ref: b9fbb17c04e4ccfb2021dac818e514351ca8f646
dir: /troff/0104.ms/
.LP \& .ce .sp |4.25i .PP .ps 12 .CW ░ It would require a non\-trivial measure of an as yet unspecified effort to deduce just when SL had arrived at the hotel. He no longer pretended to have any earthly idea. It had to have been before Christmas (he remembered attending a Christmas party in the hotel lobby), but before that, who could say? .PP .ps 12 His friend might remember. .PP .ps 12 But, no. .PP .ps 12 He knew why he was here, in West Berlin, and that was to forget about such things. People, situations just such as these. Taking a cue from his absent friend, he, too, would find something else to do with his time. .PP .ps 12 Today he ordered lunch in his room and settled in to commit more atrocities of language to his recovery journal. The exegesis continued. .PP .ps 12 In the long afternoons he would sometimes walk into town and gaze at the meandering traffic as it trundled along the main road, or purchase frivolous items at the drug store. Today he needed blank cassettes and chewing gum. And they were all out of gum. .PP .ps 12 On his way to the checkout SL ignored the spinner rack of comic books that had suddenly and conspicuously interpolated itself between his handbasket and the register. .PP .ps 12 Nobody asked to see his ID. .PP .ps 12 Walking around town would have been pleasant if not for the intrusive presence of overzealous NPCs, bent on chucking beer cans at his head, at suspiciously equally spaced intervals. Too bad for them, he saw through the thin veneer of their shitty programming to the underlying algorithm. .PP .ps 12 SL varied his own route to compensate. He found that the algorithm \fIhe\fR chose was effective for only a few iterations, so eventually he had to alternate algorithms via an additional, algorithmically generated algorithm. .PP .ps 12 All of this was possible only because he had held on to the data gloves. .PP .ps 12 When finally he was caught in the act, he had had to plead with the hotel administration not to kick him out of his room. At length the stern panel of twenty\-somethings had relented, but required that he hand over the contraband data gloves, temporary visor, and related accessories. SL went along with it, for now. What else was he going to do? Leave?