News ushered the whole gang away with her arms wide, as if to catch them in her net. When she pushed him out the door, the redhead muttered something about how we shouldn’t make an enemy of him. Was it a threat? If so, he never found the time to carry through, but the nerve of some folks!

When Copy got back to her chair, Arts was waiting with some paper and a grin. Every day, Arts wore a t-shirt, boat shorts, a ponytail. Straight out of his master’s degree in American studies at some university in the Northeast, where he’d written a thesis about the representation of Batman’s Gotham by D.C. Comics writers of the early ’90s and the implications for the attitude of the suburban male geek toward major metropolitan areas. The overarching question: Do people even like cities?

“You see him with Marketing last night?” Arts asked.

“Who, Layout?”

“Yeah, they snuck into the kitchen. I thought they were just talking ad placement so I walked in on them.”

“Wow,” she said, and then, “So your thing’s for web, right?”

Arts handed over his little essay — printed, because web or not, Copy insisted on editing everything on paper with her multi-color ballpoint pen. “Here you go.”

“Be still my beating heart,” she said. Arts grinned even wider.

“I’m sorry about last night,” she said. “I get carried away.” And before he could begin to address the statement, ask her why getting carried away necessarily involved sex, she said, “Any UFOs lately?”

There are no real UFO sightings, Arts insisted, because the aliens don’t like being seen, and they’ve got the superior technology to keep us from finding them. They’re mostly energy anyway, wavelengths holding together electrons that somehow think. They can do anything at all, including reorder our bodies, and they did just that the time they turned some apes into the first cavemen. The aliens can turn anything into anything, even one of us into one of them. That’s what people are talking about when