do anything.”
Jimmy Dee sent Skip a “help me” look. She said, “Honey, we have this thing in police work. Do you know what excessive force is?”
Kenny answered for her: “It’s like when you hit somebody and you didn’t really have to.”
Sheila raised her hand again, ready to give a second swat. But she caught Skip’s eye. “Overkill?”
Skip nodded. “Overkill. As in, that’ll be enough.” She changed the subject quickly. “One of you wouldn’t have a laptop I could borrow, would you?”
“I’ve got a notebook. That’s better.”
She went home with a computer she could take to bed. Jimmy Dee had shown her how to attach her phone so the modem would work. All she had to do was ask it to dial the number of the TOWN (programmed in by Jimmy Dee at her request).
Sure. She knew how that went. In about a week the glitches would be ironed out and she’d be connected.
But not true; magically, the TOWN identified itself and asked her for login: Steve. Then her password: Skip2mLu. And zap, she was on the TOWN.
Now what?
It was quite a lot like being in a real town—say, New York or Paris—with eighty million different options. She could walk down to the corner for coffee or she could take in the opera. And why do just one? Why not the movies, then the opera, then coffee and after that ice cream?
There were categories: Body and Mind, the World, Interactions, the Arts, Sports, Politics, Hill and Dale, Computers—on and on like that; she counted twenty-three. And under each category, there were conferences. In some twelve or fifteen; in one or two, a hundred or so. At random, she picked one: Pets. She ended up at the top of a list of topics. As instructed by Steve, she pressed BR for “browse, reverse.” Now she was at the bottom of the list where the current topics were. The last one, Topic 256, was “TOWNies recommend vets”; most of the entries had to do with West Coast practitioners. Number 255 was “When Calicoes Turn Bad.”
She tried another conference: Relationships. Worse still— there were 733 topics. Already she was overstimulated and she’d only been here five minutes. She could see how a person might feel safe on this thing. It was so enormous, surely you were just another graffiti artist. She realized with a shock that was what this felt like—illicit scribblings on someone else’s wall.
I’ll just see what looks interesting and go there,
she told herself.
First she went to Confession. It was nothing if not lively. The topic devoted to Geoff’s death had the rather flip title, she noticed, of “Out on the TOWN.” Outraged, Lenore (whose user ID was her name) had started a new topic called “TOWN Without Pity,” in which TOWNspeople were invited to assess their own voyeurism, cruelty, and lack of feeling. Someone called Bboy had answered: “Now, hold on, Lenore. I think about ninety-nine percent of the posts in that topic are really very caring. The topic name is a little over the top, but surely you realize that one of the main ways people have of dealing with grief is black humor.”
A third user, none other than the legendary Bigeasy, had said simply: “Great book on that subject—
The Grief Cycle
by T. M. Collins.”
To which Greenie had riposted: “I think Lenore has a good point. Haven’t we been acting a little like vultures?”
“Speak for yourself, Green One. :-).” wrote Arthurx. The little pictograph was something both Steve and Jimmy Dee (a veteran of AOL) had told her about—a little side-wise face called a “smiley,” the idea being to defuse anything that might sound sarcastic, to show that the writer was just kidding.
If the idea, thought Skip, was to make you feel like you were in a real conversation, this topic was a terrible advertisement. Because a lot of conversations were like this—banal. A lot of forgettable remarks came out of people’s mouths, but fortunately they were forgotten two minutes later. These were here forever; legitimate
Jimmy Dee sent Skip a “help me” look. She said, “Honey, we have this thing in police work. Do you know what excessive force is?”
Kenny answered for her: “It’s like when you hit somebody and you didn’t really have to.”
Sheila raised her hand again, ready to give a second swat. But she caught Skip’s eye. “Overkill?”
Skip nodded. “Overkill. As in, that’ll be enough.” She changed the subject quickly. “One of you wouldn’t have a laptop I could borrow, would you?”
“I’ve got a notebook. That’s better.”
She went home with a computer she could take to bed. Jimmy Dee had shown her how to attach her phone so the modem would work. All she had to do was ask it to dial the number of the TOWN (programmed in by Jimmy Dee at her request).
Sure. She knew how that went. In about a week the glitches would be ironed out and she’d be connected.
But not true; magically, the TOWN identified itself and asked her for login: Steve. Then her password: Skip2mLu. And zap, she was on the TOWN.
Now what?
It was quite a lot like being in a real town—say, New York or Paris—with eighty million different options. She could walk down to the corner for coffee or she could take in the opera. And why do just one? Why not the movies, then the opera, then coffee and after that ice cream?
There were categories: Body and Mind, the World, Interactions, the Arts, Sports, Politics, Hill and Dale, Computers—on and on like that; she counted twenty-three. And under each category, there were conferences. In some twelve or fifteen; in one or two, a hundred or so. At random, she picked one: Pets. She ended up at the top of a list of topics. As instructed by Steve, she pressed BR for “browse, reverse.” Now she was at the bottom of the list where the current topics were. The last one, Topic 256, was “TOWNies recommend vets”; most of the entries had to do with West Coast practitioners. Number 255 was “When Calicoes Turn Bad.”
She tried another conference: Relationships. Worse still— there were 733 topics. Already she was overstimulated and she’d only been here five minutes. She could see how a person might feel safe on this thing. It was so enormous, surely you were just another graffiti artist. She realized with a shock that was what this felt like—illicit scribblings on someone else’s wall.
I’ll just see what looks interesting and go there,
she told herself.
First she went to Confession. It was nothing if not lively. The topic devoted to Geoff’s death had the rather flip title, she noticed, of “Out on the TOWN.” Outraged, Lenore (whose user ID was her name) had started a new topic called “TOWN Without Pity,” in which TOWNspeople were invited to assess their own voyeurism, cruelty, and lack of feeling. Someone called Bboy had answered: “Now, hold on, Lenore. I think about ninety-nine percent of the posts in that topic are really very caring. The topic name is a little over the top, but surely you realize that one of the main ways people have of dealing with grief is black humor.”
A third user, none other than the legendary Bigeasy, had said simply: “Great book on that subject—
The Grief Cycle
by T. M. Collins.”
To which Greenie had riposted: “I think Lenore has a good point. Haven’t we been acting a little like vultures?”
“Speak for yourself, Green One. :-).” wrote Arthurx. The little pictograph was something both Steve and Jimmy Dee (a veteran of AOL) had told her about—a little side-wise face called a “smiley,” the idea being to defuse anything that might sound sarcastic, to show that the writer was just kidding.
If the idea, thought Skip, was to make you feel like you were in a real conversation, this topic was a terrible advertisement. Because a lot of conversations were like this—banal. A lot of forgettable remarks came out of people’s mouths, but fortunately they were forgotten two minutes later. These were here forever; legitimate
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