Good Will Mystery Hunting

Good Will Mystery Hunting “Itll be over before sunrise.” The first time I heard it, midnight was approaching like a derailed train headed toward Charleston, West Virginia, the most important city in the world that night for all I cared (Read on to find why, after this commercial break). The third floor kitchen of Random Hall had melted from a relatively-docile social hub into a hyperenergetic refueling station for the 2009 Mystery Hunt team members as we slowly deep-fried our brains over the relentless course of 63 hours. Before me sprawled a miniature metropolis of snack foods inspired by the great American spirit of elementary school sack lunches: crackers, bread, peanut butter and jam, sodas and juice, cheese, mustard, apples, oranges, cheerios, granola bars and a box of organic alfalfa sprouts that appeared in no explicable context. For two protein-deprived days, I had lived off the sustenance of a third-grader who ate nothing but lunch and slept off the sleep schedule of a 24-hour pharmacy worker in Alaska. No wonder: Random Halls population had seemingly doubled on the cusp of the weekend as tides of alumni, friends, honorary residents, and other puzzle-obsessed hunters flooded into our warm, welcoming walls, while travel time from the 2nd floor kitchen to the 3rd floor lounge tripled due to the stepping-over of crowds of people stretched on the carpet, laptop cables and flipped-open screens, empty plates, and scattered scraps of paper marked with indecipherable words. Couch space was at an unprecedented premium. On a tired whiteboard, someone had written: BAND MITER SABRE JIG CIRCULAR SCROLL DROOD PICKWICK RUDGE TWIST NICKLEBY CHUZZLEWIT HURRICANE SMITHERS NITRO CHARLESTON HUNTINGTON WHEELING DRAGONFLY REVENGE TESTAMENT FANDANGO WATERWORLD NOWAYOUT (If anyone finds the pattern, I will be suitably impressed.) After a few hours and a few more false starts, I was staring at this with half-a-dozen others as we soaked in a collective haze of puzzlement: After a few additional hours and around 29842942 wrong leads, I drew some more lines on the hexagonal mess above, saw something interesting, and yelled “SPACEBAR!!!” A beat of silence, and then half the room was crushing my ribs with hugs while the other half burst into the lounge to phone headquarters with our answer. Confirmed. It was 1:00 AM on Monday, and after puzzling, crosswording, board-gaming, coding, algorithm-writing, Googling-and-Wikipedia-ing, picture-analyzing, wordplay-solving, index-calculating, and head-against-wall-banging non-stop(ing) since Friday(ing) at noon(ing), we had dragged ourselves into the final stretch of Mystery Hunt. Solve two more meta-puzzles, find the hidden location on campus, call headquarters to confirm, and wed be done before sunrise. Theres just one minor hitch: MIT Mystery Hunt is diabolically hard. Quoth Wikipedia, “One of the oldest and most complex puzzlehunts in the world . . . the puzzle solutions require knowledge of esoteric and eclectic topics.” Somebody should edit this understatement. For those who are morally opposed to clicking on hyperlinks in my blog, heres the summary: Puzzles are organized into rounds and are posted online at set times. Few if any come with instructions (half the challenge is figuring out the challenge!). Rules change depending on the year and may or may not actually exist. Each round concludes with a metapuzzle, which integrates answers from that round, and solving all meta-puzzles plus a meta-meta-puzzle allows you to run around wildly on campus in search of the hidden item. First team to find it wins. Winning team writes the puzzles for the following year. This years theme was an Interstellar Board Game Convention set in 3009, an epic-scale, unspeakably convoluted mash-up of sci-fi plots and RPG-inspired tasks that is undoubtedly much cooler than it sounds. Except that my description comes nowhere close to describing the exuberant creativity and sheer brilliancy that the puzzle-writers mercilessly flaunted in our admiring, frustrated faces. Examples included (1) an Apples-to-Apples applet (“apple-t”) that gave you strange error codes when you tried to play certain cards, (2) a series of lolcats with suspiciously accurate spelling, (3) a word puzzle grid that came with video clips of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers instead of actual clues, (4) a PDF that appeared to be blank, (5) a board game given to all the teams . . . without instructions. Solutions? (1)All the error codes were from the Mac platform (“apple” computers). Somehow, finding this led you to the grocery produce number for a certain type of apple. The answer was GINGER GOLD. (2)Each lolcat only had one correctly-spelled word. Taking the first letter of these spelled a message that led you to the Frontier Airlines website. It turns out that each of the animals in the lolcat pictures was taken from images on the airplane tails. Organizing these animals by name and the tracking codes of each plane gave you a message about “Korean Star Margaret.” The answer was CHO. (3)The trick was to identify the characters played by Rogers and Astaire and write them in the grid. The second trick was to realize that Gingers character name had to be written backwards each time, since Ginger “did everything he did, but backwards and in high heels,” a nod to the classic quote. Reading the grid vertically provided the necessary clue. (4)Zoom in to 6400%. (5)After about 3948293 transformations, the game turned out to be checkers. Every piece of the board game (pawns, spinner, the board itself, etc.) turned out to be necessary in order to solve another puzzle. One of my personal favorites was the time-variant word search. Stare at it for a few minutes, and you begin to comprehend why MIT students lose uncountable hours of sleep during Mystery Hunt. Rewind to Friday, noon. Thanks to Mystery Hunt Kickoff (a.k.a. “Zyzzylcon 3009”), Lobby 7 approximated the milder sibling of a bad sci-fi convention. Soon after, the teams dispersed from Lobby 7 to commence the first phase of hunting. As a sad and unfortunate person, I broke away from Randoms team of 70+ members and spent 7 grueling hours working in my research lab instead of 7 grueling hours cracking through puzzles with maniacal fervor. By the time I returned to Random at 8:30 PM, puzzling was in full, glorious swing and my maniacal fervor was still screamingly repressed. Catherine 12 handed me a fistful of gift certificates to the best ice cream parlor in America and I sprinted away into the snowy night, channeling my maniacal fervor into purchasing ice cream for Off by Two Pi. (Its a tradition to pick horrifyingly terrible team names that put the worst of homemade garage bands to shame. Other gems: S.C. Johnson: A Family Company, The Evil Midnight Bombers What Bomb at Midnight, Colon-Inflating Rhinoceri, Eigenpirates, Grand Unified Theory of Love, Team Unwanted Pregnancy, Jews for Cheeses, Hella Minerals, and Super Team Awesom e.) Rounding the end of the block, I dashed into Toscaninis, nearly knocked over a few customers/chairs/tables, slapped down the gift certificates on the counter, and casually ordered $92 worth of burnt caramel, Belgian chocolate, coffee cookie sandwich, regular coffee, cookie dough, raspberry, chocolate banana, hydrox cookie, tiramisu, chocolate banana, and banana gingersnap molasses ice cream. It took around 20 minutes for Toscis to process my order, so I lounged around, enjoying the cozy ambiance and savoring the last few drops of peace that I would taste all weekend. With the help of Umaimah and Katelyn, Random Hall was thoroughly dairy-fied for the night. After which I chucked my camera into the snow and finally plunged head-first into the madness of Mystery Hunt. Fortunately for this blog, part of that was a lie. Parenthetical note, sans the parentheses: Somewhere in the haze of fluid time trickling around Saturday night, I caved in and took a break from puzzling and peanut-butter-sandwich-eating in order to join Fifth East on their weekly pilgrimage to Pour House (half-priced burgers on Saturday nights!). The treacherous hike across the Moat of Charles into the Kingdom of Boston gave me frostbite about 29 times in the course of 20 minutes, but luckily I ordered a Hawaiian burger and all was forgiven. (American cowmeat topped with a luminous slice of pineapple glazed in Terriyaki sauce) Anyway, since this post has thus far defied all chronological reason, lets go back (or forward) to the wee hours of Monday morning, when Random Hall was as abuzz as the inside of a mosquito light. Desperately we scrutinized each luxuriant and perfect drop of a hint, stretching the exhausted limbs of our minds toward the gleaming secrets of Zyzzl 3009, striving mightily to beat the loathed genius of S.C. Johnson: A Family Company. Time crawled like a frantic beetle. 3 AM. Like the coming of daylight savings time, it caught us unprepared. At 3:02 AM, team Beginners Luck found the coveted location and won the hunt. Off by Two Pi finished in 4th place. I missed the sunrise but was awake by sunset. Epilogue: Win or lose or end-in-a-perfectly-respectable-fourth-place, Mystery Hunt was unforgettable, not least in the sense that my Google search history wont let me forget it. For your viewing pleasure, heres a selection of some deeply profound queries that I implored: aliens in disguise burden of eternity charles xavier dickens charles dickens basil coneheads cykosis max ex-hockey player niagara falls greatest hockey players hebdomad high school aliens hexagon dance hockey players list hockey series randy jackson calls you x men hockey xho key xhoc key xhockey xtreme hockey player quantum pool quinquinella know your sid join military without dying stunt double survival airport tracking numbers grizzly bear in front of mt. mckinley boston cable channel ist cast of x-men clam chowder clip art woodsaw court terminogy cream of mushroom soup cubic zirconia famous titanic survivors good will hunting script hexadecimal clock humpty dumpty herbie hancock song list let me google that for you list of superhero movies movies in 2000 people named rose sawhorse polaroid picture mirror porridge six degrees calculator smurfettes swordfish words ending in oilet Real life resumed shortly thereafter. Post Tagged #Mystery Hunt

Focus On Voluntary Turnover Business Essay - Free Essay Example

Shortest definition of organizational politics could be termed as unsanctioned influence attempts that seek to promote self-interest at the expense of objectives, goals and growth of an organization. Cropanzano and Grandey, in press; Drory and Romm, 1990; Ferris, Frink, Beehr and Gilmore, 1995; Ferris and Kacmar, 1992; Ferris and Judge, 1991; Ferris, Russ and Fandt, 1989; Kacmar and Ferris, 1993). Organizational politics is a subjective experience and state of mind which cannot be measured exclusively on objective state (Gandz and Murray, 1980). According to Gerald R, Farris (1992) mentioned that perception of organizational politics influenced by organizational, environmental and personal factors in turn influences organizational outcomes such as job involvement, job anxiety, job satisfaction and physical and psychological withdrawal from the current working organization. Organizational politics perception also could be due to variability on job, age, sex education as well as the hierarchal level in an organization resulting impacts in job satisfaction, anxiety, employee promotions. In the same way other causes could be job environment influences (Graen, Novak and Sommerkamp, 1982), wok group cohesion (Price and Muller, 1986), span of control (Ferris, 1990), Feedback and advancement opportunities (Ferris, Frink, Galang, et al, 1996). Every organization have human resource with a different age, income, education, gender and hierarchal level, and they all respond or participate differently in the organization politics, so we can say that status level, economic conditions and personalities are effects the organizational decisions (Vigoda, 2000). Employees with a low hierarchal level think that organizational policies are the main source of unjustified decisions and employees frustration and these unfair decisions and frustration simulates negative and unhealthy attitude (Vigoda, 2000). For the top level of organizational human resource, organizational politics works as centrifugal force which pushes them to physical withdrawal and they find a new job place which they think or perceive less political. So we can clearly understand that organizational politics strongly correlated with the organization commitment. Bozeman (1996) and also depicts that this relation cab be a negative relationship. Every organization provides some rules and policies for employees who are engage in political behavior for guidance. In the organizations where these rules are not available to prescribe how to act, there are m ore chances of the occurrence of political activity. In the circumstances where rules and policies are not defined and available for the guidance of employees then circumstances allow individuals to define a situation and fit their own wants and needs. This redesign of situation is often called political behavior. (Kacmar, 1995). Ferris et al (1989) and Fandt, and Ferris (1990)found that, political behaviors are found more in the organization where uncertain conditions and ambiguity exist in work place. According to Ferris (1992) job autonomy, job variety, and feedback can be a helpful tool to reduce uncertain condition from the work place, low uncertain environment leads to reduce political activities in the organization and provide healthy space to achieve organizational goals. According to Daft, 1989. Job autonomy and low variety of tasks could be helpful factors to reduce political situation and environment. Ferris et al 1989 identified that age, gender, tenure, race play very vital role in perception of organizational politics, human resource with a different demographics sound differently in the way to organizational politics. Mintzberg (1983, 1985) identify another important factor of organization politics which is Formulization, organizations who are highly formalized, they have very less rate of organizational political activities. It is also an outcome from the research of Mintzberg (1979) which tell us political activities are lowest in highly formulized organization. According to Mintzberg (1979) he indicates that professional organizations have more political environment then other organizations. Ferris also highlighted the same points and fact in his researches that opportunities (Smith et al, 1962) also reduce the political situation or political behavior from the organization and organizational opportunities have negative relation with organizational politics and peoples involved more in politics when they see they have lesser opportun ities of growth and betterment. According to (Madison et al, 1980; Ferris and Buckley, 1990) employees performance is linked with the employees promotion and if the organizational decisions regarding promotion are fair and transparent the ratio of politics in organization at very lower level. Employees promotions is also a most essential and basic ingredient of organizational politics. Every employee in the organization have a different personality so personality traits also an important factor of organizational politics Machiavellianism. According to Cropanzano in 1997 he found that there are so many other factors of organizational politics which could be countless. In the organization where politics exists, there employees think that they are working hard and their hard work will not be rewarded properly, timely and consistently. Since Employees think that power is a key to success and more powerful employees and groups and affiliation with these groups provide more benefits to the employees. In these situations employees have options to quit or withdrawal, (Mobley, 1977) stated in his study, withdrawal process means, the process in which employee want to quit from the organization if a person dissatisfied from the organization he will be start thinking about the switching of job and think about leaving the organization. (Mobley, 1977) these withdrawals could be physical and psychological. In physical withdrawal peoples quit the organization and another one or physically withdraw their self from organization and in the case of psychological withdrawal is quit different with the physical withdrawal, in psychological withdrawal process employees mentally unable to present their self on the work place and do add any value in his or her job responsibilities and they spend lot of time in day dreaming and detracted others and also involved in non productive works. So we can infer that Psychological withdrawal positively correlated with the organizations politic es. (Ferris et al, 1993; Randall et al, 1994). Similarly as Ferris et al, 1993 also depicts that organizational politics have a positive relationship with the employees turnover intentions. This situation could be happen where employees become more isolated and do save themselves from political situations then they take a step towards turnover.(Price, 1977) Turnover means the ratio of the number of employees quit from the organization during the period and divided these employees by average number of employee in the organization during the period (Price, 1977). This research focus on voluntary turnover means turnover from the side of employees. Turnover intentions are the inclination or the attitude of the mind. If the organization noticed that the employee are having attitude of turnover the organization must find out the problem, because these problems making a mind of employees towards quitting. (Wanous, 1979). Organizational commitments, turnover intention and job satisfactio n are interlinked with each others, but according to study, organizational commitments had strong relationship with turnover intention, though the employees satisfaction are directly related with the turnover intention, unsatisfied employee always searching new and better opportunities.(Peters, Bhagat, OConnor 1981) and all kind of organizations are focusing on these problems and take it seriously to reduce the turnover ratio from their organizations (Lucas, Parasuraman, Davis Enis, 1987). Another point of view which was presented by Pfeffer (1981) about organizational politics is organizational politics can be use for the improvement of an organizations processes. Pfeffer (1981) also argued that organizational politics also helps organization in betterment of processes, execution of plan, implementation of new strategies and for running of business. Employees who are skillful in doing politics they can get maximum rewards in his professional career and get maximum benefits fro m his or her organization.(Wayne Farris, 1990). According to Pfeffer (1989) he further suggest that political focus is very much important perspective in sympathetic of career growth. He also found that lower levels of employees are highly involved in job rotation or turnover. 2.1.1.1 Impacts of Organizational Politics on Employees Physical and Psychological Health. Here it is very much important to understand the impact of perception of organization politics on the employees physical and psychological health because organizational politics creates number of problems for the organizations human resource. In this regards many researchers explore relationship between organizational politics and employees health physical or psychological. Organizations where higher level of political environment exist, it will increase or generates the level of stress in employees (Valle Perrewe, 2000) and it will also increase level of tension for the organizational human resource and this will creates anxiety anxiety (Ferris, Frink, Galang, Zhou, Kacmar, Howard 1996) job and somatic tension and level of employees energy is low in these circumstances (Cropanzano, 1997). Political environment effect overall productivity of an employee and political situations are also creates conflicts between employees and organization. Similarly tiredness and burnouts creates number of problems which are known as physical problems like headaches, backaches, lingering colds, gastrointestinal, etc (Maslach and Jackson, 1981). The basic out come of organizational politics is work stress. Work stress is subjective feeling of an employees which can be take place when employees feels that he or she do not have sufficient capabilities to perform and complete the organizational work and task and he feels he unable to achieve his or her goals and objectives. (Folkman Lazarus, 1991; Edwards, 1992). Work stress drops negative impact on the employees performance as well as organization and economy performance because these all things are inter linked with each other. Due to work stress organizations face number of costs like wastage of time, reduction in production processes, physical accidents and in the shape of lost (Ganster and Schaubroeck, 1991; Holley and Frye, 1989; Joure, Leon, Simpson, Holley and Frye, 1989; Minter, 1991; Murphy, 1988) and these all mo tives also indicates work stress and organizational politics. If employees feel or perceived, organization have political environment or politics involved in every matter of organization and also involved in decision making process of an organization then employees reports low resistant power, work tension, general health problem and negative attitude (Cropanzano, 1997). Cropanzano mentions in latest book that, organizational politics badly effects on the organizational formal decisions and politics involved in organizational formal decisions then the decisions are tend not be transparent and this non transparency pushes the employees towards turnover intention and mental withdrawal. Non transparency of decision also increase stress level of employees because employees are unable to execute their decisions as they thought and plan. Political environment and stress will also creates uncertain conditions and situations and politics and stress also involved how peoples understand un certain situations and where necessary actions can be taken for the removal of politics and come out from stress (Cropanzano, R., Li, A. in press). Some researchers describe stress, it is internal resistance power of peoples in which they under estimate their self against demands and they think these demands are exceeded from their capacities, some others researcher depicts that Politics as Stress (Dipboye Foster, 2002). Kahn and Byosiere (1992) categories the responses which will be the creation of stress, according to him there are three kind of responses or outcome of stress, physiological, psychological, and behavioral. Stress damages peoples physically in reduce their physical strength, physical outcome of stress involve, high blood pressure, high heart rates, and high cholesterol level (Fried, Rowland, Ferris, 1984) here the researcher mentioned very limited outcomes but these should be more then these. Psychological outcomes of stress involved anxiety, burnout, confusio n, depression, job dissatisfaction, health problems, and fatigue (Beehr, Walsh, Taber, 1976; Cooper Roden, 1985; Davidson Cooper, 1986; Fisher, 1985; Kobasa, 1982). At the last but not the least final outcome of stress is behavioral damages like absence at work, late arrivals, negative attitude, early going, low motivation level, low work productivity counterproductive behavior, job performance, turnover, and drug use on the job9192 (Blau, 1981; Mangione Quinn, 1975).

Personal Factors That Affect An Individual s Cognitions...

Personal factors, such as age, gender, traits, and attitudes can impact an individual’s cognitions and influence the type of crime they commit. In accordance to the Penal Reform Trust Bromley Briefings (2016), out of 3,861 women in prison in England and Wales in June 2016, eighty-five per cent are imprisoned due to a non-violent offence. Compared to women, men are more likely to be in prison because of serious violent offences, particularly violence against the person (Allen Dempsey, 2016). This is a possible indication that women and men have a different thinking process due to different social structures. Gender In the past, female violence was socially recognised and celebrated (King, 2013). Famous examples include Joan of Arc, the Amazon fighters, and Boudicca (King, 2013). However, in the current day children are exposed to media and social norms depicting what is expected of each sex (Hoeksema, 1990). It is expected that girls should be ladylike and behave non-violently, while it is more acceptable for boys to misbehave (Hoeksema, 1990). Lawrence Kohlberg (1966) was one of the first supporters for the cognitive theory on sex-typed behaviours and personality traits (Hoeksema, 1990). Kohlberg argued that children construct a cognitive representation of the world, also known as schemas, which then guides their behaviour (Hoeksema, 1990). All children develop a gender schema of how their sex is supposed to behave (Hoeksema, 1990). Perhaps the reason why women are moreShow MoreRelatedFemale Representation For Female Guilty Parties1701 Words   |  7 Pageslike crime and prostitution; the law frequently treats the prostitution exercises of guys and females in an unexpected way. and it has vacillated for still different classifications, for example, exasperated strike and drug law infringement (see Steffens Meier, 1993, for an audit of patterns and clarifications). 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Solving World Hunger through Microenterprises, Policy, and...

Solving World Hunger through Microenterprises, Policy, and Community Health Workers The World Hunger Education Service (2011) describes world hunger as the want or scarcity of food or nutrients in a country. World hunger is an insidious issue that impedes progress for millions worldwide. World hunger is not only a physical need, but also has emotional and ethical implications. Living in â€Å"obesogenic† America where supermarkets display hundreds of thousands of food items and obesity affects more than 30.6% of all Americans (Nation Masters, 2011), it is unimaginable to concede that world hunger still exists. As a U. S. dietitian working with many morbidly obese patients and others with obesity-related diseases, it is unthinkable that it†¦show more content†¦Global ethics work to address the moral questions that arise from globalization. According to the University of Birmingham (n.d.) some of the most pressing of these questions arise from the â€Å"great systemat ic disparities of wealth, health, longevity, security, and freedom across the globe (para. 3). Ethicists Andre and Velasquez (1992) suggested that world hunger is a problem that violates the ethical concepts of beneficence, justice and fairness, and respect. These ethicists argue that solving world hunger should be a moral obligation. Beneficence is any act that is done for the benefit of others (Tong, 2007). As it relates to world hunger, beneficent actions suggest that the global community work to solve this problem so that all global citizens have enough to eat. Respect for life dictates that people are valued as humans with worth to the human race. Non-maleficence suggests we do no harm to others. Harming someone by withholding food, or providing foods to only certain groups of people, is unethical. The final principle of clinical ethics is justice and this demands that global benefits, risks, and costs are distributed fairly (Beauchamp and Childress (2001). Additionally, distributive justice another ethical theory suggests the value of human dignity and the common good and holds that the rich should care enough for the

Enterprise and Entrepreneurial Management Free Essay Example, 3250 words

Entrepreneurs need to set realistic and achievable goals. It may be very easy to set strategic objectives but very difficult to implement these objectives to the middle and lower management. Most entrepreneurs do not give attention to the fact that the predetermined goals they are setting may be rigid, extremely rational, bureaucratic and dysfunctional at times. Hence, the formulation of potential strategic objectives may not hold true during the implementation process (Shrader, Taylor Dalton 1984). This is one reason why the strategic objectives should be flexible and top executives need to change it depending on the changing market situations. The third step in a business plan is to formulate a market plan which takes into account the market promotion and advertisement activities that has to be undertaken in order to promote a certain product or service. However, most firms face major problems due to the paucity of data with relation to a particular product or service. Such infor mation and data is relevant to the formulation of such plans. Many firms are not able to carry out extensive quantitative and qualitative market analysis thereby not being able to obtain rational results. We will write a custom essay sample on Enterprise and Entrepreneurial Management or any topic specifically for you Only $17.96 $11.86/page Marketing plans formulated must be in accordance with the above three demographic factors in order to be successful (Yakhou Dorweiler 2006).

Terrorism Terrorism Is The Reason For Such Events

Before terrorism can be discussed in this paper, it must first be explained. Terrorism is the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims. In other words, terrorism is the reason for such events like 9/11. You may think to yourself, why would the events of 9/11 happen in the first place? Well the answer may be a little tricky. First, the 9/11 attacks were a series of four coordinated attacks by the Islamic group Al-Qaeda on the United States on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001. The attacks involved suicide attacks used to target symbolic United States landmarks. Four airplanes, were hijacked by 19 Al-Qaeda members to be flown into buildings. Two of the planes were crashed into the North and South towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. Within 1 hour and 42 minutes, both towers collapsed, with debris and the resulting fires causing partial or complete damage to all other buildings in the World Trade Center complex, including the World Trade Center tower, as well as significant damage to 10 other large structures. A third plane was crashed into the Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia. This led to a partial collapse in the Pentagon s western side. The fourth plane initially was steered towards Washington, D.C., but crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, because its passengers tried to overcome the hijackers. 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The acts of violence have aims and objectives which intend on being achieved by the perpetrators themselves, or by the organizations that support these acts. With the aid of the present day media, acts of terrorism are now becoming designed to grasp the attention of the entire world and compel a terrorist organizations message into the spotlight for the whole world to look at. Reasons and purposeRead MoreTerrorism Is A Major Criminal Act922 Words   |  4 PagesTerrorism is a major criminal act that effects a mass majority of people. Terrorism can be anything. Former terrorism acts include the Oklahoma City bombing, the major September 11th attacks on the world trade center, and one of the most recent terrorist acts being the Boston Marathon bombing. Terrorism does not discriminate. Anyone can be a victim of a terrorist attack. This statement is proven true in the multiple accounts of Terrorism going on in the Middle Eastern countries, however America alsoRead MoreThe Effects Of Terrorism On Terrorism And Terrorism944 Words   |  4 PagesEffects of Terrorism â€Å"The history of terrorism is a history of well-known and historically significant individuals, entities, and incidents associated, whether rightly or wrongly, with terrorism,† (History of Terrorism). The history of terrorism is a long bloody road. One of the bloodiest of acts of terrorism in the early years, was the reign of terror. In which, the Jacobin leader, Maximilien Robespierre, executed 40,000 people. Newspapers coined the word â€Å"Terrorism† as a way of describing RobespierreRead MoreThe Effect of Terrorism Because of Technology1366 Words   |  6 PagesTerrorism is the use of violence, usually against â€Å"non-combatants† , in order to try and achieve political change. 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Terrorism is the cause of many wars throughoutRead MoreTerroism1408 Words   |  6 PagesTerrorism Paper Stacy McCarson CJS/235 July 2016 Viviyonne Lee Terrorism Paper Terrorism is a critical issue that the world faces today. The stressful part is not knowing when an attack will happen and the location. Terrorism not only effects the people but the government as well because its purpose is a political reason. According to  Federal Bureau Investigation   Ã‚  (2016), â€Å"Terrorism is the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidateRead MoreEssay Types of Terrorism873 Words   |  4 Pages Terrorism in the United States has taken a big step since 9/11. After 9/11 there have been more and more police officers working. There are a lot or terrorist groups around the world but there are also motivational terrorist. The word terrorism does not really have a straight forward definition because there is different form of terrorism. The types of terrorisms that is around that people know are state sponsored terrorism, dissent terrorism, terrorists from left and right, religious terrorismRead MoreThe First W ave Of Terrorism1740 Words   |  7 Pagesdebate on the concept of â€Å"new† and ‘old’ terrorism, where ‘new’ terrorism phenomenon is predominately linked with ‘religious’ terrorism. David Rapoport, also known as one of the most well known founding figures of terrorism studies, joined UCLA in 1962 as a political theorist and later he became a founder and editor of Terrorism and Political Violence (UCLA). The idea of religious terrorism coincides with Rapoport’s (2004) theory on the waves of modern terrorism, especially the fourth wave. RapoportRead MoreTerrorism is not a derogatory moral classification; rather, it is a mode of warfare1600 Words   |  7 PagesTerrorism is not a derogatory moral classification; rather, it is a mode of warfare. 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Sunshine Chapter 21 Free Essays

string(30) " end of the world was coming\." I was making it, I thought. I suppressed a shudder. â€Å"No. We will write a custom essay sample on Sunshine Chapter 21 or any similar topic only for you Order Now † â€Å"One killed and three missing in No Town,† he said. â€Å"The one killed is confirmed sucker.† â€Å"You can’t be sure this soon that the other three are anything but missing,† I said. â€Å"Maybe they ran away.† Pat looked at me. â€Å"They may have run away from something else,† I said, â€Å"that had nothing to do with vampires.† â€Å"The moon may be one of Sunshine’s Killer Zebras, but I doubt it,† said Pat. â€Å"A lot of people saw these four hanging around together earlier in the evening.† I didn’t say anything. â€Å"Four is a lot for one night, even in No Town.† I still didn’t say anything. â€Å"We’d like you to come round this afternoon and have another stroll through a few cosmails,† said Pat. â€Å"I don’t get off till ten tonight.† â€Å"We’ll wait,† Pat said grimly. â€Å"There’s one little snag – Aimil doesn’t want to do it. She says you tried it on your own a few days ago and it took you away somewhere. She said she thought you’d died. Now, why would you want to try it on your own, I wonder?† â€Å"Why do you think?† I said, looking at him steadily. The shadows on his face lay plain and clean. I slid a little further into my strange seeing. These shadows had a slightly rough or textured quality I was beginning to guess meant partblood – I’d seen it in Maud’s face first, but Aimil had it too – and in Pat’s case this not-quite-human aspect was distinctly blue. But the shadows said there was no deceit beyond the basic subterfuge of passing for pureblood human. Pat was who he said he was, and believed what he said he believed. â€Å"I want to find these guys too,† I said. â€Å"And SOF, begging your pardon, makes me nervous.† Pat sighed and rubbed his head with his hand, making his short SOF-norm hair stand on end. â€Å"Look, kiddo, I know all the usual complaints about SOF and I agree with most of them.† He saw me looking at his hair and smiled a little. â€Å"So I don’t happen to mind the hair and the uniform, that’s not a crime, is it? But we can protect you better at SOF HQ than you can protect yourself anywhere else. What if what you were tracking had noticed you were searching for it the other day? You think you could have got back out fast enough for it not to follow you home? The fact that Aimil is still alive proves that it didn’t notice. But I think that was dumb luck. Nobody has ever lived a long happy life depending on dumb luck, and depending on any kind of luck is as good as tearing your own throat out when you’re messing with suckers. I don’t care what extra powers you got, Sunshine.† I swallowed. â€Å"Did you say all that to Aimil?† â€Å"You bet I did, babe, and more besides. She is, after all, on our payroll and subject to our rules. You aren’t. Yet, although I’ve thought about it. But SOF doesn’t pay so good and generally we have to blackmail people like you and Aimil, to put it bluntly, not to mention figuring out what the official description of what we wanted you for would be. I could probably tie you up in a big knot of top-secret intelligence bureaucracy – we’ve got powers to compel ordinary citizens in certain circumstances, did you know that? And we could make these the right kind of circumstances, never fear – but it would take too long and I suspect it would make you ornery. We need you too badly to risk pissing you off, if we can get you any other way. By the way, you were planning on coming to us with anything you found on the other end of Aimil’s cosmails, weren’t you? You don’t have any noble, suicidal plans to take these suckers on by yourself, do you? Tell me you are not that stupid.† I said with perfect honesty, â€Å"I have no intention of trying to take these suckers on by myself, no.† Pat looked at me with a slight frown. â€Å"Why doesn’t that sound as reassuring as it should?† I gazed back at him as innocently as I could. He sighed. â€Å"Never mind. We’ll see you at ten tonight. In fact, I’ll come by myself at closing.† â€Å"I’m not going to sneak out the back way and go home if I’ve told you I’ll come,† I said, annoyed. â€Å"You haven’t actually said you will come,† said Pat calmly, â€Å"and I don’t want you walking around by yourself at that hour, in case Bozo gets wise between now and then.† This was a little too near a little too much of the truth. â€Å"Bozo?† I said carefully. â€Å"Do you have a name?† â€Å"Have we ever had a name?† said Pat. â€Å"You find ’em and you stake ’em and then you burn ’em to be sure. But we’re obviously chasing a master vampire here, and it’s easier if we call him something. Assuming it’s a him, which they usually are. So we’re calling him Bozo. So, are you saying you’ll be waiting for me at ten tonight then?† â€Å"But if Aimil – â€Å" â€Å"I’ll tell her you’re coming anyway and we’ve got that cosmail saved and we can do it without her if we have to. She can either come be part of the safety net or sit at home waiting for really bad news and be hauled over the carpet and messily fired later on.† â€Å"What sweethearts you SOFs are,† I said. There was no humor at all in Pat’s face when he replied: â€Å"Yeah. But we’re real devoted to the idea of keeping the live alive. What did you do to your chin – and your arm? Is that from when you fell out of Aimil’s chair?† â€Å"Must be,† I said. â€Å"I don’t remember that well.† It was a fairly ordinary day at the coffeehouse. We had one crazy wander in off the street who wanted to tell all of us that the end of the world was coming. You read "Sunshine Chapter 21" in category "Essay examples" He had an interesting variant of the standard format: in his reading the moon was going to be moved in front of the sun and kept there to create a permanent eclipse while the creatures of dark took over down here. The moon would be held in place by the something-o-meter invented by the creatures of dark and which they were presently perfecting. He said â€Å"creatures of dark,† not â€Å"vampires.† I suppose I was in a twitchy mood anyway, but I didn’t like this. There are lots of creatures of the dark, but I would have said that except for vampires none of them is bright enough to invent a something-o-meter. So why didn’t he say vampires? He did say eighteen months, tops, before the eclipse began. It was a good thing he hadn’t washed in a while and raved like a loony or some of us might have believed him. I told myself his story would make a good novel. It would sure make a better novel than it would a reality. Mel got rid of him. Mel goes all Good Old Boy amiable and eases them out the door, and the thing about it is that when Mel does it, they don’t come back. The only times we’ve ever had to call the cops is when Mel hasn’t been there. Ranting crazies make Charlie nervous. Because this is Old Town we get a fair number of crazies: hell, we feed most of them, out the side door, but not so many of them rant. Charlie can soothe a customer determined to pick a fight when Mel would just throw him out the first time he swore at one of the waitresses, and I’d back Mel against most brawlers, but taking them on their own terms isn’t a good way to avoid calling the cops. Sometimes I think more throwing out would be a good thing – we hav e enough customers, we don’t need to put up with the flaming assholes – but Charlie’s is Charlie’s because of Charlie, which is probably a good thing too. But Mel is the one who deals with the noisy nutters. If there’s ever a Mel’s it will be racier. And Charlie’s will have to hire a bouncer with a degree in counseling. This crazy came in during the lull between the late-afternoon muffin-and-scone crowd and the early supper eaters so there weren’t too many people around. Mrs. Bialosky was there, and I didn’t like the way she listened to him either: it seemed to me she was having some of the same thoughts I was. Maybe she was just thinking about full moons. The crazy hadn’t mentioned what was going to happen about the moon’s phases. He must not be a Were himself. â€Å"Hey, a little live entertainment for slack time,† Mel said to me. â€Å"This one missed the mark, okay, next time I’ll get jugglers.† I smiled, because he wanted me to, but I noticed he was rubbing one of his tattoos: the hourglass one, that you can’t see which way the sand is running. It’s a charm about not running out of time. He’d been listening to the crazy too. I couldn’t see into the shadows on Mel’s face. They flickered less than some but the red edges were more dazzling as if to make up for this. I didn’t know if I couldn’t see past the dazzle because I couldn’t couldn’t, or because I didn’t want to. If I didn’t want to, what was it I was afraid I was going to be seeing? By ten o’clock I was tired, and I wanted to go home and go to bed. I had a lot of sleep to catch up on. The last thing I wanted to do was slope off to SOF HQ and plug into another live socket and fry my brains some more, but when Kyoko came into the bakery to tell me Pat was in front waiting for me, I didn’t duck out the back door – even though I hadn’t promised. I may have given the cinnamon-roll sponge a few more vicious stirs than it needed, but then I threw my apron into the laundry, washed off the worst of the day’s spatters and stains, and went to meet my fate. I paused briefly under the doorway. A few days ago I’d tacked up a string over the lintel, so I could stuff some of Mom’s charms up there. They balanced on the narrow lintel edge and were kept from pitching over by the string. She hadn’t said anything, but then we’d never discussed the fact that she was coming into the bakery when I wasn’t there (she rarely crossed the threshold when I was) and leaving charms round about. Well, so, the glove compartment was full. Or she was wearing me down. And they wouldn’t last long trying to protect a doorway that had people coming and going through it all the time, but at least they could keep their eyes (so to speak) on me when I was there. And while they still had what in charms passes for eyes. The funny thing was that I’d begun to feel them there, and kind of didn’t mind. I’ve said that charms usually rub me up the wrong way, like a rash, or a colicky baby living in the spare bedroom whose mom sleeps deeper than you do. And when I stood under the doorway for a moment I felt their – well, their good will, I’m not sure it was any stronger than that – soaking in. I felt like a baba sucking up rum. Or possibly chopped piccalilli vegetables vinegar. I shook my head to make the opalescent chain swish over my skin and patted my pockets. Pat and I walked over, to my surprise. â€Å"I kinda want to know if there’s anyone close enough to make a pass at you,† said Pat. â€Å"Hope you got a table knife in your pocket.† â€Å"Very funny,† I said. â€Å"Shouldn’t be necessary,† said Pat, unfazed. â€Å"I got a few of ours skulking in the shadows, ready to race to our rescue.† This was not comforting, not so much because a vampire could have struck in from nowhere and killed us both before any human defender had done any more than take a deep breath and wonder if there was a problem, but because of what SOF didn’t know about my extracurricular activities. I didn’t want SOF watching me that closely. And I didn’t like their spending that kind of expensive human time on me. â€Å"You sound like you’re taking this very seriously.† â€Å"You betcha.† â€Å"Why? You haven’t got any proof yet that what Aimil and I are doing is anything but psycho doodling.† Pat was silent a moment, and then gave a heavy sigh. â€Å"You know, Sunshine, you’re a pain to work with. You think too much. Have you read anything about the little black boxes that are supposed to register Other activity? Called tickers.† â€Å"Yeah. They don’t work.† â€Å"Actually they work pretty well. The problem is that there is a larger number of unregistered partbloods in the general pop than anyone wants to talk about – well gosh isn’t that surprising – and the tickers keep getting confused. Or, you know, sabotaged. It’s been a real bad problem in SOF for some reason. Can’t imagine why. There’s ways around this problem, however, once you all know you’re reading off the same page. So we got some tickers that give us pretty good readings, once we figured out how to set ’em up. And I’ll tell you that a couple we got down in No Town about fused their chips when you did your locating trick for us a few days ago, and they did it again that afternoon when, it turns out, you were committing your felony with Aimil.† â€Å"Felony my ass,† I said. â€Å"Attempting to consort with an enemy alien is a felony, my pretty darling, and all Others are enemy aliens. It’s not one of those rules anyone wants to pursue too close, but it has its uses. And trying to locate ’em is near enough to trying to consort with ’em for me. Anyway, we’ve never had readings like these readings. What you’re up to may be psycho doodlings, all right, but they’re great big strong psycho doodlings and we’re beginning to hope you may be the best chance we’ve seen in years and not another one of my over-optimistic bad calls.† I considered having a nervous breakdown on the spot. I probably could have thrown a good one too, about how I couldn’t take the strain, that my life had crashed and burned those two nights I went missing by the lake and all Pat and SOF were doing now was stamping out the ashes and oh by the way if you have an axe handy I’ll run mad with it now and get it over with since my genes are being slower off the mark than I’ve been expecting since I figured it out two months or whatever ago, and by the way, that was SOF’s doing too, you guys and your sidelong suggestive little chats. While half my brain was considering the nervous breakdown recourse the other half was considering whether maybe I could locate Bo well enough and then let SOF handle it. Con and I wouldn’t have to go within miles (vampire miles or human miles) of No Town. We could sit at home drinking champagne and waiting for the headlines: NEW ARCADIA SOF DIVISION ELIMINATES MAJOR VAMPIRE LAI R AND DESTROYS ITS MASTER. Our correspondent, blah blah blah. My imagination wanted MOST IMPORTANT STRIKE SINCE VOODOO WARS, but it wouldn’t be. It felt global to me because it was my life on the line. But it wasn’t going to happen that way. I didn’t even know why, not to be able to explain it. But I could feel it, like you feel a stomachache or a cold coming on, or somebody’s eyes staring a hole in your back. SOF could go in and mess things up for a little while, stake a few young vampires and maybe wreck Bo’s immediate plans. But†¦maybe this was something else I was learning to see in the shadows. Maybe it was from traveling through nowheresville or walking Con’s short ways last night when I was somewhere else: watching my reality stream by, finding out there are other places with other rules. I was beginning to understand how the connections in the vampire world really aren’t like our human connections in our human world. I was tethered to Con as absolutely as he had been shackled to the wall of the house beside the lake. And he and Bo had a bond that required one of them to be the cause of the destruction of the other one. I guessed now that this was as natural a situation to a vampire as making cinnamon rolls was to me. I wondered what happened if a vampire involved in one of these lethal pacts did the vampire equivalent of falling under a bus: did the other one, foiled of catharsis, spin off into the void instead? The really nasty void, that is. Which could explain why it was so godsbloodyawful a place to visit. He could have warned me, I thought. Con could have said something, that second morning by the lake. Would it have occurred to him? No. Besides, what was he going to say? â€Å"Die now or later†? That had been the choice all along. And as far as my situation now being the mere sad inevitable result of my being in the wrong place at the wrong time: grow up, Sunshine. Bo would be just a tiny bit irritated with me personally. Having not only escaped but taken his prize prisoner with me. What had kept me alive so far – my scorned and ignored magic-handling talent, my reluctant and harrowing alliance with Con – was also what was causing the bond. Ordinary mortals don’t get bound up in ceremonial duels to the death with master vampires. But ordinary mortals don’t survive introductory vampire encounters either. I cast back to that second morning at the lake and thought, he did warn me – or remind me. I just didn’t hear it. Why should I? And why should he think I needed warning? â€Å"†¦That we are both gone will mean that something truly extraordinary has happened. And it almost certainly has something to do with you – as it does, does it not? – and that therefore something important about you was overlooked. And Bo will like that even less than he would have liked the straightforward escape of an ordinary human prisoner. He will order his folk to follow. We must not make it easy for them.† I was the one who’d assumed the time limitations around Con’s annotations of our predicament. More recently Con had said, I knew what happened at the lake would not be the end. And it wasn’t like I’d been surprised. Okay, what if – just as a matter of keeping our position clear here – what if we managed to off Bo now? What new chains of vengeance and retaliation would we have forged instead? I wanted to laugh, but I didn’t want to come up with a likely story to explain to Pat what I was finding to laugh at. Unless I wanted to make the laughter hysterical, as a lead-in to my nervous breakdown. But I didn’t. I wanted to find Bo and get on with it. Whatever happened next. Whatever. I would think about whatever if there was a tomorrow to think about it in. Right now today was enough – like getting away from the lake alive had been enough. If Aimil’s cosmail was Bo, and I could trace it, and SOF could offer some protection from being traced back, then I’d risk doing it with SOF. I wanted to find Bo. And hadn’t I just been saying there was a bond between Bo and me as well? Big ugly mega yuck. What I didn’t want was to get sucked in again and maybe somehow this time pop out on top of Bo. As things I couldn’t bear to think about went, this was very high on the list. My sunshine-self, my tree-self, my deer-self. Didn’t we outnumber the dark self? What I had to figure out, fast, was if there was going to be a way I could make a mark, leave a clue, carry some bad-void token away with me that Con and I could follow or interpret better or faster than SOF could. There’d been kind of a lot going on and I hadn’t sorted what I had found – or half found, or begun to find – in Aimil’s living room. If sorting was a possibility. Aimil had been afraid I’d died†¦ No. I’d figure it out. I had to. Did the tickers do anything but register activity, could they define it? They’d pick up Con and me too, when we started going somewhere – wouldn’t they? If. Supposing our rough human-world guesses were right, and what we all wanted was in No Town. But†¦if SOF was now going to start keeping a closer watch on me, were they going to plant a ticker near Yolande’s house? Oh, gods. Could she disable a SOF ticker? Aimil, looking subdued, was waiting in Pat’s office, with Jesse and Theo. She got up from her chair and put her arms around me. I hugged her back and we stared at each other a moment. â€Å"I guess these guys worked you over so the bruises don’t show,† I said. â€Å"Which is more than can be said for you,† said Aimil, touching my jaw gently. â€Å"I got that doing chin-ups on the top oven,† I said. â€Å"Let’s get on with this, can we? I want to go home and go to bed. Four in the morning is already soon.† Pat’s combox was on, and the saved cosmail winked at us as soon as he touched the screen. Even before plugging in to the live connection it looked evil to me; the flickering print seemed to have a kind of bulgy red edge, so that it looked like tiny scarlet mouths howling behind every letter of every word. â€Å"Ready?† said Pat. I sat down and put my hands on the keyboard, like I was going to do some perfectly ordinary com thing, tap a few keys, see what the headlines were on the Darkline. â€Å"Ready,† I said. He pressed the globenet button and the mail went live. I was almost sucked in after all. Hey, I didn’t know what I was doing. Was there an apprenticeship for this? The globenet hasn’t been around all that long, but magic handlers adapt pretty fast – they have to. If I’d been apprenticed, could I have learned how to trace a cosmail? No. If this was something magic handlers now routinely did, SOF would have a division of magic handlers that did it. And they wouldn’t be all over me like a cheap suit. I was going where no one had gone before. And I wasn’t having a good time. It was my talismans that held me together, and in this world. I felt them heat up, wow, like zero to a hundred in nothing flat with the throttle all the way open, like a cold inert vampire being brought back to undeadness by a surprise drop-in guest. I guessed there was a red hoop around my neck and over my breast now, and a red oval on each thigh. I hoped they wouldn’t set my clothes on fire, which might be hard to explain as well as embarrassing. It was pretty excruciating. It was like being dragged forward and hauled backward simultaneously: as if I was living the moment when my divided loyalties ripped me apart and took off with their riven halves. Other-space yawned, and while last night, with Con at the far end of the back-country-lane version, it had merely been remote and unearthly and nowhere I had any business being, tonight it was the bad one again, the shrieking maelstrom. If I went headfirst into this one I wouldn’t come out, except in small messy pieces. But I was frisking on the boundary of dangerous territory for a purpose. Dimly through the inaudible din, I thought, perhaps this is Bo’s defense system. Okay, if I can find where the defense system is, presumably I can find where what it’s defending is. Or is that too human a logic? I tried to orient myself, carefully, carefully, staying firmly seated on the chair in Pat’s office, feeling my talismans burning their variously shaped holes into my flesh. I wasn’t the compass needle myself this time – that would have been too far in – I was trying to angle for a view so I could see where the compass needle pointed†¦ There. And I was flung over backward, with the chair, and landed on the floor so hard the breath was knocked out of me. This was just as well, because Pat’s combox exploded; droplets of superheated flying goo rained down on me as well as tiny fragments of gods-know-what, and larger pieces of plastic housing. There were a few half-muffled shouts of surprise and pain, and then there were a lot of alarm bells ringing. I was still struggling to get some breath back in my lungs when people started arriving. I had thought those were real alarm bells. They were. What looked like everybody at SOF headquarters poured into Pat’s room, and there were more of them than you’d think for ten-thirty at night. Once I could breathe again I could tell the medic I wasn’t hurt. (There are medics on duty twenty-four-seven at SOF HQ: our tax blinks at work. Well, okay, lots of big corps have medics on duty, but few of them have combat patches. This one did.) My shirt had got a little torn, somehow, and the chain and the mark it made were visible; he gave me some burn cream for the latter, while he muttered something about the weird effects of a combox blowout. Fortunately it didn’t seem to occur to him to suggest that there was something funny about my necklace and I shouldn’t wear it. I didn’t mention the hot spots I could feel on my thighs. I was glad still to have thighs. Pat had fared the worst; he needed stitches in one shoulder where he was hit by the biggest single chunk of flying combox, and had several inelegant burn marks on his face and one hand, although none of them serious. â€Å"Hey, I was an ugly bastard before,† he said. â€Å"It’s not gonna ruin my social life.† Even Pat had been rattled, however, because the two guys who rushed in and sat down at the other combox in the room – one of them with a headset he kept muttering into – had been tapping away intently for several minutes before Pat noticed. I had been watching them as I lay on the floor, but I was pretty hazed out myself and hadn’t managed to think about what they might be doing. I had half-noticed Jesse doing an ordinary startled-human stillness thing when those two came in, but I hadn’t registered it. I did register Pat snapping into awareness and then exchanging a hard look with Jesse. And then the woman came in and the tension level in the room went off the scale. I felt like we were in one of those old-fashioned movie rockets where the Gs of escape velocity crush you into the upholstery. Okay, so my metaphors had taken a wrong turn, but when I first looked at her there were no shadows on her at all: it was as if she was glowing, in great sick-making waves, like a walking nuclear reactor or something, if I had ever seen a nuclear reactor, which I have not. Instant headache. Instant wanting-to-be-out-of-here, wherever here was; hereness seemed to fade under the onslaught of her mere presence. This had to be the goddess of pain. And I had thought that name was just a joke. Uh-oh. She snapped a few undertone orders to one of the fellows with the headset; he was obviously not happy, and he shook his head. His partner in crime shrugged and spread his hands. â€Å"Your little stunt has just bombed HQ’s entire com system,† she said in a cold clear voice that was worse than any shouting. â€Å"What the hell are you doing?† Pat, almost visibly pulling himself together, said, â€Å"I had clearance. Ask Sanchez.† â€Å"You didn’t have clearance to close the regional HQ down, and you obviously didn’t do your homework about safeguards,† said the woman, not a split atom’s worth mollified. â€Å"You still haven’t told me what you were trying to do, and Sanchez isn’t here.† One of the headset guys on the other combox barked something, and she listened to them briefly. When she turned to glare at Pat again he was a little more ready for her. â€Å"We were trying to trace an Other cosmail to a land source. We have been working with Aimil, here,† nodding to her, â€Å"for some months. This is Rae Seddon, whom we had reason to believe might be able to help us. This is the second time she’s tried to make a connection. As for safeguards, I†¦Ã¢â‚¬  and he ran off into a lot of technical jargon I didn’t understand a syllable of, and didn’t want to. I tuned out. By this time I was breathing again, although my lungs felt sore. Not nearly as sore as my head, however. My eyeballs felt like they were embedded in glass splinters and my entire skull throbbed. I was now seeing a fat glaring red edge to everything, an erratic fat glaring red edge, sometimes as wide as a pocketknife, sometimes as narrow as an opalescent chain. It didn’t need shadows. It looked like cracks in reality, opening into the chaos I’d seen protecting the way to Bo through nowheresville. I clung to the arms of the re-righted chair I’d been helped into once the medic was done with me. â€Å"Hold still,† he said. He was trying to put stitches in Pat’s shoulder. I didn’t want to look at the goddess of pain again; I knew it was my eyes, but there was something really wrong about her, and whatever it was, it made my headache worse. I watched a couple of people gathering up pieces of combox. Another person appeared bearing a big bottle of some kind of, presumably, solvent, and was wiping up the littler gel blobs. Somebody else was flipping the bigger blobs into a bucket. I noticed that some of them left marks behind them. Jesse had minor burns on one forearm; Theo and Aimil hadn’t been touched. It could have been a lot worse. It was a lot worse. It just wasn’t about being burned by combox gel. My red edges were, I thought, narrowing. Not fast enough. I didn’t notice the pause in the conversation till I heard my name being repeated. â€Å"Rae Seddon,† the goddess was saying. I jerked my eyes up – and flinched: neither my eyes nor my head was ready for sudden movements – and equally unequal to meeting the goddess’ eyes. â€Å"I heard about the incident a few weeks ago,† she said, â€Å"with the vampire in Old Town.† I didn’t say anything. â€Å"I’d quite like to have a chat with you myself sometime,† she said. I still didn’t say anything. I glanced at Pat. He was so poker-faced I knew he was worried. There was a big red halo around his head, and the shadows across his face were so blue I was surprised they weren’t obvious to everyone. I hoped they weren’t. â€Å"I doubt I can help you,† I said, not looking at her. â€Å"I think it was an accident.† â€Å"Some power residue from your experience at the lake?† she said. I didn’t like having her so up on my history. I wondered what else she knew. â€Å"Yes, I agree that that is the most likely. But it is the first such incident I’m aware of in any of our records† – did this mean she was interested enough to have had research done on it? – â€Å"and I would like to know as much about it as possible. SOF is always interested in unusual and unique cases. We have to be.† She smiled. I saw it out of the corner of my eye. It wasn’t that she didn’t mean it, exactly. It was that it was an official lubricant-on-the-sticky-gears-of-community smile. It suited her aura of poisonous gases. A toxic oil slick on the sea of society. I didn’t like the smile. I found Pat’s single-minded commitment to the total annihilation of vampires a little inopportune but I believed he was one of the good guys. I didn’t believe s he was. I didn’t smile back. I tried to look too beat up from what had happened to be able to smile. I wasn’t. What I was was too beat up to make myself smile when I didn’t want to. â€Å"I assume that tonight’s misguided attempt at a connection was also based on some faulty reading of that same residue?† The tone of her voice could have made cinnamon rolls unroll, cakes fall, and Bitter Chocolate Death melt. I hoped cravenly that she was talking to Pat. Pat said, â€Å"There’s a precedent. Milenkovic – â€Å" â€Å"You’ll have to do better than that, Agent Velasquez,† interrupted the goddess. â€Å"Milenkovic was a senile old woman.† How to cite Sunshine Chapter 21, Essay examples