Death Before Facebook

zap, she was on the TOWN.
    Now what?
    It was quite a lot like being in a real town—say, New York or Paris—with eighty million different options. She could walk down to the corner for coffee or she could take in the opera. And why do just one? Why not the movies, then the opera, then coffee and after that ice cream?
    There were categories: Body and Mind, the World, Interactions, the Arts, Sports, Politics, Hill and Dale, Computers—on and on like that; she counted twenty-three. And under each category, there were conferences. In some twelve or fifteen; in one or two, a hundred or so. At random, she picked one: Pets. She ended up at the top of a list of topics. As instructed by Steve, she pressed BR for “browse, reverse.” Now she was at the bottom of the list where the current topics were. The last one, Topic 256, was “TOWNies recommend vets”; most of the entries had to do with West Coast practitioners. Number 255 was “When Calicoes Turn Bad.”
    She tried another conference: Relationships. Worse still— there were 733 topics. Already she was overstimulated and she’d only been here five minutes. She could see how a person might feel safe on this thing. It was so enormous, surely you were just another graffiti artist. She realized with a shock that was what this felt like—illicit scribblings on someone else’s wall.
    I’ll just see what looks interesting and go there,
she told herself.
    First she went to Confession. It was nothing if not lively. The topic devoted to Geoff’s death had the rather flip title, she noticed, of “Out on the TOWN.” Outraged, Lenore (whose user ID was her name) had started a new topic called “TOWN Without Pity,” in which TOWNspeople were invited to assess their own voyeurism, cruelty, and lack of feeling. Someone called Bboy had answered: “Now, hold on, Lenore. I think about ninety-nine percent of the posts in that topic are really very caring. The topic name is a little over the top, but surely you realize that one of the main ways people have of dealing with grief is black humor.”
    A third user, none other than the legendary Bigeasy, had said simply: “Great book on that subject—
The Grief Cycle
by T. M. Collins.”
    To which Greenie had riposted: “I think Lenore has a good point. Haven’t we been acting a little like vultures?”
    “Speak for yourself, Green One. :-).” wrote Arthurx. The little pictograph was something both Steve and Jimmy Dee (a veteran of AOL) had told her about—a little side-wise face called a “smiley,” the idea being to defuse anything that might sound sarcastic, to show that the writer was just kidding.
    If the idea, thought Skip, was to make you feel like you were in a real conversation, this topic was a terrible advertisement. Because a lot of conversations were like this—banal. A lot of forgettable remarks came out of people’s mouths, but fortunately they were forgotten two minutes later. These were here forever; legitimate graffiti.
    She went back to “Out on the TOWN.” Now this had a lot more going for it. She had to admit that scribblings that escalated from a simple newsflash that a TOWNsperson had tied to getting the autopsy report and launching what amounted to a coast-to-coast investigation was a use of computer technology she hadn’t really thought of before. Lenore, Layne (Teaser), and Bigeasy were large in “Out on the TOWN,” Lenore and Layne especially. Both were deep in the drama of it; wanted to keep it going, maybe keep Geoff alive that way. (Or maybe throw suspicion off themselves.) But there was no new information—nothing she hadn’t already seen with Layne.
    As long as she was just browsing, she found a topic that explained the nuances of smileys and another that was essentially a guide to TOWN abbreviations. F2F, for instance, meant “face-to-face,” a type of interaction most TOWNies seemed to want to avoid. Then there was IMHO: “in my humble opinion”; SMTOE: “sets my teeth on edge”; MIML, as in “the MIML says”: “man in my life”; and Skip’s personal favorite, AFOG, as in “I broke up with my boyfriend; it wasn’t true love, only AFOG”: “Another fucking opportunity for growth.”
    Just to round things out, she went to “Sex.” Topic 543, at the top of the reverse list, was “The Sensuality of Ears.” She went down the list, finally settling on “What’s Your Favorite Perversion?” It was quite amazing. People whose names could be looked up by pushing a