The Brave New World wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. A**m had become aware of this at his job. He worked for one of those bookstores that also sold CD’s, DVD’s, soaps, incenses, candles, purses, had a restaurant inside, and provided babysitting services. Each cash register at his store was equipped with an enormous robotic arm designed exclusively to prevent customers from having to do menial tasks such as getting the receipt for their purchase out of the shopping bag so that they could record the transaction in their checkbook, or reaching to get an ink pen out of the coffee mug in front of the register where the pens were kept. There had been litigation over arthritic conditions caused by customers having to reach inside a brown paper bag for a small sheet of paper. The arm itself was a thing of wonder. It moved impossibly slow, made a noise so loud that you could hear nothing else in the store until it was finished, and it often required so much power that the lights in the store would flicker and the other registers would freeze up. But customers would endure all of this rather than reach into the shopping bag to grasp the receipt. And the technological advances didn’t stop there. There were robots to perform almost any task or remove any burden from their owners. There were robots to teach your children the birds and the bees, robots to combine peanut butter and jelly for a tasty sandwich, and even robots to operate machinery which had been designed to keep its owner from having to perform a particular task. Calluses were obsolete. No one perspired. A certain ancestor of **am’s would have been dismayed to learn that greeting cards were written in binary code, leaving only the name of the relative or acquaintance receiving the card. A typical greeting card would read: “Dear Aunt _____: 1001110011110001110011111.” Even subversion was designed to be less problematic. It had long been known that the sarcasm of the younger generation was the intended result of a government program. The consensus was that we had met the Buddha in the road and killed him. Life didn’t have to be a constant cycle of suffering- life could be a Never-ending Groove of Fabuliciousocity!