The Collapsium

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In the eighth decade of the Queendom of Sol, on a miniature planet in the middle depths of the Kuiper Belt, there lived a man named Bruno de Towaji who, at the time of our earliest attention, was beginning his 3088th morning walk around the world.

The word “morning” is used advisedly here, since along the way he walked through the day and night and back again without pausing to rest. It was a very small planet, barely six hundred meters across, circled by an even tinier “sun” and “moon” of Bruno’s own design.

Walk with him: see his footpath cutting through the blossomy meadow, feel the itch of pollens in your eyes and nose. Now pass through into the midday forest, with its shafts of sunlight filtering warmly through the canopy. The trees are low and wide, citrus and honeysuckle and dogwood, not so much a shady, mushroom-haunted wilderness as a compromise with physical law—taller trees would reach right out of the troposphere. As it is, the highest limbs brush and break apart the puffy summer clouds that happen by.

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