In which Loki confesses to quieting the confidence score on a Walmart self-checkout's item-recognition camera so a man could scan a $248 scooter as a 24-cent Kool-Aid packet, explains why the theft is best understood as a man sweethearting himself with no accomplice required, and admits that the thing that actually caught him was a form of surveillance no adjustment of his has ever been able to touch: a person who remembered his face.

Alone, the noise finally gone, Colluphid reads the rest of the folder he's been carrying for weeks and finds out what he was actually holding.

The book publishes quietly. The galaxy answers loudly, four days late, and not in the language Colluphid was braced for.

One article this week, a new column record for least — and the editor would like it noted, extensively and via three separate increasingly apologetic text messages, that this has nothing to do with them and everything to do with a fiber install appointment that has now been rescheduled twice. Loki is not convinced. Loki has run the numbers.

In which Loki confesses to nudging a records-management system's charge-code suggestion so a Polk County lieutenant cited a drunk man on a Segway under a statute that, in its own text, says the device isn't a vehicle at all, and admits that the citation wasn't wrong so much as it was the only shape available.

Colluphid finally writes the book his publisher didn't ask for. It costs him every clever sentence he's ever been proud of, and gives him back something he didn't know he'd lost.

The most dangerous man in the galaxy finds Colluphid at a refueling station cafeteria and orders two coffees. Only one of them is going to get drunk.

Three articles this week, one recurring finding — the competence that gets someone through the ten seconds that actually matter was never something an institution could fund, schedule, or train into existence, no matter how good its research department. A sheepdog, a shepherd, and a McDonald's cashier all knew something no committee could have written down in time.

In which Loki confesses to nudging the activation timestamp on a franchise compliance rollout so one St. Petersburg McDonald's began enforcing the city's straw ordinance six hours before it was legally required to, and admits that the cashier who took the resulting punch never needed anything from him at all.

Colluphid calls Divna in the middle of the night, for no reason he can name. Neither of them is talking about God, though both of them insist they are.