Dealing with murder takes a lot of practice; first
you have to learn to control your own instinctive disgust and panic,
then you have to learn to control the reactions of a nerve-shredded
crowd of civilians, some of whom may have just lost a loved one, some
of whom may be murderers--quite possibly both at once.

A dummy plays the corpse. The roles of the bereaved, the morbidly
curious, and the homicidal are played, for pay, by local Georgians:
waitresses, musicians, most anybody who needs to moonlight and can
learn a script. These people, some of whom are FLETC regulars year
after year, must surely have one of the strangest jobs in the world.

Something about the scene: "normal" people in a weird situation,
standing around talking in bright Georgia sunshine, unsuccessfully
pretending that something dreadful has gone on, while a dummy lies
inside on faked bloodstains.... While behind this weird masquerade,
like a nested set of Russian dolls, are grim future realities of real
death, real violence, real murders of real people, that these young
agents will really investigate, many times during their careers....
Over and over.... Will those anticipated murders look like this, feel
like this--not as "real" as these amateur actors are trying to make it
seem, but both as "real," and as numbingly unreal, as watching fake
people standing around on a fake lawn? Something about this scene
unhinges me. It seems nightmarish to me, Kafkaesque. I simply don't
know how to take it; my head is turned around; I don't know whether to
laugh, cry, or just shudder.

When the tour is over, Carlton Fitzpatrick and I talk about computers.
For the first time cyberspace seems like quite a comfortable place. It
seems very real to me suddenly, a place where I know what I'm talking
about, a place I'm used to. It's real. "Real." Whatever.

Carlton Fitzpatrick is the only person I've met in cyberspace circles
who is happy with his present equipment. He's got a 5 Meg RAM PC with
a 112 meg hard disk; a 660 meg's on the way. He's got a Compaq 386
desktop, and a Zenith 386 laptop with 120 meg. Down the hall is a NEC
Multi-Sync 2A with a CD-ROM drive and a 9600 baud modem with four
com-lines. There's a training minicomputer, and a 10-meg local mini
just for the Center, and a lab-full of student PC clones and
half-a-dozen Macs or so. There's a Data General MV 2500 with 8 meg on
board and a 370 meg disk.

Fitzpatrick plans to run a UNIX b