To find Louis Fegelmeyer at the center of the world -- at the Omphalos -- is somewhat surprising. The center of the world moves constantly -- that's why the world moves constantly. If you had the perspective of a god, you would see it as a beam of light. Occasionally someone intersects the beam and their actions set off the ripples called history. Some adepts of this or that mystical school may recognize the light when it strikes them. They spend their whole lives waiting for the beam, and if they're lucky (they call it karma) the beam, the Axis Mundi, passes through them. They know they have to act quickly for the beam may only touch them for a few seconds. At the best it may hang around for a week or so. James Watt was near the beam when he invented the steam engine. Steam engine. Steam engine. Steam engine. And the world was transformed from an agrarian society to an industrial one in one hundred and fifty years. Nice going James. Hero of Alexandria also invented the steam engine, but the beam was somewhere in India at the time. Hero's engine was a toy that amused the public two, three days tops.

Louis Fegelmeyer, who hadn't had any sort of mystical training, stood five feet four inches tall; had brown hair, light brown (almost yellow) eyes; wore a brown corduroy ("wears like iron") coat, and on occasions when he felt exceptionally daring, sported a red tie. He managed the accounts at Dependable Appliances with the aid of his trusty IBM clone.

There had been hints that the world beam was approaching Dependable Appliances. On Monday Louis' hair had stood up while shaving -- during this electric frisson he had cut himself with his razor. He'd stopped at the pharmacy to buy bandages, but all the bandages were gone. "There's been a rush on them," said the clerk, whose own chin was bandaged. Louis got to work fifteen minutes late, but that was okay because the boss Ralph Schmenge was late too. So were the customers. On Tuesday Louis lost his contacts and his wife Sarah-Anne had to drive him to work before going to her own job managing the Daisy Smiles Laundromat. The House of Representatives passed HR0135, a bill of some 2,374 pages ostensibly a Highways Beautification Act, but containing a clause on page 1066 giving unlimited power to Jason Sykes, a Congressional page who had slipped the clause in as a joke. Such revolutions and near coups are often snuck into bills and promptly ferreted out by devoted staffs who read every page, every sentence, every word of the damned things. But a case of collective eye fatigue had hit a thousand staffers, the most dedicated of whom read only to page 825. That evening Jason visited Potomac Pawn and spent his life savings on a 14-carat gold crown which had formerly belonged to Emperor Norton. On Wednesday Louis found his contacts in his medicine chest. The Senate examined HR0135 and after a short deliberation sent their Master of Arms S. T. Nakt to kill Jason Sykes for High Treason. These things never make the papers. On Thursday the beam was only meters from Louis' desk. Ms. Vye Bailey, salesperson and health food faddist, brought carob brownies for everyone. Louis picked up one -- thinking it chocolate -- swallowed and began choking. Twenty-three auto fatalities occurred within seconds. "I don't know what happened, officer. This guy was driving normally and then he was grabbing at his throat. He went right into that pylon and that's all she wrote."

On Friday Louis enjoyed a pleasant breakfast of reconstituted orange juice, poached eggs, and whole wheat toast. His lawn gleamed with dew and his neighborhood with smiles. Louis felt that the whole world was fresh and happy (which, of course, it was). He whistled on his way to work and that high-spirited dissonance echoed in the disappearing forests of Amazonia and the cold deserts of Mongolia....

Pleasantville.

He booted his system and a hitherto unseen message appeared on the screen. Drive C **FULL** Now Louis had vaguely supposed that files went somewhere -- a misty foggy land beyond the screen the same neutral gray of the background -- but he never felt it was something that could fill up. He starting pulling up file after file to see if there was anything he could delete, but each account held some fascination for him. All those marvelous details. Mrs. Knockworster, who had left a basket full of kittens and a check for the balance of her account at their doorstep (thereby hoping to discharge two obligations at once). Mr. T. O. Mann, who had paid for his refrigerator with Spanish gold of an ancient date. Miss Belinda Johnson, who had come to the store after hours and persuaded him to accept sex in lieu of a monthly. Was she enjoying her five-function microwave as much as he the memory of her orange lipstick staining his body? All of this data, he felt like a god -- everything had grown from his first entry -- from one word.

Louis didn't know it, but this oceanic feeling came from the world beam, which had just struck him.

Desperate, he pulled the manual out from under the telephone, shook off the dust, and consulted. He found a nice little utility called Compress. Louis smiled. He seldom found solutions to life's problems this easily. He ran the utility feeding it file after file. The utility looked for similarities and reduced them to singularities. Huge files could be squeezed to near nothing.

And the ripples....

The Pentagon, one of the nation's most redundant structures, suddenly collapsed into a one-room pentahoidal shack with a bored PFC pushing one of three buttons, Buy, Lie, Kill. Every red Corvette merged into a single red Corvette. Most of the drivers merged too, but some found themselves standing on the freeway watching other cars vanish like popping soap bubbles. Louis' track house neighborhood contracted into three model homes, each representing one of the available models, and these too collapsed into one. Sarah-Anne watched all her washers become one washer, but that seemed OK -- she only had one customer anyway. When her laundromat began to move through space to be stored with all the other laundromats, she was only slightly dizzy.

Louis worked all day -- unaware that the entire front of the shop had vanished. He had reduced the data to half size and if he really worked it he could halve it again. Equestrian statues galloped into one another, newspapers rustled into a single sheet, sitcoms resolved into a single I Love Lucy episode. Soup became condensed soup became one can, which included many of Andy Warhol's paintings.

When quitting time came, Louis stepped out of the beam. Everything looked fuzzy. Maybe he'd lost his contacts. He drove his generic featureless car, which seemed filled with millions of tiny invisible features, which made his hair itch. His house had become a child's painting. Door in the center, window on each side, smoke out of the chimney. Maybe Sarah-Anne had redone the place. He'd never been very good at noticing things away from work. He went in, kissed the blurry shape that was his wife and millions of other wives, sat down to a generic dinner, watched I Love Lucy four times, and went to bed where he dreamed the fate of the world. The compaction continued. Stone into stone, life into life, water into water until stone, water, and life had disappeared. Earth and all its glory sank to a single green phosphor on God's TV screen. Then that too vanished. And in the long run, in the very long run, it
didn't matter at all.