Re: The Show Must Go Off

In four minutes eleven seconds I saw Thrash and three other guys headed for me. Upclose had started drifting in and out of arenas on the other side of the hall, the ones with bigger fighting floors. Footage suggested she was just drumming up business. I didn’t think so. By that time, I had attempted to recreate what ESO had been sending, what my bot search had turned up, any dregs of unerased footage from the quake hallways, buffer data-mining losses, etc. The short summary is I hadn’t gotten very much accomplished.
Of course I’d DONE a lot. It just amounted to nothing. ESO had been reporting on Enforcers waving magnetic wands at cameras, starting a maintenance routine that just happened to last twenty-two hours. The cleaning bot was still not found, but I had figured out that it was buried in the quake and out of range of any standard transmitters. Quake footage really had been completely purged from the system during a seventh copy-outward command. Data mining hadn’t gone very well either except that I discovered the Enforcers were goofy enough they’d left power to some of the rooms buried in the quake. The four guys drew near. I prepped GameFace for rapid changes and looked at them like a Pharaoh watching slaves arrive. Each one carried two bottles.
“Q?” said Thrash, “We have water, beer, lemonade, and FayKafay. Which would you like?” Yikes.
“Is the lemonade real?” That would make it more expensive than beer.
“Sorry, no,” said the one holding it.
I nodded and looked at the water. Filtered, ozoned. “Water is fine. Thank you.” The guys looked surprised, but handed me one. I opened it. I drank a long swallow. Then they opened theirs and drank too. And Thrash told me about the wonderful idea that I didn’t know I’d given him.