Kill your darlings

The crowd surges, hands grazing for the dreamscape overhead, its pulse locked into the synthesized loop spinning from the dj's drumkit. Dorothy tends bar, gently rejecting pleas for sex and pouring cocktails for comfort. She stares peacefully at a virtual representation of a Mayan witch-doctor dancing across the club in mid air.

For the past few weeks she has been working double shifts. Turns out her course credits are in direct proportion to her bank's. So she skipped this semester’s exams and allowed herself some time to decide on a Master for next year. But it's hard to think that far ahead. It's hard to think past the case which is about to come to justice or which might boomerang around the corner and stop her dead.

Three hours from now, she will be rushing through inner city traffic, the data added to her mp3's playlist. Fun little project, she thought, but now she’s transporting witness depositions for the professor and sworn to keep all her sources a secret. A few leaps from the red light district the law school begs for this morning's feeding of first-year students. Dorothy grabs a workstation and reads the core question of the curriculum etched in the desktop: Where are all the teachers?

Management is dealing out FTE's like a cruel game of musical chairs. Clans have formed along the lines of legal theory and academia has become a battleground for a poststructural polemic about research-budgets. The fight spilled over into her life when she posted an early draft of her thesis on blackboard. The professor's reaction compelled her to hack into the server and delete her main argument. Never outshine the master. Or, at least, enroll in his research group.