She cannot call Martin. She cannot type to him on the phone, or any phone she finds or the six, she thinks it is, computers in the house. There is only her old computer, shut up in a duffel bag with stopped-up wine and running shorts for camouflage, and surely someday this will be cast away, locked out from the Vic’s home network. It is old, a dated and silly-looking clamshell in the mogul’s sleek palace. It ruffles the Vic that she uses it to listen to music, rather than his own hyperpersonalized home system, so she points to the lullabies she’s put on her screen, tinkly tunes for Kitsune that the system hasn’t grabbed yet. This is her reasoning to him. But really her old laptop is the last telegraph office, the only carrier pigeon to Martin Icke.

Martin and Padgett chose an old jazz album, obscure but not hip or beloved, up on an old, dying-out site. All the other places log you in and keep track, selling at you and monitoring your hankerings. Here no one cares. It is like meeting Martin in an old abandoned shack, were any such shacks not now condominiums in San Francisco. They’re paranoid; they’re careful. They use lots of blank aliases, accounts utterly unsupervised, and communicate in the loopy manic scrawl of online comments to pass even further unnoticed. Their correspondence is permanently up underneath the screen that plays the jazz album, tunes Padgett is so tired of she keeps it on mute.

WAYD

is What Are You Doing and is Martin.

I’m babysitting today SO BORED!

could be anyone, but it is Padgett. Two minutes later, Martin replies,

We should talk sometime soon k?

Fed the baby today,

Padgett types, hoping this is sending the message that things are progressing. But maybe Martin thinks the baby is the Vic, or that it’s just a euphemism for drinking more. Padgett finds a swig while waiting for Martin to respond.

Do you still like this record tho?

Hellzya