Do you remember that party where I was forced to break your face to teach you manners? You probably don't even remember the boy you brought along with you--uninvited, I may add--to my little affair. His name was Brian Anthony Sanders--a commonplace, boorish, stupid, and insufferably rude young man. Before we were even introduced, he made some insulting comment about my arm. I laughed it off, as I had learned to do. I even responded politely--answered his boorish questions, as though they were of no consequence. But I never forgot them. After the party, when he returned to his university, he found his scholarship canceled and a charge of cheating on his previous term's finals leveled against him, for which, I'm pleased to say, he was shortly expelled. Five years later--because I still had not forgotten--I had an accountant visit the firm where he was then working. A week later he was fired for embezzling some few paltry thousands of pounds sg from his employers--and actually spent three years incarcerated at hard labor for it, where I gather he regularly protested his innocence till he became the laughingstock of the other prisoners. Five years after that--by then he wasn't doing very well, as I recall (you probably remember him as a rather stocky boy; he'd become a very gaunt man)--when I had my people hunt him out ounce more, it was not difficult to have some minor drugs secreted in his room in the single-men's complex where he was now living--so that he was put out onto the street. Two years after that, when I decided to devote still another hour to seeing what I could do to tarnish the quality of his life, I discovered that he was still without a home--and had developed a serious drinking problem. A couple of particular ironies there: When we found him--in a ditch just below the highway that led to some storage hangars behind the space field--he was sleeping in a corrugated crate that had once been used to deliver a Red-shift manufactured intra-atmospheric turbine coupler. And somewhere, in some accident or other over the intervening time, he'd lost three fingers off his left hand--that, believe me, I had nothing to do with. but by then he simply didn't have what it took to go and get them replaced. It wasn't too hard, at that point, to shift his interests toward exactly those drugs that had made him homeless in the first place--a young woman in my employ plied him with the drugs daily at very high dosages...then disappeared, leaving him back on the street with only his habit to remember her by. The last time I checked--only three months back, actually--I learned that, after a colorful and recidivist penal career, trying to support that habit, Brian Anthony Sanders died...not a full year ago, of exposure to the cold in a dead-end alley of an inconsequential city of a few million folk on an icy world thousands of light-years from either yours or mine, doubtless cursing the gods of chance that had thwarted all his attempts to give himeslf a happy life--as though somehow he were just particularly allergic to the...bad luck plaguing him. Knowing I was a persistent, niggling factor in that plague is a wonderfully invigorating feeling, Lorq. Really, it's something everyone has envisioned--making the rude and thoughtless pay for their thoughtlessness for the rest of their lives. Well, I just happen to have been born powerful enough to do it.