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It was such a short trip that Carlisle almost lost Merroth completely -- out the bedroom, left, then, in rapid succession, a right turn into the next door along the hallway, a grand total of about six feet. The lights came on automatically as they entered. There were no windows in this room. There was no furniture except a single raised chair in the middle of the room. A pile of big pillows lay in one corner, a pile of tangled cords and peripheral computer devices in another.

With a flicker, the entirety of the far wall came to life. The whole wall was a massive screen. The desktop background was a ocean-like abstraction of waving green and blue patterns, and in the middle of the screen was a waiting prompt. No instructions, no text of any kind, simple a white box waiting for input.

Merroth hopped into the chair and keyed in his password with practiced speed, instantly bringing up half a dozen rather plain-looking windows. Lots of text, not a lot of graphical interface, even on the music player in the top corner. There was an area of typed notes, a scheduler, and some screens that looked like garbled nonsense. "Save layout, standard format, close all, open overlord, browser, login local chatter, audio mute with sound alert." As Merroth commanded, the screen changed, the programs popping up as Merroth called them out. He immediately set about typing into one of the programs, too fast to follow, garbled nonsense characters like the ones on the screen previously, with one exception: the word William I in quotation marks. Merroth said, "Execute," and settled back.

The screen began to animate without any input. The browser window in particular flashed too fast to read, but there were a few pictures that turned up and were gone in the blink of an eye that had a medieval look to them. A new window popped up and began spewing out words and phrases that quickly changed and ran off the bottom of the screen. Merroth interlocked his hands behind his head and stared unblinking.

Merroth blinked and craned his head to see what Carlisle was doing. "???" was the comic book caption above his head. There was a little blink on the screen and the words "Lord Clark: lo roth" popped up. Merroth quickly responded with, "T. M. Clark: Lo dad. I think my classmate is trying to summon demons."

"Lord Clark: what
Lord Clark: ?
Lord Clark: joking right"

Merroth craned back around. "Are you trying to summon demons in our house?" he demanded. Carlisle did look like some demoniac child, all that red and black and the glowing halo and creepy eyes and skin and hair that reminded Roth of a doll's.

"Is that on William One?" asked Merroth as he typed one-handed. "T. M. Clark: Joke." The reply went zipping across the house to Boston. "If it's been published, you don't need to read it. Overlord will read it for us." Which sounded a lot more ominous than it really was.

"My sysadmin slave AI," said Merroth, pointing at the screen, which was still flashing over pages at superfast speeds. It was also displaying a new message from Boston, "Lord Clark: don't do anything I wouldn't -B" Apparently Merroth had not been actually reading anything, just having his program do all the work.

And then a new window popped up, " : "

Flushing faintly with embarrassment, Merroth attended to the message. "Reply: bunny cookie star break do not work work. Send."

" : . "

" : "

" : "

" : "

Merroth was about ready to die from horror at the fact anyone, Carlisle in particular, was witnessing this. "Logout local chatter!" he blurted. Emma would keep Boston occupied for now, meaning Merroth could focus on Carlisle and the project and getting Carlisle the hell out of here before dinnertime. He keyed up a chart of Overlord's search results so far. "Don't even think about saying anything to anyone about that."

Merroth would have thought it was obvious, but he could hear Boston's admonition ringing in his ears: People aren't going to be able to see what you see, Roth. Don't hold it against them. You can't see the things they see, either. Except Merroth was pretty sure he could see what other people saw and only a great deal more experience was going to teach him otherwise. "You can do what you want," scowled Merroth, and barked at the computer, "Generate idea web!" This prompted the computer to draw up a giant web, and in the middle of it, William I.

Given the way Merroth slouched in his chair and crossed his arms, it would seem he was now sulking. Carlisle had done something to displease Merroth. Not that it was hard. Everything Carlisle did seemed to displease Merroth on some level. Somehow, they were going to have to salvage a project out of this fiasco.

Merroth had no idea what "visual aid" meant, nor did he have any clue as to how he wanted to do the project. He had figured that Carlisle, having attended school longer, would know these things already and then Merroth would have been able to play along like he knew them, too. This was not going according to plan at all. Nor could Merroth admit to Carlisle that he didn't know this stuff -- to admit he was stupider than Glow-in-the-Dork in some regard was a fate worse than death. Fear rose in Merroth's throat. He needed a plan. He needed a plan fast.

So he exploded on Carlisle. "What the hell! Don't you know ANYTHING? Do I have to explain everything? You're a complete and utter ball of worthless trash! You stupid, stupid ******** dimwit!" As he threw this self-righteous indignation at Carlisle, his fingers tap-tapped on the keys in his armrests, entering in a set of commands that brought up a much smaller secondary search on school projects and then plopped a set of five webpages on the screen - a glossary of terms among them. "There! Look! There's everything you need! Can't you do anything without my help? Or do I have to help you sound the words out!" His tirade finished, Merroth glanced at the results of his own search, finally gleaning what it was they were expected to do for this project.