"Accio Jensen index!" Harry cried, pointing his wand at the maintenance margin requirement. If he could just prevent Voldemort from off-balance-sheeting a little longer, he knew Hermione would come through with the EAMS differential disclosure. But Voldemort's equity was powerful, even with Dumbledore's setting value date on the Eurodollar; his random-walk didn't seem so random, and Harry was sure that even with translation exposure he could paper over his losses. "Autoregressive kedavra!" Voldemort snarled with a sudden fiduciary. Harry leaped aside, nearly forced to sell at a dirty price. If he hadn't set his global bonds to Market-if-touched he would have been forced into liquidity
he pushed it open, sending it creaking open on its ponderous corpulent hinges. Even the malfeasance of his memory, though, could not protect him from surprise at the sight he encountered within. A pallid arachnid, dressed in some kind of papal bustier, turned to face him. This mutant horror, closer to the size of a blimp than an ant, turned with a horrible temporal scream and faced him. It whipped back a corner of its bizarre liturgical negligee and pulled a deadly rune-covered sword from its scabbard. "Hm! No happy shindig today," he thought to himself, the single thought filling the usual vacuum of his mind. The sword swooped down and caught him a glancing blow. The horrific spider laughed with glee, but the cheer caught in its thorax as he rose, unhurt, to his feet. Thank God he was wearing his kevlar
He grabbed Steinfrau's nose. There was nothing for it now; he had to hang on, hang on for dear life, or else the mad German would be gone and there would be no way to prove his innocence. Steinfrau tried to roll up the window of the moving cab, but with a massive lunge he managed to jam his free hand in and around the crank; the pressure on his arm was terrible, but the window stopped in mid-rise, and the extra handgrip helped him hang on as the cab increased its speed. They were heading toward Midtown. There was a chance, a bare chance; if he could hook his ankle around the fence at the 59th Street sidewalk café he might be able to slow them down. But would he be able to? People were screaming, throwing things; there were angry shouts from theatregoers and commuters, traffic cops pointed at him and swore. Steinfrau seemed to be egging them on, damn him.
progress has achieved wonderful things, too. Paving. Asphalt. Smog. Car alarms that wake you up in the middle of the fucking night. Carcinogenic food. The Exxon Valdez. That stereo in the apartment upstairs. Hydrogen bombs. Hormone-injected meat. Artificial coloring. Alarm clocks (and a society so dependent on measured time that we need alarm clocks). Television, and a society that has replaced "How can we improve the human condition?" with "Hey, did'ja see the Simpsons last night? Huh huh". An Internet where people like us can waste away their free time instead of going out and having a life. Yeah! Progress! I love it! Get me the genetic splicing kit! I want to make a new kind of trout!