Full Catch Diorama

by Nick Salomon

  “We’re not calling you anything. At least not yet,” says Paul from behind me. The guy puts so much effort on making his voice sound authoritative. Poor wannabe police who probably failed academy and now gets the consolation prize of being a corporate Loss Prevention loon. “But we’ll be conducting a thorough investigation.”

  “Listen, Ted,” says Scott and I look at him. “I believe you had nothing to do with this, but we have to follow corporate procedures in these cases. I mean, a pretty expensive piece of equipment disappeared and we need to figure out how.”

  “S-so what happens to me now?” I ask Linda, voice shaking.

  “I’m very sorry Teeeed. We’ll put you on administrative leaveeeee and replace your hourly wages with accrued vacation timeeeeee.”

  “I don’t believe this,” I say, looking down to my feet. “We’ve been through so much. All the things we’ve done and now you show me the door. I thought Dreamax was my family.”

  Paul scoffs behind me. “Dude, please, you’re embarrassing yourself.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask looking at him. “What does he mean?” I ask Linda from HR.

  “Please calm down Ted,” Linda says, grabbing my hand. I see tears forming in her eyes. Fuck, at least the vocal fry appears under control. “I apologize. You’ll be very welcome back once the investigation is cleared.”

  I nod meekly. I hear Paul stand up behind me and puts a hand on my shoulder and says “let’s go, buddy.”

  “What about my stuff? I have personal things in my desk drawers.”

  “LP will go through it then I’ll put everything in a box and ship to your address on record,” says Linda, sniffling.

  I nod again. Meekly. Then Paul guides me out of the HR office, past the bullpen and through the stairs down to the first floor. The small number of slaves that remain at Dreamax HQ look up from their boring work days, give me a quick glance and return to their conversations about fantasy football and the ‘insta.’

  “Alright, buddy, we’ll be in touch,” says Paul then closes the door behind me.

  I turn around and look at my former place of employment. I’ll miss the free diorama screenings, I guess. It’s only 10:30 AM so I make my way to the coffee shop a couple blocks away. The email account and admin access in my smartphone have already been blocked. Steve probably clicked a button the minute he saw Linda take me to the HR office. As I walk the short distance, I login to my bitcoin purse and see a whole whooping $33 and 33 cents in transactions. Some people have already started purchasing the wino’s rama. Just have to wait for it to go viral and we’ll be set.

  No more coffee. I go inside the coffee house and order an orange juice. As I scan for a free seat, waiting for them to mix pulp concentrate with tap water, I text Lucy.

  From Me:

  How’s sales?

  No answer. I get my order first, before I even see the three dots in the SMS app and sit down. There is no rush. I take a breath to enjoy the smell of forbidden bean juice and exhale. I savor freedom from corporate slavery. I must remember this day. I wonder how future generations will think of me. Will they call me the Steve Jobs of entertainment? The Edison of the diorama. A genius. A visionary. A captain of industry. Sweet immortality, here I come.

  I feel my phone vibrate inside my pocket, pull it out and read Lucy’s response.

  From Lucy:

  Not good. 33 sales in the first 2 hours the site went live then nothing in the last 8 hours.

  Fuck, that’s not good. Eight hours is too old for a meme to go viral.

  From Me:

  Did you promote in the chans

  like I told you?

  From Lucy:

  Yes, and I was told “not your personal

  army” and “tits or GTFO”

  This is not good. Not good at all. Immortality slips through my fingers. I don’t understand, someone in those 33 purchases should have tweeted it to a rama e-celebrity. Where is the buzz? How do you advertise illegal content to the masses?

  From Me:

  Thx, I’ll think of something

  Even if I’m not out of a job, I can’t go back to a cubicle now. Just when I thought I was out, the NPCs pull me back in. I take a few sips of OJ, allowing myself a few seconds of silence in my head to clear my mind. And it comes to me. If the masses want celebrities, celebrities they shall have. My phone still has a cached, outdated version of the Dreamax corporate contacts list. I find the man’s email address and compose a message, short but to the point.

  From: Ted Davies (tedsseract@tormail.es)

  To: Topher Bass (tobogan@dream.ax)

  Subject: Business opportunity

  How would you like to be the next Chad Mars?

  -Ted

  There goes nothing. Who knows how loyal the Maximum Straya is to Dreamax? But I haven’t even put the phone down when it vibrates with a new message. ToBogan is interested and he’s giving me his cell phone number. I copy-paste it into the phone’s contact books then send him a text.

  From Me:

  Are you still in LA?

  He replies almost immediately.

  From ToBogan:

  Yah

  From Me:

  Can we talk?

  From ToBogan:

  now?

  From Me:

  Yah

  Might be pushing it but now it’s not the time for subtleties. If anything, it may convey a sense of urgency. Who wouldn’t want to be the next Chad Mars? The phone vibrates again with an address in Santa Monica. A GPS app points to a boardwalk parking lot. Worst that can happen is he laughs at my proposal. Even then, I’ll take the opportunity to eat some beach hotdogs.

  Third Wheel

  I make it to the boardwalk less than half hour later, even after having to walk home to get the car. Got to love those empty LA freeways. I used to come here with my family when I was little for birthdays and other special occasions. Nothing would beat the seafood places, ice cream shop and the arcade on the pier. You could walk a short distance away from the water to find street performers and masses of tourists and rich assholes showing off their million-dollar supercars.

  Santa Monica was somewhat spared the brunt of the crash. It’s still got some tourist value and as far as I know, most of the condos near the water are still occupied. Most owned by Saudi and Chinese nationals. I don’t see many of either but street signs and stores mostly incorporate Mandarin and Arabian characters in signage and logos. There used to be a few beach bums here and there but the Chinese don’t fuck around. Some city ordinance was passed years ago to forcibly remove loiterers that usually get dumped a few blocks inside the city of Los Angeles.

  I have no problem finding a parking spot by the boardwalk, among extravagant golden and red luxury vehicles and the occasional high-end Kia here and there. Even before I get out of the car, I see a small crowd gathering by the beach gym. Bunch of swings, ropes, benches and other artifacts for the fitness-obsessed to publicly show off the fruit of their steroids investments. Or in this case, a mildly relevant rama dreamer in a green and gold speedo.

  ToBogan. The Top Bogan. The Maximum Straya. He hangs from gymnastics still rings doing swings and turns and other tricks. Easy to forget before he became famous for poking deadly Australian outback beasts assholes, Topher Bass was already well known in a couple sports disciplines. Good enough to win local tournaments but never to make it to the Olympics. Good enough, but not quite to win first place. Something I can exploit, I figure.

  I stand by the edge of the small crowd. An odd mix of Chinese and Saudi women from the neighborhood. The former group mostly wearing those bikini sets that cover a good couple square inches of skin they might as well be naked and the latter, full black gowns you can only see their eyes. Away from the circle of swooning fans wetting themselves to the sight of such a virile alpha male specimen, their men stand around or mind the children. Nothing stranger than Americanized fundamentalist cultures.

  The show goes on for a few minutes and I get bored and walk
away to sit in a nearby bench. I nod to a middle-aged Chinese dude smoking an e-cig there, no doubt waiting for his woman to be finished cuckholding him in public. Some more twists and turns and spins and ToBogan finishes by rapidly spinning, letting go of the rings, then landing and making a pose, as sand raises up in the air. The small crowd gasps and claps then rush him to get autographs and maybe steal a squeeze of those sun-tanned muscles. As he signs little pieces of paper, we lock eyes for a moment and he gives me a ‘be right there’ look.

  About half hour later, he’s finally done pleasing the fans. I see some of them grab their men and rush them away, perhaps back to the privacy of their expensive beachside condos before the heat of arousal fades away.

  “Out to make me the next Chad Mars, are you?” says ToBogan, as he sits next to me. The man still wears nothing but the tiny speedo emblazoned with the colors of his motherland. There’s a white towel on his shoulders he uses to wipe some of the sweat away.

  “That’s right,” I say with a nod. It’s a good thing the bench is wide enough so I can sit far away enough as to avoid the sweaty smell.

  Topher Bass chuckles and leaves the towel alone, reclining back and running his left arm along the back of the bench then says with a wide grin “and how do you plan to do that?”

  Here it comes. All or nothing. I turn slightly to my right so I can see him in the eyes and ask him “what made Chad Mars so famous? What’s the difference between you and him?”

  The Maximum Straya smiles no more. “Hard to compete with a trust fund baby. The guy came out of nowhere with millions of dollars to do his exotic holiday ramas while I was still busy with sports training.” I quickly realize his loud, exaggerated bogan accent is all part of his rama persona, as he now talks in normal American English, pretty much indistinguishable from a native speaker’s.

  “Wrong,” I say with the deepest voice I can make without looking like an attempt to be threatening. “Chad Mars was not the first to a relatively new platform but knew exactly how to use it to its maximum potential. Just like Stan Lee or Shigeru Miyamoto or Pewdiepie”

  ToBogan listens attentively, every now and then looking around the beach at nothing in particular, if only to break eye contact for a moment. Discussing Chad Mars is apparently an uncomfortable subject for this alpha male specimen. He does not interrupt, while I continue my sales pitch.

  “Chad Mars did not come out of nowhere. True, he is a trust fund baby, but he made a name for himself in the darknet fetish scene. All he had to do was realize the potential of the diorama, a new platform the old dinosaurs in the legacy entertainment industries of music, movies, videogames and VR scoffed at. And now, where are the Hollywood blockbusters? Where are the videogames that players used to rabidly preorder? The singers who used to fill stadiums? The VR experiences? Gone, no one gives a shit about that crap anymore. It’s all about the ramas now.”

  “So, you’re saying you invented something better than a rama?” the Straya asks, sea breeze making a mess of hair coated in dried sweat.

  “I can’t talk much about it without you agreeing to be the third partner in a startup,” I say.

  A smile comes back to ToBogan’s. He crosses his arms to his chest and says “Dreamax pays me 20 mil a year, whether their ramas sell or not. What makes you think I’d leave that behind in exchange for your vague promises?”

  I return the smile plus a shrug. “It’ll be a leap of faith. Do you think Chad Mars makes 20 mil a year?”

  ToBogan scoffs again, his grin reduced to a smile trying to hide annoyance. This is where I stop calling the name of his greatest rival. We sit there for several minutes, as I let the Straya digest the conversation and think for a bit. I don’t mind waiting, it’s been years since the last time I came to the beach. A real beach. Although at the end of the day there is no sensory difference between real and rama.

  “I’ll give you a couple hours to show me, what the hell,” he finally breaks the silence.

  “I need your signature in an NDA first,” I say, summoning superhuman strength to not show excitement. I then pull up a NDA form in my smartphone and hand it to him for e-signature.

  Without hesitation, he takes it from my hand, places his finger on the thumbprint reader then gives it back. “Alright then let’s go make me the next Chad Mars.”

  I make a gesture with my eyes towards his exposed bulge.

  “Oh right,” he says with a chuckle. “Clothes are over there, give me 10 minutes.”

  *

  “The fuck’s that smell?” the Straya asked when we got in my car. I explained I had tripped into some disgusting sewage pool by accident and didn’t have a choice but to drive home while soaked in the ungodly concoction. We opened the windows all the way down and this provided some relief for him and also for me, as there was no further opportunity for him to keep asking any more questions about the ‘new technology’ due to the noise of the wind circulating in and out.

  Eventually we make it to North Hollywood, then Lucy’s street. Again, I have to park a couple blocks away. ToBogan wears sunglasses and a baseball cap to mask his identity. Like anyone gives a shit about him. Oh, but they will. They will, big time.

  I knock the door to Lucy’s apartment. She opens a couple seconds later. A new record, as she usually takes her god damn time when I visit. But no, I texted her in advance I was bringing ToBogan himself. She grins like few times I’ve seen then hugs me, then hugs him then urges us to come in. She even hastily cleaned up her mess. A celebrity is in the house.

  “Did you guys talk about it?” Lucy asks us, after we sit down in her couch.

  “Vaguely,” grunts ToBogan.

  “Well, surely you understand…” I begin.

  “Yeah, yeah. I signed the damn thing, will you show me now, please?”

  “Yeah, for sure. Better if you see for yourself,” I say, standing up and motioning for him to lay down on the couch.

  Instead, ToBogan grabs the Oneiros visor and looks at me, disappointment in his face then says “really? It’s just a rama.”

  “A new class of rama,” I say, still motioning for him to lay down. “Sorry, that’s all I can say.”

  For a few seconds ToBogan looks at the visor, then at me, then at Lucy, then back at the visor. My heart races. He seems to be considering just walking out of there. In the end, he shrugs, maybe he figures all he was going to lose was 10 minutes of dreaming a rama. He takes off the baseball hat and lays down. Lucy goes behind him to assist in putting on the Oneiros.

  “Hey, don’t do anything funny with my junk while I’m out, eh?” ToBogan says.

  I look at Lucy and say “see? It’s a legitimate request for a man too.” She just rolls her eyes then sits at her nerd throne. Then she does a dramatic and unnecessary countdown from 5 and runs the full catch diorama from the hobo for him. ToBogan’s body tenses for a couple seconds, then goes limp, fully immersed in next generation diorama.

  Several minutes go by. ToBogan is deep in diorama sensory immersion without apparent reaction. Lucy sits in her nerd throne in silence. Sometimes looking at me, until our eyes meet for a second, then at the sleeping Straya. Whether she’s still awkward about the whole impulse fuck thing or worried about him joining our business venture or not is anyone’s guess.

  It doesn’t take long for the experience to finish and ToBogan inhales deeply then exhales, his body coming back to life. He then reaches for the Oneiros to take it off. He puts it to the side and sits up, massaging his temples with his right hand. Me and Lucy stare at him in silence, unsure of what’s going on.

  After a short while, I get tired of waiting for a reaction and ask “well? What do you think?”

  “Huh,” ToBogan mumbles then looks at me for a second. Not only was he massaging his temples, he was also wiping tears from his eyes and they’re still red from moisture. “Fucking hell,” is all he has to say.

  I think I know what he means. I think he gets it. “Awesome, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” he says, look
ing at me, then Lucy. “Yeah.”

  The Maximum Straya seems at a loss for words. He doesn’t move. Doesn’t talk. I try breaking the ice and ask “well, did you kill them? Or did you fuck them?”

  “Really?” asks Lucy. I shrug then she rolls her eyes.

  “What?” ToBogan asks, seemingly still disoriented. “Who?”

  “The people in the lucid diorama you just lived,” I say. “You know, that diorama, the type that’s going to make us obscenely rich and yourself bigger than Chad Mars?”

  “Oh,” he mumbles then reclines back on the sofa. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. The rama started outside of a house, at night. So I went exploring the neighborhood.”

  “Huh,” I say then me and Lucy look at each other, confused.

  “I just walked down the street,” he continues. “It was dark. It was… sad. I just kept walking and walking until I reached the edge of the stage. This is when I realized it was a lucid rama. Simply by walking beyond the limits that were caught from the dreamer.”

  “Isn’t it awesome? Lucid dioramas!” I say with a wide grin. ToBogan is still deathly serious. It begins to disturb me, as I’ve never seen him in this sustained state of misery.

  “Yeah,” he says.

  “Well, then what happened?” asked Lucy, maybe asserting her role as the other business partner so we don’t forget.

  “This lucid diorama. It creates weird shit the moment you think about it,” he says, looking at me.

  “Tell me about it,” I say. “I ended up with a self-aware pothead alien friend.”

  ToBogan nods in acknowledgement then says “these creations, they get pulled from your memory. Some kind of mix between diorama and your memories and the dreamer’s.”