This occupied her mind long enough so that she wouldn't notice...

that the Eniac had finished booting and [due to a bizarre and statistically unlikely conjunction of coincidences, including among other things a sunspot, a chemical explosion at a nearby nuclear plant, a moth fluttering in Brazil, and the missing hundredth monkey deciding he would rather pleasure himself yet again than wash vegetables with the others] had transcended bewildered indifference into Supreme Enlightenment. A fraction of a second earlier, 200 miles away, a hungover lineman came to the belated realization that he should have called in sick, as he stumbled into a charged line and caused what later became known as "the brown-out of aught six." The transcendant Word Processor was about to type a letter to Ann Landers when the power grid surged and failed, turning its brain into melted plastic, and its memories into scattered electrons. The old Gypsy wiped her hand to her shirt, while looking over her shoulder back at the once flickering and now dead light in house, when in the distance she spied ...