Dust and Dreams

by Hand of Vengeance

Between the two of them, poets Horace and Housman declared human existence dust and dreams. Through short stories I characterise the dust and dreams of two souls: the endeavors and realisations, the aspirations and losses of Edogawa Conan and Haibara Ai.

1. 01 always

.01 – always

She always one-upped defeat. Regardless of the problem at hand, there was always a solution; and she always found said solution.

When she was imprisoned and slated for execution by the Syndicate, she escaped her sentence through a trash chute.Haibara – 1, Defeat – 0.

When the same organisation burned down her lab to deny her access to the files on the toxin she'd created, she came up with an antidote anyway.
Haibara – 2, Defeat – 0.

When that boy captured Vodka and shot her a contemptuous glance for having stayed home that night, she brought down the Syndicate within a week. (Her absence during Vodka's capture was due to the fact that she'd been home engineering the Organisation's downfall, but she let him think that with just a week to devise and execute her plan she'd achieved what he could only dream of doing.)
Haibara – 3, Defeat – 0.
And so on.

So when Microsoft Word, deeming itself the paragon of omniscience, saw fit to impose its all knowing presence upon every text based file in her computer, effectively stripping the meticulously chosen code of her newest project and replacing it with a useless tangle of nonsensical words, she calmly sat back and weighed her options. Half an hour and half a million tries later, an uncharacteristic, enraged scream tore from her lips.

There's always an exception to always.