The Well is Dry and All the Dogs are Crying

(Well, there’s that one piebald mutt over there who’s laughing.)

Gregor knew that someone was writing about him. He knew that his every move was being typed out on some vast machine hidden inside an even larger network of machines connected all over the world. No matter what, he couldn’t discern _how_ this was happening. He supposed that surveillance equipment had simply gotten to subtle and refined to detect. It’s not that Gregor could come up with any good reason why someone would by typing up his every move. He supposed there was a dossier about three boxes thick by now with all his comings and goings, his bags of (itemized) groceries from the grocery store, the route his each particular stroll happened to take as he meandered through his neighborhood, and etc, etc, etc. Some days he would try to do things that were especially hard to write up in text form, or so he imagined, like making odd, nonverbal shrieking sounds that (he hoped) would defy typing up in onomatopoeiac fashion. Sometimes he would talk quickly and only while others were talking to make transcribing his dialogue tedious and uncomfortable. Or sometimes he would speak in sentences that he imagined might be difficult to punctuate, by adding odd pauses and emphasizing words in all the wrong places. Yes, Gregor’s most cherished joy was imagining driving his watchers to distraction as they typed furiously away on their devices.

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