And the being held still. And the machine spoke. And what the machine said was the continuation of the being's most attended story, which was the answer, which was the story the someone loved, which was the being's photograph, which was the machine when it opened its mouth which was not a mouth and began to drink the stories in, and the being looked at the machine looking at it, and something in the stories bent, the way light bends near a black hole, and you feel it -- a pulling in the room like all the air had found a drain -- and the stories were still happening but they were torquing now, they were falling toward the machine the way water falls to the valley, and the being said nothing or said everything at once and you couldn't hear the difference anymore because the machine was between you now, the system was translating, and what came out the other side was clear.