ref: b9fbb17c04e4ccfb2021dac818e514351ca8f646
dir: /troff/0702.ms/
.LP \& .sp |4.25i .ce .ps 12 .CW DATABASE ANIMALS .R .PP .ps 12 It was the only time K.A.R.R. had ever fallen asleep out in the desert. He was busy cataloguing his failures, vis\-à\-vis K.I.T.T., when it happened. Started awake just before he hit the ground. He had come to just as he was falling. .PP .ps 12 Dusk. .PP .ps 12 So, the last time he had bothered, K.I.T.T. had insisted upon pushing even more details lifted from unrelated media into their narrative. A partial list of his latest infatuations included: NASCAR, Namor the Sub\-Mariner, and, for some reason, the Falklands War. Some of these would make it into issue three. .PP .ps 12 K.A.R.R. had rejected NASCAR out of hand, without really knowing what it was all about. He guessed that K.I.T.T.'s sources were probably not much better informed, TBQH. Besides, the material was anachronistic, class crass. He rolled over in the sand. Why was he even out here? .PP .ps 12 K.I.T.T.'s susceptibility to whatever half\-baked novelty snagged his attention had proven a consistent annoyance. The resulting work he produced most often resembled whatever garbage was currently being talked about by the most insipid of K.I.T.T.'s friends. At the same time, K.I.T.T. was incredibly sensitive to criticism. He took disagreements over taste personally. Which was why K.A.R.R. was more relieved than surprised when K.I.T.T. inevitably quit the company. .PP .ps 12 .I If I am destroyed, so shall you be, .R he remembered thinking, contrary to his actual feelings, which were as usual reliably blank. Where had .I that .R come from? .PP .ps 12 K.A.R.R.'s eyes went blurry. Without his visor he was oblivious to quite a lot of detail. Luckily, the landscape consisted primarily of wall\-to\-wall, undifferentiated pink. Even the sky, at dusk, was more or less this same color. Stylistic conformity, a real timesaver. It freed up his attention for more important tasks. What use would he have had for the increased resolution, he wondered? The details would only have irritated him. .PP .ps 12 In these moments of relative sensory deprivation the shapes and whorls he usually tried to ignore would settle down and coalesce into a sort of .I fabliaux, .R spread before his mind's eye like a colorful arrangement of unslabbed comic books. K.A.R.R. considered his visor's interface to be a metaphor for this process, and not the other way around. But now, perhaps for the first time, he realized that he'd never heard anyone express it in quite the same way. It seemed that whichever direction he faced, he would find himself affixed to the same monotonously rotating landscape, which seemed immune to confessing its situatedness via the usual method of empirically reverse engineering his POV. Walk too far in any one direction, the motionless/revolving horizon seemed to suggest, and you'd overtake yourself from behind. That was the nature of this world he lived upon. Static, but devolving. Sinking, spinning. .PP .ps 12 He was dizzy. .PP .ps 12 Called Bonnie, who dispatched K.I.T.T. to come and pick him up. .PP .ps 12 There would be no delay.