Metafire

The game Randy and Dave liked was killing each other with phasers. They didn't seem to mind it too much if they accidently swung around actually hitting the other person. In fact, it turned into a sort of contact-version of virtual reality.

Erisa also liked it when Jane introduced her to the customer support activity. Jane was her supervisor and Erisa was the 'trainee.'

"Remember, Erisa, you are outside of the firewall talking with customers here. I can cut you off, and, if you make too many mistakes, we can ruin your life. Will you be good?"

"Yes. What do I do?"

"Open the mail for support@Metafire.com. It shows the questions that are queued up. In most cases, you can also set up a direct link with the person requesting the support. Otherwise you just have to write him back. Let's try one. You'll see how to do it quickly enough."

The first unanswered one on the list was from Gannett, the owners of USA Today. Gannett had long ago provided USA Today on the Internet as www.today.com. Furthermore, they had consolidated worldwide operations and could provide customized daily newspapers for anybody and completely current newspapers at any time of day or night. In their business activity of absorbing other newspapers they had a need for the Metafire archiving software. They wanted to freeze the states of other organizations before they started re-organizing them for commercial efficiency. Since so much of the newspaper's business is created through personal relationships, and since people would tend to guard these, it was important to freeze the information before the employees became aware of the buy out. Like most all newspapers, a buy out meant the loss of jobs.