Mary asked me out to dinner

and of course I accepted. We go out from time to time.....we are both in O.U. Administration, so we compare notes about things....and we get along pretty well on a social plane.....she says she likes my company because I'm the only other person she knows who can quote lines from both The Importance of Being Earnest and A Day at the Races.....things that are, like scotch, tastes you have to acquire ......her name is actually, believe me on this, Mary Tudor.....a lot of times people in bars or whatever just won't buy that. She is tall, skinny, fine-boned....a couple of years older then me....and has a much higher security clearance that I do, because she "works with computers"....she "has codes"......In the Treaty Powers scheme of things, she ranks as a Major....you know, in a State of Emergency, she would be commanding people.....Anyway, we went to one of those Top Deck places with the velvet rope and the whole nine yards extra fancy wise trip....she had asked me out...she has the bucks, what the heck? She had the game hen, I had the trout, etc....By the time we got to the cherry cheesecake and port, the conversation had worked around to the thing about deeply embedded data bombs......Mary said that was something that was no joke.....some of the old farts who wrote a lot of the code that many current systems were based on had......vanished.....Treaty Power Security, Cybernetic Branch, had no idea where they were.....they would be way up there in years by now, who knew what they were thinking of? Were they OK with where the machines were going now, or.....or even one senile malcontent could possibly throw the ultimate monkey-wrench into the machine works.....She swirled her port, and drank it off....she looked pensive, with a crooked little smile....I asked her what could really happen if this geriatric radical thing actually came down? She said the shit would hit the fan big time.....the virus probably wouldn't just get the teaching machines.....a lot of systems could crash....like life-support, and navigation....whatever.....We went out and found a bar with a dance band.....