What's in the box?

I did not so much wake, as phase out of sleep, fully lucid at zero dark thirty. Algid night air fraught with the promise of a storm. Distant heels clicking on the pavement, the odd murmur of a night bus. Thunderbolts at 3 AM. One of those rare occasions when you cheat the circadian rhythm, doing a U-turn from REM to NREM1. 

No point in going back to bed, I brewed the usual quadruple espresso con leche, lit up and watched the storm bloom through the night. Electric tendrils of lightning inscribing the sky with chevrons of a primal, ineffable tongue. Raindrops like radio static. Random memories, like phantom images on a dead channel coursing through the mind. 

Ten hours later, mid commute on a sidewalk of boiling asphalt, the sky radiating heat at what felt like five hundred degrees, I almost got beat up. Not got into a fight. The outcome would have been singular from the start. If not for my glib tongue and the happenstance presence of a stranger. Wrong place, wrong time. Benevolent quantum states.

Right now, the adrenaline rush long abated, I'm thinking gulags, pogroms, IQ-based mass genocide. Frank Herbert's quote ringing in my ears.
“Ever sift sand through a screen? We Bene Gesserit sift people to find the humans.”