✴︎✴︎✴︎

LOST CHAPTER: "Adequate at Being Pointless"

From the papers of Kurt Vonnegut, unpublished appendix to Player Piano (ca. 1952)

(Editor's note: Discovered in a manila folder labeled "TOO WEIRD? HOLD FOR LATER")

Scene: The Anchor Bar & Grill, Ilium, New York

The machines had stopped screaming.

For the first time in living memory, the city of Ilium was quiet enough to hear a beer fizz.

Paul Proteus sat in a sagging booth with Finnerty, Lasher, and three machine shop rebels whose names he'd never caught. They weren't leaders or poets or engineers. They were just people who used to be useful.

Finnerty tilted his glass, watching the bubbles rise and die. "So that's it? Revolution accomplished. We've successfully broken things."

Lasher scratched his neck. "Maybe revolutions aren't supposed to fix anything. Maybe they're just how people admit they're scared."

The bar's only light flickered. Outside, a conveyor belt groaned one final time before going stiff and silent.

A machinist stood. "I'm gonna fix the hot plate. I could murder a grilled cheese."

Nobody objected.

Entry of the Cosmic Auditor

The jukebox gave a death rattle and switched itself into something approximating Morse code.

The overhead lights flickered in rhythmic bursts. Bottles on the shelf danced a little two-step.

Then—outside the fogged window—a chrome plunger the size of a streetcar descended from the clouds.

It landed gently in the alley. No explosion. No overture. Just a polite hiss of steam and a blinking red bulb.

A hatch irised open.

Out stepped a tall, bluish figure with too many joints and a clipboard that pulsed like a jellyfish. Stamped across its uniform, in a cheerful sans serif:

"PLANETARY GAP YEAR PROGRAM — GALAXY CLUSTER 5"

"Good evening," it said in clean, mildly bored English. "Is this a representative cultural node?"

Nobody moved.

The alien pressed a button. A glowing slide appeared in the air above the bar:

EARTH: FINAL EVALUATION

Mr. Mentat Presents

"My name is Mentat," the alien said. "Assistant Practicum Supervisor for Cohort 7-BZ-Flapjack."

Finnerty blinked. "Flapjack?"

"It's randomly assigned. You'd prefer it was meaningful?"

Paul stood, hesitated. "What do you mean, final evaluation?"

Mentat tapped the clipboard. A sequence of slides appeared:

• A caveman inventing a wheel.
• A medieval scribe drawing doodles of goats.
• A man in a bathrobe screaming at a toaster.

"Thirty millennia ago, your species was selected to test an emergent hypothesis," Mentat said. "What happens when a sentient biped becomes, from a systems perspective, utterly redundant?"

Finnerty muttered, "I knew it."

"You've reached full automation. Social detachment. Identity erosion. Despair. And yet…" Mentat gestured toward the half-fixed jukebox, the man reassembling the hot plate, the beer being poured for strangers.

"You kept making noise. Drawing chalk on sidewalks. Asking pointless questions."

Another slide: a finger-painted giraffe labeled UNCLE.

"You didn't excel," Mentat said. "But you didn't collapse, either."

He pressed the final slide:

EARTH: ADEQUATE AT BEING POINTLESS (Final score: 62%)

The Box and the Bar

Mentat set a crate gently on the bar. It was no bigger than a breadbox, wrapped in soft material labeled:

"FOR WHEN YOU'RE READY — SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED"

Paul looked at it sideways. "What's inside?"

"A test. A gift. A joke. It changes depending on who opens it." Mentat paused. "You won't open it until you've stopped trying."

Finnerty stared. "So what now? Do we evolve into beams of light, or just go back to drinking?"

"Yes," Mentat said, ambiguously.

He looked toward the jukebox. "I like this one. Jazz in 5/4 time is popular in ten dimensions."

He pressed a final button. The machine resumed playing something smoky and off-kilter. Outside, the ship warmed up.

Paul asked, quietly, "Why tell us this?"

"Every cohort has someone who needs a reason. You're it."

And with that, the ship rose. No applause. No explosions. Just polite ascent and vanishing into a sky that hadn't changed one bit.

Postscript: Paul

The bar was still buzzing, but Paul stepped outside.

He sat on the curb, coffee gone cold in his hand, and listened to the city without machines.

A light wind moved the trees—real ones. Not sensor-linked. Not optimized for photosynthesis. Just messy, irregular trees.

Someone had strung up a banner across the street months ago. It read:

"CONGRATULATIONS ON FULL EFFICIENCY!"

Someone else had crossed out "EFFICIENCY" and painted over it, in big black brushstrokes:

"IMPROVISATION"

Paul read it twice. Then again.

He set the coffee down and smiled, just a little.

Final Line

It was the worst of times for efficiency, and—by golly—the best of times for tipsy sing-alongs.

Editor's note: The crate from this story reappears briefly in an unused outline for Breakfast of Champions, where Kilgore Trout mails it to the President of the Moon. Its contents were never specified.