Chain of contact.

2000 Years to Christmas
Well, that’s a start. So, where did you go yesterday evening? Oh, okay. I didn’t know there was a pinball alley in this burg. News to me. Do they have any old Bally machines? Seriously? Got a quarter?

Oh, hi. Well, we were just starting to get back on our feet this week here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in upstate New York, Big Green’s adopted home, in the wake of last week’s medical debacle. Then fate moved its mighty hand, as Bill Conrad used to say in the opening sequence of The Fugitive. Now we’re all at sixes and sevens. In fact, some of us are at eights and nines, and that can’t be good. Pretty soon we’ll be fresh out of numbers.

So what’s the beef? Well, it turns out that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was at some point exposed to the COVID-19 virus. We don’t know how or when, but apparently it was someone at the pinball palace down the street … could be the quartermaster (you know, the guy who doles out the quarters to the punters) or the barmaid, or maybe a fellow patron. They can’t say, apparently, because of Hippa … Hippa McGillicutty, the owner of the joint, who apparently takes a dim view of such disclosures. Damnation.

Marvin's last known contacts.
You know what this means, right? We have to trace all of Marvin’s contacts over the past month or so. Even more problematic – some of those contacts are, well, us. Well, that shortens the list. To simplify matters a bit, I asked Mitch Macaphee to do a level-four diagnostic on his proud invention (Marvin) so that we can have a readout of his activities over that time. He told me that there was no such thing as a level-four diagnostic, even though I distinctly remember hearing it on a television program. After that little back and forth, he plugged what looked like a table lamp into Marvin’s USB port. The light bulb started flashing a semaphore-like code, and Mitch rendered it into this list:
  • Tumble dryer, corner laundromat
  • Stamp dispenser, post office
  • Gas pump, filling station, fourth and main
  • Air compressor, mechanic’s shop next door to filling station
  • Computer terminal, public library
Okay, so … those are all machines. Should we be concerned that Marvin’s only friends are inanimate objects? Or should we be thankful that he’s not rolling around town like Typhoid Mary on gimbals? Troubled times, indeed!

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