ref: b9fbb17c04e4ccfb2021dac818e514351ca8f646
dir: /troff/0110.ms/
.LP \& .ce .sp |4.25i .PP .ps 12 .CW ░ The buildings were all connected. (All of them?) Yes, underground, just like the trees of the semantic forest. For SL it had seemed like just another rumor, probably bullshit, but he intended to find out for sure. .PP .ps 12 The foundations of the old school building still occupied the equivalent of a city block, up on a hill overlooking the town. Here SL located a service tunnel that supposedly joined the school to the covert subterranean network. .PP .ps 12 Interference was light, so SL was able to confirm that the school's buried roots stretched at least to the abandoned motel\-cum\-apartment building down the street before he decided it was time for lunch. He unfolded a sandwich and apple slices from his backpack and unscrewed his jumbo thermos of tea, admiring the decrepit splendor of the vast ballroom into which his tunnel had suddenly opened. This place, too, was falling apart. He surmised that no one had been down here in quite some time. Even the trash was obsolete. .PP .ps 12 Same routine, different day. SL was scarfing down his lunch in the basement of yet another abandoned building, this one also tethered to the secret network of tunnels, though at the moment he wasn't sure exactly which building he'd stumbled into. Ambient lighting was nil. He ate in total darkness. .PP .ps 12 He could still hear the traffic. .PP .ps 12 After a few months of this he'd managed to map out an intimidating web of tunnels. Carefully, he marked them all down on a big piece of graph paper that he folded into triangles and stuffed into his backpack. Sometimes when he pulled out the map it would snag on a pair of his contraband data gloves, flipping them carelessly onto the floor. He'd snatch them back up, guiltily, but there was no signal down here in the tunnels, and anyway he hadn't even been trying to use them, so at length he'd just shrug and stow them away again. It \fIdid\fR make him feel more secure, just knowing they were in there. .PP .ps 12 I'm sorry, \fIwhy\fR was he doing this? .PP .ps 12 By now his map was crisscrossed with densely annotated routes to and from various branching arteries beneath the town. Useless, since he had no intention of ever visiting them again. He had no one to share the map with, nor any desire to do so, which, he suddenly realized, he regarded as a species of progress. .PP .ps 12 He folded up the map and stuck it into a crack in one of the tunnel walls. .PP .ps 12 Back to the previous routine, then. Holding court on his balcony (although there were no well\-wishers, relatives, or advertisers vying for his attention) from the petty optimism of breakfast to the depressing dregs of lunch. SL ate his eggs. There was nothing else to do but think. There was nothing else he \fIwanted\fR to do but think. Was this, too, then, a sign of progress? The flame of his addiction, the perpetual interplay of point and counterpoint at long last extinguished? .PP .ps 12 It seemed unlikely. .PP .ps 12 All the same, SL observed, given his newfound equanimity, it might finally be time to go home.