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professional, and Ted examined her cereal selection. An array of bran-based products displayed in identical glass and steel canisters from the Container Store lined the back of the kitchen counter. Grape Nuts was the closest thing he could find to something edible. He wondered briefly if Laura suffered from constipation and reminded himself to check the medicine cabinet later. Hey, he was supposed to go in there and get a disposable razor anyway! If he happened to see some stool softener while he was there, well, that would just give him something to tease her about!
    Which, upon reflection, would be a terrible idea while she was in "my entire career's on the line" mode. Laura left, and Ted waited a respectful ten minutes before cruising for pornography on her computer.
    For some reason, tight-bodied lesbians in the throes of simulated passion weren't doing it for him today, so Ted closed the laptop and went to cut his hair and shave his beard.
    Great, Ted thought once he'd finished and thrown away all his discarded hair. He'd accomplished his task for the day, and it wasn't even nine o'clock yet. What the hell was he going to do with the rest of the day? He needed to be not thinking. Where did Laura keep her booze? He opened cabinets in the kitchen, and found only orderly stacks of dishes and alphabetized spices and dry goods. "Come on, Laur, where's the booze? Don't you even have any cooking sherry or anything?" Finally, in desperation, he opened the freezer. He seemed to remember Kendra, that attorney Laura dated briefly, pulling some kind of horrible-flavored vodka out of there when he was here last summer . . . .
    And, of course, it was still there, and probably hadn't been touched at all since Ted was here, it was sort of two-thirds full, as Ted imagined most bottles of frozen fruit-flavored vodka were in yuppie freezers all over America.
    He reached for the bottle, yelling at his inner Jiminy Cricket to shut up, yes, he was going to drink the whole fucking bottle and then probably puke it up, but so what? He was a raw nerve, he was probably having some kind of post-traumatic stress, he needed it . . . he knocked a pint of Chunky Monkey out of the freezer, and it bounced painfully off the top of his foot before hitting the floor. He looked at the ice cream on the floor and the bottle of lingonberry vodka (What the hell was a lingonberry, anyway?) in his hand, and stood there until the freezing cold bottle started to hurt his hand. He put it back into the freezer and closed the door and leaned down to pick up the ice cream.
    "I reserve the right to get absolutely shitfaced on that horrible shit any time I fucking want, okay?" he said testily to Laura's empty apartment. He picked up the ice cream. "Hmm, I wonder if this would be good with Grape Nuts on it . . . "
    While he ate, he decided he'd have a try at the original CD while Laura's IT buddy looked over the copy down at the federal building. He looked briefly at the spreadsheets and found they made no more sense to him than they had to Laura. He tried to look at Half-caf's Age of Mythology and Roller Coaster Tycoon files, but he couldn't open them without the software. But Virtuality was web-based. Once you bought a subscription, you just logged in. Maybe he could make himself useful and find something out today. Maybe at least view a profile or something, find out something about Half-caf. But then if there really was some kind of conspiracy behind Half-caf's rampage, then there were other people still out there looking for Ted and the lost CD, and they would probably be lurking in the Virtuality world waiting to see if anybody would log in with Half-caf's account so they could trace the connection back and get the CD. So he couldn't use Laura's internet, or they might trace it all the way back here. What he needed was a wireless hotspot. Such as he happened to know was at the Queequeg's down the street.
    But that would mean leaving the apartment, risking