Read John Golden: Freelance Debugger for Free Online Page B

caffeine/sugar/fat tanks, which explains why he was acting like a chimp on meth.—
    A minute or so passed, while I continued to make a nuisance of myself. Eventually I heard heavy footsteps inside, and Delphi's voice, heavy with sleep, said through the door, “Unless this is Publisher's Clearing House with a novelty check the size of a surfboard, keep that up and I'm calling the cops.”
    “Delphi, it's me,” I said. “John Golden. We need to talk.”
    “John? What are you—did you follow me home from work?”
    “No, I got your address off the net. Listen—”
    “My address isn't on the net.”
    “It is if you look in the right places.” I realized, somewhat belatedly, that I wasn't making a terribly good impression. “Lo ok, this isn't what you think.”
    “ It had better not be, because I'm about two seconds from dialing 911.”
    I took a deep breath. “I know who planted the fairies in your system.”
    There was a pause.
    “Someone really infested us deliberately?” she said. I could hear cold anger in her voice.
    “ I can't prove it yet, but yes, I think so.”
    “ You think so,” she said, “or you're sure?”
    “ I'm pretty sure.”
    “ Pretty sure?” She sighed, and I heard the lock click. “All right. Before you come in, you should know that there's a security camera above the door and it's already taken your picture. Also, I have a bat.”
    “ Where the hell did she grow up?” I muttered to Sarah.
    “ Seems like a sensible set of precautions to me,” Sarah said in my ear [47] .
    — [47] John has (obviously) never had the experience of being the only pretty young woman in an office full of young men. I would keep a bat next to the door too, if I lived alone, and still had a body.—
    I was about to respond with something pithy like, 'Sure, for a zombie apocalypse', but at that point Delphi opened the door, and I lost my train of thought again. She had her hair down, and it fell in tousled waves on one slim, bare shoulder exposed by the too-large neck of the man's t-shirt she was wearing, which hung like a tent on her slim frame and covered her to the knees. S he didn't actually have a bat—it was a bokken, a wooden practice sword for kendo, well-suited for cracking skulls, and she rested it idly on her other shoulder as though she knew how to use it.
    Something about the combination of the rumbled, vulnerable look and the deadly weapon reached down into my hindbrain and pushed a few highly significant buttons, with the result that I stood there for a few seconds with my mouth open while my mind crash ed, dumped core, and restarted.
    “ Well?” she said. “Are you coming in?”
    “ Excuse John,” Sarah said, painfully loud through the earpiece so that Delphi could hear. “He's a pig.”
    ~
    A few minutes later, I was sitting at Delphi's kitchen table, pushing aside a few stacks of magazines to clear a bit of space. Her place was a mess, in a way that I found endearingly familiar. It was the mess of the young woman on her own in the suburbs for the first time, used to living in a kind of groove between bed, bathroom, and computer, suddenly blessed with more square footage than she knows what to do with. I'd gone through a similar phase when I first left New York, complete with the hand-me-down couches and the kind of framed prints they sell at IKEA.
    It was also the mess of someone who rarely or never entertained visitors, especially visitors of the opposite sex. This put to rest a concern that had started growing in the back of my mind ever since I'd realized that man's t-shirt that served as her sleepwear might once have belonged to an actual man [48] .
    — [48] Clearly the most important thing to be worrying about at this juncture!—
    Delphi re-emerged from the depths of her bedroom, more professionally dressed and looking considerably better rested than she had that morning. Some ingrained host-reflex made her go into the little ki tchen and peer into the fridge.
    “Do you want