This number, or lack of number, has been the primary focus of philosophers for as long as accountants have insisted that it exists. Philosophers have worked with exceptional diligence to prove that it does not actually exist, specifically those same philosophers whose accountants have told them their ledger has reached a level of zero. Over a period of generations many wars have been waged on the matter of whether or not zero exists and more than a handful of accountants were lynched during this campaign. Though loss of life is always tragic, it is generally regarded that these people probably had it coming.
Most of the philosophers were quieted and themselves lynched upon revelation that their own balance sheets had already dipped well into the red screaming promptly past the contested zero value, but that’s little consolation to the families of dead accountants. Many children and widows were forced to stare down into graves with passionate indifference as their beloved’s remains were buried.
The consolation that resolved the difference was that zero does not and can not exist, but that negative zero does and its value is likewise nill. Once this pact was established, all self-proclaimed philosophers who signed on to the “zero isn’t” campaign were summarily executed or sent to hardish labor camps, and the universe was a better place for it, at least according to the victors who ultimately wrote the history books on the matter.
Shallow sea hydro-archaeologists working in the warm ocean waters off the southern coast of Georgia discovered his remains and determined to the surprise of prominent historians of the time that the animatronic President Lincoln was in fact a self-motile robot.
