Carter met Kyle, the first time, while chasing down a glitch in the drone deployment module of TaoZon's two-hour-delivery system. The code was fairly straightforward but the storage and network bandwidth that it was consuming seemed excessive. Digging around the user interface, he found a back door to an old processor, an obsolete code repository, that was supposed to be idle but that showed a slow, steady ripple of activity. Carter had discovered URTH.

URTH, Carter figured out, was a hacked xchat partition that was being unwittingly hosted in TaoZon's hardware, providing a dark web resource for fanatic environmental political discourse and doomsday angst. Open discussion of the environment had long been banned but had found quiet, illicit pockets here and there around the net. Dubbed URTH by its participants, the User's Road To Hell, it was a bootleg outpost frequented by outsiders and the most radically pessimistic. Carter's first instinct was to expose the hack but, just before making the call, two words in the storage dump caught his eye. Fly fishing. Further digging uncovered an obscure little thread where a handful of outsiders claimed to still be practicing the arcane sporting practice. Carter, remembering Grandpa, tumbled down the rabbit hole and landed on Kyle. The hack went unreported.

Archie felt so good he had to push down the guilt. It was his nature, as a God-fearing son of the prairies, not to take pleasure in the misfortune of others. But this time he couldn’t help himself. It was too delicious. He was gleefully, ecstatically happy.

Not that he’d had a hand in the thing, although the struggle for restaurant supremacy in South Sioux City had been waged for years, bitter as any blood feud. He hadn’t even wished for it, at least not in any but the oblique, diffuse way that one daydreams of a future in which one’s rivals fall victim to calamity.