money so they keep it up. It only gets nuts when you start believing your own nonsense."
"I'm not so sure," Jefferson said. "It seems more likely every day. These are troubling times, you know."
"Oh, you too?" Wyatt felt disgusted for a moment. He remembered now that awkward scene. Jefferson Ash had once been a staunch Rationalist, but that has been before his conversion. He'd originally gone into the church for the lifestyle, but now it was taking hold of him. In was in and he was in now all the way, it seemed.
"Do you remember?" Wyatt prodded. "Do you even remember how it used to be? When the bots first came out? Look what they've done for us! All the landfills, eaten away. Nuclear waste? Disposed of, naturally. Oil in the ocean? Garbage in the sea? Gone, every bit of it. Abandoned cities, broken down, restored. Extincted species? Returned. Of course there have been some unintended side effects. There have been some rogue elements here and there. Some were accidents, some got carried away, and some were botched jobs. We deal with it. We take care of it. There's nothing we can't handle. That's our motto, what we believe, remember?"
"But the snakes," Jefferson counted. "What about the snakes? Sure the helpbots have done some good. They were supposed to. But now the line's been crossed. It's out of our hands. They create themselves! My God, what are they planning? What about us?"
"They're not 'planning' anything," Wyatt said. "They have some intelligence, yes, but hardly any more than we do. They make mistakes. They mess up. They're practically human!"
"The Church has knowledge," Jefferson informed him. "We have inside sources. The snake that got away this morning, that snake is dangerous. I wonder if you realize what you've done? Still a Rationalist I see, but now maybe you're rationalizing just a bit too much, don't you think? I don't wonder if you do. That was a bad mistake, my young friend."
"Come on, Jeff," Wyatt said. "She thinks the whole family's possessed because the kids cleaned up their rooms and Blair's messing around with Clarissa Simpson."
"I know about that too," Ash replied. "That Clarissa's in a tricky spot right now. The Church doesn't look kindly on divorce. Families broken up are not usually permitted to remain in The Gathering. I heard she'll be evicted soon."
"What is it with this place?" Wyatt blurted out, walking back towards his bike. He felt it was wrong to come here. Ash was not really his friend anymore. A friend is someone you can talk to. This one was like a wall, a repeating wall of doctrine. Frantics seemed to wish the apocalypse would happen and happen fast. They yearned for disaster, cataclysm, catastrophe. Living in a normal world where things take time and even calamity comes slowly was just too dull for them to bear. Ignoring the actual events of the factual world outside, they tuned in to their random noise factories of gloom and histrionics. They would not listen to reason. Wyatt knew. He'd been out there. For all the shrieking and moaning the basic fact was that the world was not going to hell, not in a hand basket or any other way, or rather, it was still going to hell the old-fashioned way, in due course and in its own time.
Nine
Bilj Bjurnjurd was his usual know-it-all self all the ride home.
"Don't worry," he reassured his host, "this will all blow over. You'll see. And it wasn't a snake. I know that for certain."
"Yeah," Wyatt shouted into the wind as he pedaled faster and faster, "I should listen to you, right? You, who never makes a mistake."
"I can understand your impatience."Bilj noted, “but you just have to hang in there. Time will ..."
"Spare me the homilies," Wyatt interrupted, realizing at that moment that he had no idea who Hominy Wells was or why a young man would want a picture of her on his wall. I am so out of touch, he reminded himself, and not for the first time. Being out of touch with the world at large was one of his perpetual goals. No good could come of knowing who was what or what was who. There was no shortage of images and input streaming in from the world. Quite the opposite, there was a constant deluge, none of which could be taken seriously. A million books a year and still they talked about 'literature'. A million songs and they talked about 'music theory'. A million movies and still they used the word 'film'. The convergence towards continual onslaught had been peaking for so long it was no longer possible to shut it out completely. There was a time when people had to seek out new things. Now there was no way of avoiding them.
"At least I have my Rubble Land," Wyatt thought, "where nothing and no one can reach me."
If only that were true. Rounding the corner he saw that the walls of his home were now covered in bright pink spray paint, the word "CHUMP" written over and over again across ever inch. Posters were plastered to his front door, displaying a blown-up picture of the so-called snake with the legend "$500,000 REWARD," and underneath a photo of Wyatt himself, with a smaller but still bold caption reading "FORMER CITY BOTNIK WYATT LORENZO RELEASES SNAKE INTO THE WILD".
"I did not!," he protested to no one, thinking, "It was all Jalopy's fault. I didn't do anything. I just happened to be there," though he knew, and didn't need Bilj to remind him, that he had been complicit, that he had been partially to blame, if blame there was to go around.
"Not even a snake," he spat as he kicked opened the front door, threw his bike into the hall, entered and slammed the door behind him. The floor of the hall was covered in paper, notes that must have been slipped under the front door and pushed further in by the others. They were filled with scrawled threats and warnings. Get out! Go Way! No Chumps Aloud!. We Will Frickin Kil U.
"Oh this is nice," Wyatt muttered, glancing at the phone. Sure enough it displayed bright letters announcing he had precisely seventy three voice messages. He pulled the plug on the thing and flung himself down on a chair. The wall screen was beckoning but he knew he shouldn't turn it on. It would only be more of the same.
"Blow over, eh?" He texted. Bilj was apparently not there. Whenever Bilj had something to say, he sure as hell went and said it, but if Wyatt had something to say, you'd never know if the other would be around. It had been like that since childhood. They had met online as toddlers, practically, and kept in touch ever since, never meeting in person, always a half a world apart. He had lived with this intermittent companion ever since and had grown accustomed to his ways.
"It was not a snake," Bilj messaged now.
"So what's the reward for?" Wyatt retorted.
"Maybe it's for you," Bilj replied. "Maybe you're going to get it all".
Ten
Wyatt slept soundly that night, and even enjoyed his dreams, in which large ants paraded around Rubble Land carrying yellow and orange banners and flags in some sort of celebration. Wyatt and a few other people sat on lawn chairs in the street watching the march and applauding every now and then. In the morning, he felt calm and even cheerful. He had decided at some point during the night to paint the whole house pink, and by nine o'clock he had been to the supply store and back and was already busily at work. The first order of business was of course to smudge out the various wordings which had been styled on the walls, and he went about it systematically. He had always preferred solo assembly-line-type work, where you did first one thing, then the next, until you had completed all your tasks. He liked the fact that when you dug a hole, it stayed dug. He had had too many jobs where digging a hole only led to others coming around and filling it back in again.
He didn't wonder about how the graffiti had appeared so quickly, or the notes in the hallway, or the messages on the phone. There was no more of it the following morning, as if it had all been a random spasm of nature. There must have been a team, he decided, a group whose job it is to go around slandering and stomping all over people, then moving on to the next guy. Maybe it had merely been his turn, as if he'd won the "kick me" lottery. The only person who showed up that morning was Jalopy, around eleven. He had been down to the Center, checking on their career path. He looked quite ecstatic as he pulled up on his motorized unicycle and jumped off.
"Dude," he exclaimed, "nice paint job. I never pegged you as a fluoresc
ent rose kind of guy."
"It just happened," Wyatt shrugged.
"Listen, man," Jalopy went on, "We're going to have to wait this one out a bit."
"So we're done, huh? Like I thought."
"No, no," Jalopy said. "We just have to cool it. Hey, I met this really great girl down there and she's going to handle our case. Cecilia. You've got to meet her. She's awesome. I even asked her out and she said yes! How about that?"
"That's great," Wyatt said, putting down his roller and wiping his brow. He was truly happy for his friend. Jalopy hadn't met anyone in awhile and Wyatt could see how excited he was.
"Yeah, thanks," Jalopy said. "Anyway, she says that as soon as this whole snake thing blows over we'll be fine."
"It wasn't a snake," Wyatt corrected him.
"Whatever," Jalopy countered. "Everyone says it's a snake, so it's a snake".
"No," Wyatt retorted. "That's not how it works. A thing is what it is, not just what people say it is".
"Really?" Jalopy asked. "Okay, then, what do you want to call it, then? The Renegade Robot? I'd say R.R. but then we'd sound like pirates!"
"Right, mate," Wyatt said in his best bad Australian accent, and laughed. He told Jalopy about the mess he'd come home to, the messages, and everything.
"I saw the poster, man," Jalopy said. "They even had it up at the