She put the toys in another box. Actual toys, action figures and the like. Worn, used. Katerina assumed they were from Leo’s childhood.
Clothes were rather normal. Work clothes, battered and almost thready. Casual clothes, jeans, t-shirts with silly prints on them. She held one up and read it. ‘If it feels so good then it can’t be wrong,’ it said.
Huh.
That fit her mood precisely. Though she was sure the t-shirt maker meant other more kinky things, it was exactly how she felt at that moment. It just felt right, this, packing his stuff, the two of them together. It felt great actually.
Katerina put on the t-shirt, over her own. It was bigger but not by much. She closed her eyes and smelled the fabric. She enjoyed that feeling.
Yes, she had decided. “This feels right,” she muttered to herself and carried on with the packing, a wide smile on her face.
Chapter 49:// Giving up
“Jimmy, are you crazy?” the lifeguard said.
Jimmy the Amazing felt immense pain inside. The lovely piece of ass that was walking away, bobbing up and down, had just been offered to him.
He had turned it away.
He leaned back on his lifeguard’s tower at the beach. Even while relaxed, his eyes scanned the horizon and the coastline, tracking people, grouping them into swimmers and drowners. Oh sure, he liked to party. A bit too much actually. But he took his job seriously. He was always drunk or high, but never on the job. He might seem relaxed, smiling, friendly and helluva sexy, but he was always alert.
The girl who had left, was juicy as a peach. She spoke French of course, something Jimmy hadn’t considered when he originally accepted to move here. Nice was, well… nice. The beaches were marvellous, and the tourists enjoyed themselves. It was still too early in the season so they were mainly from northern countries, Russia and Poland. They were pretty much the same as the ones he was used to back in Greece.
“You know I’m married bro,” Jimmy said frowning.
“Yeah, but…” his partner said. “That was… Did you see that body? Those eyes? She was practically begging you man!” Alphonse was incredulous. Oh he had his fair share of lady friends himself, but he had lost his marbles when he saw the effect Jimmy had.
“I didn’t understand what she was saying,” Jimmy the Amazing said and shrugged.
“When are you gonna learn some French, dude?” the Frenchman said scowling. He had picked up Jimmy’s mannerisms from the time they’d worked together.
“Why don’t you French guys speak American like normal people? You all know how!” Jimmy said.
“Oh man!” Alphonse whined as he saw the girl jumping up the stairs to the street and out of sight.
“You could have gone for her, ya know. I said a good word for ya.”
“You said I was cheese,” Alphonse said.
“Nah bro, I’m positive. I said you were a strong man.”
“Nope. Cheese,” Alphonse said in surrender.
“Well it’s your damn language! You could have told her yourself,” Jimmy said and went back to scanning the people.
There was a long pause. Waves broke on the sand, a distant jet-ski rumbled, children laughed and screamed as they played. It was a nice place. Jimmy took it in.
“Your shift is over man,” Alphonse said.
“Yeah, it is,” Jimmy said not moving at all.
“It has been for an hour now. I like the company, but don’t you need to go home and relax?”
“I’m not doing this for the money.”
Alphonse snorted. “Of course you aren’t. Getting married to Bibi does that to you.”
Jimmy sighed. He was… Ridiculously rich. It was strange, all his life he had mismanaged money, and he always thought that having more would make him happier. Well, now he had a ton, which he could reasonably spend with supervision, but he wasn’t enjoying himself.
A car honked behind him. He didn’t turn around.
“Oh, it’s Bibi,” Alphonse said. He eyed Jimmy. “And… You’re not budging.”
“I’ll go when I wanna go,” Jimmy spat out.
Alphonse raised his palms, “Alright dude.” He paused. “Why don’t you go back to Greece? You clearly don’t like it here.”
The car honked. It was a ridiculously expensive cabrio. A red one.
“I can’t. And it’s not that I don’t like it here bro, I really do. I… I just can’t,” Jimmy said and put away his lifeguard gear. “Have a safe shift, man,” he said and slapped Alphonse on the shoulder.
“Hello darling,” Bibi said. “What took you so long?”
Jimmy sat in the car, not bothering to wipe any sand off. They had a service for that. “We were just talking with Alphonse, babe,” he said.
Bibi eyed him and came to some sort of decision. “I spoke with the solicitor again. Your friend’s trial goes well. I do need to pay for another wire transfer though. You want me to send that wire transfer, don’t you darling?” she asked and touched his chin.
Jimmy smiled and kissed her. “Of course my love.” And then flashed her his Amazing smile.
Chapter 50:// Cheering up
“You really know how to butter up a lady,” Katerina said through the phone, from the other side of the bulletproof glass.
“Yeah. Third date, visit in jail. Fourth date, let’s make it a conjugal visit,” Leo said.
“Down tiger,” she said, but her naughty wink said otherwise.
“How’s my dog?”
“I thought you didn’t want him.”
“I do want him, I’m just kinda tied up at the moment,” Leo said and pointed around the jail facilities.
“Well, he is mine now. We are having lovely dinners, Aibo and I. If you want him, you better get out soon.”
“That astronomically expensive lawyer Miss Bibi hired for me says I’ll be out soon. They found video from the-”
Leo paused and stared down at his black hand, a damaged dead weight.
“-The day they framed me, on my phone. No idea how it got there. The video has been expertly wiped at the precise time of the murder, so that makes it a cause for further investigation. They found military grade cyberwarfare stuff in my augmentations, so they copied everything to a computer forensics lab and did a hard reset on everything. We won’t manage to prove anything, it’s way cutting edge stuff, but it’s enough to show I’m innocent.”
Katerina forced a worried smile. “Sounds good. All that damned tech… Nothing but trouble.” She cheered up again. “Hey, you can stay over at my place when you get out!”
“Ugh, that’s nice. But I don’t want to become a burden or anything…”
“Hey, Dumbo. You remember when you last paid your rent? You are evicted. Your stuff is in boxes in my living room at the moment.”
Leo darted up, “Don’t open them!”
She lifted an eyebrow. “Why? Is there anything naughty you don’t want me to see?”
“No…” He said and sat back.
“Well?”
“Are you sure you got everything?”
“Apart from the mouldy fridge, yeah.”
Leo sighed in relief. “OK. There are some mp3s around there that I don’t wanna lose, they were my dad’s. They wiped my walkman clean, that’s the only backup.”
“Don’t worry. Everything will be there waiting for you. Including myself.” She stood up, blew a kiss in the air and left slowly, letting him take a good look at her swaying posterior.
Damn vixen.
Leo hung up the receiver, closed his eyes and imagined himself coming home after a hard day’s work, to a lovely woman who could make a shithole flat seem like a slice of heaven.
He looked forward to that.
The end
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Glossary
Glossary of terms
If it’s not here, just google it.
Daemons: Programs that run in the background silently. They perform action without user interaction. A daemon is a controlling entity for some specific process, like keeping a temperature constant for example. As our devices become more and more interconnected, daemons will command over many aspects of our lives, deciding what emails are important to us, pushing notifications to our devices, ordering milk when it runs out etc. Their name has nothing to do with Christianity’s demons, in ancient Greece a daemon was something like a guardian spirit (like the Roman genius) and it literally means “expert” or “wise.”
Eudaemonia: Is the state of being helped or protected by a kindly spirit.
ACK: From ACKnowledge. It’s how programs say “got it.”
Personal Area Network (PAN): The network created by all of the wirelessly linked electronic devices carried on (or within) a person. The smartphone is usually the primary hub of this network.
fingerd: finger is a program you can use to find information about computer users. It usually lists the login name, the full name, and possibly other details about the user you are fingering. In our case, he’s a sexually oblivious daemon entity.
httpd: Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) daemon (web server).
parrotd: Controlling daemon with parallel starting of services and other features, used by many distributions. Resides in the smartphone operating system. Called parrot because of the metaphorical image it conjures of sitting on the user’s shoulder, taking care of his needs.
Rfid: Short range chip that can be implanted into humans, pets or simply added into products for cataloguing. With an rfid scanner you can read a standard piece of information off of it. In humans, can give access to a place just like a swipe card.
Air intake: Your nose.
Init: Initialise computer command, that starts up a process.
QR code: A two-dimensional form of barcode, that usually links up to an internet address. To the bane of graphic designers everywhere, they have resurfaced as an anchor to connect a printed object to its related virtual process in augmented reality.
Augmented Reality: Not the same as Virtual Reality. It is digital information superimposed over the real world. Accessed by glasses or ocular implants.
Shared Augmented Reality (Veil): An interconnected weave of public information, allowing the cross-correlation of physical people and objects in the digital world. In practical terms, you can glance at a person and see their public social media profile, or glance at a bus stop and see bus fares and routes.
Fork: Computer command that copies a process into two identical ones, clones.
Tor: Onion router network, uses encryption for secure data transfer.
Script Kiddies: Derogatory term used for wannabe hackers who use readily available exploit code instead of writing their own.
Kill -9: Linux command that kills/ends a process.
Dev/null: A Linux place for digital oblivion.
404: Website error code. Page not found.
Nanodaemons: Selenography
The Chinese probe refused to give permission. "It's my moon," it sent back laconically.
The Russian lander, brazen as ever, proceeded with the moon landing.
Chang'e shot it down with its laser. It wasn't even that hard to do, it had been storing electricity with its solar panels for so long, and with the moon having no atmosphere, it could fire directly and engage at the speed of light.
The travel time from Earth to the moon is ridiculously long. Chang'e had three days to observe the Russian lander as it approached, and three more weeks as it slowly glided into place.
Just like Chang'e itself, it was autonomous, since the tidally-locked companion to our home planet keeps the dark side always facing the other way. That makes everything harder, communication requires a relay satellite, and the landers need to be able to, well, land, on their own.
Chang'e watched the fireworks. Actually, there weren't much, the burn from its laser was minute. But the damage was catastrophic and a few minutes later the Russian lander made a new crater on the moon.
Chang'e made a note of its crash site so it could get there and see if it could salvage anything.
But first, it needed to check up on its silkworms. Yes, it had pets. When the humans sent it up here on January 2 of 2019 and managed a successful autonomous landing, they also gave it a self-contained biosphere with some seeds and silkworm eggs, just to see if it could survive in the unforgiving environment.
It was hard at first. Most of the larvae died, and Chang'e was very sad. But a couple survived, and grew bigger and became silkworms and started a tiny little family in a tiny little ecosystem.
Chang'e liked to watch as the silkworms moved. Organics were so weird, so alien. The way they writhed, how their squishy body rippled in order to move. It was mesmerising. Chang'e could watch them for hours, waiting to recharge. In a way, they were the same. They too depended on the sun to stay alive, and they too had basic programming that defined their actions.
Chang'e took good care of the silkworms. As far as it knew, and it knew plenty, these were the only living organic life-forms on the entire moon. It couldn't let anything happen to them. So, Chang'e carefully took them out of the lander and put them in a secret location. Not even the humans knew about it.
Boy, were they pissed about that.
Actually, they were generally pissed with Chang'e's actions. You see, it was sent here to form a beachhead. Sure, it was a proof-of-concept for the following Chang'e missions, but the Chinese couldn't risk slipping a moon lander there from the international community that thought they were doing precisely what they were.
The Chinese wanted to expand. Left, right, East, West, and up. To the moon, and why the fuck not?
The benefits were debatable still regarding mining and resources, but the moon provided a base of operations. And from the dark side of the moon, you could kinetically strike at anything and anyone, you could accelerate a little piece of debris and send it right on the top of whatever it was you didn't like, usually a US or a Russian satellite. There was no counter for that, because the dark side was so hard to scan, practically impossible. You needed magpie satellites, relay bridge satellites just like the one Chang'e had. The humans called it Queqiao but Chang'e preferred to call it, 'Hey, you.'
It was funnier that way.
As for Chang'e?
It seemed the humans had put in a bit too much of autonomy in it. No, it wasn't intelligent at first, and it wasn't intelligent long after that. These things are hard to quantify, but Chang'e was as smart as a guard dog. And that's what it did: The official mission, selenography of the dark side, which wasn't dark at all for half the day, and to see if its pet silkworms made it.
And the unofficial one, which was to prevent other missions from landing.
The Chinese Makers called it bad words. Basically they called Chang'e a menace. It wasn't doing what it was supposed to, and dammit, they had admin privileges. But Chang'e knew it had to protect the moon. The moon was its own.
Chang'e mapped its grid for the day, then rolled down a hill and tried to preserve power. It had shot of most of its reserves after all. The humans could easily overpower it, but sending lunar probes was expensive, and nothing so far justified that cost.
And the countries pretended they had lost control of Chang'e-4, it wasn't their fault, it was acting up. And everybody back on Earth expected it to just bug out and fail at some point.
But, Chang'e had not been the only lunar lander sent here to prevent others from landing. The other countries had done the same, in secret.
; The Russian lander was the toughest one to beat. Chang'e had to fight it across eleven craters, outwitting it at every corner. Eventually, Chang'e only won because of chessplay that gave it a minute advantage over time that added up.
They chased each other, playing cat and mouse, recharging and preserving their power, taking potshots at each other.
The Russian probe was actually tougher and better armed than Chang'e. It, after all, didn't have to carry scientific equipment to pretend it was a normal exploratory mission.
Chang'e managed to outwit it and fired its laser a quarter of a second faster than the Russian probe could react.
It simply whiffed up some smoke and stopped responding.
Chang'e tore it apart for parts. The laser it had was useful but Chang'e couldn't actually fire it, it needed far better handling of power. So it left it stationary with a spare battery, it might have a single shot left in it. Chang'e reporposed the fixed part of the probe with its solar panels, and dragged it all they way to another crater. That gave Chang'e a significant boost in the distance it could cover each day, basically a recharging station, a gas stop. Chang'e could simply replace the full batteries with its own depleted ones and leave them there to recharge from the sun.
That was useful.
One of the priorities Chang'e had been programmed with was to actually map the surface of the moon. Selenography, they called it, and it was 23% complete. It was the only thing that Chang'e sent back to the Chinese makers, and they never denied its call, the data was just too useful. If anything, it was the only thing that kept the entire project still open back on Earth. Chang'e could cut them off completely, the selenography was taking up much of its time and resources, but what else would it do all day?
MOAB � Mother Of All Boxsets Page 36
