Fish Swim in the Lake

Part 2.5 | Am Unavailable

She stopped in a bar at Sparks and Laurier and fed a plastic two bit piece -- a Chretien -- into a twenties style payphone. Maybe it's nothing, she thought. Maybe it's a random audit to keep us on our toes. Or if it is something, maybe in trying to be discreet I'll raise flags for using a phone. Nobody uses a phone.

Maybe it really is nothing. Maybe I vlogged a cop spitting in a government donut and that's all.

She felt the five hundred nallars folded in her pocket, crisply waxy plasteen, and thought five hundred nallars was a lot to pay for a random audit. She punched in a ten digit vox number and held the sticky warm telephone hook in her small round palm. It rang and she waited.

She had gone to school with Lola, the person she was calling, both grade school and university. Lola was sharply pretty with a soft, luscious mouth. Pretty enough to coast on her looks, which she did, with great deliberateness.

"I'm named for Lola Montez," she claimed. She said that Montez and Ludwig I of Bavaria had a secret son that was mailed off to the New World for a republican education. Then Napoleon was exiled and everything fell apart, Lola said. "Which is why I am not a German princess today. But she, my gran-gran-mere Lola, would never ever do work she didn't have to do. It would take too much time from what she alone could do."

alphaDana fidgeted grumpily with the still-ringing phone. Obviously Lola was at home; she would have the message service on if she was not.

Where Lola Montez hunted with princes and generals, Lola Saxover made an equal decision to associate only with high tech men. Programmers, hardware designers, hackers, crackers, they were all the same to her. In the twenties she would have needed more nerve to exile herself among blue-complected hornrims. Now they were simply inexperienced introverts. Despite attempts to introduce more women to programming and engineering, the disciplines were still male dominated and likely always would be. Women ended up as organizers and managers while the men operated the guns.

Lola Saxover, having married four multi-patent packing virgins, knew how to manage.

"Lola!"

"What? Who is this? Is that a telephone?"

"Yes, Lola," alphaDana said patiently. "Listen, I need you to hook me up with a high speed vlog dumper, tonight, right now actually. You're the only person I know who can. You can, right?"

"Oh, darling, no, not at all. Completely out of the question."

Posted by gtaylor at April 19, 2002 07:36 AM