. It's so hard to describe. Imagine a pig, living happily in a muddy quadrant in a farm. He (or she) sleeps when the lights go out, and rises some hours later to a troughful of nourishing bran, companionship from from other pigs and all the hurly-burly and excitement of a piggy life. Then one day, he is pushed and prodded out of his pen and into a truck. Gosh, what an adventure. Loud noises, strange movements. He is a little bit scared (in fact he shits himself, but that is the pig way of things) but imagines how much he will have to tell his porcine pals when he returns. But as the truck stops, he smells something which rings primaeval alarms in his head. He smells the blood of pigs. He hears the squealing of pigs who are but paces further down the same path of thought as he, trying and fighting to not get killed. He sees his destiny as maple-cured streaky rashers looming ahead of him, and though he would run the other pigs are not yet aware, and their weight pushes him toward the end. He sees the sky, sees his way out, but there is no way out. He is pushed in. Then, as the doors close behind him and he is forced onto a conveyor belt towards death, someone hands him a bloody laptop computer and informs him that he has been allocated five and a half kilobytes to write home to the pig farm with.

Alas, I am nearly at the end (there are, of course, more than 1,000 bytes in a kilobyte. 1,024 to be precise). Perhaps I will meet some of you there.

Oh, for wings on this sorry piglike wretch. Thank you for listening.

Fuxuwupinthehed. It really does.