We always die and we always live. We always lose and we always win. Like it or not, Jonesy, we’re the future.
You’ll never get out of here, Jonesy said.
I will, Mr. Gray said. We always die and we always live. We always lose and we always win. Like it or not, Jonesy, we’re the future.
If that’s true, it’s the best reason I ever heard for living in the past, Jonesy replied, but from Mr. Gray there was no answer. Mr. Gray as an entity, a consciousness, was gone, merged back into the cloud. There was only enough of him left to run Jonesy’s motor skills and keep the snowmobile pointed toward the turnpike. And Jonesy, carried helplessly forward on whatever mission this thing had, took slender comfort from two things. One was that Mr. Gray didn’t know how to get at the last piece of him, the tiny part that existed in his memory of the Tracker Brothers office. The other was that Mr. Gray didn’t know about Duddits—about no bounce, no play.
Jonesy intended to make sure Mr. Gray didn’t find out.
At least not yet.
