THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 4, EPISODE 3

He doesn't... what happens to Wayne and Margie is much more fundamental. The first week in November, a few local Mansonistas break into the flat to rob, beat, trash and stab those present, whom did not include yours truly, nor the estimable Mr. Streich. There was blood to donate, a mess to haul down to construction dumpsters the next block over; after being sewn up and debriefed the Bowens split without explaining and without a forwarding address... Oregon, somebody said, or maybe Washington... with their useless, bipolar dog. One of those damp, safe places.

Not the snake though... the bandits snakenapped it. Hard to be pacifistic on the outskirts of the Spahn Ranch.

Slane's noticed, of course, how buggy old Alice and Ralph have gone, but who's he in position to criticize? OPIE... far from its relatively focused purpose in the Zone... denaturizes as it's expanded; this almost gaseous bureaucracy has jack to say when Ralph and Alice start poaching territories and functions, each in the belief they'll be spared when Max finally comes on-line. I think he hopes we'll find a means for Ralph or Alice to merge with discrete systems, to penetrate and swallow them. Elements of rape cannot be disengaged, nor blamed on the victim, howsoever the government wallows in purported Lentex sins.

And then, only then, Slane will gather himself up on his mycological throne to, at last, ask "... and who are you?"

More errors... March and April's... failure of integer estimation cutoffs in the Rocky Mountain sector. Coal and oil programs halting because local memories are consumed with repeating decimal fractions that haven't been snipped... sevenths run out as .142857142... and onwards, displacing everything else in the system. Two thirds repeating .66, .666 and so forth. Zeroes dropped, decimals set adrift like Dr. Frankenstein upon the North Sea... government checks issued at ten to a thousand times normal sums; metal stress calculations compromised, robots gone berserk with digital encephalitis. We have over two million lines of source code; more, even, than the competition and trail only the phone companies.

Even from progeny. "Virtue," Socrates presumed to warn his students, "exists, ultimately, in the One, not many."

Legion's holding but - on what Jersey's taken to calling Information's Superhighway - it's four in the morning, nothing but tire scruffs and roadkill. And, still, no telephones on the moon.