Release 1.27

After what, strangely, seemed like weeks, I woke up feeling like my head had been forced through a pasta maker. I distinctly remember the feeling that my eyes would shoot out of their sockets if I moved. Having no desire to see anyone damaged by an armor-piercing baby blue, I kept as still as I could.

Slowly, my vision began to focus, and I realized I was sitting in my car next to Anabella, and that a crowd had formed around us. I couldn't quite make out their faces; all I could really see were vague black forms shaped something like people peering through the windows. Then I caught the faint scent of old leather. Suddenly, I felt like screaming.

"Quiet, Kubota," Anabella whispered. "We're surrounded by Luddites."

Luddites, for those of you who live in third-world countries like, say, Michigan, are a curious bunch. They've got a real beef with technology, claiming that it threatens to destroy individuality, turn people away from each other, and could eventually destroy the human race. Until today, I'd found them completely ridiculous. Now, well, I had to wonder if maybe they didn't have a point.

Still, a couple of professional techno-geeks half-unconscious and surrounded by Luddites is generally considered to be a dangerous situation. When one of us high-tech types gets frustrated and angry, we've got simulations like Boom; we can take out our aggressions on figments of some programmer's imagination. When a Luddite gets pissed, he hasn't got much to turn to but the nearest hand-carved baseball bat.

My life flashed before my eyes, then quickly dashed out of the way when it remembered they were about to fly out of my skull. A face appeared in my window. "Hey guys," he yelled, "they're alive!"

All eyes turned to Anabella and me, and I my heart sank. I realized, too late, that I should have just pretended I was dead. They probably would have just chopped my head off and stuck it on a pole. Now they were going to have to kill me, probably slowly, then cut off my head and stick it on a pole. I could have done without the extra step.

"Are you O.K., buddy?", the barbarian at the window asked. I had no idea what the right answer was, and just groaned a bit. I hoped I wouldn't scream when they jammed the bamboo shoots under my nails.

"That's a nasty bump on your head. Hey, Naomi," he said to a woman behind him, "run over to that Multi-Mart and get this guy some ice, would you? That's gotta hurt."

I waited for the other steel-toed boot to drop. Surely I'd be pummeled into paste with the bag of ice when it arrived. While he waited, my assailant stripped of his jacket and shirt, revealing a muscular body obviously used to hard labor, and even more obviously capable of beating the living crap out of me.

When Naomi returned with the ice, he poured some out into his shirt and offered it to me. "Here, put this on it. It'll feel a lot better."

"Aren't you going to beat us first?", I asked. "Or are you going to nurse me back to health so you can beat me longer?"

"What?" He looked puzzled, and maybe even a bit hurt. "Of course not. Sure, you almost ran me over, but you missed. I'm over it."

"But you're Luddites," I stammered, "and we're network engineers, for God's sake. Just crucify us now and get it over with."

"You must not get out much," he said. He reached out his hand. "My name's Warren. What's yours?"

"Biff," I said, offering my hand in return, and hoping he wasn't about to snap it like a twig. "And my friend here is Anabella."

"Glad to meat you, Biff and Anabella. Say, you guys wouldn't happen to know if there's anything going on in this town that might interest a bunch of rabid anti-technologists out looking for good time, would you?"

Hard enough as it was for me to believe, it looked like Warren and I were about to become very good friends.