Anthology Complex Read Online Free PDF Page A

these
things because they were part of the reason I was here. My partner asks me why
I took off my mask and I tell him it's because I want him to see my face. I
look into the eyes of the painting again. This is a painting of the mayor of
New York City.
     
    After a minute or two, we hear talking and footsteps, so my partner and
I hide the best way we know how. The mayor walks into his office alone and he
turns on the light, and then sits down in his seat. The seat of the mayor of
New York City. I get out of my hiding spot and walk towards him, gun pointing
at those eyes, and the entire time he is shouting with his arms in the air. My
partner now gets out. I cock the shotgun and I aim. Then I shoot.
     
    His painting of himself is ruined now, covered in blood. Who hangs a
painting of themselves in their own room? The front door kicks open and shots
are fired. My partner goes down, but not before he gets a few shots of his own
in.
     
    I take cover, and I see my partner laying on his back about four meters
away from me. My heart is pounding. I don't know if it's because I just killed
a powerful man or if it's because a close friend of mine is in danger. The
pounding gets louder and louder until it finally wakes me up.
     
    What does it take to truly change the way the world works? Do certain
people have to die? Do certain people have to live? Someone said that the more
things change, the more they stay the same. I could also kill the next mayor of
New York City, and then the one after that and the one after that, but even though
the people in this seat change, the seat itself never changes. The people
change, but the seat stays the same. So the world and the way it works stays
the same. Sometimes what seems like true change is actually just the process of
repetition. The process of repetition.
     
    A king named Solomon said that there is nothing new under the Sun, and
this is probably true. Every day we wake up, we go through our day, and then we
go to sleep, until we wake up the next day to do it all over again. Rinse and
repeat. Every day the Sun comes up, and then the Sun goes down. We are born, we
have children, and then we die. Our children our born, and they have their own
children, and then they die. Our children's children are born, and they have
children, and then they die. A way to keep our species alive in a
never-changing world.
     
    These thoughts reflect the image of the double helix; the name of the
structure or form our DNA takes. Two perfect spirals that continually repeat
themselves. Because DNA is almost the road map to life, it is sort of poetic
that it would take the form of a repeating structure. The same repeating
structure that is symbolic to the lives we live.
     
    The same repeating structure that is symbolic to a world that will
probably never change. A world that can't change. Maybe a world that doesn't
need to be changed.
     
    There is a story of a group of humans who could only live for six hours.
In most cases these humans would only live to see a world with light or a world
with darkness, but there were some lucky humans who saw the change from day to
night, or from night to day, but they didn't know what was happening.
Unfortunately, before they could understand and document these changes and what
was happening, they would die.
     
    After a while, along came a human who could live for an entire week.
This human saw changes from day to night and from night to day multiple times,
and this human told the other humans that could only live for six hours that he
or she could tell what was going to happen next.
     
    So this human would tell the the other humans that soon there would be
light, and while some humans died before then, the lucky ones saw this change
and thought that this human who predicted this change was some sort of higher
being, but eventually that human's week was over and he or she died.
     
    After a while, along came a human who could live for years. This human
experienced all the