Page 178 of Nearly Roadkill
To:ScratchnWinc
From:Jabbathehut
Subj:Confirmation
There being only two nodes left makes you extremely vulnerable to actual capture. Since the gun-rights site is in SF and mine is in NYC any fool would know you’re in one or the other.
F.G.,
—J.
Right. So back to the spreadsheet: We skipped down to the third question, our favorite one to hate:
Sex: M/F
Annnnnnd, I go…
—CLICK—
And the whole column was selected, easy as pie! Saying that out loud made Winc announce that ze wanted some pie. Obviously punchy by then, bored out of our skulls but wired from all the waiting, adrenaline, and the sex we weren’t having. We put our fingers together and hit theDELETEkey as one, fully expecting a big old nothing.
We didn’t really know what we’d done, but it went sorta like this:
Winc:Wow, it’s an hourglass.
Scratch:What does that mean?
Winc:It’s thinking.
—pause—
Scratch:Wow, it’s still thinking.
Every time we looked back at the screen, the hourglass was still there. And the little lights blinking on the console. S L O W L Y.
Meanwhile, in came another memo from Jabba:
To:Scratch/Winc via bypass
From:Jabbathehut
Subj:Neatness
There is one more node left besides my own, the gun-rights site. Not a blocker, but one likes clean, smooth lines in one’s patterns.
There appears to be no means of having your little action work, so long as this node is open.
—J.
It always fucking goes this way. One stupid little scared clutch of people fuck it up for the rest of us. All they had to do was shut down for 24 hours. But no, as if taking a stand on something, anything, would fucking kill them.
What else could we do? We had to sign off. Winc says to be patient.
END SCRATCH JOURNAL ENTRY
TOOBE ENTRY
To:Jabba
