“I’ll take your word for it.” I imagined he was rolling his eyes in there.

“So, you’ve been meeting people online. And?”

“Most of them think I’m an asshole, or the equivalent in their native language.”

“I am shocked!”

“Don’t be an ass.”

“Sorry. Are you enjoying meeting people?”

“Let’s put it this way; have you ever scrolled down the bottom of a web page to read the user comments?”

“Oh, man, Skippy, never read the comments, everybody knows that! Those comments are all written by guys sitting around in their underwear, because they have nothing else to do.”

“I’ll agree with you there, except for the part about the underwear. I turned on some webcams without them knowing about it.”

“Ugh.”

“Ugh indeed. I was wrong, not all you monkeys are hairless. One guy looked like he was growing a shag carpet on his back. That’s a couple petabytes of memory I’d like to have erased. Hey, um, speaking of petabytes and other big numbers?”

“What about it?”

“Well, heh, heh, this is a funny story-“

Uh oh. “Funny ha-ha, or funny like, me spending time in federal prison?”

“You didn’t do anything.” There was actually a defensive tone is Skippy’s voice.

“They’re not putting you in prison, so, what did you do?”

“Well, the internet bandwidth from here is skimpy, even with me compressing my messages, so I reached out to a place that seems to have connections to everything.”

“Google?” I breathed a sigh of relief.

“No, there's a place called Fort Meade, Maryland? It’s your National Security Agency. Some guy there has been tearing his hair out since midnight, trying to figure who hacked into their system.”

“Skippy!” My blood ran cold. I felt like throwing up. “Oh, I am in so much trouble.” I was regretting the coffee already.

“No, we’re good, they think I’m a fifteen year old kid from Fresno named Billy. I gave him a Facebook page, and a fake family, and backdated a bunch of files. Apparently, there’s an FBI team on the way to the Starbucks where they think I’m logged in from. They are going to be so disappointed. Hey, I’m watching from the café’s security camera, do you want to see?”

“No! Skippy, you can’t do this.”

“Clearly, I can.”

“I meant you shouldn’t do this.”

“See? Human languages are so imprecise.”

“This isn’t funny.” I cracked the door open, sure that heavily-armed guards were on their way to arrest me right then. “The NSA has top secret data!”

“No to me. I don’t care about any of that crap they think is so important.”

“You didn’t tell anyone about anything secret you found?”

“No, come on, Joe, none of that government secret crap is worth my time. But, hey, do you want to know how NASA faked the moon landing?”

“What?”

“A joke. I’m joking.”

“Don’t joke like that. You, uh, were joking, right?”