Page 3 of Nearly Roadkill: Queer Love on the Run

At that point, I figured in for a penny, in for a pound. So I signed off, then signed back on as, get this, a major macho dude! HAHAHAHAHAHA! And I had *more* sex—with some women this time! *Then* I signed off and signed back on as a DRAG QUEEN!

And I had all this sex with straight boyz and gay boyz AND straight girlz.

All of this is like when I’m working my phone line, being someone else for some guy. Only, online it’s really *me*, a different aspect of me. *For* me. Not for some guy who’s payin’ me to be his fantasy.

I want to learn to do *that* in the real world. My dream come true!

END WINC ENTRY

To: Editor, They/Them magazine

From: D.I. Drew

Subject: New character

Hi Asa,

Have I got a treat for you today!

Enter a character called Jabbathehut, apparently a friend of Toobe. Toobe calls Jabba “she,” so I will too. Jabba writes the technical and legal accounts of the story in a kind of narrative. Reminds me of a smoky film noir scene. Enjoy.

Let me know if you have questions about this next batch of materials—

Cheers,

Drew

NARRATIVE ENTRY, JABBATHEHUT

Green walls. Darker green trim. Wherever one might glance from the vantage point of Wally Budge’s well-worn government issue swivel chair, there’s some shade of green.

The brightest green is the monitor into which Wally Budge is now peering: it’s positively glowing green.

The lone window in his office is a pale brown-yellow: layers of nicotine obscure nature’s one shot at adding some real green to Wally Budge’s life at the Federal Bureau of Census and Statistics.

Wally Budge couldn’t describe the color of his office walls if you paid him.

He’s 46 years old, and the best he can come up with is: “The same color I went to school with.”

Cigarette wedged between his fingers, he reads the daily reports offered by the FBCS’s twin Cray supercomputers; he’s sucking at a hole in his teeth, an annoying habit, but Budge has no one left in his life to annoy.

Three failed marriages and two lost custody battles, so no one to care about his three-pack-a-day cigarette habit, no one to wince at the soft sucking sounds his tongue makes as it pokes the well-traveled cracks and crevasses of his teeth.

His nicotine-stained fingers are, ironically, well-manicured; they now dance clumsily across the worn and battered keyboard of one of the Bureau’s oldest desktop computers as he adds information to his spreadsheet.

He peers up at the screen from time to time in search of a clue, a pattern. And for someone outside a pattern.

Wally Budge knows that once you have a pattern down, criminals show up outside it; criminals will inevitably break the patterns laid down by the law.

He begins humming a mangled version of “London Bridge is Falling Down.” Good sign for him, bad sign for some poor sap trying to escape the length of this particular lawman’s long arm.

His monitor beeps, and on his screen flashes:

To: FBCS Investigations

From: DevilsOwn

Date: (transmission garbled)

Subj: Think about this, my fine-fettered friend…

“Of course the entire effort is to put oneself

Outside the ordinary range

Of what are called statistics.”

—Stephen Spender

Budge snorts once and hits SAVE. The hackers are getting downright poetic.

At first he’d been alarmed by the ease with which some of these people could read his files, but he’s learned there is nothing you can do about them except collect what they send you, save their electronic signatures, and build a profile—those files are getting fat.

Who knows, they might come in handy some day.

He has, however, the persistent suspicion that the hackers are only letting him collect what they want him to collect.

It was easy enough to spot patterns in the old days: the object of everyone’s desire had been money, and money had very few possible pathways—into and out of banks, or into and out of the black market.

Follow the money, and eventually you’d find your criminal.

But money is on the way out, and the world is beginning to trade in information.

Information, Budge quickly discovered, can come from anywhere and can go anywhere else, be it cyberspace or real space.

And there is no clearly defined black market for information.

Well, none that the Registration Enforcement Task Force is aware of.

That’s why Budge is humming happily: he’s discovered a pattern, and it’s finally starting to pay off.

Not that any of his supervisors had wanted to hear about it. A month ago, he’d tried to explain it to them:

“Most people sign onto the Net with whatever name they’re given by the system or whatever name pops into their head at the time,” he’d said to the roomful of FBCS brass. “They tend to go to more or less the same areas of the Net time after time.”

His audience had looked at him blankly. He was used to it.

“Okay,” he continued gamely. “Let’s say some Joe out there is going online using the name JoeBlow, and let’s say you’re going to find him night after night in a corner of the Net called, say, Flirt’s Corner. One guy, one name, one place to hang out and shoot the electronic breeze. With me?”

Heads nodding tentatively. The word flirt had made most of the men nervous.

“Right,” Budge continued, buoyed slightly.

“Then there’s this other type: the guy who changes his name night to night from JoeBlow to JoeCool to CoolBlue to Blue Velvet to whatever, but that’s still him in that Flirt’s Corner room, no matter what his name is.

He’s got a lot of names, but only one personality, like a core identity.

He’s no different, really, from the first guy. ”

The half-dozen faces bore the unmistakable look of “Yeah, so?” But Budge was on a roll.

“Finally, there’s the guy who keeps changing not only his name but also his entire identity—he doesn’t have a single, unshakable identity.”

His audience had looked decidedly uncomfortable with that one. Single, unshakable identities were, after all, the basis of any social grouping and key to their profiling techniques.

Budge forged ahead. “These folks might hang out in Flirt’s Corner one night, Bible Talk the next night, and Love My Puppy the next.

If they’re doing that online,” he’d concluded triumphantly, “they’ll do that offline too.

Those are the folks who will refuse to Register their identities with you all. ”

It was the undersecretary of the Bureau who’d broken the uneasy silence.

“Even if that is true,” she’d said quietly, “how do you propose to find them? Follow every person on the Net to see how many names each of them has?”

“No, ma’am, no, we don’t have to follow these… what do we call these people? Criminals? Rebels? Freaks? Nah, they’re going to announce themselves to us loud and clear when they fill out their own profiles.”

He thought it was so clear, but nothing but blank stares.

A memo flashing on his screen shakes Budge out of the memory of that meeting.

To: FBCS Investigations

From: Inspections

A summary of the tactics you plan to employ to identify the evaders.

Kindly respond by day’s end.

—RR

He shakes his head. Right. Good plan.

But in that meeting, he’d tried so hard to make things clear:

“So, Ol’ Joe, he keeps going into Flirt’s Corner…

well, pretty soon he’s going to be targeted for breath fresheners, time-share condos in the islands, and adult videos.

Fits a pattern. But if someone changes identities all the time, they’ll get ads for everything from—” and here Budge had paused, glanced down at a printout, smiled, and said, “mutual funds to skateboard insurance. So all you gotta do is watch who’s getting more than their fair share of ads. ”

He might as well have been speaking Klingon.

“Look, there’s that whole marketing group, Allied Consumer Industries. They represent virtually every company that spends more than a nickel a year in advertising. Right now they keep records of who gets which ads and sort that by zip code. Right?”

Heads nodding slowly.

“Right! But now, with the Net, you can flip a switch and you will know exactly which individuals are getting which ads. All we have to do,” he’d pointed out, “is find someone who shows up in one too many marketing windows.”

More blank stares, but Budge ignored them. He was on a roll. He had a pattern, and he’d found some folks he suspected were breaking it.

“Those are the ones who won’t register an identity, the ones who don’t have an identity to begin with. Those are the folks who are telling us about themselves right now, three months before the Registration deadline.”

They’d looked at him with polite smiles, dismissing him without really saying a word. He’d seen that look before: they were giving him just enough rope to hang himself. Well, perhaps he would.

That was four weeks ago, before two names practically fell onto his screen, right out of one too many marketing windows. And now he stares at the printout again:

Scratch \\\ Winc

a.k.a.: (no alternates located)

“What’s W-I-N-C stand for?” he says out loud to his empty office with the green-green walls. “It’s an acronym for something, right?”

END JABBA NARRATIVE ENTRY

To: T. Sparrow

From: Drew

Subject: Chat rooms

Hi Dad,

Still working on my dang opus. It’s a ton of work, but I’m INSPIRED. It’s like I’m directly meeting my queer ancestors.