Prelude

It was creepy to walk through the lobby of the apartment building. It wasn't Meg's building, but a sister building in the same complex. The floor plan was identical to hers, which make the differences more pronounced.

This must be what an alternate universe feels like, Meg thought, as she patted her sweatshirt pocket for her laundry room card and headed past the familiar -- yet not quite familiar -- bank of mailboxes, and toward the basement stairway door. The laundry card credit-dispensing machine was the object of her mission, since its counterpart in her own building was out of order.

It's the smells, Meg decided. That's the most jarring difference. The lobby carried a faint musty odor, and now that she had reached the stairwell, a new foreign smell was introduced, some kind of cooking smell she did not care to identify. She couldn't wait to get out of there.

At the same time, Meg was fascinated by the power of the effect this was having on her.

The paint was worn from the cement block walls and the painted metal stair rail. Overall, this stairwell was in no greater need of maintenance than its twin in her building, Meg judged, but the patterns of wear were just enough different to attract her notice.

Exiting the stairwell, the laundry room was just where it should be, guarded by a familiar glass door, the kind you see in stores, able to be pushed to open from the inside. But it had an unfamiliar feel as Meg pulled it open; the hinges were tighter, or not so well oiled.

Seeing two residents, one loading a washer and one folding dry clothes, Meg instinctively tried to make eye contact and offer a small neighbor's smile, then stopped. No occasion for that, she thought, they're not my neighbors.

She poked her card into the designated slot in a machine, also located where it was supposed to be, just inside the door, then she slipped in a ten dollar bill. Good, it works, Meg thought, as the machine's LCD screen displayed the recharged value. Now I can get out of here,and shake this feeling, whatever it is.

Chapter 1

"Honey, you just don't have enough to keep your mind occupied," Barb scolded on the phone.

"Yeah, got that right," Meg muttered back.

"What?" Barb's hearing was escaping her.

"Look, I'll talk to you later," Meg said, and hung up the phone.

Meg looked at the silent phone as if it might tell her something new, but it was not forthcoming.

She had called Barb on returning to her apartment from the eerie trip to the other building in the complex, forgetting all about doing her laundry, and hoping for a distraction from the experience. She ended up telling Barb about it.

Barb was past 70, how far past, she wasn't telling, but she'd been married four times, had grown up in Southern California, and had seen pretty much everything, making her a life sage, Meg figured. Meg was half proud and half embarrassed to have such a friend, nearly (or more than) twice her age at 37.

The older woman had come with the package from her last relationship, a five-year, non-live-in affair that Meg had ended two months ago, not long after her job as project manager for an IT consulting firm also ended. Barb was Charlie's third cousin, his family's nutty black sheep and Meg enjoyed her company.

Barb was right, her life was empty at the moment. Maybe the vacuum did allow for petty systems of gloom to settle in on her.

She needed new friends; somehow it worked out that Charlie ended up with all her favorites among their mutual friends after the split. Plus, she definitely needed to get serious about deciding what sort of work she would do. Her cushion would last a few more weeks, maybe three months if she scaled back, but she had to start weighing the options and making some decisions. Another job or go independent? Stay in Los Angeles or go back to Ann Arbor where she could live cheaper?

Barb had advised Meg to write down her questions about career and residence choices. She said the answers might flow better if the questions were put down in black and white.

OK, Meg thought, and woke up her computer. She opened a new Notepad document, because she was only making notes. Word expected her to care about spelling and capitalization -- not so good for stream of consciousness to have some application nagging you about stuff.

Just write down my questions, she thought, staring at the blank document. After fighting an urge to do some random web surfing and aggregator checking, Meg typed:

Can somebody help me?

She laughed out loud at herself, then answered her reaction out loud. "Well, it's a question!" But the start did propel her to jot down the real questions at hand:

Do I want to work for another consulting firm?

Are there any good reasons for me to stay in L.A.?

What makes me think I'll tend to new business-getting this time if I go solo again?

Ah, there's the rub, Meg considered, but it prompted another good question.

Do I need a business partner?

She had never even thought about getting a partner before. Maybe there was something to this technique. Not such a crazy idea after all. Let's try something a little more general and see what magic happens.

What is bothering me?

The question derailed her focus, and Meg started typing fast, answering the question by describing her encounter with the Other Building, endowing it with proper noun status. Along with the narrative, she posed some of her questions about the duplicate world, like:

Would my building seem just as distasteful to resident of the Other Building?

And:

The differences were all put there by the inhabitants, weren't they?

And finally:

Bad smells, and refuse, and wear and tear are OK if they're my bad stuff, but not if they come from strangers. How does it follow that my little community's bad stuff is OK, but a foreign community's is not, if I don't really even know my own community?

Huh! she thought, staring at the last question, interested in it, but somewhat exhausted by so much thinking, and wanting to set the whole thing aside for a while.

Meg copied into her computer's clipboard all the text related to the Other Building, intending to paste it into another document and separate it from the career questions. She was tidy in that way, but hardly disciplined in general because she got lost on the way to the new document and opened a browser window.

The Google start page loaded at a crawl. It was personalized with too many junky, slow-loading widgets. She'd have to take the time one of these days to get rid of some of them. Maybe replace them with a to-do list widget! Right now, she wanted to search for a Blake quotation she'd run across.

Without thinking, instead of typing in the gist of the quote, she pasted the contents of the clipboard into the search box, and hit enter.

Shoot. She realized what she had done the instant she hit the button, but decided to wait for the results instead of canceling the search. How would that huge block of text about the Other Building behave as a search query?

Taking on awful long time, Meg thought, nearly ready to stop the churning. Then the search results began to appear on the screen. Only three results -- why did that take so long?

The results display looked slightly odd to Meg's eye; the font size seemed bigger than usual, and a decorative border framed each entry. It was the sort of singled-out treatment you would see for a sponsored link, but it was not a callout style the practiced searcher ever remembered seeing.

In a cursory skim, it seemed that each of the three page excerpts did have something to do with the query. Pretty smart search, Meg silently complimented.

She glimpsed William Blake's name and blanched at the realization that she had only thought about performing a search about his words.

Meg's heart wanted to pound right out of her chest when she read further and realized Blake was answering her question directly, and personally:

My Dear Miss Meg Harkin,

Our place is where our fellows dwell, and the degree of our acquaintance matters little. Yours very sincerely, William Blake

Holy shit! Eyes wide, Meg skipped to the second search result entry:

Meg, remember we used to say we were twins because our houses had the same floor plan, only mirrored? And you tried to get your mom and dad to give you the corner bedroom so it would be just like mine? Sometimes I wonder...

"Paula?" Meg asked out loud. She had not heard from her childhood neighbor since Paula moved to Saginaw when they were eight. There was more to the missive, but Meg had to check out the final search result before trying the link.

Half afraid, but madly curious, she dropped her gaze to the last entry on the screen:

I'll tell you what to do. Save the HTML source of the search results right now. Make a blog post about all this alternate universe nonsense, and e-mail a short note with a link to the post to all the habitual players on TechMeme. You get yourself a little exposure that way, and then you run with it.

best j

Oh, that's probably a good idea. To save the source, Meg agreed. But who is "J?"

Meg's chin was trembling, in rhythm with her hands, which she snapped away from the keyboard and into her lap, afraid to touch anything for fear it would vanish.

I'll copy the URL, and also take a screen capture. Just in case. But I want to know who wrote that. Meg had to talk to herself like that, making little verbal short-term lists, because she knew herself; she would wander off.

Following her list, she copied the long web address, pasted it into a Notepad doc and saved it to her desktop and to her My Documents folder.

But Meg was impetuous and she simply had to see who "J" was before doing another thing. She pointed her mouse at the link in the last search result, meaning to right-click and open it in another Firefox tab to be safe, but she was so shaky that the link opened in the same window.

Markup code, an XML file? What is it -- a feed, no OPML. What the hell, she puzzled. Scanning the file, filtering out the tags with her brain, she looked for a name or some kind of identifier. There it was, an e-mail address.

jason at calacanis dot com

Calacanis was an internet entrepreneur who sold his collection of popular blogs empire to AOL. He'd an executive position with the acquiring company, but had just announced he was leaving for greener startup pastures. Huh! Funny he'd bother with this five days after he announced he's leaving AOL.

What the heck is going on here, Meg wondered for the hundredth time in the last 10 minutes.

Now I'll grab a capture of the results page so I can prove this nonsense, she said to herself. She clicked on the browser's back button expecting to see the search results page again, but:

Page not found

"No..." Meg groaned. God, I'm such an idiot. I'm a reckless impatient four-year-old.

She buried her face in her hands, shook her head, stood, and walked away from the computer.

Chapter 2

Am I in the mood to be embarrassed by Brian, Meg wondered as she made the turn on to Ventura Boulevard.

She had tried not to think much about yesterday's long strange trip to the Other Building -- and the shorter, stranger trip into some alternate internet. Maybe she would try to explain it to Brian, a former co-worker. She was on her way to meet him for dinner at Casa Vega.

No, wait a second, Meg brought herself up short, I know I'm going to tell him about it. Why else would I have called him after not talking to him for weeks? He's an internet geek and one of the only people I know very well who is odder than I am.

It was one particular manifestation of Brian's oddness that had Meg wondering if she was up for embarrassment. He always carried a little audio player device with him that played one tune over its speaker: the Darth Vader theme from Star Wars. Thinking it was funny -- actually it was -- Brian flipped on the dirge when he entered any room, no matter how public or inappropriate. He thought of it as his entrance music, his own personal "Hail to the Chief." Good grief.

Brian was anything but menacing, a wiry, spectacled, late-twenties programmer whose grooming and dress lived up to all the stereotypes.

That's what makes his Vader gag funny, Meg considered as she pulled in to the parking lot.

I'd trade his physique for mine right now, she thought, checking her look in the rear view mirror before going into the restaurant. She didn't look a tenth as bad as she thought: Meg was a little taller than average height, with wavy reddish brown shoulder-length hair, and a decidedly female shape. Her problem with herself was the shape. Ten years ago she seemed to be all angles, with wide but fine-boned shoulders and narrow hips. These days she was more rounded, all over, and she didn't like the effect.

Entering the restaurant, she spotted her friend in a booth. Oh good, she thought, he's already here, no entrance. Meg giggled as she made her way across the floor, knowing that his musical entrance had been made earlier for everyone else in the room. She giggled again as she waved to him, wondering if the restaurant patrons would be expecting her, as an acquaintance of Darth, to come in with her own theme music.

There was Brian -- ratty backpack at his side, his nose three inches from his little Nokia tablet. He was pouting.

"Hey buddy," Meg said, swinging her bag on to the seat and sliding into the half-circle booth.

"Meg," he grunted, not looking up.

"Have you ordered?"

"Huh?" he answered, still concentrating on his display. "No."

Meg leaned over to see what was competing for his attention, and saw a photo of an orange sofa, with reversed-out type spelling "Scripting News."

"I'd have thought you would read Dave Winer's feed instead of going to the web page," Meg wondered.

She and Brian, who made their livings by keeping up with the internet, both read the blog every day, but Brian was an addict.

Brian sighed and switched off the device. He looked heavenward, looked at Meg, and sighed again.

"What," Meg said.

"He's going to stop blogging. He's already slowing down," Brian explained. Winer, a celebrity programmer, had announced earlier in the year that he would cease publication of his blog by the end of the year, and the end was just a few weeks away.

"Oh, right," Meg said. "That's going to be tough on you, isn't it?"

"Yeah…" he said in such a dreamy, hangdog way that Meg had to laugh.

"Look, maybe it will be healthier for you to shake this," Meg proposed. "I mean. You watch every TV show he mentions."

"No!" Brian countered. "Only the ones he says he loves."

She pressed on. "You bought the same HD rig he has with all the same accessories and connectors, which you couldn't afford!"

"I got a gig on deck, I'll handle it. He makes you want things."

Meg frowned. That was all true. "Admit that it's not good for you. You probably wanted to buy firewood the other day when he was looking for some. Even though you don't have a fireplace."

"No." Brian said. "Well… I might have wanted a fireplace. Look, Meg. It'll be intervention time when I buy the firewood and make a campfire in the middle of my living room. Anyway, it'll all be over soon. Except it sounds like he'll still have websites that aren't blogs." His face brightened a little at this thought, then fell into a pout again. "But it probably won't be something you can check all throughout the day. Not like a blog."

Poor thing. He really was feeling a loss. She gave his arm a soft little punch in sympathy.

-----

Meg was on her third chicken taco before she felt able to broach the topic of the Other Building and the response from the internet. She was reluctant for all kinds of reasons: it was crazy as hell; she wasn't sure how to tell it; and worst, she was beginning to even wonder if it really even happened.

Once she started the telling, it all came tumbling out fast – the visit to the other laundry room, the Google query and its results, and her panicked reaction to it all. Brian did not betray whether or not he believed it was real, but he knew Meg. She obviously thought it happened, so he took it seriously, interrupting as a help desk rep would interrupt, with questions about the Google session. He kept a poker face, except for the eyebrows, which made an occasional reach for the ceiling. Brian was oblivious to the waitress, who kept checking back to see if they wanted anything else.

Meg gestured to the lobby, where people were waiting. "They need the table," she said. "Let's get coffee somewhere else."

Having gathered their things and paid the tab, including a fat tip, Meg and her friend edged through the crowd, brushing past Gary Collins. Meg had seen the TV host and actor around the valley before, and she mentioned it to Brian once they emerged from the building.

"Seems like every one of the three or four times I've run into him, it's always been at Tower Video or some place right on Ventura. Maybe he isn't allowed on any other street!"

"This isn't part of your mystical shit, is it?" Brian asked.

"No!" Meg said. "Unrelated. Just a comment. Can't I just make a comment now and be silly about it? I'm sure and I hope that Gary Collins will not be showing up to answer questions I pose to Google. I hardly even know who he is or like him, and I probably would have guessed he was dead. I knew I shouldn't have told you about my mystery. And it's not mystical. I don't think. Not necessarily." But she was glad she had told him about it.

They decided to go to her place so Brian could look at the Google search results URL that Meg had saved before she got impetuous and neglected to grab the screen capture.

(Now would be a great time to warn you against expecting any romance between Meg and Brian. He may be gay, we're not quite sure -- and anyway it would spoil their chemistry.)

-------

At home in her apartment, Meg heard the faint notes of the Star Wars Empire Theme seeping in from the hallway. Brian.

The minute Meg let him into her apartment (he'd followed her over in his own car), they both started talking at once, having stored up some questions and ideas during the 10-minute drive.

"I wonder if --"

"Have you tri--"

"You first," Meg said. "Do you really want coffee? I think I do."

He followed her to the kitchen.

"Oh, I was just asking if you'd tried the query again," Brian said.

"No, I've been afraid."

"Afraid? Of what?"

Meg couldn't really say. "I don't know. Afraid I'll use it up?" She poured water into the coffeemaker and pulled out two mugs.

Brian looked down and shook his head – that techie gesture that means "you poor dumb shit." Meg ignored it. She and Brian had worked together for six years and treated each other like family.

"You're afraid you'll use up the… whatever it is… the magic or whatever?" Brian asked with a slightly scornful but friendly and amused smile. "Like Aladdin?"

Meg laughed. It did sound pretty stupid when he put it that way.

"Well, let's look at the search string and try a real search and compare them," Brian proposed, "then we'll shoot the moon and risk trying the query again. Did you save the text you input?"

"I think so."

Meg had an extra bedroom that she might have used as an office, but she preferred to have her desk and computer set up in the living room. She pulled up an extra chair for Brian, seated herself at the desk, and went to look for the two text files – the search results URL and the text she had pasted into the search box.

She found one. "OK, here's the URL."

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=The+building+ was+identical+to+my+building%2C+but+the+little+differences+ seemed+so+very+different.+The+smells+really+turned+me+ off%2C+because+they+were+unfamiliar%2C+but+more+than+ that%2C+they+were+unfamiliar+because+they+were+produced+ by+people+who+were+not+%22my+people.%22+I+know+that%27s+ crazy.+And+the+wear+and+tear+was+not+put+there+my+my+ people+either%2C+even+though+I+hardly+know+the+people+in+my +own+building.+&op=answers.opml&btnG=Search

"Paste it into Google," Brian ordered.

"No, trade me seats," Meg said. "I don't want to screw it up again." They switched.

Brian hesitated. "Now I'm nervous. Is the coffee ready?"

"Yeah, hang on. Cream and sugar?"

"You got some Baileys?"

"No, I like Baileys but I don't keep stuff like that around anymore," Meg answered.

Brian grabbed the backpack that was never out of his reach and rummaged in it. "Not a problem, got some right here," he said, and whipped out a little plastic one-serving package of the whiskey and cream liqueur.

"What a boy scout you are," Meg chided him, always amazed at his stash of useful stuff. She brought him a mug and dumped in the liqueur.

Armed with his drink, Brian stretched his fingers in the air like a cartoon pianist and pasted in the string.

They looked at the screen. Brian looked at Meg, who shook her head. It was normal search results page.

"Let me try the text," Brian suggested.

"It's right there on the desktop," said Meg. "Text file named 'otherBuilding.'"

"Got it. Hang on to your butt," he said.

Meg wrinkled her brow.

"Jurassic Park," he answered.

"Right. Samuel L. Jackson," she remembered. "Go."

Brian flipped Meg's rambling text into Google's search query field with a deft CTRL-V, then tacked his initials -- BTR -- to the end of the string, and hit enter.

The pair looked at the monitor, looked at each other, and back at the monitor. The Windows hourglass showed that Google was still working on the problem.

"It's taking too long," Brian noted.

"Happened that way before, too," Meg said.

"Did you follow up on the results from the other time?" Brian asked?

"I haven't tried to reach my old playmate," Meg answered, not really wanting to talk while they were waiting for the new results, and keeping an eye on the screen. "But I did spend a little time searching Calacanis's blog and Blake's collected works, and I cou--"

The results started to draw on the screen.

"Those borders? They were there before?" Brian asked.

Meg nodded. She wanted to see the words. Only two results this time. They leaned in to read:

I don't know, Bryan. As you know I spend some 20 pages in my book, How Buildings Learn, on maintenance, but I concentrated mostly on the long-term effects of weather, chiefly water. I should learn more about what people do to interiors to cause buildings to change and differ from one another.

Thanks for planting the ideas,

Stewart Brand

Brian absorbed the message, eyes widening with every sentence. He read it quickly again, then bolted from the desk chair to have a seat in Meg's big overstuffed armchair.

Meg took his place in front of the monitor and read the second entry:

Ms. Harkin, would you be available to meet with me about the unusual search results that have been returned by your question? It interests me, and I would like to attempt to replicate what you have been doing. Please reply by OPML.

Charles Eppes

Charles Eppes… Meg thought the name sounded familiar but could not quite place it.

And "reply by OPML," what the heck is that about, she wondered, remembering that she had found the identity of "J" in an OPML file, a type of XML format file. Meg looked to Brian for an answer. He had not been able to sit for more than a minute before he was up and pacing.

She wiggled her finger in a come-here gesture, and Brian crossed the living room floor to read from the monitor over her shoulder. He started to smile.

"Who's Charles Eppes?" Meg asked him.

"Maybe you know him better as 'Charlie,'" Brian responded.

"Charlie... Charlie, the genius math professor on Numb3rs?" Meg said incredulously. "But he's not even real."

Brian shrugged. "Let's take a walk and I'll tell you about Stewart Brand."

"I feel a little ansty, too."

Brian picked up his backpack on his way to the door.

"Do you always have to bring that along?" Meg asked, pointing to the pack.

Brian hoisted his backpack, Meg grabbed her purse, and they headed to the building's elevator bank.

"You want to show me the other building?" Brian asked.

"Ah. No, I don't think I want to go there again just yet," Meg said. "Let's just walk and talk."

"Asher's teacher-slash-mentor used to say that in Chaim Potok's sequel to The Chosen. Walk and talk," Brian said.

"I read all those. All the novels, not the nonfiction. Potok died a couple years ago, didn't he?" Meg asked.

"Maybe not in your world," said Brian wryly.

"Yeah. So what do you think is going on?" Meg asked. "Should we forget about it and just hope it all goes away one morning when we wake

up? Scares me. Anyway, it's not just my world anymore. Looks like you're in it now too."

Brian looked a third excited, a third glum, a third freaked out as they rode the elevator down to the lobby of Meg's building.

The elevator doors opened and they pushed through the big lobby doors to the sidewalk. Meg pointed to the left, toward Ventura. "Let's walk toward Ralph's. I need a can of coffee." Brian nodded and followed.

"So… Stewart Brand?" Meg prompted. "He's the one who wrote The Media Lab at MIT, right?"

"Right," Brian confirmed. "I hadn't paid much attention to him lately either, but the other day Jon Udell mentioned on his blog that The Long Now Foundation's seminar podcasts were a good listen if you felt like thinking, so I checked them out.

"Brand's talk was about how cities learn, extending his work for his book How Buildings Learn. I was way into it -- the podcast -- except he kept referring to slides, and that was frustrating, since I was listening in the car and couldn't even check it see if the PowerPoint was available."

"The point?" Meg urged. (It was their way with each other to indulge in rudeness to advance a discussion.)

"Right. So I ordered the book," Brian said as he rummaged in his pack. "And I just got it today." He pulled out a landscape format paperback with two photos of buildings on the cover.

"Yikes," Meg said.

Chapter 3

OK, let's see what we got, Meg said to herself as she settled in at her computer the morning after dining and exploring with Brian.

It was barely the next day. She had fallen into the habit of waking at around 4 a.m. and couldn't break out of the rhythm, partly because she kind of liked it. If dawn felt like a really new day, then pre-dawn was brand spanking new and fresh.

Opening Gtalk, Meg noticed Brian was online and active. I'll wait until he pings me, she decided. I want to write down some notes about all this weirdness and see if I can pull some of it together.

She reached her mouse for the Word icon, then, on a whim, opened the OPML Editor instead. Brian had made her try it because it was a Dave Winer invention -- and because he knew her penchant for brainsterbating (Meg's term for brainstorming alone). He was convinced she would come to love putting ideas into an outliner. She hadn't warmed to it yet, but she couldn't say she had given it much of a chance yet.

Also, there was that remark from the fictional Charlie Eppes about replying in OPML, still a puzzler. Meg and Brian both intended to talk about that last night, but somehow didn't get to it. Maybe while she was in the editor she would get an idea of what that it might be all about.

How will I organize this, she asked herself while opening a new outline file. Be straightforward. Make a main node called "What happened" and list what happened in a list under it.

Almost in spite of herself, and almost before she realized it, Meg started enjoying the task, making subcategories under "What happened" like "At the Other Building" and "In Google," each with its own list and with links to the results page URL and to the local text file.

Pretty cool. Wonder how I can beep Brian in here. You're supposed to be able to collab--

Oh. That's what Charlie meant. I bet that's it. Where the hell is it? The collaboration part.

Meg buzzed through the menus of the outliner program until the word "instant" caught her eye. "Instant outliner." That might be it.

And sure enough, when she expanded the menu, among the options that flew out was "Open buddies." Buddies. That has to be related to the feature that works something like an IM client, Meg decided.

She selected the item called "Open buddies" and she was not altogether surprised (but she was a little freaked out) to find a listing of the real and dead and fictional so-called people who had surfaced in her Google searches.

- William Blake

- Paula Tubbs

- Jason Calacanis

- Charlie Eppes

"Oh boy," she said out loud. "Am I ready for this?"

The flash of freaking passed quickly; she was already on to more detective work. Something was wrong with that list. A name must be missing, because she'd had five responses from Google.

No. I've only had four. The one from Stewart Brand was for Brian. I'll bet Brand is on Brian's buddy list. I gotta call him.

First she pinged him on Gtalk:

Can you take a call?

The answer came right back:

give me 5 min

Meg glanced at the clock in the corner of her computer's desktop. 4:54 AM.

Cautiously, she clicked on the first name in the buddy window, William Blake. Indented in a single outline node was the same message produced by the Google search:

My Dear Miss Meg Harkin,

Our place is where our fellows dwell, and the degree of our acquaintance matters little.

Yours very sincerely, William Blake

Clicking on each of the other names had the same consequence; same messages she'd seen before in the search results. But the last buddy, Charlie Eppes, had written something new:

Meg, this might make things more clear. Click on 778.

She clicked, but it didn't clear anything up.

Brian checked the time: 5:50 a.m. He didn't feel like calling Meg, not right now. Maybe I'll tell her I'm going back to bed, he said to himself, trying out the escape option. Sounded reasonable. He typed an instant message:

sorry. got busy, then got sleepy. talk later this morning??

But Meg already had left the computer, and left a "Back to bed" away message herself. That worked out.

Brian really liked Meg; don't get him wrong. It was just that he had planned to get up early to make some extra time today.

He had to tend strictly to his list today, and not let his curiosity make him wander off course. That was Meg's trouble, he considered. She used to be efficient as could be when she was busy and working. These days she'd become a total airhead -- the opposite of the efficient project manager he met six years ago when they both worked at E.E. Platt.

They had become the most sought-after team for the tech consulting firm's internet projects, due to Meg's great client and organizing skills, to his programming wizardry and their synchronicity as a team. Once Meg and Brian dove into a project, it got done fast and right, so their reputation was earned.

Brian made the smart move once he saw he had some leverage, and worked out a contracting deal three years ago with old man Platt's son, the COO. His retainer paid the same as his old salary. No benefits, but he was obligated to a measly 35 hours a week for Platt, and he gained the freedom he craved to work on other things, or not. Meg was so bright; why hadn't she negotiated the same deal?<

Move on. What's next?

6:23 a.m. He could reach his client in Boston, who wanted to talk to him, but Brian didn't have enough to report. With any luck, he would have something to show by this afternoon, but he couldn't make himself begin the big chunk of coding ahead. He wasn't sure how to approach this piece of the web application yet, and really needed some time for the problem to stew. Maybe just start it anyway and something will reveal itself, he thought. Whoever said the independent life is carefree?

I'll just jot down in English what needs to happen. Haven't done that since school. What did they call that?

The project was a searchable directory of elearning vendors sponsored by Harvard's education department and a few other partners. Brian was acting as sub-contractor to a web design firm in Boston, and the experience had been frustrating.

He'd been assured by the firm that the app's specs had been drawn up in detail, the result of long hours of planning and consultation with the client at Harvard. However, as the work progressed, Brian found the spec to be closer to a wild-eyed wish list made by graphic designers, and he was doing more of the development planning than he'd bargained for. And they kept getting new ideas. That was going to have to stop.

Brian opened a new outline in the OPML editor. Before he could force himself to start writing down steps to be taken in the routine that would clone a record in the database, he allowed himself the distraction of opening the buddy window in the editor's instant outliner. He didn't check it very often because, although he had been able to convince a couple of acquaintances to install the editor and try messaging in the outliner, no one had stuck with it. It was like checking every few days to see if his shoe size had changed.

But today he'd made a new buddy: Charlie Eppes. Can't be. Buddies can't add themselves. I have to subscribe to their outlines.

Brian noticed the name was in boldface, which meant the outline had new messages. He clicked on the name.

Brian, I have two new neighbors who you and Meg, respectively, may be interested in: Blaine Davies and George Knightley. See the updated 778 outline.

778

2
Jason Calacanis 221
Stewart Brand 225
Paula Tubbs 227

5

Eppes 502
Blaine Davies 500
George Knightley 503

7

William Blake 703

Brian shrugged off his incredulity and opened his own instant outline to reply. Time to engage these fuckers, he thought.

Adopting the format Charlie employed, he made a node in his own outline called "messages," and a subordinate one named "Charlie," indented once more and wrote:

dr. eppes, call me at 818-255-6588 or skype brianobrieno. or if you are too fictional to have a voice, just tell me what is going on. stop the coy routine. we are tired of it.

Guess he told him.

Who knows I collect Blaine dolls, Brian wondered, looking at the one seated on his router.