Bill's still in the driver's seat, opening bottles and reading emails, smoking and chuckling. I'm over in the passenger seat with the console, blogging. The windows are up tight--Bill was cold, the big baby--and so fogged-up we might as well still be navigating through the blogosphere. He's got an army blanket around his shoulders, and seems to be more comfortable now. I think maybe Mullah Billdoug's regulating the temperature inside the blog.

"Listen to this one," he keeps saying, regaling me with the email messages he's finding. They're all pathetic, if you ask me, but Bill is getting a huge kick out of them. "It's from Donald Trump to George W. Bush. 'My friends ask me what I would do if you appointed me to a cabinet position. I tell them, "Hey, anything for my country. Anything for my President." And listen, please, I'm not fishing for an appointment. The only fishing I do is off my hundred-million-dollar yacht, the Trump Princess.'"

"Interesting," I mumble. I try to block him out, mostly. Sometimes I wonder why Mullah Billdoug wanted him on the team. He's low comic relief, at best.

So I'm done. I go to publish my post, and--nothing. I seem to have lost my internet connection. No huge surprise, in here. I wait and wait. Finally I get an error message: A NETWORK ERROR HAS OCCURRED. Duh. But it gives me a link to click for details, and when I do, the box that pops up explains that the network error was a network sharing violation. Sharing? Who am I sharing with?

"Bill?" I say.

"Listen to this," he says.

"No, wait," I say.

"No, you gotta hear this. Some fundamentalist polygamous Mormon sect has bankrupted a local bank by borrowing $18 million for nonexistent businesses. They believe the end of the world is coming soon, and the world financial market is going to collapse, so why not? The bank manager blames the regulators."

"Bill, listen," I say.

"What?"

"Are you on the internet?"

"No. I'm just reading these bottled messages. Why?"

"I'm getting a network sharing violation."

"I don't even know what that is."

"It means some greedy grabber boy is grabbing my IP address."

"Well it ain't me."

"Yeah? Then how did you get that link to the Independent site for the Mormon story?"

"What link?"

No use talking to a junkie. I snort and go back to my console. A chat box has popped up. A message is waiting for me:

IT WASN'T HIM. IT WAS ME.

Huh?

THIS WHALE WASN'T BUILT FOR MULTIPLE LUSERS.

This whale? Shit. Of course. Another user in the whale! I slam the console back into the glove compartment, open my door, and stumble out into the gastric juices and debris. Bill doesn't even look up, the big dumb hippie.

I slosh around for five minutes before I find him. It's a big belly. He's sitting on a packing crate for Nineveh gourds, legs crossed, typing on a wireless laptop. He's wearing some kind of Old Testament patriarch robe and has a long beard. He looks up as I approach.

"Howdy, neighbor," I say.

"Repent!" he cries.

"Repent?"

He shrugs. "I've always wanted to say that. Hi," he says, sticking out his hand. I shake it. "I'm Jonah. Welcome to the whale."

# posted by Doug Robinson @ 7:14 AM

POW, the blog says, and bocka bocka bocka bocka.

"Shit," Bill says. "We got a fucking flat. I'm gonna pull over."

"That wasn't a fucking flat," I say. "That was a pop-up blocker."

"Those things never work on my computer," Bill says.

"Well," I say, "count your blessings. So far they aren't working on us, either."

The landscape outside our windows is weird. Sort of grayish, almost foggy, but with thick pinkish-charcoal viscosities shot all through it. It looks sort of like South Dakota at dusk in a sandstorm, after Mt. St. Helens erupted a million squid into the air. We navigate through it like an infection.

POW: another pop-up blocker explodes just off our left front fender.

And then they're all over us: antivirus drones, spam grinders, pop-up blockers like the Fourth of July. Bill steers through it all with two fingers on the wheel, smoking, stroking his beard, his eyes lit up like a little kid's. Mullah Billdoug seems to have some tricks up his sleeve too: he keeps jettisoning packing-peanut chaff, fine black sprays of printer ink, synthetic spam, phony urls.

Through the din, then, gradually, we begin to hear a keening, like a fax whine, or a garbage truck in reverse.

"You hear that?" Bill says, cocking his head to one side.

"Slow down," I say. "Whatever it is, it's getting closer. We don't want to plow smack dab into it."

"Whaddya mean, slow down?" Bill smiles over at me, taking a deep pull on his cigarette. "I haven't touched the pedals in hours. If we crash into something, we crash into something."

"But--"

"Being a virus means never having to say you're sorry."

"We're not--"

"Virality cubed," Bill says.

"I hate it when you--" I start. Then:

"What the fuck," Bill breathes, "is that?"

That is, but can't be, yet certainly unmistakably appears to be, a whale. A huge motherfucking whale. Dead ahead of us, swimming lazily toward us. Mullah Billdoug begins running hex code down his passenger-side monitor. Digitized whalesong?

I'm so engrossed in the battalions of figures trooping across the screen that I hardly even notice it getting darker outside our windows.

"Doug," Bill says softly.

I look up to see the whale's maw upon us, opening wide to swallow us up. As we plunge into the darkness, with only the flickering light of the monitor casting a pale greenish pallor over the interior of the blog, I read out Mullah Billdoug's translation of the whale's mournful song:

Release the banana and go free!

# posted by Doug Robinson @ 6:59 AM

"What the hell?" Doug says.

"Is that--?" Bill says.

As Doug turns the Mullah Billdoug blog around, another pulls up with a screech and blocks their path.

"Isn't that--?" Bill says.

His right arm on the seat back, his head turned back to make the three-point turn, Doug senses rather than sees the second blog pull up on their other side, hemming them in.

When he looks, it too is the spittin' image of the Mullah Billdoug blog. Same blattodeific markings, same sidebars, but--different blogroll bars? Probably powered by a different site feed.

"Imitators," Doug growls. "They want us off the Web. Well, we won't make it easy for them."

"We won't?" Bill says.

"We need to take a screen shot," Doug says. "Send ourselves to a new url."

"But you aren't pixelated," Bill says. "There's no way you can make that jump."

"We'll just have to take that chance," Doug says grimly. "If we stay here, we're dead anyway."

"But--" Bill starts.

"Trust me," Doug cuts in. "Or rather, trust the Mullah. He'll know a way to get us through."

More Mullah Billdoug imitators come screeching up, barricading their escape route four or five vehicles deep on each side. Nobody is getting out of the blogs. They've got something more nefarious in mind than simple virtual violence.

Doug fiddles under the dash for the Print Screen button, hits it hard. The image floods into the clipboard. Doug flips the Photoshop lever, loads the blog into a GIF, and goes to save it--but GIF saving has been disabled!

"Damn," he says. "They're all over us."

"What are they doing?" Bill says with a big grin. Man is he out of it.

They're forcing us to save as a JPEG," Doug says. "We could come through a little--wavy."

"Uh, okay," Bill says.

Doug shrugs. Calm down, he thinks. Bill's right: it is okay. Whatever happens to them as a JPEG beats the hell out of staying here.

"You might want to fasten your seatbelt," Doug says.

"Naw, I'm good," Bill says.

Doug nods, turns the Photoshop lever to JPEG save, and floors the blogas for the ride of their lives.

# posted by Doug Robinson @ 7:13 AM