'Not me,' you say.
That is the way of things.
Buzz never knew until it happened that he would be the one who would take the DARE.
Growing up on the mean streets of Butte, Montana, Buzz spent all his 'extracurricular' time working to support his family. He would stand hour after hour, in all weathers, flogging his father's hydroponic produce to passerby.
he would whisper. And sometimes a passerby would buy a roll or two, but often as not the police would come along and throw Buzz in jail.
Because they were Masons... and so were the people that ran the big agribusiness consrortiums that Buzz's father was competing with. Some of them were also jealous of Buzz. Such was his introduction to the powers that would harry him the rest of his life, to the powers that would stymie his every attempt to make the world a better place.
One day, the Masons took Buzz away to live with the Fosters.They treated him well at first. Soon, however, he noticed that Mr. Foster spent many hours a day communing with a glowing box in his room. Fearing that the man was under the box's control, Buzz smashed it to flinders one day with a forehead. As the green plastic buckled and snapped, Buzz saw them....
Dozens of them came rushing out of the computer on their little pink legs, shouting
and turning cartweels on their many-fingered hands. Buzz fell to the floor and lay there a long time. He pulled out one of the hydroponic rolls his father had given him and set it on fire in hopes that the smoke would keep the little pink demons away. He resolved at that moment to learn the secrets of the Diddlers and the devil machine they inhabited.
During the next several years, which he spent locked in Mr. Foster's basement, Buzz read the old defiler's vast collection of books on computers and magazines on anatomy. By fusing the knowledge he gained from these two sources, Buzz came to know the Diddlers. Most importantly, he came to understand how he could control them.
YES! I want to know the story of the Diddlers, too