To this point, I'd been snuggling under the sheets vaguely wondering why wakeup calls always came in the midst of the best dreams. I'd been on a beach, basking in the love of someone who seemed to have always been part of my life, even though my slowly waking mind had finally reminded me that it had been a long time since I'd had a girlfriend. Still, she seemed familiar. Was she merely a figment of the dream, or could my subconscious be urging me to pay more attention to someone I already knew? In the dream, I'd felt as though I'd been with her forever. Now I was struggling to recall the most basic aspects of her image as wakefulness blurred it to little but a vague impression of "blonde."

Suddenly, Hal was no longer his usual smooth self. "Attention!" he blared like a foghorn. "I have just received an important announcement!"

The beach and the blonde evaporated into total alertness. Who died, was my first thought, followed by, What did I forget? Was I supposed to be having breakfast with the product development team? Had I planned on calling my broker before the market opened back East?

Having secured my full attention, Hal continued in the same urgent tone: "An incredible medical breakthrough has been reported by scientists deep in the Amazon jungle. Working with a remote tribe, they have found a tiny, miracle berry that combines the benefits of Prozac, Viagra, and human growth hormone, all at once. Male or female, you can now stay healthy and vigorous into your 80s and beyond, add three inches to your penis or enhance your bust size by--" The message died as I punched the disconnect.

I'd acquired Hal three months ago at a trade show where one of my firm's suppliers was giving the clocks away as favors. If I'd preferred, I could have had Mickey Mouse, Woody Woodpecker, Marilyn Monroe, or any of several under-clad pop divas. I'd been assured that the Web connection had an unbreakable firewall, and there'd even been a written guarantee from the manufacturer, although I vaguely remembered a caveat about it applying only to existing worms, viruses, code-breakers, and net-probes. Nobody in their right mind guaranteed there wasn't somebody smart enough to beat them. It was an exponentially mounting problem. In the past year alone, I'd been forced to give up my pager, my cell phone, and my fax as each in turn was so swamped in ads that they'd become useless. Was the clock next?

Luckily, there were no other smart electronics in my bedroom. I switched on an old-fashioned FM radio, disconnecting the cable input when it started blatting about berries. There aren't many stations that still bother to broadcast over the airwaves, but there are a few, and I listened to public radio, uninterrupted by even the most benign ads--which at the moment would have seemed quaint.

In the kitchen, a blinking light indicated that I had messages on my unlisted phone line. There proved to be three--one from a political candidate who instantly jumped to the top of my list of those to vote against, another from Sis, reminding me that tomorrow was Mom's birthday, and a third from Tiny Berries, which this time managed to inform me how much my bust would enlarge before I could hit the erase button.

I'd had the phone number for less than a week. It should have been at least another couple of months before the spammers started finding it. I wondered if Sis had accidentally led them to me by programming my new eighteen-digit number into her autodial, where somebody'd managed to hack it. The older fifteen-digit numbers were supposed to slow down the phone solicitors by hiding each functioning number among thousands of nonfunctionals. I was paying a premium for three extra digits designed to increase the difficulty by another factor of 1,000. But such defenses only work if nobody ever puts the number in an electronic database. Even then, they're merely stopgaps; the spammers always catch you eventually.

Once I was on the road, I confirmed Hal's traffic report with my superBMW's autodrive. It too preferred Canyon Road, so I gave it the go-ahead and sat back to scan the business headlines as the car swung onto the quasi-freeway that allowed me to bypass the congested section of the real one.