the last cigarette loomed before me like a painted smokestack in an industrial town during winter. cold and icy were the rooftops where dancing mice yielded umbrellas and swung from chimney to chimney. It was summer and down below flowers sang in the brees and bees relaxed and relapsed on hammocks made of wheat and stitched together with the webs of a thousand meddling spiders. It may seem odd, snow and dancing mice in winter up high while flowers and bees swayed in the breeze down low, but such was the miniature world of the future, shrunken down by a hundred powerfull pens and movie lenses, made real by a million minds of the scientific sort. The technologists had made fiction real and the roboticists had made love to the dozenalists and reprogrammed a master race with base-12 that spoke only in C-. They were the best of times and they were the worst of times, but much more of the latter, all things considered saving for relativity.