Gooseflesh prickled my neck hairs. Wrenny! - that was who the Pixel Princess was meeting in Zillah!

Right then my PDA went nuts with beeping. My programmed Publicam agent had spotted Bernley there in Zillah, and an e-mail marked URGENT had just arrived too. Aporkalypse watched over my shoulder as I first checked the live netcams in Zillah. Nothing there in the restaurant. Nothing on the main drag. Nothing on the Interstate. The laundromat - there was the troll! He was propped lazily against one of the washers, looking directly at the camera, big goofy smile on his face. Every few seconds he would wave at the camera, and then turn and point to a coin-op phone on the far wall by the front windows.

I turned my attention to the e-mail. It was anonymous, from the eldorado remailer, and public-key encrypted. Very familiar. But again, we didn't have the key. Porky laughed lightly, and asked "Can I help you with that?" So I beamed it to her set, and she tried the key "NO WEAPONS." It worked!

It was e-mail from Bernley, with a file attached. Seems he was on a field trip of his own, he had met SENU, Princess of Pixels, and he was helping her. He didn't explain that further. But he referred to the attached file and asked if I could tell what it was. His message finished with a phone number. The laundromat, I figured.

Porky opened the file with her text reader, and a weird stream of program code was scrolling across her monitor. She puzzled over it for a few seconds, and then explained: "Eddie, this is source code. It's a program, ready to compile and run."