THE FISH HEADS RULE AGAIN

The old men kept them for ages, through revolutions, tribulations and golden ages. Took it in turns guarding the ever-growing pile; their original quest, now long-since lost to time, had been to unearth the next book, but it had never arrived. What had, by the score and hundred and thousand, had been the work of those who thought they had it. But the old men knew better, they were wise and had fallen from the broken stars to the hard ground long before the roots took hold. And now they were paper barons, new moguls with the raw materials to prosper at their disposal. But they didn’t, for whatever reason, in one night of madness they terrorised the planet with their wrath and disappointment – setting ablaze the whole rejected mountain of paper until charred visions, incendiary grammar, bogus incantations and incestuous verbs rained upon the earth. And then, as the organisms seized the moment, the three old men walked into the ocean and the ocean boiled in its greedy acceptance of their failure. They were no longer monuments with the patience of voids, they were bait, and the fish heads waiting below in the cool depths took the old men’s poached remains in a frenzy of artificial intelligence and ingestion. Many centuries later, after evolution had played its tainted parlour games - three fish walked from the ocean on slimy legs one murderous day and immediately assumed control; they were not interested in a book of any sort.