La velocidad y la monarquía

"Practically everything can move faster than the light of the Disc, which is slow and gentle, unlike ordinary light. According to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle, the only known thing that moves faster than ordinary light is the monarchy. He arrived at this conclusion through the following reasoning: you cannot have more than one king, and tradition demands that there be no intervals between one king and the next, so that when a king dies, the succession must pass to the heir instantly. According to Wheedle, it is likely that there exist certain elementary particles — reions or perhaps reionas — that are responsible for carrying out this function, but it must be borne in mind that sometimes the succession fails if, mid-flight, they collide with an antiparticle, or republicon. His ambitious plan to use this discovery to send messages — for which purpose he had to carefully torture a minor king in order to modulate the signal — was never fully developed, because at that point they closed the bar on him."

Terry Pratchett, en Mort, novela de la serie Mundodisco