I swing my legs over the side of the bed. My feet dangle halfway to the floor. “What happens if I’m stuck in this skin? Will I eventually Grow up?” I think for a moment. “The real Tommy Carlton died when he was in his late sixties—does that mean I’ll die in my late sixties, too? Or will I grow out of my Skin before then, gradually splitting at the seams like some kind of grotesque Hollywood creature effect?”
“That would be so cool!” Ernie exclaims.
“No, it wouldn’t! And what are you even doing in my room?”
“Pirating shit.”
I lunge forward, yanking my laptop away from him and cradling it in my arms. The screen’s all smudged, and there are crumbs all over the keyboard, and oh, geez, he’s got, like, two-dozen browser tabs open, has somehow completely rearranged my Unity desktop so that every window has a PornSmurf search bar attached to the top. Launcher is nowhere to be found; when I hit the Windows key, the Dash pops up showing various porn icons instead of my usual apps. “What…have…you…done?”
—SuperMegaNet, ep. 104, “Circadian Fart”
