— So Alice, there’s this cabinet right? It's housing an old mainframe. And there’s a switch on it, but with only one wire. And that wire is pretty clearly a ground. The switch is labeled “magic” and the rumor is that it will crash the server even though switches on principle have to have at least two ungrounded wires —

— Bob, I know what a switch is. A switch is a thing that breaks another thing but only if those two things are linearly or otherwise correlated —

— Alice, a switch is not a gate. For example, two people went gambling in Vegas and only one returned — when Charlie arrived home he found someone had stolen the copper in the walls. Rust belt. He wasn’t too bothered about it. In Vegas, he had bet smart — Kelly. His friend had double or nothing’d. That was part of the problem. The friend’s. The one who didn’t return.

But so Charlie had meant to upgrade his wiring with the bag from Vegas any way. Now there’d be insurance money too. He went to Walmart to ape some batteries and battery-powered lamps. But someone was watching. Mal could tell Charlie’d just come home from Vegas. You didn’t see carts full of expensive lamps like that in that Walmart. Well, Charlie drove home, Mal followed, pulled a gun, and took Charlie’s bag. And so Charlie was at home with no copper in his walls, no bag, and no light. Cause Mal also took the lamps and the batteries.

That’s when he saw it. The switch. It hadn’t been there before. On the wall of the cabinet by the door so the street lamp shone on it. With blue masking tape spelling out the letters, someone had labeled the “off” position “OFF”. And the “on” position “MAGIC”. Without thinking about it, Charlie flipped the switch to “MAGIC” and his entire house blew up. And Charlie survived that too, but he had a hell of a time with the insurance company, had to get a lawyer out of the phonebook and knock on their door cause he didn’t have a cell phone. Turns out the phonebook had mixed up Larry’s — that’s the lawyer — office and home addresses and sent Charlie to Larry’s house. Larry answered the door with a rifle. Charlie asked him what the fuck and well Larry didn’t like swearing, so he pulled the trigger. Impulse. And just like that Charlie and his friend — the one from Vegas — ended up in the same place — six feet under the ground.