The Turd: An American Journey – Chptr 4 – Xperience Fiction

The Turd: An American Journey – Chptr 4 – Xperience Fiction – by Liam Sweeny.

A ringmaster in a top hat hyped the crowd assembled, each to a one blowing hot air out of a noisemaker in between shouts of “you can do it” and “go Ernie!” Hobo clowns circled around him with big balloon sledgehammers and started hitting each other as they laughed and laughed. A lithe woman in a silver leotard had Ernest’s poop knife in her hand, on fire as she swallowed it, putting it out and bringing it back up to place in Ernest’s hand. An elephant’s trunk protruded from the bathroom window into the room, over to Ernest, and around his waist, squeezing as the whole entire circus shouted push, push, PUSH!

Ernest awoke in a sweat on the can and the jolt of waking knocked him off it, his pants around his ankles.

“You okay, Ernie?” Lysette called from the kitchen on her way to the bathroom.

She opened the door to see Ernest lying there in defeat.

“Fell asleep again?”

Ernest groaned. “Yep.”

“Was it the circus this time or the Olympics?”

“Circus.”

“You can try again later. We got dinner. Chicken soup. Your favorite.”

Lysette’s chicken soup was little more than broth, but Ernest had cut back on solid food since day fifteen. It was surprisingly hearty for a soup just thick enough to not actually be broth.

“Honey,” she said as they sat down. “What do you think of my tweak to the ionizer?”

“It’s good,” Ernest said as he filled a soup bowl from the steaming pan.

“But do you think it’s our ticket out of here?”

“Any one of your inventions in the right hands could be our ticket out of here.”

“But I mean that one in particular,” she said. “Like a piggie had to go to market, and you had to pick, would that be one of the piggies?”

“Babe, I don’t even know what that means.”

“If I had to throw one away…”

“Nope,” Ernest said. “I know what you’re going to say, and nope. They’ve gotten enough.”

“We need a break, Ernest. Some breathing room. They don’t pay that bad.”

Lysette found the IdeaBank the month before, and she braved the 3-star rating. A website that bought ideas, preferably ones with blueprints. Exactly the kind Lysette created in her office. Exactly the kind that Ernest quit being a mechanic to help her build.

“What’ll you get? What did you get last time? A grand? You can get that in a

Funder campaign.”

Lysette dug into her mashed potatoes. “I can’t go to Funder for the rent and the

power bill. And I’m not ready to sell these as products, you know that. I’d need a thousand just to get through trademarking and whatnot. What choice do we have?”

Ernest stared at his soup like it might drown him. “What are we even doing here,

Lys? You need to be recognized for those three pounds of electric jello between your ears. That IdeaBank doesn’t even give you any credit, not even in the small print. We can do better than this. You can do better than this.”

They ate with nary a word passed between them. Lysette was probably mad that Ernest wasn’t supporting her, but she had to know that he wasn’t supporting her because he was that proud of her. She caught glances at him in between bites and chews of lemon-pepper chicken. Ernest finished his soup like he was drinking it on a hundred mile highway cruise. He wiped his mouth with a Christmas-embroidered napkin, used year-round just like the Thanksgiving turkey salt and pepper shakers.

“I can take a couple cars,” he said. “I know enough people with classics they’re trying to restore. I can make fifteen hundred a month on the side, easy.”

Lysette’s dark eyes pierced his, her hurt a vapor swirling through her irises. He tried to look away, but she was a lion tamer.

“You want to give this up, don’t you, Ernie.”

“No,” Ernest said. “Hell no. The opposite. I want you to be Hedy Lamar.”

“Hedy Lamar didn’t get credit for Wifi until a couple of years ago.”

Ernest picked up the napkin, destination forehead. “I’d rather you get your due late than never get it. But we need money, and not like that. I’d rather give blood than see you lose your inventions.”

“Well, what in the hell good are we gonna do? I got a closet full of blueprints.”

“So what?” Ernest said.

“So what? What do you mean, so what?”

“Why can’t I go fix a couple of cars while we figure out a way to make bank on all this? Maybe that Sponsor account you set up? We could shoot videos of us building the stuff for the Platinum subscription?”

“I did a video, and all I got was twenty guys wanting to see my tits,” she said. “My old gym teacher, too. Gross. No one sets up Sponsor accounts to do anything clothed.”

“So we’ll figure something else out. I believe in you, Lys. It’ll just be a couple cars a month.”

“What happens if you have an emergency with your shit situation?”

“That could happen anywhere,” Ernest said.

“I don’t want to be the last person to know you’re in the Emergency Room.”

“If I see someone else about it, will you let me do cars?”

Lys got up and went into the dining room, pulling a business card off the top shelf. He returned to the kitchen and sat down by the soup bowl. Ernest picked it up.

“Moriah Bloodstone,” it read, “Holistic Healing, Reiki, Essential Oils,

Acupuncture, Aromatherapy – walk-ins welcome.”

“You gotta be kidding me,” he said.

“It’s that if you want to be waist-deep in engines,” she said. “Considering you ran from real medical care.”

“He was going to molest me with a robot, right?”

“Sure, Ernie. Go to her please?”

Ernest looked at the card again. The top right corner had a dream catcher in metallic rainbow ink. If Moriah cared that much about her cards, maybe she’d be better than a par three sawbones.

“Tomorrow, Lys.”

***

The basement smelled like everything that ran the twenty floors above. Iron, copper, industrial cleaner and mold. Were one to pull apart the walls of any of the floors, mold would be a perfume on the skin of the plumbing pipes and junction boxes. Jasen didn’t hate it, but they were cautious friends. Ophelia didn’t seem to care one whit.

One thing Jasen hadn’t considered in his deal with VidYou, aside from the fact that he hadn’t considered anything at all, was how he planned on depositing ten thousand dollars cash in a bank. It would draw red flags and get suited men to ask questions he didn’t know if he could even answer. It had been years since he was a working hacker, and he never made enough money to worry about red flags. In fact, most of his hacking only paid in satisfaction and bragging rights.

“How are you getting your pay in the bank?”

“I’d avoid banks,” Ophelia said. “You ever do anything with Crypto?”

“I know there’s a coin with a Doge on it.”

“Yeah, stick to Bitcoin. I can get you set up.”

“What can I buy with Bitcoin?”

“All kinds of stuff,” Ophelia said. “Computers, cars, missile systems, assassins, maybe?”

“So I’m thinking of bills.”

“If you don’t put more than six-hundred at a time in the bank, you should be good.”

A knock at the door announced the mail girl, who dropped off a manila folder with Jasen’s ill-gotten security badge. He pulled it out and held it up by the lanyard.

“Now we can get going.”

“What do you mean?” Ophelia said. “Where will that take us? If we’re going up to some office, probably should have a game plan.”

Jasen hung the security badge from his neck. “I’m thinking we just go down to the other end of the sub-basement and give Jim Barner a visit.”

“Didn’t he just print you that thing? Seems kind of reckless to stay on his radar, no?”

“You are playing checkers right now,” Jasen said. “I’m playing Mahjong.”

Ophelia chuckled. “Anyone ever tell you you’re kind of an asshole?”

“My therapist said I didn’t get enough love as a kid. That was until we slept together. You know, she was kind of a shitty therapist.” Jasen got up. “C’mon, let’s go.”

Jasen and Ophelia went down the hallway, Jasen wearing the security pass, Ophelia clutching a small slate gray spiral bound notebook. They passed a bank of servers behind a glass wall. Jasen pressed the glass and it was ice cold. There had to be a thousand servers, which was a drop in the bucket of how many servers VidYou had in farms all over the world.  They passed janitorial and maintenance offices, down a room-bare hallway with an artery of pipes and cables. At the end of that hallway, Jim Barner’s office.

Jasen rapped on the door.

“C’mon in.”

Jasen and Ophelia slid their way in, past Ethernet cabling and computers, the landscape of a perfect thigh-level labyrinth.

“Can I help you folks?”

“Yeah,” Jasen said. “You got me this badge the other day, I called, said I was moving positions.”

“Okay,” Jim said. “I’m sure that’s true if you’re saying it. I get a lot of those calls, sorry for not really remembering.”

Jasen took off his badge. “Bad news, bud. I don’t work here. Just got fired. You should’ve checked the personnel records. I got fired that morning.”

“What morning?”

“Tuesday.”

“Yeah, personnel changes don’t come in until Friday. So how could I have known?”

“You’re supposed to call an employee’s supervisor to make sure they have the right information,” Jasen said. “I could’ve had the wrong building I needed access for.

Point is, you screwed up.”

Jim let out a breath. “So okay, I screwed up. Are you going to tell my boss?”

“Not if you cooperate,” Jasen said.

“Cooperate? Is this blackmail?”

“I guess it is.”

“What the hell do you even want?”

“I-,” he said. “I’m not sure. Gimme a second.”

Jasen let the security badge dangle from his fingers. Blackmail was a good idea.

But he found himself the dog that caught its tail.

“You didn’t plan this out at all, did you?” Jim said.

“Right?” Ophelia said. “Look, Jim. We’re trying to figure out how to stop the viral turd. I’m trying to disable the video, but I can’t get through all the security.”

“Of course not,” Jim said. “Whole countries can’t break through VidYou’s security. Ever notice VidYou never goes down for longer than a couple of hours?”

“We have to get that turd off there,” Jasen said. “My amazingly hot girlfriend wanted to engage in shitplay. Do you two know what shitplay is?”

“Oh yeah,” Ophelia said. “It’s the most popular category on SexNet right now.”

Jasen and Jim looked at Ophelia.

“What? I have a life.”

“I’m with you on down with turds,” Jim said. “Hell, at this point we can go into the server rooms with fire axes and have fun. But it won’t do anything. This isn’t a coding issue. It’s in Profiles, it’s in PicFeed, shit challenges are on 15Min. People are keeping pieces of shit in alcohol in Mason jars like they’re family heirlooms. My neighborhood smells like a third-world country on purpose. It’s people.”

“So we change people’s minds,” Jasen said. “I know how to get things viral, small ‘v’. I did it from the Nipple Factory. How do we get into the system to do that from the outside?”

Jim took out a pen and scribbled a name and a number down.

“There’s an algorithm I heard about called the Piss Algorithm. Powerful enough to hook someone in their seat till they piss their pants.” He handed the slip of paper to Ophelia.

“Colby Ferris,” Jim said. “He’s the one that I heard it from. He worked on it, I think. But he is a weird, paranoid fuck. You might not want to blackmail him.” He pulled a badge and lanyard off a rack of them, and handed it to Ophelia.

“I’ll set that up for you when you leave,” he said. “I wish you luck. I’m tired of smelling crap with my morning tea.”

More from Liam Sweeny…