About eighteen-hundred thousand and twelve light years away, there lived a man – a short man – who was frugal. On his back he wore one side of a shirt, and on his front, a second side. He wore one glove, which he oscillated between his two hands in cycles of sixteenth of days, sometimes longer if the wind had been especially unkind to his extremities.

His morning alarm was a mouse, a mechanical mouse made of pipes, pumps, and fluids, that sloshed up, sloshed down, and sometimes splooshed into each other to create action. This action drove the mouse to hunt for food, crawl along the skirting of a dark shed, or curl into a wheel in the palm’s of the man when the nights set in.

Two splooshes were intertwined in a cyclic dance, two partners made of waterfalls, and this fluid elopement was in turn driving the mouse to nibble like an unwinding ratchet on a head of corn. The man reached an ungloved finger down and gently caressed the humming body of the mouse, whose hair tightened at the contact, but relaxed upon recognition.

The horizon was offering them something rather peculiar and they accepted it with their eyes. With fewer piping than the man, the mouse didn’t know what it was being offered.

In some ways, the man didn’t either. A certain cobweb of piping, optimized over millions of years – bending, wrapping up, reversing, going all the way to the end and then all the way to the back for no particular reason – all this mess, told the man that, in fact, he did know.

But he didn’t.

And so, as two great klindos stretched across the prairie before them, the man’s wiring told himself that he did know that two great klindos were stretching across the prairie before him. Their great pink legs with claws three-a-piece grappled at tufts of grass, pulling their body after itself almost like it was a feathery pink blimp.

They cawed a wet shrill noise at the setting sun which made their feathers sparkle.

The man swapped his gloves.

“It’s been about eighteen journeys around the sun now you know, Mikey.” Just like the sounds of the winds chasing themselves through the grass, the words were a background phenomena. Mikey continued attending to his corn.

Mikey’s splooshes continued to dance.

“About eighteen journeys, and still I feel like I’ve got a cannon’s worth on my shoulders.” The finger returned to Mikey’s soft fur. The man sighed a deep sigh.

“I’ve been thinking – I know, we don’t do that a lot these days. I feel much better without all that, that noise.” He used his eyes to point to his forehead, which he thought was noisy.

“But you know Mikey, I think this last lot of thinking is the last lot of thinking we will be doing. You see, I think – hell there I go again – you see, I’ve done all this thinking and I’ve found out what all our problems are. Where all this weight is coming from.”

The faster klindo had reached a copse and decided it was a significant milestone to constitute a mocking caw at its partner.

“It’s all this stuff,” he prodded a finger at his temple like he was testing whether his baguette from last night had gone stale.

“All that swishing and swoshing, you hear it too right? It tells me to do this, do that, get this, drop that. There’s layers underneath all of it. It’s like all my life I’ve been building collage on top of collage and before I realized it I’d built an entire wall out of paper cut outs. Only now I start to take the first piece of paper off the top and find that there’s just more paper. Paper all the way down, like they say.” He turned to try and connect with Mikey, “That’s what they say right?”

Some fluid jammed because another pipe connected from the side had spat a few drops out of nowhere. Mikey paused his nibbling sonata on the corn.

The jam passed.

Mikey’s ratchet restarted on the corn.

“Exactly, you get it buddy. You get it.” Mikey turned back to the horizon, back to pretending he knew what it was offering him. A bug that might have been a cricket, were this Earth, spontaneously convulsed and shot itself ten metres into the air with delight. The man heard this as a ping in his ear and saw nothing of the tiny entities impressive projectile journey.

The sun had almost set.

“So here I got to thinking, instead of pulling off this paper one by one, why don’t we remove the paper from the equation? Rip out the supports that the whole mess is on. I’ve left everything I own here and there as we’ve gone along. All I have is a few things to keep me alive when it gets cold and something to drink when I’m dry. But it still feels like it is all still there.” The man formed a kebab of his head with his fingers against his temples.

“We can’t go on like this Mikey, the journey is impossible. Or, that’s what I thought. I’ve got it all now Mikey, we just have to clear out that noise. Clear out all the paper in one go.”

Another jam in Mikey’s plumbing forced him to agree with the man. The man’s pipes wish-washed about and told him that Mikey had agreed with him, and so the man perceived the mouse’s agreement.

The man pulled out a gun.

“It was a sign when I found this, honestly. I’d done my last lot of thinking and then there my foot hit something heavy and soft. The guy must have been so busy thinking himself he hadn’t seen what hit him. No legs left that I could see for miles. But he had this.” The man grinned and lifted the gun so it blotted out the sun. The shadow covered Mikey, the corn, and the small boulder they had perched against.

The sudden cold made Mikey’s pipe jam and it didn’t unjam.

“Don’t be nervous, buddy. I’ve thought it all out – thought about it for long enough my head started really hurting. Told me to stop and that told me I was on to something, so I pushed right through that part that was trying to stop me and once I did, I found what we needed.” Mikey settled the barrel of the gun towards Mikey.

“You’ll feel as light as a klindo’s feather after this, I promise, buddy.”

The second klindo had now caught up with the faster once. It let out a bellowing caw.