The Categorical Universe of Candice Phee Read Online Free

from Another Dimension doesn’t fit neatly into this category). Hopefully, all will become clear. . . .
    My family. Mum, Dad, and Rich Uncle Brian. It’s clearly a complicated story, and I don’t know all the fine details. In fact, I don’t know many of the coarse details. Everyone has tried very hard to keep me in ignorance. I think that they think they are protecting me. But I would have to be living in a lead-lined coffin not to realize that everyone is miserable.
    I asked Mum, and she said it was all water under the bridge. For a while I pondered scenarios involving buckets and cantilevers (I mean, I know it’s a saying,but sometimes I can’t help myself). Dad mutters darkly under his breath but refuses to be more specific. Rich Uncle Brian says we are weathering a storm.
    Water flowing under bridges in a storm, while people mutter. Darkly.
    It’s not helpful.
    Luckily, I have picked up information over the years, simply by pretending to be invisible. Adults always fall for this. They will talk freely if you just hang back and blend in with the wallpaper. If you have wallpaper. If not, you have to blend in with the paint.
    What follows is part of the story. I believe there is more water that has yet to hit a bridge.
    Dad and Rich Uncle Brian were once partners in a business, back when Rich Uncle Brian was just Uncle Brian. In fact, I think it started before I was born, so Uncle Brian wasn’t even an uncle. Just Brian. It was a business involving computers. I know nothing about computers and don’t care to learn. Which is strange, since I hail from a genetic line of people who love the things. However, though I don’t know much, I do know a little.
    Dad—present-day Dad—builds computers and takes them apart. The original business didn’t do that. Brian and Dad . . . Actually, Dad wasn’t Dad then, either. So Brian and James (who became my uncle and father, respectively) devised software, the thing (I don’t know exactly; don’t ask me) that makes the machines run whatever the machines run. Word-processing programs andsuchlike. They didn’t pick up a screwdriver. They picked up pens and wrote code.
    Any idiot who can manipulate Legos can put a computer together (I quote my Dad), but it takes talent to program (I quote Rich Uncle Brian). Many people were doing it.
    The brothers’ business was performing quite well, but it wasn’t performing completely and utterly well. No one was buying yachts, or fast cars with only two seats. Then Brian (a.k.a. Rich Uncle Brian) patented a piece of software that he designed.
    Here is where things get tricky and one person’s truth apparently doesn’t coincide with another person’s truth. Dad doesn’t believe Brian did all the designing. He thinks Brian used some of his ideas. Rich Uncle Brian, it seems, disagrees. Mum thinks that even if Rich Uncle Brian did invent the software, it was unfair to have patented it in just his name, since the brothers were in business together and should share.
    It is easy to guess what happened. The software was a huge success (it has something to do with social networking—that’s it, don’t ask me any more) and money flowed in like stormwater under a bridge. But all the money flowed into Uncle Brian’s pocket, making him Rich Uncle Brian. There was a court case. Nasty things, unforgivable things, were said. The business was sold to pay legal costs.
    But, when everything was over, Uncle Brian was Rich Uncle Brian and Dad was broken and broke. Rich Uncle Brian bought a yacht. Dad bought a small white van and a remote-controlled airplane.
    My family. Chaos. They’re
almost
synonyms.

D Is for Dimensions
    I want to tell you how I met Earth-Pig Fish.
    About six months ago, Rich Uncle Brian took me to a fair. It wasn’t one of those fairs with craft stalls, people in cowboy hats wrestling steers, and woodchoppers turning logs