by Lee Bond
Larry tutted with his hands. “All right, all right, relax, bro, I made a mistake. No need to go all spastic.”
Garth flashed his hundred watt ‘everything’s cool with me’ smile. “Word.”
“Cash or credit?” Larry asked, turning all business. His demeanor faltered when the unnamed and highly sensitive guy with the dark hair and blue eyes went all shifty. “You’re kidding me.”
Garth proffered his Piddy. “Yeahhhhhh. Kinda just moved into, well, uh, the United States. Haven’t had time to get a bank card. You know how these things go.”
“In point of fact, man, I got no clue ‘how these things go’.” Larry gestured at the PID-reader mounted next to the bank card machine. “I’m not even sure if it works, or how to use it properly. No one uses their piddy for this kind of thing, bro.”
“Why?”
This was a genuine question; in the first version of his visit to the 21st century, everything had either been paid for in cash or –in those moments where they were all at an establishment where the owners knew who Drake was- put on a tab. Garth had never once used his piddy for anything other than straight identification.
“Because a piddy-made trans is automatically monitored by the government, man.” Larry started on the PID-reader, checking to see if everything was actually working. He had to dust the damn thing pretty seriously just to make the LED display visible. “Practically screams ‘hey, government, I would like to terminate my few remaining rights of privacy and Net neutrality in favor of having you watch everything I’m doing because I’m not enough of a citizen to do things like everyone else does’. Christ, man, you might as well try to pay me in Bitcoins from a Kyrzakhstan server!”
Garth read the scrawny kid’s nametag and started snapping his fingers. “Larry? Larry! Larry, man, calm down. A few things. One, I got zero intention of running an onion browser to go spelunking in the Darkweb, all right? Gotta make some online purchases and arrange a few things. I’m not gonna be brokering sales for assassins today, or bulk-ordering leftover stockpiles of Agent Orange from Chechnyan ex-patriots, okay? Second thing, if you’re doing something illegal, well, that’s none of my business, but if you are, that’s your deal. I’mma be here for a while. I anticipate spending a lot of money on your already over-priced services. If you promise to treat me nicely from now on, there’s a real good bet some mysterious benefactor will be buying the entire store and everyone in it pizza. Or even Slappy Burgers. Not sure which is which. Not a huge fan of that stuff, but whatevs. We got a deal? Stop freaking the fuck out, be a normal dude doing normal dude stuff, stop worrying that I’m going to order missile strikes on the White House from your Internet café, and everyone gets to have themselves a nice pizza coma. Sound cool?”
Larry nodded. He’d been mainlining Red Bull since he’d opened the shop because he hated dealing with the MMPORG shitbirds that came in first thing. How such scrawny fuckers had such high levels of energy, or how they managed to keep breathing with toxic rage boiling through their malnourished bodies was totally beyond Larry’s skills of comprehension. It was either slam energy drinks and bury himself in retro-cartoons or murder them all.
“Yeah, okay, sorry. It’s just…” Larry gestured lamely at the rowdy pack of online gamers.
“Oh yeah, I get it.” Garth turned around and leaned backwards on the counter so he could better appreciate the mini-hell his new friend Larry had to suffer through on what was probably an eternal basis, marveling at the caffeine and rage induced fervor swelling the ranks of computers arrayed in tight clusters through the café. “Gimme space zombies any day.”
“Sorry, what?” Larry entered his access codes into the PID-reader and was rewarded with an incorrect password announcement flashing at him.
Garth winced as one kid slammed his head so hard into his keyboard he was going to have the damn alphabet permanently ingrained into his skin. “This. All this. What the hell is this?”
Larry tried another password and failed. “Take it you’ve never played online video games before. Maybe if I try…”
“Well, sure, but, like, in someone’s basement or whatever. You know, with people. Drinking beers and having a laugh. Not, like, in public, screeching like a fucking howler monkey and threatening to murder someone’s entire family for … the fuck is a penta steal? That kid over there looks like he’s gonna go Damien on someone, sick hellhounds after babies.” Garth was flabbergasted at the attitudes and wrath boiling out of the teens and preteens in the café. He’d never seen anything like it, and he’d been an actual overpowered teenager, dealing with a Kith’s brutal attempts at overriding Heshii influences long enough to teach his son how to not accidentally murder normal people without accidentally doing the same damn thing to his own son.
This was insanity.
“You’re what, mid-twenties?” Larry gave himself a little high five when he used the right password, pleased as all hell that there wasn’t any kind of PIN timeout. The small readout began filling up with the various things a store owner could do with their very own PID-reader.
Garth nodded and handed over his piddy when Larry held out his hand. A wide, shit-eating grin crossed his face. “You … could say that.”
“So you kind of had a normal childhood and teenage years.” Larry checked the digital face on the piddy against the man standing next to him and nodded briefly, pleased. From what he read on the Internet and saw on television, piddy-theft wasn’t exactly a thing that was taking off in America, but that was only because the tech going into the one-stop-shop of identification solutions was rock solid; other countries, like Australia and Russia, were trying the same thing, only with limited success because they hadn’t sunk something like a trillion dollars into their system.
Garth tried to keep the snort of laughter from escaping but failed; the first thing from his childhood that popped into mind was him and Antal, skulking through the city streets of downtown Detroit, playing a particularly savage game of cat and mouse. He thought he might still have a scar or two from that little game.
He’d been seven. “Yeah, I suppose I had a normal childhood. All things considered. My dad was a bit on the weird side, kind of a … survival nut, but sure.”
Slotting the piddy into the reader, Larry began setting Garth up for his time on the computer. “Okay, so, these kids grew up on the social networking sites, man. They had smartphones before they hit kindergarten. They were taking selfies and sexting and all that weird shit before they even hit puberty. Online gaming and the luxury of remaining relatively anonymous while doing so is slowly but surely turning them all into little sociopaths. That’s if they don’t develop a mild to awful case of Asperger’s from the lack of retaliation for the awful shit spewing out of their mouths.”
“Sounds like you know your stuff, Lar.”
“Gotta. Need to know what I’m dealing with. I’m surrounded by these screeching monkeys for twelve hours a day. These are the ones that are officially grounded from using their home systems to fuck around on because they do stupid things like throw their controllers at the wall or scream a torrent of abuse into the webcam for a solid thirty minutes. So they tell their parents they’re gonna hang out at the park or whatever, sneak off here, and … get up to no good.” Larry looked up from the monitor. “So, what’re you thinking here, man? An hour, two hours, what?”
Garth checked the time on the wall clock. It was just before noon. “When you close?”
“Midnight.” Larry felt deflated. He’d been hoping to get off work a bit early so he could cram in one more episode of Lost, mostly in part because while everyone currently double-fisting energy drinks into their craws would be active for a considerable while yet, the inevitable crash would see most of them gone by eight or nine at the latest. Any remaining assholes would be pried loose with threat of a Permaban.
Garth Nickels looked like the sort of guy that could sit in front of a computer all damn day and night.
“Hm.” Garth took a mental step backwards.
What did he really want to accomplish on his first day of Internet Raiding?
Prior to the recentralization of everything American, the stock market had remained closed on the weekends, but when the powers that be realized they were completely and utterly fucked in every way, shape and form imaginable, they'd sat down and started looking at how best to get up from underneath the mountain of debt they’d accrued running around being everyone’s least favorite Big Brother.
One of the first things they’d done was the heavy decision to allow trading to continue on a nearly non-stop basis, shutting everything down for a few hours every night before opening the doors up again.
It’d been a hard thing to adjust to, and a lot of business had suffered in those early days of a twenty hour trading market. The endless onslaught of predators looking to flip weak companies, overseas investors looking to get a toehold into lucrative-seeming American companies … thousands of businesses had experienced massive success from the new business model.
But the almost Darwinian process had also had untold success in weeding out companies not strong enough to do what the American government really wanted, which was make their country robust again. The short term result of many thousands of men and women being out of work in the blink of an eye was a tough sell to voters, but the long term benefits of being spared the economic burden of having to buy out companies on the verge of total bankruptcy –a more costly venture than most citizens imagined- was one that cagey voters understood all too well.
Up and running now for nearly five years, the twenty hour trading floor was officially a juggernaut of precision machinery. All the companies on the boards were either survivors capable of weathering damn near anything that came their way or were fresh fish riding the waves of some hot new technological process or had backers worth billions.
That was the new model. You wanted to play with the big boys and girls, you wanted the opportunity to make trillions of dollars, you had to put up or shut up.
It was the dawn of nascent Conglomerates. So-called supramergers were about a year away from becoming a reality, and the US Government was looking for any angle they could to exploit that model before it hit the streets.
For now, though?
Easy pickings for someone who knew the future. For Garth, who gave zero rats’ asses about anyone or anything in this simulation, he could pillage and plunder his weasily black heart out until the store closed, all while turning an insane profit.
The question was, did he really want to spend a solid twelve hours doing so?
Give a regular person a hand guide to the future, with clearly highlighted passages pointing out which companies would float and which would drown, or show them which emergent technologies would sweep to the four corners of the earth and which would fall flat, the answer would be ‘are you fucking kidding me right now, of course, we’re gonna make all the fucking money ever and then fuck off to a non-extraditable country, tax-free country for endless Mai Tai’s’.
But that was an ordinary person with an ordinary person’s goals, and didn’t include a dude at the other end of The Line staring backwards into the past, a fat-as-fuck mug watching ever so carefully for the smallest ripple, ready to unleash ODDities at the merest hint of something untoward happening.
The odd vibe outside had warned Garth that Samiel was hunting for him. Since the region wasn’t presently stuffed to the tits with raging ODDities howling for blood, Garth knew he was safe.
For now.
A big company like Apple suddenly floating down the river, a bloated, ransacked corpse … that might just throw up a neon sign pointing directly at him.
So, the question was, did he want to jeopardize his safety so soon in the game?
He didn’t have a base camp yet and he definitely couldn’t survive an ODDity right then, so … was circumspection the way to go or not?
About the only thing working to his favor was Samiel’s shockingly wise decision to keep any and all altercations period-compliant, meaning unless things got way out of hand –as they had in proto-Real Las Vegas the night of Drake’s half-assed, rash rescue- bad guys coming his way would be keeping things non-laser-y.
Following the Hellfire Failure, Samiel for sure wouldn’t come at him overtly. But if he imagined for one second that the motherfucker wasn’t gearing up for full-on temporal Kung Fu battles all across Frisco, Garth supposed he deserved to have his ass kicked.
So as much as Garth loved the idea of hitting Steve Jobsian rich overnight, getting just enough coin to start on the Arcade of Awesomeness and a few other projects necessary that’d keep his joint as DeadShop-free as possible was the play of the day.
“Hey, man, as much as I’m here all day and really don’t got anything better to do but stand around watching you stare thoughtfully off into the fucking distance, I’m streaming a Powerpuff Girls marathon followed by a Dexter’s Lab thing, so could we hurry this along?” Larry rapped the counter a few times with his knuckles to draw Garth back into the present. “So what are you doing here, man?”
“Uh, like, let’s start at … six hours.” Garth tapped his lip thoughtfully. “You got any dual or triple monitor setups? I … I got some multitasking to do. Oh, yeah. Uh. Software. I … need stuff like AutoCAD annnnnd … other modeling programs. And Illustrator and Photoshop.”
Larry laughed. He couldn’t help himself; now that he’d a chance to talk to the guy, Garth Nickels might actually seem like the sort of dude to sit at a computer doing stuff on the regular, but … talking the way he was right now was at odds with the mental image. “What’re you trying to do, man, start your start-up in my shop?”
Garth nodded, blue eyes gleaming with sincerity. “Yeah, basically. You got licenses for the programs I mentioned?”
Larry checked the laminated piece of paper stuck to the wall behind him, trying to remember the last time anyone coming through the front doors had asked to use a single non-video game related program. “Uhhhh, I got the Adobe stuff for sure, all up to date. Definitely don’t have AutoCAD because really? There’s all kinds of online programs that’ll do the same.”
Garth twitched his lips back and forth. AutoCAD was the best choice but whatever. “And 3D modelling?”
“Zero. Zilch. Nada. My rigs can barely handle League of Legends on High quality settings, friend. Those geeks out there currently trying to dismantle each other through telekinetic rage at me every other day 'cuz the pixel count isn’t high enough, or about how they need God rays to play properly. Any modeling app you might even consider using would fry the GPU before you got through the load screen.”
Garth hung his head, momentarily crestfallen. While he'd kinda always known getting the kind of computer setup you'd use to destroy a virtual simulation was something that'd take more than a day or two to get rolling properly, Garth’d been hoping to at least get started on designing a few gadgets sooner rather than later.
Garth held up a hand when it looked like Larry was going to start bitching again about wasting his personal television time. “OK, fine, all right. No modeling software. I won’t even try streaming an online app. I totally swear. How about the dual monitor rig?”
“I’ve got a few, but they cost …”
“Extra. Yeah, I figured.” Garth leaned forward, drawing Larry into a whispered conversation. “For an extra hundred bucks, how about you let me set up a third monitor.”
Larry licked his lips. A hundred bucks was nothing to sneeze at, and for something like wasting a few minutes setting up a third screen? A c-note? That’d buy him food for two weeks! “What in the hell for, man? No one can split their attention across three screens. You’re gonna be designing stuff on one and doing what the hell ever on the other. And that’s assuming you can actually multitask.”
“Dude.” Garth rolled his eyes. “The Science Fiction Network is running an old school Battlestar Galactica marathon at two o’clock. Right now, they’re showing the two best episodes of Space: 1999. After Battlestar, it’s gonna to be
motherfucking Tim Thomerson and the Trancer movies. You kidding me right now? Get your head in the game, Larry. So whaddya say? An extra hundo and we get this show on the road, right?”
Larry nodded so hard he thought his head might swivel right off. “Oh yeah, no, I get it. You’re a man who likes his sci-fi, I’ll tell you that. Yeah, let’s get this party started.”
Garth smiled wide. “Thought you might say that.”
***
“What’re you doing now?”
“Stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Important stuff.” Garth didn’t look at the obnoxious fourteen year old super-nerd douchebag beside him. He’d done that once already and knew that if he took in the pizza-stained ‘I’m a rich, self-entitled nerdchild with absentee parents’ t-shirt once more, headbutts and suplexes were en route, lawsuits over child abuse notwithstanding.
If it did come down to that, Garth was willing to bet his left nut he could bargain his way out of jail time just by pointing at the folded up idiot on the floor and going ‘c’monnnnnn, am I right?’.
Boom. Done. A curt nod from the attending officers and the whole thing’d be swept under the rug.
“You’re making all kinds of money on the stock market. How are you doing that?” Emerson took a long, noisy, rattling slurp on his cherry cola flavored Slurpee. “And the stuff you’re watching on this other monitor is stupid. That robot with the twinkly head is stupid.”
“The robot with the twinkly head is Lucifer, and he is fu … awesome.” Garth looked over his setup in the hopes of catching Larry’s eye, but the shop owner was head deep in his Dexter’s Lab marathon. “And it’s noneya goddamn business how I’m making money on the stock market. That stuff is for adults only.”