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982. alistairConnor - 4/9/2009 8:03:15 PM Hank and Dumitra were installed in a medicalized living space in the WHO building. Part hostel, part hospital, he thought, taking the measure of the security arrangements, the video surveillance, the orderlies who were used to dealing with the sort of borderline psychiatric cases that Ayotunde's department attracted.
Through the night, they talked and made love, talked some more and so on. Since Hank had interrupted her Coffed state the previous night, Dumitra soon showed signs of needing her coffin again, as Hank had hoped. He was not yet ready to reveal his double agent status to her; he hoped things would be clearer to him after the Davos mission.
Once Dumitra was Coffed, Hank wrote her a note, and made his way out of the building. They were under strict instructions not to go anywhere, and it had been made clear to them that if they tried to leave, they would be restrained; but it was easier than he had expected, he could probably have walked out the front door with just a little bit of stealth. But he chose to climb down from the third-floor balcony, bare handed. Nothing difficult for him, except for the weight of his backpack. To avoid the possibility of being filmed, he told himself. But for the hell of it, too.
He picked up his car and drove out of town, north around the lake, then taking the motorway east. He had a little more than an hour before dawn. Turning north at Lausanne, he got off the motorway near the lake of Neuchatel, and drove until he found some secluded park space along the lake front.
He got out of the car and assembled his coffin on the shingly beach; then stood in the cold January dawn, waiting for the sun to rise. 983. alistairConnor - 4/21/2009 10:56:13 PM Hank was gazing out over the lake when he felt a hand on his shoulder. "Iancu. Good, your coffin is ready. I must use it at once, the sun is rising."
Mark Davidson climbed into the coffin. The light was already fading from his eyes, as the daylight increased. Only his exceptional mastery of vampire lore, and of his own mind and body, enabled him to function even for a minute or two after dawn. Any other ordinary vampire (Changers and Perps excepted, of course) would be in convulsions by now : the refuge of a coffin is vital to their metabolism, as soon as the sun breaks the horizon.
But Davidson was tough: lying in the coffin, he had to remain in control. "Remember, boy : we must be in Davos by 6 pm to meet Petru."
"Yes, Master Mirka. It's only three hours' drive from here", Hank replied.
"I always knew I could rely on you, Iancu", said Davidson in a whisper, with a faintly ironic smile. And then he was out.
It had been quite a shock when Peter Brown had informed Hank that Davidson would be joining him by teleportation. The implication was clear : Davidson had, at some time, unknown to Hank, infected him and brewed the Imperative serum. (Perhaps he did that systematically to all his pupils; or perhaps only to those he didn't trust?) He could therefore teleport at dawn to wherever Hank was; moreover, he could compel obedience. Hank was relieved, in retrospect, that he hadn't chosen the route of open rebellion.
Davidson's power over Hank did, however, suffer one rather obvious drawback: as a common vampire, he needed to spend his daylight hours in a coffin. As it was impossible to teleport with, or in, a coffin (it had been tried, with disastrous results), this made him entirely dependent on being well received at his arrival.
Theoretically, then, the tables were now turned, and Hank had the upper hand. Insofar as they were enemies; which he still wasn't sure of.
But what could he do with the advantage? It was all or nothing : he either had to obey Davidson, or kill him. And this was no seventeen year old girl : if he were to drive a stake through his heart, he would undoubtedly wound him mortally, but he was certain that Davidson would manage to kill his attacker before expiring himself.
Hank pondered : what if he just filled up the coffin with rocks, and sank it thirty feet deep in the lake? He decided it wouldn't make any difference to Davidson until sunset (he was, to all intents and purposes, already dead; he couldn't be drowned). Waking up at the bottom of the lake probably wouldn't faze him either; he would simply swim to the surface and start tracking Hank down.
He decided that there was really no other option, he had to see the mission through. Unless he happened to come across a building site with lots of fresh concrete. 984. NuPlanetOne - 4/24/2009 6:18:41 PM alistair,
I have officially noted your memo and hopefully I can put something together soon. You have a ton of material to sift through, but I am enjoying your prolific exploits.
I just watched 'Twilight' the other night and must admit I enjoyed it. It was a decent movie making effort. I wasn't crazy about their reason for allowing the Vamps to go about during the day, but it was plausible. I do like our ideas much better. But the flick had a good hook, and I can see why it did well.
Have you discussed movie rights yet?.....never know! 985. alistairConnor - 4/25/2009 2:49:46 PM As they walked down the long, slightly curved corridor at the CERN particle accelerator, Alistair was humming the song Supermassive Black Hole. Courtney rolled her eyes, and explained to Halima : "It's the Muse song from Twilight, the vampire movie. He does it to wind me up."
Alistair hummed louder, and started to croon: "You caught me under false pretenses, how long before you let me go? Yooooouuuuuuu, you set my soul alight."
"Oh, cut it out!" Courtney snapped.
Alistair made a gulping sound, and stopped dead, one foot in the air.
Courtney gasped : "I didn't do that! ... did I?"
Alistair smiled and started walking again. "Your wish is my command... mistress."
Halima glared at him. Alistair grinned at her, uncertainly, then with mock fear. She muttered : "Just wait till we get home..."
"Why wait?" he murmured back. "We could find an empty storeroom..."
"No", she said, louder. "The mad scientist is waiting for us."
"Well of course, Kronen's experiment, whatever it is. Actually, it was the black holes connection that brought that song to mind. It wasn't the vampire thing."
"Ah yes", said Dr Cascu. "Will this large hadron collider we're walking along generate black holes when they start it up? Will they grow and destroy the earth? Or will technical issues or legal injunctions save the world?"
"I thought it was supposed to be running since last September?" said Alistair. "That was the plan", said Cascu, "but technical issues arose -- helium leaks and things like that -- and it won't be in working order until this autumn at the earliest."
"Nine months till the end of the world eh?" said Alistair. "We should give up our jobs, run up debts, enjoy ourselves. It's a shame the banks aren't lending." 986. alistairconnor - 4/27/2009 10:37:32 PM Hank drove slowly through the small town until he spotted a ski shop. He turned down a side street and parked as unobtrusively as possible. He bought the cheapest pair of skis he could find, a bag for them, and a few accessories; then hurried back to the car and camoflaged the coffin with them. Then breathed a sigh of relief.
There is nothing quite as coffin-like as a coffin. It really doesn't look like anything else; and he had no plausible explanation for driving a stiff around Switzerland with him.
Getting the damn thing into the car had been hard enough. Though he was short, Davidson was solidly built, and heavy as hell. He had manoeuvered the car as close as possible, and heaved the coffin in through the back hatch, having folded down the back seat. He had to jam the front passenger seat forward and incline the back of it toward the windscreen before he could force the hatch shut.
Ford frickin' Fiesta. God damn poky European cars. 987. alistairconnor - 4/27/2009 11:27:28 PM No way was he going to walk blind into that meeting with Davidson and Brown. Hank had set up a rendezvous with the Organization's men on the spot : Milòs and Laslò. They were, respectively, cook at the Davos Conference Centre, and room service waiter at the resort's most prestigious hotel. The Organisation had sent them to get jobs there during the winter season, in order to get inside knowledge of the workings of the conference. Now they were vital to the implementation of the Master Plan.
Hank had arranged to meet them at 3pm, in a café on the outskirts of Davos, outside the security perimeter. He knew them both slightly, from their time as interns at the Organisation, a couple of years previously.
The Organisation offered a generous internship program for science and engineering students from all over the world. By a curious coincidence, most of the applicants, and all of the successful ones, happened to be vampires.
Although younger than both by a couple of years, Hank had been their instructor in Proactive Self-Defense.
Laslò had cut quite a dash. Tall, blonde and angelically beautiful, he had usurped Hank's position as the acknowledged heart-throb of the young Californian vampirettes, and had lost no time in working his way through the field, to Hank's irritation. After a couple of months, perhaps sensing a danger, or perhaps because he had exhausted its possibilities, Laslò abandoned the limited vampire social scene, and branched out into San Francisco night life, where Milòs had already found happiness... but not among the women. 988. alistairconnor - 4/27/2009 11:27:48 PM "Iancu! Man, I'm glad to see you. Coffee? Something to eat?" Laslò ordered for him.
Discreetly, they recounted what they knew of the operation. Laslò was to collect samples of organic matter from the rooms of world leaders : hair, nail clippings, anything he could get. And Milòs was supposed to add something to the food, he didn't know what.
Clearly, neither of them knew what it was all about; probably they knew nothing about teleportation or Imperative serum. It took Hank about thirty seconds to work it out.
World domination eh? He smiled grimly, and did not inform them of his conclusions.
Instead, he asked them how they were planning to proceed : the conference was to start that evening, and the town was already buzzing with the world's most powerful businessmen and politicians.
Milòs had studied the menus he was to prepare over the next few days, and had worked out strategies for incorporating the mystery ingredient into sauces and soups. The main thing was not getting caught.
"It's easier for Laslò", he said, smiling. "He has an army of helpers."
"Well, hardly an army", said Laslò modestly.
"He's bedded five chambermaids. They would do anything for him!" said Milòs, clearly proud of his friend.
"Six, actually", said Laslò.
"Oh, who's the latest? The Swedish girl with the big..."
"I haven't had my way with her yet, though I did get a feel of those ... they're the real thing, in case you were wondering. No, it's the Turkish lovely on the fifth floor."
"Ooh, I thought she was saving herself for marriage?"
"Well, she is... but we've found a compromise arrangement."
Milòs laughed knowingly. 989. alistairConnor - 5/11/2009 12:44:03 AM When Alistair and his companions arrived in the conference room, there was a palpable tension in the air. He ascribed it to the presence of Sorin and Dumitra, visibly ill at ease in each other's presence. Albu introduced them to a couple of CERN physicists, and to Errin Davidson, who had arrived that morning from London.
Alistair congratulated Kronen on his TV appearance : "That was quite a performance, doctor! You may have found a new career : you have a real talent for improv comedy! Though you had some good help: that interviewer is really..." He caught Halima's glare and said no more, but wriggled his eyebrows suggestively. Kronen beamed : "Yes, Sue is quite something, she..." His voice trailed off as he saw Errin looking at him, and he reddened.
"It's time to begin the biology presentation!" he said briskly.
"Biology? But it's ten o'clock on Thursday," said Courtney playfully. "I thought we had physics?"
"Before we get to the practical physics", Dr Albu explained, "Gustav wishes to brief us on the biological underpinnings of the phenomena we are to experiment together."
"Today's subject is mitochondria", Kronen announced. "Can anyone explain what mitochondria are?"
"They're um, little bitty critters in our cells?" suggested Alistair. "Plants have chloroplasts, us animals have mitochondria, because we don't do photosynthesis, we do, um, the Krebs cycle and stuff like that. They are little powerhouses for the cells. Is that right?"
"Near enough", said Kronen encouragingly. "Who can explain where mitochondria come from, originally?"
"Well, when our ancestors were single-cell organisms floating in the primeval ocean, a couple of billion years ago", suggested Sorin, "it is generally thought that mitochondria were independent organisms, that got engulfed by our ancestors and lived in symbiosis inside them."
"Very good!" Kronen approved. "Then, the theory goes, they gradually lost their independence, and most of their genetic material migrated, by successive mutations, to the nucleus of the cell. They still have a fragment of DNA of their own, but not enough to reproduce independently."
"That's really weird!" exclaimed Courtney. "It's like we're two different species at once!"
"Actually", Kronen said, "your own case, and that of Dumitra, is somewhat different. The principal biological difference between vampires and the rest of us -- or at least, the only difference that we have been able to isolate thus far -- lies in the mitochondria. Yours are larger, and apparently far more complex, with a great deal of their own genetic material. We have not yet been able to sequence their DNA, we hope to begin that project soon, since it seems we may be able to obtain sufficient funding and resources." Dr Ayotunde smiled benignly. 990. alistairConnor - 5/11/2009 12:46:24 AM "What we do know is that vampire mitochondria have extraordinary capabilities. Firstly, they seem to be responsible for inducing the pseudo-death or "coffed" state, and for preserving the body's cells from any harm or deterioration during that phase. It also seems that they play the predominant role in the extraordinary capacity of a vampire's body to heal itself of any injury, no matter how severe, with extraordinary speed."
"Oh here we go", murmured Alistair. "It's science fiction time again."
"Do I sense scepticism?" suggested Kronen.
Dumitra spoke up : "I suggest a little demonstration, Doctor." She came to the front and faced the others, rummaging in her handbag. She took out a wicked-looking clasp knife and unfolded it. Before anyone had time to react, she slashed both her wrists, expertly, deeply, clinically.
She dropped the knife, and, with a triumphant smile, held up her arms in a parody of crucifixion. Bright red arterial blood spurted from her wrists, once, twice, then weakened to a trickle, a drip, stopped completely. The deep wounds became shallower, pink scar tissue formed in welts, then subsided, paled. Within two minutes there was no trace of any cut.
In the stunned silence, Alistair started to clap slowly. "That's quite a stunt! Tell us, how do you do it? What's the trick?"
"There's no trick, Alistair", Courtney said gravely. She was visibly shaken, but not surprised, by the demonstration. "I've always had to be very careful to conceal that from people. I have to try to avoid all risks, because if I ever got a cut or graze, at school, or playing with friends, and somebody saw it heal..." 991. alistairConnor - 7/19/2009 8:58:41 PM That same afternoon in Davos, Peter Brown also had a rendezvous with Milos and Laslo. He interrogated Laslo about his sample collection methods, and smiled with approval when he explained about his helpers. He enumerated a number of high-value targets, which Laslo undertook to give the highest priority to.
"And our number one target is Vladimir Putin", said Brown.
"No way!" said Laslo. "I've talked to the permanent staff about him. Apparently, every year, he brings his own staff, chambermaids and everything. Nobody gets near him. He doesn't even use the hotel's toilets : he craps into a sort of potty thing, and they ship it all back to Russia."
"Wow, that's weirder than Howard Hughes!" said Milos.
"No, it's sort of rational paranoia", Laslo continued. "It seems the CIA pulled a trick on Brezhnev in the seventies : they cut into the waste pipe from his room, collected a sample of his shit, and diagnosed the liver disease that eventually killed him. Putin doesn't want to be diagnosed, it seems."
"What are all these samples for, anyway?" asked Milos anxiously.
Brown smiled broadly. "It's a research project. We wish to discover whether, as we suspect, a large proportion of world leaders have vampire ancestry. We need to analyze biological samples to do that."
"Then why do you want me to add stuff to their food?" Milos pursued.
After an almost imperceptible hesitation, Brown replied : "It's a biological agent that will react in a certain harmless way on the metabolism of a person with vampire ancestry, and leave traces in samples taken afterwards. It will greatly enhance our capacities of detection and analysis."
"That's great!" said Laslo enthusiastically. "I'm proud to contribute to the project!". Milos kept his own counsel, but accepted the bags of blood Brown handed over to him. 992. alistairConnor - 7/19/2009 9:01:27 PM The town was already buzzing with business magnates, power brokers and deal-makers. World leaders were mostly expected the following afternoon, in time for the inaugural dinner.
Shortly after nightfall, Hank and Mark Davidson met with Peter Brown in a different café on the outskirts of Davos. Brown was terse and businesslike:
"As our direct-action operatives, your mission is to obtain biological samples from high-value targets which we can't access by other means. But your first duty is to avoid detection. Even at the expense of failure in your assigned missions. And in the event of your being captured or killed, it is imperative that there be no connection to myself or to the Organisation. Any compromise of my status as official invitee would be disastrous."
Hank realised that Davidson was seething with anger. Understandably so : Brown was apparently treating the two of them as equals, and as his inferiors; whereas Davidson was a fellow Director, and chief of the Security section of the Organisation. In Davidson's mind, and perhaps in that of Brown, his status as a mere Coffer put him perpetually in a position of inferiority, and resentfully on the defensive.
"Master Petru, there is no need to lecture me about security imperatives. Indeed, it would be well to defer to me on the subject. Give me the list of targets, and let me deal with the matter."
"Of course, Master Mirka." said Brown, with a forced smile. "I treat with you as an equal. But you must understand that, in this mission, there can be only one operational commander."
"Indeed", Davidson concurred. "However, for security reasons, I think it would be unwise for us to meet again at Davos. There are police, soldiers, cameras everywhere. Iancu and I will execute our missions without any further reference to yourself. I believe this will be the most effective strategy."
"Fine", said Brown, realising he had been out-manoeuvered. "Vladimir Putin is our highest value target. Our local operatives do not have access to him." He outlined what was known of Putin's domestic arrangements. "Over to you, Master Mirka, to devise the plan to get what we want from him." On the one hand, Brown realised, if the Putin mission succeeded, he would have difficulty claiming much credit for it. On the other hand, if it went sour, then he would carry no blame.
993. alistairConnor - 7/19/2009 11:37:18 PM Brown decided to undermine Davidson by pampering Hank. He's the up-and-coming lad, everyone says it; he would like to see him take over security in a few years, if he could find a way to sideline Davidson.
"Iancu, my boy. Tell me about your previous mission. You understand, we had to cancel it: we couldn't afford to take the risk of a high-profile murder case being linked to vampires, given the overriding importance of the current mission. And eliminating a renegade vampire will be of no importance, if this mission succeeds. Did you get close to your target before we called you off?"
Hank realised that this was his moment of truth : if he was playing straight with the Organisation, he had to spill the beans now, and explain that he had infiltrated an enemy organisation which was conducting advanced research on the Imperative effect. If he didn't tell all now, it would be very difficult to explain himself later. He had been thinking about this situation all day; and hadn't reached a decision.
On instinct, he went with the minimal version. "I located the target in a country house near Lyon. But when I entered the house to complete the mission, it turned out that the girl was no longer there. The following day, I made discreet enquiries, which confirmed that a seventeen year old girl from New Zealand had been there..."
Brown interrupted him : "From New Zealand? Seventeen?" He seemed intrigued.
"Yes, but she had left... to visit Switzerland", said Hank, guessing that the Organisation's detection equipment would have picked up the movement anyway.
"Yes, it seems she is in the Geneva area." said Davidson. "Perhaps you can go find her after this mission and romance her eh? Ha, ha, ha. Private joke", he explained to Brown.
Davidson spent the rest of the night prowling the streets of Davos, taking the measure of the security systems. Hank took the opportunity to get some down time : they only had the one coffin between the two of them, so he went Coffed in the garage the Organisation had rented on the edge of town. 994. alistairconnor - 7/23/2009 10:15:58 PM Alistair took advantage of a coffee break at CERN to call his sister Ruth in New Zealand. He updated her with the latest developments, and quizzed her about Courtney. "You must have known her as a little girl, you've known her mother for years, haven't you?"
"I've known Lara practically since she got off the plane from California. I introduced her to Ted."
"Oh, Courtney's father, right?"
"Well..."
"What do you mean, Well?"
"Well actually, Lara was pregnant before she arrived in New Zealand."
"Oh... Oh fuck..."
"Come on Alistair. It's not like her father is Darth Vader."
"No... For what it's worth, Courtney's father is a vampire named Peter Brown." 995. alistairConnor - 7/26/2009 4:55:08 PM Alistair was, on balance, rather disappointed when it turned out he wasn't to be strapped to the target that day.
Kronen ushered them into the laboratory, and made a little speech : "The protocol of this experiment has been determined by Dr Errin Davidson and myself, with the able assistance of Dr Vassiliu of CERN. I am therefore taking upon myself the risk -- or should I say, selfishly claiming for myself the honour -- of being its first subject.
"Oh, so it's Kronen who gets bombarded with hardons" said Alistair to Halima. "Why am I not surprised?"
"This is not the large hadron accelerator", Sorin explained sternly to Alistair. "This is the Low-Energy Ion Ring. Only 78 metres across."
"The object of this first phase is to demonstrate the holographic effect hypothesised by Einstein, according to a theory reconstructed by Dr Davidson from fragmentary references in his manuscripts. The space of this module" - Kronen took his place in a structure which somewhat resembled a hexagonal phone booth - "will be suffused with a stream of energized particles from the accelerator ring."
Errin Davidson who was standing on the opposite side of the lab, took over the explanations. "And a holographic image of Dr Kronen will appear -- all being well -- in this space", she said, indicating a second phone-booth structure.
"Can we dim the lights please?" asked Kronen. "Hamming it up for dramatic effect", muttered Alistair. "We don't know for sure if the intensity of the hologram effect will enable it to be seen with the naked eye", explained Davidson. 996. vonKreedon - 7/30/2009 8:24:39 PM A brief interuption in the current programming. I'm a UA Writer at Microsoft, and my manager recently actively wondered if we might be able to get some well known writers to write some articles for us. This led to the following two impressions: 997. vonKreedon - 7/30/2009 8:24:54 PM Tom Clancy - Office UA Writer:
Colonel-General Tupolev was a demanding taskmaster, but the task he gave to his adjutant, Major Tamilla Kortovna, was even more daunting that was his usual wont. He required a set of place cards for the annual 'Umansko-Berlinskaya' Brigade reunion, over 12,000 current and former members of the Guards Motor Rifle Brigade had registered in three different Russian military, veterans, and Party databases. He wanted the cards printed by tomorrow at 10:00. Of course the Colonel-General also had to have the reunion in the Ingushetian provincial center of Nazran, all but on the border with both Chechnya and Georgia. And finally, her Internet connection was down, again.
Tamilla called the IT department of the 58th Combined Arms Army and lit a fire under the Officer of the Watch. Her connection was up in under five minutes. While she waited, Tamilla booted her notebook and opened the Publisher 2010 place card template she had downloaded earlier from Office.com. She added one of the stock military clip art borders through the Insert tab’s Borders and Accent building block collection and changed the color and font schemes on the Page Design tab. Since the Internet connection was now up, she then clicked the Mailing tab, launched the Step by Step Mail Merge Wizard and added the three data bases in the Mail Merge Recipients dialog, and pressed OK.
That’s when the truck bomb exploded. 998. vonKreedon - 7/30/2009 8:25:34 PM Raymond Chandler - Office UA Writer:
It was hot in Seattle. Not Los Angeles’ Santa Ana winds hot, the blast-furnace heat that drives men mad and women into those mad men’s arms. No, a calm persistent claustrophobic heat that drove men and women alike to stay at work where there was air conditioning, and the Internet, so that they could complain on Facebook about the heat while observing it from the coolness of the office. I got out of my rented Prius and started to sweat as I made my way up the stone steps to the polished hardwood door, the door slightly ajar to let in the breeze. As I started to lift the brass door knocker the door swung open and there she was, wolf grey eyes on a moon pale face framed by Goth black hair. Eileen, she was my client now, once though she’d been much more than that, but that like the Santa Ana wind was a memory of Los Angeles.
Eileen had called me weeping the night before, saying something about needing me to come up and troubleshoot some catalog merge issue, or something. I couldn’t really get the story out of her between her sobbing and the bad cell connection, so I settled for calming her down and took the red-eye up to Seattle.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come.”
“Babe, a promise is a promise, I expect you remember that.” I tried to keep the hurt out of my voice if not my eyes. “Show me your problem so I can fix this up and get back to a bar with air conditioning.”
“Here, I’m trying to get this catalog for Michael’s shoe exporting company to the printer before he gets back from Vancouver. If I don’t he’s going to be so upset…he hits me sometimes, and…other things.”
I ignored the sickening freefalling elevator trip that my stomach took as Eileen talked of Michael hurting her and concentrated on the Publisher 2007 publication she was showing me. She had gotten as far as launching the Catalog Merge wizard from the Tools, Catalog merge menu.
“I can connect to this one database, but Michael says that there are two databases for this catalog and I don’t know what to do!” Her chin quivered and my knees weakened.
“No problem doll, here in the Catalog Merger Product List dialog, just choose Select an existing list in the Add to product list area. Now pay attention, this brings up the Select data source window, so where does your husband keep his data?”
“Who wants to know?” Michaels baritone voice was accompanied by a pair of .38 Police Specials for emphasis. 999. vonKreedon - 7/30/2009 8:42:29 PM Raymond Chandler - Office UA Writer:
It was hot in Seattle. Not Los Angeles’ Santa Ana winds hot, the blast-furnace heat that drives men mad and women into those mad men’s arms. No, a calm persistent claustrophobic heat that drove men and women alike to stay at work where there was air conditioning, and the Internet, so that they could complain on Facebook about the heat while observing it from the coolness of the office. I got out of my rented Prius and started to sweat as I made my way up the stone steps to the polished hardwood door, the door slightly ajar to let in the breeze. As I started to lift the brass door knocker the door swung open and there she was, wolf grey eyes on a moon pale face framed by Goth black hair. Eileen, she was my client now, once though she’d been much more than that, but that like the Santa Ana wind was a memory of Los Angeles.
Eileen had called me weeping the night before, saying something about needing me to come up and troubleshoot some catalog merge issue, or something. I couldn’t really get the story out of her between her sobbing and the bad cell connection, so I settled for calming her down and took the red-eye up to Seattle.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come.”
“Babe, a promise is a promise, I expect you remember that.” I tried to keep the hurt out of my voice if not my eyes. “Show me your problem so I can fix this up and get back to a bar with air conditioning.”
“Here, I’m trying to get this catalog for Michael’s shoe exporting company to the printer before he gets back from Vancouver. If I don’t he’s going to be so upset…he hits me sometimes, and…other things.”
I ignored the sickening freefalling elevator trip that my stomach took as Eileen talked of Michael hurting her and concentrated on the Publisher 2007 publication she was showing me. She had gotten as far as launching the Catalog Merge wizard from the Tools, Catalog merge menu.
“I can connect to this one database, but Michael says that there are two databases for this catalog and I don’t know what to do!” Her chin quivered and my knees weakened.
“No problem doll, here in the Catalog Merger Product List dialog, just choose Select an existing list in the Add to product list area. Now pay attention, this brings up the Select data source window, so where does your husband keep his data?”
“Who wants to know?” Michaels baritone voice was accompanied by a pair of .38 Police Specials for emphasis. 1000. alistairConnor - 7/30/2009 9:43:54 PM J.K.Rowling - Office UA Writer:
"Harry! Wake up! ..."
Harry woke from troubled dreams and found he was slumped over his laptop in the library. "Gotta get this assignment finished", he mumbled to Hermione.
"Goodness Harry, haven't you finished your Lives of the Great Wizards presentation yet? You know you're going to fail Magical History if you don't hand it in tomorrow."
"I've got all the material I need", said Harry. "And it hangs together, sort of. But the formatting is no good."
A subliminal image of a ghost started zipping across the screen of his computer, a reedy voice accompanying the rythmic movement :
"Potter is a rotter, his Office skills are zero.
He'll never get a proper job, the messy little hero!"
"Get out of there Peeves!" shouted Harry, pointing his wand threateningly at the screen.
"All right, I'm going!" said the House ghost sulkily. "Just a harmless bit of fun!" The CD drawer slid open and he slithered out of it flatly, before resuming a three-dimensional translucent form and disappearing through a bookshelf, giggling like a maniac.
The three friends stared despondently at the thumbnails of Harry's thirty slides, with their widely differing typefaces and colour schemes.
"Face it mate, you're rubbish at Powerpoint." said Ron smugly. "Pack it in Ron", said Harry angrily, rising to his feet.
"No hang on Harry, we're here to help! Listen, there's this really wicket web site where you can download all sorts of Office templates. Go on : Marvolo.com, have a look."
"I've got a bad feeling about this!" said Hermione. "Oh don't be wet!" said Ron. "Look how about this scheme : Gothic Pallor. That'll be really good for a history presentation."
"Anachronism, Ron. The so-called Gothic style is a late 20th century Muggle trend with no relevance to..."
"Harry!" Ron said in a frightened voice. "Have you ... have you updated your antivirus lately?"
"Oh. I was meaning to, only..."
A black mist streamed out of the liquid crystal panel and filled the air, obliterating their surroundings completely. In a few seconds it cleared, revealing a totally new location.
"Yessss!" gloated Lord Voldemort. "The three finest wizards of their generation have carelessly uploaded themselves into my very server center!" 1001. vonKreedon - 7/30/2009 10:04:19 PM Nice!
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