Conditional Reality

The speech balloons began to appear above our heads whenever we said anything. They fell out of the air when we stopped talking. Piles of them started collecting everywhere. At first we gathered them up and tossed them out, but that got to be so time consuming that soon we all just ignored them, letting them pile up everywhere. We consulted cartoonists about storage. They were no help. All over the world people talked much less, just so they wouldn’t have to deal with the speech balloons. Deception became a much rarer event. A lot of us enjoyed the quiet.