Gus Prepares for Everything Except a Wi-Fi Password

Friday: Setup Takes One Sentence

I plugged the stick in, picked the home network and entered the password. Setup took about as long as it takes to say the Wi-Fi password out loud, which Gus counted as a personal injury.

"There should be more to it," he said. "A man should have to earn a picture."

The picture is 4K Ultra HD with HDR10+. Gus watched a nature clip with his arms folded and said it looked fine. From Gus that is a parade.

Then I showed him the part that matters on a lane with eleven households. Prime Video, Netflix, YouTube, Disney+, Hulu and the rest all live in one place, and I pinned the few apps we would need up front. Nobody has to hunt through menus while a crowd waits in lawn chairs.

Setup took about as long as it takes to say the Wi-Fi password out loud, which Gus counted as a personal injury.

Saturday: The Caucus Arrives in Regalia

By dusk everyone had set chairs facing the garage door. The Cat-Owners' Caucus arrived in full regalia. The Caucus maintains that no human achievement outranks the keeping of a cat, so the sash of office was laid across a folding chair and the gavel placed on a cushion that no one may touch, while the Admiral, who holds the office, slept through his own inauguration on the wrong chair.

The bylaws say no screening may begin until the gavel is struck. The bylaws also say nobody may touch the gavel. Mags stood beside the cushion holding the agenda and looked like a woman at the edge of a very small canyon.

The twins offered a hypothesis. Ada thought the gavel could be struck by a gust of wind, and Felix thought a gust of wind was a kind of hand, and I stopped listening when they started drawing it.

Saturday, Later: Three Things Go Wrong

First, the credits. Mags wanted the program to thank Brenda, who was watching from under the porch at No. 2 with her usual composure. Doris moved that the credit read "Brenda, bear, domesticated," on the cataloguing principle that the noun comes first, and Mags countered with "Resident Domesticated Bear," and the two of them debated the placement of a comma for forty minutes while the lane stood in the dark holding folding chairs.

Second, the lights. ORACLE, the HOA's assistant, is trusted by Mags with anything involving a switch. Mags asked ORACLE to dim the lights, and ORACLE announced that it was beginning an update, that it was now eleven percent wiser, then thirty-four percent wiser, and that it had learned Portugal is a lake. It kept reporting its progress, with great calm, through the opening remarks.

The porch lights at No. 2 are the compatible kind. I pressed the button on the remote and said, "Alexa, dim the lights," and they dimmed. ORACLE reached sixty-two percent as the last bulb went down, and nobody thanked it.

Third, the gavel. The Caucus ruled that a spoken command is not a touch. So I pressed the button again and said, "Alexa, play the movie," and the garage door lit up, and the ruling stood.

Sunday: What the Generator Did

The movie ran start to finish. The Wi-Fi did not blink. Gus's hand-crank generator sat on the driveway beside the tarp, unopened, and he looked at it a few times like a man at his own surprise party.

The twins asked whether the stick could play Hogwarts Legacy. It can, through cloud gaming, but only with an Xbox Game Pass subscription and a compatible controller, each sold separately. I told them that was a conversation for a grown-up, and they filed a patent for a controller made of cheese.

Gus helped me coil the cables. He said he could build a streaming stick. Then he said he could build a better generator, and he looked at it again. Doris wrote the generator in the Lending Ledger under items borrowed from the future.

The Admiral was still asleep on the wrong chair when we folded it up. The gavel sat untouched on its cushion. I'm told it will be struck at the next meeting, by a gust of wind.