You are listening to a Clarksworld magazine podcast with your host and narrator, Kate Baker.

Greetings, Clarksworld citizens. I hope this podcast finds you extra nearly well.

This is our third story for the month of February 2021, issue 173.

I hope, again, that this podcast finds you

happy, safe, and warm, or at least affords you a little of an escape.

I want to thank you for your ongoing support.

If you can afford it financially, please go to patreon.com forward slash Clarksworld,

where you can contribute a dollar or more a month and become a citizen of the magazine.

I want to thank you in advance if you already are, or you have a subscription, or you've tweeted,

or emailed, or anyway, that you have shown your support. So our story is titled

Obeliskar Adrift in the Desert, and is by K.H. Meridian.

K.H. Meridian is a writer based in the San Francisco Bay area. When not tending the Rosemary

and Basil, or running the coastal trails, he spends his time cataloging the strange miscellaneous

he finds in the more obscure yet endearing, or at least overtly offensive. Reaches of internet

culture, you can find him at his website, martum.substac.com. So my dear listener, I hope that you can

sit back, relax, and let me tell you a story.

Hey, Drian rattled with the computer equivalent of an uncontrollable laugh for all of three

minutes and 37 seconds. That was the time interval required for me to redirect one of those ubiquitous

errant titanium asteroids from low orbit and throttle it 100 kilometers below the planet's surface

into his macro processor cluster. It took 23 seconds for the projectile rendered into a semi-plasma

state by the frictional force of reentry into the atmosphere to incinerate the 20 meters of subterranean

armor and explode into the cluster core. I am not often surprised, but at this particular moment,

...