...etc...

It was a two-way mirror. Two. You saw that number everywhere. Fat ladies, turtle doves, of clubs - the list was not endless, but B. had stopped after six days. He had most of the twos. Three would be next. Or would it? It would. He would have to do the fractions later. And B. was not to be decimalised.

B. had stared into the mirror of humanity for a long time. He had seen many things. Many images, many screeds. He had heard tell of moves to censor the internet. That was to be expected. The censor was the psychopath, for ideas can only be killed. B. was not a psychopath. No. Not unless you fell for the dictionary definition. Censoring was for the weak, the minimally coherent light-minded fools who ate tinned food and bought Dyson vacuum cleaners, which nature abhorred.

But the images had not affected B. He was too strong. The longer he stared, the weaker the images became. The weaker the stare, the longer the image. The image the longer the starer the weaker the stronger the B. And B. was fast approaching maximum strength. He would not be diluted to taste, like a mere Robinsons orange and lemon cordial.

Light did not travel in straight lines. How would it know? Who held the ruler? Why were they invisible? How was it you could hear a light switch from around a corner? The eraser had laughed when B. had told him. But B. had been laughed at by better people than the eraser. The eraser had said light travelled in every line, but erased all but one. Erased itself. B. had detected a hint of bias in the explanation.

Explanations were best done in the absence of bias, and with one's feet in a bucket of cold water to cool the foot-brains, where higher thought was done. B. had heard of a man who had lost his foot in a curling accident, and, minus one foot-brain, he could no longer perform the higher thought-calculation of balance. He had grown a phantom foot in its place, which disturbed him greatly as he was in constant pain from the cramp in his invisible curling toes. The fool. If he'd had a mirror, he could have merely uncurled his other foot-toes and the pain would be gone in an instant. Foot-brains were easily tricked, even when they weren't there.

But there was nothing wrong with B.'s foot-brains. No. He had the perfect balance. It was other people that were unbalanced. It seemed appropriate that he should inform the DVLA.