This Blue Ball | Page 9

key of at
least 1024 bits in PGP-encrypted message. (Assume that this is not perfect protection, so
be discrete about your personal details.) I highly recommend that you send this message
through an anonymizer or from a temporary third location, for your own safety, but your
life is ultimately your own. My response will appear in the same newsgroup, if it is
directed to you the individual, or in this blog, should I choose to respond to all. Be patient;
I will delay any response in order to avoid inadvertent patterns that might otherwise
emerge from my behavior.
I do expect that the majority of the messages I will receive will be from plants and
pursuers of various stripes. I admit that I'm looking forward to the excitement -- no doubt
a fatal flaw, but without excitement your nerves can dull. For you the pursuer, let me just
point out that I am already prepared to deal with your posting specific variants on servers
across the country in order to cause me to reveal my location. I am prepared for a scripted
message intended to trigger a connection directly from my computer to your server. I also
fully expect that you will do your best to enrage me, in the hopes that anger will make me
slip up, expose something about my location or myself to you. Please consider these and
the other obvious options already eliminated and move on to something more creative,
something more bold.
Gary. We left him rather awkwardly kneeling in Andrew's bedroom, staring at an artifact
of experiential quantum mechanics. He had the sensation, in a way that we all might, that
there was something monumental facing him. At the same time, he knew how easy it is to
be fooled; how seldom the monumental appears; and how foolish someone appears at the
moment they dream of the one and are confronted by the other.
"Wow," he said. "I'm not sure what would have caused this." He looked back over his
shoulder. Despite a lingering heat and oppressive humidity, Alice had put her arm around
Andrew and pulled him tight, as if a chill had taken hold of her body. Gary would later
assert that he could already sense something growing in Alice's self-representation, her
demeanor and actions, something akin to pride -- a feeling of having been chosen. This
feeling was in direct conflict with her flight instinct, and gave her a flustered appearance
in the following, which Gary found unavoidably and incredibly alluring.
"Is it dangerous?" she asked.
Gary said: "The monitor isn't, I don't think, but I couldn't tell you about whatever it is that
caused this."
She pulled Andrew tighter to her and said, "You're sleeping in my bedroom tonight."
Then: "Should we get rid of the monitor?"

Gary looked back at it. "I can take it; maybe there's something inside that would help me
understand what happened."
"Just be careful," she said. A concern, not for him per se, but for the service man whose
specialty she does not understand.
He smiled his careful church smile, one which he had not used for quite a while. He did
not want to say this right away, but he knew it was the crux: "Do you want to know what
I find?"
Alice had a number of options. She could resolve that this whole incident had never
happened, remove any sign that it had, and act the unknowing. If it was a freak of nature,
this course could be the best. But if it was an act of will, as it seemed to be, this might be
a risky course of action. Perhaps, the force that had willed contact would accept such a
break and undo contact from that point forward; you might even assume that contact as
secretive as this could not be sustained against someone's will. Or she could ask for the
monitor back after Gary had done whatever analysis he could -- establishing, for example,
its anti- quotidian nature -- and live this mystery for herself and Andrew. This would
avoid the complication of Gary's non-entity kneeling in her son's bedroom. Or she could
continue to interact with Gary for the sake of finding out more about what happened here.
There was also her promise to Andrew to find out what had happened. But perhaps most
importantly, there was the truth that this represented: that the world did surprise, did
create new stories, did open gates where there had been none.
By contacting Gary she had already started down a particular path. But the uncertainty in
his eyes might have made this a different path from the one she had imagined. And even
if she had no way of knowing about the ill-fated society with which we began this
narrative,