where all our young professional readers live, and Arts held a thoughtful piece at the ready about a pulpy science fiction movie he feared people might ignore because it starred a pop singer who couldn’t act. The thing is, Arts argued, when you look at the actual script, The Machine That Ate the Future is a commentary on the most pressing issues of our time, the average Joe and those who hold over him the power of death. He didn’t once mention any aliens, because he knew Copy would delete that sort of thing with Chief’s blessing. Rather, he drew a series of analogies, eventually mentioning the protesters and their proximity to our workplace, then asked some tough-but-not-impossible philosophical questions.

Unfortunately, not a one of us can spell to save our lives. Chief especially, maybe because he overbooks himself (or maybe because he dropped five tabs of acid at once at a Hendrix show), can’t quit it with the run-on sentences. We needed her, so Copy came.

We also called her because the protesters were mad at us — it wasn’t completely clear about what — and we wanted someone with an eye for detail to track down whatever minor infraction had led a dozen of them to our front door. They waved that day’s issue around, which was actually our first hint that the thing had been distributed; for delivery, we hire these fly-by-nights with a cruddy old van, and sometimes the guys don’t get our stuff out to the public until evening. This group that came to bother us wore all black — though we’d seen enough of the tent city to know that they weren’t really representative of the protesters as a whole, and anyway News wears all black too — and they smelled a little ripe from living in tents for so long. Other than that they were normal people. We brought them in and let them wash their feet in our bathroom sink. When Copy got there, we took them to the glass-walled meeting room and asked what was on their minds.

“Hey,” said their de facto leader, a man with red dreadlocks down to his thighs. “So we wanted to thank you for not calling us assholes, basically, like everybody else does.” This was a good start. News smiled her tight smile and nodded, which is as close as she’ll ever come to telling somebody they’re welcome. The redhead cleared his throat. “But you did call us anarchists.”