nd later the building's top emits a bolt of lightning that broke
even Tesla's record for man-made lightning, recorded at nearly a kilometer in
length. A clap of thunder accompanies it, louder than any sound I have ever
heard, and it its wake I am perfectly deaf, submerged in silence.

The finger of lightning crawls through space like a broken-back rattler, and my
hair rises from my shoulders. In the presence of so much current, I should be
petrified, but it is magnificent. The finger seeks and seeks, then contacts one
of the saucers and literally blasts it out of the sky. It plummets in
slow-motion, and as it does, the building's top descends even further, and I
_swear_ I see the chair falling from the building's edge, and the man strapped
inside it had not aged a day in all the lifetimes gone by.

#

Chet's comm died somewhere in the lightning strike, but the emergency crews that
took him away and looked in his ears and poked him in the chest and gave him
pills take him back to the Royal York in a saucer, bridging the distance in a
few minutes, touching down on Front Street. The Royal York's doorman doesn't bat
an eye as he gets the door for him.

The elevator ride is fine. He is still wrapped in the silence of his deafness,
but it's a comforting, _centering_ silence.

Once Chet is back in his room, he fires up the vid and starts writing a letter
to The Amazing Robotron.

--

<!--

<rdf:RDF xmlns="http://web.resource.org/cc/"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"> <Work
rdf:about="http://craphound.com/place/Cory_Doctorow_-_Home_Again_Home_Again.txt"
> <dc:title>Home Again, Home Again</dc:title> <dc:date>1999-2-1</dc:date>
<dc:description>A science&#45;fiction short story by Cory Doctorow about aliens
subjugating humans by putting them into mental institutions, from the short
story collection "A Place So Foreign and Eight More," published by Four Walls
Eight Windows press in September, 2003 (ISBN: 1568582862)</dc:description>
<dc:creator><Agent> <dc:title>Cory Doctorow</dc:title> </Agent></dc:creator>
<dc:rights><Agent> <dc:title>Cory Doctorow</dc:title> </Agent></dc:rights>
<dc:type rdf:resource="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text" /> <license
rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0/" /> </Work>

<License rdf:about="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0/"> <permits
rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Reproduction