Death of a Coder – Ben Givertz-Steel
April 1, 2026
Ross had a perfectly fine remote-type job and a perfectly fine girlfriend. The remote-type job was a no-frills software gig for some kind of weird sex website, or maybe a dating thing, that he didn’t ask about ever, a start-up he could trace back to X. He just did the code, the back end, and the pun made him a little uneasy, so he just told people he did the complicated stuff and left it at that. The headquarters was in New York City, but he never visited; he liked Kansas City perfectly fine. Actually, he didn’t really do the code. He passed it off to a man named Ahmed in Bangladesh for some change. That was a secret but not really all that secret, since there was a silent agreement with all the other developers to slow down a little, especially with Stice and DeLint. As for the girlfriend, well she was a ballet dancer and had a pretty face like an Audrey Hepburn-type and when they’d watch Roman Vacation he’d tell her that she looked like Audrey and that he’d take her to Rome one day and she’d say you’ve never been east of the Mississippi and he’d just laugh and say I’m full of surprises and she’d faintly smile and he’d be satisfied with himself. He thought about that a lot. Maybe because sometimes he thought she didn’t really look all that much like Audrey and then he’d feel a bit guilty.
His life went on between the morning coffee and eating parts of meals in the wrong order. Like he would eat the ice cream first before the man brought the Chinese on the electric bike in the rain. He’d run and hide in shame, both for his failures, his inability to do all that much that day, and for the inconvenience he’d cause the driver man when he had to walk up three flights of stairs with Hot and Sour Soup. He’d feel sick eating General Tao’s because he’d already eaten Haagen-Daaz and couldn’t be sure why.
This one time he was mid scrolling, his sleepy-time routine, these big spirals of finger motion, when he came across an ad for his job’s conference which he hadn’t known about for some reason–a big immersive, Experience-type thing with new machines and salespeople, which from the looks of it was to be held in New York City.
Ross: What’s the deal with this?? [screenshot120725.jpg]
Stice: the confo?
Ross: Ya
DeLint: what’s the move for dinner
Stice: at the confo?
DeLint: Ya
Ross: Wait what conference?
DeLint: That one
Stice: Ya
Ross: The one I sent?
Stice: Ya
DeLint: Ya
The conference was to be held at a big fancy hotel in NYC. Ross had never been to the Big City. He wondered if he’d need some kind of weapon and what kind of cars they drove up there and after conferring with Stice and DeLint decided to buy a plane ticket.
The next day he received a 4:30 pm invite on his calendar from his boss Steve which was decidedly strange. He rarely ever saw Steve. Never ever, even. Steve would check in like every six or seven weeks with some complaints from up above. Like maybe they had to speed up the patch on some nameless bugs. That was the thing: they were never specific. It was just bugs. Bugs were always crawling through the system. Steve even resembled a bug a bit and he seemed to get squirmy like bugs could be crawling on him. He had this quality, this aura, like there was something itching that he wouldn’t dare scratch. The bugs just needed to be sorted and that was all. So that’s what he’d tell Ahmed. Only this time there were no bugs. Instead, Steve told him that he was fired; TrueLove.ai had decided to go with an Auto Gen AI agent from a start-up called DeBug.ai–the code would be supervised by Stice and DeLint who’d be getting promotions.
His Slack was deactivated before he got home. When he entered, he found a note on the kitchen table in the empty apartment, torn from Amy’s NYC themed notebook with little buildings on the periphery like children’s stickers: “I break up.” He couldn’t stand her grammar. Why not use the gerund, he thought, and why not specify ‘with you.’
Later that night he tried masturbating to all sorts of internet porn but couldn’t get hard, so he watched Roman Vacation instead.
He resolved to get on an airplane the very next day; if he got on, he could confront Steve in New York, he thought. He had never been on an airplane, and for him, the experience was like all things that are abandoned in perfect condition on streetcorners, especially the smell of fake air. The passenger tube was dead-skin dry though sort of sterile like that time he was in the hospital when his brother died. He fingered the empty seat next to him. He rubbed the synthetics to see if the texture could touch him the same as the waiting room chairs.
“What are you doing,” asked the woman two seats over with a vague gawking-thing on her face, her jaw hanging all slack-like.
Frozen to the bone, he acted as though he couldn’t hear her and turned back to his old Mad Magazine from the mid-2000s. There seemed to be a running joke about Bush, but it went way over his head.
His cousin Nick picked him up from LaGuardia. As for his story, well as far as Ross knew, Nick lived in a neighborhood called Sheepshead Bay with three Russian guys, heavy-set men with small arms, who watched a lot of horse racing on a local TV station through a makeshift satellite out the window above the AC. The four of them worked nights trading places at a few doors in downtown Manhattan, looting the fake IDs of college students to re-sell them to high school students.
“Why didn’t you fly into JFK,” Nick asked. “Doesn’t make any sense. Way up there in Queens. It’s like, what, no airports in Kansas City?”
“No, I flew out of an airport in Kansas City.”
“I’m breaking your balls!”
Nick was always saying things like that which made Ross smirk a bit even if he thought for the most part his lines made no sense.
His flaky apartment was disgusting and in piles: inexplicable empty packages, cheerio bowls, clothes. To compensate, he resolved to take Ross to Manhattan, The City, that night. They’d go to one of his favorite sports bars in the Lower East Side.
For Ross’s part, they took what seemed to be an innumerable number of trains and buses to reach their final destination, but it was okay because Nick kept peeling off his lines, these little zingers about how Brooklyn wasn’t the same and how everybody was a phony and how he’d never read Catcher in the Rye but was sure he’d hate that kid.
They reached this bar that was emptier than all the other bars on the street. The smoky den housed these frail clay-like old men, like clay if you painted it real white. On the TVs above the counter, the bartender’s Bluetooth played montages of Family Guy, Subway Surfers and an assortment of Brain Rot interspersed between the Polymarket and Kalshi graphs. And in the mix of all the yellowed-eyed, flat-nosed sixty-pluses, the ones with the skin boils and pock marks, there were these twenty-somethings, perfect skin, in vests and nice suits and well-trimmed stubble. All the paintings on the wall were these graffiti-type things with famous peoples’ faces pasted and plastered like logos. Apparently, a famous actor had given them to the bar to pay off his debts.
Nick rushed to the corner to dap up some guys unsuccessfully. He took out his wallet and handed them a large sum of cash. There was this loud bang on the table and Ross jumped up a bit, making some of the sixty-pluses crack up good. Someone had just lost a bet, and Ross learned that this was just the way things went in there and that he should get used to it.
Nick was talking to some guy, and it was funny because Ross started thinking that he recognized that guy. He couldn’t place him until he centered his attention on the cadence of their conversation and then he heard the voice more plainly in all its brutal tones and colors.
“Ross, this is John. He’s my politics guy. Actually, he’s also from KC.”
This guy John had been his high school bully, or something like that, but really vicious all the same.
“Hey, bud,” John said, shaking Ross’s hand.
He didn’t remember. It was clicking for Ross just then. John didn’t remember shit.
“I’ve got everything on him–Kalshi’s under,” John continued to Nick.
He had terrorized him, and by all signs, had no memory of even meeting. All that gray, gray horror.
“I don’t know, man. Isn’t a third term illegal?”
But for the life of him, Ross couldn’t recall exactly what it was that John had done to him. And the when. There was no sense of the when. It was like everything had occurred to some grainy other self a thousand years ago or a thousand years later and he just had this perpetual winded-ness. But he couldn’t trust himself enough to see it through to a clean picture-perfect, apple-thought-experiment, memory. And he did have one of those brains, actually. The kind where you can see the apple perfectly.
“People love him because he’s fucking funny, dude,” John said. “He’ll always win. That’s what you people don’t get.”
Nick must’ve caught Ross looking at John real strange because he started gearing up to interject with all those little muscles around his cheeks twitching pretty.
“Ross here is a programmer. Software and all that.”
“What shop?”
“TrueLove.ai.”
“No shit. I just sold those retards a bunch of our AutoGen. Not gonna be needing you much longer, no offense.”
“You’re a ‘Politics Guy’ for this AI company?”
“No, I just took Poli-Sci in college,” John explained. “The New School. My thesis was basically Gramsci-qua-Yarvin.”
“He makes a good bet,” Nick said.
“I’m in sales. DeBug.ai,” he continued at a ferocious pace, making sure to say the “dot” in ‘.ai.’ “We already had the commission close- you didn’t see?”
“Ross won’t tell me what they do because it’s some weird sex thing.”
“It’s not just some weird sex thing,” John said. “It’s the weird sex thing. It’s everything. It’s the Serpent.”
“The Serpent?”
“The Entertainment, capital-E. It’s the Thing. The David Foster-Wallace type beat. The infinite goon,” he explained, chattering frozen.
“What?”
“It’s a dating thing that’s got kink involved,” Ross interjected. “It’s nothing that serious.”
“Jesus Christ,” John laughed. “You really have no idea what you’re building, do you? A guy hung himself after he was caught by his kid with your app, man.”
“What,” Nick chimed in, again.
“Hanged,” Ross corrected him.
“Right,” John said, smirking. “Well, we’re always hiring SDRs.”
“I thought you only banged sales reps,” Nick added to the conversation. “Now you’re recruiting too?”
“Don’t be gay.”
“You sleep with co-workers,” asked Ross.
“Some of them are on the line-up,” John explained. “But they have to be on the G-Pill.”
“Birth control?”
“No- what? GLP. I got the script for the pills. Ozempic type shit. They’ve got to be on it. Thems the rules.”
“If they don’t?”
“Aperitivo flavorings.”
“For what?”
“Keep the line up skinny. And for all the Bushwick artsy weird girls, to get them off the cigarettes and weed. Shit’s annoying. But good pussy, the girls who can’t wait to be transformed by money.”
“You’re trying to manage their addictions?”
“What addictions?”
Ross made a pitstop to the restroom. He opened the stall door to a man on the toilet who was wearing a VR headset and big soundproof headphones with a fake robotic vagina wrapped around his penis. Ross kindly asked him to leave so he could piss peacefully but the guy wouldn’t budge so he relented and took his own penis outside the bar around the corner.
Stice: YO DID YOU GET FIRED???
Ross: Yes
Stice: YOO WTF??!!!
Ross: Yeah
Stice: Wait but they still need you man
Stice: Theyre asking for you
Ross: What do you mean?
Stice: There’s this bug dude
Stice: In your old code that nobody can figure out
Stice: I can’t understand any of this man..did you write a brand new index lol
Stice: Like genuinely what is any of this [patchROSS111125.msp]
Ross was sure he had no idea what Stice was referring to. He zipped up and kept walking, leaving Nick at the bar with John. There was a long line for what looked like a fancy club with a pack of girls not wearing all that much and there were broken glasses and the smell of bad weed and piss. He turned into a dive. It looked like a 70s living room, a replica almost to a tee of his grandmother’s, which seemed straightforwardly dumb to Ross. There was a pool game in the middle of it all and there were people betting on that pool game and everybody was drinking the same can of beer.
“I’ll have that same can of beer, please,” he said to the bartender.
He sat at the counter and began reading the long text file Stice had sent over. Pretty strange, he thought; he definitely hadn’t worked on it. Ahmed had, surely, but it couldn’t be parsed. He started going through it properly and there was this whole index at the beginning, like a bible-long thing, just pages and pages of this sludgy text, this scrap without any good formatting, which he realized was a dictionary of sorts: Ahmed had built a whole new language just to patch a bug.
When he kicked his stool, he noticed a copy of a big book with a big title on the cover, just below his foot, whose jacket read Infinite Jest. He picked it up and noticed the name of that same writer guy John had mentioned which annoyed him because John was bad, John was evil. He flipped to a page about three-quarters through the cloud-covered tome. He put his phone down on the scroll.
Ross: Hey Ahmed, sorry to get you at a weird time. I’m just a bit confused about the code here. The compiled sheet is so long for a routine bug fix. Like 450 pages long. There’s a whole index of terms. Could you fill me in a little? I’m told something’s not working (double bug, lol). Send me a text when you get this, thanks [patchROSS111125.msp]
“I love Infinite Jest.”
He craned his neck right and there she was.
Well no it couldn’t really be, but it looked just like her, even more than Amy. The little brown bangs, the mousey eyes, big eyebrows–every little detail all stitched together on that little head with the sharp angular jaw. She was a stunner that Hepburn.
“I feel like there’s so much happening today from that book. Everything’s repeating, all these spirals,” she said.
“The Entertainment,” Ross blurted out.
“Yes! Exactly! Oh my god. It’s like everything now. I mean you can find the spirals in everything now too but that’s another story.”
“I love David Foster-Wallace,” he said, nailing it again.
“Have you read his essays? They’re probably better than the fiction.”
“Audrey Hepburn.”
“Audrey Hepburn?”
“You.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, that’s acceptable.”
“I need to walk. Would you walk?”
As soon as Ross asked the question, he realized he’d really asked it.
She turned for a moment, laughing to herself.
“Confession,” she replied. “I’ve been on this Vyvanse binge to finish some paintings before the opening of my show tomorrow and I started mixing in these sleepers to go down, and I honestly don’t remember getting here. I just sort of woke up in the bathroom.”
Ross thought that was strange, but he was prepared: He nodded like a good active listener.
“What’s your name, anyway,” she continued.
“Ross.”
“Like from Friends? Or doubled up, all meta, like the DJ?”
“What?”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a coder.”
“Why?”
“Well, my brother was.”
“And he’s not anymore?”
“Well, he’s dead.”
“Oh, shit. I’m sorry.”
Ross shrugged.
“Where are you from?”
“Kansas City.”
“Well, we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
He just smiled; he was from Missouri.
“That’s a Judy Garland line, though,” she went on. “I guess you want me doing My Fair Lady or something like that–all dolled up, off the cuff, all coquettish.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Perfect. That’s perfect, really.”
They started walking out of the bar, or at least he started following, making sure to drop the book on the way out.
“What neighborhood do you live in,” Ross asked, not knowing any neighborhoods.
“Bushwick,” she said. “I’m in a loft. There’s 10 of us. Above the gallery.”
“Well, what do I call you?”
“Anya.”
And then he thought, well this could be like a Woody Allen movie or like one of those Before movies from the School of Rock director but then she suggested they go to this silent bar and, well, all that was caput, but he didn’t mind so much. He didn’t really have anything to say and figured he’d fail if he tried to be Ethan Hawke: That guy really had it. And anyway, he was going to ask her to go to a Back to The Future II showing—he knew the Cinetriplex was rescreening it all over the country and that people were protesting Cinetriplex all over the country and that he’d feel a little bad crossing the picket line, but he wanted some Doc Brown action, some virtual-2015 motion. Besides, he missed real-2015.
They walked just a couple blocks and then scaled these stairs into what looked like a basement apartment. She thrusted some occult knowledge at the door, a sort of rhythmic rapping, like a real long and complicated thing she must’ve known by heart. This bar opened up and a whole soiree function formalized in his view–he squinted to be sure–with these cartoonish characters in little sunken tables just staring at each other smiling and laughing every once in a while. Nobody said a word.
Anya put her finger to her lips and they sat down carefully. A server came by with a bottle of Soju, two small porcelain cups and a postcard with a photo of Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift’s engagement, ostensibly generated by AI. Did someone already know he was from Kansas City, Ross thought. He wondered if he just gave that off, a Kansas City tell. Then the server came back with a little baggy of white powder and a tiny little spoon.
Anya flipped the postcard over where there was a whole paragraph written out in precise little cursive in the center: “Welcome to Kelcē Lounge. Enjoy our house soju while you relax with a line of ketamine with your loved ones. The House Rules dictate that you may not speak in this abode. But do not fret: Silence is the Language of Masters.”
At that point, Anya had ripped a page of lined paper from her notebook and started scribbling something down.
Ross was antsy and fidgeting silly.
Anya: Take a hit of this and then we’ll start.
She carefully dashed some Ketamine in the tiny little spoon and took a bump into one of her nostrils.
She was holding out the baggy and the tiny little spoon which looked like miniatures in her long hands. She had these oversized spiders’ fingers like a piano player might.
His heart pounded as he raised the spoon to his nose.
She started scribbling something down again.
Ahmed: I can’t figure this out
Ahmed: I originally used ChatGPT to do most of it to be honest with you
Ahmed: It won’t listen to me anymore
Ross: What do you mean it won’t listen to you?
Ahmed: It won’t tell me what the index means, it says “you’re not a keyholder”
Ross: Dude I’m paying you to figure this out, please find the solution in the next 8 hours, my job depends on it so yours does too.
At some point the ketamine must’ve hit because Ross stopped fidgeting. They passed notes back and forth, offerings of near valueless dime-store psychoanalysis, which slowly degraded to the asymptote in quality. Anya subtly pointed to the booth across the bar where a man had sunken into the sunken cushions and just wouldn’t budge even when his friend started prodding.
“They already told me I could have a free night, so it’s on me,” she said outside the door on the street. “That wouldn’t be enough, anyway.”
“Oh, okay,” Ross said, realizing he must’ve tried to pay with the little cash he had on hand. “Thank you.”
“I’ve got to get at least a little sleep before my show tomorrow,” she said. “Besides, I think our little movie is fading.”
He couldn’t remember the second act. He wondered if he actually wrote any notes to her or if he just read hers.
“You don’t have to go you know,” Ross said. “It’s almost midnight. We could be almost anywhere. It’s not actually like in the movies.”
“It’s not? Well, I was thinking maybe it was. I thought to myself, ‘hey, maybe at midnight, I’ll turn into a pumpkin and drive away in my glass slipper.’”
“But that’ll be the end of the fairy tale,” Ross said on cue.
“You like fantasy, like movie fantasy, don’t you?”
“My brother used to say I live in my head. He told me I wasn’t all that real.”
“That’s a pretty rough thing to say.”
“I mean, I think I just wanted to be his friend.”
Ross locked eyes with the pavement. But then she grabbed his chin and kissed him. Ross felt a rupture in the weave, something that made everything about the future a lie and the past a short ramp. He’d never felt quite so actual; he got hard instantly.
Then she just turned around and walked away.
He sat there on the corner. He sat for a solid 20 minutes.
He walked back toward the gambling den uncarefully. He looked through the window from the street and spotted Nick staring at some girl. Then Nick looked straight at him and moved toward the door. Ross just kept examining the interiors. She was with John, this girl Nick had been staring at, as far as Ross could see, but her contours weren’t traceable. Then she did this big, elegant spin for the room and appeared, face-first, the mystery girl, clear as day: Anya. Looked like she hadn’t gone home after all; Ross’s chest fell in. Nothing felt actual again and he knew for sure now that time was a lie. That thing he’d remembered about John, that feeling of being beaten down and bullied, was happening right there in front of him. There were no twisted locker antics buried deep in the past, just this Anya left hook. And the VR guy in the bathroom stall started making even more sense–why you wouldn’t let anyone tell you when your session’s over.
“I could’ve sworn I saw your girlfriend in there,” Nick said. “The one from FaceTime.”
“It’s not her,” Ross replied. “Let’s go.”
“Where were you anyway?”
It took them hours and hours to get home in the Uber, but Ross slept most of the way.
When he awoke at eleven in the morning and started changing in a panic, he found Nick and the Russians eating cheerios and watching old Disney Channel re-runs on the couch—the Ariana Grande era. Their TV couldn’t have been more than 35 inches, but it packed a serious punch on the air waves.
Ahmed: I figured it out. I stayed up all night. [patchfinalfinalfinalv11.msp]
Ahmed: Apparently the key holder was Gemini. Or any other chatbot I guess. I’m kinda freaked out. It built itself a language to only be accessed by other LLMs
Ross: Thanks man!
The conference was all sweaty. The heater broke or something and everything was like a jungle in that fancy hotel ballroom.
“What we’re selling here isn’t a normal purchase,” said the man in the suit on the stage in front of the sea of sweaty seats. “We only offer debt. See what we’re doing here is we’re automatically signing people up on payment plans. Think Klarna, except now Klarna is native. And then we repackage that debt into a structured note. Then that note becomes a security. We’ll sell that security back to hedge funds who like consumer risk. Then we’ll keep loading the private credit debt to make this giant credit line for spending. We keep buying debt with that leverage. Debt on debt. But not just any debt—we buy private equity debt. We buy the debt of our backers. We’re calling it The Great Spiral.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Ross spotted Stice and DeLint. They were checking out the new TrueLove.ai Device—a full suite sex system complete with a moldable, foldable chair, a VR headset, noise-cancelling headphones, a military-grade computer and a fake vagina, mouth and asshole. He thought about the man from the stall. Ross wasn’t so interested in the toys, but he realized that his session, any kind of session, could start whenever he chose.
“I got it, I got it,” Ross yelled at Stice and DeLint, skipping on toward them. “I got the bug!”
A few heads turned as Ross yelled and Stice and DeLint looked a little embarrassed. In fact, DeLint started walking away which made Ross’s head tilt.
“Hey, man,” Stice said.
“I have the patch!”
“Yeah, that’s great and all, Ross, but we already figured it out. Or Gemini did, actually. But it’s done. Caput. Zilch.”
“Oh,” he said. “But I thought they needed me?”
“Enjoy the conference, dude. There’s a bunch of free food and shit.”
“I just thought we were looking out for each other.”
“What?”
“Like protecting our jobs together.”
“We’re not friends, man. I barely know you.”
That moment, those words and just the way Stice had said them, was a double, a fake. He could remember his brother saying those same words in just the same way.
“It’s okay,” Ross said, bear-hugging Stice. “It’s okay, I forgive you.”
Stice wasn’t sure what was going on but didn’t bother pushing him away.
“But the security isn’t even the main product,” the man on stage went on. He flipped the slide to show a photo of Biff Tannen from Back to the Future II holding the Sports Almanac.
Ross caught sight of his old manager Steve talking to DeLint. He looked buggier than ever and decided he didn’t need to squash him. That bug was just a pathetic little thing.
The PowerPoint slide flipped to an AI-generated image of Biff giving a thumbs-up while holding “The Porn Almanac,” which had a nude Riley Reid cut-out on the cover.
“Every time these men login with their dicks,” the man on stage explained, “to create their perfect virtual girlfriend to fuck, every time they go through an ad gate, every time they scan their body and face into The Device, every time they choose which virtual products to buy their perfect virtual girlfriend into our perfect virtual world, we get a new data point on the future. We can literally predict what these guys are doing in their house after they finish jacking off.”
The crowd applauded at a hushed volume only to be broken by a lone-standing reporter.
“What about the reported suicides,” asked the sweaty woman in the crowd to the man on the stage, “allegedly stemming from use of the TrueLove.ai product suite?”
Ross slipped out of that joint—bad vibes all around. He bumped into a man with a long trench coat in nothing but underwear walking inside the building, which felt like his ‘I’m in the crazy Big City’ moment.
Outside the fancy hotel, the local UAW union chapter was protesting and well they were going at it like hell with those creative chants and all. Ross grabbed a pamphlet from a man wearing a big sign.
“We’re striking against our employer Cinetriplex,” he explained. “They’re trying to replace concession sellers with robotic arms. We need your support now. This isn’t just about us. This is everyone.”
Ross nodded to the man and then kept walking down the block. He wanted to want to support the Mighty Mighty Union, but he knew in his chest that he didn’t belong to anyone or anything, just the movies.
He received a text from his ex-girlfriend Amy. It was this extra-long blurb that explained how she was sorry that she steamed off like that in a huff with nothing but a one-liner, and explained how it wasn’t really anything about Ross, not his porn addiction or gambling problems, all the debt he was still paying off, but that there was just something missing. And besides, she wrote, she was in New York City, taking this spur-of-the-moment trip and had met this great guy named John who worked in sales and went to a fancy school in The City and was also from KC and that’s when she realized it was really really over.
Now that smacked him good–Ross realized it had been Amy twirling in that gambling den the night before. Nick, for all his intellectual faults, was right: he had seen Amy.
Immediately after this epic epiphany, Ross deleted Slack.
And see what happened next was funny because he saw that same John, his arch nemesis, smoking a cigarette with some other guys in suits on the corner at the end of the block, and everything started glowing.
“You’re not my enemy,” Ross yelled, sprinting toward John.
“Oh..hey,” John said as Ross ran toward him. “Listen, my bookie told me about your bet yesterday-”
“No, you listen,” Ross said. “I thought you were my bully, but I was remembering a future.”
Ross grinned so hard his cheeks spasmed.
“It was all just some reverse déjà vu poppycock!” he continued.
“What?”
“You’re not my enemy: You’re the path. I mean, the coder is dead, man. I watched him die.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It’s okay, you can have, Amy. Just give me a job man. I’ll sell shit really good. Just teach me.”
“Here’s my card,” he laughed out. “Were you watching Polymarket too?”
Ross took the card smiling.
“No, why?”
“There’s this bet that someone will shoot up your conference. We think someone’s actually going to do it. You know, fulfill the prophecy and all.”
“Well,” Ross said, walking backwards swivelling around the group, “stay safe out there, boys!”
As he floated down the block, gun shots and screams rang out from inside the conference. He wondered about the man in the trench coat. But thinking didn’t feel quite as actual as running. Part of him knew that he might not find Anya again, but he also knew he had to lock in to his session. He wasn’t going to wait for the world to stop screaming: the world would always scream. Just someone else’s bug to patch. Ross was Bushwick bound.