This is for Dan. We were talking tonight about the book's revision process, and he mentioned a bit that he had particularly liked in an earlier draft, that had subsequently gotten the chop. I'm pretty certain this section isn't coming back into the book, so here's a bit of immortality just for it. :-) Setup: Shefali is at a confusing moment in her love life...
Shefali saw the boys off and then sat down at her computer. She had plenty of work to do, but instead, she went online, searching the net for data. Since the days, years and years ago, when she first found the internet, posting to painfully slow BBS's with their small communities of like-minded folk, everything had changed. Shefali can't remember when BBS's morphed to newsgroups, when those were, in turn, overrun by newbies, so that the techies mourned and retreated to more private communities. It was still instinct for Shefali, when confused, to turn to the net for information. It was almost an article of faith for her, who believed in no god, that the answers to everything were out there, if you just knew where to look, how to ask the correct, precise question.
