| Subject: | Unfortunate news from Fiat Lux |
| Date: | Wed, Nov. 13, 1996, 16:23: 13 -0500 |
| From: | ifielding@fiatlux.com |
| To: | ifielding@fiatlux.com, client64@cafezuzupetal.com |
Dear Ptolemy:
I'm very sad to inform you that Isabel recently died in an accident.
All of Isabel's business is now being handled by her husband, Arthur Fielding (afielding@fiatlux.com). If I can be of any help, feel free to e-mail me or give me a call.
Are you by any chance the Ptolemy featured in Max Reinhold's book about the Collective Cybconscious cult? That name must be worth a lot of money by now.
Take Care,
Ginny Kim
>Isabel,
>Let's meet to talk about this. How about noon on Friday at the Cliff House?
>Ptolemy
Ginny's Final Hours?
"Look at this," I said to Mrs. Kim. "How did this get here?"
"Ptolemy," she said. "Who names their child Ptolemy?"
"No, it's not his real name," I said. "It's his e-mail name. He made it up himself."
"Still strange."
"Yeah, but I've seen weirder. Oh my god, look! The date it printed is November 13th,
7:25pm. The night Ginny disappeared."
"We should give that paper back to Mr. Fielding. It
might be important."
"I don't want to take it back just yet. Ginny printed this. But
how did it get here?" I said. "Wait a minute. I printed out these flyers from Ginny's
office computer. The printer was out of paper. This must have still been in the printer's
memory from the night she was killed, waiting to print."
"I don't understand."
"If you print something, and the printer is out of paper," I said, "your file will be
remembered until you put more paper in. As it turns out, the next person to put paper in
was me."
"Why didn't Ginny put paper in?" asked Mrs. Kim. "It's not something she would forget."
"Maybe she didn't realize it didn't print."
"You think Ginny wrote this?"
"Yes."
"So this Ptolemy is one of the last people she wrote to," Mrs. Kim said.
"Yes. I've heard about that cult before," I said. "It's some big thing on the Web."
"Ptolemy was the ruling house of Egypt in Ceasar's time," she said, looking at the
paper. "Early example of Western decadence. Cleopatra. She was a Ptolemy."
"This isn't about Cleopatra," I said.
