Read Online Death Before Facebook by Julie Smith - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Julie Smith
Tags: B008DP2B56
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when he needed to. But yet, when the silly old thought came, he rather relished it. Especially if he was well into that friendly little ritual bourbon.
He also had more serious thoughts, along the lines of
Get out of TOWN by sundown
.
And
You’ll never eat lunch in this TOWN again.
He had the power to make someone disappear. He was loved on the TOWN. You couldn’t do it by hate, by being nasty to someone—the TOWN didn’t work that way. What you had to do when one of these arrogant assholes came along, these goddamn know-it-alls, was simply outpost them. Outperform. Upstage.
They were there partly because they thrived on competition, but mostly because they had to be at the top of the heap all the time. So Pearce had his work cut out for him. He was mayor of the goddamn TOWN, and that wasn’t easy to do, considering the vast majority of heavy users were concentrated in California and actually knew each other F2F.
That he did pride himself on; that was the fun of it. Of course it helped that he was a professional writer and what you did on this thing, when you got right down to it, was you wrote.
He could do what he had to do in thirty minutes, but he usually spent a leisurely hour, even an hour and a half, dropping witticisms here, bon mots there. First, the TOWN Hall, everybody’s favorite conference. If the TOWN had been the COMPANY, this would have been the virtual watercooler. As it was, in twentieth-century America there wasn’t an analogous meeting place in. a real town. Which was one of the things, in Pearce’s opinion, that made the virtual one superior. You dropped in, you said hello, you got the news, you bantered a bit, and you went on to your other favorite conferences. Pearce liked Writing, Movies, Books, Confession, Games, Weird Stuff, and Sex, but he never posted in the last, just lurked. It was amusing to match up the ingenuous disclosures here with the pomposity affected by the same users elsewhere.
Pearce skipped Sex, Games, and Weird Stuff tonight. He was addicted to Writing for the companionship with other writers, and to Books and Movies because they provided lots of scope for what he did best—writing and thinking.
But tonight Confession was the undisputed hot ticket. Poor old Geoff wasn’t even cold and the TOWN had turned him into a game. Still, Pearce had to admit, Geoff was its leading citizen right now, which might have pleased him. Geoff hadn’t been much of anything in life, except a nerd, much like everyone else on the TOWN.
Pearce typed out G CON —“get Confession”—and then went to “Out on the TOWN.” But in the end it was disappointing; nothing new, really. The latest topic, “TOWN Without Pity,” had some merit if you liked to observe the maunderings of self-righteous assholes. Predictably, all the politically correct, put-you-in-the-wrong types were posting here. Living in New Orleans instead of L.A., Pearce had never met them, but he knew who they were: guys with scrawny shoulders and dirty blue jeans, women with fifty pounds they didn’t need and scrunched-up, toady little faces. There were those types, the PC ones, and then there were the Henry Clays, those who’d missed out on dynamic careers as diplomats permanently assigned to the Bureau of Tempests in Teapots. They were always posting the sort of little gem that was meant to defuse but made you want to rip their throats out: “I can really see Lefty’s point, Bilious, but I just wonder if it isn’t time to put this behind us and quit fighting among ourselves. After all, what’s really important here?”
Out-self-righteousing the PCs.
Back to “Out on the TOWN.” At least Lenore hadn’t posted today. One of the worst things about Geoff’s murder, as far as Pearce was concerned, was the ready-made stage it gave Lenore. Privately, he called her “the TOWN crier.” If Lenore had a problem, the whole TOWN had to be consulted, and if she didn’t she was going to make one up.
So far they’d seen
He also had more serious thoughts, along the lines of
Get out of TOWN by sundown
.
And
You’ll never eat lunch in this TOWN again.
He had the power to make someone disappear. He was loved on the TOWN. You couldn’t do it by hate, by being nasty to someone—the TOWN didn’t work that way. What you had to do when one of these arrogant assholes came along, these goddamn know-it-alls, was simply outpost them. Outperform. Upstage.
They were there partly because they thrived on competition, but mostly because they had to be at the top of the heap all the time. So Pearce had his work cut out for him. He was mayor of the goddamn TOWN, and that wasn’t easy to do, considering the vast majority of heavy users were concentrated in California and actually knew each other F2F.
That he did pride himself on; that was the fun of it. Of course it helped that he was a professional writer and what you did on this thing, when you got right down to it, was you wrote.
He could do what he had to do in thirty minutes, but he usually spent a leisurely hour, even an hour and a half, dropping witticisms here, bon mots there. First, the TOWN Hall, everybody’s favorite conference. If the TOWN had been the COMPANY, this would have been the virtual watercooler. As it was, in twentieth-century America there wasn’t an analogous meeting place in. a real town. Which was one of the things, in Pearce’s opinion, that made the virtual one superior. You dropped in, you said hello, you got the news, you bantered a bit, and you went on to your other favorite conferences. Pearce liked Writing, Movies, Books, Confession, Games, Weird Stuff, and Sex, but he never posted in the last, just lurked. It was amusing to match up the ingenuous disclosures here with the pomposity affected by the same users elsewhere.
Pearce skipped Sex, Games, and Weird Stuff tonight. He was addicted to Writing for the companionship with other writers, and to Books and Movies because they provided lots of scope for what he did best—writing and thinking.
But tonight Confession was the undisputed hot ticket. Poor old Geoff wasn’t even cold and the TOWN had turned him into a game. Still, Pearce had to admit, Geoff was its leading citizen right now, which might have pleased him. Geoff hadn’t been much of anything in life, except a nerd, much like everyone else on the TOWN.
Pearce typed out G CON —“get Confession”—and then went to “Out on the TOWN.” But in the end it was disappointing; nothing new, really. The latest topic, “TOWN Without Pity,” had some merit if you liked to observe the maunderings of self-righteous assholes. Predictably, all the politically correct, put-you-in-the-wrong types were posting here. Living in New Orleans instead of L.A., Pearce had never met them, but he knew who they were: guys with scrawny shoulders and dirty blue jeans, women with fifty pounds they didn’t need and scrunched-up, toady little faces. There were those types, the PC ones, and then there were the Henry Clays, those who’d missed out on dynamic careers as diplomats permanently assigned to the Bureau of Tempests in Teapots. They were always posting the sort of little gem that was meant to defuse but made you want to rip their throats out: “I can really see Lefty’s point, Bilious, but I just wonder if it isn’t time to put this behind us and quit fighting among ourselves. After all, what’s really important here?”
Out-self-righteousing the PCs.
Back to “Out on the TOWN.” At least Lenore hadn’t posted today. One of the worst things about Geoff’s murder, as far as Pearce was concerned, was the ready-made stage it gave Lenore. Privately, he called her “the TOWN crier.” If Lenore had a problem, the whole TOWN had to be consulted, and if she didn’t she was going to make one up.
So far they’d seen
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