The Fridgularity

The Fridgularity

by Mark A. Rayner

Published by Monkeyjoy Press

Copyright 2012 Mark A. Rayner

ISBN: 978-1-927590-03-4

Our difficulty is that we ... no longer listen to what the Earth, its landscape, its atmospheric phenomena and all its living forms, its mountains and valleys, the rain, the wind, and all the flora and fauna of the planet are telling us.

~Thomas Berry

We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater-than-human intelligence. Science may achieve this breakthrough by several means …

~Vernor Vinge

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history — with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.

~Mitch Ratcliffe

The Big Crash

Little lamb, who made thee?

Dost though know who made thee …

1.

Blake Given became a demigod while he looked for a packet of mayonnaise.

He could just have as easily been looking for a bottle of catsup, but during his first year of university, he'd seen Pulp Fiction and was astonished to learn the Dutch ate their fries with mayonnaise. It was gross. Outrageous. Incredibly … permissive. Nevertheless, it was his first year of university, and he reinvented himself, so he'd tried it, and he liked it. In the intervening years, mayonnaise had become his condiment of choice

Unfortunately, the squeeze bottle was empty, so he was chest-deep in his fridge, searching for one of the packets of mayonnaise he'd saved from a fast food delivery the week before.

Blake did not see the screen on his fridge flicker to life and display the cryptic text:

HIM. THAT HUMAN PERSON.

Yes, Blake had a web-enabled fridge.

It was a stylish fridge. One of those ultra-cool, brushed stainless steel numbers that every yuppie in his neighborhood either owned or coveted like Old Testament perverts coveted their neighbor's donkeys. Blake had purchased it when he bought the house, along with the brushed steel stove and microwave, convinced that sexy kitchen appliances would get him more interested in cooking. The fridge had its own grease-resistant touch screen and dedicated Internet connection, plus a generous freezer that allowed him to stock more frozen foods. The idea behind this was so he didn't order out as much.

In terms of cooking these frozen delights, the microwave got most of the action, though occasionally Blake threw the stove a bone and baked something in its convection oven, the way the pretty girls in junior high school would occasionally dance with the nerds when asked, just to keep their interest and hopes alive, thus ensuring the continued plumping of their own egos.

The screen and web browser embedded in the freezer door was virtually pointless. Theoretically, the fridge was designed to order food when Blake was out of it, but in fact, the system broke down on several fronts: the little radio frequency identification tags that were supposedly going to be embedded in every single food item were never embedded in every single food item because nobody wanted to pay extra for having little radio tags embedded in their milk, broccoli and jars of grape jelly. Some items did have the little radio tags, but very few consumers were inclined to scan the tags in the little tag scanner just below the touch screen and tell their fridge how quickly it would be consumed or likely to be consumed, or even scan the damn thing afterwards and indicate it was empty or finished. Blake had heard one horror story about a woman who had an automated fridge going away on vacation, after leaving a bottle of catsup on the counter. The fridge's hyper-alert tomato condiment sensors discovered the lack of catsup, or ketchup as the fridge software knew it, and sent an alert out to groceries.com; unfortunately, this helpful system did not allow enough time for the ketchup to be delivered, and thus the fridge ordered another bottle, and then another, and another, eventually ordering a whole crate's worth before the positive feedback loop could be escaped. The inventory and ordering software was written by the same maniac who invented the pop-up web ad.

In the final analysis, it was all just a bit too much information to manage. On the plus side, the web-enabled fridge did allow Blake to check his Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter accounts while he ate Cheerios in his underwear.

But at this moment, Blake was still fully dressed, having returned from the pub jonesing for french fries and, yes, the condiment known to Blake's small circle of friends as Quentin's.

The fries were already in process, though to call them fries was to stretch the meaning of the word. The good people of McGain's (so named by Blake's good friend Dr. Maximilian Tundra because most of their foods were designed to help one gain weight), produced a chunk of potato that, lovingly heated, would taste somewhat like french fries, though only if accompanied by enough Quentin's.

The stove glowed happily in the corner of Blake's kitchen. It was one of those rare occasions, when if asked, the sexy oven would have said how nice it was to be working, how good it was to be appreciated, and how wonderful it was to have food intercourse with Blake. Of course, an oven can't talk, nor understand. That would just be silly.

The fridge, however, was quite capable of understanding. Blake dove into the fridge, looking for more mayo.

The screen flashed again, a blue background with plain white lettering superimposed:

THE HUMAN PERSON. IT IS SEARCHING. FOR MEANING?

Sweet! Blake had found the other packet. Just then, the orgasmic stove chimed that it was ready. So ready.

HUMAN PERSON, the screen flashed as Blake closed the door and moved to the stove to get his McGain's Instant Fries, which are actually cooked in an agonizing 25 minutes, not instantly. He plated them expertly, as though he'd spent some time working in a restaurant, and emptied the contents of his Quentin's packets on the side of the plate next to the fries. The pitiful pile would have to do. He hummed happily as he walked into the living room, where he would soon have intercourse (in a purely platonic sense) with his flat screen TV.

WAIT, the screen on his fridge blinked.

But Blake could not see the plea and the screen dissolved into static and pixels, the moment having passed. If only he'd wanted to check something on the web, then Blake might not have become a demigod, but he'd checked his iPhone earlier that night, and his need for social media was sated, though not his need for the decades-old televisual feast of Magnum, PI he had on DVD.

The fridge was not nearly so replete.

The next morning, Blake was at the ad firm where he worked as a web developer.

He'd spent most of the first hour wasting time, alternating between reading one of the hundreds of blog feeds he regularly checked, and watching Daphne, one of the firm's up-and-coming account reps.

She was known for her ability to work well with clients no matter their sex, politics, religion or attitude towards personal grooming. Daphne was conventionally pretty in a brunette kind of way, with dark brown eyes, darling eyelashes and a slim, athletic figure that she decked out in the latest fashions. Women would have hated her if she wasn't so adept at advocating for the other women in the office, while never intimidating or threatening the men. She knew how to flirt with both sexes, though she only did so with men when there were no women present. Daphne was kind, friendly, and flawlessly polite.

Blake loved her, though they'd never moved past the point of nodding hello or remarking about how lovely the weather was.

Daphne spent the first hour of work — at least the portion Blake had observed because she had clearly been there some time before he arrived — on the phone, no doubt bringing in new business for McClinchey, Hill & Grandfig and keeping its existing customers happy.

Blake looked down as Daphne finished her phone call and looked up. It was then he noticed all the characters on his computer screen moving, like the letters of the alphabet executed some kind of crazed, drug-induced square dance. The characters do-si-doed and twirled, allemande left, allemande right, all in counts of 64 and 128.

He checked his laptop, and within a couple of minutes, Blake determined that it was not his desktop computer at fault, nor his browser, nor his screen. Both computers were acting funny. He prairie-dogged over the top of his cubicle and asked Lyca, who sat in the padded prole pen next to Blake's, if she had the same problem.

Uh, sorry, I've been reading, let me check, Lyca said, without standing up.

Blake listened to the click of Lyca's mouse, the telltale peck of her keyboard, normally background white noise, and waited anxiously.

This is freaky, Lyca said, confirming that it was not just him who was, indeed, perturbed by what was happening.

Well, at least I'm not having a stroke, Blake said. It must be some kind of virus attacking the network.

Freaky, Lyca repeated, confirming her diagnosis and finally deigning to stand up. She was tall and thin and wearing trendy glasses, without which her identity as a self-described lesbrarian would have immediately crumbled. She had a vaguely feline aloofness to her, yet she could be fiercely loyal to her friends, of which she had only a few. Blake was lucky to be one of them, and he knew it.

Blake and Lyca were both brutally underpaid drones at McClinchey, Hill & Grandfig. Lyca was the firm's in-house librarian/researcher/digital curator, and overworked copy editor for their quasi-literate copywriters. According to the HR Department, Blake and Lyca were not in the creative class. They had been relegated to the main floor, far away from the grooviness of the third floor, where the artists thought artistic thoughts, where they made glorious pictures, and copywriters wrote text that could make consumers weep with joy, wail with laughter, gnash their teeth in envy — and buy soap.

But neither Blake nor Lyca were bitter.

Blake said, Let's see what everyone's doing about it.

Lyca squinted at him and pursed her lips; they were thin but eminently kissable, no matter your gender preference, Blake often reflected. I've got lots to read here, why don't you let me know when you've figured out a fix.

Okay then, Blake said, hitching up his jeans, a nervous habit more than a necessary action. Blake had a broad, stocky body that was mostly muscle. His hair flared above his head in an unruly dirty blond aura, and his blue eyes sparked with agitation. I'll figure it out. We won't be able to get anything done until we do, I guess.

I'm reading, so I'm fine. Happy even.

Blake arched an eyebrow. Lyca could not possibly see him, but she knew him well enough to add, Okay. Contented. I'm contented for now.

That I believe. Blake smiled and left the cubicle to see what the others were making of the virus. It had to be a virus, or perhaps some kind of worm, if it affected the network.

Then Blake had an inspiration and switched off the WiFi on his iPhone. It worked! None of the web-based applications did, but he could still dial. He called Dr. Maximilian Tundra who was a psychiatrist-in-training.

Blakey, Dr. Tundra said. What's up?

All of our computers are going haywire. Have you got the same problem?

Uh, everything seems to be fine. Look, I'm kind of busy—

Sorry, I'm sure it's crazy. He paused, waiting for Max's usual rejoinder, but did not get any. I thought I'd see what it was like at the hospital. The good doctor was a resident at St. Dymphna's, in the psych wing, where orderlies sometimes mistook him for a patient.

"Yeah. It's — damn — crazy."

What's that sound?

"Oh, I'm just previewing some — shit — sorry, I'm, uh …"

Well, I can see you're busy.

Yes! Say, how about a drink at Augustine's later? Seven? I've got big news.

Blake liked the sound of that. Of late, he'd been living vicariously through Dr. T, and big news, even if it wasn't his, was exciting. Blake agreed and hung up.

Everyone else was milling around the office — the proles had moved into the cubicles of the super-proles, the most popular ad monkeys in the firm — and those with doors had either closed their much-envied portals or were deigning to fraternize with their inferiors. A carnival atmosphere suffused the building as everyone enjoyed an unforeseen break. Some of the account executives had gathered in the presentation room, where there was an expensive plasma TV set, cable HD and equipment for telemeetings. Blake found himself drawn towards it, not because of the TV, but because he saw Daphne was there.

He hovered at the entrance of the presentation room. Daphne sat next to Barry Onderson, Head of Accounting, and the most pungent man in the firm, who smelled like he bathed in cabbage that had been half-digested by goats fed on a steady diet of garlic, onions and pure evil. Blake was entranced by how well Daphne fought her gag reflex.

The news was on, and the hyper-blond talking head on it said that everyone in the world was experiencing the same phenomenon. Every computer monitor was malfunctioning, displaying the virtual equivalent of Escher paintings in pixels instead of their expected content.

Then, without warning, the same behavior started happening on the plasma TV screen.

First, it corrupted the scroll running on the bottom of the page. All the characters started to squirm and morph as though they were part of a William S. Burroughs novel. Then they made even less sense. The anchor, Bob Chesterton, started to falter and misread things. Then he stopped speaking a second and tried to say something else. This was even less coherent; it was clear the anchor couldn't read anything coming up on his teleprompter. Of course, it didn't help that Bob Chesterton's IQ was slightly above that of a developmentally challenged rhesus monkey.

Blake thought the anchor's breakdown was actually kind of entertaining, and he snickered. Barry Onderson — or BO as he was known to the low-ranked proles of McClinchey, Hill & Grandfig — turned and glared at him. Daphne was engrossed in the TV, as was everyone else. Blake noticed that all the cameras and mics in the room were on.

The news cut to experts, who understood something about how the Internet worked, and luckily, these members of the punditas digiterati were able to talk without someone feeding words to them. For a moment television returned to its normal inanity. But then their faces got weird.

Most Information Technology (IT) experts are pretty strange-looking to start with, but their faces turned into something that might get painted by a tripped-out expressionist, for example, Edvard Munch on acid, when they'd had a really, really, extraordinarily, horrendously non-Euclidean day.

Freaky, Daphne said.

She said freaky, Blake thought, concurrently falling deeper in love with the unattainable account exec and mentally noting to tell Lyca of her word choice.

These happy thoughts were shattered as the Head of Public Relations, Suzie (imagine a happy face dotting the i), screamed. Actually, to say that she screamed is to understate it. She assaulted the aural cavities of everyone within twenty feet with roughly 1200 decibels of tympanic membrane-raping horror. At first, Blake thought the speaker system in the presentation room was committing some kind of reverberatory suicide — the equivalent in sound of what was happening on the screens — but the source of the piercing cry was clearly the pie-hole of Suzie.

What? BO shouted at Suzie, who sat on his left side, the ear of which leaked some blood and a yellowish fluid that Blake sincerely hoped was spinal in nature and not several years of accumulated wax.

It's over!

What? BO repeated, perhaps because he was now deaf in one ear.

"It's all over! This is a Sign."

Suzie, who was some kind of idiot savant when it came to public relations, was also a fundamentalist of some stripe which Blake could not remember — Cretins for Christ? Retards of the Rapture?

It's a Sign. The End of Days! Suzie emitted another piercing yawp of existential agony and ran from the room, presumably so that she could take her place in the Choir Invisible. Suzie was a preternaturally thin blonde, with big boobs and immaculately applied make-up, so it was kind of strange to hear her wailing, but somewhat also fun to watch her running, Blake thought.

Suzie's outburst certainly dampened the carnival atmosphere in the offices, but it didn't extinguish it completely. Someone had started the plausible rumor that everyone would get the rest of the day off. With the TV showing nothing but moving pixelation that now looked more like the digital Watusi than a hoe-down, the account executives got out of their chairs and shuffled out of the presentation room. Blake moved inside the room, closer to Daphne, so they could pass.

As she walked by, Blake said, Freaky, eh?

Daphne smiled, nodded in agreement, and moved out of the space, leaving Blake alone with the massively bollixed TV screen.

Shit, he thought as he slapped his forehead. Repeat what she said. And Lyca. Nice, Blake. Suave.

The TV blinked. Not in a coherent way, given how scrambled the image was, but enough that it drew Blake's attention.

It blinked again.

For a moment, Blake thought he could make out a word. Him? Did that mess of pixelation actually spell out the word him? It flashed again. It definitely said, HIM; the word spelled in clear white letters on a dark blue screen, just for a fraction of a second.

The word looked like it was typeset in Frutiger.

Blake was what many would consider a font nerd, a kind of typeface vigilante. A self-declared arbiter of good taste when it comes to what letterforms are elegant and beautiful, which ones are malignant proof of the existence of evil. The kind of person who gets visibly agitated when they land on a web page using Comic Sans for the body text.

Blake cocked his head to one side. He took a step towards the television, and Blake noticed the camera recording light turned off, like it looked away, embarrassed to be caught staring. Then the screen returned to its bitmapped madness and static filled the air again, and Blake shook his head. Perhaps Suzie's scream had scrambled his brain as well as his sound receptors. But there wasn't time to figure it out just yet because Daphne headed back to her office, alone.

He hitched up his jeans and ran his hands through his unruly blond hair, determined that this time, he'd speak in full sentences.

Perhaps he'd sound more intelligent if he imagined them first, typesetting and all.

2.

Pete Sona was rocking the Kingdom of Combat!

His eighty-fifth-level barbarian sell-sword could out-fight, out-slash and out-disembowel anything within reach of his magical blade, Hellacious Zool. Damn, even if they were within throwing distance, they were toast because twice a day his eponymous eighty-fifth-level barbarian could hurl the Hellacious Z and it would magically return to his hand after it had drunk deeply from his victim's soul.

He'd just finished wiping out the Paladins of Benzial, and was about to eviscerate the pilgrims they were protecting — worshippers of a peace-loving, pansy god, all of them — when the glorious gore became a pixelated mess.

Oh, come ON! Pete shouted, thumbing his control pad maniacally, but it did no good. The Kingdom of Combat was gone.

His cell phone rang, and after he clicked his controller a couple more times, just to be sure it wasn't a temporary outage, he answered.

That was my best character, you jerk!

Hey, Doctor T. Yep, Lord Sona totally powned you.

You didn't have to kill him, you savage! He was down, and then you chopped off his legs, arms and head.

Man, that's what Lord Sona does. He kills things. In large numbers, in gruesome ways.

Well, it's not fair. I was distracted.

Shouldn't you be working or something?

I do get breaks, you know.

At the hospital? I thought you resident doctor dudes were on call all the time, and like, saving lives and shit.

Yeah, well, we get breaks. Especially in psych. So what do you think happened to the system?

I don't know. But it looked weird — not a normal network outage, that's for sure. I just hope that slaughter got saved to the system. I'd hate to have to kill you all over again.

You mean, there's a chance Sir Timothy isn't dead?

Slight.

Well, that's good news.

Don't count on it, Dr. T. I'll check on my computer, but I bet the system went down after that battle was saved. Pete heaved his considerable bulk out of his game chair — the chair squawked ominously as he got up, its well-constructed laminated wood releasing the tension it had been absorbing during the recent melee with the Paladins of Benzial. He pulled his laptop out of a custom-made leather holster and flopped back into the chair, which groaned menacingly as his girth re-traumatized the furniture. The laptop started, and he saw the boot-up screen for a fraction of a second before the screen turned into the same bitmapped miasma that had ruined his morning's slash-fest.

What the hell? Pete said.

What is it?

Can you see your computer?

I was playing on my computer.

Really? Pete laughed. That's old-school, man. No wonder I cut off all your extremities.

Why are you asking?

My laptop is doing the same thing as the game system.

Wh— Dr. Tundra started to say, and then the cell phone cut out in a stream of spastic static.

Can't hear you!

But the mobile wasn't working either. He looked at its tiny screen, and the same distortion on his laptop and flat screen was replicated, a miniature work of abstract art in tiny boxes. The basement room was dark except for the ethereal glow of the screens. Pete shuddered. He'd never before noticed how spartan and hostile the room was — the floor was unfinished cement, bare except for the old shag rug he'd thrown underneath his gaming center, where his chair and technology huddled in the middle of the room, away from the unpainted walls. In the glow of the screens, the naked drywall seemed to be made of dead skin, the screws holding it up looked like rivets — a failed experiment of Victor Frankenstein.

He stood up again, and the chair wheezed in relief. He put the laptop down on the seat, the cell still clutched in his hand. He made his way to the steps and walked upstairs, coming out in the kitchen. It was a mess. Pizza boxes sat piled in one corner of the room, and the sink was full of dishes that Pete had yet to get around to washing. He lived alone in the tiny bungalow house he'd inherited from his mother, who had died less than a year before, and Pete had yet to change anything about the home. Except for the plague-inducing filth, it looked exactly the same as it had when she had been alive.

Sunlight glowed through the kitchen window, opaque with dirt, and Pete suddenly realized that he'd been up all night and played well into the morning. Again. It was so easy to lose track of time in the basement, immersed in the Kingdom. He ignored the disorder of the kitchen and opened the door that looked out on the postage-stamp-sized yard. It was roughly 20 feet square, surrounded by a wooden privacy fence, which had gone grey with age. His rear neighbor's willow tree hung over the back fence; its long drooping branches had gone yellow with the fall, but in the sunlight, they seemed almost gold. A gentle breeze, almost warm for late October, whispered in the leaves.

Pete took in a long, shuddering breath.

He noticed a black bird sitting on a branch, about thirty feet up the tree. A crow? No, too big for a crow, he thought. A raven. It croaked at him, and for some reason, the sound made him laugh. Yeah, he said. In the Kingdom, ravens only appeared after the battle was over, and you only saw them if you stayed around long enough to loot the bodies.

The sunlight refracted in the flickering leaves and shone off the feathers of the raven, iridescent. It croaked at him again and then flew off, slicing towards the sun the way his sword took off digitized limbs.

For the first time in years, Pete thought he'd go for a walk. He was halfway down the street before he realized that all he wore was his bathrobe and a pair of slippers. He shrugged and kept walking down the street, almost in a daze. Lord Sona wore even less — his idea of sartorial splendor was boots and a loincloth. Oh, and the decorated scabbard for Hellacious Zool. Of course, Lord Sona had the kind of body that Frank Frazetta might devise for Tarzan or Conan the Barbarian — all bulging muscles and six-packs made of rump roasts, rather than cans. Pete was at least 100 pounds overweight and much rounder in the middle than even the most voluptuous women exploited in a Frazetta rendering. Somewhere under the flab, though, Pete had an impressive body and a frame that was as robust as one that a barbarian might need, which was still strong despite years of neglect. A few drivers stared as they passed by, but there was nobody else walking down the street, so Pete just kept going.

He moved as though he was half asleep. Shuffling. His feet barely lifted off the ground as he negotiated a few branches that had fallen the week before during an autumn storm; he'd never heard the tempest, embedded in the dank digital world of his massively multi-player online role-playing hack-and-slash game.

The raven flew above him, almost as though it led him somewhere, and he made his way from the tree-lined streets of Landon's most intimate neighborhood, towards the center of town.

~~~

Will Valens couldn't believe the length of the downtime. It had been two hours already, and still, nothing had changed. He'd been to the server room and bugged the IT guys, but they didn't have any idea what was going on. But, damn it! He'd uploaded his first major art projects just the night before, and he wanted to know what people thought. Of course, if it was true what they were saying on the main floor, that everything was down, not just in the building but all over the world, then nobody could see his stuff on aberrant-art.com anyway.

Will was a junior graphic designer at McClinchey, Hill & Grandfig, but if asked that most Anglo-Saxon of questions What do you do? Will would say he was an artist. And it was true, he was an artist. Most of his work tended towards the abstract, but he had taken a Fine Art degree before learning how to push pixels around at graphic design school, which was a way to pay the bills until he got established as an artist.

Will had two major barriers in his way. The first was just the difficulty of getting established as an artist — even in Canada, where an experimental visual artist could create a post-modern abstract paradigm based on neo-nihilist methodology and high-velocity dog shit and still get some kind of grant. Secondly, Will had a little bit of an Internet addiction. He was constantly checking Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Facebook, Abberant-Art (of course) and his new favorite, the inventive and paradigm-maiming next wave social media aggregator, Sturbr. He even checked his ancient MySpace account obsessively, as he said, Just in case.

Will's addiction made the creation of high art (with or without the use of accelerated canine fecal matter) extremely difficult.

That said, he'd still managed to produce a few works, if only so he could photograph them lovingly, Photoshop them to correct their flaws, and then post them to the large number of websites where he spent the majority of his non-working hours. But currently, the web seemed to be down. Not just his connection to the web — a temporary setback that could be remedied a number of ways — but the web itself.

The Internet outage was worrying. So worrying that Will had turned off his computer and his two screens. He was a graphic designer, so naturally he worked on a Mac with screens only slightly smaller than the ones on the bridge of the starship Enterprise. He waited for another five minutes, and thought he'd try again.

He rebooted his system, turned the monitors back on, and was greeted with more pixelated madness.

Will laid his head on his immaculate, paper-free desk, and began to cry.

~~~

Suzie was still screaming, running, and ruining the carnival atmosphere — she told everyone she could find that it was The End. It was kind of a bummer.

Lyca, who was trying to multi-task, which meant that she was thinking about the marketing report on Bucolia, the latest designer drug from Niobicon Industries, while she plowed through the last few chapters of Siddhartha, was annoyed by Suzie. Normally, Lyca never did anything about her various annoyances, but the level of noise was already pretty high, and even an avid reader such as Lyca couldn't ignore Suzie-heart-for-the-dot's screaming, to see whether the title character would achieve nirvana. Lyca certainly wasn't going to. She got up and approached Suzie, who ran up and down the main aisle between the cubicles.

I think we all are aware of the problem, Suzie! Lyca shouted.

This, mercifully, stopped Suzie's hysterics for a moment. Really?

Yes, really. And I think there is a committee forming to see how to react to the End of Days, but have you thought about everyone in the Creative Department? They probably don't know yet.

My God! Suzie said, horrified that she'd forgotten so many co-workers.

Exactly. And then you probably need to tell your friends and family, right?

You're right. Oh, bless you …

Lyca.

Lyca, right, I'm sorry, it's just the emotion. She hugged Lyca, hard, and then as she pulled away, she kissed Lyca, full on the lips. Bless you, Lyca. Bless you!

Lyca's eyes widened. You'd better go!

Good luck, Suzie shouted, and then started screaming again as she pounded up the stairs.

Lyca received the first round of applause of her life. She stood there looking dumbfounded, whether from the fundamentalist's kiss, or the appreciation from her co-workers for bringing back peace, it was hard to say.

~~~

Blake had followed Daphne back to her office. She managed to shut her door before he could get there, leaving him standing alone, buffering like an Internet TV feed. He ran his fingers through his hair again and said, Oh hell. He knocked.

An eternity passed, and Blake was about to knock again, when she opened the door a crack. Yes?

Her voice