I want my own office," Lena said. "My own space to work from."

Social Services paused for a while to think. Lena knew that it was thinking, because the woman in the magic mirror kept animating her eyes this way and that behind cat-eye horn-rims. She did so in perfect meter, making her look like one of those old clocks where the cat wagged its tail and looked to and fro, to and fro, all day and all night, forever and ever. Lena had only ever seen those clocks in media, so she had no idea if they really ticked. But she imagined they ticked terribly. The real function of clocks, it seemed to her, was not to tell time but to mark its passage. Ticktickticktick. Byebyebyebye.

Illustration: Kurt Caesar (?) Tell me the difference between these two pieces of text.

The dilemma of how to reconcile the needs of security with the desire for humanity is the defining question of the twenty-first century. This sentence opens my thesis, "Loss Prevention:… Read the rest of the article: Surfaces – a short story for a thesis on border security