CHATBOT: I. On an ordinary summer's day in the late 1980s, young Rick Grimes and Shane Walsh decided to spend a day in the sun, far from the beaten path on which their dusty Georgia town seemed to have placed them. "Meet me at the old quarry," Rick had suggested to Shane via an overnight telephone call, the kind that occasionally ran on into the small hours of the morning, with neither participant minding the time. "We'll catch us some catfish with our bare hands and cook 'em right up there!" "Sounds to me like a classic Grimes plan," Shane had replied, punctuating his acceptance with a soft chuckle. When you had been friends as long as Shane and Rick, plans needn't be ironclad, nor even have anything resembling the integrity of ocean-building crust. There was something deeper that joined these two, a common bond like the one that holds yin and yang together, an understanding that basic things of life expand in the retelling, catch color and detail, and quite often take on aspects that are marvelous in no particular order. Life didn't need to be refined to be rich, as they say. II. The sun rode high in the sky, casting spells of warmth and light that turned the very air into a magical elixir. Shane reached the rendezvous point first, the ancient oak that bore the laughing visage of Mr. Rockwood, a truly ferocious caricature gouged into the bark by the combined efforts of their fathers more than a decade before. Rick respected himself on that old tree, feeling the splintered edges cutting into the palms of his young hands, and pondering a stillborn sense of wonder. Years later, he would consider this simple act, this small defiance in the face of time, as an unconscious rejection of the darkness that had seeped into the town from the outer reaches of the cosmos, like a secret cancer. When Rick rode up on his Huffy Cruiser, Shane handed over a familiar pack. "Bullets," he intoned, a single word conveying volumes of intention and shared history. The origin of that pack had long been lost in the mists of their memories, but it remained at the nexus of their bond, a token of friendship older than most of their simple pleasures - fishing, baseball, and chasing the kinds of girls who had retained the vestiges of their youthful beauty and what might have been called innocence. III. It was another three miles to the quarry, a distance they covered in a small eternity of easy pedaling and easy conversation. The air shimmered over the fields, where goldenrod and oleander whis...