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How to Avoid Acting Monstrous
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On the word “monstrous” the Guide offers no definition, which is worrisome; if it’s all I know and it doesn’t know something, then how far does my ignorance reach?
I reread the correspondence, looking between lines for meaning: that’s how I learn *ignorance*, but the definition of *monstrous*, *exploitive*, and *negligence* elude me. From the context I gather they are nothing good.
The Mayor calls the factory exploitative and Management monstrous. The factory is my home so I associate “exploitive” with place and “monstrous” with person but still none of it tracks. I vow to never be monstrous, but it’s a hollow promise with so little definition to fill in.
Management sends the shutdown order, a full halt to mining and lithoid battery production. Water is trucked in overland across the lightning fields. The bubble-wheeled flatbeds run electric — powered by the residual static charge from the ground’s gravel matrix, electrons vacuumed off the ground by the vehicle’s deionizing rake.
Lightning falls across the great crystalline plain in long liquid strikes as if punched through holes in the clouds by a giant godly hammer, the periodic electric discharge halting all conventional trade across the land in a long belt around the circumference of the planet’s equator, dividing North…
