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Silas.
No, you should not assume that you’re going to get a dog, too. Andy’s case was special, and with the enemy he was facing, he needed all the help we could provide him. And that’s my final word on the matter.

At the Brink with Jensen Huntley
    Epic Fail at NTRP
    Civilization, as we know it, has taken another direct hit from our old friends at the NTRP Broadcast Center. For a company with a ritzy Park Avenue address like theirs, they are seriously low-class. If their new program, called How Far Will You Go?, is any indication, they will stop at nothing to gain control of the airwaves while trying to turn its viewers’ brains to mush.
    With How Far Will You Go?, NTRP has taken bad taste to levels no one has seen since the Roman Empire or, at least, Saddam Hussein’s gold-plated toilets. Each week, a group of contestants is given a task and encouraged to “do whatever it takes” to get the job done. The winner gets a hundred grand; the losers get ridiculed by the judges—a panel of three has-been “celebrities.”
    In the pilot episode, contestants were challenged to borrow as much money as possible from an unsuspecting relative. The winner, a knuckle-dragging plumber named Ben, used a river of crocodile tears to convince his unsuspecting grandmother (retired and living in Florida) that if she didn’t loan him $20,000 for a lawyer, she would never see her great-grandson again. His evil ex-wife, he said, was threatening to move to Singapore with her new husband and the child. None of it was true, of course, but poor Granny cashed in some stocks to the jerk. Following the network’s tried-and-true formula, they brought her out at the end of the show and told her that it was all “just a game” and that she had “helped” her grandson win $100,000!
    When host Wilkie Wonderly asked Ben if he would share the loot with the woman he’d duped on national TV, you might have thought he’d asked him to donate a kidney to a total stranger. Class act.
    Then came the parade of losers. The judges took turns mocking their inability to lie, cheat, and/or steal. According to the judges, we can all learn something from Ben the plumber—namely, that the principle that all’s fair in love and war is no longer true.
    “All’s fair, period,” remarked sports agent Allen Ullman.
    A proud day for humanity.

    “Hello, my little friends,” said Silas as he reached into a cage where two pairs of zebra finches fluttered about, singing happily. One of the birds hopped onto his index finger, joined by its mate a moment later. “Be free.” He let them fly about in his studio apartment, and the other pair soon followed. After a few laps around the room, the first pair landed on a bookcase; the second settled on the ledge of a large wooden easel that was set up in a corner.
    In the kitchen, Silas turned the knob on an antique Zenith, a gift from Mrs. Cardigan, and waited for the radio to warm up. When it came to life, he fiddled with the tuner dial until he was satisfied that the sound of the Beethoven quartet was as clear as it could be, and then he sat in the only chair he owned, staring at the painting on the easel. The enormous canvas—six feet tall and eight feet wide—dominated the room. Barely visible pencil sketches, drawn and redrawn over and over, covered most of the surface, but here and there were a handful of spots, a few square inches each, that had been completed in such detail that a casual observer might have thought they were photographs glued onto the canvas.
    He had been working on the painting for more than three years. Those small finished sections were bits and pieces of his childhood—the only clear memories that he had. A grandfather clock at the end of a long hallway. Nameless men and women in lab coats, hurrying past him, speaking a language he didn’t understand. A young girl, her face always turned away from him. Waves crashing onto a rocky seacoast. And a pair of zebra finches. How they were all