ref: b9fbb17c04e4ccfb2021dac818e514351ca8f646
dir: /troff/0102.ms/
.LP \& .ce .sp |4.25i .PP .ps 12 .CW ░ SL, beleaguered protagonist: .PP .ps 12 "Every novel is somebody's first," he announced, by way of introducing the impending storyline. .PP .ps 12 SL's friend, long\-suffering sidekick: .PP .ps 12 "Sometimes, I think I don't know who I am anymore." He sighed, happily, and downed his coffee. .PP .ps 12 Preamble concluded, the main cast could now see their way to getting on with the tale. .PP .ps 12 The hotel was a couple of centuries old, give or take a few decades. Not that the \fIcasual\fR visitor could tell, what with all the layers of hi\-res renovations. It followed then that the parts which appeared to be the oldest were in fact the most recently revitalized. The hotel restaurant, for example, had been rebooted just last month. Its bar, a recent addition, was now canon. .PP .ps 12 SL liked the hotel restaurant. He'd pack up his supplies and sit down there in a booth for half the day, reading his comics and sketching portraits the other guests. Most of them would calm down if he agreed to show them his work. .PP .ps 12 SL's friend didn't like to be sketched. When SL picked up his pencil his friend would just up and leave the room, often without saying a word. Suited SL fine. As time wore on he began to regret having invited the imbecile in the first place. Why had he agreed to come, anyway? And why had SL agreed to take a pass over the imbecile's recovery exegesis? Just who was the bigger idiot, here? .PP .ps 12 No bacon this morning. It had only taken them a month to figure out he wasn't going to eat it. .PP .ps 12 The fines for attempted network connections were piling up. Fortunately, SL was fucking rich. .PP .ps 12 He'd sit there in the restaurant and wait for something remarkable to happen. Something remarkable rarely did, and so he remarked only rarely. During the interminable delay between minor piques of interest SL would jot down whatever observations occurred to him, recording it all faithfully in his recovery journal. Just the facts, just as recovery theory demanded. Scrawling out page after page in minute detail, mundane mechanized responses to the predictable plot machinations he witnessed all around him. He supposed that this was what they wanted. He described in some detail what it must have been like for them to probe the shared hallucination for the familiar topography of his face. Let them sort that one out. .PP .ps 12 Nowadays, \fIhe\fR could look in the mirror. .PP .ps 12 Or, in this case, a salt shaker. His reflection bent and wobbled as the unsteady shaker tipped itself completely over, a server having bumped into SL's table on her way through the dining room to extinguish a small fire in the no smoking section. .PP .ps 12 SL dropped his pen. .PP .ps 12 The quiet here was near total. Unbelievable. SL found it was conducive to memory, which was something of a mixed blessing given his many uncomfortable reasons for having retreated to West Berlin. .bp .IP .ps 12 .I West Berlin... has many roles. .R .PP .ps 12 \(em John F. Kennedy, 25 July 1961 .TP .PP .ps 12 On the one hand he could barely keep in mind why he was here. On the other hand he really didn't want to be here in the first place. .PP .ps 12 And now he was out of hands. .PP .ps 12 Most of his personal equipment had been confiscated upon arrival, but SL still concealed within his shirtsleeve a backup pair of data gloves, folded neatly into a palm\-sized green square, pressed into the equally diminutive Faraday pouch laid smooth against his bare arm. He could feel it there, cool against his skin. .PP .ps 12 Hastily, he ripped open the pouch and slipped on the data gloves. .PP .ps 12 What do you mean? .PP .ps 12 He knew what he was doing.