Page 5 of Nearly Roadkill
It has been noted that several departments have not submitted a projection on the status of Registration evaders. To complete the Divisional report, we need:
A projection (in percentile figures) of Registration evaders in your online sectors;
A summary of the tactics you plan to employ to identify the evaders.
Kindly respond by day’s end.
—RR
He shakes his head. Right. Good plan.
But in that meeting, he’d tried so hard to make things clear:
“So, Ol’ Joe, he keeps going into Flirt’s Corner… well, pretty soon he’s going to be targeted for breath fresheners, time-share condos in the islands, and adult videos. Fits a pattern. But if someone changes identities all the time, they’ll get ads for everything from—” and here Budge had paused, glanced down at a printout, smiled, and said, “mutual funds to skateboard insurance. So all you gotta do is watch who’s getting more than their fair share of ads.”
He might as well have been speaking Klingon.
“Look, there’s that whole marketing group, Allied Consumer Industries. They represent virtually every company that spends more than a nickel a year in advertising. Right now they keep records of who gets which ads and sort that by zip code. Right?”
Heads nodding slowly.
“Right! But now, with the Net, you can flip a switch and you will know exactly which individuals are getting which ads. All we have to do,” he’d pointed out, “is find someone who shows up in one too many marketing windows.”
More blank stares, but Budge ignored them. He was on a roll. He had a pattern, and he’d found some folks he suspected were breaking it.
“Those are the ones who won’t register an identity, the ones who don’t have an identity to begin with. Those are the folks who are telling us about themselves right now, three months before the Registration deadline.”
They’d looked at him with polite smiles, dismissing him without really saying a word. He’d seen that look before: they were giving him just enough rope to hang himself. Well, perhaps he would.
That was four weeks ago, before two names practically fell onto his screen, right out of one too many marketing windows. And now he stares at the printout again:
Scratch \\\ Winc
a.k.a.: (no alternates located)
“What’s W-I-N-C stand for?” he says out loud to his empty office with the green-green walls. “It’s an acronym for something, right?”
END JABBA NARRATIVE ENTRY
To:T. Sparrow
From:Drew
Subject:Chat rooms
Hi Dad,
Still working on my dang opus. It’s a ton of work, but I’m INSPIRED. It’s like I’m directly meeting my queer ancestors.
Speaking of back in the day, maybe next time we talk you could tell me more about chat rooms. From what I can tell, there were tons of chat rooms on America Online, and people actually used themto chat! i.e., have long conversations with one another. No one talks online that way now. We argue in the comments section or do private messages, but that’s different—right? Can you tell me more about that? It seems to me those spaces had a lot of freedoms that we don’t have now.
When I was reading chat room logs, it seemed freakin’ sad that they didn’t even anticipate that someday you’d be able to… well… become a troll and dox people with death threats on social media.
Thoughts?
Love,
Yer kid Drew
