Vern hardly heard the remark. The caterers had arrived and begun unwrapping platters of potato salad, finger sandwiches, cheese balls with impaled gherkins, and plastic silverware. He got busy, making sure that his guests were fed at least minimally. It was almost dusk when the last bus departed, transmission grinding. Mrs. Lemieux had left gumbo and sandwiches in the kitchen, so Vern wouldn't have to eat the dubious concoctions of the caterers, and he dined slowly, dreamy with fatigue. After last night's labor and standing on his feet all day, he felt definitely middle-aged.
At last, brandy in hand, he sat down in the study, fired up the computer, and contacted Schweizerische Bankverein. Just one glance at the millions, he thought, then go to sleep. Tomorrow would feature a take-your-job-and-shove-it letter to the Mims Foundation, followed by escape from Bonaparte, followed by rebirth into the life he had earned and deserved.
He keyed in his PIN, a string of numbers identifying the account, his mother's maiden name, and the code word he'd thought up all by himself. He was sitting there in the dusk sipping brandy, when—very quietly, discreetly almost—the monitor revealed what his account contained. Or to be precise, what it didn't contain any longer.
When he reached Petey's mother, desperation in his voice, she told him that she really didn't know where her boy had gone. He'd been talking lately about taking the money he made from fixing computers, getting out of Bonaparte, seeing the world. He really was way too smart, she added with pride, to stay in this little old town forever.
Next morning at three A.M., Vern lay sprawled on Ish's big bed, the mostly empty scotch bottle beside him. He wanted to keep drinking, but his mouth tasted like a glue trap with the mouse still in it, and he just couldn't. Never in his life had he been robbed so thoroughly, and never had he been so absolutely helpless to do anything about it. Chase the Nerd King, who was probably already on a flight to Europe—or, for that matter, to anywhere at all? Call the cops and tell them—tell them—tell them what?
Over and over, he asked himself how he could have been so dumb. Since he couldn't have memorized the account information with its string of numbers at a single glance—or many glances, for that matter—he'd foolishly assumed that Petey couldn't, either. The rest of the ID he'd probably cracked with ease. Vern's Mama's maiden name blazoned Mims Castle. Maybe Petey took a while getting the code word, but after all he hailed from Bonaparte where everybody knew everything about everybody else. Why had Vern been so proud of KLEAGLE? He should have chosen SHAVONDA, a name known to few besides himself and Senator Vitter.
For lack of anything else to do, he picked up the remote and with trembling hand started to channel-surf. Commercials ruled the predawn airwaves, interspersed with porn, preachers, and "classics." Syfy was doing Reign of Fire for the umpteenth time and he flipped past the dragon epic with a shudder. Next he hit OGC, the Oldie-Goldie Channel, a kind of retirement home for second-rate cinema, and almost had a coronary right then and there. It was showing Revenge of the Nerds.
Vern was still in bed next morning, when Sylvie called to say that a computer tech had been imported from Baton Rouge. Pilgrimage accounts had been straightened out and Mims Castle had, as usual, been the top money earner.
"Ah s'pose it's true what they say, you never go broke underestimating the taste of the American public," she mused. "But business is business, as they also say. So Vern, Honey, Ah do hope you'll be opening the Castle again for the Spring Pilgrimage."
"Don't worry," he croaked. "I'll be right here."
* * *
Gnarly Times at Nana'ite Beach
By KJ Kabza | 7122 words
KJ Kabza was last seen in our July/Aug. 2011 issue with "The Ramshead Algorithm." Of this new story he says it originated thusly:
"Cyberpunk, steampunk, dieselpunk, clockpunk," I said to a friend over lunch one day. "I'm so sick of the -punk appellation. I want to write a -punk that is like no -punk that has ever come before, just to prove how absurd the whole thing is." He looked at me.
"Beachpunk?" he suggested.
SOUTH OF THE BIG ISLAND, on the famous nano'd beach of Malihini—because really, what else is south of the Big Island?—Dusty Yokoyama strolled across the Smart sand, pushing out his chest and hoping the girls wanted to bang him.
Hoping? No. Knowing. Yeah, they were looking at him, at his Mojo wet suit and brand-new board (bought on sale at GoodBuy—but shh, don't tell anyone). Dusty ran a hand through his newly waterproofed hair, so they could see how the 4-micron-thick polymer layer made it shimmer in the tropical sun. Inland to his right, a pair of girls in white virtual bikinis whispered to each other across their beach towels, their breasts and privates masked by nothing but the shimmering white illusion of the jamming signal their cyberneurons transmitted to the minds of the world. As Dusty strutted by, they erupted into titters. Yeah, ladies… swoon.
"Yo, Dusty!" called Roderick from down the beach, waving a deep-brown arm. "Trusty Dusty! Dust or Bust! The Dustman! Le Dust Devil!"
Dusty's strut deflated just a shade. To his left, a trio of girls in blue virtual bikinis leaned into each other and giggled.
Roderick ran to his side, grinning, his flip-flops flapping like loyal dogs' tongues. "Dusty the Dustbuster! You Must the Dust! The—"
"The girls are checking me out, man," Dusty whispered. "Can it."
Roderick nodded approvingly at a nearby girl lying facedown on a towel. She appeared to be naked, but between her soft, downy buttocks lay the rear strip of a C-string, cupping her private area in the tiniest possible arrangement of fabric. Her freckled shoulders hunched forward slightly as she watched a talk show segment in the polarized Smart sand. "Hey, honey," said Roderick.
The girl yawned. The image changed to a music video.
"Well," said Dusty, loudly. "I just came down to give my new board a run, before the big Surf-Off this weekend. Yeah. Pretty nice, isn't it?"
A couple girls glanced up. Roderick whistled. "This board here?" he said, smacking it. "This is a nice pounding board. Damn! Volts, man, where'd you get it?"
"The Edge," lied Dusty, trying to sound bored. More girls glanced up. "You know, Zhaoping Ho's shop."
"Zhaoping Ho?" said Roderick, clapping his hands to the sides of his head. "You know Zhaoping Ho? The Zhaoping Ho?"
"We go way back," said Dusty, with a cool shrug. All the girls were staring now. "Come on. Grab your board."
Roderick raced away, his steps kicking up the disrupted, glittering matrix. Dusty glanced casually at the sand by his feet and transmitted a few commands to it with the thoughts of his cyberneurons. In a fraction of a second, the polarization changed, the network oscillations of the sand's binding nanoparticles moved away from random, and the sand aligned into a bright screen displaying ocean data at his feet. The girls would see all that junk, about salinity and temperature currents, and know he was a serious surfer for sure.
Roderick ran back. What fool runs top speed with a board? Well, Roderick, that's who, but Dusty only acknowledged his return with an upward nod. Roderick was a good guy, really. He was just a clueless spaz. It's a good thing he's got me, Dusty thought, to show him how things're done.
"In the water, Doofus," said Dusty.
They trotted toward the surf. The sand grew darker and more compact near the tide line. Dusty knew from science class that it was this changing tide line that somehow gave the augmented sand the juice it needed to do its thing. Something to do with ions getting transferred everywhere? It was pretty neat, really. But Dusty wasn't a nerd, or anything. His business was passing through the foaming white that now roared against his thighs, then riding atop the chaos of the waves. Taming them, you could say.
"Crap!" said Dusty as a swell tore the board from his hands.
He took a foundering step toward shore, but a wave sucked back around him. Dusty went down, and a second wave spit him forward with a projectile-vomiting WHOOSH. End over end, Dusty spun in a froth of scouring foam and sand, somehow ending up with his rear planted in muck. Spittin
g and coughing, he turned and crawled the final few feet to the dry.
"Lost your board, loser?"
"Oh, he's lost way more than his board." The sound of whoops and high-fives pattered through the air.
Dusty rubbed the salt from his lashes and looked up. Dirk "The Jerk" Rider and the Coastal Gang stood nearby, laughing. Big Kohaku himself stood atop Dusty's board, pinning it to the beach beneath his obese and towering frame. The Smart sand around the board's edges glittered with static from the pressure. "Where'd you get this, anyway?" said Dirk. "Your mom's bathtub?"
Dusty gritted his teeth. Dirk thought he was all that just because he was a senior, and in a band. But what really galled Dusty was the girls . Why did the Coastal Gang always have so many freaking girls hanging off them? Dirk was flanked by girls right now, one on each arm, one with a winking jewel dangling from a short navel chain. She turned to nibble Dirk's ear and the navel chain wagged, like a wagging finger from some old lady going, ah-ah-ah, oh no you don't, young man . "No," said Dusty, struggling for a comeback. "I got my board from…from your mom's bathtub."
A couple more girls drifted up behind Greasy Mike to watch. Dusty's frustration peaked. "And what do you think you're doing with my board, you big walrus?"
Big Kohaku grinned. "I'm thinking I'm gonna jump on it."
The Smart sand beneath the board crackled as Big Kohaku jumped. Firecrackers of light flashed from beneath the resin, and a jangle of audio and visual fragments zagged away from it in veins.
"Hey!" shouted Dusty. "Stop it! I need that for the Surf-Off!" He lunged at Big Kohaku, but he might as well have tried to move the Big Island. Big Kohaku just watched Dusty bounce off with a laugh.
Enraged, Dusty mentally commanded the sand into a ten by ten screen, and flashed Dirk and his whole rotten gang an image of the finger.
The girl with the navel chain grinned and fingered her jewel. A wave of images rolled across the sand, each a live feed of Dusty, panting and crusty with salt. His waterproofed hair stuck out in swirling tufts. Beneath scrolled the words, "News Flash: Loser-ville Elects New Mayor."
"You can't do that!" shouted Dusty, pointing to the bauble at the end of her chain. "Cyberneuron signal boosters are illegal!"
A ripple of laugher grew on the beach as everyone looked down at the new screens beneath them. Dusty and his two thousand images turned red in the face.
"Hey!" shouted a voice from the surf. Roderick flailed through the foam and up the beach, his own board held securely under one arm. "Why are you letting Big Kohaku jump on your board? He's gonna break it!"
"Too late," said Big Kohaku, with a grin. He flipped Dusty's board over with a massive foot and one of the fins broke clean off. It lay in the sand like a discarded crab shell. "Whoops. Well, that's what happens when you ride the waves as hard as you do."
Dusty gaped in despair.
"We gotta ride," said Dirk. "But we'll see you at the Surf-Off this weekend—watching from the beach, that is!"
High-fives pattered through the air. The Coastal Gang ran off down the beach, distributing more hand-slaps along the way. A trail of hot girls, like the nimbus of a comet, drifted in their wake.
Dusty wanted to cry. Or maybe tear Big Kohaku and Dirk the Jerk open with that broken fin. Those voltheads! So what if the board had only come from GoodBuy?
It was all Dusty could afford.
"Oh man," said Roderick. "Your board's totally pounded. No joke." He glanced around the beach. "I hope no girls saw that happen. The one in the C-string was totally hot for me."
Dusty put a hand over his eyes.
"Hey, Trusty Dustman," said Roderick. "How come there's video of you everywhere?"
DUSTY NEEDED another board, and soon. He wasn't sure how that would happen, but he dragged Roderick off the sand anyway, and they shoved their way along Surf Street, Nana'ite Beach's main drag. It was packed with tourists, fat and pale-skinned and stopping everywhere to stare so their cyberneurons could take pictures. One geezer, a wheezing bald guy in a flower-patterned shirt (a cloth shirt, even, without any video playing on it! Geez ) kept blocking the entire sidewalk in front of them. At least it gave Dusty time to watch the access points to Nana'ite Beach, where the exiting girls spread-eagled themselves against the walls of the suck-showers before going beneath the water ones. One Korean cutie in a fabric bikini even leaned forward and rubbed her breasts against a suck-shower wall, saying to her friend, "Oh my God, I hate it when I get matrix stuck in my top. At least regular sand doesn't get so static -y and just stick there."
"Yo, Just-Dust," said Roderick, turning to face him. A tourist next to Roderick yelped and jumped away, narrowly avoiding getting smacked in the butt with Roderick's board.
"Watch it, kid!"
"What is it?" said Dusty.
"So, like, if we don't have any money? How are we gonna get you a new board?"
"Roddy, Roddy, Roddy." Dusty clamped a hand on Roderick's shoulder. "Don't worry about it. I'm on top of things."
Roderick snapped his fingers. "Oh, I know! We're going to Zhaoping Ho's shop so he can cop us a new board. Because you know him."
"Well, uh…actually…?"
Roderick took off down the block to Zhaoping Ho's shop, and Dusty had to follow. The Edge was on the south side of the road near the beach, wedged uncomfortably in a deep but narrow lot between Adolph's Dolphin Falafel Hut ("The Pros of Bottlenose!") and Righteous Tattoo. Righteous was packed—they'd just started offering Whose-Mood Tattoos, and dudes were lined up and down the block so their ink would change color with the mood of the crowd they were hanging with—but Zhaoping Ho's was even packed-er. It had to be, anyway, because why else would the scowling old beach bull watching the entrance not let them in?
"Oh no you don't," said the guy. He pointed at Roderick's board. "Not with that thing."
"What thing?" said Roderick.
"That nasty old thing. The Tidewinder. Leave it outside before you come in here. It's, like, offensive."
"What? This thing? No! No, dude, this is my board. This is Shelia." Roderick kissed it. "Hey, Shelia baby."
The guy stepped in front of the doorway and folded his arms.
"Dude, it's okay, it's cool," said Roderick, grinning and bobbing his head at Dusty. "Turns out my man here personally knows—"
"Sorry, thanks, we're going," said Dusty, grabbing Roderick and dragging him away.
"Hey!"
Dusty pulled him into the tight alley between Zhaoping Ho's and the Dolphin Hut. "Cut it out, man!" he hissed. "I don't actually know Zhaoping Ho. I was just saying that because there were girls. "
Roderick's eyes went big. "Dude, Zhaoping Ho's gonna be mad when he hears you were denying him."
"Gosh darn it, Roddy—oh, forget it. Let's just go."
Roderick started to turn, but his board slapped against the cinderblock walls. "Oh, dude—I'm stuck."
"Put your board down."
"No, see, that won't help." Roderick put the board down on its side and tried to turn it where it lay. Its ends smacked the concrete again. "See?"
Dusty sighed. "No, I mean put it down so you can flip it up."
Roderick laughed. "You don't carry a board pointing up! Dude, I'm sorry, but you're being stupid. "
Dusty grabbed the Tidewinder. "Just give me the pounding board and let me do it!"
"Hey," growled a voice.
Dusty and Roderick turned. The voice came from the far end of the alley. Backlit by the sunny beach, a figure squatted on a narrow concrete patio, barely the width of a Tidewinder board itself.
"Hey, kid," the guy growled. "C'mere."
"Yeah," said Roderick. "That's a better idea. We'll just walk out that side of the alley." He picked up his board and raised his voice. "Thanks, man!"
As they approached the patio, Roderick suddenly stopped and turned. Dusty stopped too, right in time to get smacked with Roderick's board. "Holy orbitals! This dude looks just like Zhaoping Ho! Dust-Ruster, look at this guy!"
"I can
't see a darn thing with your stupid board in my—"
The shout died in Dusty's throat. The guy squatting on the ledge was short and thick, and wearing nothing but a pair of horseshoe-patterned boxer shorts, a moon of dark sweat curving under his belly. A sweetweed cigarette dangled from one calloused hand. The dude's breath whistled through his nose as he breathed, but he crouched as still as a leopard made of stone and watched them with the same ineffable intensity. His broad chest sported a thatch of untamed hair.
And when Dusty realized that every last one of those hairs was shimmering with waterproof polymer, he sucked in air like a drowning newbie. "Oh, my God. It is Zhaoping Ho."
"Oh," said Roderick. "Sweet. You can introduce me, then."
"Your friend's mistaken," said the man, in a voice as rough as Pebble Beach. "We haven't met." His smile was more forced. "We have now, though. I'm Zhaoping. Who're you screwheads?"
"Oh, me, I'm Roderick Calcutta," said Roderick. "And this is my best bud Dusty Yokoyama. The Dusty Yokoyama."
"Uh-huh," said Zhaoping. He took a drag on his cigarette, moving only his arm and lips, remaining perfectly balanced on the balls of his feet. Zhaoping turned to Dusty and exhaled, and a sweet cloud of smooth vanilla smoke blew through the stale air of the alley. "I see your genius friend has a board. Where's yours?"
Dusty slumped. "I…Dirk broke it. I mean, Big Kohaku broke it."
"Big Kohaku?"
Dusty looked down at the sandy asphalt by his feet. "He's in Dirk's band. Dirk Rider and the Coastal Gang. They don't even write real music—they're just a mood band, transmitting what they think their songs would make you feel, if they were even able to write any. And they're the biggest jerks on the beach."
A corner of Zhaoping's mouth twitched in a smile. "Yeah?"
"I just bought this new board, right, and Big Kohaku took it, and put it down on the sand, and jumped on it. And a fin totally broke right off. So that's where my board is—sitting ruined on the beach."
Fantasy & Science Fiction, Extended Edition Page 10
