“Your Honor,” she whispered excitedly, but everyone could hear. “If what’s being said here is my client’s the one spreading that fish sickness, then I need to know if others are in danger of catching it!”

Cheddar shot Weed a menacing look.

“Others meaning me,” Cheddar went on. “He bit my hand, Your Honor.”

“I don’t think we’re talking about that sort of disease,” Judge Davis told her with a glint of irritation.

“Your Honor,” Cheddar said in a more demanding tone, her nails flashing as she gestured. “How do I know for an absolute true fact that he doesn’t have some sort of bug of some type that all of us should be concerned about! Especially me because his teeth made contact with my skin!”

She held up her hand like the Statue of Liberty.

“Doesn’t look like he broke the skin,” the judge observed.

“Then you’re saying you’re not going to send him to mental health or someplace where they can do tests?” Cheddar’s voice rose to a shriek.

“That’s what I’m saying,” Judge Davis said.

“Then I quit!” Cheddar threw her hands up, red and gold flashing.

“No you don’t ’cause I fired you first!” Weed called out as Cheddar grabbed her falling-apart briefcase, papers spilling, and rushed out of the courtroom.

“Your Honor,” Brazil spoke up. “The truth is, we really need our COMSTAT telecommunications system up and running again.” He was out of line, but didn’t care. “The network’s down all over the world because of the fish thing.”

“Officer Brazil, that is irrelevant to this case.”

“Of course,” Brazil mumbled a deliberate challenge to Weed, “he probably couldn’t fix it anyway.”

“Can too,” Weed said.

“Oh yeah?” Brazil taunted. “Then how?”

“Just take out the program I did when I punted and messed up the HTML interpreter in AOL.”

Judge Davis couldn’t help herself because like all else in the world, she used AOL and lived in fear of color bombs, IM bombs, HTML Freeze/Lag, HTMO errors, a combination of the above, or possibly the less innocuous but more annoying Blank IM bombs.

“What’s punting?” she asked Weed.

“The bug’s in autowrap in the text handler,” he informed her as if his explanation was as obvious as colors. “See, if you use VBMSG subclassing, you know? To hold the window open and do some other things I told it to do, you know? ’Cause, see, like I said, there’s this bug. So I told it to put my map on there and hold it. And the Anti-Punt program won’t work, either, because I made my program hit Reply on the IM.”

Amazement stilled the room. Brazil was writing everything down. The C.A.’s mouth was open in disbelief.

“But I never meant for my fish screen to go everywhere,” Weed added. “Someone must’ve stuck all these addresses together, and it ain’t me who did.”

“Does anybody understand what he just said?” the judge asked.

“I sort of do,” Brazil said. “And he’s right about the addresses.”