““The Newton Twins were the first to try to force the machine to be wrong. Both their tickets said Old Age, so they committed suicide. Ten times they tried, and ten times they failed. Gun jammed. Car engine died. Gas ran out. Tree branch snapped—and by now, the media was all over it. They injected HIV, and it just went away. Concrete slippers in the lake, underwater for half an hour—but the medics brought them back to life, pictures of health. One of the twins, Julie, jumped off the railway bridge, but her sister was scared of heights, so abstained. Nonetheless, she was caught by the tarp on a slow-moving train, and trudged home three days later. I try to inject some perspective, but it’s hard when religion died overnight.””
