Jeremy Bornstein	58,614 words
3815 Susan Dr., #M-12	(word processor’s count)
San Bruno, CA 94066
Tel: (415) 738-2529
Fax: (408) 974-5505
Email: <uke@rollover.com>

Rollover
by
Jeremy Bornstein

draft #2
reading copy for friends
please do not distribute

Prologue

There was something disturbing about the man sitting there three rows behind him, in the window seat on the other side of the aisle.  Of course, Agent Randolph Flournoy was subtle when he looked at him, using all the appropriate techniques of distraction that he had learned in his many years of covert operations.  He just casually spilled a little of his soda into the aisle, said "darn!" and got up out of his seat to ask a flight attendant for a napkin.  On the way to the back of the plane it was simple to catch a few glimpses of the suspected counterespionage agent.
The fourth time he performed this routine, he was positive.  The man had been following him since Amsterdam, at least.  His seedy, deep-set little rodent eyes gave him away.  His dark blue suit that looked like it had been bought from a junk dealer in Prague.  The thinning black hair--obviously dyed--combed over the growing bald spot in the center of his head.  All clues.  Everything was a clue to Agent Flournoy.  The fact that the man wore brown socks with his blue suit, but black wingtips.  Agent Flournoy was proud of his powers of observation and deduction.
Ex-Agent Flournoy, maybe, he thought.  Ever since Namibia, the Sweatshop didn't seem to trust him.  They had even gone so far as to put on this charade of firing him, but he knew all too well that nobody ever really left.  Of course, his salary was no longer being depositied into his Swiss bank account, and for months there had been no messages left for him in any of his regular drops, and as a result his confidence in this analysis was beginning to waver...  but still had not disappeared completely.  It could all be part of an even more elaborate cover than usual.  Internal Affairs.  Internal investigations.  Trouble on the inside.  He was being called to investigate irregularities in his own department.  If he could only figure out what his mission was.  The mission per se could be of secondary importance, though, since he was positive he was now being followed by some enemy.  He no longer had his gun, but he could still kill a man in twenty ways with a pencil.  Flournoy reached up to his breast pocket and felt the sharpened pencils there.
Right now he was on a plane back to San Francisco.  He was almost out of money.  His last official contact had been a few months ago when he had tried to get some instructions and money from his old controller in Prague, but the meeting hadn't gone very well.  Granchfeld had never been very nice to him, in fact, but the meeting had certainly been an escalation in rudeness.
Granchfeld's office had still been in the same place it had always been in for the past few years.  It was in a bar.  Above the bar, actually, in a dusty little office cluttered with old literary magazines.  The only patrons at the time were two burly-looking wrestler types in matching plaid pants and suspenders, who hadn't even looked up from their huge beer steins when Flournoy had come in from the street.  Leftovers from Oktoberfest, probably, he had thought.
Granchfeld's secretary had been filing her nails when Flournoy trod up the stairs and into her vestibule.
"Sir, can I help you?  Sir!  Sir, you can't go in there!"
He had, of course, ignored her, thrown the door open and walked right into the office.
Granchfeld was in conference.  The guy he was meeting with was sitting across from him in that really comfortable overstuffed chair that looked like a martini olive.  He was wearing some sort of strange sunglasses with mirrored orange lenses; a silly-looking beret perched on top of his curly brown hair made him look like a deranged sidewalk musician.
Flournoy ignored the visitor and glared at Granchfeld. "I demand to know what's going on!" he said.  "I have received no instructions in months.  None of my drops have been active.  I'm at my wits' end."
"You're far beyond that, my boy," said Granchfeld, glancing briefly at his other visitor before staring into Flournoy's eyes.  "You're off your rocker is where you are.  Round the bend.  You no longer work for us.  We told you that months ago."
"Yeah, yeah, I know the cover story."
"Look at me, man."  Granchfeld stood up.  "It's no cover.  You've become unstable and unreliable.  You are no longer an asset.  You're off the books.  Your pension is activated.  Go back to  the San Francisco office to sign the papers."
"I just want you to give me a straight answer," Flournoy said, his voice beginning to shake.
"Randy, I'm really sorry that it worked out this way.  I know you're still young.  But you know the business.  Pressure, you know."  He shrugged, then reached into his desk and came out with a wad of cash.  "Here's some money for your ticket.  Please, go to San Francisco and sign the papers.  They're expecting you."
"Just give me a--"
But Ex-Agent Flournoy didn't get to finish his sentence, because at that moment the door opened, and with feline grace the two identically-dressed bruisers from the bar strode in, grabbed his arms, and dragged him down the stairs.
"But I didn't get to find out what he wanted," Flournoy had said as the bodyguards pushed him out the door into the street.
This humiliating incident was followed by weeks of slinking around Europe, hitching rides and systematically investigating all of his previous drops and contacts.  Nothing had been there at all.  And he became even more certain than ever that he was being followed.  It was more than a feeling.  It was a really strong feeling.  A really really strong feeling.  He could just swear something was going on.
Finally he had returned to Prague, to the bar.  Everything looked the same from the outside.  Oh, there was a new American bartender.  A sexy girl in her early 20's with a weird name.  But when he turned the corner to go upstairs to Granchfeld's office, he was met with an electrical junction box in an otherwise blank wall.  There was no more upstairs office.
Walking back down the halway, he returned to the main bar area.
"What happened to the upstairs office?" he asked the bartender.
"Excuse me?" she said.
"There used to be an office upstairs.  Now there's just a wall.  What's the deal?"
"Can I get you something to drink, sir?" she asked.  "I don't know anything about any upstairs office."
"How long have you worked here?"
"Oh, I don't know.  A while.  I don't really want to talk about it, okay?"
That had been a bust.  The only thing left was to return to San Francisco.  Maybe the thing about the pension was real.  Maybe he had lost his job.  But he was still being followed.  Maybe an enemy had figured out who he was and was preparing to kidnap him.  He would be taken to a secret hideout in Liechtenstein and tortured until he revealed secret details of the Sweatshop's operations in Lybia, Botswana, and, yes, Namibia.  Never!  He had to tell his bosses what was going on, but the only way seemed to be to return to the states, to San Francisco.
So he was on a plane to San Francisco now, bought with practically the last of his money.  He had filed a will with a lawyer in Amsterdam.  Just in case he were to die, he had set up a message drop of his own at an American company.  The will had instructions for how to retrieve messages that he would leave on the service; the messages would be published in a few newspapers and sent to the President of the United States when Flournoy shuffles off this mortal coil.  Flournoy figured that'd do it.  He hasn't left any messages there yet, but if he were to find out anything concrete...
Against his better judgement, Flournoy turned around in his airplane seat.  He quickly popped his head up to stare at the person he suspected of being an enemy agent.  The man was asleep, his head cradled by the shoulder of the elderly lady in the center seat, resting on her beige flower print dress.  Satisfied for the moment, he sat back down again and resumed his planning.
Across the aisle from Ex-Agent Flournoy sat a thin man wearing sunglasses with mirrored orange lenses and a beret.  His name was Kavanaugh.  He was very happy.  His target was finally returning to the United States, where he was authorized to terminate him with extreme prejudice.  A classic turn of phrase, he thought.
Kavanaugh shook his head.  When he had been a young boy, an aspiring assasin, he had never dreamed of all the intricate bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo that would be involved in a simple killing, especially one of your own agents.  You'd think that you could just off them in an alley somewhere, but not on your life, so to speak.  There were forms in triplicate.  Cross-departmental signatures.  Off-site filing requirements.  And then after you were assigned to the job, you find out that the operation had only been authorized on U. S. soil.  Doesn't create an incident in case there is a problem, they said.  But there had never been a problem on any of his jobs.  Not one.
If the man had only stepped into a U. S. embassy!  Just for a minute!  But no, the psycho loser had to wander around Europe for months, staring into blind alleys and hebephrenically shaking on dilapidated city buses.  Kavanaugh had stuck to him so close it was amazing that he hadn't been noticed, but the intelligence he had received about the target's powers of observation had been more than accurate.  He certainly appeared to be agitated, popping up and down on the plane like that every two minutes.  The flight attendants were really starting to get pissed at him.
Finally the plane began its descent into San Francisco International Airport, slowly lowering itself through the winter rain clouds that covered the bay.  It was early in the morning and the captain made his announcement.
Soon the plane was on the ground, baggage had been retrieved, and the passengers had begun to shamble off towards customs.  Kavanaugh stuck closely to Flournoy.  He figured that as soon as they were past customs, in the uncontrolled part of the airport, that it would be easy to whack him.  There are records of who's in the international section, though, and so he figured he could wait a few more minutes.
The passengers arrived en masse at the customs inspection stations.  Kavanaugh got in line directly behind his target, who was still looking wildly around for conspirators and spies.  The inspector declined to examine Flournoy's one suitcase and he walked on through.
Kavanaugh only had a small over-the-shoulder bag, so he was not worried about customs.  In fact, it was perhaps this appearance of overconfidence that induced the inspector to ask him to open his bag.
"Huh?" he said.
"I said, please open your bag, sir," said the customs agent, a large Samoan man with a friendly smile.
"There's nothing in it."
"Well then it won't take that long, sir."
"I need to go."
"This won't take long, sir, if there aren't any problems."
"I'm going to miss my ride," Kavanaugh said, trying to follow Flournoy's progress through the crowd.
The customs agent stopped smiling.  "Is this going to be a problem, sir?"
Kavanaugh's shoulders sunk.  "No."  He opened his bag.
Another customs agent strolled over, a thin woman with bright red hair.  "You got a problem, Maurice?"
"Artists always give us problems, don't they?" said Maurice as he began to empty Kavanaugh's bag.  "Usually drugs."
"I'm not an artist.  I don't use drugs."
Both agents stopped and looked up at him without raising their heads from his bag.  Then they looked at each other and smiled.
"Sure you don't, buddy," said the red-haired agent, still smiling.  She picked up a condom from the pile of small items that had been removed from the bag and triumphantly displayed it.  "Then what's this?"
"It's a condom!"
"Oh.  I knew that," she said.
***
Thirty minutes later, after a meticulous examination of everything in Kavanaugh's bags and pockets, after a body cavity search, after several demeaning comments about the status in society of those who pursue artistic endeavor, Kavanaugh is told that he is "free to go."
After passing through the customs inspection station, Flournoy had spent the next half hour in the nearest bathroom, sitting on the toilet and complaining to himself about the constipating effects of airline food on his digestive system.  He was almost about to rise at the same time that Kavanaugh decided that the search was hopeless--that Flournoy had been lost in the airport and there was no hope.  Kavanaugh sat down on the floor next to a pay phone and rested his hands on his knees and his head in his hands.  He was almost crying.
Inside the bathroom, Flournoy sat holding a piece of toilet paper when the latch of his stall was flipped up from the outside with the help of a wire coat hanger.
The door opened and a man brandished a knife at his belly.  "Give me your wallet," he said.  "Don't do anything funny or you will die."
Flournoy said, "Okay, no problem.  Stay calm.  My wallet is in my breast pocket.  I'm going to get it very slowly."  His mind raced.  This couldn't be a simple mugging.  What are the odds?  This man is the real enemy agent.  He was contacted by the man who followed me from Amsterdam.  They're going to kidnap me and take me to their hideout in Daly City and torture me.  Not a chance, he thought, not a chance.
He dropped the toilet paper and slowly reached for his pocket.  With a sudden motion, he grabbed a pencil with the intention of stabbing his assailant in the eye.
Unfortunately for him, his assailant was faster.  Flournoy was stabbed once, right below his ribcage.  The assailant received a scratch on his cheek from the pencil, then grabbed the wallet from Flournoy's pants and left the bathroom.
The pain was excruciating.  Flournoy held a hand tightly against the wound as he pulled up his pants with the other hand, using his elbow to help hold the pants up.
He realized that he might die.  Bright spots were appearing in his vision and it was hard to balance.  But the importance of this new information gave him strength--he had foiled a kidnapping attempt by an enemy agent.  This was definitely something to preserve.  He had to leave a message, especially if he was about to die.  He just had to hold on until he could get to a phone.
Kavanaugh sat sniffling on the floor of the airport when he saw Flournoy stagger out of the bathroom.
A mother and her little girl passed by.
"Mommy, why is that man walking funny?" said the little girl.
The mother said, "Shhh!  It's not polite to comment on the physical disabilities of those less fortunate than you are.  I'm sure that he leads a very fulfilling and rewarding life."  She walked faster, dragging her child by the hand.
Kavanaugh's jaw dropped and he began to cough violently.  Flournoy walked right up to the pay phone.  He picked up the receiver and cradled it against his shoulder, then used the same hand to drop some coins into the slot.
The phone rang, and a female voice said, "C. D. S."  Agent Flournoy pressed "5" on the telephone keypad.
"Please enter your account number."
More numbers.  Flournoy felt blood and something else trying to come out of his stab wound, and his arm was losing the strength to hold everything inside.  He pressed himself against the plastic cover of the telephone book and that seemed to help.
"Please enter amount of transaction, followed by the po--"
He pressed "0#".
"Please ent--"
Zero and pound sign again, quickly interrupting the voicemail system as soon as his weakening muscles allowed.  Flournoy almost fell down but caught hold of the top of the telephone with his free hand.  His eyes closed and he silently mouthed the word "please."
"Pl--"
"If you wi--"
Finally he heard, "If you wish to record a verbal note about this transaction, please speak now," followed by the traditional beep.
Agent Flournoy tried to clear his throat but only wheezed.  "I finally have proof.  They're after me.  I didn't tell them anything, but I've been stabbed.  I was followed from Amsterdam and they made a handoff.  It was disguised as a robbery.  I... I didn't tell them anything.  I was right after all, but I hold no--"  He began to sob, then moan, and suddenly he collapsed into a heap on the floor.  The phone's handset swung freely at the end of its metal cord.
Kavanaugh had barely recovered from shock when Flournoy dropped onto the floor in front of the phone booth.  In a second he was crouching down beside him.  The man was dead.  Not even a fluttering pulse.  Holding the telephone handset with a handkerchief, he replaced it in the cradle.
He lifted Flournoy up by the shoulders and began speaking to the corpse in a Brooklyn accent.  "Bob, I told you not to drink while you were on the plane.  It plays havoc with your digestive system."  He dragged him over towards the bathroom.  "But you never listen to me, do you?  I only say it because I care about you, Bob."
Kavanaugh was relieved to find the bathroom empty.  He sat Flournoy down on one of the toilets, positioned his feet properly and locked the stall door, then clambered over the partition.
In a few minutes he had returned with a wheelchair.  The bathroom was still empty.  He climbed into the stall and quickly maneuvered the body into the wheelchair.  Now as long as nobody noticed the smell, things would be okay.  It was getting stronger, though.
It smelled, of course, like shit.
Part 1

Clankings of what are probably illicit pots and pans in an illicit itself kitchen come from behind the counter through the greasy beaded glass doorway that separates the cook from the counter at the Habanero Hut--a clanking that sounds slightly more sinister than the normally innocent sounds made in the process of cleaning cookware, as if the pots were being banged against each other for spite and not actually being cleaned.  There is a dense, fruity, vinegary smell in the air as the fumes from the incipient hot sauce waft not at all gingerly through the restaurant (for the kitchen probably has no ventilation, or it has been uncomprehendingly blocked) and out the screen front door, off to assault passersby and to warn or attract potential new customers.  The sauce is a special secret blend of hot peppers and other mysterious and perhaps illegally-imported ingredients, the featured ingredient of which is a closely held subvariety of the habanero pepper (capsicum chinense), the pepper thought to be the absolute hottest and mouth-searingest in the globe.  As one might intuit from the name of the establishment, the chef of the Habanero Hut devotes himself to the morbid study and consumption of this pepper whose flesh can burn 20,000 more tongues at a bite than can a simple cayenne--unfortunately this is ultimately to the detriment of the establishment's fortunes, for as the habanero is a pepper enjoyed by only a few hardened weirdos, the restaurant (at the peak of the lunch hour, yet) has but a sole patron.  To make matters even more fiscally dismal, the chef (and owner, if it need be said) has the habit of frequently presenting new creations to his favorite patrons, gratis.
It is such an occasion now, as Frog Hamilton sits in contemplation of the menu, soon to be the recipient of a featured new dish.  He is attempting to decide between the "Ouch Burger" and "Devil's Eggs 'n' Grits", the former being a hamburger whose meat has been interspersed with much habanero flesh, served on a bun whose seeds are pepper seeds instead of sesame seeds, and served next to a cucumber pickle fermented in pepper vinegar; the latter being a slightly more simple concoction of scrambled eggs and grits which includes peppers at every stage of the process except the feeding of the chickens, although that has occurred to the chef and has been discarded as not yet economically feasible.
The beaded door makes an unsettling noise as it parts to let pass a man wearing a white apron decorated with a palette of dark reds and browns spread across the front.  The man bears a plate and moves swiftly, somehow avoiding the many obstacles that must be cluttering the unseen floor behind the counter, including the napping cashier/waiter.  Frog looks up as the plate is set before him.  It contains an object of approximately spherical proportions which looks rather large for lunch.  The object's aluminum foil covering shines in the fluorescent light of the restaurant.
The proprietor smiles and raises his left eyebrow.  "It is called the 'Death Star'."
"Do I get to ask what's in it?"
"Please, just eat first."
Frog, whose bravery has only seldom been so taxed, picks up the food object in both hands, peels back the wrapping, and takes a large bite, so as not to appear distrustful.  He tastes tortilla, Mexican rice, black beans, sour cream, roast chicken, but a mere tinge of heat, of which dearth he makes note.
The chef is quick to respond.  "At the center you will find a whole pickled giant red habanero pepper, stuffed with minced pickled orange habaneros."
Frog understands at once, stuffs his mouth deep into the Star to bite the pepper, and soon makes appreciative sounds.  "You may be a genius.  I hope you don't go broke.  Thank you."
The proprietor shrugs expressively, bows slightly, and retreats to the kitchen, nudging his sleeping employee gently with his shoe in the process of passing behind the counter.
The Death Star occupies Frog's plate as a Rubens occupies a room--it is impossible for him to look away, and even if he did he would still see it looming in his mind.  A burrito-sphere concealing a bullet of death, he thinks its presence is rather aggressive for a mere lunchtime dish.
So engrossed is Frog in his meal that he doesn't even look up when the restaurant's screen door swings back violently, banging against the wall and imparting a rip (not the first) to a poster advertising a Japanese medical plaster.
Accompanied by a gust of warm summer air, Clifford Greer strides into the room wearing a smile that says he just discovered he's right about something and that someone is in trouble.  He makes a beeline for Frog's table and clears his throat with a formal "a-hem".
Frog looks up and smiles.  "Join me for lunch?"
"You turned off your beeper again, didn't you?"
"It must be out of batteries."  He takes it from his pocket and presses the test switch.  "What do you know?  Dead."
"You probably put a dead one in there just in case I checked.  Anyway--"
"Sit down, I'll order you something."
Clifford makes a face and sticks out his tongue.  "Bletch!  I'd rather drink Dräno than eat one of the colitis bombs they serve here.  I'd hate to spend my declining years in any worse shape than I'll already have to."  He sits at the table and scoots in his chair, which makes a sticking noise on the linoleum floor of the restaurant.  "You have an appointment soon.  You better get your butt moving or you'll be late. The customer specifically requested you."
"I thought I got promoted out of that stuff."
"That's what I had thought too, but that's not what Mom says.  And we know who runs the show these days." Clifford hands Frog a printout, crisp and fresh and unfolded, pristine in a fashion that makes Frog wonder where Clifford was keeping it, anyway.

--------------------------------------------------------
Rollover Consulting, Inc.
324 Irving Street, Suite 201
San Francisco, CA 94919

APPOINTMENT NOTICE

Engineer:   feh (Frog E. Hamilton)
Arrive At:  1:00 pm, Wednesday May 6, 1998

Client:    Punjab International Video & Grocery
Address:   2410 Geary, corner of 15th

Description:  standard check & fix
Comments:     complimentary (it's my fault. -rac)

Scheduled by: rac
Priority:   1 (no rescheduling, be on time or else)

Printed courtesy of Mom, your favorite office manager.
Your Fortune: Loop, Endless: n., see Endless Loop
--------------------------------------------------------

Frog's eyebrows rise to steep peaks, his forehead creasing. "Hey, this definitely wasn't on my calendar last night." He gathers his partially-eaten Death Star into its aluminum covering and inserts it into a bag from the counter, grabbing a few to-go containers of fresh habanero salsa and dropping a five dollar bill in the fold of the sleeping cashier's hat. He asks Clifford, "you going back?"
"I'll walk you.  No, I should say 'trot you', because you'd better hurry."
Clifford and Frog leave the restaurant, turning left and then right onto Irving Street towards the offices of Rollover Consulting, Incorporated, at the corner of Irving and 10th.
The building at the corner of Irving and 10th is typical for the area except for a part of the second, topmost floor, which looks like it could have been a gun turret in a previous renovation. Now it has a proper pointy roof and looks like an old Victorian done over in bad stucco, circa 1967. Sometime soon after that, and not since, it has been painted a rusty yellow which threatens to remind one of a trailer park. On the bottom floor of the building is a dry-cleaning store, "Laundry by Bob Nebrig", run by an aging hippie who also owns the building and is therefore RCI's landlord. The landlord's name is actually Creek; he bought the building and business from Bob at some time in the mid-1970's and has been running it with a suspicious eye on the neighborhood ever since.
There is no sign for RCI, but a side door opens onto a steep stairwell that leads up to the top floor and the company's offices. Frog sprints up the stairs and into his office for his laptop computer, yelling "keys please," on the way out of his office.  Computer in hand, he is about to pass the receptionist's office on the way to the stairwell as a set of car keys comes flying out the door just in time for him to make a perfect catch.  "Thanks J. Random!" Frog yells as he tumbles down the stairs towards the parking lot.

The name "J. Random Hacker" is well-known to computer geeks worldwide.  However, J. Random Hacker, receptionist at Rollover Consulting, Inc., is not.
The name originated at MIT as more or less the computer-geek equivalent of "John Doe".  If you were sitting in 6.001 ("six double-oh one", formally but never formerly known as "Structures and Fundamentals of Computer Programming") and someone you never noticed before snapped out an annoyingly smart answer to a professor's question, you might later complain to your suitemates that "some J. Random Hacker geeked out in 6.001 today and nosed Blackburn's rotund behind."
"J. Random Hacker" is relatively synonymous with "just some geek".  Not a particularly complimentary term, but not a particularly insulting one either.  If you really wanted to insult someone you had to be more inventive.  For example, you could say something like, "that bagbiter couldn't bum a byte from BSD."  Of course, if you said that then most normal people would look at you very strangely.  (The alliteration is not required but some consider it to add a classy touch.)
J. Random Hacker lost a bet his sophomore year and as a result had to change his name to this mostly anonymous one.  Since J. Random was born and raised in Malaysia, however, and had on his better days a tenuous grasp of English, even in its somewhat debased and altered form as spoken at MIT, his friends had wondered if he fully grasped the humor in what he had done.  They still wonder.  In any case, he has been J. Random Hacker for so long now that he is always surprised and slightly confused when his mother, on the phone from her village, calls him Zhiang.  
Don't think, just because of the unfortuitous circumstances under which he acquired his nickname, or the fact that he occupies a position of seemingly little importance at Rollover Consulting, that J. Random is not a true hacker in the best sense of the word.  He can hack binary images on a Lisp machine even though they are an extinct species.  He can toggle in boot code from his own wet memory on the front panel of a PDP-11 even though that machine is even more extinct.  He once had all of ex-President Carter's phone calls rerouted to ex-President Ford, and vice-versa.  He answers yes or no questions with "T" or "Nil" in the honored AI Lab tradition.  He knows how to write PGP in TCL using only six lines of code, maximum seventy-four characters each.  Yes, he knows his stuff when it comes to computers, yes sirree, and he'll tell you about it sometime, too, even if you do have a tiny bit of trouble understanding him at times.
He also has good aim with a keyring, and that is important at RCI, especially if you are the receptionist.

Date:	Wednesday, May 6, 1998 12:47:07 PDT
From:	hemo@flame-ingot.rci.com (Shem Harper)
To:	dbunsen@burned.rci.com (Dan Bunsen)
Subject:	Re: New Business Ideas

I've been thinking about the new ideas you suggested.  Somehow, in spite of my imminent ALCOR membership, I suspect that I will not be alive in the decade of 9,990 in order to enjoy the fruits of The Really Big Rollover Consulting, Inc.  Also that date is too far in the future to attract sufficient investment in the present time.  Just IMHO, of course.  All right, IMNSHO.

Many computer systems these days represent dates and times using 32-digit numbers that represent the seconds after some target date in the past.  May I suggest, instead of waiting for the big 5-digit rollover, that we figure out when some of these date representations will reach their ends.

I know we won't have the great Apocalypse Hype that is already getting worse by the nanosecond, but you know how easy it is to spread rumors around.  We probably wouldn't have any real problems getting rich with that idea.

Besides, haven't you been reading rci.general?  Frog already said that the year 10,000 was too far in the future for RCI to consider as a serious business opportunity.  Here, I found it:

On May 3, 1998 11:35:11 PDT, Frog E. Hamilton <frog@ribbit.rci.com> wrote:
>It's a great idea, but I really feel that it would
>be  an excessive dilution of our marketing message
>to deal with more than one rollover at a time.  I
>think that it is safe to say that neither our
>current business plan, nor the business plan of any
>future year, will contain anything to indicate that
>Rollover Consulting, Inc. is intending to take a
>part of that market.

>As always, gentlefolk, your time is your own to
>apportion amongst whichever activities seem proper.
>So, if you all want to work on the big rollover for
>the year 10,000, be my guests, but please do it
>under a corporate umbrella different from this one. 
>RCI will stick to the year 1999-2000 rollover for
>the foreseeable future.  Good luck!

There.

 h E M O

--
 hEMO -- Shem Harper -- <hemo@rci.com>
If anyone around here shares my opinions, I'd better quit!

In an office on the fourth floor of a downtown office building, not far from the Transamerica Pyramid that architecturally dominates the cityscape, Douglass Castor stares at the collection of backup tapes that almost cover one windowless wall of his computer room. A subtle discontinuity somewhere there bothers him, a rupture, a splice, an incomplete metonymy.  He strokes his beard as he considers what it might be, and wonders what Derrida might say.  He has no idea, actually, what Derrida might say, if anything at all, but he likes to think of himself as cultured, and accomplishes this in part by invoking the names of slightly obscure philosophers in his internal dialogues with himself.
The backup tapes are tiny DATs, each representing one day's worth of changes in the computer system that he supervises, plus whatever else they can fit from previous days. The tapes are stacked on plain wooden shelves that had been built into the office by a previous tenant for the storage of paperback books. Castor could have easily afforded to replace the shelves with a more suitable storage device, but the shelves were there when he moved in and they didn't cost anything, and Castor considers himself to be a frugal businessman.
He has just arrived at the office, all ready to begin his day by putting his feet up on the desk and reading the latest issue of Modern Auto, sipping a hot café latté from the place downstairs, both cocoa and cinnamon on top, please, but no nutmeg.  Not a very stressful work schedule, to be sure, but he had thought of the idea for the business in the first place, so doesn't he get a little slack?  Well, he had sort of thought up the general idea.  It was his cousin who put the whole thing together--she was, however, shortsighted enough just to do it for a straight fee.  Castor's most stressful regular duty was coming to the office, period, although perhaps on some days he was resentful that he had to change the backup tape each and every workday.
If the system were to need anything more extensive than an occasional tape change, Castor would have to call his cousin Anneline Clerot, who was the one who had actually programmed the system herself.
Mostly he sits at his desk and reads auto magazines, which suits him fine. He isn't making millions, but he isn't getting killed either. He thinks that he had picked a fine way to enter the family business (as was expected of him) without taking an undue personal risk (as he expected of himself).
The business, Castor Data Services, makes its money through the automated bookkeeping system built by Clerot.  Customers, identified throughout the system only by an account number, call CDS from a touch-tone phone and enter data about their transactions through the telephone keypad.
The customers pay by depositing cash anonymously into the CDS bank account. Clerot's program makes sure that every client's quarterly bill comes to a different amount (adjusting accounts by pennies if necessary) so that it is always evident by the amounts of the transfers who has paid their bill and who hasn't. Customers with delinquent accounts receive warnings through the system when they try to access it, and if a bill were to remain unpaid, the account would be terminated.
That has seldom happened in the five years of the business. Customers need their data, and the services of CDS, too much. The business has no way of identifying its customers and that's the way everyone wants it. New customers are signed up by the system over the phone, automatically. Castor Data Services has no advertising expenses, reasonable overhead, small personnel costs, and minimal maintenance costs. It is a very profitable enterprise, filling a niche and skimming just a bit off the top.
Castor usually doesn't worry too much about the business, but there isn't usually anything to worry about. Now, however, given something about which to worry, he worries.  He sits staring at the tapes, stroking his beard and thinking about obscure French literary criminals until it finally hits him and he realizes what is now different.
One of the backup tapes is missing its label.
He will spend much of the day sitting in his chair, swinging back and forth, contemplating the possibilities--thinking about what this could mean.

Date:	Thursday, May 7, 1998 12:53:51 PDT
From:	dbunsen@burned.rci.com (Dan Bunsen)
To:	hemo@flame-ingot.rci.com (Shem Harper)
Subject:	Re: New Business Ideas

Hey, Captain Hemo!  I saw you cooking lunch in your cube the other day.  You'd better be careful or you'll be redecorating and cleaning your cube at the same time.  Not that I'll mind--I'm not paying the insurance around here, so flame on, dude!

In fact, the current color of the carpet is getting rather boring, so it will be a good move to replace it with one with a much darker shade.  It's nice to see someone traditional enough around here to cook on a real Japanese hibachi, too.  (On the other hand, I do have some equity, but that has historically always played second fiddle to amusement value with me.)

Maybe, as a result of your indoor cooking activities, you've been inhaling too much smoke and your remaining neuron has expired, though, and so you can't remember, but doesn't ALCOR have a money-back guarantee?  "If you don't wake up by the end of time, simply present your receipt for a full refund."  Sorry, I couldn't resist.  I guess really I could have resisted but I didn't want to.  You get the idea.  I guess I have a lot of energy today, is all, and so I'm bababababbling.

Well, thinking about completely separate businesses that we could start, it seems as if there is a big opportunity for some serious trademark brokerage activity in the coming few years.  No reason just to stick with a rollover--we're approaching the legendary end of the second millennium since the birth of some famous dead guy.  Just think how much money you could make if you owned the following trademarks:

	Apocalypse Bakery
	Apocalypse Cookies
	Apocalypse Shoes
	Apocalypse Pizza
	Apocalypse Sewing Supplies
	Apocalypse Guns & Ammunition Depot
	Apocalypse Martial Arts School
	Apocalypse Bowling Alley
	Apocalypse Groceries
	Apocalypse Books
	Apocalypse Informatics
	Apocalypse Consulting Services

I could go on for pages and pages of these!  We could register them all and then auction them off to the highest bidder.  Now *that's* a business: very lowbrow intellectual property.

    Dan

********************************************
* <dbunsen@rci.com>                        *
* Industrious.  Superintelligent.  Humble. *
********************************************

Rollover Consulting has grown a lot since Frog and Raymond Charles founded it in 1995 after they graduated from college. The business was formed to profit from the fact that many accounting and database programs, since the first mass computerization of businesses in the 1960's, only used two digits to represent a year. Computers could add and subtract these numbers to find out, for example, when a bill was next due.
This two digit plan works fine as long as those two digits never get smaller from one year to the next. However, the year 2000 in this scheme would be represented by the two digits "00", which is smaller than "99", which would represent the previous year, 1999.  So say the Fnord Construction Company uses this system and prints out a bill on December 1, 1999.  The next time the Fnord Construction Company's account-maintnance program runs, it examines each account to see if it is overdue.  The bill in question, due on December 1, 1999, would be past due after 60 days, so that's, let's see... well, the computer says that would be March 1, 1900—because of the rollover error, the computer knows no difference between 1900 and 2000. March 1, 1900 was rather a long time ago.  The computer, merely trying to do what it's been told, prints out a past due notice, terminates the business relationship, files a civil case in county court, places a lien on the customer's business because, as is plain to see, the bill is over 99 years past due and the customer has shown absolutely no evidence of willingness to pay. In fact, with interest added to compensate for the Fnord Construction Company's financial hardship and collection expenses, not to mention the treasurer's emotional trauma, the bill could go up by thousands of times the original amount.
Office workers tend to take output from a computer and slap it in one of those tacky windowed envelopes without looking at it. It wouldn't be very good for business for all the phone lines to be tied up with complaints and people yelling at and about lawyers. So, most business owners don't mind spending some money to make sure that their computer systems will continue to work when the next computational millennium rolls around.
***
Checking programs for this kind of accuracy is not incredibly difficult. Computers don't generally disbelieve you when you tell them that although yesterday was 1997, today is 2061. And in fact for testing, that's basically what you need to do.  However, as Frog and Ray saw it when they founded the company, the real money would get made when you offered to fix the programs and cure them of their evil two-digit ways.
The part of a computer that does the computing is generally pretty durable; it doesn't wear out all that often: maybe every three or four decades, if that. However, auxiliary parts such as keyboards, monitors, cables: they all wear out like a salesman's welcome. The actual box? The computer itself?  Lasts for years. Which makes it interesting because manuals, as a rule, don't last for years.  Nobody knows how to change the slightest operational parameter on most business computers because the person who originally knew the particular magical incantations involved has moved on to run an even more complicated computer in an even more complicated business, or made a bunch of money, bagged the profession entirely, and has become an itinerant motorcycle repairman or bamboo gardener.  Furthermore, the manuals which described the operation of the software, if they existed at all, are now probably compost in the garden of someone who thought they were ordinary vegetable matter because of all the pizza stains.
In any case, old manuals are more often than not missing or unreadable, which makes the process of programming old computer systems more of a detective game than your standard eager undergraduate computer scientist might realize.

When he reaches the parking lot at the back of the RCI building, Frog sees that he will be driving the company's El Camino.
He stops to look at the car.  It is black and has "Conquista" painted in red over the tailgate.  Frog loves the odd curve of the thin rear window.   He had bought the El Camino for a few hundred dollars in 1994, the summer after his junior year in college, when he had an internship at a Silicon Valley startup that later made millionaires of everybody who had owned stock before the IPO, a category which didn't include any interns. The company was in Sunnyvale, his apartment in Redwood City, and the two were connected by the valley's most popular road--El Camino Real, Spanish for "the royal path". Frog bought the car and resolved only to drive it up and down "the El Camino", as people called the road in spite of the double definite article.
That resolution lasted until the end of the summer, when Frog had to return to Providence for college. He lent the car to his high school buddy Raymond J. Charles. Ray was also about to begin his junior year in college, at Stanford in Palo Alto, so he could continue the spirit if perhaps not the letter of Frog's desire.
In reality, the El Camino spent most of Ray's senior year immobile in a faculty parking lot near Ray's dorm, about a mile from El Camino Real over pothole-filled roads. Ray didn't really need a car. His senior year had hit him like a teetering Amtrak train--slow-moving but with a lot of momentum and definitely out of control--and he spent most of his time riding his bike from lecture hall to library to cafeteria to bed. Each semester, Ray peeled a freshly-authorized parking sticker from a legitimate faculty vehicle and affixed it to the car, to prevent it from being towed away like most of the other student vehicles parked in the faculty lots. He has never told Frog about the car's desertion of the Royal Path; Ray has always felt he would be happier not knowing.
Now every time Frog has to drive the El Camino he is hit with a bolt of nostalgia for college, which he finds uncomfortable, and for his broken vow only to drive the car on the aesthetically proper road, which he finds aesthetically displeasing. After he finished college with no particular plan in mind, Ray had talked him into cofounding Rollover Consulting, Inc., and the car, along with most of the pair's other meager assets, became the property of the corporation. Even in his more cynical moments, Frog has to admit that being the president of a small but reasonably successful San Francisco computer consulting firm probably beats the pants off being an underemployed and underappreciated English teacher in Tokyo, which had previously been his plan. The English teacher in Tokyo part, anyway.
Frog approaches the car with customary reverence and gently strokes its aging black paint. "Poor baby, you need washing and waxing, don't you?" he says to it, out loud. He shakes his head and enters the car.

As he drives up 19th Street, through the park, he notices that he only has five minutes before he is late.  He begins to worry. Just then, the sound of a siren makes him check his rearview mirror, in which he finds a police car flashing its lights, apparently complaining about him.
Frog proceeds at an appropriate stately pace to the next stopping place and hands over his license and the car's registration without being asked.
"In a hurry, sir?" asks the policeman.
"I guess so--sorry, officer."
The officer regards him for a moment, apparently thinking.  Finally, he speaks.  "You know, time is essentially an illusion. Just another part of being stuck in samsara.  If you calmed down a bit you might be able to be more centered and a safer driver."
"I know. I have an unexpected appointment and had to skip lunch and miss my afternoon zazen. I guess I'm a little out of sorts.  I shouldn't be." Frog twists his hands in his lap.
"Maybe you could try sitting in the morning instead."
"Then I wouldn't have time for my exercises, and if I do them in the afternoon I need to take a shower, and there isn't one at work."
"What a complicated and busy life!"  The policeman puts his hands on his hips and takes a step back.  "If you're so upset by such a little disturbance, I think you probably have some greater imbalance in your life. You shouldn't normally be thrown off by a little shuffling of your temporal affairs. Have you been to sesshin lately?"
"Actually, I have one next month. I agree, I really need it."
"May I ask where?"
"Mudo Zendo, in Marin."
"Nice place.  Good sangha."
They look at each other in silence.
"Well, this was just a warning.  I'm not going to give you a ticket this time.  Please try to maintain the same speed as the surrounding traffic, it's much safer and ultimately more compassionate. Have a nice day, Mr. Hamilton."
"Thank you, officer," Frog says as the policeman walks away.  He sits back in his seat and smiles to himself, thinking.  Northern California is nothing like Rhode Island.  There, if people find out you're a Zen Buddhist they think that that's some kind of terrorist and then they don't want you living in their neighborhood for sure.  Never mind that you offer to make them tea.

Date:	Thursday, May 7, 1998 13:00:05 PDT
From:	hemo@flame-ingot.rci.com (Shem Harper)
To:	dbunsen@burned.rci.com (Dan Bunsen)
Subject:	Re: New Business Ideas

I like "Apocalypse Informatics".  That should have been the name of this place we work.  Or maybe "ContraApocalypse Informatics" instead.  Didn't someone write a book about something called the "Infocalypse", too?

When you said "trademark brokerage" I started thinking of stock market stuff.  I heard about this "investment newsletter" idea but I don't know if it is legal or not.

You start out with a mailing list, say of, say, 12,800 people.  You send them all a newsletter saying what your prediction is for the forthcoming month: for example, whether the Dow Jones Industrial Average will go up or down.

You really send out two newsletters, though.  The one you send to the first half of your mailing list has the prediction that the market will go up.  The one you send to the other half says that the market will go down.

At the end of the month, say the Dow has gone up.  You drop the half of the list for whom you predicted that it would go down.  Now you have a list of 6400 people to whom you have sent an accurate prediction.

You repeat the above procedure any number of times.  After six months, you have 200 people who think that you're omniscient because you have made 6 successive successful predictions.  If they're reasonably wealthy, they may be willing to pay through the nose for a subsequent six month subscription.  Even if every subsequent prediction is wrong, your average will still be 50%: you will do no worse than chance!

If you charge $6000 for a six-month subscription, and half the people buy it, that's $600,000!  Even if you paid $10,000 for the mailing list in the first place, you're still making lots of money.

Now here's the real idea, the new part:  The above is a fairly despicable scheme.  However, we could market it to people who deserve to get screwed!  For example, we could buy mailing lists from white supremacist groups.  Or the foolish children of really really rich people.

I think I'm only half joking.  The prospect for making gobs and gobs and gobs of money is just too enticing to worry about any downside.  Sort of.

 h E M O

--
 hEMO -- Shem Harper -- <hemo@rci.com>
If anyone around here shares my opinions, I'd better quit!

From where he has been stopped it is only a short drive to the client's business. When Frog arrives, he sees that Punjab International Video & Grocery is what the name implies--a small Indian grocery and videotape store. There is a piece of notebook paper taped to the outside of the storefront window, with a picture of a thin man wearing a dark suit standing on a beach with his hands straight down at his sides, and the legend "HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?" and a phone number below, written in thick black marker. Inside, Frog can see row upon row of different kinds of lentils, rice, spices, henna, and other mysteries. The entire right hand side of the store appears to be occupied by an extensive collection of videotapes.
As he enters the store, currently devoid of customers, Frog notices that the walls are plastered with garish ads for Indian movies featuring an assortment of mustachioed men with large automatic weapons and demurely clad but seductive-looking women who wear little dots on their foreheads. At the far right corner, next to a freezer case advertising "homemade-style pakora," stands a large metal cabinet making a constant whooshing noise. It looks like an old minicomputer from the 1970's.
A man appears from the recesses of the videotape stacks and says, "Yes sir, can I help you?" He wears a red turban tightly and neatly wrapped around his head and a red Izod-Lacoste shirt with a little green alligator over the left breast.
"Yes, thank you.  My name is Frog Hamilton.  I'm here from Rollover Consulting, Inc., to check your computer.  I'm really sorry for being late."
The man wrinkles his brow, which creases deeply.  His brown skin shines in the fluorescent lights of the store.  "Rollover Consulting... Are you a friend of Raymond's?"
"Didn't you make an appointment for this morning?  I work with him at RCI--Rollover Consulting."
"No, I am afraid not. Raymond did tell me about his business, but I have not lately spoken with him recently."
Frog frowns. "Well, he asked me to come check your software, you know, for problems after the year 1999. It's free, courtesy of Ray."
"Ah well, Raymond did write the software for me, so it should be free if he made any mistake, should it not?" The man smiles kindly. "I am Balvinder Singhania. If Raymond did not tell you, he worked for me when he was in high school, when I just had the market in Sunnyvale."
"I went to high school with Ray. My name's Frog Hamilton." The two men shake hands.
Frog looks at the whooshing box in the corner and says, "Is that it?  What do you use it for?"
"Ah yes, vintage equipment I am told by those who say they know. It is a Hewlett-Packard mini computer circa 1973. It holds all of the store records for video and foods.  It speaks with the cash register and keeps the inventory. It is a very satisfactory system."
"Vintage is no joke--it must cost a bundle in electricity just to keep it running! You could probably just replace this whole setup with something that would just be the size of your cash register."
"But what would happen to this fine machine? Nobody else would want it--I could not sell it. It works well and many admire it who come here."
"I'm not trying to sell you anything. If it works well for you, keep it by all means. I also love old computers. If you sold it I might even offer to buy it myself.  I could certainly find someone who would want it and take care of it.  There's a whole historical society for the preservation of our computational history, in fact."
"I am glad to hear it. Please do not unnecessarily disturb her insides when you do your work."
"I wouldn't dream of it.  Besides, I probably know as much about her insides as you do.  Shall I begin?"
"Certainly." Singhania leads Frog to the minicomputer and brings him a folding chair.  "May I get you some cardamom chai?"
"Yes, thank you!"
After Singhania disappears into a back room for the tea, Frog cracks his knuckles and begins to examine the computer's screen. He has never worked with this particular model before, but the basics are often the same so he is not worried.  The whooshing of the computer and the quiet noise of customers moving around the store comfort him as he works.
After a few minutes of exploration, during which he slowly sips hot cardamom tea, Frog locates the source code to the program that keeps the store records.
Source code for a program is vaguely like what a recipe for baking a cake would be like if the recipe were to contain such items as exactly where the wheat for the flour should be grown, under what atmospheric pressure the field should be kept, exactly how many seconds should elapse between waterings and what the farmer's full name must be and what his family heritage should be, back until the first anaerobic bacteria evolved from primal sludge.
In practice, however, the recipe wouldn't generally be for something as mundane as baking a cake. It would be, instead, for how to prepare a gourmet feast for 10,000, anywhere in the world with locally-available fresh produce, including rules about complying with local government regulations on the subjects of food production and distribution, labor, and other miscellany.
This complexity often gives rise to mistakes in writing the code, as if the simple cake recipe incorrectly stated that the farmer's seventeenth maternal grandmother must have signed her name "Conchita" whereas she actually should have signed it "Concha". In baking an actual cake, it wouldn't make any difference. In writing a computer program, it would be called a "bug" and would be the subject of much consternation. Perhaps this goes some way towards explaining the social deficiencies of many computer enthusiasts.
It could easily be said that Rollover Consulting, Inc. has built its entire business plan on the location and elimination of one very common, very annoying type of bug.
Frog finds that the source code is neatly packaged with documentation. Documentation is text that often accompanies source code, and informs readers exactly why the seventeenth maternal grandmother of the farmer who grew the wheat for the cake must have signed her name "Concha". There would actually be a reason, and it might be explained for a few paragraphs. For computer programs, this documentation often begins with a short file called "READ ME", or some equivalent, that explains the structure of the program and its documentation from a very high level. To pound the metaphor submissively into the dust, the READ ME file for our cake would say something like, "This is a recipe for a very delicious cake."
The READ ME file for the store's program, when Frog puts it up on the screen, reads as follows:
All maintenance coders please run program DOCVIEWER before beginning.

Not too unusual--the author of the system (Ray, he reminds himself) has written yet another program to help guide readers through the documentation. Very forward-thinking of Ray in 1989 or whenever it was, he thinks. Definitely ahead of the fashion on that one.  Frog runs the program and the screen clears.
PLEASE PAY CLOSE ATTENTION.
ENTER YOUR NICKNAME FROM 2ND YEAR OF HIGH SCHOOL:

There is a little flashing mark at the end of the line on the display, waiting for someone to type something so the program can continue. This is very odd. Documentation does not usually start with an interrogation of the reader.  Especially not something so personal to the user.

Alphonse Sebastian strolls out of the pool hall, his hands deep in the pockets of his shabby brown overcoat. Wind tosses his thinning hair in chaotic patterns and he raises his shoulders against the weather.  Turning a corner sharply, he stops at a payphone and dials a number from memory.  The familiar touch-tone notes play a simple tune in his grizzled ear.
From the telephone, a smooth female voice says, "CDS".
Sebastian punches some more keys on the telephone keypad, fingers flying quickly on wings of memory.  He begins to hum "Age of Aquarius" from the musical Hair.
"Please enter account number."
He punches some more keys. He does the same in response to the subsequent queries:
"Please enter amount of transaction, followed by the pound sign."
"Please enter amount due, followed by the pound sign."
and
"Please enter date due, with two digits each for year, month, and date, in that order."
Finally the voice says, "If you wish to record a verbal note about this transaction, please speak now, " at which point Sebastian hangs up and walks away from the pay phone, probably to another pool hall, book joint, or other place of similarly disreputable demeanor and repute.  Possibly off to a slum somewhere to break somebody's kneecaps.  We will not meet him again.

After he has rushed Frog out to make his appointment, Clifford retreats to his office and closes the door.  The room is immaculate, which makes it a real standout at RCI.  Out of thirteen employee offices, only in Clifford's is it possible to see more than half of the carpet at any one time.  Clifford doesn't necessarily pride himself on being neat--he just sees it as part of his personality.  He has been known to make guests wait outside his apartment while he gives the kitchen counter one last compulsive swipe with a dishtowel.
Now he leans back in his chair, gazes at the ceiling, rubs his eyes.  Some time back, somehow he had let himself be finagled into accepting the position of office manager for the firm.  The image that arises in his mind when he thinks of his current job is of a friendly and forgiving father: settling fights, making lunches, doing shopping for all of the rambunctious, starving, grubby, ungrateful, ill-mannered, needy street urchin/programmers that RCI has somehow adopted.  Not a lot of reward here, but at age 29, Clifford has begun to come to accept the fact that he enjoys being a martyr, to a certain limited extent at least.
Clifford is employee number 3 at Rollover Consulting, after the two founders Frog and Ray, and at first was a standard three-digit, which is Ray's only vaguely humorous term for the programmers at RCI who fix the actual rollover problems.  Implying that they transform systems from being limited to two digits into being limited to three digits, which is a joke, because three digits wouldn't be any better in this case.  Nine hundred ninety-nine is still more than zero.  Only a very very bad programmer would try to fix the two-digit date bug by expanding date storage to three digits.  Which is the joke, anyway.
When business started to pick up, to the surprise of almost all concerned, RCI needed more programmers and therefore problems of scheduling became much more apparent.  Ray smooth-talked Clifford into writing an office manager program, and somehow he eventually ended up becoming the human office manager himself.
Perhaps in anticipation of his own role as company dad, Clifford named the office manager program "Mom", which name, under considerable duress, he will admit is really an acronym for "My Office Manager", although when it is written or typed at RCI, it is never in all caps like a real acronym, but merely capitalized like the name of a real person.
Mom is the software side of the office manager's job.  She (for everybody always refers to Mom as "she", and it is a point of office pride to pretend that she is in fact human) keeps calendars, stores messages, provides reminders, prints bills, coordinates paychecks, and composes and prints out greeting cards for employees.  She can even hold her own in a poker game, which she does on alternate Thursdays after closing hours.  Her cards are dealt onto a flatbed scanner and her winnings are reserved for upgrades to her processor and other physical equipment.  In spite of the fact that the poker games are generally low stakes, in the first year of her operation she not only paid for her initial processor, but for Clifford's time in writing her.  On contemplation of this fact, Clifford often wonders if he should quit and try to make a living as a card player, but he always remembers (just in time, on some extraordinarily bad days) that Mom has a better memory than he does and has been programmed with skills that he never had.  She's definitely a better card player--he himself has lost over $500 to her so far.

Date:	Wednesday, May 6, 1998 13:08:24 PDT
From:	dbunsen@burned.rci.com (Dan Bunsen)
To:	hemo@flame-ingot.rci.com (Shem Harper)
Subject:	Re: New Business Ideas

Well, as long as you don't mind getting prosecuted (and probably convicted) for fraud, that's a great idea.  I'm certain that I could think of enough random groups of people that I detest: white supremacists are a good choice, also right-wing gun nuts and people on more than three boards of directors of fortune 1000 companies.  Members of local vigilante militia organizations.  We'd better avoid lawyers because they'd find a way to make our lives as miserable as possible.  Avoid all contact with lawyers is my motto, except for of course the divine Ms. Smythe, who is a warrior on the side of good. [Trumpets play in the background.]

But really we'd have to have some sort of offshore protection.  I wonder what the laws in the Bahamas are like for this sort of thing.  And whatever happened to Oceania?

It goes without saying that we could never do this at RCI, which is, of course, Strictly Legal and Above-Board and Which Would Not Condone Any Illegal Behavior.

    Dan

P.S. What about selling a newsletter with predictions as to where the aliens will show up next to kidnap and otherwise abuse people?  All this psychic crap is completely unverifiable and comes with a premade, easily-identifiable gullible target market.  Pretty good, eh?  Figure the target suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmarket of around 50,000 people, of which maybe 3000 will subscribe, a biweekly newsletter for a subscription price of $500 per year.  We can make up as many statistics as we like about how accurate we were in the past, since there's no evidence.  An easy $1,500,000, and at that price we can even afford to hire somebody else to write the damn thing.

I always knew I was an "idea man".  If I were born already rich the world would have been saved a lot of pain, eh?

********************************************
* <dbunsen@rci.com>                        *
* Industrious.  Superintelligent.  Humble. *
********************************************

There is a knock on Clifford's door, interrupting his reverie.  "Come," he says, imitating Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek.
Yi-Minh Chee walks in.  He has a slight build and spiky black hair.
"Hey Yi-Minh, did you catch the Twins game last night?"
"They sucked as usual.  Obviously because we aren't there anymore to cheer them on."  He looks at his feet.  "I came to ask if I could take some vacation this week."
"We can just temp-hire a few more college kids--shouldn't be a problem.  What are you doing?"
"I, uh, have to do some papers for Wendy."
"What?  You're still doing her homework?  Isn't she in graduate school now?  You're not even a mathematician."
From the door came muffled sounds of excitement and large objects moving around.  Both men stopped briefly to listen.
Yi-Minh shrugged.  "Yeah but I've been doing her schoolwork for so long I practically am by now."
"At least she's going to move back here soon, isn't she?"
"We'll see."
Clifford's mouth forms into an "o" and his eyebrows rise.  "Things okay?"
"We'll see.  Thursday and Friday all right?"
"Sure, no problem.  Good luck."
"Thanks," mutters Yi-Minh as he puts his hand on the doorknob.  "Oh, hey, did Wanda tell you she's staying another year at her job?"
"No, neither of my sisters ever tell me anything."
"Oh.  Later."  He opens the door to the hallway.

In an only slightly unsavory section of an unnamed (but not unknown) city somewhere in the still relatively free nation that calls itself "the United States of America," John  'Chico' Kessler sits in his office, talking on the telephone.
The building he sits in is large.  Not huge, though, just large.  It's a factory, and it makes bears.  There is a large plastic sign on the roof that says, "Hungry Bear Factory." The sign is accompanied by a very large and pudgy bear made out of fiberglass who sits, looking happy, and leans against the sign.  In one arm he carries a pot of honey.  He has four toes on each paw.
"What I want to know," says John  'Chico' Kessler into the telephone, "is why we didn't hear about this earlier.  You know we operate on a seven day delay for shipments.  We need to coordinate.  It just doesn't work otherwise.  More expensive."
"I understand this is a hardship," says the strange voice on the phone.  "Nevertheless, your cooperation is essential."
"Oh, you already have that.  I mean, we've basically got to comply or we could lose our jobs.  I'll have you know I voted against the union, and until now I've been glad that they lost."
"Yes.  Well..."
John  'Chico' Kessler sits up straight in his leather desk chair and smooths the bib of his overalls with his callused palm.  "I mean, it's only right to expect some kind of bonus for all this extra work.  Such a huge rush job and all that."
"I can promise that you won't be disappointed," says the voice.
"Well, that's better."
Feeling somewhat satisfied, John  'Chico' Kessler covers the mouthpiece and says to his secretary, sitting beside him with her hands busy in his lap, "He says we won't be disappointed with our bonus."  His secretary is not listening; she is trying to unbutton the fly of his overalls, but the fabric is folded in such a way as to make it difficult.
Speaking into the phone again, John  'Chico' Kessler says, "Well, what time do we expect the driver?"
"Pretty soon.  Maybe five minutes," says the voice.
"Will the driver have the payment with him?"
"No.  That will come later.  After the shipment has been paid for by the supplier."
"Oh, okay," John 'Chico' Kessler says, his mind taken away by the skillful means of his employee.  "Is that all?"
"Good-bye," the voice says.  The phone goes dead.
"Good-bye," says John  'Chico' Kessler into the dead phone.

The owner of the mysterious voice, no longer speaking into the telephone, says softly into the still air of the room, "You should never have even hinted at rework, John 'Chico' Kessler.  You might have kept your job that way."
The voice's owner's companion says, "You could have promised he wouldn't be disappointed, but you didn't."  He chuckles.
The voice's owner says, "No, how about this one: It's true--he won't be disappointed.  He'll be furious."
They laugh together, little sparkly laughs filled with playtime and teddy bears.  A handwritten sign that hangs above them reads, "Centre pour le Liberation des Ours du Monde."

As Yi-Minh opens the door, he and Clifford hear the sounds of excitement become louder. At the moment, the sounds are of many people laughing.
Yi-Minh and Clifford walk outside.  People are crowded around one of the cubes.  Dan Bunsen, one of the three-digits, is doubled over coughing in the middle of the hall, apparently from an excess of glee.  Clifford looks at him with raised eyebrows.  
Bunsen looks up and stops coughing-laughing.  "Hemo--you know how he cooks his lunch on that hibachi all the time--he totally lit up his office.  I even warned him about it just earlier today, but--"
"Is everyone okay?" Clifford asks.
"Totally.  The fire extinguisher worked fine, once we moved that bookshelf that was blocking it.  Hemo's office is trashed, or more trashed anyway, to be more accurate about it."
Clifford looks up the hall.  The hallway is lined with bookshelves, all stuffed with manuals for different kinds of computer systems.  From a lack of space, one of the bookshelves had been partially obstructing the fire extinguisher door that had been inset into the hallway wall.  Books from the shelf, toppled in haste once the extinguisher had been needed, lie in an uneven layer over the hallway around it.
"I knew we never should have put that there.  Are you sure we can't put some of the manuals in storage?"
"No way man."  Bunsen had been one of the more vocal opponents to this plan when it had been proposed a few months earlier, and archiving is still one of his hot buttons.  "One, as soon as we cart them away we'll totally need one of the ones that got carted away.  And B, I didn't spend over three hundred hours at business auctions and trash heaps all over the damn valley to get these books put where they'll be of some use, only to have them shut up somewhere.
"There are treasures here," Bunsen says.  "Not only things that merely help us to do our jobs in the most efficient manner possible, but real... In fact I found a special one yesterday.  Let me read it to you."  He dashes down the hall and plucks a book from an overstuffed shelf.  Jogging back to Clifford, he waves the book in his face.  It is severely dog-eared and its floppy cover is covered with some sort of red stain.
"This is the technical manual for the REVA-10.  This was the first minicomputer manufactured and sold in Brazil.  The manual was translated into English when the company was going to try to sell them in the U.S., but it didn't work out.  I found this at a garage sale given by the guy who used to be the American representative of the manufacturer.  He went back into used car sales.  Anyway, check this out.  It's from the introduction.
"'This book is the best book you will ever read, of any sort.  Whether the category is technical manual, journalistic reportage, or novel, this is the best.  It will soon become your favorite book of all time.  You will memorize your favorite passages and quote them to your friends.  You will bring the book up in conversations and extoll its virtues constantly.  You will buy extra copies and give them as gifts.  You will--'"
Clifford says, "Isn't this a little out of hand?"
"Not just out of hand.  This is amazing!   Let me just finish this section; there's just a bit more.  Where was I?  Ah, here."  He takes a deep breath.  "'You will buy extra copies and give them as gifts.  You will read it again and again, keeping a copy close at hand for many years to come.'"
Clifford says, "Is that normal for a Brazilian technical manual?"
"I have no idea," Bunsen says.  "This is the only Brazilian technical manual I've ever seen.  But even if it is, can you believe the audacity?  Just telling the reader to love it.  Amazing.  Did the author or the company think it would work?"
"It must have been some sort of standard incantation, like when poets invoke their muse at the beginning of a poem," Clifford says.  "Included for form only in some cases."
"Anyway, it's just an example of why it's important to have this stuff here.  How could you give up something like that?"
"Okay, okay.  Whatever.  You've overwhelmed me with your enthusiasm once again.  We'll just have to get some space somewhere.  Maybe Creek wants to quit the dry-cleaning business."
"Yeah, a real library would be bitchin'."
Clifford walks over to Hemo's cube, where the occupant, a red-haired man in a Cat-in-the-Hat T-shirt and about a million orange freckles, is busy sorting through soaked papers.  Other RCI employees stand around in the corridor, laughing and watching and drinking bottled water out of little paper cups which have been expanded with a breath into little paper-lantern shaped cups that hold more water.
Seeing Clifford, the red-haired man says, "Don't say it.  Please don't tell me you told me so.  No more paper on the floor of my office, I promise."
Clifford counts to ten, smiles, and returns to his office, where he asks his computer to cast a hexagram from the I Ching.  The hexagram is "No Blame".  He breathes deeply and closes his eyes for an eternal moment, resting.

Frog stares at the screen of the computer in the Indian market.  He has been staring at it for some time.
ENTER YOUR NICKNAME FROM 2ND YEAR OF HIGH SCHOOL:

The main memory that Frog has from his sophomore year of high school is the time that he was arrested for sneaking into a movie theatre, but somehow a nickname didn't result from that embarrassing ordeal.
After a while he remembers that people started calling him "Bare" after he lost a bet and had to run through the lunchroom naked.
Frog keys it in to the computer and hits enter.  The screen clears and displays:
Are you alone?:

Automatically Frog looks around and sees that Singhania is inspecting the bulk spices and that no customers are nearby.  He hits the "Y" key and the screen clears again, to:
Greetings.

There is no problem with Balvinder's program.  I wrote this message via a back-door remote access routine that I left installed when I originally wrote his system.    I phoned up this morning and installed this message.  All this will self destruct when you hit a key and his computer will be returned to normal.  Don't let him pay you anything for the checkup, especially since you won't actually need to give him one.

You are reading this message because I have not been able to get to a networked computer in the last eight hours.  Mom scheduled your appointment here when I failed to check in.  I hope I'm all right!
I know you're going to be angry with me, but I was suspicious about a company I was doing a job for--Castor Data Services--also known as CDS--and took one of their backup tapes.  I planned to replace it, but after I saw what was on it I didn't want to go back there in case someone had already noticed that it was gone.  After I saw them waiting for me at my apartment, it seemed wisest for me to just disappear.  I don't know if anyone really noticed that it's missing or not, but I already hid the tape.  If anyone contacts you about me say I'm on vacation and you don't know where I am, both of which are true except this isn't a very good vacation.

I hope that because nobody knows you are involved that you can get the tape and figure out what to do with it.  They already suspect me, although there is only circumstantial evidence as far as I know.  However, with these characters--well, let's just say that I believe they have different standards of evidence than a court of law does.  I trust you to do the right thing.

Anyway, the tape is stored at a place in Pacific Grove called the Seal Food Inn.  It's in the phone book.  Near Monterey.  Go there in a few days and ask to inspect box 3817.  They're a real high-security storage joint.  The password to the box is the name of my last blonde girlfriend at Stanford.  I don't want to say the password explicitly because if anyone else manages to read this...  The password to decrypt the tape is in there too.

Be really careful about going there.  In fact, you may be being watched right now.  Don't let anyone follow you when you go down to the Inn.  Don't let anyone take the tape away from you.  Get the data off the tape and encrypt it as soon as you can, then you should probably destroy the tape.  I'm serious.  You probably won't be killed if you do things right.  See if you can arrange for the data to be published if you OR I die soon.  I think that The Consultants have a deadman service that can do that.

I'm sorry now that I started this but there's really no option anymore.  I don't know what to do now, but maybe you will after you see the stuff.  Good luck.  I'll try to send you encrypted e-mail later if I can, through a secure and anonymous remailer.

Remember--make sure you aren't being followed.  Take ridiculous precautions, really.  Be careful.  With luck they won't suspect that you're involved at all.

Hit any key.

After reading the message over and over, Frog hits the spacebar and continues to stare at the screen.  Ray has been known to play a practical joke or two but the tone of this current message is more serious and more desperate than Frog would expect if it were bogus.  He resolves to postpone judgement, but the threat of being killed has still whacked his corpus with a double shot of adrenaline.
He realizes that his heart is beating triple-time, at least, so he decides to meditate a bit to help calm himself down.
After many years of practice, Frog has found that Zen meditation, also known as zazen or just plain sitting, usually succeeds in helping him to achieve a peaceful state in which he feels at one with the universe in a very non-corny sort of way.  In this state, the constant background chatter of his mind tends to drop off.  One of Frog's teachers once said, "Let's be silent for a minute to listen to that voice that's always talking.... That's the one--that voice that says, 'what voice?'"
Now he sits, in front of Balvinder's computer, on the edge of the folding chair, in the lotus position, with his feet resting on his thighs.  His little voice keeps saying, over and over, "What a shithead!  I can't believe it!  What a fucking shithead!"
After a few minutes his mind is somewhat quieter and his heartbeat is normal and his breathing is slow and relaxed and he knows that it is time to open his eyes, to ease back into the stream of life that he didn't even really take a break from, anyway.
He still doesn't know what to do about the message, though.

The front door slams shut and from somewhere deep in the house Jordy Jameson's mother yells, "Jordy!  Don't slam the door!"
"Sure, Mom," he says, knowing that she can't hear him anyway.  He throws his bookbag on the couch, runs into his room and closes the door.  He flips on his stereo and sets the tape player playing an Ivor Cutler album.  Ivor is singing something about a particularly pretty tree and a girl named Nina Katchasomethingorother.
On a small desk in the corner of the room sits a personal computer.  Jordy turns on the screen, and when it warms up it displays a summary of the things that the computer has done so far today, at Jordy's earlier instruction.  It has dialed 597 phone numbers, and among them detected 16 modems, 24 answering machines, and 17 voicemail systems.  The remaining telephone numbers were disconnected, didn't answer, were answered by people, or Jordy's program was unable to figure out what they were.
Jordy's program--which he calls "BarneyPhone" for some obscure childhood reason--probably made some mistakes, of course, but years of hacking have enabled Jordy to gradually mold the program into shape so that its layers of heuristics upon heuristics upon heuristics generally make errors on fewer than 1/2% of the phone numbers.
Jordy tells BarneyPhone to play back the sounds the computer has recorded from the 17 voicemail systems.  Voicemail systems are interesting for some of the same reasons that modems are interesting--computers almost always sit behind them.
"Welcome to Appleby Construction.  To request a bid, press '1'. To leave a message for Bob, press '2'.  To leave a message for Sam, press '3'.  To speak with our receptionist, press '4'."
"C. D. S."
"Hi. This is Indigo.  Leave me a message and I'll call you when I come to."  This sounds like a plain vanilla answering machine.  Jordy presses a key that tells BarneyPhone that it has made a mistake.  The program will later re-analyze the audio data so that it will be unlikely to make the same mistake again.
"You have reached the voicemail system for Rollover Consulting, Inc.  If you hate voicemail, press '0' now.  If you want a free estimate, press '1' now..."
Jordy's attention begins to wander.  His long experience with phone systems has taught him that systems with cryptic greeting messages are often some of the more interesting systems to hack.  "C. D. S." sounded pretty interesting to him, so he goes to work on it.

As soon as Frog turns onto Hill Street, he stops the car's engine and coasts until he is a few doors down from his own home. Slowly and carefully, he pulls up the emergency brake, trying not to make any loud noises. It takes him almost thirty seconds to open the car door and get out. He has already removed his shoes; as he walks the asphalt slips into the cracks between his toes.
He sees Tiger and Bandit, Unagi and Tiramisú, a gang of neighborhood cats sitting together on the fence in front of the house. Frog holds up a finger to his lips as an apology for not petting them, then slips through the open gate to sneak around to the house's back entrance. He hopes that the miscellaneous nighttime noise of the city has been successful in masking the noise of his footsteps through the tall grass.
He slides his key slowly into the lock, then spends a full minute attempting to enter the door without a sound. The stairs to the top floor present a problem, as they will probably creak, but Frog had made an extensive study earlier in the week and assayed a path that he judged would be less likely to make unwanted noise. One baleful step lets out a quiet groan as he ascends, but it could conceivably have been part of the normal evening noise of the old house.
As he attains the top floor, Frog notices that all the lights are out in the cavernous living room, and it appears to be unoccupied, so he decides to check the bedroom. As he turns the corner of the hall, something drops on him from above and he discovers that a strong arm has been wrapped around his neck. There is also a sharp pressure in the small of his back that could only be a knife.
Without thinking, he reaches up with his right arm to grab the attacking arm by the shoulder, and gently, quickly, tilts his body forward until he is resting on his right knee. His adversary comes tumbling over his head but still somehow manages to land on her feet in the narrow hallway. He sees the shine of the knife as it sweeps back and forth in the dim light. Frog's assailant is using the knife as a shield as she inches forward, trying to force his back against the turn of the hallway.
As the knife swings to Frog's right, he steps forward to his left in the narrow hall and positions himself behind his attacker. His left hand is on her left shoulder, and his right arm shadows hers, his hand over hers, gently holding the knife and leading the arm forward.
As she feels his presence there, she attempts to slash back to the right with her knife, and Frog uses this momentum to spin her around in a complicated movement that starts with a wrist lock and finishes with her on her back and him holding the knife to her throat, its silvery blade not quite touching her skin.
"Nice kote-gaeshi.  Okay, you pass this time," she says, giggling and out of breath at the same time, "but that car made so much noise that I heard it even when you stopped in front of the Tyson's."
Frog doesn't move the knife, but he does smile.
"I could hear you coming for miles, practically," she says.  "You need to work on your self-awareness some more."
Ursula smiles innocently at him, blinking her eyes flirtatiously.  He still doesn't move.
"Hey, what do you know?  You're getting better, sweetheart.  Want some grapefruit?"
Frog relaxes and removes the knife from Ursula's throat, smiling. "Grapefruit" is the code word that has to be uttered before the game is actually officially over.... In the beginning Frog had occasionally forgotten this and Ursula had shown him no mercy. That is, mercy as defined in their tandem Aikido practice--no bones were actually broken and no arteries actually slit, but he had been subjected to immoderate and immodest tickling.
Frog always has a hard time remembering exactly where and when he met Ursula.  He often has the impression that one day she was just there, living with him in a strange connubial/Aikido bliss, and that was that.  Now she is lying beneath him, and they will lie beneath each other later, and that is that too.
"Wanna hear what happened today at work?" he asks.  "It's really weird."
"Maybe later," she says, and cranes her neck up to kiss him with her soft lips.

Late at night, after his parents have dragged him away to shovel dinner (pizza) down his throat, after some consultation with a few of his buds, but mostly after some computer-aided experimentation with the voicemail system at the company whose name turns out to be "Castor Data Services," Jordy Jameson has discovered how to do some very interesting things.  He punches some keys on his computer and then picks up the telephone.
It rings on the other end, and then, "Hello?"
"Hey is Z.U. there?" Jordy asks into the phone.
"It's me, bonehead!"
"I thought you were your mom."
"Cut it out!  One day your voice will change and you'll see."
Jordy laughs.  "Guess what I found?"
"A brain?  About time."
"How about free voicemail forever?  Sort of."
"Oooh, cool.  Tell me."
"I found this company that lets you open an account over the phone, then start using it right away.  They have some kooky payment system where you're supposed to pay your bill by depositing cash directly into their bank account."
"Yeah?"
"So you've got a whole three months before your bill is due.  And they don't know who you are.  So you use their system for a while, then open a new account just like you were a new customer."
"We could use it to send messages back and forth.  Like a secret hiding place, except nobody could watch to see people going there."
"Isn't that cool?"  Jordy goes into detail about how the two can leave secret messages for one another on the CDS system.  The telephone call is terminated by an elaborate sequence of slaps and mouth noises that may be the telephonic equivalent of a secret handshake.
It's a cool but not too far-out-way-rad hack, Jordy thinks.  It hadn't even been that hard.  Even those old man lamer phreaks like Mitnick could have probably done it no problem.  Still, it was a grin.

The old house on Hill Street is never silent at night, especially when someone is awake to hear all the interesting noises, especially when someone is awake to worry about what all the interesting noises might mean.  Now there is a creaking noise from somewhere up above the bedroom.  Just when Frog, lying naked in bed, thinks that it has stopped, of course it reappears.  It's just irregular enough to drive him batty.  Then there is a scurrying across the ridge of the roof--two squirrels, no, too large and heavy and slow for that: two raccoons, or maybe two skunks chasing each other across the roof and up the huge oak at the end.  Please don't spray any of the neighborhood cats, Frog thinks, trying to send the putative skunks his thought waves.
Even though the house is in a quiet neighborhood, and on a quiet street in the quiet neighborhood, there are many sounds to be heard by someone awake in the middle of the night, even discounting the gastric rumblings of the old house itself.  An occasional bird tweet, snarling female cats in heat, someone's hotrod jamming on the almost deserted roads, car alarms whining uselessly about minor tremors in the hills.
He didn't even get a chance to tell Ursula about the latest issue of Ray's Special Stupid Thing of the Month Magazine.  He turns his head to look at her, sleeping next to him, her right arm extended, his neck gently resting on it.  Her face is turned away from him, and her spiky peroxide blonde hair rests in mild disorder over her pillow.  She is snoring gently.  This is not quite ladylike, but Frog thinks that sleeping people deserve some slack, especially in the middle of the night when they don't expect you to be watching them.
Frog wasn't even certain what he would tell her about what happened today.  It was a severe escalation in terms, both of potential for embarrassment for Frog if it was a practical joke, and of potential for Bad Consequences if he didn't take it seriously and it was real.
Sometimes Ray just didn't seem to grasp the distinction between something that was funny to have happen to you and something that was absolutely, certainly, one hundred percent not funny at all.  It was the kind of thing that Frog just expected people to get after a while but that Ray didn't seem to understand.
Sure, you could be forgiven for the first one or two jokes that you didn't really realize were sort of mean-spirited.  But after a while, you had to expect (or so Frog thinks) your friends to stop paying so much attention.  Hey: Peter and the Wolf, right?  What a stupid cliché, mostly a cliché gets to be a cliché because it tells a useful truth.
One time in high school Ray came to class wearing a cast.  He spent a lot of time getting people to sign it and to make nice designs on it, in the eternal grade school tradition.  The cast stayed on for a week.  Ray got lots of nice sympathy from pretty girls.  (He said he had broken his arm while helping to build a house for Habitat for Humanity, which probably helped.)  Then, one day in physics class, during a test, he let out a huge scream and proceeded to bash the cast against Mrs. Parker's desk, yelling inanities about the difficulty of some calculation.
He continued to wail on the desk (and the cast) until the cast started to come off, and then he started yelling in pain.  "My broken arm!  Aaaaah! My broken arm!"
After the cast had been shattered, and Ray had stripped the crumbling shards from around his arm, he revealed proudly that it had all been a joke and his arm had never been broken and he wanted to see how it would be and how people would treat him.  Not a few people treated him differently after that.  Frog understands that they felt that they had been coldly manipulated for Ray's amusement, and he doesn't fault them for their changed attitude towards him.
In fact, Frog wonders why he wasn't affected in the same way.  He had seen Ray do things like this before, and when he talked to him about them, Ray had always left him with the impression that oh, yeah, now he understands and he wouldn't, couldn't do anything like that again ever.  But somehow, of course, nothing ever changes.  Maybe it was because he had been friends with him longer than anybody else at the school, or maybe it was because he saw some of those same tendencies in himself.
This current matter is something even more serious, though.  It isn't the case that Ray could be trying to manipulate Frog into feeling sorry for him.  It is the case that Ray could be trying to manipulate Frog into believing that Ray's life is in danger and his continued healthy existence depends on Frog's taking the threat seriously.
Frog, convinced at this point that he is not going to be able to sleep soon, carefully sits up in bed.  In two lines surrounding him and Ursula are piles of small furry bears of many different shapes, colors, sizes, and personalities, and he grabs one to hug.  Many of his friends do not understand his love for the small bears, nor his dislike of the term "teddy bear."  Even Ursula thinks it is a little strange, but somehow a lovable characteristic in the end.  She herself prefers bunnies, but Frog insists upon calling them bears as well.
The bear he holds now is named "Brown Not Fat Apple Bear," and was a gift from a friend who works at a computer company down in Silicon Valley.  Most of his friends don't understand his strange naming scheme for his little friends, either, but that doesn't bother him in the least.  (Most of his friends aren't usually interested enough to inquire about it in the first place.)
Stealing a tape was not out of character for Ray, who spent one summer in high school occupied with lifting merchandise and clothing from thrift stores.  Thrift stores!  Frog wonders if there is any kind of store that deserves to be ripped off less than they do.
The theft also showed the lack of foresight that Ray could be susceptible to at times.  Although he had returned "borrowed" items in the past, by taking the tape he had seriously endangered the business that he and Frog had built up over the past few years.  How could that be a good thing?  Even though he was the instigator of the business, Ray had always been less emotionally-involved in it, leaving Frog to take care of it from day to day.  Ray was mostly interested in having started it in the first place, because he was amused that such a niche market could come into existence at all.
The only solution seems to be to take Ray's message seriously.  This is it though, Frog tells himself.  If this is fake, I don't want anything more to do with him.  Is there such a thing as a business divorce?  Are they always messy?
Frog realizes that he has made a decision and is suddenly very sleepy.  Slowly, trying not to disturb the peaceful sea of the bed, he slides back down under the covers, lying on his side with an arm wrapped around Ursula, his face nuzzled to her neck.  He rests the small brown bear on top of his head as he falls asleep, finally, at 3:20 in the morning.
Part 2

The time is 10:30 in the morning and Douglass Castor has just arrived at his office, after a short and leisurely drive in his Jaguar from Pacific Heights.  The backup tape with no label still sits in the center of his desk where he had left it the previous afternoon.
It had been next to impossible for him to sleep last night.  It had been next to impossible to do almost everything yesterday and this morning, so far.  He kept compulsively thinking about the tape with no label.  Not thinking particularly deeply, actually.  Just thinking, over and over:  Why is the label missing?  Did it fall off?  Did I forget to label it?  Did someone remove the label?
In a flash, it occurs to Castor that the tape is not a backup tape at all, but a substitute tape left in place of the original backup tape, which is no longer there, is missing, has most likely been stolen.  He opens the plastic case, snatches out the tape, and brings it close to his face.  A Mitsubishi tape!  His tapes are all Sony!  He drops the tape suddenly and it falls to his desk, landing on the blotter with a muted thud.
Douglass Castor, in his office, sitting in front of his desk, stares blankly at the backup tape with no label.  He picks it up again.  The tape still says "Mitsubishi".  All the DATs he bought said Sony, he is certain.  All of a sudden he gets up, shoving his desk chair back against the window, and dashes into the computer room.  The chair bounces back after hitting the window and continues to spin for a bit on its own.
He puts the tape into the drive attached to the computer.  It makes a clunk, then begins whirring as the drive attempts to read the data on the tape.
The tape drive spins a bit longer, emitting randomly-timed clunks and whirrs, and then finally the tape pops out.  A message appears on the screen:
ERROR: CANNOT MOUNT AUDIO FORMAT TAPE (#33)

Audio!  That has to be a mistake, Castor thinks.  Maybe the drive is broken or the tape is damaged, causing the computer to mistakenly think that it is an audio tape instead of a data one.  He decides to try to play the tape on an audio DAT player, anyway, just to be certain.
A backup tape from the previous week, when Castor inserts it into the drive, performs appropriately.  Data from the system is stored in an orderly manner, as it should be, and the utility program retrieves it with no problems.  Castor is conscious of a ray of focused blame emanating from his forehead, beaming straight onto the unlabeled tape.  Blistering the tape with hate rays.
Castor slips the tape back into its case, and the tape into his jacket pocket, and gets his coat and hat from the coatrack in his office.  On the elevator down, he scowls at the elderly Chinese man who shares the ride with him.  No time and no brainpower to be friendly.  Pay somebody to be nice to you, or even pay me, but I won't do it for free today, he thinks.
A three-minute walk takes Castor to the local outpost of a popular electronics chain.  He attracts virtually no notice as he strolls to the mostly deserted audio area and pops his tape into one of the players on display.
As the music on the tape begins to play, Castor's mouth drops open, and he is lost in thoughts of anger, trying to think who could or would have done such a thing to him.  The sound of the song--reggae bass under a pair of fiddles and some kind of tinny-sounding toned percussion--washes over him as the surf washes over a rock embedded in the sand: it leaves no visible traces of progress, but everything gets wet.
A Fact is a Showdown

What it is, Fats, is a serial slowdown
Every other mother knows a fact is a showdown
What is it thing but an attitude breakfast
Show me other mother win a hairy ass contest

Put another nickel in the dime slot (dime slot)
Every other quarter makes my dick rot (dick rot)
Kick it off the planet when you don't try (don't try)
Any other quarter kill the skull fry (skull fry)

Is it not a man that's all wrapped up in clay
Every other father don't see everything our way
Do it to me sister if you find out what for
I and I live in the basement but the house has a back door

What it is, Fats, is an ass-first showdown
Every other daughter knows a fact is a slowdown
What is it thing but an attitude contest
Show my hairy ass a slice cheese for breakfast

Put another nickel in the dime slot
Any friend of mine give shoulders a knot
Each and every quarter makes my dick rust
Even atom bone can turn to dust

Eyes like cheese and back like twine, I find my
Son in my ribcage and my daughter in my spine.  When the
Shit comes out and the bags go in, my lovely
Gut pops out and the whisky pumps in.

Even after sex, her dirty feet show, that the
Clean can get you but only so low.
A blink and a shrug and a knee to the balls
Is life an ugly habit or do you just climb walls?

What it is, Fats, is a fucked-up slowdown
Any other father knows a fact is a showdown
What is it thing but an attitude contest
Mother walks in put your feet on the headrest

Put another nickel in the dime slot
Cause you wouldn't want my dick to rot
A fine angel you'd make with your pants down
Every mother you meet tell you turn around

***
A salesman comes over as the song ends, dipping his head in time with the final drumbeats and tapping out a percussive ostinato on his chest.  He is wearing a polyester permanent press dress shirt, white with thin blue lines running up and down.  The shirt is tucked into a pair of what can only be Sans-A-Belts.  They remind Castor of his grandfather's clothing.  Castor presses the stop button and then ejects and pockets the tape.
The salesman comes to a stop in front of Castor, and begins to speak rapidly.  "Hey, cool--you like the Consultants!  Not many people with taste come in here, truth be told, daddy-o.  How you like the 310-CVX?"  Castor cuts him dead as he turns to exit the store.  The man looks hurt and in pain.  Castor figures that this is a sales tactic.  Salesmen should be used to being treated like shit.
He returns to his office, dropping his coat and hat on the floor near the coatrack and roughly punching the keys to disarm the alarm system.  He paces up and down the office floor, glaring occasionally at the door to the room where the computer lives.
All of a sudden he stops pacing and dashes to his desk, where he yanks a drawer open and pulls out a brown leather book with a zipper on its side.
He zips his address book open.  An old candy bar falls out, along with an impressive collection of mangled Post-It notes and tattered business cards.  Castor shoves them aside, flips some pages in the book, and dials a number.
A smooth female voice comes on the line almost immediately.  "You have reached the office of Clerot Consulting, a minority-female owned business.  If you know the extension of the person you are calling, please--"
This is ridiculous, Castor thinks.  Only one person works at Clerot Consulting.  Castor presses "1111" on the phone and it begins to ring.
"Clerot speaking."  It is the same voice that gave the message, but sounding a little more real for being, well, real.
"Anneline, this is Douglass Castor."  Castor sits down at his desk, resting his elbows on the green blotter.
"Oh, hi!  Is everything okay?"
"Someone swiped one of our backup tapes.  They can't do anything with it, can they?"
"They're encrypted.  Without the password, there's like a one in sixteen million chance they could decrypt it in ten years.  How's that?"
"What if they guessed the password?"
"Well duh!  Of course then they could decrypt it.  It's a standard tape format.  Your password isn't something stupid, is it?  You changed it from the default one I gave you, didn't you?  Tell me you did."
"Uh, I did."
"Then what's the problem?"
Through the office window, Douglass Castor hears a distant siren, and looks out the window to see if he can see anything.  It amazes him how the ambulances can move at all through the stagnant downtown traffic.
He turns back to the phone.  "The program wouldn't let me change it to anything I could remember, so I wrote the new one on the bottom of the keyboard."
"Well I can't help you with that one.  Someone who could get into your office to steal the tape could obviously flip over the keyboard and read the password.  Did your alarm go off?"
"No.  I think I know who did it."  Castor drums his fingers on the desk.  "I hired this company to check over the program to make sure it wouldn't crash after 1999--this was when you were still on sabbatical last week--and I made the guy do the work here.  I thought it would be more secure.  I feel like a goddamned idiot."
"Oh man, Doug.  I don't think I want to know any more.  Couldn't you have waited until I got back?"
"I suppose it could have been an accident.  There was a different tape in its place.  It could have fallen down and the guy just picked up the wrong one or something.  All the time he was here he was listening to his own music and it was the same kind of tape.  DAT tape, I mean."
"'DAT tape' is redundant.  DAT stands for Digital Audio Tape."
"Whatever.  Can't you help me any more than that?"
"Well, it's not too likely that he switched the tape by accident, but it is possible. It could have been an accident--it's not that far from the realm of the possible.  Besides, there's--hey, you're not on cordless or cellular, are you?"
"No."
"Good.  Besides, there's nothing incriminating on the tape.  You're not even doing anything really illegal.  Sure, the law might go after your clients and then some of them would probably kill you, but--"
"Thanks."  At being reminded of this bad situation, Castor bends down and presses his forehead against the desk.  "Thanks for the good news."
"--but there's no obvious connection between the data on the tape and any particular people, unless they used the voice message feature and their voices are on there.  Hey, you can check something.  Go to the computer room."
"Okay, hold on."
Castor parked the call at his desk and picked it up again in the computer room.
"I'm back.  What do you want me to do?"
"You know which tape is missing, right?"  Castor grunted.  "Search the archive info file for that date.  It should tell you what's on the tape."
"Okay, hold on...  Here it is.  There were 1428 new transactions.  Five voice messages totalling ninety seven and a half megabytes.  Payment records for seven accounts."
"The only actual evidence that the government, or anyone else for that matter, could reasonably expect to get from the tape are those voice messages.  They can probably figure out who left the messages if the voice quality is reasonable and if the voices weren't disguised, but they may not be saying anything incriminating at all.
"If they were reasonably innocuous, as they should be if they were left by professionals, then you're fine.  I don't think you have anything to be worried about.  Take it easy."
"Easy for you to say.  Thanks for your help."
"Watch for my bill.  Take care of yourself, Douglass."
***
On the floor above the office of Castor Data Services, in an office whose door is labelled "Insurance Media Sales," a man in a cheap brown suit sits in a folding chair, in front of a collapsible bridge table on which sits a large reel-to-reel tape deck.  The tape is slowly winding from one reel to the other.
The man picks up a telephone and dials.  The small room is dark and the shade is pulled down over the windows, yet the man is wearing dark glasses.  Into the telephone he says, "We have, as it is said in the holy scriptures, a problem."
After a brief conversation he hangs up, rises from his folding chair and removes his brown suit jacket from its back, lifting it gingerly by the shoulders.  He pushes in the chair by bumping it with his leg, puts on the jacket, and begins to pace the room with his hands clasped behind his back.

Date:	Thursday, May 7, 1998 11:15:56 PDT
From:	hleon421@pupnet.ny.us
To:	year-2000-research@world.net
Subject:	Re: Corporate Budgets

I was very happy to find this list.  It's comforting to know, even if I haven't fixed the problems in my own organization yet, that there are all you people out there sitting in front of your own computer screens thinking about the same problems.  I hope we can help each other.

Let me introduce myself and my situation to you all.  I'm a senior systems analyst with a large investment bank in New York.  We have 37 separate computing applications that are totally in-house, mostly written in a mixture of assembly code and PL/1, mostly vintage 1963-1972.  Of course we have our share of COBOL and FORTRAN as well, with a substantial smattering of 4GL user applications running off SYBASE databases or (gasp!) flat files.  Oh yes, and some Smalltalk and Visual Basic as well.  (If I find the person who authorized a development project in Visual Basic, they're outta here.)  After an internal survey, we discovered that every single one of these 37 systems has a two-digit bottleneck for year data.

This is obviously no small problem.  We have one system with custom microcode, for Babbage's sake!  An off-the-cuff estimate shows that rewriting all of the affected systems will eat up our predicted profit for any year in which we decide to go for it.  Basically, we're looking at a $42 million problem.  Approximately.

I guess I'm not writing to this mailing list for advice.  It's obvious what I have to do.  The problem will be making the business guys understand that this wasn't my fault.  Wish me luck!

Howard F. Leon

P.S. I read here last week that the US gov't had budgeted FIVE TO SEVEN BILLION DOLLARS for "rollover" problems.  Does anyone have any further information to substantiate this claim?  Perhaps after we fix our own problems we'll have in-house experience to sell to the government.  That's not too small a market.  Plus I read an estimate in the NYT about a month ago that said corporate America will have spent $100 billion on this problem by the end of 1999.

A truck drives down an unnamed (but not necessarily unknown) interstate highway in the still more-or-less free nation that calls itself "The United States of America."  The truck is filled with consumer goods.  Two people sit in the cab of the truck, a woman and a man.
The woman is driving.  Since she is so much taller than the man, her seat is pushed far back, and when she turns her eyes to look at her travelling companion, she actually finds herself most of the time looking at the back of his head.
"I think it's just too spooky," she says, looking at the back of his head once again.
"That weird invoice," says the man.
"Uh-huh."
"What do you think it means?"  He looks out the window at the misty clouds hanging in the valley through which the truck moves.
The woman clears her throat and spits into a plastic Big Gulp glass which she holds between her legs.  "I got no clues.  What do you think it means?"
"I think it's just the computer's fault."
"Well, sure.  Could be," she says.  "But you ever see one like that before?"
"Nope."
"Me neither."
"Maybe it's a new computer," he says.
"Could be."
"You never know."
"Sure enough, true by my book," she says.  "Far as I can tell."
They drive on in silence, passing a lime green Volkswagon Bus painted with yellow and purple flowers.
"We ever make so many deliveries before?"  asks the man.
"Don't think so."
"'Cause I don't think we have."
She spits again, into the cup.  "Me neither."
"Wanna get some food?"
"Naw, not yet.  Let's wait until after the first dropoff."
"When's that?"
"You got the list somewhere over there."
"Let's see..." The man reaches under his seat and pulls out a clipboard filled with a shaggy stack of papers.  "Looks like we hit the children's shelter in Taos first."
"Can you wait?" she asks.
"Yeah, probably."  He glances over at the dashboard.  "Hey!  Why didn't you tell me?"
"Tell you what?"
"Look!" he says, pointing at the odometer.
The odometer reads 499,999.2 miles.
"What are you talking about?" she asks.
"It's about to go to half a million miles!  Five hundred thousand miles!"
"Oh."
"Isn't that cool?"
"I don't know," she says.  "Why is it cool?"
"It's about to change from 499,999 miles to 500,000 miles!  That's why it's cool."
She shrugs.  "Must be a guy thing."
"You like football, don't you?"
She makes a face.  "What's your point?  You saying that I ain't ladylike or something?"
"Uh, no.  It's just that... isn't it cool how all those numbers are going to change, all at once?"
"Not all of them are.  All but the '0'," she says, looking at the side of his face out of the corner of her eye.
"If you look close, Mary-Beth, you'll see that that first zero's just painted on there.  It's not real."
"Oh."
"Won't it be cool when they all change back to zeroes?"
"I guess.  This rig might even make it."
"You won't even be able to tell how many miles it'll have gone.  The odometer will say zero, but it'll be a million miles."  The man's eyes are wide and he has a big grin on his face.
"That is definitely a guy thing," says the woman.
"Here it goes," says the man.
The odometer reads 500,000.0 miles.  If you count the painted-on leading zero, it reads 0,500,000.0 miles.
"Yee-haw!" screams the man.  "Half a million!"
Mary-Beth gives him a slightly disgusted, slightly perplexed look as she spits once again into the cup between her legs.

Clifford is strolling the halls at RCI, walking around the debris outside Hemo's office and stepping over the manuals scattered on the ground near the fire extinguisher.  As he walks past Ben Sharpe's cube he sees that Ben's head is encased in a bulky mask of black plastic.  Ben is moving his neck around, as if trying to see over something that keeps changing position, and his hands, which are in black gloves, are moving around in the air grabbing and stretching imaginary objects.  To Clifford it looks like Ben is making invisible bread dough while doing some kind of strange Cambodian sitting dance.  Wires drape and dangle from the gloves and from the mask.
Clifford clears his throat.  Ben doesn't respond.  He taps him on the shoulder and Ben starts and removes the mask.  When he does, Clifford hears a strange droning noise coming from headphones attached to the mask.  The noise is very loud.  No wonder he didn't hear.
"It's finally up!" says Ben.
"What's up?"
"Check it out for yourself."  Ben removes the gloves with a scream of velcro and helps Clifford into the mask and gloves.
Cliford is immersed in a world of strange pulsing globby objects of many colors.  Irridescent beams of silver fly from glob to glob, accompanied by twinging sounds, and in their wake the globs change form slightly, pulled together along the axis of the beam, becoming deformed.  The whole world is pulsating to a strange drone that sounds like a diggeridu.  Every so often a purple flash will emmanate from a glob and a new glob will come into being, or a yellow flash will signal the destruction of a glob.
Off in the distance are shadowy black mountains.  There is no sun, and no stars.  In fact, there is no ground.  What are the mountains sitting on, then?  Clifford wonders.
Clifford reaches out to touch a blue chalky-looking glob and a small panel of text appears beside it.
	EmployeeRecord id 0x5449
	Data: 0x4D455741
	Created: 0x53544552 ticks
	Size: 0x6765
	Flags: 0x74206120 0x6C696665

The blue glob turns translucent and Clifford can see inside it.  He sees a cluster of other smaller, different-colored globs, spinning slowly within the blue one.  He touches one and a small panel appears beside it.
	Name: "David Durand"

"What is this?" Clifford says.  He can't hear himself over the noise.  He feels the mask being unfastened; light floods in and he blinks in the real world.
"You don't have to yell," says Ben.  "This is something that Ray and I have been working on.  He calls it the Elder Gods Programming Environment.  It's still in the early stages, that's why some of the info is less than useful.  You still have to flatscreen for some of it."
"What's it good for?"
"What's it good for?!?  Hell, who cares?  Doesn't it look cool?"
Clifford gives a disapproving smirk.
"Well, really," Ben  says, "it should help programmer productivity by a bunch.  And we think we can make a bundle by publishing it.
"I wish I could see the point in all this virtual reality stuff," Clifford says, "but I'd really rather just stare at a good ol' flat screen."
"The market analysts say this is going to be big."
"Okay, whatever.  Just don't try to make me use it."
"No worries," says Ben, as Clifford turns and leaves his cubicle.

There is a cat (felis catus, nothing more exotic but still a cat and still pretty darn cute for all that) on Frog's face, hunkering down for a good snooze after a good nap, after a good snooze after a good nap, after a good snooze....  There is another cat performing a similar maneuver between his legs, spinning around a few times getting into sync with who-knows-what before it does so.  There are more cats.  Frog is covered with cats.  He is swimming in a sea of cats, cats in his eyelashes and cats between his teeth.  He is lying on cats which seem to be unhappy about this situation and their relative place in the universe.  Frog is scratched and bleeds and the blood oozes out until he is covered in one huge thick crusty scab, enclosing his body as well as his clothes.  The scab is stiff and hurts when he moves, fracturing along fault lines that well with the red river inside him, Mississippis and Niles and all their minor and major tributaries, covering the backs of his knees, armpits, neck, forehead, covering his body with lines of red blood.
The cats are gone off to somewhere all of a sudden and Frog tumbles through space, around the Earth, at a leisurely pace.  He starts to fall faster, still tumbling gently in almost zero gravity.  Now he is speeding, at some unimaginable rate, bouncing against the atmosphere of the planet.  Frog becomes warm, warmer, warmer.  Now he is hot, and sweating.  The scab (baking on the outside and melting on the inside) and the gas conspire to cook him like a foil-wrapped baked potato is cooked in a convection oven.  Frog streams through the upper atmosphere, roughly tumbling, glowing, falling.
Frog wakes up.  He is lying in a pool of sweat and there are too many blankets on top of him.  He looks to his side and does not see Ursula.  He wonders if he will go in to work today.  He doesn't usually have much to do, but he feels like a slacker when he skips.  He wonders if Ray is playing a joke on him--the urgency of yesterday's message does not feel the same as it did the day before and he wonders if it was his overactive imagination and naïve gullibility that made him take the message seriously.
He gets up, stretching his arms and back in a quick limbering exercise, and walks to the window.  Outside it is summer, and his garden is growing all full of green.  There are no clouds in the blue California sky, and it looks as if the day will be typical for the season: warm and dry.  Across the street he notices a brown Lincoln Continental conspicuously squatting in a driveway where there is usually nothing.  Probably meaningless, he thinks, the Andersons get a new car every six months, and it's usually an ugly motherfucker like that one.
When Frog goes out to get the paper, he thinks he sees some motion in the car, out of the corner of his eye.  Then he goes back into the house.

The gritty southerner's voice coming over the speaker says, "We have, as it is said in the holy scriptures, a problem," and the Grimm Reaper turns to his companion and says, "You know what was on that tape, don't you?" and his companion, in a voice cracking with tension, says, "uh... yup."
"That's okay," the Grimm Reaper tells him.  "Planning is fun.  It's all a big hack anyway."
His companion says, "so they had a tap on CDS too?"
"Isn't that funny?  Fact is, we don't even tap CDS direct, we tap their tap!"
"Huh."

Douglass Castor is on a small airplane, heading south.  He is the only passenger, and the pilot the only other person in the plane, which has a total of four seats.  The loud, unreliable-sounding rumble of the engine and the buffeting wind outside make it seem as if there is very little between himself and a frightening 2000-story drop with only a windbreaker for a parachute.
Castor is looking out the window at the small houses and small cars when, for the fifth time, he notices that the pilot has a ridiculous-looking beatific grin on his face.
"Why are you smiling like that?"
The pilot, still smiling, says, "I just love it up here.  I'd spend my whole life in a plane if I could.  I used to be a doctor--still am, really.  Used to be married too.  Nothing can compete with this."
Castor is disgusted.  Nobody should enjoy anything that much, but he doesn't say anything.
"Do you know where we're going?"
"The boss said Bakersfield."  The pilot scratches the back of his wrist with his short beard.
"Bakersfield?"
"New headquarters, I guess.  You know, with the new kid and all, maybe he wanted a calmer environment."
"I guess."
After his conversation with Anneline Clerot, his cousin and contract programmer, Castor had called up his, well, his boss, and advised him of the situation.  Nelson Queneau had asked him many of the same questions Anneline had, and he had given him her answers.  Queneau didn't seem worried, but he had wanted to speak with him in person anyway.  The one thing that Queneau kept saying, over and over, was that Castor shouldn't even think about reporting the theft.  No matter how many times Castor promised he wouldn't, it seemed to him that Queneau always needed to tell him the same thing again and again, as if he weren't even listening.  As if he wouldn't be putting his life in immediate and horrible danger by acting against Queneau's explicit instructions.
The pilot interrupts his reverie. "Isn't that cloud beautiful?"
"Yeah.  What a beautiful cloud.  Never seen its like."
The pilot, for the first time losing his smile, turns to Castor and says, "Hey--don't make fun of me.  I don't like it.  How'd you like to fly the rest of the way to Bakersfield upside-down?"
"No thanks, but please keep future aesthetic judgements about the beauty of the airborne world to yourself, unless they directly impinge on my safety.  I hate these goddamn things."
"Just don't barf on the floor," the pilot says, pointing to a disreputable-looking bag marked FOR TRAVEL DISCOMFORT.
Soon the pilot is smiling again, moving his head side to side keeping time to a private melody, and Castor is looking out the window; soon they will land in Bakersfield.
Castor remembers a play that he wrote with his college roommate freshman year in college at Bard.  It was called "To Bakersfield: Voyage of Zeboth and The Tranya," and was about a mystical voyage of discovery to noplace special, which quality they thought Bakersfield was the epitome of.  As an adult he has of yet seen nothing to change his earlier judgement.
***
As the plane begins to descend over Bakersfield, it becomes obvious that the runway they are headed for is located inside a massive walled complex.  One huge building in the center appears to be a residence of some sort, and there are numerous outlying buildings of indeterminate purpose.  The boundary of the complex consists of two separate walls, the outer of which appears to be surrounded by a moat.
As the plane lands, Castor sees Nelson Queneau coming towards him, followed closely by two bodyguards in Armani suits.  About six feet tall, with short black hair and a beard, Queneau somehow looks like an Iowa country boy thrust unwillingly into the world of high-finance, or whatever the world that Queneau inhabits is called.  Maybe it's those Mork from Ork suspenders that he insists on wearing everywhere.  (Even in bed, Castor has heard, but he would never actually ask.)  Someone should tell him that they look ridiculous, Castor thinks.  On the other hand, maybe someone has, and maybe that someone got made into fishfood.  Castor resolves not to pursue this train of thought.
"Douglass, it's good to see you."  They shake hands, and Queneau begins to lead Castor towards the house.  "Wait till you see the setup I got down here.  A thousand-gallon aquarium.  Two-acre playground.  And, best of all, I discovered the best burrito place in California!  And they deliver!"
Castor makes a real effort to smile politely.  Queneau's (and his wife's) first child has arrived recently, and it seems to Castor that Queneau has gone a little overboard.
"I find it difficult to believe that the best burrito place in California is out here in the middle of goddamn nowhere."
"Watch your language, please.  I have a child now."
Castor also finds it difficult to believe that Queneau's infant kid could hear his "goddamn," much less understand it, but discretion being the better (or at least a) part of a decent business relationship, he holds his peace.
As they walk towards the house, which still appears to be under construction, Queneau puts his arm around Castor.  "Well, nephew, tell me more about what happened."

Clifford Greer taps furiously at a computer keyboard while yammering unintelligibly into a phone held in the vise-like grip between his ear and shoulder.  He'll need a massage later, although the connection between these events, or states really, is one that he is destined not to realize for many more years.  A speaker crackles, then says, "The candidate is here."  Clifford spits a few more words into the phone before tossing it down on the desk, and issues a few final taps to the keyboard with his fingers.  Finally, he looks up and yells, "come in."
The door opens and a young boy walks in.  He appears to be about fifteen years old.  His brown hair would probably be straight if he were to comb it.  He gently closes the door behind him and takes a step forward, in the general direction of Clifford's desk, as he looks around the immaculate but cluttered office.
"Have a seat, if you like.  My name is Clifford Greer.  I'm the office manager and general scapegoat around here."
The boy sits in the chair in front of the desk, perched on the edge of it as if he is about to make a run for it.
"Do I need a lawyer?  Do I need to tell my parents?"  the boy asks.
"Jordy, please relax and calm down!" Clifford says.  "No, you don't need a lawyer, but you may wish to tell your parents.  This is not a deposition; this is a job interview."
Jordy does not react visibly.
Clifford continues.  "It's a job interview for a job for you."
Jordy's eyes widen to the size of golf balls.  "But... but I broke into your computer over the phone!"
Clifford laughs.  "No, you just think you broke into our computer over the phone.  What your really broke into was an achievement test that measured your computer skills.  You did very, very well."
Jordy's eyes darken.  "Hey!  That was mean!"
"Excuse me," Clifford says as his eyebrows rise, "but what did you think you were doing with our computer?"
"Breaking in."  Jordy examines his sneakers.
"Was that mean?"
"No.  I wasn't going to do anything bad to it."
Clifford's phone rings, and he slaps a button to silence it.  "Well, we're not going to do anything bad to you.  In fact, if you're willing, we'll give you money to work for us part-time.  How does fifteen dollars an hour sound?"
Once again, the boy's eyes grow to massive dimensions.  "Are you lying?"
"Certainly not.  I never lie if someone might believe me."
"What would I do?"
"Write programs, help other employees write programs, maybe fix computers if you have hardware knowledge, that kind of thing."
"Okay."
Clifford stands up and offers his hand to shake, which the boy accepts.  "Congratulations, Jordy Jameson," he says, "welcome to Rollover Consulting, Incorporated.
"If you go see J. Random outside, he'll fill you in on all the details and help you set up your work schedule.  Again, congratulations, and welcome!"
Jordy, moving somewhat awkwardly--from shock, Clifford supposes--opens the door and shambles out of the room.
Clifford plops back down behind his desk and starts to check his messages for the fifty-seventh time since arriving at work.

Two men in dark grey suits trot past Laundry by Bob Nebrig, bound briskly up the stairs, and stalk into the reception area of Rollover Consulting, Inc., where they are greeted by J. Random Hacker.
J. Random looks up from behind the reception desk.  "Hello.  May I help you?" he asks, but it sounds more like "Heyo, may I hahp you?"
"Grimley and Cobb, United States Defense Department," says Grimley.
"Who's in charge here?" asks Cobb.
J. Random, fully prepared for this occurrence from watching many many Hollywood movies, says, "May I see your identifications cards, please?"
With ease that must have been born from long practice, Grimley and Cobb in one fluid motion that reminds J. Random of Jackie Chan movies draw out their identification badges, flip them open simultaneously for a split second, and then smoothly return them to their breast pockets.  The whole maneuver takes approximately half a second.
J. Random, living out one of his long-time fantasies, says, "Those could have been Tower Records rental-club cards, for all I could see, gentlemen.  Please hold them where I can read them."
Grimley and Cobb, trying their hardest to show without saying it that J. Random is an idiot, slowly draw out their identification badges and hold them practically in J. Random's face.  He copies down everything on the badges:
United States of America -- Defense Department
This badge identifies
Walter Grimley (Lawrence Cobb)
as an employee of the Defense Department of the USA.
Valid until 12/31/00 (01/31/01)

This card is the exclusive property of the Defense Department of the USA and must be surrendered upon demand.  Return postage guaranteed.  Do not bend, staple, mutilate, or otherwise molest this card under penalty of law.

As he holds his card out for J. Random, Grimley says, "you don't even know why we're here yet."
J. Random says, "I hate bureaucrats and anything to do with government.  That is my personal position, not that of my employer."
"I'm no bureaucrat!" says Grimley.
"Which Bureau do you work for, sir?"
Grimly raises his fist.  "You..." Cobb grabs Grimley's upper arm, interrupting him.
"I apologize for my associate," Cobb says to J. Random.  "I'm certain he wouldn't want to impugn the sterling image of our employer, the Government of the United States of America."
Cobb lets go of Grimley's arm and drapes it around his shoulder.  "May I suggest that you have perhaps consumed too much caffeine today?," he says in Grimley's ear.  And then, to J. Random, "A theft has been reported to us.  We are investigating the possibility that your company is involved."
J. Random smiles wanly, falling out of his fantasy.  "Please wait here, gentlemen."  He rises from behind the desk and dashes around the corner.
"Computer geeks," Grimley says, "I can't stand them fuckers.  When this is settled maybe we can whack him."
Cobb glares at him.  "Just keep your gob stopped until we split, asshole."
The two men wait silently for a few minutes, exchanging unpleasant facial expressions and pretending to be interested in the details of the office.
Dashing around the corner, towards the agents this time, J. Random slips back to stand behind his desk.  "Our president and legal counsel will see you now, gentlemen.  This way, please."
He leads them down a short hall and into an office that looks out over Irving Street.  Two walls are piled high to the ceiling with bookshelves, on which sit books, manuals, teetering stacks of paper, software packages, a large ball of orange cat fur, several old computers, a collection of videotapes, a small plastic dragon with three heads and two tails, a box of oatmeal, a television set, a mechanical postal scale, an empty carton of Combos Snack Food now filled with many decks of playing cards, and a small collection of ceramic mugs, among other things.
As the agents enter, Frog Hamilton is moving a stack of photocopies from one of the two guest chairs to a clear spot on the floor.  Grimley and Cobb look around the office, which is about twelve feet wide and twice as deep.  There is a large desk at the end, facing away from the window that looks over Irving.
The desk, like the bookshelves, is piled high with all manner of stuff that looks like, well, crap.  There is a small clear spot in the center of which is a keyboard.  A large flat-panel computer monitor sits off to the side of the desk on a swivelling base.
"Please, sit down," says Frog.  "I'm Frog Hamilton, president of Rollover Consulting."
"Grimley and Cobb", Cobb says, pointing.  "Defense Department."
Grimley and Cobb sit, and as Frog is negotiating the path back behind his desk, trying valiantly to reach his own chair without further increasing local entropy, the door opens and a woman comes in.
Lena Smythe is a lawyer who chose her career for the express purpose of making life hell for other lawyers, whom she hates as a class.  Lena maintains an Internet mailing list for lawyer jokes, lawyers-are-scum@rollover.com.  In her personal life she is frequently described as sweet, but that description has never crossed the mind, in court, of any opposing counsel.
"Hi Lena!" says Frog, and to Grimley and Cobb, "This is Lena Smythe, our head counsel."
"Pleased to meet you, gentlemen," she says to the men in dark suits, without smiling in the slightest imaginable way.  She gracefully avoids the debris on the floor as she makes her way to the fourth chair and sits.
"J. Random tells me something about a theft?" Frog says.
Grimley clears his throat.  "We are investigating the theft of a computer tape from a company called Castor Data Services.  Your company had recently done a job with them.  Then the tape went missing."  He stops and rests his hands on his crossed legs.
"First let me say that of course our company is more than willing to cooperate fully with any investigation, but isn't theft usually a matter for the local police department?" asks Lena.
Cobb nods.  "We have reason to believe that the data on the tape was obtained via telecommunications with out-of-state devices, therefore making it the concern of the Federal Government."  He smiles briefly, without opening his mouth.
 "Who did the work for CDS, Mr. Hamilton?" asks Grimley.
Frog looks at Lena.  She gives a series of hand signals that means "cooperate minimally but politely."  Frog wishes he had told Lena about the message from Ray, but now he feels rushed and worries that it would look suspicious if he called her out to speak with her privately.
"I'll find out for you," Frog says.  He types on the keyboard:
>Mom, who did work for CDS?

The response appears almost immediately:
Raymond Charles (rac).  <<Click here>> for more detail

Frog turns to Cobb.  "It was an employee named Raymond Charles.  I don't see how he could be involved.  Why would he want to steal this tape, anyway?"
"The data on the tape was extremely sensitive.  He could have arranged to sell it," Cobb says.  "Where is he?"
"I haven't seen him in a few days, but that's not unusual," says Frog.  "Let me check to see if the computer knows." He looks over at the computer monitor as he types on the keyboard:
>Mom, what's Ray's schedule like?

After a brief delay a response appears on the monitor:
Frog honey, Ray is on vacation for the next three weeks.  After that he has no appointments currently scheduled.

Have you eaten lunch yet?  You know that you should always eat a nice lunch.  There's a new restaurant that you might like.  It's called the Polenta Grill.  <<Click here>> if you want more information on it or other recommendations about where to have a nice meal.

"He's on vacation," says Frog.
"Where?" says Grimley.
"I don't have that information, I'm afraid."
A soft throat-clearing sound comes from Frog's computer and the screen now shows an additional message:
Frog, bubbeleh, You didn't answer my question.  Is that any way to treat someone you love?  I know you're a busy man these days, but please show some respect.

"When's he get back?" says Grimley.
Frog says, "In three weeks, but he could take longer without telling us."
A soft sigh comes from Frog's computer.  The sigh seems to carry with it a sense of complete and utter hopelessness in the face of incomparably insurmountable obstacles, obstacles that are arrayed with all the forces of nature against the One Who Sighs.  A new message is added to the bottom of the window:
I can wait.

Grimley asks, "where's he usually stay?"
Lena sits forward in her chair, clearing her throat.  "Gentlemen, do you have any evidence that our employee had anything to do with the theft of this tape?"
Cobb smiles.  "Not at this time.  Our investigation is in a preliminary stage.  Obviously, we'd like to talk with Mr. Charles at the earliest opportunity."
Nobody says anything.  Frog sits at his desk with his hands clasped in front of him, resting in front of the keyboard.  Grimley shuffles his feet back and forth and rearranges his rear end in the chair.  Lena still sits forward in hers, looking at Cobb.
Cobb reaches into his jacket and pulls out a card case.  He takes two business cards from it and hands one each to Lena and Frog.  "Please call me if you should hear from him within three weeks.  Other than that, we'll come by again when he is expected back."
Cobb starts to rise, and Grimley, who has been examining his cuticles, rises soon after.
"Bye.  Good luck in your investigation," Frog says.
Grimley glares at him malevolently, and Cobb smiles.  "Thank you," he says.
Lena says, "I'll see you out, gentlemen," and the three of them leave Frog's office.
Frog is still sitting at his desk, staring blankly into the middle distance.  On the computer screen in front of him, a message blinks annoyingly:
Frog, bubbeleh, didn't I teach you to say "Thank you"?

And as he watches, more messages are added beneath it:
Oy vey, where did I go wrong?  Tell me.  No, don't tell me.  I don't want to know.

I'll just be sitting here in the dark in case you need me.  Good-bye.

<<Session terminated: Timeout>>

Trotting down the stairs behind Grimley, Cobb says, "Don't say anything."
"I wasn't going to say anything, asshole," Grimley says as they walk along Irving Street.  Grimley scratches his behind with his thumb, not making any particular effort to be in the least bit discreet.
"You didn't fucking listen to one fucking thing I said before we went in there, dickhead," said Cobb, "How am I supposed to know what you're going to do?"  He wipes his forehead with a white handkerchief, then tucks it away in his jacket pocket.
Grimley stops in front of his car, a brown Dodge Dart.  "Look, if I hadn't..."
"Who's in charge?"
"I was told that you," Grimley says, smiling in as unfriendly a manner as he can, "were the asshole in charge."
Cobb smiles broadly and pats his chest.  "That's right.  That's me.  That's what I heard, too."
"That doesn't mean you have to treat me like some douchebag out of Soldier of Fortune, does it?"
"I don't know where they got you."  Cobb laughs, raising his eyebrows to what he thinks is great comic effect.
Grimley's eyes open wide and his mouth tightens to become a sphincter.  "You little shit!  I'm gonna..."
Cobb holds up his hand.  "Let's wait until we get there, okay?"  Cobb reaches into his jacket, finds the business card case, and throws it into a nearby trash bin.
"Okay.  I can wait to throttle you.  See your sorry ass in fifteen."  Grimley gets in his car, slams the door, and pulls away with a screech, depositing part of his tires on the tarmac.
Cobb walks west another block and a half until he reaches his car, a green Lexus.  A disarming female voice from the car says, "disarmed", and Cobb gets in, carefully preventing his door from touching the door of the car in the adjoining space.  He closes the door with a crisp thwack and starts the engine.  The license plate on his car reads "MOHAWK".
***
Cobb lets out a deep breath as he grips the textured leather-covered steering wheel of his Lexus.  He slowly backs the car out of its parking spot and makes an illegal--but extremely safe, as traffic is light--U turn on Irving.
There is a tape in the tape deck of his car.  He punches the "play" button and a deep voice comes over the speakers of the Blaupunkt stereo.
"You and one other man will meet at the corner of Irving and Seventh Streets, in San Francisco, at approximately 3:45 PM on Friday, May 8.  You are Agent Lawrence Cobb of the United States Defense Department.  Your partner is Agent Walter Grimley.  He's a real jerk, and you may in fact consider him incompetent in certain essential respects, but he's the best we could do.  Keep him in line.  You're in charge on this operation."
The voice has a strange quality to it.  It is a deep voice, and speaks at a normal rate, but it somehow still sounds slow to Cobb's ears.  He has decided that it has been altered with some sort of computer.
Computers, Cobb thinks, I can't stand them.  This job sucks.  I've never taken a job before where I didn't actually talk with a real person.  I guess it doesn't really matter as long as I get the cash.  Shit, I can't wait to see that cash.  More drugs and babes!  He is lost in fantasy for a minute or so.
Cobb becomes aware again of the voice continuing on the tape.  "When the meeting is terminated, meet at Deli Pub on Bokonnon.  Sit in the corner table and discuss the operation with Grimley.  This will be your final report to us.  Be certain to include as much detail as possible.  Include even things which you think are irrelevant.  Details are important.  Read all of any notes that you may have taken during the meeting.  Speak as clearly as you can.
"When you are done, if your report was satisfactory, you will find the remainder of your payments taped under one of the newspaper machines just outside of the café.  We expect that your report will have been satisfactory.  Leave this tape on the table at the Deli Pub.  This message ends now. "
The voice stops, and Cobb in turn stops the tape, driving on.
***
As he rides in his Dart, feeling every bump in the road as a mushy wobble in his seat which has been covered with a beaded "Drivers Relax-O-Massage", Grimley listens to a tape which is playing in a portable Radio Shack tape deck that sits beside him, on the passenger seat.
In a strange, deep voice, the tape is saying, "Cobb is an arrogant asshole, but he's the best we could do.  Follow his instructions for now."
Yeah, for now, Grimley thinks.  I can't wait.  Maybe I'll get to whack him.  I might even do it for free.  Arrogant asshole.  He fondles the gun in his shoulder holster, thinking of Cobb strung up in the shooting range instead of one of those paper sheets, strung up with a rope around his neck; Grimley thinking of putting five or six holes in the asshole's forehead.
I'll bet I could make some nice holes with a fork in his forehead, Grimley tells himself, never mind using a gun.  Guns are too impersonal.  Nice bloody holes.  Lots of them all over.  Deep red blood coming out of the holes.
Grimley twists his knuckles around the steering wheel and drives south, heading towards Deli Pub on Bokonnon.

Deli Pub is a relatively typical San Francisco sort of small neigborhood fixture.  It's a low budget eatery with Odwalla juice, good espresso, homemade sandwiches that are just okay, and pretty good desserts that they don't make there.  There is a piano on one wall, a spinet, but nobody ever plays it and it probably isn't even remotely in tune.  A colorful row of Italian soda syrups sits on a shelf behind the cash register.  Plants are scattered throughout the establishment, bringing the major colors in the decor to two: brown and green.  The place could have been built and decorated in 1970 and nobody could tell the difference.  The bathroom doesn't have much graffiti because the owner repaints it every month.
In a corner of the store, at a table with only two seats, Grimley and Cobb sit staring at each other.  Grimley's hands are in his pockets, and Cobb sits back in his chair with his arms crossed in front of him.  A small brown tabby cat comes wandering up to the table and meows plaintively.
"Aw, kitty want be petted?" Cobb asks it in a silky, silly sweet voice.  He stretches out his hand towards it, petting it and scratching it behind the ears.
"You make me sick!" Grimley says.
Cobb reaches down with his other hand and grasps the cat underneath its chest.  He lifts it to his lap and begins stroking its head and back.  The cat begins to purr.
"Why's that?"
"You treat me like shit, but that cat is royalty, huh?"
"I'm sure I have no idea what you're talking about," says Cobb.
"Shit, what's the use?  I might as well complain to the Equal Opportunity Commission as to you."
"Let's give our report, okay?"
"I can't believe I agreed to this.  What a scam!  We'll never get our money!"
"Too late now.  Just cooperate with it, okay?"
"Are you sure we're at the right table?"
"Yes.  Positive."  Cobb looks meaningfully at the blue ceramic vase that sits on the table, filled with an assortment of miscellaneous flowers.  "I'll start.  We entered the building at approximately 3:45..."
***
As Grimley and Cobb are staring at each other silently across the table at the coffee shop, after having completed their report to each other and to the microphone hidden in the vase, a young boy about thirteen years old is riding his bicycle up to the curb outside.  He has dark black hair and pale white skin, with not even the slightest premonition of a hint of a pretense of whiskers beginning to form on his lip.  The boy wears a T-shirt that reads "HOPE 97--Youth Contingent", and ratty blue jeans with many holes and no patches.  Bits of fabric trail behind him in his airstream.
He comes to a gentle stop and casually leans the bike against a telephone pole as he leaps from the seat.  Reaching behind him, he removes a canvas backpack from his shoulders.  
The boy unzips the backpack and roots around inside.  He pulls out a roll of duct tape and then two packages wrapped in newspaper, each about the size of the box that new checks come in.  Looking around and seeing no one nearby, he strolls over to the newspaper machines that sit against the side of a red brick building that houses "Neal's Bar."
With a noticeable economy of motion, he swiftly tapes the two packages at the bottoms of two of the newspaper vending machines.  The boy hops on his bicycle and rides off down the hill.
Inside, Grimley and Cobb are still staring at each other, neither saying a word.  Two cassette tapes rest on the table beside the bugged vase.
Eventually, Grimley asks, "Is that it?"
Cobb looks at his watch.  "We're done," he says.  "Let's go see if it's there."  He pushes back from the table with both hands and rises evenly to his feet.
"It better be," Grimley says, knowing even as he says it that there's nothing to be done about it if it isn't.  Cobb just smiles calmly in no particular direction, saying nothing.
The two men push through Deli Pub's screen door and out onto the sidewalk.  Grimley dashes to the newspaper machines and then begins checking under each one.
"Yes!  Ha ha!"  He rips the packages away from their hiding place and tears the duct tape off.  He tosses the duct tape to the ground.
Each of the packages has taped to it a small piece of paper.  On one is laserprinted "COBB", on the other "GRIMLEY".  Cobb takes his package and tosses it up and down in his hand a moment.
"Feels about right," he says, as he puts it in his outer jacket pocket.

Frog Hamilton is in his desk chair, leaning back to the maximum extent the chair will allow, with his stockinged feet up on the desk.  The socks are a concession to the business world, one of few that he has been willing to make thus far.  For shoes, he still wears $2-a-pair Kung-Fu slippers that he buys by the dozen in Chinatown, and he still walks around wherever and whenever possible without them.
Right now his feet rest on a pile of MacWeek magazines a foot high which is sitting on the right hand corner of the teak desk in front of him.  A magazine from some other vintage is lying on the floor, having fallen from Frog's face, where it had been being used to prevent the sun, streaming in through the window, from blinding Frog as he tried to relax.
Now the Rollover Consulting, Inc. president is asleep, vaguely feeling the warm sun bathe his face in a pleasant but ultimately carcinogenic stream of photons and other tiny particles.  He snores lightly, his head lolling back and forth against the neck rest that has been attached to his chair with the aid of two lengths of rebar and a welding torch.  It's not a pretty sight, but then again he never has to look at it and thus doesn't tend to notice or complain about or desire to improve it in any way whatsoever.
Anyway, he's asleep now, lost in some unknown dream world.
With no cautionary preamble, the speakers attached to Frog's computer suddenly start playing the "Evil Empire Theme" from Star Wars, and a video window opens on Frog's monitor.  The face of Dan Bunsen appears within it.  Frog wakes up with a start and a stupid look on his face, and looks at the monitor.
"This is a recorded message," Bunsen says in the video window.  "I know you're probably goofing off, what with being the president and all and having absolutely no responsibilities and all that.  However, may I humbly suggest that you go take a break?  In fact, I insist.  And I also want a raise for perpetrating this egregious hack with such style and verve that it will live throughout the history of the universe.  You should be aware, as I'm certain you are, that your computer's operating system did not make it easy for me to do this and that furthermore neither I nor any agent of mine entered your office to make this possible."  In an old-and-fat-Las-Vegas-Elvis voice that has earned him extremely local but well-deserved fame, he adds, "Thank you very much."
The video winks out and the Evil Empire theme fades into silence.  Frog is left staring dumbly at the monitor.  He rubs his eyes, then his face, in the hope that this will help him to wake up.  He scratches his head, ruffling his short brown hair back and forth.  He looks at his watch.  It is 4:48 by his watch, which has hands on it and requires winding every so often.  He points this out to people occasionally.
He leans forward and the following dialogue ensues in a window titled "MOM Interaction":
>Mom, please credit Dan Bunsen with one mildly-amusing egregious hack.

Yes, dear.  Dan's such a sweetheart.  He was just telling me that you looked thin.  Why don't you go get something sweet?  Some coffee will help wake you up, too.

>Thanks, Mom.  Later.

Oh honey, you know I'd do anything for you.

<<Session Terminated>>

Frog gets up and slides his Kung-Fu slippers onto his feet.  He still feels stiff from his nap, and so goes into a brief routine of stretches that he does to warm-up for his Aikido training.
He sets his feet apart and swings his hands around from side to side in a motion that looks as if he's scooping chunks of air, then lifting them from each side and tossing them over his head to the other side.  He stretches his legs one at a time by keeping one leg straight and bending the other knee until he's almost sitting on the ground, then begins a series of motions in which an imaginary partner is attacking him in imaginary ways, requiring him to respond concretely.
Frog had taken some Judo when he was very young, and some Karate when he was a little less young, and has now been doing Aikido for over five years.  He doesn't think that it is only his adulthood which caused him to stick with Aikido training for so long--something about the basic philosophy of it appeals deeply to him.  Aikido, as literally as possible, means "Way of Harmony with Energy," and this is really the principle of the whole of the art, as Frog sees it.
In Aikido, if you are very good, you never hurt anyone who attacks you.  You don't even sprain their wrists.  Angry people may come at you, brandishing knives, guns, baseball bats, and evil intent, and if you do Aikido as its ideals dictate, your assailant will walk away perhaps confused, but essentially unhurt.  Their energy has been sensed, harmonized with, and redirected harmlessly.  There is lots of twirling and spinning involved, and people who have the poor sense to attack skilled Aikido students tend to have the experience that their intended prey just disappears, and then something happens (what?) and now they're on the floor and where's their knife gone to?  Hey!
The idea is to communicate the concept that attacking people, specifically the Aikido practitioner in question, is futile and ultimately self-defeating.  The idea is emphatically not to get them on the floor and then to bludgeon them into the ICU.
These are the principles to which Frog feels drawn--taking care of people, even if they don't feel like taking care of you, blending with them peacefully.  Not that he feels that he's that good at it yet, but just that that's what he likes.
Unfortunately, unless you are perfect, which hardly anybody is these days, you may come across someone who challenges your ability to take care of them.  In these cases, which grow less frequent as one's Aikido improves, someone can get seriously hurt, and more often than not it's not the one attacking with the knife who suffers this fate.  All the more reason to practice, for once a student grasps the essence of Aikido, he or she tends to realize that one can assume complete responsibility oneself for taking care of the other, and failing in that is no less great when the other isn't trying to take care of you.
Frog finishes up his stretching with some wrist exercises, repeating over and over on his own body what it could be called upon to do if he were so unbalanced as to attack somebody else--part of taking care of the other person is taking care of yourself.
He rises and walks out the door, leaving it open behind him.  As he passes the reception area, he calls to J. Random, "I'm going to Tart to Tart.  Will you tell Mom for me, okay?"
"T," says J. Random from behind the desk, as Frog hurtles softly down the stairs.  Frog thinks that this is slightly inappropriate usage of "T", but he's not willing to push it.  It's hard to find people who can throw keys like J. Random can, and so such a minor point of hacker grammar is not worth complaining about.

Inside the café called "Tart to Tart," Frog peers intently into the glass dessert case for at least two minutes before choosing a particularly tempting apple tart.  He pays for it and for a nonfat latté, and repairs to a small table to consume them.
While waiting for his coffee drink to be prepared, he glances around at the walls of the café.  The business is long and narrow, and all of the available wall space is covered with artwork.
Most of the pieces are still-life renderings of fruit, executed in pastel or oils.  One in particular catches Frog's eye: two grapefruit halves and a kiwi half, resting on an invisibly black surface against an invisibly black background.  He looks closely at the tag underneath the frame:
Impossible Grapefruit Spoon
by Simon Lucius Guzman, III
pastel, 1995
$240

As he is just beginning to eat, Frog notices two stocky Asian men enter through the front door.  They wear dark glasses and identical charcoal grey suits, and scan the room as if they are doing twin Arnold Schwartzenegger impersonations from the movie where he played that indestructible robot from the future that caused havoc until it was finally destroyed by some much dumber, but much stronger robot in a manufacturing plant from the present.
Frog takes a bite of his apple tart.  It is several inches in diameter and a pleasant golden color, except for the paired kiwi slices on top.  The flavor is mostly butter with a bit of rich apple thrown in almost as an afterthought.  Pretty good, he thinks.  If I had one of these every day I probably wouldn't be able to fit in the door here.  Frog imagines himself as an extremely fat man in huge trousers and bungee cords for suspenders, hopelessly sucking in his gut to shove his pasty, corpulent body through the doorframe.
He is in the middle of sipping his latté (no sugar, thank you, it makes it taste like a Yoohoo, Frog says) when the two Asian men approach his table with strong, purposeful-looking strides.  One sits down next to him and the other walks behind him and starts to closely examine the artwork on the wall, which is an oil painting of a ballet class.
Frog thinks this might have something to do with the missing tape taken by Ray, and is getting rather nervous.  He waits for someone else to start speaking.
"We looking for tape," the man says, with a heavy Japanese accent.  "Looking," in particular, comes out like "rooking".
Frog sits and stares, trying to look confused, thinking about the message he read at the Indian market--the message from Ray telling him that he had taken that tape.
The man moves slightly closer.  "You know about tape, ne?"
Frog decides to at least make a feeble attempt to play it cool, and says, "what tape is that?"
"Tape taken from company called CDS.  We think you know where tape is."  The man leans forward and begins tapping his fingers on the café's heavily scarred wooden table.  Frog notices that the pinky finger of the man's left hand is missing a joint or two, but the stump still moves up and down as if it were actually making contact with the table.
"I heard about the tape from some government agents who were investigating.  I don't know where it is."  Frog is staring at the stumpy pinky finger.  He remembers that Japanese gang members--Yakuza--often cut off parts of their own fingers as a demonstration of loyalty or in apology for mistakes they've made in serving their boss.
"I saying: you lying."  The man looks behind him and nods.  "You coming with us now."
"I'd rather not."  Frog is extremely nervous at this moment, and perspiring freely from his forehead and armpits, but is determined to stick it out for as long as he can.
"Tosh standing behind you have nice black gun," the man says.  "You no come, he shoot you dead."  He smiles politely.
"Right here?  In front of everybody?"
"Yes!" the man shouts, his voice continuing to rise.  "He shoot you then we run away!  Just come like good gaijin and no-body die!"
People around them are staring now.  Most of them look as if they are trying very hard to decide how much attention they will draw towards themselves if they run away, and if they will get shot when doing so or if they will merely escape with a good story.
Tosh, standing behind Frog, says, "Don't worry everybody.  Community theatre practice.  Come and see us next month at the Castro.  You can buy ticket from me now, only $20.  Anyone want?"
The other patrons, glad for any excuse to believe that things are relatively normal, go back to their reading, smoking, sketching, flirting, and/or moping.  The additional mention of buying tickets for $20 just helped to clinch it.
The man sitting next to Frog leans very close to him.  "I not kidding.  Come now or die."  He grabs Frog's arm and yanks him to his feet.
"Okay, I'll come quietly," he says, and the man releases his arm, although he continues to favor Frog with a menacing glance.  People all around are studiously ignoring the unfolding drama.  No fewer than three patrons have raised their copies of The Fountainhead to their faces, obliterating all visual evidence of potentially disturbing events.
Tosh behind him, Frog is marched out the door and east on Irving.  He has decided to give up all hope of escaping or resisting, and perhaps it is this which causes his Aikido training to react and seize control of his body when Tosh grabs his wrist to pull him towards their car.
He starts moving before he realizes what he is doing.  His mind is strangely calm.  I've heard of this happening, he thinks--martial arts training asserting itself without conscious choice.  I guess I'll see how it turns out for me.  At the same time, of course, he is extremely worried that he will lose his life, but this worry has a very abstract quality to it at the moment.
He finds himself stepping to the side of the man who has grabbed his wrist, curving his arm in one of the many circles and arcs of Aikido.  Frog breathes the man in as he moves, turning, gathering up his ki, raising it up--still attached to his wrist--until the man is standing on his toes and very off-balance.  With a fluid, circular reversal of the movement, Frog breathes the man out.  Frog twists his hips and the man goes tumbling into his partner, who staggers backwards.  That was the best kokyuu-nage I've ever done in my life, Frog thinks.
The two Japanese men are slightly dazed.  From his position, the one who didn't grab Frog's wrist looks like he has knocked the back of his head against a parking sign.  He reaches up behind him to feel the back of his head, and winces when he touches it.  His hand comes away covered with sticky crimson blood, and his eyes close tight when he sees it.  Tosh is lying on the ground groaning, starting to get up.
Frog isn't inclined to hang around, especially when it looks like he can probably get away, and it feels like he has the adrenaline to run as far as he needs to.  He looks around and sees that he is right outside of a bookstore, Green Apple II, which he knows has a back door.
Frog throws open the bookstore door, in his unchecked haste almost toppling an unhappy-looking old lady exiting the store with an armful of books about codependence.  Then he almost trips over a small Pekingnese who is following her closely.  He zips through the obstacle course of irregularly-placed shelving, jumping over the occasional stack of Danielle Steele novels, until he pops out the back door and into an alley that runs behind all of the shops on the block.
Somehow the alley seems dim, in spite of the bright (and typical) springtime sunshine.  It's probably the dark rear facades of the buildings all around, painted not so much for the purpose of aesthetics as for the custom that when one paints a building, one typically paints all of its external (and internal) walls.
Propped up against the back wall of the building, resting against a battered aluminum garbage can, is a janitor's broom.  The broom consists of a bristly head into which is screwed a wooden pole about four feet long.  Frog starts to unscrew the handle, telling himself that it could be useful.  Just in case they come after me, he thinks.  His hands are starting to shake.

Date:	Friday, May 8, 1998 17:15:32 PDT
From:	hemo@flame-ingot.rci.com (Shem Harper)
To:	dbunsen@burned.rci.com (Dan Bunsen)
Subject:	Re: New Business Ideas

Sorry for not writing you back on this earlier.  I was extremely busy, as you may have noticed.

Your scheme is interesting but too much on the far side of the law for me.  You can get arrested & go to jail and be the girlfriend of someone you'd cross the street to avoid out here on the outside.  I will do no such thing.  I prefer to choose my romantic partners.  Okay, maybe not all that carefully, sometimes, but still upon reflection I find that the principle is rather important to me.

So if we can set it up where I get some of the profits and still take no risk of going to jail, then okay.  Otherwise... we'll have to think of something else, at least if you want me as a partner for it.

It seems that the concept of a rollover is a rich one, especially if we expand it to include changeovers of all kinds.  People change systems all the time, and not because they want to.  Maybe we could make a company that specialized in making new systems appear to function like old ones.  You know, write an NCR cash register on an old IBM XT.  Okay, well we could make old systems function like other old systems too.

Or we could also specialize in easing people through hardware and software transitions in general.  Specialized manuals, phone support, all that stuff.  (New college hires for the phone support, naturally not any of us.)

--
 hEMO -- Shem Harper -- <hemo@rci.com>
If anyone around here shares my opinions, I'd better quit!

Just as Frog has finished unscrewing the handle from the janitor's broom, the bookstore's rear door opens and the man who had grabbed Frog's wrist comes bolting through, apparently heedless of any danger that might have been lurking on the other side of the opaque door.
Instinct and adrenaline are still running strong inside Frog, and in a single motion he takes the staff and pokes it lengthwise at the man's throat.  Instinctively, the man backs his neck away from the poke of the pole, but his feet are still moving forwards and this combination causes him to fall backwards rather suddenly.
Only by breaking his fall with his right arm does he manage to avoid pounding his head not very gently against the cobblestone of the old alley.  His arm catches on the stone, but the downward force of his fall pushes it in a way that it ordinarily wouldn't have chosen to go, and the man hears a muted snap from inside his body, conducted loudly by conduits of bone from his arm to his ears.
As the door to the bookstore swings closed, Frog realizes that he probably only has a few seconds before the other man comes through.
The downed man is groaning softly, lying on his side, and Frog approaches him from the rear and kneels, resting his knee softly on the man's neck so that he doesn't try to get up.  He searches for and finds the man's wallet in his back pocket and slips it into one of his own.
Just then the door starts to open again, quickly, and Frog pushes against it suddenly from the other side, extending his energy, his ki, through it and into the body of the man on the other side.  He hears a clunk and some noises that might be a body falling against, and toppling, a bookshelf.  Then he starts running down the alley, his staff held in his right hand and tucked up under his armpit, his Kung-Fu slippered feet making a soft pitter-patter on the stone surface.

There are three people sitting around a collapsible bridge table in a rather disreputable hotel on Broadway Avenue in San Francisco.  One of the immediate neighbors of the hotel is a establishment whose sign is primarily composed of a large illuminated woman who is wearing pasties and a g-string.  The hotel advertises hourly rates, but the room has been paid for for a whole day.
Two of the people are men, and they wear almost identical cheap brown suits.  One of them, with very white skin, white hair, and burning red eyes, wears a pair of dark blue socks that have printed on them "Fun Lovin Papa" over and over in a flowing script.  The other man is stocky, with curly black hair and dark brown skin that reflects almost coherent images of the small fluorescent light overhead.  He is wearing dark glasses in spite of the inadequate light in the meeting room.  The remaining member of the cabal is a woman, whose lime green suit reminds the red-eyed man of the Key Lime pies his grandmother used to make for him when he was small.
The red-eyed man speaks.  "As it is written in the holy scriptures, I think we're in deep doo-doo."
The woman tilts her head down and looks at him from the tops of her eyes.  "I really wish you wouldn't do that, Dourish."
"My daddy told me I could talk however I wanted, thank you."
"Please," says the black man.  "Just shut up.  The drop has been compromised.  The likelihood is high that the message in question is one that could have been on the stolen tape.  Our mission was not only to locate and investigate the drop, which we have already accomplished, but to preserve the secrecy of the message or messages in question until such time as our colleagues determine the nature of the information therein."
"And he didn't tell me I had to listen to no sorry-ass woman who wears suits that look like something from Carvel."  He turns to the black man and smiles with his mouth closed.  "Sorry, Campbell."
Campbell smiles thinly, trying to look impatient so he doesn't have to actually get upset, which would be bothersome.  "We need to recover the tape and identify who could have had access to it while it was out of the CDS offices."
The woman stops glaring at Dourish and turns to Campbell.  "We know the backups are encrypted with a decent algorithm, although one that we could break if necessary."
Dourish says, "Oh please, Thomas.  If we could break it, somebody else could."
The woman named Thomas says, "Why do you think that CDS was approved for a drop anyway?  Do you think we're idiots?"
Campbell clears his throat.  "If you will kindly remember, this was not an agency-approved drop location.  Why else would we have been investigating it in the first place?" 
Then he turns to Dourish, and says, "However, the security of the tape is in fact important.  I think what your colleague was trying to say is that the algorithm is of sufficient complexity that we are sufficiently confident that nobody could break it unless they had a shitload of computers.  Is that correct?"
"Yes," says Thomas.  "It's an implementation of triple-DES with a 256-bit key.  Specifically not approved by the NSA, and you know what that usually means."
"Is it possible that someone besides us could have the password?" says Dourish.
"Unfortunately, yes," says Campbell.  "We know from our video surveillance that a man named Raymond Charles took the tape, although we didn't view the tape until we heard the audiotape of that phone conversation.  Our budget isn't what it used to be.  No money to save the world from Communism, Socialism, or any kind of crazy people anymore."
"What did the tape show?" says Thomas.
"It appears that Castor had written his password down on the bottom of his keyboard, and Charles found it and figured out what it was."
"How do you know?" says Dourish, stretching out and putting his legs up on the table.
"As soon as he saw the password on the keyboard, he exchanged one of his personal DAT tapes for one of the backup tapes.  The fact that he did this so quickly after seeing the password, after having worked there for some days previous without stealing a tape, makes me believe that the motivation for the theft was the fact that he knew, or suspected, that it would be useful to him."
Thomas says, "by the way, Dourish, with socks like that, how dare you complain about the color of my suit?"

As he approaches the Asian Art Museum, Frog comes out of his trance and finally starts to feel his body complaining of mistreatment.  There is a stitch in his left side: it feels as if someone is poking up under his ribcage with a chopstick, jabbing jabbing jabbing every few seconds, in a rhythm syncopated with his pounding heartbeat.  His body is covered with slick sweat, and his T-shirt is soaked through, especially under his arms and on his back.  His hair is likewise soaked, laying limply on his head as if he had just emerged from a swimming pool.  Although he is reasonably fit, and even played soccer for a number of years when he was little more than half his current height, running has never been a specialty, and has always been something to be avoided at almost any cost.  Today it was just in the cards, and it hadn't seemed to Frog as if he had had any choice in the matter whatsoever.
For the past twenty minutes or so he has been running through the streets of San Francisco.  Running down streets almost at random until he found himself entering Golden Gate Park--for some unexamined reason he found himself wanting to go to the Japanese Tea Garden, but at the last minute turned into the museum, which is immediately adjacent.
He stops before the steps, stretching his back by touching his toes, then resting his hands on the knees of his unbent legs.  He sits on the steps, breathing heavily.  It seems unlikely that the two men could have followed him, but he keeps a wary eye on the passersby, just in case.
Frog rises to his feet with a groan.  Slowly, for his muscles have really started to seize up now, he makes his way up the stairs and into the museum.
After making the "suggested donation"--annoying terminology, he thinks--Frog wanders around the museum aimlessly for a while.  The place seems to be in the midst of a Tibet kick, which is fine with Frog.  His favorite piece of clothing is a Tibetan jacket which he bought at a store on Polk street known only as "the Tibet store."
Frog spends about twenty minutes visiting an extensive exhibit of wildly-colored Tibetan thangka paintings in which (for example) black gods dance wildly on red backgrounds.  Eventually exiting that wing, he comes across a multicolored mandala made of sand in the hallway, and a computer exhibit illustrating the rhetorical details and stylistic conventions of the thangka form.
It is only when he is in the middle of the adjoining modern Vietnamese pottery exhibit (1976-1984) that his brain suddenly re-engages and he makes his way to the pay phones by the bathrooms.
He dials Clifford's office at RCI.  After a few rings the phone is answered with a formal "Clifford speaking."
"Hey, it's me."
"Where are you?  Mom told me you went out for a snack two hours ago!"
Frog wonders about all the programming time that Clifford has put into Mom, and what Mom can do that he doesn't even know about yet.  "I had a little problem.  Please don't ask, but I need a favor."
"Oh, I get it.  You need my help but you don't trust me, eh?"  Clifford rarely misses a chance to collect some guilt points from Frog, even if Frog usually knows that Clifford is almost never as  serious as he tries to sound about it.
For once Frog doesn't laugh at this ploy of Clifford's.  "Hypothetically, if I knew something and it would be bad for the company if you knew it, would you want me to tell you?"
Clifford uhms.  "I guess not, not really anyway.  This doesn't have anything to do with those government goons that were here earlier, does it?"
Frog doesn't say anything.
Finally, Clifford gives in.  "Okay, never mind.  I'm sure you'll tell me when you can."
"Thanks, Clifford."
"What do you need?"  Clifford is tapping a mechanical pencil rapidly against his desk, and Frog can hear it over the wire.
"Grab a car and meet me over in front of the botanical gardens in the park.  Try to make certain you aren't followed.  Try to stop in front of the gate.  Get out of the car and I'll drive it away."
"This is too weird.  Who are you being today, Bond James Bond?  Shaken not stirred?  Although you sound sort of shaken.  Are you okay?  How do I get back to work?"
"The company will pay for a cab, but don't call it ahead of time.  I'm okay, basically.  Let's just say I got to try out my Aikido for the first time, which was fun in a scary sort of way."
 "I'm dying of curiosity!"
"I promise to tell you--if I live."
"Hey, is that bullcrap or are you for real?"
Frog grunts.  "I have to say that I don't really know.  Will you do it?"
"Sure, why not?"  Frog can almost see Clifford's resigned shrug over the phone.  "I'll see you in about fifteen minutes outside the botanical gardens.  Over and out."
"Over and out."  Frog hangs up the phone, then walks into the bathroom and washes the sweat from his torso and face as well as is possible with paper towels.  On the way out of the museum, he lingers briefly in front of an original Hokusai print of Mount Fuji in Japan, one of some large number of views of the same big ol' impressive-looking mountain.

In the shade of an oak tree beside the gate to the botanical gardens, Frog Hamilton sits quietly in seiza.  His legs are folded beneath him and his body rests on his knees and shins.  He is attempting to relax himself with meditation while staying aware enough of his surroundings so that he doesn't get surprised by any, well, any bad surprises.
The shine is starting to fade off from the day.  The sun's benevolent dominance has given way to a chilly breeze that blows in bursts through the street, as if rushing its way home somewhere but it doesn't remember where it lives.  Leaves and pine needles dance carelessly in the air, half-following a trade wind that leads nowhere.
Frog sits, fighting his wandering attention, when he notices the black El Camino coming down the road towards him.  Its worn paint is comforting, he thinks, sort of like a reminder that life can be relaxed enough so that you don't always have to tuck in your shirt.
There is little traffic in the park, and Clifford has no trouble coming to a stop in front of the gate.  Frog gets up and approaches the car, looking around to see if he can spot anything suspicious or threatening.
Clifford gets out, leaving the door open.  He doesn't say anything.  Frog thinks that he looks upset.
"What's wrong?" he asks.
"What do you think?  Two not-very-undercover government whatevers come asking about something that nobody will talk about.  You tell me that you know something that's bad for the company and you can't tell me about it.  Plus you're acting extra mysterious and make some casual remark about maybe dying.  What am I supposed to think?"
"I'm really sorry.  I needed your help for this but I still can't say anything.  From what I understand now, which admittedly isn't everything or even maybe very much at all....  From what I understand now, if I told you what I know, they could come after you too.
"I really really really don't want to involve other people I care about, or RCI either, any more than I have to.  It already could mean that we get sued and die."
"Dying is one thing, but getting sued?  Yikes.  'Other people you care about.'  Can you at least tell me whether or not this has anything to do with Ray's vacation that he took on zero days' notice?"
Frog makes a sad face.  "Clifford, please!  Come on!"
"Fine.  Anything else, boss?"
"Could you email me a complete known schedule for The Consultants for the next month?"
"Huh.  Okay.  Next?"
"That's it.  I'm really sorry for putting you through this and telling you nada.  You may not feel like it, but can I have a hug?  I feel like I really need one."
Clifford moves his head back as if he has been poked in the forehead.  Normally the hugs he gives to non-family-members are severely restricted to major holidays, like Christmas every other year.  "Sure, no problem, buddy," he says, his mood suddenly softer.  They embrace.  Frog gives Clifford a bear hug.
"Look, I'm sorry for being nosy, okay?  It's just that I, uh, care too, right?"
"I know, sorry for being testy on top of secretive."
"Not really a problem."  Clifford leans back against the car.  "Can you keep me updated on status?  Maybe not details yet, but that you're okay or if you need anything...."
"That's a great idea," Frog says.  "Let me just think how.  We have to be able to communicate in real privacy.  Hold on a sec."  He drops his head, resting his chin on his sternum, contemplating.  After about half a minute he raises it up again.
"Okay, I got it.  How about this: you know milk.com?"
"They're a public-access bulletin board & internet provider in Menlo Park, right?"
"Yeah, that one.  Open an account there under some fake name.  They don't require credit card verification--you can pay anonymously via their bank account.  Use the user id 'penscan6' so I can figure out who you are."
"Got it.  Pen scan six."
Frog nods.  "I'll be 'gumborah', so you know it's me."
"Okay."
"So as far as privacy goes: they have secure telnet sessions.  Just open the account from one of the public internet cafés, then you can login from work after that.  All your interactions with the milk.com machines will be encrypted using Kerberos public key stuff."
"Hey, you're pretty smart!"  Clifford smiles.
"Yeah, but Mom still beats me at poker, and you wrote Mom."
"But you still beat me."
"Don't get technical on me."  Frog grins.  "Look, are we all set?  'Cause I gotta jam, most likely."
"Sure, bwana."
"Thanks again, Clifford."
"Good luck."
Frog gets into the car and closes the door.  Clifford backs away, then turns and begins walking towards the museum and the tea garden, towards some pay phones to call a cab.
Frog steps on the accelerator pedal and then on the brake, causing the car to buck forward violently.  He rolls down the window rapidly and sticks his head out, calling to Clifford.  "Hey, one more thing.  Clifford?"
Clifford, who had crossed the street, stops and turns to face Frog.  "What is it?"
"Call Ursula.  Tell her not to worry, but I don't know when I'll be back.  It could be days."
"Who?"
"Just call my house and leave a message on the machine if nobody answers."
"Sure."
"And tell her I'll bring her some grapefruits when I come back."
Clifford makes a face, wrinkling up his nose.  "I don't even want to know what that means."
"Nothing you'd be ashamed of, I'm sure."  Frog smiles.  "Bye!" he calls out the window as he begins to drive away.
"Bye," Clifford says softly into the cool afternoon air.

Tosh Yamashita wakes up gradually.  It feels as if he is climbing up a mountain made of charcoal, climbing up from a valley covered in sooty clouds up to a peak of bright light, dragging himself up by his callused hands which are missing a pinky digit.  His bleary eyes flutter open and shut for a few moments before he gives in and rubs his eyes with his knuckles, like a little kid.
He turns his head to the side and there is much pain in his neck.  He also feels a warm burning sensation in his forehead.  He is lying on a couch, a yellow and brown ratty old thing that looks like it was a reject from the set of a 60's sitcom and has resided here since then.  The couch is in a small room filled with books stacked on every available surface in no discernible order.  The four walls are covered with built-in bookshelves.  A book on quantum electrodynamics sits under a book on ursine physiology sits under a book on Vedic astrology.  Tosh tries to sit up but falls back on the couch with a groan when his shoulder explodes in pain as it moves.
He makes the minimum amount of movement necessary to look at his watch, tilting his head downward and rotating his wrist slightly.  The watch is a cheap digital number with seven alarms and three time zones, purchased at Emporium on sale.
When Tosh sees what time it is he curses loudly.  He closes his eyes and forms his hands into fists in preparation for making the concentrated effort that getting up will be.  He rises to his feet with a cry of "isa!" and, overcome immediately with dizziness, fails to stop his forward motion until he falls into a bookshelf.  Luckily for him, it is bolted to the wall and sturdy enough to take this abuse.
Through sheer force of will he gathers his energy enough to push open the door.  Passing through, he finds himself in the bookstore through which he ran after Frog.  He tries to remember exactly what happened--something about a door, trying to get through, running...
He finds the rear door and gently pushes it open.  There in the alley is his friend Yoshio.  Yosh is propped up against the outside wall of the bookstore, holding his right elbow in his left hand.  His eyes are open but he looks sleepy.
"Hey Yosh, you okay?"  Tosh's heavy Japanese accent is gone, replaced by an almost inflectionless northern California pronunciation.  He leans against the doorframe, still rather unsteady.
"Yeah, but I think my arm's broke.  Wouldn't be the first time."  Now Yosh too speaks with a thoroughly American pronunciation, almost a midwestern accent.
"Uh, you know what time it is?"  Tosh asks, looking down at his partner.
"Shit, not only we lost him but we're late?"
"We gotta leave right now or it just gets worse.  C'mon, our car's right out front unless it got towed already."
Tosh reaches down and helps Yosh to his feet.  They stagger together through the bookstore at a much more sedate pace than they took on their previous traversal.  This time they definitely don't try to go through anything solid, not even a shelf full of Tom Peters management books.  Even anything only vaguely solid.
The two men gingerly seat themselves in the dark brown Lincoln Continental, accompanied by a custom self-produced soundtrack of physical and mental woe.
***
After ten minutes of very, very careful driving, the brown Lincoln Continental with tinted windows carrying Tosh and Yosh parks in the garage of a commercial office building downtown, on Spear Street.  The car comes to a gentle stop in a spot marked RESERVED which is near a door guarded by a flashing amber box mounted on the wall--an electronic key required to open it.
Getting out of the car, Yosh reaches for the key, which is in his wallet.  He discovers that his wallet is not in its customary place, the left rear pocket of his trousers.  Spastically, and groaning from aching muscles, he pats every conceivable wallet-storage location on his person, to no avail.  He concludes that his wallet has gone missing.
"Uh, Toshio-kun?"
"Hai."
"You don't have my wallet, do you?"
"You lost your wallet?  Shit, man, what'd you do that for?"
"I hope it's sitting in that alley.  He could have taken it, though."
"Yeah, I know.  With our luck, he did."  Tosh scratches his head.  "Well, nothing else to do now."  He extracts his own key from his own wallet, which is still thankfully living in his back pocket.
The key is a small device about the size of a credit card, except about twice as thick.  No moving parts, lasts for years.  Cheap by the dozen at Fry's Electronics Supermarket.  Tosh brings it close to the lock.  After a moment, the little amber light turns green and there is a soft chirp, followed by the clunking noise of the deadbolt pulling back to unlock the door.
The door leads to a small foyer whose only other exit is an elevator.  The pair enters the elevator and use the key again to activate the button for the seventh floor.
Inside the elevator, there is a sign that reads:
POSTED: Defacing this elevator in any fashion is a federal crime punishable by up to five (5) years imprisonment, or a fine of not more than $150,000.00, or both.
Underneath this dire warning, someone has scratched "you asshole vandals!" into the metal.
The pair exits into a similar foyer, with exactly one other exit besides the elevator.  They go through that door and find themselves in a square room with a large mirror on one side.  Three folding chairs are set up around a collapsible bridge table.
A voice comes over a concealed speaker.  It is muffled and warbly, as if it were an audio tape being played back on extremely substandard equipment.  "Where is the subject?"
Tosh makes an effort at standing to attention, his neck, shoulder, and legs all complaining as he does.  "He didn't make it."
"He is dead?"
"No, he, uh...."
Yosh tries to save his partner from too much embarrassment by taking it on himself.  "He beat us up and ran away.  Sir.  Or Ma'am."
There is a pause.
"Did you find out if he knew anything about the tape?"
Yosh says, "He was not cooperative and claimed not to know anything about it."
"We understand."
"One more thing," Tosh says.
Yosh shoots him a nasty look.  "I lost my wallet," he says.  "Hamilton may have taken it."
"Ahh.  We're not worried about that.  We've never heard of you two incompetents before."
Tosh wrinkles his eyebrows.  "You didn't tell us he was a trained fighter!"
"All intelligence is imperfect.  Not our fault."
"Yeah."  Yosh coughs.  "One more thing, actually."
"What?"
"I think I broke my arm.  How about paying for a doctor?"
"What a whining little shit you are!  You have a job.  Say it was a workplace injury."
"Thanks for your help."
"Hey, that's what we're here for.  Your money's in the elevator.  Leave the keys on the table: the car keys and the electronic one.  Good-bye."  The speaker makes a loud click.
"Uh, my electronic key was in my wallet," Yosh says.
"Great.  What a surprise.  Good-bye."  says the voice from the speaker.  The speaker clicks again.
Yosh and Tosh look at each other.  Tosh shrugs.  "I mean, what can we do now?" he says.
"At this point..."  Yosh shrugs, looking resigned.
The two men turn and leave.  There are two envelopes waiting for them in the elevator.  They scoop them up, inspect the contents, and stash them away.
On the sidewalk outside, walking towards a bus stop, Yosh holds his mutilated hand with the missing digit up in front of him.  "It never occurred to me that that damn stamping machine could cause me so much grief even after it lopped my pinky off," he says.
"No shit.  And we'll be docked a whole day's pay, too, for missing work."
"And we got beat up.  Definitely not worth it."
Tosh imitates Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man.  "Definitely.  Definitely not.  Definitely not worth it.  Definitely not.  No way.  No."
"You liked that movie, did you?"  Yosh slaps a parking meter with the hand of his good arm as they walk by.  "I knew I should have studied karate like my dad wanted me to."
"Eh.  Back then, who knew?"
***
On the other side of the large mirror in the room where Tosh and Yosh were interviewed is a narrow dark room just as wide as the mirror itself.  The room is furnished with three chairs, a folding bridge table, and a small audio console.  A small desk lamp sits on the table, and it is the only light.  Thick dust is visible in the air, illuminated by the narrow beam from the lamp.  All three chairs are occupied.
After the two Japanese men leave, Campbell turns to Dourish and Thomas.  "Well, whose brilliant idea was that?"
Dourish and Thomas look at each other.
"Hers," says Dourish.
"His," says Thomas.
"Hers!" says Dourish.
"No way!  His," says Thomas.  "I remember."
Campbell shakes his head, holding up his palm.  "I don't remember, and I don't really care.  As far as I'm concerned, it's as much my own fault.  Just because real Yakuza don't usually have martial arts skills doesn't mean that we couldn't have hired some fake Yakuza who actually knew how to fight."
"We didn't know he could fight!"  Dourish says.  "Plus it's more accurate this way.  If he were knowledgeable enough to know that real Yakuza are mostly untrained toughs, then real fighters would have tipped him off!  I'm sick of my expertise being undervalued.  It's seriously affecting my self-esteem.  Didn't you read the special California Governor's Commission report on that a few years ago?  It's a serious problem."
"I always tell you: don't overanalyze.  I've told you that a thousand times before, or something like it.  What government do you work for?  England?  Wake up!  This is the United States!  We just make whatever decision feels good and don't think too much about it.  It's not as if you just obtained this job, or at least you shouldn't act like it."
Dourish starts to sulk, slouching even farther down in his chair, looking off into the corner.
"You know what I think?" Campbell says.  "I think that we should reinstate the draft, except this time we take all the smart people into the government and make them work with me instead of you two fucks."
"Speaking of smart, I got paid for one hour too little sometime last month," says Thomas.  "I only had 39 hours on my paycheck.  It's supposed to be 40.  I didn't take a sick day or anything."
"Can we deal with that later?" asks Campbell.
"It's never later," she says.  "You never want to talk about the boring normal stuff.  Something to do with daylight savings time, I think.  It'll only take a few minutes."
"Look, not now.  Okay?  Just not now.  Let me think."
"Sure, look where your thinking got us now.  Two disgruntled ex-fake-Yakuza and one escaped person by the name of Frog Hamilton who in all likelihood knows where to find top-secret government information that could compromise the security of the entire western world!"
"Don't overdo it," says Dourish to Thomas, "he'll stop listening after a while.  I know."
"Too late," Campbell says through clenched teeth.  "Look, I don't care that it probably won't 'compromise the security of the entire western world.'  It's secret.  It doesn't matter if it's plans for an atomic bomb that can be made out of walnut husks and cigar wrappers, or if it's the telephone number of the main Pentagon switchboard written backwards, or the incoherent ramblings of an insane and paranoid ex-agent convinced that he has the secret to a plot against the President of the United States.  It's still secret, and it's your job--and mine--to keep it that way."  The man is almost frothing at the mouth as he spits out these final words.
"Jeez, take it easy on her," Dourish says.  "You having a bad hair day or what?"
Campbell slams his forehead down on the bridge table and the desk lamp teeters and then falls onto the floor.  The bulb shatters with a strange in-popping vacuum sound and the room is left in darkness.
"Shit," someone says softly.  "I think there's glass in my nose."
"Watch out for the table.  The department's not made out of money, you know,"  someone else says.

Frog Hamilton drives south on Interstate Highway 280.  As he enters the highway from 19th Avenue there is a small sign welcoming him to the "Junipero Serra Freeway -- Most Beautiful Highway in the World."
For some reason, the highway--which really is beautiful, Frog and many other folks think--is named after a Catholic missionary priest who is mostly famous, nowadays, for the extent to which he tortured and murdered the Native Americans to whom he was supposedly ministering.  Just goes to show you, just another example, not surprising at all: infamy is not really all that different from fame, and if you want to get famous real bad, killing people might be an easy and helpful start.
Thinking about the evil priest's career of torture and murder brings Frog back to his present situation.  It's a little calmer in the car than it was out at the back of the bookstore, and he can scope out the cars around him enough so that he's not too worried about anyone following him.  The El Camino has plenty of power; although he's no racecar driver he can probably run away pretty fast, even if the steering will probably get a little shaky.
Anyway, his mind is calmer now, and he can focus.  Those two men--one of them was missing part of a finger.  Yakuza have that.  They cut it off to demonstrate their loyalty, usually after making a mistake.  They didn't fight very well, and that fits in.  According to tradition, Yakuza are usually just thugs, and they rely on intimidation and guns to be effective.  And they knew about the tape that Ray took.
Why were the Yakuza involved?  The only reasonable answer is that Castor Data Services is somehow a Yakuza front, or part of their organization in some other way.  But how did they know that he knew about the tape in the first place?
It could have just been a guess.  Frog and Ray have been friends for a long time, started up a business together.  Maybe the Yakuza thought it was a plot that the two of them had cooked up between themselves.  Or maybe just that Ray would have told him about it since they were so close, or something like that.
Which, of course, he did.  Only after the fact, though.  If he had known about Ray's plan before, he certainly would have done almost everything he could to convince him not to do it.
That's probably why he didn't tell me, Frog thinks.  Smart boy, that Ray.  Easier to ask forgiveness than permission.  Should be one of his personal mottoes.
So it could have been deduction.  The alternative is that someone else read the message that Ray had left for him in the Indian market.  How would they know about that?  Ray had supposedly called it up directly, and he's smart enough to have done that away from home.  So it seems unlikely that anyone really knows that Frog knows anything.  Even if he'd been followed, he hadn't done anything that would indicate that he actually knew anything about what happened with the tape.
Which makes it even scarier that those two government guys and the two Yakuza were all over him about it like they were.  He shudders.  It didn't seem as if the government really knew anything; there probably wasn't any hard evidence.  Ray had a reason to be there at CDS.  The tape could probably have disappeared in any number of ways.  Fell into the garbage, or whatever.  Picked up by a cleaning person.
Frog looks ahead at the road.  He has passed the ticky-tacky houses on the hillside that all look just the same, and is about to enter the bounds of a city called South San Francisco.  The highway runs at the edge of the mountains that divide the peninsula, and over to his left is the plain of the city that spills and bleeds off into the bay, over and through a considerable amount of landfill.  He turns to look over his shoulder and sees his favorite sign in the whole world.  The sign is immense and seems to cover at least half a mile in length.  It sprawls across one of the hills at the north end of the South San Francisco plain.  It is the only possible Bay Area equivalent to the infamous HOLLYWOOD sign in Smell-A, and it reads:
SOUTH
SAN FRANCISCO
THE INDUSTRIAL CITY

The sign is made out of what appear to be huge boulders, painted white. It dominates the whole south-facing hillside of the landscape just north of the city of South San Francisco, whose only other major contribution to the local macro-architecture is the San Francisco International Airport, which Frog is about to pass as well.  Yes, he can see the airport off to the left, across the valley and through the fog.
Frog finds this large boulderish sign extremely amusing.  Especially since the late 80's and early 90's, which framed the reign of "industrial" music, that cacophony of metal on metal which later picked up a dance beat for its trouble (and to its ultimate detriment, Frog thinks).  Naming a city "industrial" is comical in so many ways since almost none of its associations and connotations are exactly pleasant.  Industrial chemicals.  Industrial pollutants.  The Industry.  He shivers.  Even after the absorption of industrial music into the larger pop scene, all of this still helps Frog to find the South San Francisco motto at least an order of magnitude more amusing than his second-favorite comical city motto.  That second-favorite motto belongs to another nearby burg, Redwood City; its motto is "Climate Best by Government Test."
That good old government. The year of 1950 lives on forever in the forgotten city mottoes of Middle America.  Glamorous, vacuous film stars; James Dean playing chicken on the highway.  Was Elisabeth Taylor in a car crash back then?
The Industrial City.  After you live in South San Francisco: The Industrial City for a while, Frog thinks, maybe you can upgrade to Burlingame: The City Full of Needles, or Bakersfield: The Middle of Nowhere.  Frog chants out "Bakersfield: The Middle of Nowhere" in a loud and deep voice just for fun.  An elderly lady driving a huge 1970's vintage Cadillac on his right puts on an extremely startled face and changes lanes away from him.
Something about that tape must be pretty important and pretty dangerous, Frog thinks.  Who knows what would have happened if I had gone with those Yakuza?  Or told those State Department folks what I really knew?  Would I be locked up?  Or dead?
He realizes that he needs to take some extra precautions when he goes to retrieve the tape.  It's probably important to preserve the contents as well as the physical evidence, providing the physical evidence can't be used against the Forces of Good.  Frog figures that he and Ray must represent the Forces of Good, since he finds it difficult to conceive that either the United States government or a pair of Yakuza are fulfilling that role themselves.
This intense combination of thinking and worrying has exhausted Frog.  He turns on the radio and listens to a National Public Radio program about some recently discovered letters that L. Ron Hubbard wrote just before his final disappearance.  Something about a secret deathbed correspondence with his old friend A. E. Van Vogt, the central themes of which, on Hubbard's part, were apparently "I Told You So" and "I Want My Two Dollars."
As the program is ending, Frog gets off the highway in Menlo Park, midway down the Bay Area peninsula.  After ten minutes of threading through minor roads, he comes to a small blue house in a suburban neighborhood, not far from El Camino Real.  In the driveway sit an old pickup with no identifying marks and a red Toyota Supra with the license plate KOKYU.  In Japanese, "kokyu" means "breath," and in Aikido is used to refer to certain acts of apparently effortless blending that one does with one's (acting) adversary.
Frog pulls up at the side of the road.  The El Camino comes to rest in a small patch of mud and sod.  Frog sits in the car for five minutes.  No other cars come down the road, and he figures he hasn't been followed.
He gets out of the car and walks to the front door, walking carefully through a few patches of slippery mud and stepping up onto the wooden deck at the front of the house.  The lights are off inside and there is no sign of activity.  Frog leans on the doorbell and it makes a loud electronic buzzing sound that he finds extremely annoying.
The day is starting to end, and the wind is chilly.  Frog walks over to a large rosemary bush and plucks off a leaf, which he crushes and smells, then puts in his mouth to chew on.
After another few minutes of waiting, he rings the doorbell again.
Frog sits in a wooden chair beside the door.
Eventually, the sound of steps come from inside the house, creaking floorboards complaining that their backs hurt.  The door opens, and a man, clutching a bedsheet around his waist, peers out into the yard, shielding his eyes with his hand from the feeble light of the dwindling day.
"Hello?" he says.  His long brown hair is severely tousled, and even his moustache seems to be uncertain of in which direction (or directions) it should be pointing.  Below his left knee, the leg and foot are made of a high-tech combination of metal and plastic: an artificial limb which does not seem to impair his movement.  He takes a slow step closer to the outside, craning his neck.  "Hello?"
Frog gets up.  "Warren!"
"Oh, hi, Frog."
"I woke you up."
"Yeah."  Warren rubs his face with the heel of his hand.
"When did you go to sleep?"
"Oh, you know, the normal time.  Around 10 AM.  Maybe a little later.  I'm not sure."
"Sorry."
"Oh, no problem.  Kathi was supposed to wake me up before she left, but either she didn't or I just went back to sleep anyway.  I have a Gurdjieff workshop I'm supposed to lead at eight, so it's good you came by."  His makeshift bedsheet garment starts to slip, and he readjusts it, tying the sheet like a sarong at his hip.  "Hey, I'm sorry, come on in."
Frog steps into the house, into a large living room.  In one section that looks as if it might have been intended to serve as a dining room, seven acoustic guitars rest against one wall, a tenor saxophone on a stand next to them, and an upright piano next to that.  A table is cluttered with sheet music and a panoply of old radios of various varieties and vintages.
"I miss having you at Aikido," Warren says.  "There's nobody to really beat up on.  Everybody else seems to feel pain."
"And I miss your classes a lot.  I might be able to start coming back if I can rearrange my schedule.  Since it takes me a good forty-five minutes to get here, though, right now that pretty much makes it a whole day."
"Oh, I understand.  Don't worry so much.  You want some coffee?"
Frog shakes his head.  "No, but go ahead."
Warren gets up and shuffles towards the back of the house, not into the kitchen but into a room piled high with stacks of tiny ring binders, portable radio scanners, leather cases that look like they might fit some of the scanners, a pair of bookshelves stacked with software packages and programming manuals, a computer, and a coffee machine that sits next to it on a desk.  Warren moves some stacks of paper from one part of the floor to another, clearing a small space.
"Sorry I don't have another chair," he says as he motions for his guest to sit.  He presses a button on the coffee machine and it fills with water and begins to brew.
"With what I see here," Frog says, "business is either really good or really bad."
"Which one do you mean, the mail-order radio stuff?"
"Yeah."
"It's not bad.  Hey, speaking of things for which I don't get paid enough, let me show you the latest version of Downtime!"  He pulls out a desk chair and starts up the computer.  "Rob just sent me a new version of the opening credits, and I found the version without all the typos."
"Uh, Warren, I have some questions to ask, and a favor."
"Oh, okay.  What?"  Warren spins around in his desk chair.
"So you hinted at one point that you had hacked the cellular net.  Is that for real?"
"Well, yeah, but only to a certain extent."
"What does that mean?"
"I can only follow the old analog system, not the new digital one.  The new one they installed around here has decent encryption, so even if you intercept the transmissions they're garbled.  By the time you could hack the password, the password would have changed already."
"Say I was in Monterey, and I didn't want... No, I got it.  Never mind."
"Huh?  You have to cut me some slack, I just got up."
"I thought I would have to borrow some of your radio expertise, but I just figured out I don't have to.  Oh yeah, wait.  I thought of something."
"I'm offended!  I thought you only liked me for my looks, not my brains."
Frog seems not to have heard.  "Say someone was operating a laptop and an external DAT drive.  Is it possible for an eavesdropper to get an image of the screen or a copy of the data coming from the DAT deck?"
Warren says, "Sure.  The military have these vans.  The system is called Tempest or something like that.  They can get almost anything."
"So they don't even have to be in the same room?"
"Nope.  Parked outside your house will do."
"Can you protect against it?"
"Yeah.  Just get a Faraday cage to hold everything you want to shield."
"That's just a big sheet of aluminum, right?  That goes around the computer?"
"Basically.  You can make one yourself.  Just get some aluminum and fold it up."
"Is there a place around here I can buy some tonight?"
"Tonight?"  Warren looks at the wall clock.  "No, it's too late.  Everyone like that's closed."
"Is there something else I can use, that I can actually get tonight?"
"Why do you need it tonight?  Hey, I have some aluminum you can have."
"What do you have aluminum for?"
"You know, I make those skullcaps for the Tripods."
"No, really!  Why?"
"Actually it's Kathi's.  She's doing some artwork with it, but she hasn't touched it in a few months.  I can replace it before she really needs it."
"Thanks!"
"Remember--with that kind of setup, it's only shielded if the aluminum surrounds everything.  Like if you have an opening for the keyboard, you're exposed."
"What about holes for power cords and modems?"
"Power cords are no-go if you're serious about shielding, unless you isolate and shield the generator and all the wires, or unless your run a mondo filter on the power.  As for the power cord, the RF interference will modulate the house current for you, and they can read that like the headlines on the National Enquirer.  Modem is okay if you're encrypting inside the computer and not the modem."
"Got it.  Surround everything with metal.  Check."
"Cause only encrypted stuff goes out over that wire, so it doesn't matter."  Warren scratches his chin.  "Oh, if you need to, you can plug the computer into the wall if you run a really good line conditioner--it'll isolate the modulations that the computer would normally give to the current coming in from the wall."
"Right."  Frog looks around at the room.  A large poster of William S. Burroughs with his arm around Albert Einstein dominates one wall.  Digital photo editing, thinks Frog.  He looks closer and sees Warren's signature in the corner.
"Pretty cool, huh?  I just finished that last week."
"Can I borrow your Internet connection?" Frog asks.  "I only need to use a telnet session."
"Sure."  Warren spins around again and punches at the keyboard.  "There you go."
He gets up, and as Frog sits, Warren pours himself some coffee.
"You want to tell me what this is about now?"
"Later, okay?"  Frog begins typing at the computer.
"Sure.  Hey, I'm going to get some breakfast.  Wanna share?"
"Are you still eating that weird stuff?" asks Frog.
"The berries and bugs?  No, I haven't done that for weeks.  I have a lot left over if you want it.  Probably not."  He shakes his head.  "No, now it's flower petals and baby shrimp.  Like the cocktail shrimp."
"What's that supposed to do?"
"I'm not certain, but a friend of mine said that it helped him a lot, so I figured I'd give it a try for a while and see if anything happened."
"I suppose I could go for some.  As long as you don't throw in any bugs."
Warren smiles, and says in a very bad Chinese accent, "Not unless you make special order."  Bringing the coffee mug rapidly to his lip and flipping his head back, he downs the rest of the coffee and sets the mug on the desk, on top of a stack of cable descrambler boxes.  "I'll be right back," he says, and leaves the room.
Frog turns back to the computer.  The screen looks something like this:

NETEUNICHS(tm) System Vee, Release 1.0.1 (milk.com)
Welcome to Milk Kommunikations Ko-op!
		My
		Ittybitty
		Little
		Kokopelli

New users: type "newuser" at login prompt.

login:

Frog types "newuser" and answers a few questions to create a new account.  Since he doesn't have to provide a credit card number or any accurate information about himself, there's no practical way for anyone to connect the new userid "gumborah" with him.  He checks to see if there is a user called "penscan6", but apparently Clifford hasn't set up his account yet, for there is none.
Warren comes back into the room.  He's holding two plates covered with lettuce, shrimp, and flower petals of assorted colors.  A clotted, quivering, viscous pink liquid sits atop the shrimp like a devouring alien organism.
Frog looks at the plate that Warren hands him, and blinks twice.  "Hey, this looks just like that shrimp salad that you always get at Café Borrone!"
"Well, yeah, except for the flower petals instead of tomatoes.  Only weirdos like you eat those love apples.  They'll kill you, you know."
"This doesn't seem like such an esoteric spiritual practice to me."
Warren sits on the floor in the clear spot that Frog had occupied earlier, and sets his plate down on his right thigh.  "Well, nobody told me that you couldn't have some lettuce, carrots, and thousand-island dressing on it.  What do you think I am, an ascetic?"
"Huh.  Well, I'm sure it's good."  Frog starts to eat, and it is good, in spite of the fact that he gets the strange feeling that the thousand-island dressing is about to self-animate and turn to rubber plugs in his arteries, reducing his lifespan by twenty or thirty years.
They do not speak as they eat.  Frog leaves half an hour later with Warren's gift of a large sheet of aluminum.
***
After a short drive down El Camino Real to Palo Alto, Frog parks the El Camino in front of a large building that has been painted to look like a big computer chip embedded in the circuit board tarmac of the parking lot.  A large sign says "Fry's", and beside it, astride the building, a smiling cartoon version of a computer chip, outlined in red, waves hello to prospective customers.
Inside, there are aisles and aisles of everything that a computer geek could need:  computers (of course), computer software, televisions, VCRs, audio equipment, speakers, enough electronic parts to stock 4,096 Radio Shacks, junk food, and the bedtime reading of choice for many computer geeks, pornography.  Frog figures that the only thing really missing is a pizza franchise.
In the computer department, Frog flags down a salesman.  The salesman wears a name tag that says "Bob."  Bob has had a very bad day.  Just now, he has found out that his sweetheart Patrice has been wrapping her gelid thighs around the neck of his coworker Freddie.  The fact that Freddie is a woman has thrown him for a bit more of a spin than the news would have had the fact of her gender been otherwise.
"What's the cheapest laptop computer you have in stock and available right now?" Frog asks.
"About $1500," Bob says wistfully.
"That's nice," Frog says, "and which one would that be?"
"Oh, one of the ones over there," Bob says as he waves his hand at the tables and tables of computer systems.
"Could you be a little more specific?  Like could you put your hand on it?"
"Oh, yes sir," Bob says, wondering when Freddie is scheduled to take her next break.
Frog scratches behind his ear and looks around for another salesperson.  Finding none nearby, he tries again.
"Bob.  Please walk to the cheapest laptop computer that you have on display over there.  The cheapest one that you have in stock that, if I paid for it, I could leave the store with today.  When you get to it, please place your hand on it."
"Oh, okay," Bob says, starting to cry as he walks.  "I'm sorry I'm such a bad salesman."
"Don't worry about it.  You'll grow into it, I'm certain."
Bob sniffles and wipes his nose with his jacket.  "Thanks.  Do you really think so?"  Frog nods and smiles, trying to be comforting.
"Here it is, sir," Bob says, placing his hand on a small laptop with a bumpy white case."
Frog scrutinizes the ad for the laptop, which has been posted next to it in a plastic stand.  "This has everything that I need?  All the drivers and stuff?  I'll be able to make it work today without a thousand calls to a thousand different tech support departments?"
Bob looks startled.  "Oh, you want it to work?  Sorry.  Why didn't you say so?  Get this one instead.  Uh, over here."  He spins around twice before getting his bearings and leading Frog to another table.  "Windows doesn't work," the salesman says dreamily as he wanders away, in the general direction of the junk food aisles.
Frog, emotionally exhausted by this interchange for reasons he does not understand, examines the computer, and after a few minutes of putting it through its paces, decides that it is acceptable.  Along with the computer, he buys a cellular phone with a high-speed modem, and also a portable DAT drive and some other miscellany.  The cellular phone is pre-activated, and the modem is a newfangled ultra superduper high-speed type meant to work specially with the digital cellular phone network.
In the parking lot, he assembles all of his components.  He takes the aluminum he received from Warren and folds a simple enclosure to serve as a Faraday cage.  He tests the whole assembly by logging in to his new account at milk.com.  He finds that Clifford's account has been created, and Frog sends a message to him:
From:	gumborah (Jim Smithers)
To:	penscan6
Subject: all set up

My connection is in place.  I'm going to do what I need to do; if I'm lucky and things go as planned, I should be finished by tomorrow evening.  If I'm not, then who knows?

As he is about to leave the parking lot, he remembers that he still has the wallet of one of the Japanese men who attacked him in Tart to Tart.  He reaches into the glove compartment and plucks it out.
Frog searches first for some identification.  He finds a California drivers' license in the name of Yoshio Tanaka.  The main compartment of the wallet contains $124 in bills, sorted neatly in order of denomination, all pointing in the same direction and all right-side up, and including two two dollar bills.  Folded in beside the bills he finds a pay stub, also made out in the name of Yoshio Tanaka, indicating 57 hours of work at $10.45 an hour.
A pay stub for a Yakuza?  What happened to illegal business being conducted exclusively in cash?
Frog reads the company name at the top of the stub.  "Farmington Industrial Pharmaceuticals, Inc."  What are industrial pharmaceuticals?  It sounds vaguely suspicious, but also an unlikely name for a front organization for Japanese mobsters, especially because of the easy connection you could make between "pharmaceuticals" and illegal drugs.  It would be like calling a bookie's organization "Frank's Industrial Odds Trading and Brokerage Center, Inc."
As he pulls out of the parking lot, still wondering about the contents of the wallet, Frog notices that there is a tape in the car's stereo system, most likely left there by another RCI employee who had driven the car recently.  He pops it in with his thumb and turns up the volume, and is treated to a song by a post-punk band called Korpus Kallosum:
I hear your daddy eats people
Your momma eats people too.
When I come to dinner
I'll eat the salad (yeah yeah yeah)
But I don't want your stew...

He listens to the tape three times during the two hour and fifteen minute drive down to Pacific Grove.  By the end of his trip, he has memorized the words to "Cannibal Parents" as well as those to "Elephant Organ" and "Guerilla Tongue Piercer."

Part 3

After ten minutes spent driving around slightly lost in Pacific Grove, Frog finds the place and parks.  The neighborhood is a pleasant little thing sitting gently on the shore, mostly populated by wooden two-story houses and the occasional thrift store.
The Seal Food Inn appears to be an old motel whose facade has been decorated like the pseudo-Swiss chalets that were unaccountably popular in the early 1970's.  The brown wood that was supposed to impart a refined European ambiance as it crisscrossed the building has not weathered the salt air well, and most of its paint, stain, whatever, has blown off to sea, leaving the building looking like a pale and sickly cabbage tied crazily with crumbling strips of modeling clay.
The establishment's sign, mounted on a tall metal pole, dominates the parking lot.  In a circle sits a moving neon logo illustrating a happy tourist throwing food to happy seals.   On the sign, seals jump up to catch morsels of food, which migrate inevitably towards them in a discrete sequence of three giant glowing steps.
Frog enters the lobby and finds it empty.  A sculpted brown carpet provides substantial evidence of the poor taste or limited budget of the interior designer.  Behind the counter (a slightly lopsided job that might have once lived in one of the lesser fast-food restaurants) a large wooden sign displays another moving neon logo--this time, the happy seal is locking morsels of food inside a tupperware container.  A sign on the counter reads "James Amber and Anh Lee, Proprietors".  As Frog looks around for the manager, his eye is caught by a formal portrait that hangs on the wall next to the counter.  It looks suspiciously like Richard Feynman.  The man sits bolt upright in a gilded chair with a set of bongo drums between his knees.  At the bottom, a banner bears the initials "Q. E. D."
One eye of the portrait is flashing strangely as Frog watches it as he walks, and as he approaches it in curiosity he sees that the painting is set up to be used as a low-tech surveillance device for the manager to inspect the lobby: the eye of the portrait is a spyhole, and it has been left open.  Walking as softly as he can, Frog peers through the hole and into the room beyond where he sees that the flickering was caused by a television set.
In the inner room, a thin old man sits in a wheelchair bobbing his bald head back and forth to some unheard melody.  The television is making no sound.  The man's back is to the portrait's spyhole.  The room's fluorescent lights make his pink skin appear translucent and Frog wonders if perhaps his skeleton shows through in places.  From somewhere out of sight a slight, gray-haired Asian woman appears, walking with a cane in one hand and a stuffed bear in the other.  She moves the bear back and forth as if it is saying something and the old man reaches out spastically for it.
Somewhere a refrigerator or ice maker stops and Frog hears a snippet of conversation.  The woman is saying, "And if you don't take your heart pills, Bobby Bear won't tell you about his trip to Il Fornaio!  Too bad you couldn't go yourself."
Without thinking Frog cracks his knuckles and the woman looks sharply right at him for an instant.  She says something inaudible to the man and moves out of sight.  Frog quickly moves across the room and sits in an ugly chrome chair and picks up a brochure entitled "Seal Food Inn--Description of Services".
The door behind the counter opens and the woman steps through.  "May I help you?" she asks.  Her voice is flat, affectless and accent-less, as if she has just come out of cold storage or she is a computer program.
Frog rises from the chair and walks to the counter, putting the brochure in his jacket pocket.  "I'm here to inspect box 3817," he says.
The woman gazes at him expressionlessly for a moment, then taps some keys on a computer terminal, swipes a plastic card through something that looks like a credit card reader and then hands him the card.  "That box is in room 29, Two Nine, and is labeled 1501,  One Five Zero One.  Go up the stairs here to the second floor and turn left.  The card will let you into the room exactly once.  It may be used only within the next five minutes."
"Thank you."
The woman glares at him silently and he tries to think of something else he wants to say to her.  After nothing comes to mind and becoming sufficiently uncomfortable, Frog turns and proceeds up the stairs to the room.
There is a slot on the door of room 29, above which is written the legend "Insert Card Here".  Frog slides the card into the slot and, startled, jumps back as the device pulls the card out of his fingers and draws it entirely into itself.  The door clicks and a green light illuminates on the locking mechanism.  Frog pushes on the handle and the door opens smoothly.
Inside the room there is a bewildering array of boxes, each marked with a four digit number and each with a small telephone-style keypad on the front.  The room was obviously once a motel room, but even the bathroom has been converted to store boxes and no longer functions in its original capacity.  Besides its layout, the only visible remaining vestige of the room's former life is a mounting plate for a security chain on the inside of the door.  The chain itself has been removed.
After some difficulty, for the boxes are in no means in numerical order, Frog locates box 3817, appropriately labeled "1501".  (Or is it really box 1501, appropriately named box 3817?)  The message on the computer at the Indian market had said that the password to the box would be the name of Ray's last blonde girlfriend at Stanford.  Frog, finding his memory isn't what Ray probably thinks it is, can't remember whether that was Jessica Tambre or Sarah Miles.  He spells out one name on the keypad and a red light flashes on the face of the box.  Frog notices a sign on the wall that reads, "Three consecutive incorrect entry attempts per day may result in immolation of box contents."  Frog frowns at the sign and sighs.
He keys in the other name and the red light flashes again.  Now what should he do?  He sighs deeply, sits on the floor, and removes from his pocket the brochure (now slightly crumpled) that he picked up in the lobby.
Frog reads, "The Seal Food Inn is Northern California's premier small object and data protection and storage facility.  Featuring anonymous accounts, remote password changing, and optional automatic item immolation upon entry fault detection, we are the repository of choice nationwide for small and large businesses and individuals sensitive to privacy and security issues.
"For complete up-to-date cost schedules and availability, call us at 408/SEAL-INN, send electronic mail to 'info@sealfoodinn.com', or visit 'http://www.sealfoodinn.com/' on the World Wide Web."
The brochure goes on at length about the Inn's advanced security and protection features, as well as the establishment's auxiliary services relating to digital cryptography--fingerprint timestamps, anonymous unforgeable digital signatures, private electronic cash, and a host of others that Frog understands even less well.
Optional automatic item immolation, eh, thinks Frog.  He moves to a nearby box and presses a few keys randomly.  The box doesn't respond, and Frog realizes that the office has only enabled his individual box.  Okay, they're not idiots, he thinks.
After a few minutes' away from the problem, Frog's brain spontaneously surfaces the memory that the blonde-haired female in question was Jessica Miles.  Jessica Tambre was one of his own old girlfriends.  D'oh!
He enters the name and the box clicks open.  Inside is a DAT cassette.  Frog takes it out.  The printed label says "Backup 09/14/97", and there is a post-it note stuck to the label.  The post-it note, in Ray's handwriting, reads "r1X$4*9U".  This must be the password to the backup, he realizes.  Frog sets up his equipment and inserts the DAT into his tape reader.  He reads in the digital data, decrypting it with the password from the Post-It note, re-encrypting it with his own password, and broadcasting it with the cellular phone to sit in his milk.com account in Menlo Park.  In order to ensure reliable transmission, he has unwound and spread a special antenna across the floor.  The transmission process takes a few hours, during which Frog mostly paces the room and peeks out the window, from which he can see his car.  He also takes a nap.  He wishes he had gone to the bathroom first, but as the lady at the counter had said, the card would only let him into the room once.  Of course, since the card had been eaten by the door, this was obviously true.  Maybe he could get another card, he thinks, but he doesn't want to have to face that stony-faced lady again.
When the transmission is finished, Frog takes the tape deck, portable homemade Faraday cage, and the cellular phone and puts them back into his carrying bag.  The DAT itself he stashes in the pocket of his jeans.  He erases the relevant programs from his computer, along with all traces of the tape's data on his laptop's hard disk.  He shuts down the computer, stuffs it into his bag with the other stuff.
The room retains enough of its motel karma so that Frog wants to check under the bed and in the dresser drawers before he leaves, but there is of course no bed remaining in the converted room, and no dresser, only rows and rows of metal boxes numbered out of sequence like a bus station in Hell.

"You know, this just points out a very serious flaw in our communication and data-protection protocols."
"No protocol is perfect.  Some are better than others, obviously, but still--"
"Sure, you could design an arbitrarily complicated fault sequence for any given protocol, but this was an obvious problem that could have been dealt with earlier."
"At least we had out-of-band password transmission."
"The password is hardly significant when the cheesehead who implemented the prototype system used XOR as a placeholder and never replaced it with a real version when we went final."
"What!?"
"You heard me."
"You mean all our club data is protected by (a) obscurity, the worst-known access protocol, and (2) exclusive-or, the worst-known encryption algorithm?"
"I knew you heard me."
"Shee-it!"
"You can say that again.  But don't, okay?"
"Damn."
"Yup."

Away from the Seal Food Inn, Frog parks in a convenience store parking lot and sets up his gear once more.  He uses the cellular modem to dial up milk.com.  The huge file that he transmitted from the Seal Food Inn is still where he left it, sitting encrypted in his home directory.  A message informs him that he has one piece of new mail:

Date:	Friday, May 8, 1998 21:51:39 PDT
From:	penscan6 (Pen Scan Corporation)
To:	gumborah
Subject:	just stuff
Enclosure:	schedule.html

Things around here have been relatively quiet since you left, with the exception that I can't seem to get any work out of Hemo, who, every time I walk by his cube, seems to be spending all his time sending email, playing Tetris IV, or making pencil sketches of the view from his window.

I didn't sign the checkout sheet for the car I brought you in case anybody were to do any snooping around the key board in the hopes of doing some investigating.  I also left the spare set of keys there on the board.  It probably makes no difference, but what the hey.  Some situations seem to be appropriate for paranoia and I'm willing to go along.

Please let me know if I can do anything to help.  Oh, BTW: enclosed please find the Consultants' published schedule for the next month.  I got it from http://www.consultants.com; you can too.

I called your house and left the suspicious-sounding message that you told me to.  Who is Ursula?

I suppose my questions can wait, but I am anxious for you.  Don't die or get arrested--I like having someone around who takes responsibility for things besides me.

Oh, in your absence I renewed the bottled water contract.

C.G.
--
"Is it the horse that kills you, or is it her hooves?"
"Neither of them kills you.  What kills you is your internal organs bursting."

The sounds of San Francisco at night come in through the window of the company car as Frog Hamilton drives through the SoMA ("South of Market") district.  There are the dark whooshes of cars zooming by, apparently as heedless as Frog is of the speed limit, which is something ridiculous like 30 miles per hour anyway.  Somewhere out of sight a saxophone is being played, crying out its blues melody.  An unfindable hum underlies everything, as if the whole city is vibrating, chanting the name of its strange San Francisco Buddha in the darkness, who perhaps is Avamahalinga, the Supreme Buddha of Ultimate Weirdness.
The enclosure in the electronic mail from Clifford said that the Consultants would be playing at the Press Any Club tonight, at 837 4th Street.  Frog has never been there--he doesn't tend to go to live music much, ever since he got out of school.  Startups can be draining, and before you know it you're the boss and feel ridiculously responsible for the livelihoods of too many people.  It has taken something out of him.  For one, his social life, for the most part anyway.
So Frog drives around and around in a widening spiral with the club at its putative center, looking for a parking space in the crowded streets.  It is a weekend night, and there is much activity in the neighborhood, ranging from teenagers riding their in-line skates through the obstacle course of broken bottles and toppled garbage cans, to sixteen-window shiny white limos double-parking to disgorge tuxedoed rich people into the basement doors of secret underground clubs.
After seven minutes of parking-space spiral, there is an empty spot, which Frog makes an illegal U-turn to capture.  He pulls the keys from the ignition and holds them tightly in his hand as he slams the door shut.  Frog suspects that this morbid key-grasping is no longer useful to prevent him from locking his keys in the car since the action has more or less become automatic and thoughtless, pretty much below any conscious level of mental processing.
The streets are dim, lit by the occasional yellowish street lamp and supplemented by the headlights of passing vehicles.
Frog walks by a department store, closed for the night.  In front of it there is a bus stop.  A pair of elderly ladies wait there, along with a young girl who looks to be about twelve years old.  As he passes in back of the glass-walled bus stop, Frog notices a bird beneath one of the department store windows.  It is a pigeon, and appears to be in some distress.
The pigeon is lying on its side, flapping its wings sporadically and feebly, and staring off into space with a fixity that is odd even for a bird.  Frog wonders if the bird is dying, watches it flap twice more, then decides that yes, it is dying.
Is it in pain? he wonders.  Hard to tell.  It's trying to do something, it's acting as if something invisible holds it back, something invisible has tied its wings with invisible thread and locked its head and eyes in place.  It must sense that something is deeply wrong with it, but might not know why or how or even what.
Should I kill it? he asks himself.  Would it be helping it to put it out of its misery, as it were, as if life itself is more than misery anyway for almost everybody?
What if he were wrong?  What if it was just trying to lay an egg or something?  Frog certainly didn't have much experience with pigeons.  In fact, he had always thought that they were rather disgusting.
He sits down on a narrow ledge beneath the department store window.  The bird is near his feet and makes no effort to get away that Frog can distinguish from its previous pattern of flapping.  It is definitely sick, he thinks.
The bird is trying to tell me something, Frog tells himself.  What could it be?  Although publicly disdainful of such behaviors, Frog closes his eyes and tries to send healing energy to the bird, just in case such a thing is possible and just in case he can do it.  He concentrates on thoughts of health and vitality and flying and youth--green mother nature energy flowing from his chakras to help to heal the dying pigeon.
His eyes are closed, and he can still hear the bird slap its wings futilely against the concrete pavement.  He opens his eyes and the bird looks the same as before, grey and black feathers in disarray like a pile of animated pillow stuffing.
Slowly, painfully for Frog and no doubt for the bird as well, the bird's motions slow.  Slow, and then cease.  Frog understands what it means when the light goes out of something's eyes because he sees it happen to the pigeon now.  Something is there, and then it is not.  Alive and suffering, and then dead, and presumably not suffering, at least not in this bardo.  Swing on by in your next life, pigeon, he thinks.  Frog closes his eyes in another silent prayer for the avian soul of the pigeon, and he does not know or really understand why he does this.
After a minute of staring down at the immobile corpse of the dead bird, Frog stuffs his hands in his pocket and moves on down the road.  A moment later, the wind blows a crumpled piece of newspaper across his path, and he thinks about the bird again and chases after the newspaper.
When he catches it after a brief dance, he takes it back to the bird and gathers it in the newspaper.  Frog's mother warned him about the dire dangers of contracting exotic diseases from birds of all kinds, and so he still maintains a probably irrational paranoia of actually touching birds, especially dead ones.  So now he gathers the dead pigeon up in the paper and gently carries it to a nearby trash can, feeling sad.  The corpse of the bird is still vaguely warm through the thin layer of newspaper as Frog cradles it in his open palm.
Frog, his hands in pockets once again, and his shoulders raised against the chill wind, walks down the street and towards the club.

After another five minutes of wandering through the dark streets, he arrives.
The funniest thing, to Frog, about the Press Any Club, is that it looks like a drycleaner's from the outside.  People are lined up for half a block down the street, and a few of those immediately outside--just the newbies, probably--gaze in at the window displays: before and after wool sweaters, a successfully-mended herringbone tweed jacket with comfortable leather elbow patches, and an attractive pile of folded sheets.  Painted on the glass are the eternal words: "One Hour Martinizing".
Frog is standing in line, in front of the club.  Another man, about 25 years old, stands in front of him.  His buzzcut hair is rainbow-hued: red to violet, side to side, and he wears a series of small steel rings that pierce the skin at the back of his neck, in a line all the way up to the base of his skull, in decreasing size as they go up.  The ratty black leather jacket that he wears comes down to his upper thighs and reminds Frog of something from the Mod Squad.  The jacket has "Slay the Buddha" written across the back in fluorescent green poster paint.  Below that, there is a fluid line drawing of a Buddha in fluorescent yellow.  The Buddha has a knife protruding from the center of his chest, but he looks pretty unperturbed about it.
The man turns to his companion and says, "yo, babe, wanna know what's cool?  What's cool is I heard this never was no dry cleaner's.  They just made that shit up one day: 'hey, let's make a club, you know, really cool on the inside, but really, like, make it look like a drycleaner's on the outside!'"
His companion is a diminutive Asian woman wearing a black cashmere jacket that, like the man's own, has seen better days.  She does not react visibly to the man's comments, continuing to stare straight ahead.  She shifts her weight from one foot to the other and clasps her hands behind her back.  Frog notices a strange ring on her finger--he thinks she has a rat or some kind of rat-like animal on her ring.
After a moment waiting for a response, Slay the Buddha says, half to himself, "I should've known better."  He looks around and Frog pretends not to have been listening.
The Press Any Club is in a run-down part of San Francisco, along Mission, in a neighborhood occupied equally by Filipinos, Italians, and Puerto Ricans.  Frog looks around.  He hasn't been here often, but he loves the combined smell, even this late in the day, of gasoline and pastry.  He supposes the gasoline comes from the numerous cars which appear to be permanently parked by the side of the street, their hoods propped open or actually missing.  Across the street there is an old dime store, by its architecture built in the 50's, with cracking marble tiles appliquéd to its concrete facade.  Now it is an auto parts store.  Good location, Frog thinks.  Look at all the cars here that need help.
The line jerks forward, and soon Frog has presented his driver's license and entered the dark club.  The place is packed, and he can barely move in any direction without bumping into another black-clad clubgoer, but since everyone wants to go somewhere, everyone is pushing in some direction, and Frog finds that neither he, nor anyone else as far as he can tell, gets too squished in the process.
The Consultants are already on stage and well into their set.  Frog knows the band, but isn't really good friends with any of the members.  Being a band is only part of what The Consultants do, and that other part is how Frog knows them.
They are playing a song, an instrumental whose components are guitar, bass guitar, drum set, congas, and cello.  By the side of the stage, something that looks like a lute sits strapped to an instrument stand, and Frog thinks that the misshapen thing on a nearby table must be a hurdy-gurdy.  To him it looks sort of like a guitar built by a mad instrument maker with a sadomasochism fixation.
Frog makes his way through the crowd, weaving where he can.  One of the unexpected benefits of Aikido, he thinks, is an almost mystical ability to maneuver through groups of people.  He doesn't understand exactly how he does it, but soon he is standing right at the stage, swaying back and forth with the crowd as the song comes to an end.
Frog manages to catch the eye of Despina, the group's leader, currently strumming away behind the six-string guitar.  She is tall and thin, and her softly curling black hair is cut in a bob that puffs out behind her as she moves.  Frog smiles and beckons her over, and she flips the guitar onto her back as she crouches down to speak with him.
"Hi Frog.  I don't think I've ever seen you at one of our gigs before.  It's nice to see you."
"I need your help.  My--"
"Do you know we don't do consulting at a gig?  Not that I'm offended..."
"Hazard pay?"
"Triple, right?"  Despina's brow wrinkles as she tries to imagine what trouble Frog might be in.
Frog nods.  "No problem.  I'd rather be broke than dead."  He reaches into his jacket and pulls out the DAT.  "This may be physical evidence that a court wants to see, but I also have a copy of the data.  This tape is the original; it's triple-DES'd, 256 bit key; the password's in the case."
Despina accepts the tape.  "What should we do?"
"I suspect that my life is in danger only as long as that information isn't public, or only as long as killing me will prevent it from becoming public.  Ray is also mixed up in this: he's the one who, uh, obtained the tape in the first place.  He's gone missing."
"This wasn't your idea, was it?  I can tell.  That shithead.  I always thought he was a fuckup."  Frog finds it difficult to disagree this time.
The band, behind Despina, is making restless noises with their instruments, musically hinting that they are waiting to start the next song.  Despina holds up her right hand and makes a few signals which Frog cannot interpret.  There is immediately some shuffling of instruments and personnel and the band launches into a country-western song about a conceited martial artist who liked to pick fights in cowboy-hat bars, but who eventually got a shuriken in the forehead from a John-Wayne ninja.
At the same time that the song starts, a boy who couldn't possibly be older than 17 scampers across the stage to Despina and Frog, looking expectantly at Despina.  "What's the emergency?" he asks her.
She hands him the tape.  "Take this.  DES-3 key's inside--256 bits.  Publication deadman switch for Frog Hamilton, who is this person."  She points at Frog and Frog smiles mechanically.  The boy looks emotionlessly at Frog and Frog can't help thinking that the boy is memorizing him somehow.  What a cliché, he thinks.  Goddamn boy geniuses, pop up all over the place around here.  Used to be one myself.  Foo.
The boy says, "Oh, one of the good unapproved algorithms.  Target population for publication?"
Despina looks at Frog.  The boy turns to face him as well.  Frog says, "Uh, local media, international government, organized crime.  That enough?  Too much?"
"Gimme your wallet, man."  The way in which he demands this somehow causes Frog to immediately obey.  The boy flips through Frog's wallet, taking out and examining each item.  "No Social Security card.  What's your number?"  He hands the wallet back to Frog.
Frog tells him his Social Security number.
The boy turns to Despina.  "Any time limit on the deadman?"
Despina looks at Frog.  He shrugs.  She turns back to the boy.  "No time limit.  Termination on personal confirmation from me and him together.  Not to occur before three months from today."
"Anything else?"
Despina shakes her head and looks at Frog.
"Can you put Raymond Charles on there too?"
"You know his SSN?" asks the boy.
"No, sorry, I don't.  I could find out, though, but I'm sort of trying to stay away from anything connected with work."
"Got it," the boy says, "I'll deal," and takes off, sprinting, through the exit at the side of the stage.
"Who was that?" Frog asks.
"We call him Spider."  Despina turns around and glances at the band, now almost done with their country & western song.  "You're all taken care of, friend.  Come by the house tomorrow afternoon and we can talk about it.  In the meantime, stay out of places where it would be easy for a sniper to shoot you, if you can.  Spider will announce the deadman on the nets almost immediately, but there's always a risk, especially before all the details are set up."
Frog nods.  "Thanks, Despina.  I really appreciate it."
"No problem.  The Consultants appreciate your business.  Now, if we're all done..."
"Got it.  I can't wait to hear you sing tonight."  
The song is coming to a close as Despina smiles and bows slightly, from her crouched position.  Then she gets up and walks to the microphone stand, making another fluttering motion with her hand.  Just as she reaches the microphone, the next song begins a capella, in four voices, one of them hers.
Dona nobis laudandum
Dona nobis laudandum
Dona nobis practicum spiriti
Logos domum magistrae non inhabit
Logos domum meum hodie inhabit
Nemo me caedo
Cantant in caelo:
"Si non vastaris tum dies vastatur"
Dona nobis laudandum laudandum
Dona nobis
Dona nobis
Dona nobis

The singing stops, and Despina recites, to a heavy rap drumbeat:
Si carminam meam te amas
Tum multas boves consumas
Sed si non carminem deliges,
Ponam crustum in tuum face.

Frog has no idea what this means, but he thinks it sounds like Latin.  He likes it, especially the pretentious pseudo-intellectual idea of a modern song actually written in Latin, especially when probably nobody in the audience even understood the song.  At least he can't.
As she finishes the rap, Despina wonders how many of the people in the audience realize how bad the Latin in the song is.  Maybe Frog does, she thinks.  Isn't he the one who spouts Latin aphorisms all the time?
The bartender at the Press Any Club, as it happens, has recently moved back to the United States after graduating from Oxford, where among other things, he became quite proficient at Latin.  While the song was being performed, he became so annoyed that he had to go on break early, out front this time so he wouldn't have to listen any more.
Slay the Buddha, holding his girlfriend close to him as they sway back and forth after the closing cymbal crashes, says, "whoa, wicked song."
"De gustibus non disputandum est, Brutus," she says to him in a flat voice.
"Whoa babe!  I love it when you talk Chinese to me."
She gives him a drop-dead-now-please look, but he is rocking out to the beginning of the next song and does not notice.  Nor does he notice when Frog brushes past him on his way out the door, for the evening is filled with many bumps given and received by many people, most of which are utterly, entirely, and ultimately empty and meaningless.

Date:	Friday, May 8, 1998 23:46:17 PDT
From:	anon-y-mouse@somewhere.world.universe.net
To:	alternate-postal-system@world.std.com
Approved-By:	WASTE DELIVERATION CONSORTIUM, LTD.
Subject:	Net Mischief

It's still amazing to me that the Internet standard for electronic mail allows such trivially easy forgery.  (Witness, of course, my supposed address above.)  Until we all use PGP or some other public-key equivalent, this is unlikely to change: who will stop using email while all the vendors (for the net is hopelessly commercialized, not just Eunuchs anymore) sort their shit out?  Please don't mention "BlackNet" or Tam June whoever.

One opportunity, of course, is to make mischief.  I wonder how many people regularly communicate with their stockbrokers over email?  With their families?  With their lovers?

The problem with this opportunity is that most of the people who know how to pull these sorts of tricks on people are also cursed with an incredibly juvenile sense of humor.  Myself included, unfortunately.  I can think of few things funnier than sending someone I hate into financial ruin by short-selling a few random technology IPOs, but that's just me.  (At least I know I'm warped.)

SO the point is, since I guess there sort of should be one: how can we make it easier for people with real senses of humor to take advantage of all the chances for mischief?  In My Not-So-Humble Opinion (I refuse to use that damn acronym, thank you), mischief is one of the chief contributors towards making the universe a more interesting place in which to live.

Does anyone else have some ideas about this?

The drive through the city towards his home is uneventful, and to Frog it feels like it is the calmest drive he has taken in days.  In fact, he actually feels relaxed and at peace as he steers down Dolores towards a midnight snack of leftover steak and, hopefully, Ursula.
The night is clear and there are few cars on the road.  Frog realizes that if he is to download and examine the data, he should do it while still away from home.  He can't read the original source tape onto his hard disk, which is too small to contain the gigabytes that would be required, and so he'd need two DAT decks to translate it on the fly.  His body aches for bed, but instead, he pulls off his customary route onto one of the culs-de-sac which he has never explored before.  A street sign reads "Guy de Maupassant Pl".
The road curves gently downwards.  He turns right at a stop sign and drives along a slightly twistier road which eventually rises up to become a small parking lot that looks out over the hills of the city, away from the busy main roads and towards the whispering Pacific Ocean.  There is a nearby park, a small one that couldn't be larger than a quarter acre.
From his car, Frog can see the steady lights of the city's houses, intermixed with occasional patches of darkness that must be trees, or at least parks.  The whole thing is covered over with an intermittent layer of flimsy white clouds.  The rush of cars on the nearby streets is a distant murmuring sussuru that would be quite a peaceful melody if the other cars in the parking lot were not rhythmically, disturbingly rocking back and forth on their tires.  As he parks, Frog is having a difficult time keeping his mind on the task at hand.
His laptop still has plenty of battery life left in it, but the battery for the portable DAT is getting low.  Frog plugs it in to the lighter socket, using a sturdy old car adapter, hooks the tape drive and the cellular phone to the computer, and powers up the system.
***
He pops a blank DAT tape into the deck and tells his computer to download the doubly-encrypted data file from milk.com, decrypt it doubly, and store it out on the tape.  A message appears on the screen indicating the computer's estimate of the relative completeness of the task and an estimate of the time remaining until its completion.  The current estimate is 1 hour and 49 minutes.
Sighing, Frog dims the backlight on his laptop, removes his keys from the ignition, and gets out of the car, locking the door behind him.
The sky is black and clear.  The main drag's forest path of headlights is not visible from where he stands, at the edge of the parking lot of tiny park, and so the sky is that much darker and brighter for the stars.  He sees Orion, his sword and belt dominating the heavens with a promise of military endeavor of some sort.
A Toyota Celica parked nearby starts bucking back and forth.  Its windows are steamed, and Frog's mind suddenly focuses on Ursula.  What is she doing right now?  I always have trouble getting details out of her; somehow it never seems appropriate, or if I do ask the question is subtly deflected.  I always knew that Aikido spills over into more domains than I would think, and I guess this is just another example.  Sometimes I think I've given up wanting (needing?) to know, but sometimes the urge is overpowering and I never understand why or what changes to make it like that or what changes to flip it back the other way.  What kind of world is it where you never have the control you think you do?  Where every important question seems to continually go unanswered?  What kind of world is it where the universe itself seems to conspire against your desires?
I guess it's this kind of world, Frog thinks, kicking a small rough stone over the wooden railing and down the grassy hill.  Ambiguity is not just a part of the universe, it's a basic, fundamental, inseparable component of it.  One big glopping cloud of ambiguity and no control over anything by anyone.  The only solution is to live with it, because you sure ain't going to change it.  Frog sighs, bending down to feel the grass and weeds and stones with his hand.  The grass is dewy, and one of the weeds pricks him, but somehow it is gentle too.  He kneels at the edge of the parking lot, leaning against the railing and staring out at the city below.
As Frog stares out to the west, he sees the faintest glow of the sun lingering on behind the sunset, lending a warm reddish color to the Pacific clouds.  When exactly is the day over?  At what exact second has the sun set, and does the answer to that question make any sense at all?
***
Frog turns around, spinning quietly on his feet clad in their black Kung-Fu slippers, and glides back to his car.  The download procedure is far from finished, and so he decides to take a nap.  He has no problem falling asleep.
When he wakes up, the progress dialog indicates that there are still a few minutes left to go in the process.  Frog waits the few minutes until the progress dialog disappears.  When it does, he terminates the session with milk.com and puts the cellular phone/modem away.
Now there is the problem of how to examine the data.  If it's in a proprietary format, it might take him a month to decode, but since Ray apparently figured it out pretty quickly it shouldn't be too difficult.  Maybe something obvious.
Wait a minute--did Ray's message even say that he knew what was on the tape?  Frog rests his forehead on the steering wheel, trying to concentrate and remember exactly what Ray had said.  He sits that way for a few minutes before giving up, deciding that it's a hopeless quest for forgotten data.
Frog can think of one possibility for an easy solution.  If the tape is written as a disk image, he should be able to mount it on his desktop like any other storage medium, from 1.4 megabyte floppy disk to 5.5 gigabyte magneto-opticals.  It'll just be slower.
Having nothing to lose, Frog goes for the easy way out.  He's only half surprised when it works, when he gets a nice little tape icon on his screen right under the icon for his internal hard disk.
Looking at the contents of the tape/disk, he finds that there is a directory called "Voice Messages".  Inside, there are five sound files, which Frog's computer can play through the laptop's built-in speakers.
He double-clicks on a file called "VM9143211" and listens as his speaker comes to life.  A nasally, whiny voice begins to speak, cracking into an upper octave at least once every ten seconds:
"Yo, Scourge Master, homeboy, what's up?  I cracked the Warner Brothers preproduction archive and found a premix of the new album by that band you like, Ground To Bits in a Garlic Press.  I'll give you analog of the title cut here--it's called Rip it Out--but if you can get me a digital image of the unreleased Grouchy Lewis from IRS, I'll give you the binary.  Here it flies, up next."
Rip it Out

I sit at home and
Read my books, and
I don't really care
How it looks, to the
People
On the other side
If I stop for them,
Would they give me a ride?

I know they won't (Would they give me a ride?)
I know they won't;

I sit at home and watch my TV
And I don't really care what it (what it) does to me
I sit up close, eating cathode rays
I watch all night
And I sleep
All
Day

I sleep all day
I sleep all da-a-ay
I sleep all day (And watch all night)

I sit tearing pages from my address book,
All the names of people: I could
Never stand to look at their faces
And now baby
Don't you doubt
When I get to your page
I will rip it out.

I will rip it out.
I will rip it ou-ou-out
I will rip it out
Baby I will rip it
Ou ou out
Ou ou out
I will rip it out
Baby I will rip it out!

As the song comes to an end, Frog opens his eyes and realizes that they had been closed.  He's more tired and exhausted than he had thought, even after his nap, but what is there on the tape that's worth all this hassle from either end?  What kind of data service is Castor Data Service if it's serving as a pirate bulletin board for preteen hackers?  He clicks on the next file, and hears a weak, tired voice that sounds as if its owner has just run a marathon on his bare knees.
"I finally have proof.  They're after me.  I didn't tell them anything, but I've been stabbed.  I was followed from Amsterdam and they made a handoff.  It was disguised as a robbery.  I... I didn't tell them anything.  I was right after all, but I hold no--"
On the tape there is a muted sob, then the muffled sound of something heavy hitting something soft, then a period of silence, some shuffling noises, and a click as the message ends.
Frog is dizzy now, almost falling asleep but not prepared to surrender himself just yet.  The car's vinyl seat seems to hug him closer, softly yielding to his heavy very heavy body.  The car seat is the epitome of helpful technology, it seems to Frog.  Comforting but not overwhelming.  Easy user interface.  It's not even a metaphor--it just is what it is, a car seat, everybody can understand that.
Frog's body jerks once and his eyes open and reclaim some of their previous awareness, thereby subtly increasing the overall awareness in the universe and, exactly in balance with this transaction, a farmer in French Guyana scoots out of his shack, and, feeling water coming down from the sky, stands there in the incessant stream of polluted dihydrogen oxide.  The farmer doesn't know why, but he feels as if he is moving through a dream, through a dream world of events that he can't even begin to understand so why bother going to trial at all?  Yes, he is a confused man.  Frog has stolen something from him.  Perhaps he will realize it--either of them could do that.  Perhaps he will realize where he left it and he will go there and it will have still been there, through the whole time and all of the searching.
Frog is having serious trouble staying awake.  He plays the next audio file.
"Cheese Master, this is Scourge Master.  Do you copy?  Ha ha--just kidding obviously.  I have the Grouchy Lewis digital binary.  I'm leaving it here in D04-S format.  Mark five."
The speaker of Frog's computer erupts into noisy digital static, and Frog finds himself suddenly very very awake and slapping spastically at the box, trying to shut it up by sheer physical force, like an alarm clock.
It takes him a minute to figure out what happened.  The noise was definitely digital data.  Digital data, modulated into audio with a modem, and played into a voicemail system.  Clever idea for reducing the storage capacity of a digital system, and a practical way to store digital information over an analog channel--that's what all modems do, anyway.  But why were all these funny messages on the Castor Data Services system?  Weren't they an accounting outfit or something like that?
He plays the fourth audio file.  This one is pure noise--no speech preamble like the previous one.  What is it?  He doesn't have the signal-processing software to convert the file's audio pulses into digital form, and he doesn't have the technical knowledge he would need to route the audio through the laptop's modem, which could probably do the job for him.  Maybe the Consultants could find the answer, he thinks, but it probably isn't important.
The fifth audio file consists only of a man's gruff voice saying, "Damn.  How do I cancel this thing?"  That is the last one.
A yawn overtakes Frog, and he gives in to it, stretching his arms out as far as he can inside the car.
Realizing that if he does not move quickly home to bed then he will soon become a morning fixture of the external cityscape, Frog packs up the computer equipment and starts the car up with a roar.
As he drives down Hill Street, slowing down as he looks for a parking spot, Frog notices a man in a raincoat sitting on one of the neighborhood stoops.  Looking at him out of the corner of his eye, Frog sees the man bring a small radio to his mouth.
This is evidence enough for Frog that it would be dangerous for him to go home, so he slams on the accelerator and flees through the streets of the neighborhood, taking Castro to 24th to Church to Dolores to 280 North.  He does not notice any pursuit.

In Minnesota, Clifford Greer's younger sister Wanda is working late at her lab, known locally as the "PCAAC Lab", pronounced "P-Cack".  Wanda is about as tall as a parking meter, something between four and five feet tall.  She wears her short straight black hair slicked back like a tough biker chick in a bad 50's movie.  Her immaculately pressed lab coat, however, would not be appropriate attire for such a rôle.  She knows this, and although the tough biker chick somewhere within her disapproves, Wanda does not regret the sacrifices she has made in her life thus far.
Wanda is walking down a thin hall lit by a solid ceiling of fluorescent lights.  On one wall stretches a glass window, through which she can see several large atomic clocks and a jumble of computer cables that seem to be connecting larger pieces of equipment to each other.
At the other end of the hall is a closed door secured with a card key.  As Wanda approaches the door, she takes out her card key and waves it at the electronic lock, which beeps once in acknowledgment.
The door's deadbolt slides back with a thunk, and Wanda pushes open the door.  A rough animal stench immediately assaults her nose and she inhales deeply, smiling cryptically.
She is now in the second major part of the PCAAC lab, surrounded by an array of cages in which sit, play, eat, shit, and masturbate a collection of chimpanzees in varying degrees of surgical alteration or dismemberment.  Some have bandages, mostly on their heads.  A few have missing limbs.
The full name of the lab is actually "Primate Cognitive Ability and Atomic Clock Lab".  It was formed as part of a bargain made by two threatened university departments: one had government funding but didn't do anything useful in the modern world, and the other which the University wanted to close down because it wasn't bringing in enough grant money.  In exchange for the chairman of the primate lab not exposing the massive waste and overspending going on at the atomic clock lab, the atomic clock lab chairman agreed to help fund the primate experiments, and everyone, while not actually happy, had now been more or less pacified.
Amusingly enough (to Wanda, but not to the department's chairmen), the Atomic Clock Lab used to go by the officious and pretentious name "Bureau of Time."  In fact, they still keep that on their stationery instead of the more reasonable half of the lab's official portmanteau title.  "Atomic Clock Lab" just isn't anywhere near as romantic as "Bureau of Time."
Wanda works two jobs, and both of them are in the lab, though on different sides.  She is a research assistant for various primate experiments, and a technician who helps to maintain the atomic clocks.
Atomic clocks, which measure the passage of time by duly noting the imperturbably steady resonance given off by the orbital decay of excited electrons in cesium atoms, are great big honking chunks of iron.  (Exactly what does an electron read or look at to get excited, anyway?)  Or at least the ones in the PCAAC Lab are big honking chunks of iron.  Built in 1952 by a long-forgotten government contractor, the clocks are so far from the state of the art that they could probably be replaced for the tiniest fraction of their original cost.  Adjusted for inflation, that is.
This replacement would probably have been accomplished some decades ago if it were not for the fact that the lab held a 99-year contract with the United States Government to provide timekeeping services.  So, every tenth of a second, the main atomic clock in the lab sends out a pulse of radio waves that encodes the current date and time.  Nobody is listening any more, but that doesn't matter to lawyers.
In fact, Wanda is extremely certain that nobody is listening because for the past three years she has recalibrated the clock by the time announced over the air at WOOF, the local university's radio station.  Ordinarily, of course, atomic clocks don't need recalibration.  The whole point of an atomic clock is that they posess a certain deadly accuracy.  In particular, the PCAAC Lab's atomic clocks were usually just fine.  They were fine even in power outages, since they were run from uninteruptible power supplies that stored up a few hours' worth of electricity before they would even admit to being turned on.  Well, they were supposed to be fine during power outages, anyway.
A few years back, during one of the constant budget crunches, one of the researchers in the primate lab had secretly reconfigured the backup power generators to run the primate lab's systems instead of those of the atomic clock lab.  Some complaint about their monkeys dying without proper air conditioning, and who needs atomic clocks any more anyway?  There were a few civil and criminal lawsuits pending between various members of the two sub-laboratories, and each side had stationed a 24-hour guard to countersubvert any potential future subversions of the status quo, but in the meantime the lab continued to run as per usual.  So now, when the power goes out, Wanda has to tell the atomic clocks what time it really is, and the radio is pretty convenient.  And it's probably pretty accurate, too.

The corridor is long and dark, but there may be some light at the end.  Frog has to get closer to tell for sure, but every time he thinks he can see a little more, the corridor seems to recede a bit, back into the distance, and he's back to where he started.
It's then that he notices that the corridor is filled with doors.  On either side, an infinite procession of paneled doors, but none of them have doorknobs.
Suddenly Frog gets a premonition that there is something evil waiting behind one of the doors--something cold and shivery, slimy, covered in bloody sweat and scabs, hiding almost silently enough to escape detection.  Certain of impending death, Frog stops and stares at the door in question, sending out mental energy beams, intending to dissolve the malevolent creature.  After a timeless era of concentration, some invisible signal tells him that he has accomplished this, and he moves on.
He walks for miles, it seems.  Then he undergoes a perceptual shift, and it seems to him that now he is walking around a circumference of a sphere.  The corridor is infinite because it wraps around on itself.  He will never go anywhere but where he is right now, unless the monster gets him on the next lap.
Yet he persists in walking.  Why is he still walking around this pointless track?  Especially when that monster is probably up ahead somewhere, reformed from karmic mist and slavering acid drool onto the concrete floor.
In his dream, he does not know the answer to these questions.  If you were to ask him while he is awake, he probably wouldn't even remember having asked them.

Part 4

Pulling the emergency brake up, Frog stops the car at the curb a block from the Pacific Heights residence/office of The Consultants.  The office looks like an old (for San Francisco) Victorian mansion, authentically if jarringly painted in varying hues of maroon, gold, pink, and green. The mailbox is strange--a cylinder on end with a tall curved door in its side.  A year or so before, talking to Despina, Frog had found out that there was some sort of pneumatic tube system that they used with the mailbox, but this is the first time that he has seen it himself and he finds that now he really wants to see it in operation.
Getting out of the car, Frog stretches his stiff neck.  After running frantically from his Noë Valley neighborhood last night, he ended up sleeping on the worn vinyl car seat while the car was parked in a Chinatown back alley.  The rest of the day he spent hiding behind a newspaper in a tiny Dim Sum shop, eating a stomach-widening quantity of sesame buns filled with bean paste and drinking cup after cup of thick, bitter, black coffee.
As he climbs the stairs to the porch, Frog sees a sign on the wall, behind glass.  Light from the setting sun is bouncing off the glass, and Frog has to squint and shield his eyes to read the sign:
	Open for business--please come inside.

As he presses down on the impressively massive brass door handle, he hears Despina's voice: "Hey there Frog.  I'll be down in a minute.  Take off your shoes if you want and I know you want."
"Thanks," he says to Despina's disembodied voice.
Inside the front door Frog finds a comfortable sitting room and he slips off his Kung-Fu slippers, leaving them on a mat by the door.  There are a few books and magazines neatly arranged on a mahogany coffee table.  He picks one up--a vintage issue of Creative Computing from 1979--and sits in an overstuffed chair in red velvet and gold-covered wood.  As he is about to open the magazine he notices a box sitting on a table to his right that also supports a lion-clawed reading lamp.
The box is black, about four inches on a side.  The magazine rests on Frog's lap as he stares at the box.  It is covered with a star field, across which in bold red letters reads
CREATE YOUR OWN UNIVERSE™
using ordinary household matter

(and in smaller letters below)
laboratory tested--completely safe!

Frog picks up the box, which he finds to be fairly hefty--probably a couple pounds.  He shakes it slowly.  He sets it down on top of the magazine, on his lap.  The box, made of thin cardboard, unfolds at the top like an origami flower.  Inside is a shiny metal cube that completely fills the packaging.
The cube has a circular thing at its top that looks like it screws out, and on looking closer Frog sees little arrows with OPEN and CLOSE next to them.  There is a metal button on one side with START engraved on it, and what looks like a crank mechanism on another side, with a space to put a finger in to spin it.
As Frog turns the cube over in his hands, feeling its solid mass, he notices that there are words engraved onto the bottom of the cube as well.
CREATE YOUR OWN UNIVERSE™

Open the receptacle using the hand crank.
Place one milligram of matter inside and replace the cover.
Turn the crank until you hear a chime.
Observe through the eyehole if desired.
Press the button.

Congratulations!

You may remove your universe,but be cautious as it will be extremely hot at first.
-------

Created by The Consultants
Licensed to ConCo Ventures, Inc.
By using this product user assumes all responsibility for any consequences, etc.
Product should operate, according to current scientific theory.  However, no guarantees or warrants are made as to satisfactory results.

Frog laughs, and turning the cube over notices a small dimple in the center of one of the other sides.  In the center of the dimple is a tiny lens.  Must be the eyepiece, he thinks.
A door to the left of the front door opens and Despina Durand walks in.  She is tall and thin, and today wears a babushka over her loosely curly black hair.  Frog gets up to greet her.
"What's this?" Frog asks, holding up the metal cube in his hand.
A smirk crosses Despina's face.  "Didn't you read the box?"
"It is a funny joke, especially the disclaimer on the bottom."
"It's not really a joke."  Despina sits in a chair next to Frog, and he sits again.  "At least, some people--real scientists, not New Age loonies or UFO cultists or anything like that--think that the universe is a self-replicating fractal.  The theory is that any concentration of matter, under the right conditions, can become exponentially large, subjectively perhaps even larger than our own universe.  Mostly the conditions seem to be high temperature and a certain kind of scalar field at high potential energy.  They probably even have different laws of physics, like the gravitational constant could be different for example."
"Blah blah blah.  Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't a large universe take up a lot of space in your sitting room here?  Obliterate life from the planet, destroy the current biosphere, gamma rays, etcetera etcetera etcetera."
"Well, I don't understand it either, but I gather that it's only large if you're inside it.  We could arguably be in one ourselves.  Ask Bink, if you see him.  It's his project.  He worked for months on the miniature mechanism to get it just right.  There's a lot of gears in there so you can get high pressure, and you need less electricity, all that stuff.  The boy's a genius."
"It should be popular in toy stores."
"Actually we're trying to get Sharper Image or Nordstrom's to sell it for us.  There's some concern because, again theoretically, a proliferation of sub-universes with a sufficient total mass could eventually change the laws of physics in our own universe or a section of it, sort of like a leak."  Frog compresses his eyebrows in a mistrustful look, and Despina continues, "They think that's extremely unlikely, especially at the rate we can manufacture them."
"I'm extremely relieved."
"Just ask Bink for some references on inflationary cosmology and he'll talk your ear off for weeks.  Sorry--I've been babbling.  He halfway infected me with it too.  He has about thirty of these universes in his lab upstairs--all these little pellets.  The guy's crazy, but he did invent the Third Eye.  That bought us this house, practically."
Despina reached into the pocket of her dress, pulled out a small flat object--a Third Eye--and twisted it around in her hand, looking at it.
It is a small electronic device, powered by a single watch battery, in the shape of a plastic eye that users attach to their foreheads.  It reads electrical fluctuations from the user's brain and emits pulses to help nudge the brain into a more relaxed state.  Something to do with chaos theory; the effect was derived from work on preventing epileptic seizures.  The deluxe version even has a gauge, a needle that points from "prince" to "boddhisatvha", which supposedly reflects the brain state of whomever the device is attached to.
Already a seemingly permanent staple in certain enclaves of the northern California New Age community, it was the Third Eye exports to Japan that really put sales through the roof and made all the profits.  There the deluxe model is used at parties and bars, where men apparently find it easier to get dates if they're wearing a Third Eye with the needle at "boddhisatvha".  There's even a company that specializes in fixing the needle there permanently, for those with less patience and more devotion to worldly illusion.
"Come up to my office," Despina says,  pocketing the Third Eye, "and we can talk about your problem."

There is a loud fizzy electric snap from everywhere and the lights go out like hey we gotta split there might be trouble.  Frog looks up from the computer screen, which is now blank so it hardly makes any difference.  He thinks that the house is shaking, rocking back and forth on its homegrown homebrew make-do foundation done without proper authorization of the San Francisco City and County Building and Planning Department of the San Francisco City and County Environmental Services Division, or of the trustworthy and caring public servants therein, who Only Care for the health, safety, and property values of their charges.
The lights turn back on with a whine and the computer starts back up with a New-Age guitar strum and a few plucked harmonics.  Despina laughs, saying, "We have three backup generators in one of the subbasements.  Plus there's an experimental geotherm."
A periscope appears from nowhere--it must have dropped out of the ceiling though, since that's where it's attached.  Despina peers into it and shuffles around in a circle.
"Doesn't look to be much unusual outside, but I don't have infrared on this scope.  I can't see any roadblocks out there or anything.  Wait--couple of cop cars parked outside.  And there's a big van parked across the street."
She walks to the wall and punches a few buttons on a device that looks like an intercom.  There is no response.  "Shit.  House communications electronics down."  Despina thrashes her head from side to side, looking for something.  Finally she takes out a tiny cellular phone from her pocket.  "Local cellular subnet," she says to Frog.
"Ah," he says, scratching his ear.  He starts to walk towards the window and stops abruptly when he considers that he might be shot as a result.
"Spider, come in," she says into the phone.  A blast of static is the only reply.
"Damn."  Despina turns to Frog.  "Follow me, quick."
As they begin to exit the room, Frog notices a metal shade slide swiftly down to cover the room's window.  The thick sound of a deadbolt closing in the window echoes in other parts of the house, as every window closes and bolts itself.
"You know, I was always sure Spider was overly paranoid," Despina says.  "But maybe I was a little too sure."
She spins on a sandaled heel and dashes out the door, followed closely by Frog.  The layout of the renovated Victorian is actually, and Frog thinks ironically, rather Baroque.  They do a dance up and down stairs and through secret passages, occasionally stopping to try an intercom box.  Frog is amazed because the house seems to be much bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
Eventually they reach a small room on what must be a belowground floor since they have done nothing but descend for some time.  In a swivelling desk chair, the young boy known as Spider sits, wearing some sort of helmet that Frog thinks is a biofeedback device.  A strange agglomeration of half-silvered mirrors sits astride his face, and wires seem to be attached to almost every point on his body.  Underneath all the apparently weighty gear, Spider wears a pair of beige shorts and a very worn out, almost threadbare, T-Shirt.  The shirt says:
MYSTIC JAMMERS
MENDESFRAÜ
KEEN FELIX
THE MMYTACIST
KÏLLED BY A BLÖW IN THE HEÄD
friendship concert 1989
free food and beer
thanks to all our fans

"They're broadcasting interference on all frequencies," Spider says.  "That's why we can't get out on the nets."
The walls shake briefly, and there is a muffled explosion.
"There goes our backup satellite link.  Grenade hit--from somewhere up the hill."  Only Spider's mouth moves.  The rest of him sits there on the chair like a ventriloquist's dummy between shows, except this puppet is made of meat.
"Can you upload the key?" asks Despina.
"What's going on?" says Frog.
"I think I can nuke the interference source with a directed EMP."  Frog is staring at Spider and thinks he sees his mouth twitch, just a little.  The lights dim for a brief moment, then return to full strength.  "Got it," he says.
"Whoa, horsie--those aren't real cops at all," Spider says.  "No cop radio traffic.  Unless it's some special unit.  I'm getting some nearby data packets on one of the leased bands--could be encrypted voice.  But definitely not normal cop tech."
"Hey!  What's happening?"
Despina breaks away from some furious tapping at a keyboard.  "The deadman is set to publish on any news of your death, but that doesn't do any good to you if you actually die, or to us if we all buy it.  Also they could be planning to keep your name out of the news, and be organized enough to pull it off.  Your name in the newspapers is what would trigger the deadman in the first place.  Specifically, if and when it appears as the star in an obituary section."  She gives him a small smile, and continues.
"The encrypted file is sitting on a dozen fileservers out on the Internet, in addition to a few personally-delivered packages.  If Spider can keep the interference down long enough for us to upload the right key to one of the right sites, it's set up to be like an advance warning that it might have to go off quickly, like arming a bomb.  The deadman would go off unless we disarm it by sending another key within ten minutes."
"How does that help me?  I mean us?"
"Just another threat.  It means that they no longer have to kill anybody for the information to get out, which means they might no longer think it's worth it to kill us.  We also have to get through their jamming enough to broadcast what we've done."
"Can't you use the EMP to take out their power?"
"Capacitor's gone and needs to be recharged," Spider says.  "It takes an hour, and besides we're running off generators now and can draw only so much."
"Besides," he continues, "it probably wouldn't do any good if we could recharge it.  Check out the tactical display.  They're not using much electricity."
A projection TV comes to life and lights up one of the room's walls with a complicated multimedia status report.  The main feature is a wire-frame drawing in blue lines of the house and yard, rotating swiftly about its vertical center.  Green symbols mark the locations of external sensors, and they flash red when they sense something.  Occasionally a video subwindow will pop up to show information received from an external camera.  On one, displayed in the tinted monochrome of the camera's night vision, Frog can see that there is a man in an electric company uniform attempting to saw through one of the window shields with a reciprocating saw.
On the video, the man giggles.  He steps back and stumbles, dropping the saw, and falls on his back onto a rose bush, where he sits immobile.
"Nitrous oxide released from a valve by the window frame," Despina says.
"I'm extra impressed," says Frog, shuffling his feet back and forth.  "Not that I'm complaining or anything--I'm glad you can defend yourself--but it took a lot of paranoia and foresight both to do all this defensive mechanism."
"Nahh.  Tax deductions," says Spider from his chair.  "Plus it's way cool.  Didn't you want a house like this when you were small?"
Despina looks at Frog and shrugs.  "Licensing fees on the Third Eye brought in a lot more than we expected."
She turns to Spider.  "What can you tell me about the situation so far?"  She continues tapping on the keyboard, starting up the key transmission protocol.
"Primary electricity went out at 21 hours nine minutes ten seconds.  Emergency power came on almost immediately at 21:09:34, and concussion shields all lowered successfully during the period 21:09:34 to 55, except for one in the second attic which I sent Buster to fix.  Sensor logs show that at 21:09:47, our main and backup satellite links were taken out with high-energy laser pulses, probably from one of the neighboring buildings, and followed up with ballistic grenade hits."
Frog grimaces through the play-by-play, thinking (a) that it's all his fault that the Consultants are involved and having all this trouble, and (b) that he's glad that he got the Consultants involved because otherwise he'd probably be through with this bardo and he doesn't feel quite ready for that eventuality yet.
Spider continues.  "Ground-based telephone service for the entire exchange went down as of 21:09:20.  Based on the line resistance, my hypothesis is that they cut power to the whole telco switch."
"By the way, Frog," Spider says, "I'm really glad you brought this to us.  This is better than playing wargames all the time.  Gets boring after a while."
"Uh, thanks, I guess.  I hope you're insured."
"Cheaper just to replace everything," Despina says.
Frog doesn't quite know what to make of this idea.  "So what's been happening since the phones went out?" he asks.
"Infrared detectors showed two people trying to drill in from the outside--one on each side of the house.  We neutralized the threat.  It looks like they were carrying gas dispensers--probably some sort of tear gas.  We knocked out some of their interference with an EMP.  No cop traffic--I'm running a make on the plates now."
"I thought we barely had enough bandwidth for Despina to do her thing there," says Frog.  "How can you connect to the DMV at all?"
"Didn't need to.  I have the DMV database on tape.  The tape robot needs to retrieve it, and it's not properly indexed--that's why it takes so long."
Despina issues a few triumphant keystrokes and cracks her knuckles.  "Congratulations, everybody.  We're going to win.  I just initiated the countdown.  They have ten minutes--now the only thing left to do is to convince them to leave us alone."
"We could get their attention by broadcasting some of the data," says Frog.
"That's no good if they aren't scanning, or they're only running scramblers," says Spider from his chair, "but I'll give it a shot.  By the way, there's a big semi outside.  Some guy's getting out of it.  He's carrying a teddy bear.  He's putting it into the mailbox!  Now the truck is driving away."
"Don't bring it in yet--could be a bomb."  Despina rises and starts looking around the room, in filing cabinets and in piles of stuff on the desks.
"It's not a bomb.  Can I help you with something?" asks Frog.
"If you can find a pen and pencil."
"Okay," says Frog as he starts looking, "But why?"
"I think we need to lob something at them.  Physically."
"Okay, they're not cop cars," says Spider.  "The plates are faked."
Despina grins and begins writing with a pen Frog has handed her.  "Okay, let's write them a good ol' nastygram.  Spider, are you done yet, honey?"
"I'm not delivering it.  I'm minding the store.  Ask Shelley, she's the ninja."
"Can't we toss it out a window or something?"  Frog asks.
"They'd probably think it was a grenade.  We need it to be delivered in person."
"Well, seeing as how this is basically my fault..."
"Oh, so you stole the tape, not Ray?"
"Not exactly, but I did drag you into it."
Spider coughs.  "Frog going makes sense; they'll see that it's him and figure that he's carrying a message--otherwise he wouldn't be coming out."
Despina shrugs.  "Sure.  If this weren't a stealth operation we could broadcast our message on loudspeakers, but since we need it hand-delivered.  And you have some martial arts if I remember, don't you, Frog?"
"Some Aikido," he says.
"When you go," Despina says, "don't forget to take your zanshin with you."  Total awareness.
"Sure, of course I'll be careful," Frog says.
Spider jerks in his seat.  "Hey, a S.W.A.T. team!  Men in black with guns!  They're trying to sneak up from the south, on the sidewalk."

A block and a half away from the Consultants' residence and office, three United States Government employees named Dourish, Campbell, and Thomas sit around a portable, foldable bridge table.  The bridge table is in the back of a van.  On the bridge table sit a cellular telephone, a few almost-stacks of carelessly scattered documents, and a deck of cards, which is present for the sake of tradition only and has not yet been opened.  Someone has scrawled "Command and Control" on the back side of a piece of line printer paper which has been stapled to the fabric wall of the van behind Thomas; it looks like it has been written with crayon.  The cellular telephone is wrapped at one end with a worn strip of red fabric tape.
Campbell is drumming his fingers on the table, staring at the phone.  Thomas shoots a glance out the corner of her eyes at Dourish.  Dourish is trying to scratch his crotch without being noticed by rubbing his crossed legs at just the right angle.
"What's the matter, Dourish, your wife give you crabs again?"  Thomas asks, looking pointedly at the man's crotch.
"Naw, I think it was your mother," Dourish says.  "And she probably got them from you."
"My mother's been dead for twenty years, but I know that probably never stopped you before."  Thomas' voice is deadpan, with no detectable excitement therein.
Dourish sneers.  "My private life is my own business.  As for you, I strongly suspect you'd be a nicer person if you got laid once or twice yourself."
"I've had as much action as I need.  I just don't want you to be sneezing diseases at me.  Plus I hate your socks."
Dourish looks down at his socks.  They are a dark, rusty orange color, gloomily festooned with a border of mustard yellow in a pattern reminiscent of an ancient Greek temple.  "What's wrong with these socks?"
"I don't know," Thomas says.  "But are you color-blind?  Those socks are orange.  Your shirt is blue.  And your cheap suit is brown, but maybe not for that much longer.  Who dresses you, anyway?"
"Well, if you really must know, I am color-blind.  I pay a friend in my apartment building to set out my clothes each Sunday night."
"What exactly is your relationship with this friend?  I thought that you didn't..."
In a deep bass rumble, Campbell screams: "Enough!" and Thomas stops dead in the middle of her no doubt supportive and team-building comment.  She closes her mouth with a snap.  Campbell resumes drumming on the table, and there is silence for a brief while.
"What are we waiting for, again?" asks Dourish.  "Cause I got something I want to do tonight, you know."
"We are waiting," Campbell says, "for the S.W.A.T. team to call and tell us that they are ready to begin."
"I thought we couldn't get the S.W.A.T. team after all."
"They're not an actual S.W.A.T. team," Thomas says, "They're just a bunch of the local Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms rejects.  Campbell told them that these folks are dangerous, armed cultists who grow tobacco and don't pay taxes on it."
Dourish sits up in his folding chair.  "Naw, Earnest wouldn't do that, would he?"
Campbell's fingers stop their drumming.  "Desperately insufficient spending limits call for desperately desperate, some may indeed say 'stupid,' measures."
"So what's going to happen?"  Dourish actually sounds worried now, even to himself, and he usually makes a habit of lying to himself as much as possible.
"I have no idea," Campbell says, shaking his head slowly from side to side.

Date:	Saturday, May 9, 1998 21:00:40 PDT
From:	someone-else@out-there.net
To:	alternate-postal-system@world.std.com
Approved-By:	WASTE DELIVERATION CONSORTIUM, LTD.
Subject:	Re: Net Mischief

anon-y-mouse@somewhere.world.universe.net writes:
>Does anyone have some ideas about this?

Well, many of you may not know this, although I suspect that most of you do, but lots of computer systems on the Internet, probably mostly Un*x ones but probably others too--they set their system clocks off of a networked time server.

Lots of stuff checks what time it is.  Calendar programs.  Billing programs.  Telemarketing autodialers.  Tons of other stuff.

Guess how hard it is to do packet spoofing on these babies?  Not hard.  With just a little covert engineering work, you could have people thinking it was any time from 1971 to 2042!  Well, you could have the programs think that: people have a little more common sense.  But computer programs have a lot of responsibilities these days.  It could be a while before the humans noticed what was happening...

Think what would happen if you told all the computers that it was the year 2000.  Probably a lot of bad stuff would go down.  There's that whole rollover thing for us to play with.

That is, of course, if you find that stuff amusing.  Not really my cup of tea at the moment.  Please quote this paragraph if and when I'm taken into custody.

+-----------------------------------------+
|        someone-else@out-there.net       |
|        making the world safe for        |
| incompetents, idiots, and invertebrates |
+-----------------------------------------+

At the Primate Cognitive Ability and Atomic Clock Lab, Wanda Greer is again working late.  Tonight she has an actual legitimate reason (other than her normal misanthropy) to stay late at the lab.
Wanda's job this late night is to adjust the clocks for the leap second.  The convention of three hundred and sixty five and a quarter days per year isn't quite right, so every year on a certain date (regulated by no fewer than seven federal agencies), the official time of the great nation that calls itself the United States of America jumps forward by one extra second.  Instead of 86,400 seconds today, there will be 86,401.  That extra second will remain forever unexpressed, skipped, counted but not experienced.  Perhaps it will collect somewhere in the infinite universe to commiserate with lost socks and unvoiced declarations of love.
Actually, The PCAAC Lab no longer regulates the official time of the USA, although it usually likes to pretend otherwise.  The lab's atomic clock functions have long been supplanted by the Boulder laboratories of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and by a new international system regulated by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris, France.  A maze of old contracts and other miscellaneous legal entanglements, however, keeps the old, obsolete system up and running, and somewhere there is probably a lawyer ready to get out of bed at three in the morning to make certain that the evil, malicious government doesn't do something as obviously bad for the American People as trying to squirm out of its commitment with regard to the lab.  The new system always has its leap seconds after midnight on December 31, but the old system functions in ways much more arcane and useless.

This particular year's leap second isn't scheduled to happen until close to midnight, and so in the meantime Wanda intends to visit a particular chimpanzee friend of hers.  His name is Chester and he has a plug cut out of his skull into which have been inserted an assortment of electrical sensors and effectors.  Chester is participating (unwillingly, as is his relatively sad fate) in an experiment to determine various neurological parameters which regulate sexual behavior in chimpanzees.  Attached to the outside of his head is a small device which administers electrical current according to signals received by a radio receiver.  The device also transmits sensor information from the probes.
As soon as Chester sees Wanda enter the room, he gets very excited, jumping up and down while holding the bars of his cage.  None of Wanda's coworkers has figured out why he likes Wanda so much.
She pauses in front of his cage, admiring him.  His tall forehead and broad, flat upper lip are his best features, Wanda thinks, not to mention that gentle tongue hiding inside his generous simian mouth.
Wanda turns quickly and grabs the remote control for Chester's brain from a shelf full of experimental equipment.  It's a small black box, a Radio Shack "Experimenter's Case" sealed with black duct tape and labeled "Chester" with a permanent marker.  On the surface of the box are mounted an assortment of dials and buttons.  Chester jumps up and down, eyes glued to the device.
Wanda makes some adjustments on the remote control and Chester gets even more excited, beginning to race around the cage, occasionally jumping up and swinging by his tail, and all the time staring intently at Wanda.  Just as Wanda has almost finished unbuttoning her blouse a voice comes over the P.A. speaker at one end of the room, and Wanda stops and turns towards it, treating it to a withering gaze that she had plenty of time to bring to icy perfection in Boston's underground clubs a few years back.
"Wanda, you have a package," the speaker says.  "The guy wants you and only you to sign for it, so come on down, okay?"
Late at night, when hardly anyone is still working, the security guard at the main desk tends to get pretty friendly.  Once he even got friendly enough to accidentally brush against Wanda's chest in an extremely improbable-to-be-accidental manner.  It only happened once--Wanda's tough biker chick is hiding only so far beneath the surface, after all.
Sighing gently at the impolite interruption, Wanda places Chester's remote control gently on a nearby desk and begins to rebutton her blouse.  She turns and makes her way downstairs to the lobby, using the lab's vintage 1950 elevator with its original interior completely obscured by various graffiti carved and sprayed into and onto its surface, including all the buttons which have been rendered into a guessing game for first-time guests and other people unfamiliar with the building.  The elevator creaks and chortles threateningly on the way down from the third (and top) floor.
Standing nervously by the front desk, eyes darting back and forth between the guard behind the desk and a large package sitting on top of it, a man wearing a FedEx uniform is doing a not very good job at trying to appear relaxed.  The man's uniform is badly wrinkled and his shirt is not fully tucked in, and his belt doesn't quite look right with the rest of his sartorial ensemble.  He adjusts his collar a bit, trying to stretch the fabric by pulling it away from his pronounced Adam's apple.
As she approaches the desk, the FedEx man says, "Uh, um... are, uh, are you Wanda Greer?"
She nods, looking at the package.
"Uh, this package is for you, but you gotta sign, okay?  And show me your ID?  A photo ID?"
Wanda turns to him and nods again, flipping through her wallet and holding out her driver's license to him.
He stands mute, staring at the driver's license as if it is something completely meaningless to him like the defense budget for French Guyana.  Then he says, "Oh, uh, I forgot!"  With a flurry of anxious hands he snatches the license from her outstretched hand, looks from it to her a few times, then hands it back.  He picks up a clipboard which had been sitting on the desk next to the package and hands it to her.  "Sign this, please."
There is a blank legal pad clipped to the clipboard.  She signs "Eugenia P. Dobbs, III" and hands the clipboard back to the man.
"Uh, thanks," he says, as he turns and runs out of the building.
"What was with that guy?" asks the security guard from behind the desk.
Wanda picks up the package from the counter, completely ignoring the security guard and his lecherously friendly grin.  The box is heavy, but its weight is not evenly distributed, so Wanda has to shift it around in her arms in order to make carrying it less uncomfortable.  The heavy side rests against her belly as she rides the elevator back up to the third floor.
By the time she is back in the primate lab, she is exhausted.  Her palms are sweating.  The interruption didn't eliminate her horniness, but rather enhanced her sense of anticipation.
Chester is sitting on the floor masturbating, and when he sees her he finishes with a flourish and resumes, once again, his constant staring at Wanda, who suddenly remembers that she didn't turn him off before going downstairs.
"Sorry, Chester.  But I guess you don't mind."
Setting the package down on the floor, she grabs the remote control from the desk.  Quickly removing her panties, she lifts her skirt and backs up to Chester's cage.
Chester wastes no time and immediately enters her, grabbing her hips and thrusting wildly for about thirty seconds before ejaculating with a shudder.  Just as he does so, Wanda turns up one of the knobs, and Chester immediately gets hard again, continuing to thrust into her from behind.  After he hits his stride (about ten seconds is it), she turns down the knob again, letting him continue on more of his own juices, so to speak.
This lasts for about ten minutes, with Wanda manipulating the remote control for best effect as she grinds her hips into Chester's crotch, and although Chester shows no sign of quitting, were Wanda to turn around and look at him, she might notice a certain world-weariness, a very human sort of existential despair.  But she doesn't turn around to look and therefore doesn't see it at all.
When Wanda is finally satiated, she flicks a switch on Chester's remote control and pulls away from the chimp, who immediately sits down on the floor of his cage and curls up for a nap.  He begins to snore softly, his chest still rising and falling rapidly as evidence of his exertion.
 A large clock on the wall shows that the time is right for the leap second adjustment.  Close enough, anyway.  Wanda walks through the maze of a building until she comes to the entrance of the large refrigerated room that houses the atomic clocks.
The room is refrigerated because the souls of the atomic clocks--the cesium beams--are essentially housed in ovens.  There was a big debate about this refrigeration a few years ago.  Some department head wanted to take the heat generated from the atomic clocks and combine it with the heat from the morgue's cremation ovens to reduce the winter heating bills of the building.  The matter was settled when someone pointed out that the company which maintained the air conditioners had a 30-year contract which was not cancellable without a lot of fancy legal footwork.  Might as well make them work for their money was the eventual consensus.
Wanda stands and stares at the readout of the large atomic clock.  Its ancient digital display uses individual elements for each digit that is required in a certain place--for instance, since the leftmost element of a time display can be either zero, one, or two, then this leftmost element contains three separate filaments, one for each potential digit.  The time glows in a strange ivory color.
Some of the elements have become dysfunctional from excessive age, so every tenth of a second, the tenths-of-a-second digit blinks out into nothingness because the "3" in that position is gone.  The lab used to have a facility for manufacturing replacements, but it was a victim of a previous budget "rejustification" and is no more.  Nobody else makes that stuff anymore, and if they did they would be expensive.
Of course, that whole subsystem of the clock could be replaced with a simple LED display that would last forever.  Of course, nobody around the lab these days would actually ever take the initiative to do that.
At an approximately appropriate time, Wanda flicks some switches on the operating panel of the clock and the leap second is accomplished.  Remembering her package, she returns to the primate lab.  Chester is still sleeping on the floor of his cage.
Wanda looks at the package, a rectangular brown lump with various official-looking stickers stuck on it seemingly at random.  She picks it up and sits down on the floor with it.  The cardboard package is slightly dented, and there are a few black scuff marks distributed around its surface in an almost disturbingly regular pattern.  The packing tape comes off easily as she cuts it with her house key.  After she tears out the many layers of tissue paper from the package, she discovers that inside is a finely-crafted wooden box, with beautifully-joined, rounded corners, and smoothly polished.  It looks as if it had cost hundreds of dollars--is that mahogany?  This isn't my book of the month club order, thinks Wanda.
The box has on its top a flat LED, which is unlit, and a latch, which is closed.  A piece of thick tape has been stuck across the latch, and on the tape is printed:
WARNING -- Please read instructions before opening

Wanda rummages in the box for a while, then her hands surface with a cream-colored envelope on which is written "Instructions -- Please read immediately".
She tears open the envelope.  Inside are a letter and five hundred dollars in cash.  The letter reads:
Ms. Greer:
Please read this letter quickly.  It will darken and become unreadable within a few minutes of exposure to light.  Herein a service is requested of you, compensation for which you will find in the envelope that contained this letter.
Your assistance is requested in helping to preserve the life of a friend of your brother Clifford's, a Mr. Frog E. Hamilton.
If you hear of Frog Hamilton's death, by any means, and you confirm it to your satisfaction, then please open the accompanying box and follow the instructions inside.  Likewise, if the light on the top of the box ever illuminates red, please also open the box and follow the instructions inside.  The instructions are simple and will require no more than five or ten minutes of your time, at the most, and the use of a phone line for up to half an hour.  No illegal activities will be requested of you, and the phone line will only be used to make non-toll calls.
You are not requested to go to any special effort to become aware of Mr. Hamilton's health at any time, just to respond to such information as would normally have come your way.
This letter and box were designed by a company which Mr. Hamilton has hired to help protect him.  He himself does not at present know that you have this box, nor does he know any details about how we are engaged in helping him.  Part of the efficacy of the plan is secrecy: the fact that you have this box is not generally known.  Please do not mention it to anyone.  To discourage you from contacting us, there is no information about our company enclosed herein.
Should the plan be terminated, the box itself will inform you of this status by its light illuminating as green.  After that, you may open the box and use it as you see fit.  It is a fine box and may be used to store jewelry, guns, or many other small items.
We humbly and sincerely thank you for your assistance in this matter, which we have rudely but necessarily presumed in advance.  We hope that the compensation we offer will be adequate for any inconvenience that assisting us in this request should cause you.
Sincerely Yours,
Friends of Frog E. Hamilton
Wanda finishes the letter and sits back on her knees.  She hadn't even realized she was sitting up.
In five minutes' time, the light on the box will begin to blink, rapidly, resoundingly, red.

Almost simultaneously, two separate teams of armed men creep up to the house and begin to assault it with various methods, those both technologically advanced and primitive.  In the dark and noise, they do not realize that they are not organizationally related to one another.
In the underground control chamber, Frog, Despina, and Spider hear the swish of bullets and the rumble of explosions, some relayed through external sensors and some just through the walls.
"Request to use deadly force," Spider says.
"Denied," says Despina.
"Thought so.  Just checking."  Spider pauses.  "We have enough other stuff anyway."
"I don't know if I want to go out there anymore," Frog says.  "Those sound like real bullets."
"In my judgement, I think we're somewhat beyond nonviolent coercion.  Those are real bullets."
"And real grenades," says Spider.  "Although they haven't done any real damage yet.  Hey, Bink just broke their encryption algorithm.  Check it out."
A speaker on the wall begins to play.  One voice says, "Why aren't more real cops here?"
Another responds.  "Oh, we staged a political kidnapping on the other side of the city, and started a little rioting down on Market.  That should keep most everybody busy for a while."
"Well, I guess it's working."
"Seems to be."
The speaker cuts off.  There are two close explosions and the bullets stop suddenly.
Frog asks, "What happened?"
"Nitrous grenades.  They should all be laughing or sleeping right now.  Hold on."
There are another two explosions.
"What was that?"
"Capsaicin.  The stuff that makes hot peppers hot.  Eye irritant.  Other mucous membranes too."
"Yeah, I know," says Frog.  "My doctor said I would get colitis if I kept on eating hot peppers the way I do."
A terminal begins beeping wildly.  Despina turns to Frog.  "It's official, gentlemen.  The tape, whatever it is, is public information now."
"So now they have no actual pressing reason to kill me, other than the fact that it would only get them revenge."
"That is correct as far as we know."
Frog scratches his chin and smiles.  "I'm going to get some air."
Despina scowls.  "I don't think that's wise."
"If it's all over, it's over.  I can't run around underground for the rest of my life!  And they're all rubbing their eyes or sleeping, right?"
"At least give the information time to propagate through the organization of whoever's out there."
"If they're all asleep, it shouldn't matter.  I'm going."
Despina says, "Be careful!  Time for us to call the real cops."
Spider says, "Bye Frogger dude!"
Despina guides him to the back door, through the dimly-lit house.  It is still quiet outside, so Frog zips out the door and into the cool night.
Outside, the sounds of crickets seem to be incredibly loud.  There is also the sound of many people snoring and a few giggling.  Sneaking from bush to bush, just to be safe, Frog notices a team of about ten armed men all zonked out on the ground at the side of the house.
When he makes it to the front of the house, he sees a police cruiser that has seen better days.  The roof of the car has been dented by something heavy, and the paint has come off in long strips.  In the car are two uniformed men, in their safety belts, asleep, their eyes watering.  The interior of the car doesn't quite look like a police car, but it's nothing Frog can put his finger on.
As Frog stands, looking in the window and catching his breath from his dash, the car's radio comes to life in a burst of static, then a voice says, "Is everyone there dead yet?  We need to question Hamilton before you off him."
Another voice on the radio says, "Frankly, I have no idea what's going on.  I'm just the remote coordinator for this op, and all my boys went in already.  I'm not even at the site.  I was doing crossword puzzles until you called."
"You're coordinating?  Then what's going on?  How come you don't know?"
"I told you, all my boys went in already.  I haven't heard jack from the site."
"Do we still have the guy that Queneau brought us?"
"Last I heard, he didn't talk and was almost dead.  He got left at the sign, in the shack.  Someone will probably find the body in a few months.  I imagine a lot of South San Francisco kids go up to get drunk there."
"Well then for God's sake, don't lose Hamilton."
"I told you!  I'm not even there.  I don't know what's going on!"
Frog decides that this is a good time to leave quickly, just in case folks start to wake up.  He grabs the bear from the mailbox before he scampers off down the street towards his car.

Part 5: Epilogue

The black El Camino that once belonged to Frog Hamilton and now belongs to Rollover Consulting, Inc. rolls up the hills of South San Francisco, with Frog Hamilton behind the wheel. The industrial setting has gradually transmuted into a residential one as Frog, in the car, nears the enormous sign--the only sign that he can think of that the man on the non-police radio could have been talking about.
Frog has seen it many times in the past, as he drove (or was driven) up the peninsula freeways:
SOUTH
SAN FRANCISCO
THE INDUSTRIAL CITY

He always thought it was beautiful, but never actually visited it before.  The circumstances could be better, he thinks. 
Of course the sign as such is practically invisible from so close on the steep hillside, but Frog feels its presence like one of the looming Elder Gods of H. P. Lovecraft's mythos. An ancient horror with an unknowably alien intent, lurking silently over innocent humankind, present but almost forgotten. To invoke its name (how does one invoke the name of a sign?) is to bring down its inexorable, inexplicable wrath.
Frog notices that his breathing is quick and shallow. As he drives, he attempts to center himself, to attain some of the peace that he often feels when he sits zazen. It is moderately successful, but he is not willing to totally let go of his apprehension about what has happened to his friend, and so cannot ultimately manage to become calm. He knows that it is this worry that is making him tense, but is afraid that tension may be a survival trait in some cases.
Finally he comes to the spot that, on his faithful Thomas Brothers map of the San Francisco Bay Area, appears to be closest to the sign. It is a cul-de-sac called Mother's Circle with three houses that appear to be vintage 1965 architecture: heavy stucco walls and thick slab windowsills. 
There is a rough trail that meanders around the rocks, and Frog follows it. Against the side of one of the enormous pieces that make up the sign, there is a tiny shack, large enough to hold maybe four of those portable construction toilets they have at rock concerts. The thin wooden door of the shack is jittering back and forth in the quickly-changing wind.
This has to be the place. He walks through the flapping wooden door. It is dark inside--there are no windows--and he closes his eyes to help them adjust more quickly.
Frog waits with his eyes closed in the cool air of the shack. Something is wrong.
Frog opens his eyes, and his reason blows out like a candle. He stands in nothing, looking at nothing. The body of his friend and business partner sits, bound, in a chair. Ray's head is forward, resting on his chest, arms hanging down at his sides, tied with rope to the legs of the chair. Ray wears a leather mask that is bound tightly over his eyes.  The smell of feces and urine rises from the chair as well. Frog's reason and his thoughts are gone. He doesn't know what he is seeing; he doesn't know what he is not seeing. 
The world has stopped, but it continues. Frog feels the shack around him, the soft rain just starting as it begins to spit itself at the roof of the shack, the massive sign that he stands in, the hillside, the city beneath, with El Camino Real pumping its inexorable supply of cars holding laborers, businesspeople, tourists, teenagers. Frog feels the sun out in space, behind the clouds. 
Frog wonders if he has gone crazy, and then immediately knows that he has not. In spite of what he sees before him, what he smells, what he suspects, he is at peace. This is the way the world is. Things occur in the world. I am in the world by my own choice. Why does it feel as if he is in that space that he always sensed was there, behind his meditation? As Frog closes his eyes and breathes deeply, the smell that would normally make him retch is just another sensation to him now. 
There is exactly one thing to do. He opens his eyes and walks up to the chair. He places his hand in front of Ray's nose, and to his surprise feels a breath. 
"Ray?" he says, gently. The rain is falling more heavily now, flung down from the sky by an angry wind.  There is no response.  Frog slowly unfastens the mask from around Ray's head.  "Ray?" he says again.
Slowly Ray straightens his neck and raises his head. He has been sleeping, and his bleary, crusty eyes flicker open. His mouth widens in a smile. "Frogger!" he says, his voice cracking. "Will you pay my bill so we can check out of this sub-zero-star hotel?"
Frog unties the rope that binds Ray's hands, and begins work on the one that ties his waist. Ray, moving slowly, first rubs one wrist and then the other, feeling the circulation return with loving prickles. 
"How do you feel?"
"Hungry, weak, and covered with shit and piss. But other than that I'm fine." He says it with that smile that always seemed to tell Frog that life was a fun ride in a first-class amusement park. Frog never understood it before.
Frog says, "If you feel up to it--it's raining outside--take off your clothes and rinse yourself off outside." 
"Cool," says Ray.
"I'll give you my clothes when you're done," says Frog. "I'll stop at Target and get some replacements. There's one down on El Camino." He pronounces "Target" as if it were French, "Tar-zhay." 
Slowly, carefully, Ray braces his hands on his thighs and rises to his feet. He begins to remove his clothes, and Frog removes his as well. Might as well keep them dry as much as possible, he thinks. 
The two friends walk out into the pounding rain, Frog holding Ray's arm in case Ray turns out to be weaker than he realizes. The rain is chilly and comes straight down from the sky, as if the dark cloud overhead has stopped moving entirely. Ray rinses himself, then they return to the shack where he dons Frog's clothes.
"I can come back if I need those," says Ray, pointing at the jeans, boxers, socks, and striped T-shirt that he had been wearing.  From the looks of them, they would make good fertilizer, and are certainly no longer the comfortable-looking clothes they once were.  Ray gingerly picks up the jeans to look for his wallet and keys, but they are gone.  He then wipes his hand on the cabin's rough wooden wall, which is considerably cleaner than the jeans at this point.
Ray looks around the small cabin once more, breathing in deep the stench of filth that permeates its atmosphere.  "Let's go," he says.
Frog and Ray dash to the car. Frog says, "if you really do feel okay, maybe you could drive. It's probably a worse crime to drive naked than to drive without a license on you."
"Probably not in California," Ray says.

In at least some of the infinitely many possible universes, as the term is rather loosely used here, the laws of physics are such that some strange things can happen when a sufficiently large mass of subuniverses are gathered along certain dimensional parameters. Like, for example, being really close together in space.  In fact, under these conditions, the universes can actually coalesce into one supersubuniverse.
Cosmologically, the resulting state is really not any different at all from a normally produced subuniverse, although the method of formation is different.  Nobody knows what happens to the subuniverses (from their own internal perspective) when they coalesce, although the prevailing theory is that it's sort of like getting extra channels on your TV.  There's stuff in different dimensions where there hadn't been anything before.
Don't ask me, I don't really know.  I'm certainly not a physicist.  I didn't even do very well in physics class, not to speak of anyway.
If the world of this narrative is one of the set of universes in which this can happen, and if the conditions are met by the collection of subuniverses in one of the upper-story workrooms in The Consultants' office-cum-dormitory, then:
Reality warps as Bink constructs a micro-universe as a demo for a potential investor, a pharmaceuticals company executive from Norway who has braved the crispy cinders of the post-assault house because the patent record of this strange group of San Francisco weirdos has produced such a good investment return in the past for others.  This demo turns out to be the last demo for either of these two individuals in the observable universe, for as the new universe comes into being across the mysterious scalar field, the until-then unknown conditions are met for coalescing subuniverses, and suddenly a large ball appears, occupying most of the space in Bink's room.  Both men are for all intents and purposes gone from this world.  From the outside the ball appears to be a perfect mirror.  From the inside, who knows?
The perfect mirror ball sits/floats in the room.  It does not appear to move, and it seems solidly anchored to one single point in space.  In fact, when someone chops away at a desk that had seemed to be supporting the huge ball, the ball moves not one measurable nanometer.  A few years later, someone in Uruguay will find one of Bink's red high-tops under a filing cabinet in a disused storage room in the Peruvian embassy there.  The room will have been sealed since 1947.
Gradually, over a period of about an hour, the ball changes, growing darker and redder as the minutes pass.  Flame seems to come from inside the globe of subuniverse and the globe becomes a glob as it begins to warp and fold along the borders of some Lovecraftian dimension.
Frog Hamilton finds himself running away from the fiery red glob, and he bursts out the door just in time to turn and see the whole house of the Consultants burst into a weird coruscation of silver-red flame.  A fountain of metallic fire lights up the neighborhood like a mystical gateway in a bad horror movie, reaching into the sky with flickering arms of death.
Police cars are arrayed outside, some parked on the lawn.  One cruiser sits on top of a rose bush.  Police officers with automatic weapons are crouched behind the open doors of their cruisers, barking into their radios and looking worried, firing lackadaisically and randomly into the hellish inferno.
A blue light flashes calmly, sedately, on the mailbox outside the building.  Frog cocks his head as he looks at it from across the yard.  Strangely drawn towards the mailbox and its flashing blue light, Frog opens it and finds exactly one object inside the mailbox-cum-pneumatic tube delivery system.  Inside, there is a rolled sheet of vellum, tied with a blue ribbon, which Frog unties.
Unrolling the sheet, Frog reads, in finely-illuminated letters an inch high, "You are dreaming."
***
Some moments later, when he finally wakes up, rubbing his eyes, Frog feels as if he has just returned from a momentous adventure of some kind that he cannot remember.
Turning to Ursula, he rests his cold nose against her warm cheek and she snuggles closer to him in her sleep, resting her hand on his bare chest.  She smiles and he rubs her neck gently, thinking of back massages past and future.  Still half-sleeping, she reaches behind her and grabs his hand, which she firmly places against her belly.  I like a woman who knows what she wants, thinks Frog.  Then the problem becomes: will she let me know too?
Part 6: Afterword

								December 17, 1999
Dear Frog,
As the new century and new millenium dawn, my thoughts turn to you.  We haven't seen each other much in the past year.  Elder Gods, Inc. is going very well, as you've probably heard.  We expect to go public (don't tell my lawyers I told you this; who knows what trouble I might get in) on Jan 1, as close to the beginning of the year as we can wangle it.  Soon every geek worth his or her NaCl will be roaming the plasmoid spheres to program instead of staring at those stuffy two-page CRTs.  Aren't you glad that RCI owns a minority interest?
In other news, I've started practicing a martial art called Kyudo.  It's formal Japanese civilian archery, very meditative.  I think it'd be right up your alley these days.  Maybe we can practice together someday?
Anyway, there's some unfinished business that we have together that I'd like to clear up before this whole apocalypse thing comes down, just in case as it were.  I've tried to tell you in person, but somehow I couldn't quite make my throat disgorge the words.
The short story is this:  I set you up.
Not in the sense that I turned you in or gave out information, please understand.  Just that I instigated the whole affair on purpose.
What can I say?  I did the best I could at the time.  I have mixed feelings about it now.  Some days I know it was the right thing to do, and others I know that I was a total asshole.  You really came through for me, too, which somehow makes it worse.
Now please don't misunderstand—I hope you're still reading this, because it's a bit more complicated than the above short story may indicate to you.  I didn't know what would happen when I took the tape, but I suspected it would be an adventure.
I have been called many things for taking the tape in the first place, and for doing what I did with it.  I expect you to be down on me the worst of anybody, and I deserve it.  But I did have a reason, and most days I still do think that it was a good reason.  (And yes, I do believe that a person can have a good reason and still be a jerk.)
No one could have known how many people would have wanted that tape, no one who wasn't omniscient anyway.  Still, it was such an incredibly stupid thing to steal on the face of it--that's easy to admit, because it's so obvious.  Being stupid is not something of which I have been accused very often, in connection with other matters.  Only occasionally.
One thing that I haven't told you yet is that I didn't really go into hiding after I had hidden the tape and left you that message on Balvinder's computer.  Well, I did hide for a bit, but not for long.  After I saw things start to heat up I just went back home.  Someone would come for me soon, I knew.  And I was right, of course.  I just hoped that I wouldn't die before you settled things.  Trusting the universe is either very hard or very easy, and it turns out that it doesn't usually make the slightest bit of difference which one it is for you, because in the end you do it anyway, even if you don't know you're doing it at the time.
I know that you probably suspected that it was only a practical joke of mine at first, that no tape had really been taken and that I just wanted to shake you up a bit by making you believe that something bad had happened.  After you found me I appeared so traumatized (and I was!) that you have never really pressed me on this whole matter.  I believe that you still believed that the tape was always my main concern.
I knew that something would happen when I took the tape, because of what I figured out when I was working at Castor Data Services.  I didn't know what, but that wasn't important at the time.  Or at least–so I'll claim now—it didn't turn out to be important.
What I haven't told you is that I knew you would have some sort of adventure, that I wanted it to happen that way, that I predicted that it would.  Even though it was a spontaneous act at first.
Pretty pretentious, eh?  Trying to create adventure in someone else's life?  Well, I suppose I never had a real big problem with being pretentious on occasion.
Couldn't I have died?  Of course.  It was a pretty stupid thing to do if I was really invested in continuing to live.  I am now, by the way, very much so.  But I wasn't then.  It seemed as if the world had been crumbling around me for years and I'd just noticed.  It seemed as if I had no friends, as if I had no passion for anything.  Everything was dead, and the only emotion I could really feel was pity for myself and for the poor, stupid, optimistic idiots who insisted on populating the world.  If you were to ask me if it had anything to do with Eunice I'd have to say yes, and then I'd say that I didn't want to talk about it any more than that, except to say that it seems to me that I've dealt with that part of my life now and I'm ready to move on.
In my life I have often been accused of a certain lack of planning and foresight.  This seems to me like a fundamental character trait, and often I interpret it as a flaw.  Certainly also I have been accused of a lack of high-quality introspection and self-knowledge.  But for all the depression that was raging through my head, I still had a drive for some sort of adventure, and I knew when I took the tape that I planned to leave it for you, and I suspected that something relatively interesting would happen.
Yes, it could have been bad.  But it wasn't, not in the end.  At least not very bad.  So I ask that you not blame me for things that didn't end up happening.  If I asked you to buy me a loaf of bread at the supermarket and the loaf you picked had a pin in it, and you pricked your finger with it when you picked it up, would you blame me for your bleeding finger?  What about if I asked you to take a trip with me and our plane was hijacked?  What about bungee jumping and the cord broke and you went tumbling half a mile to your sudden painful death against the razor-sharp rocks on the riverbed below?  What if I said it's the green wire to disarm the nuclear bomb, not the red one?
Actually, you can blame me if you want.  I can ask you not to (and I just did) but whether you do or not, it really will affect you more than it will affect me.  My advice in general is: No Blame.  I learned that one from an old book called the I Ching.  Check it out sometime.  (The Wilhelm translation is still the best, in my not so humble opinion.)
I love you very much, as I think you already know.  The cliché is that you're like a brother I never had, but that phrase makes it sound like a distant relationship compared to how I actually feel.  You're the twin that I never was, except by some fluke of the universe (forgive me, please) you grew up with a gigantic stick up your butt that always made you walk real funny and look sort of uncomfortable all the time.  Somehow I have always seen through that giant stick almost as if it wasn't even there.  Still, I wanted to help you pop it out.  (I knew that you would have to be the one, not anyone else.  I've had my own sticks in the past, and can see that clearly enough.)  I saw an image of what you could be without that stick, for yourself and for the rest of the world.  And that image was so great for me, so moving and full of possibility, that I felt I had to do what I could to bring the image to life.
Of course, people never do what you expect them to, and experience means something different for everybody.  That sounds like a cliché too, but it really means something if you think about it.
I guess the point I want to make is just that no matter what you do to influence people, you're probably going to end up missing the mark somehow.  Counting yourself.  The universe somehow knows what you're up to and it will thwart you.  Sounds silly and mystical, but it's been true for me in my brief life, anyway.
Luckily for me, since you found me in that shack in the misty hills of South San Francisco, you have indeed loosened up considerably.  I don't know if you yourself notice, but I've noticed that others have noticed.  You're much more relaxed, more open to ambiguity and unfocused challenge.  You have stopped trying to pretend that you are too enlightened to have any feelings.  And I look forward with much anticipation (and even more anxiety) to your reaction when you finds out that the premise of the whole action was to get you to look at the world a bit differently, to step out of yourself and the boring attitude towards life you had let yourself live into.  I sense that you'll believe that that was my motivation, no problem: I've done enough strange things to you in the past that you already see me (so you've said) as a sort of random, unparseable quantum force in the universe.  I just hope that you take my actions as the gift that I wanted them to be.
You'll probably be mad at me for a while after you read this, but my hope is that you will reflect and see the changes that have taken place within yourself, and you will forgive me for my part.
I've rambled on long enough, too long by far.  Thanks for coming this far with me.

Much Love,
Your Brother,
Ray

--- FIN ---
Glossary: Computer and Buddhist Terminology (mostly)

Aikido	a martial art founded by Morihei Ueshiba in the early part of the 20th century.  The name means "Way of energy in harmony," and the art focuses on transforming conflict into peace.
awakening	becoming aware, through direct experience, of the nature of mind.  Also known as enlightenment.  May be transitory.  When a being is permanently in a state of awakening, that being is a buddha.
bardo	realm; from Tibetan Buddhism.  Life is one bardo, death is another, and there are a few more of them in-between which aren't so simple.
big mind	the mind that just exists.  compare with little mind
double vajra	Tibetan symbol representing the twin lightning bolts of love and knowledge that lead to enlightenment.
email	electronic mail.  A mostly-text-based means of communicating with other computer users.
heuristic	In programming, a rule based on what's likely to be true.  For example, in a database record, if the expiration date of a product is earlier than the production date, then the database record has probably become corrupted.
^H (Control-H)	The underlying code on many computer systems for the backspace operation.  If one's terminal is set up incorrectly, it may be inserted into the text instead of being used to modify it.  Occurs in written correspondence when users want to pretend that they didn't say anything, in a humorous way.  There is one ^H for each character that the author wishes to "un-say".  For example, "My boss?  He's a real loser^H^H^H^H^Hswell guy."
IMHO	acronym for "In My Humble Opinion", used often in email.  See IMO and IMNSHO.  Often sarcastic.
IMNSHO	acronym for "In My Not-So-Humble Opinion", used often in email.  See IMO and IMHO.
IMO	acronym for "In My Opinion", used often in email.  See IMHO and IMNSHO.
intern	a poorly-paid student hired for summer work.
internet	any collection of local networks connected into a bigger network.  (note that this is not capitalized.)
Internet, (The)	the name for the (current) biggest instance of an internet.  Grew out of a much smaller government network which began as a potential way to continue military and government communications in the event of a nuke hit.
IPO	acronym for Initial Public Offering.  When stock in a company is first traded on a public exchange.  The moment when everyone who has been slaving away at a startup suddenly wakes up to find that they are millionaires, and so they almost immediately quit to assume lives of leisure.
karma	the result of action based in the little mind.  Karma accumulates based on the intent behind one's actions.  Karma accumulated in one lifetime may be balanced by actions in the next lifetime.
ki	energy, life force.  also qi or ch'i in Chinese.  The middle ideogram of Aikido, and the second in Tai Ch'i
kokyu-nage	literally, "breath throw".  A particular kind of Aikido maneuver in which the effortless nature of the throw (when performed correctly) makes it seem as if one is breathing out one's assailant.
kote-gaeshi	an Aikido technique in which uke's wrist is twisted to the outside of the body, causing him or her to fall down
little mind	the mind that has thoughts.  compare with big mind
lotus position	a position for meditation.  sitting with one's left foot resting on one's right thigh and with one's right foot resting on one's left thigh, or vice-versa.
meditation	an exercise in quieting the mind, usually undertaken in a relaxed setting and with an alert posture.  See zazen and sitting.
nage	a throw.  Also used to refer to one who throws.  See uke.
nastygram	a letter (or email) that says something that the recipient doesn't want to hear.
newbie	someone who is very new at something, perhaps doing it for the first time.
nirvana	the world of perfection, which can be perceived only by an enlightened mind.  See samsara.
packet	a small bundle of data sent over a network all at once.
packet spoofing	a technique used on networked computers that makes it seem as if a made-up bit of information is coming from another (potentially "official" or "trusted") source.
PGP	an acronym for "Pretty Good Privacy", a computer program that permits secure communications over computer networks
rollover	when a counting unit currently storing its maximum value is asked to increment itself to a number that is larger than its capacity, and it thus reverts to the minimum value.  Many odometers in cars roll over after 999,999.9 miles, after which they read "000,000.0".
samsara	the world of illusion and suffering, which exists only in the deluded, non-enlightened mind.  See nirvana.
sangha	a community of Buddhist practice.  People with whom one meditates.
sensei	teacher, master.
sesshin	an extended Zen meditation retreat, usually lasting at least three days.
shugyo	hard, strenuous, daily training (in the martial arts)
sitting	in Zen Buddhism, a synonym for zazen
uke	in martial arts, the one who receives the technique.  In Aikido, this is almost always the one who attacks.
void	in computers, specifically the C and C++ programming languages, a function that returns no value, or an untyped variable.  in Buddhism, the state of emptiness that is the ultimate reality, perceivable directly only by enlightened beings.
zafu	a firm cushion used in zazen.  Often filled with buckwheat hulls.
zanshin	remaining spirit, total awareness--being conscious of everything that happens in one's environment
zazen	a method of meditation practiced in Zen Buddhism.  The practitioner sits on a zafu in lotus position with his or her eyes open, usually staring at a white wall.  Also known as sitting.
Zen	a variety of Buddhism characterized by almost total absence of doctrine and formal precepts.  Often emphasizes paradox as a means of attaining awakening.  In common parlance, also used to refer to a state of no-mind attained when performing certain tasks.
zendo	A center used for practicing zazen and for related community events.