“Look Curtis, you been hacking off our tips. Duh! Don’t you think the staff kinda of notice they’re not getting paid? And I know we’re all a bunch of senile old codgers, but even we can tell when we don’t get our asses wiped cause the staff can’t feed their kids. You leave our tips alone, asshole!”
The good doctor sniffs. “I’m afraid I have expenses.”
“Yeah, and they all got tits.”
“And I’ve only got one other source of income.” He starts to smile. A nice long pause, like it’s his close up or something. He purses his lips into a little bitty kiss. “You.”
He’s such a drama student. His breath smells of cheese. He tells me “If my account is empty, I’ll hack it out of yours.”
No he won’t. It won’t be that easy. But he has got a point. It is the whole point, the underlying point. I gotta sit on that point everyday and it goes straight up my ass.
I can’t walk without help. My kid’s poor. I gotta find a hundred thou a year.
So I take it out of other people’s bank accounts, OK?
Curtis is my doctor. He knows everything I do. I have to give him a cut.
I have a dream. I put Dr. Curtis in rubber mask and backwards baseball cap, and shove him out on the lawn at night so the cameras don’t recognise him and he gets area-denied. He gets sound gunned. He gets microwaved; his whole body feels like it’s touching a hot lightbulb. His whole goddamned shaven tattooed trendy fat little ass feels what’s like to be poor and hungry and climbing over our wall just to activate some ordnance.
All this is before lunch. It’s a well crucial day. Stick around, it’s about to get even more crucial.
It’s Saturday and that’s Bill’s day to visit. I go to the Solarium and wait, and then wait some more. Today he doesn’t show. I wait a little while longer. And then ring him up to leave a message. I don’t want sound whiney, so I try to sound up. “Hey, Bill, this your Dad. Everything’s cool, I hope it’s under control for you too.”
Then I sit and hang out. I don’t want to be some sad old fuck. I open up a newspaper. It tells me Congress wants to change tax rates, to ease the burden on younger taxpayers. Oh cool, thanks.
I go back to check out Jazza. It’s the afternoon, but he’s sleeping like a baby.
Jazza used to be so cool. It’s good to have someone from your time, your place. Even if he doesn’t remember who you are.
We wanted to send a rocket to Mars. We built it ourselves and called it Aphrodite and went to Nevada and launched it and it went straight up looking like 1969 and hope.
We made pretend-music; started our own company, developed a couple of computer games, called ourselves Fighting Fit and sold the company. We ran a pirate download and shared the same girlfriend for a while. After we lost all our money, we emptied the same accounts too. Amateur spaceships don’t pay for themselves. I decided to go mundane, and went into security software. I went straight for a while. Jazza never did. He still hung out there. From time to time I gave him some freelance. When Bill went to college I went to check Jazza out. He was still at a mixing desk at fifty. He was wearing one of those shirts that keeps changing pictures or told the punters what toons he was pumping out.
I hack Jazza’s bills as well. Otherwise, he’d be out on the street.
I sit there a while, just making sure he’s OK, if he wants anything. He snores. I give his knee a pat and leave. You get lonely sometimes.
I get to my room and there’s a message. “Dad, you probably know this already but Bessie was mugged. I’ll be over tomorrow.”
Bessie is my granddaughter. Never have a well crucial day.
The next morning we’re doing Neurobics.
They found out that even old people grow new neurons. If they give you PDA, it goes even faster, but you got to use it or lose it. So they make us learn. They make us do crazy stuff. Like brush our teeth with the wrong hand. Or read stuff from a screen that is upside down. Sometimes they make us do really off the wall stuff, like sniff vanilla beans while we listen to classical music. They’re trying to induce synaesthesia.
Today we were in VR. We’re weightless in a burning space station. We got to get out through smoke and there is no up or down. What way does the lever on the door pull?
I get a tug on my arm. It’s the Kid. He smiles at me real nice. “Mr. Brewster? I come find you. You son is here.”
These days I walk like Frankenstein, on these fake little legs. They make your muscles work so they grow back. Nobody’s supposed to hold me up. The Kid does though. To him I guess I’m some old granddad and that is how you show respect!
So I introduce him to my son. Joao, this is my boy Bill. Bill stands up and shakes the Kid’s hand and thanks him for taking care of me. My boy is fifty years old. He’s got a potbelly, but he still looks like a guy who never spent a day in an office.
Bill is real neat. I can say that. He’s a neat kid, he just never made any money. He’d work in the summers as a diving instructor and in winter he’d go south. He went to teach primary school in the Hebrides. He did a stint putting chips in elephant’s brains in Sri Lanka.
Today though his smile looks weirded out.
“How’s Bessie?” I ask.
Something happens to Bill’s face and he sits down. “Um. You didn’t see the news? It was on the news.”
“Bessie was in the news?” Oh shit. You don’t get in the comics just for stubbing your toe.
Bill’s voice rattles. “They did something to her face,” he says. He takes out his paper and fills it, and lays it out on the table.
I tell him, “I didn’t see anything about it. I think we’re filtered. I think they filter our news.”
“VAO. Only this time it really was a victim who got activated.”
VAO protects banks, shopping malls, offices. Anything First World, or Nerd World, got VAO. It’s supposed to zap thieves. For just a second I thought maybe Bessie had been on a job like maybe being a gangsta skips a generation or something.
Bill’s newspaper fills up with an animated headline.
The headline says V A O…
And the headline animates into
Very
Ancient
Offenders
And then, for your delectation and amusement, up comes my granddaughter’s mugging, caught on security camera and sold by the ordnance company to defray costs.
They run my granddaughter’s mugging for laughs. Because the muggers are old.
Ain’t dey cute, them old guys?
There’s my Bessie, going out to her car. Slick black hair, skinny red trousers, real small, real sweet. Able to take care of herself, but you don’t expect your own bolted, belted VAO parking lot to be the place where you get mugged.
These four clowns come lurching out at her. They’re old guys like me. They’re staggering around on callipers, they got the Frankenstein walk but they stink of the street. One of them is wearing old trousers that are too small. The legs end up around his calves, and they’re held up by a belt, they don’t close at the front. There is a continent of dingy underwear on display.
Bill says, “Microwave. Somehow they turned it on her instead of them. But they didn’t know what they were doing.” Bill can’t look at this, he’s hiding his face.
And on the paper, Bessie is denied her own area.
The keys in her hand go hot, she drops them. Her own shiny hair goes hot and she clasps her head, and she crouches down and tries to hide under her own elbows.
Bill takes from behind his hand. “It’s supposed to stop before 250 seconds. After that it does damage.”
These are old, old codgers. They shuffle. They forget to turn the fuckin thing off. They pick up the car keys and they’re too hot and they drop ’em. Well duh. Finally they shuffle round to some kind of switch.
We’re at 300 seconds and Bessie’s trousers are smoking, and the skin of her face is curling up.
“She’ll need a cornea transplant,” says Bill.
They pick up her purse and just leave her there. They get into the car. I get a look at them.
