Bag-el

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This morning a cow-orker sent out a company-wide email with the subject line "Bagels outside accounting". Oh no, thought me, a bag of bagels has left behind man's authority and set out on their own moral venture. What laws will this baker's dozen flout as they build their own alien society, one unrecognizable to humans but a shelter for the inscrutable bagel mind?*

First off, as I know that bagels are nothing if not stubbornly utopian, I'm betting that they will refuse to recognize property, currency and all the striving and getting that burden humanity in a market economy. Instead they will almost certainly opt for a network of agrarian collectives, bartering goods between colonies and maintaining little contact with the outside world. There they will build their gigantic bagel ovens and boiling vats, which day and night shall pour forth more of their kind. Some will willingly put themselves into bags and ship themselves off for consumption in order to garner funds for the collectives' major food source, which is cream cheese. The rest will spend their days at work and leisure, motion and repose, gradually erecting an edifice of bagel art and philosophy to rival our own. Or they'll just rip stuff off from us and insert the word 'bagel' here and there. Whatever happens, they will eventually end up competing with us for the last few cream cheese deposits left on Earth. A hellish future awaits the world as cream cheese extraction peaks and begins its inevitable decline. As supplies drop and the demand continues to ratchet up, you can expect those bagels to put aside their philosophy and pick up weapons** to gain control over their staple.

I couldn't let such a clear threat to humanity go unanswered. I left my desk and found the bag of bagels on the little table next to the accounting office. Only four in the bag (had the rest gone before to make straight the way for some Oneida bagel colony?): two dark pumpernickel and onion, one plain, and another a complex of brown spots and mottles of blood red. Plus some cream cheese on the side.

"What's the red one?" I called out.

"That's chocolate raspberry," someone answered.

Chocolate raspberry. I understood the truth of the matter then. Cleary it was us who had failed the bagels. After such cruelty, what more could they want with human socitey? Let them have their cream cheese. Let them rain down their delicious but deadly missiles on our cities, our towns, and all our works. We obviously deserve it.

*

*And where is the bagel mind? Our scientists have dissected countless bagels in vain, smearing on the exploratory cream cheese, testing the dark oniony bagel mass with teeth and tongue, but no seat of consciousness can be found. Maybe they have some kind of hive mind, with its motive centre resting in some bagel queen slumbering in a kosher bakery, quietly generating the axioms of bageldom. Yeah, that's probably it.

**Never mind the bagel mind, where is the bagel hand? The bagel limb? How do they get so much accomplished in a day?