(Previously on An Algorithmic Lucidity.)
"I stopped at the poison shop on the way home from work; want a death square?"
(examining it) "This is a well-known brand of chocolate. The wrapper doesn't seem to have been tampered with."
"It's slow-acting."
(8:5x a.m., an office on the someteenth floor of the twenty-somethingth tallest building in San Francisco)
"Good morning!"
"'Morning."
"How was your weekend? Did you do anything exciting? Maybe you went to a movie, or to the beach—"
"No—"
"Or embarked on some heroic endeavor of engineering, the likes of which threaten to upend our understanding of the nature of computation itself?"
"No, nothing like that," (sighing, resignedly) "how was your weekend?"
(pretending to inspect his or her fingernails) "My weekend? Oh, nothing special—hung out, did some grocery shopping—"
"Uh huh."
"—wrote a compiler—"