<a href="130">130</a>    [ 131 ]    <a href="132">132</a>to be terrified." "Yeah," she said. "Yeah." Mom called us to dinner. Dad shook Ange's hand. He looked unshaved and worried, the way he had since we'd gone to see Barbara, but on meeting Ange, a little of the old Dad came back. She kissed him on the cheek and he insisted that she call him Drew. Dinner was actually really good. The ice broke when Ange took out her hot-sauce mister and treated her plate, and explained about Scoville units. Dad tried a forkful of her food and went reeling into the kitchen to drink a gallon of milk. Believe it or not, Mom still tried it after that and gave every impression of loving it. Mom, it turned out, was an undiscovered spicy food prodigy, a natural. Before she left, Ange pressed the hot-sauce mister on Mom. "I have a spare at home," she said. I'd watched her pack it in her backpack. "You seem like the kind of woman who should have one of these." &&& Chapter 19 [[This chapter is dedicated to the MIT Press Bookshop, a store I've visited on every single trip to Boston over the past ten years. MIT, of course, is one of the legendary origin nodes for global nerd culture, and the campus bookstore lives up to the incredible expectations I had when I first set foot in it. In addition to the wonderful titles published by the MIT press, the bookshop is a tour through the most exciting high-tech publications in the world, from hacker zines like 2600 to fat academic anthologies on video-game design. This is one of those stores where I have to ask them to ship my purchases home because they don't fit in my suitcase.]] [[MIT Press Bookstore http://web.mit.edu/bookstore/www/ Building E38, 77 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA USA 02139-4307 +1 617 253 5249]] Here's the email that went out at 7AM the next day, while Ange and I were spray-painting VAMP-MOB CIVIC CENTER -> -> at strategic locations around town. > RULES FOR VAMPMOB > You are part of a clan of daylight vampires. You've discovered the secret of surviving the terrible light of the sun. The secret was cannibalism: the blood of another vampire can give you the strength to walk among the living. > You need to bite as many other vampires as you can in order to stay in the game. If one minute goes by without a bite, you're out. Once you're out, turn your shirt around backwards and go referee -- watch two or three vamps to see if they're getting their bites in. > To bite another vamp, you have to say "Bite!" five times before they do. So you run up to a vamp, make eye-contact, and shout "bite bite bite bite bite!" and if you get it out before she does, you live and
she crumbles to dust. > You and the other vamps you meet at your rendezvous are a team. They are your clan. You derive no nourishment from their blood. > You can "go invisible" by standing still and folding your arms over your chest. You can't bite invisible vamps, and they can't bite you. > This game is played on the honor system. The point is to have fun and get your vamp on, not to win. > There is an end-game that will be passed by word of mouth as winners begin to emerge. The game-masters will start a whisper campaign among the players when the time comes. Spread the whisper as quickly as you can and watch for the sign. > M1k3y > bite bite bite bite bite! We'd hoped that a hundred people would be willing to play VampMob. We'd sent out about two hundred invites each. But when I sat bolt upright at 4AM and grabbed my Xbox, there were *400* replies there. Four *hundred*. I fed the addresses to the bot and stole out of the house. I descended the stairs, listening to my father snore and my mom rolling over in their bed. I locked the door behind me. At 4:15 AM, Potrero Hill was as quiet as the countryside. There were some distant traffic rumbles, and once, a car crawled past me. I stopped at an ATM and drew out $320 in twenties, rolled them up and put a rubber-band around them, and stuck the
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