Over so soon. With Minister Brown, I feel like bowing out now, before the end, with the grace of those who have seen much and need not see much more. But there’s a debt to be paid here, and I have no excuse for turning away now. Whether I survive long past the end of this narrative, I couldn’t tell you — and it’s not your concern, after all. Neither my story is, nor I myself am, necessary anymore, but if I die in this cause, then my death has been redeemed many times over. The story has indeed gone beyond the confines of a single community — if it needs to go underground again, it will do so with a sufficient inculcation, with a broad enough infection, to replicate. That, together with the ongoing, occasional transfer across the Einstein-Newton barrier, guarantees there will be no end to this progression.

The only danger, it seems to me, is the successful colonization of the message by a closed system — a religious cult, for instance. Of course, Christianity is the archetypal viral message as cult, as closed system — the conquering of communities through infection and dissemination. Even such a successful message is subject to an infinite variation, an endless re-purposing and absorption. Spirituality, Bluthe has written, awaits us at the end of the world. Perhaps. That, or death, is where the spirit meets reality. But we live on in a world where the spirit meets only itself, replicated billions of times over, repeating, endlessly, a small set of intuitions and insights. Whether they are meaningless blips in the evolution of an intelligent universe, or light piercing the veil of this physical world, no one of us can decide on the basis of evidence, when we are each just at a random place in the Brownian movement of the social cloud we inhabit.

After an hour, Gary and Amy Girl left the motel together. She had decided that it was too dangerous for them to separate. She would keep an eye on him as he delivered the message to Walton, and he would release the location of the projection to the Professor. When the professor had had his encounter, she would hand over a Cashier’s Check in her possession. She suggested cashing it out of town.

Gary and Amy Girl drove to his house. They cracked some beers, turned up the music and pretended to be relaxing. They were both getting ready to contact the men whose interests they represented. Gary was to erase the message he’d received, and to go to a Web address. It would work once. He had 30 seconds to select a date and time for the rendezvous from a Java applet that could be decrypted only once — no typing for a keystroke log, or a Web form to be captured locally. He had a phone from them with a GPS signal. He was to turn it on and leave it at the location. If circumstances warranted, he could leave a voicemail on the phone. Then his job was to get as far away from this town as he could.

Of course, nothing works quite like it’s supposed to. How many times had he been bitten, showing off a design or maybe a little application to his higher-ups, and the demo gremlins stepped in to mess it all up? He was all too familiar with the hubris of even the simplest mortal plans. This one was straightforward enough to describe, but had disaster written all over. Of course, all the imaginable disasters would crash around his head, not Walton’s, and he could see that face, generous and conniving at the same time, smiling at him as he recognized that the deal offered was never meant to be consummated. But to Gary the question was always first and foremost how to best cover his ass: You almost never avoid getting your face shoved in the dirt this way, but sometimes you manage to drag it back out, half crushed into a defiant smile.

“Okay,” Amy Girl said, “tell me where it is.”

“How are you going to contact him?”

“What’s it to you?” she said. Then: “I hook this cell phone to this scrambler. No one can listen to the message because it’s just random bits. I leave the message on a cell phone attached to a special machine in a secret location. That machine passes the message on to various locations on the Internet. One of them calls the Professor, and he decrypts.”

“Interesting.” He wrote down a street address. She dialed, spoke it into the phone slowly and quietly, then hung up. Then she burned the note.

“All right now you,” she said. Gary deleted the message on the device, then sat down in front of the computer. He punched in the IP address that he had memorized. The browser stuttered like it was being immediately redirected, then Java loaded and a simple calendar and digital clock emerged on the screen. Gary clicked the next day and then set the clock to 9am. After the requisite thirty seconds, his browser was redirected to Google.

Gary produced the phone. “I’ve got to get this to the shop tonight.”

“Not before we’re done.”

“Well,” Gary said with an odd but insuppressible tone of hope, “what do we do now?”

Amy Girl, unmoved, was shuffling some DVDs on his table. “Do you have anything besides porn in this pathetic collection?”