"We've come to kill you."

"Yes."

"Don't you want to know why?"

"No."

"You're presence up here has become a nuisance to certain powerful families and more than one multi-national corporation."

"..."

"Any last requests?"

"I want to show you something."

"What?"

"A video."

"What kind?"

"Dangerous."

"How is it dangerous?"

"It will make you decide not to kill me, and you will have big trouble in the valley."

Jeff snickered.

"Sure. Show it to us, then it's lights out for Lao-Tze."

"Come in."

They followed him inside. Mutt spoke.

"MTV?"

"Might as well be. Tea?"

They declined.

"It's a video of my head."

Jeff yawned, covering his mouth.

"People out there think I live in a state of continuous something-or-other. I don't. My 'contact,' my sense of 'unity,' whatever, is intermittent. Though when it comes, it lives up to its repuation. Once, when I was much younger, I hied me hence futurewise and directly impinged my conscious state on a video tape, which of course wouldn't exist for several thousand years."

Jeff was dozing off. Mutt nudged him.

"First you'll see a good sample of my day-to-day consciousness, and it'll look quite familiar, pretty much like your own. But then, here comes the dangerous part, you'll see the 'shift' or whatever, and you'll get a pretty strong whiff of perfumial existence like we one-noses never thought possble."

"How long."

"Long enough."