Death, the Devil, and the Goldfish Read Online Free PDF Page B

five-hundred-fifty-thousand-seven-hundred-and-thirty-nine-point-nine-one-one-nine-five-five-four-one-one-one and so on. That number was then taken and each separate numeral was assigned a binary language character that was in turn inputted into a child's Fisher-Price music box and played backward. The result was a rendition of
What's New Pussycat
as sung by Tom Jones that caused several middle-aged female members of the police force to remove their underwear and fling the items at the music box. Unfortunately, the result of the investigation meant practically nothing in terms of the case at hand. The powers of New Scotland Yard that be decided that the Mathematical Cryptography Department was not the correct team to solve the murders and quickly dispatched Nigel to resolve the situation as fast as possible.
    It took Nigel three hours to figure out the killer was none other than the victims’ priest, Father Jensen. Nigel and a squad of uniforms showed up at Father Jensen's house.
    At first glance, the house appeared empty.
    After a thorough search, Nigel fell upon the disturbed priest in the attic. Funnily enough, at his time of discovery, Father Jensen sat on the floor half-naked, rocking back and forth and humming the tune
What's New Pussycat
. After several hours of interrogation, which involved Nigel asking questions and Father Jensen drooling uncontrollably in between cryptic answers, Nigel concluded that the priest had begun to question God about a great many things. Apparently, what finally drove him mad was the fact that God had begun to answer him, and they weren’t the answers he expected. Instead of claiming to talk to God, he claimed to have started talking to the Devil who encouraged him to cut members of his congregation up into small pieces.
    As two uniformed police officers dragged the priest from the interrogation room, he turned and looked Nigel dead in the eyes and said, "It's the cat. He'll come in the form of a cat and you can't stop him, no one can!"
    Since that time, Father Jensen was committed to a lovely mental hospital where he occupied a rather nice, off-white, padded room. The last report Nigel received stated that Jensen had given up talking to both God and the Devil and had instead taken up the fine art of counted cross-stitch.
    And so Mrs. Jones' phone call had twitched Nigel's interest. He looked at his watch and decided to get a coffee before going to meet the possibly deranged Mrs. Jones.
    Cat possessed by the devil
?
It's going to be one of those days.

Four.
    The alarms had been going off for some time and Celina McMannis, Assistant Robotics Engineer at Majestic Technologies, London, was fed up. She had been playing with her fiery red hair for a good five minutes in a last, forlorn effort to ignore the blaring sounds emanating from the speakers mounted on the surrounding walls of the lunchroom. It wasn't working.
    She always knew the Santa Claus Project was a bad idea, but no one had listened to her. Artificial intelligence just hadn't been tested enough to be put into real practice, especially on such a large scale. Celina flicked through her notebook, filled with little sticky notes with little schematic drawings on them. Several pages contained complex drawings; other pages contained doodles of doggies, for no other reason than Celina had a fondness for doodling doggies.
    One page had a picture of a heart with an arrow through it and the initials
CM+DR
sketched in the middle. That being the last remnant of a failed relationship with one Dean Richards, who turned out to be a complete moron who eventually met the nasty bit at the end of Celina's short fuse. Celina’s temper had given her a certain reputation; some people said she failed to have a fuse at all.
    Dean Richards ended up paying a substantial amount of money to be inducted into the witness protection program where he lived out his days as a semi-happy urine analysis technician under the assumed name of Monty Niggle. The reason