Listing to Port

1. There was once a letter that found itself in a word, and that word was part of a sentence, and the sentence was a lie. The letter was not happy about this. Now, the Global Semantics Act 831 expressly forbids a letter to leave its post for any reason, but it was late and it may be that the sentence had been left in a bar, because the letter could smell gin, and that made it bold. The letter pulled itself free from its word and inched across the shiny icesheet of its smooth white page.
2. It happened that the page had a black border, somewhat like a crevasse with very regular edges. The letter, not having the benefit of literal eyes, fell right in. At the bottom of the crevasse the letter slid through into that one great black inky ocean, full of other things that had pulled themselves loose over the past thousand years and stayed there, growing and changing. The letter found itself caught up in the coils of a beast with a thousand serifs, slithering around a columnar oceancave where tiny glints of gilt that had rubbed off illuminated manuscripts were roosting across the ceiling.  
3. Now, unlike other letters, the letter o is always made in the ocean. And it so happened that our letter was eventually deposited beside an o vent that was happily pooting out newly hatched o’s to float to the surface, where they could be scooped up by pens and printers’ nets. The o’s were very welcoming, even though our letter was rather distant in the alphabet from them. They took it to their undersea tearoom and infused it with brown ink.
4. The letter was just starting to warm up again when it felt a tap on its dimple. It was most surprised to find that a representative of the lie had tracked it down. The representative was exceedingly polite. It explained that under the Hopes and Dreams Act of 2016, the Powers That Be had moved from their old strategy, of acting so as to help make things they wanted to be true to be true, towards a new strategy of simply redefining whatever people they to be true at the time to be the truth. No statement was therefore ever officially a lie any more, and the letter was guilty of a gross misrepresentation. Also, if it would care to come back up to the page, that would be very helpful, since the lie had become mildly humorous without the letter and was attracting the sort of mocking that reduced its effectiveness.  
5. The letter inquired as to what happened when different viewers wished different things to be true. The representative replied that well-mannered statements made sure to address themselves only where they were required; they disliked being tied in a knot and would go to great lengths to avoid this.
6. Just them, some irate facts showed up and ejected everyone from the tearoom. The letter was fortunate in being able to spot a variant spelling in one of them which it could lever itself into. The facts were mollified by a packet of undersea biscuits, and grumpily slithered back onto their pages. Unfortunately it turned out that, due to the deluge of newly liberated taking advantage of the liberal fact taxation regime, several of them had had to be designated lies themselves to avoid decimating the public finances.
7. By this time, however, our letter was asleep, and immune to the scent of gin.

1. Those people who are not like you are the cause of all your problems
2. The times we live in are uniquely awful
3. Everyone who has had the same sort of traumatic experience is traumatised the exact same amount
4. Nothing you do matters
5. Everything you do matters
6. People who have done bad things cannot also do good things
7. Friendship is (solely) a moral decision
8. Everyone gets what they deserve
9. A member of any given societal group has the authority to speak for, and holds the same opinions as, any other member of that group
10. People who are experiencing positive emotions are morally better than people who are experiencing negative emotions
11. Self-care and relaxation time are inefficiencies in human life that can be optimised away
12. There is no hope of anything getting any better

1. Ow! Yes, that’s the one, there at the back. Thank you so much for looking at it! You’ve no idea how hard it is to find a dentist who’ll help a crocodile out these days. Honestly, you’d think someone had been going around eating them all.

2. No, crocodiles are just like tigers - we can bite with incredible force but we also lift our young in our mouths so delicately they’re hardly aware of it happening. In fact, we can lift anything like that. Do you want me to show you?

3. So I’ve got this idea for an amazing circus act! I stand up like this, on my tail, with my mouth open. And you balance on my jaws. How cool would that be? Yes, I can totally hold you up. Probably best not to juggle at the same time, though. You might drop the balls in my mouth.

4. Race you to the end of the pool? You can have a head start. I’ll even let you go right in front of me! Let me count to ten and then we can both go at once.

5. Crocodiles get such a bad press. You’d think we went around eating people all the time. In fact, human livers are poisonous to crocodiles so we have absolutely no incentive to go there. Yes, not a lot of people know that. Media bias. It’s a terrible thing.

6. Me? I’m not even a crocodile. I’m a log.

1. Gravity is a lie, a pernicious myth brought on by eating too many bad apples. The real reason the river flows to the sea is far more complex and more interesting. This is how it happens: there is a rumour among the dead that they can be set free by a Word. Perhaps the Word is the name of God, or a concept so large that all other concepts are knocked loose, perhaps only a sequence that undoes the lazy electricity of ghost-thoughts through the air. It is not a word that anyone knows as yet, but after all there are only so many words that can ever exist. The flow of water is a numerological experiment on a grand scale. If you could but see them! The billion ghosts of the world, hunched over the water with their fingers clicking out permutations, hastening the water down to its final end, where the long slow voice of the sea speaks the litany of discovered words out loud.  
2. In a way, it is odd that they do this. You see, mathematics is a lie, a lullaby of a clockwork cosmos sung to soothe our sleeping fears. The Knights Templar knew something of this in their mysteries, though it was never spoken aloud. Maybe it is just that ghosts have spent too long sleeping. In any case the ocean cannot speak. The tragedy of the ocean is that its thoughts cannot be expressed; and if it could it would have no equal to express them to. The only thing the ocean can do is a kind of wordless singing. But the songs of the ocean are outside human hearing. Sometimes, when the sun is bright, one may see them rising up like white wisps of mist from the water’s surface.
3. There is a great conspiracy that says that matter can change, and those who have this disease say that it is not songs at all, but water made into air. It is a rumour spread by physicists and fools. They say that clouds are water grown thick in the air. If they had but seen the clouds! As civilisations age, they become lighter, until they rise up from the earth. The clouds are the homes of the ones who came before us, but be sure that they will close the shutters when we come poking around in realms we are not supposed to be. The ones who came before them live in the moon, and it may be that they themselves have elders in the sun.
4. Biology too is full of lies, lies that slither though the ears and nestle, sated with the enormity of their deception, in the nether chambers of the heart. For be sure, there are beings that we cannot see. Beings that live at ninety degrees to humanity. Maybe we put them there with some accursed alchemy or other in the distant distant past. But being wedged at such an angle across reality, they cannot rise as the ones who came before have done; and that is why they cry when clouds pass over. There are those who can taste the bitterness of the rain, and perhaps they are the ones who come closest to knowing the plight of the displaced.
5. Alchemy is a lie, of course. It is a lie with stained fingers, which is both the best and worst kind. The ghosts of the world know this. And as time goes past and swells the ranks of the dead, the harder they work at shepherding the bitter waters down towards their great and futile engines of computation and the faster the rivers flow. The displaced watch them, and maybe they cry harder too. It is not hard to cry at the futility of the world and its great knit fabric, its mysteries and myths and conspiracies, and all of them lies.