Out of the Spy Business Forever

Judge Camper's Chair (Third from the Right) Now Sits Empty

"I like the word career," Sweetie said. "It's rather like careen. Careen is a word with class. You get to rush into unpredictable situations. You get to bounce off things."

I thought Sweetie would be morose after failing the FAA flight examiner's test, but clearly she wasn't.

"Why are you so happy?" I asked.

"I just got word from my attorney. I won my lawsuit against Linden Lab."

"The lawsuit about the UUID?" I asked. Sweetie had sued the Lindens because her universally unique identifier was comprised of letters and numbers-- just like everyone else's. "How unique is that?" was her primary argument for financial compensation.

"Not that one," she said.

"The lawsuit about your avatar distorting when it goes above one million meters?" I asked.

"No, no," she said. "The lawsuit about my inventory disaster."

In October 2012 one of Sweetie's exploding lipsticks detonated in her Objects folder. Although she had buried it 69 layers deep in nested folders, they hadn't held and the damage had been extensive. She argued that if she had only been able to bury it 100 folders deep, they would have held.

"As I know from my experiments," she said, "nested folders begin to go wonky at level 20 and are completely out of control at level 70."

That's one folder inside another inside another inside another almost ad infinitum, folks. Sweetie's experiments are extreme.

"My attorney convinced the jury I needed those 100 levels to contain those lipsticks," she said. "Seventy just wasn't enough. The folders have insufficient tensile strength."

"Who is your lawyer, anyway?" I asked.

"Judge Camper," she said. "He's no longer on the bench."

"That's probably a good thing," I said. "What's the settlement?"

"My weekly stipend is doubled," she said, "and I get lifetime free membership in Second Life. "From now on I get $1000L a week for life."

Sweetie came to Second Life just before I did, when the weekly stipends was $500L. I just missed the deadline. My stipend is $400L. For years now stipend have been $300, but in our case age has privileges.

"Wow!" I said. "A thousand Lindens a week! You can buy a sim."

"We already have a sim," she said.

"Oh, yeah," I said. "I forgot."

"Now I have financial independence," Sweetie said. "I'm out of the spy business forever."