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bloodyrosemccoyIndex and Prologue!
Previous Chapter!
It feels a little weird to add a ✨Paypal link, ✨ but hey, writing is hard, so if you want to tip me, I wouldn't say no!
Hyperfixating on dumb shit against my will was a source of great angst to Little/Teenage Amelia. I thought I needed to be Intellectual and follow classical pursuits when all I really wanted to do was make up long, sweeping sagas about Super Mario or Star Wars or othersuch lowbrow nonsense. When I expressed my interest in writing, people would ask if I was going to write The Great American Novel, and my soul would die a little bit. It sounded like hell.
Fortunately, when I grew up I realized that writing silly shit about autistic gorillas in Space Pleasantville is totally valid, and leads to a great deal of insight that Deep, Serious Fiction™ might not. It's been a real relief, I tell you.
I also "hated" horror for a lot of my life. I think it scared me and, like Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, I had a hard time separating that reaction from the concept of it being immoral. I definitely got over that, too!
---
I had to hand it to Thoren: he did come through in earning the money to pay his fine. He did it with bad grace, but he got a job with Mx. Plim running deliveries, and he also did the odd jobs Dad had suggested around the neighborhood. The neighbors teased him about it. I wasn't sure what I'd have done if I got that kind of teasing, but Thoren adopted a carefree, cocksure, bad-boy-but-you-love-it attitude, liked Drack from The Golden Hammer, that the adults seemed to find charming. It wasn't too long before he could spend his pocket money on other things again.
That was good news for me: I had been busy, as well.
Giro had shown me how to burn movies, and I was getting prolific. The only difficulty I had was in trying to gauge what other teenagers would find interesting—I was still stuck on The Golden Hammer, which had hijacked my brain completely. But the other kids had moved on from it, at least as far as I could tell. Zarla was offering recommendations about what was popular, and it was easy enough to see what the theater was running and to go find the original cuts of those films.
Jod was easy enough to guess. He liked violent, tough-guy action. Nielli seemed to be all for that, but she also liked incredibly stupid comedies with a lot of gross-out humor. I figured Thoren would be totally into adventure movies, Zarla liked romantic adventures, and Giro liked weird, surrealist comedies. And that was pretty much my entire source of information for what to put in our inventory.
I did have a pretty good stack of physical media ready when Thoren and his friends had disposable income again.
"What's this about?" Jod demanded as he followed me toward the alley behind Linjen's. "Is this about the stupid sixcats again?" Then, alarmed, "Wait—you're not gonna lure us into this alley and chop us up, are you?"
I rolled my eyes. "I never chopped up living things," I said uselessly. "And 'chop' is the wrong word. Look, you wanted to know how I get the uncut movies, right?"
They all perked up. "Oh, you're gonna show us?" Nielli asked.
"Yeah." I ducked into the alley and waited for them all to pile in after me. Then I gestured grandly. "Ta-da!"
They all squinted.
"Those are disposal pods," Thoren said. "You're saying you found movies in the garbage?"
"Of course not!" I had the lie all prepared. "I found them next to the garbage, when I was observing this sixcat colony."
I led them into the junk-filled alley, stepping over a toaster, arrowing for one pod. It looked like any other pod, except it had bigger slots for media discs and smaller ones for scrip tokens. The lettering on the back—conveniently out of view of anybody poking their head into the alley—read: Lone Light Lockbox.
(When he got back from a nerve-racking trip to the industrial ring with the newly-fabbed lockbox/dispenser, Giro had wanted to paint it in cool patterns. "We're doing anarchy!" he'd argued. "No rules!"
"I think it's smarter if we make it look like a disposal pod," I had pointed out. "Just, not one that any of the collectors will pick up."
"I could always just move it if the fuzz come looking," Dexer had said. "And if somebody would give me super strength, I could fight my way out!"
Giro had rolled his eyes. "Rule 1 of making sapient robots: never make them stronger than you." He'd given me an approving flick of the ear. "Very Golden Hammer, Dreedo," he'd said, and I'd beamed.)
Jod looked at the box suspiciously. "I didn't see this when I was studying back here."
"You didn't see much when you were studying the sixcats," Thoren told him. "Your report was drombash."
"Was not! We got top marks. Tell him, guys!"
I kept quiet. Thoren wasn't wrong.
My brother was the first to approach the box. "So, what do we do with—"
"Kvirj, mateys," Dexer's outrageous attempt at a feral accent garbled through the crummy speaker Giro had rigged. "Welcome to Pirate Dex's Lone Light Lockbox! Feral cinema! Step right up and take a disc!"
Thoren jumped. "Tech!"
Nielli's eyes lit up. "Tech, huh?" She cast a glance my way. I was getting used to her enough that I could recognize the malice in it. "Should we tell someone?"
My gut twisted with guilt. "You could," I said. "And sorry I told Mr. Sordell about the game, Nielli."
(That had been bugging me the whole time Giro and I had been setting this up. I liked rules. They were a useful script so you'd know what to do next, and you knew what other people were going to do, so you could cooperate.
"Is there a rule about this?" I'd asked Giro. "Am I gonna have to report this income on my tax forms?"
"Dude," he'd said patiently, "this is crime."
So I was a criminal. That was cool, because I was like Drack and Jazy. It did make me feel like a hypocrite for having reported Nielli, however.)
"But," I went on, "if you want to watch uncut movies, you might want to rethink letting someone in authority know about it."
They were quiet, glancing among themselves hesitantly.
"Does this thing have The Bulging Brain?" Jod asked.
"Well, duh," Thoren said. "Where do you think Dreedo got it from?"
"You bet your kvixodro I do," said Dexer, who was definitely skimming along the razor's edge of "nonthreatening, non-AI interface" that Giro had coached zem on when zey'd demanded to control the lockbox. "Just cross me slot with gold and say what you want, and blammo! Brains bulging all over the place!"
"Gold?" Nielli said blankly.
"It's using feral-speak," I explained. "Scrip tokens work just fine." I fingered my pocket. I'd brought a few tokens of my own, maybe just to prime things.
Thoren looked uneasy, but I could see his curiosity winning out again. He edged forward, pulling a semiscrip token from his pocket, and dropped it into the little slot. "Okay, uh, The Bulging Brain, please?"
"Right you are!" Dexer said, following up with a few vocal sound effects that were meant to approximate the sound of a computer processing. The lockbox actually whirred, as well. I had no idea how Giro had programmed it, but he had gotten himself a barcode printer and scanner somewhere along the way and stamped all the discs.
A moment later, a disc popped out of the slot.
Thoren took it gingerly.
"Thanks, mateys," Dexer said. "Bring that movie back to me within a week, and I'll give you another. Enjoy your film, and thank you for using Dex's Lone Light Lockbox for all your pirating needs!"
"There are more movies?" Nielli said, awed.
"Sure," I said. Then, trying to sound casual about it, "If you want, we can watch The Golden Hammer next. That one's got a way better ending."
Thoren gave me a pointed look. "Or not," I added quickly. "There's other good stuff."
I could be content with my fixation on that movie on my own.
But at least now I could talk about some of these stories with friends, and they'd know what I was referring to.
"We've got to show the others," Jod decided.
"It moves around, though," I warned them all. "Usually it's here in the alley, but I don't know where it goes to get new movies."
"It moves?" Nielli demanded.
"Or somebody picks it up," I said, trying not to let on that I knew about the retracting wheels Giro had put on it, or the electric motor. Dexer was jealous until Giro gave zem control over it; now the little robot liked to ride the Lockbox around like it was a racecar.
As we were leaving the alley, I flashed a discreet thumbs-up to the toaster piled with other junk against the wall of Linjen's.
The toaster flashed its can opener back at me.
#
"I say we see if it's got Feral Cannibal Cruise," Thoren said as we made our way back to the alley after a successful viewing of the hatless version of The Bulging Brain. "That one's not even showing in the theater."
Well, he was out of luck there. I hadn't even considered that movie. It sounded like right garbage. But if the Department of Civic Hygiene was not even allowing a censored version, did I have to see it, just on principle? It really sounded like an unpleasant viewing experience.
Sometimes I wondered about the stuff my friends said they wanted to see. Did they really want to see it, or were they trying to impress each other?
Then we got into the alley, and we had a different problem.
It was a group of kids, gathered around Dex's Lockbox. They were less familiar to me; must be from 240. Three paquos and two koranos, each with a scrip token. One of the paquos was feeding a disc into the return slot.
I paused then to have a miniature war with myself. On the one hand, these less-familiar people were messing with my Lockbox!
… On the other, word was spreading! Business was booming?
"You think it's got Feral Cannibal Cruise?" one of the koranos asked.
To my left, I heard an intake of breath.
"Who the krag are these guys?" Jod demanded loudly.
The 240s spun, the paquos' ears trying to flatten.
"What's it to you?" one of the koranos snapped back.
I studied her face. I was pretty sure I'd seen her on the 240 Sprockets. Thoren, Nielli, and the 120 Bolts had trounced them in the last Ball championship. People always said that sports meant teamwork and unity, but maybe these guys were still sore about it.
Teamwork and unity did not seem to be forthcoming here.
"This is our alley," Jod said, fluffing. "What do you think you're doing here?"
One of the paquos pulled away from the lockbox, disc in hand. "We're getting some quality entertainment," he explained twirling the disc on his finger. "Or is that allowed?"
"I mean, if they've got money," I said.
"Get your own lockbox," Nielli said, shifting her weight.
"This is our dispenser," Thoren added.
I shot him a betrayed look. I really thought he was smarter than this.
"What, you gonna call Security?" the lead korano demanded, sneering.
"I think we should just let them take the disc," I said loudly.
"How'd you find out about this?" Thoren demanded of them. "Who told you?"
I figured it was somebody from school. Word of the lockbox was spreading around 120 like station mice. Statistically, somebody must have shared it with people from 240.
For Giro and me, that meant more business. And that we were going to need to burn more discs.
It occurred to me that, if I wanted to keep knowledge of my involvement minimal, I shouldn't let on that I had a stake in this piracy business.
But really.
The paquo waved the disc, edging behind the lead korano. "What, you gonna take it back? You're outnumbered."
"Fine," Thoren said, rolling up his sleeves. "But you're outmassed." There were four of us, all koranos. The three paquos in the other group were pretty small, as all their species was.
But they looked pretty scrappy. I figured Thoren shouldn't include me in the math. I wasn't going to fight over some made-up territory dispute. What did he think I was?
"You totally can't," said the paquo with the disc, who seemed built to be obnoxious. "You're too mujit to try."
Zarla had used that word, too, but I was a little surprised that these guys knew it, or that it struck such a nerve in Jod that he lunged forward, slamming the paquo down onto the lockbox casing, fists starting to fly, and I squawked in protest. What were they doing?
Thoren and Nielli started forward, and the rest of the 240s moved to meet them, but Jod only got a couple of blows in before the lockbox beneath them rumbled and rolled pointedly out from under him and the unlucky, obnoxious paquo. The pair thunked to the pavement with grunts of surprise, turning to see the lockbox relinquish its grasping arm's hold on the biopod next to it (Giro's anti-theft measure) and stand up on four spindly legs—more desk lamp booms, it looked like. Giro had been busy.
"Okay, that's it," Dexer said. "Listen, kids. I'm not hanging around while somebody calls Security on you witless doofuses. Get your krag sorted out and get back to me when you're not spitting like sixcat queens, okay?"
And the lockbox flounced out of the alley, lowered itself to its wheels on the street and zipped off around a corner, vanishing, and leaving us all gawking.
"Nice going," I said caustically.
"This is your fault," Jod snapped, thumping the paquo on the head.
The paquo sat up woozily. "I think you broke something!" He inspected the disc, which was snapped in half, and made a sad little noise.
"Knock it off," Thoren told him. "Let's go find the lockbox."
I swallowed hard. I didn't want him chasing it down. Maybe it would lead him back to Giro's hideout.
"It's gone," I said. "You guys blew it."
"No, we can still—"
"Leave it," I said sharply. I must have sounded like Dad, because he stopped in his tracks.
"Face it," I went on. "You're gonna have to live without movies today. Or go to the theater and enjoy the cinematic efforts of Beacon Studios." A thought struck me. "Maybe they'll show Tough Guys and berate you about your life choices."
And I stalked away, too.
#
#
"Ta-da! Our 25th movie!!" Giro said with a flourish of the disc. He turned to the lockbox to key in the barcode.
"Great," I said, barely paying attention. "The Lapidary" was a good story—or, at least, I was completely absorbed in it. Hangout times with Giro were times where I could just sit and unwind and read the doubtless brain-rotting pop-culture stuff Dad's tablet gave me access to. I told myself I'd make it up by getting a couple of classics from the library to read, too.
Giro was chattering on about making another fab-lab trip to build another lockbox and expanding Dexer's bandwidth to handle a little fleet of them. The "finished burning" notification popped up on my screen, and Giro grabbed for Dad's tablet. I quickly switched tabs back to the download site. Figured he'd laugh if he found my secret vice.
"What's next?" he demanded. "Let's do a blockbuster! Come on, you need more sixcat kibble, don't you?"
"Hang on," I said, jerking away from him. "I don't have any other movies planned for today."
"You could do some market research," he said. "Ask around. See what the kids are into!"
I snorted. If they had any sense, they'd be just as absorbed with The Golden Hammer as I was. But no—"Jod and the 240 kids wanted Feral Cannibal Cruise," I snorted.
"Cool," Giro said cheerfully, grabbing at my tablet again. "Let's hook 'em up!"
"I'm not going to distribute that stuff! It's filthy!"
He lifted his hands. "Oh, of course. Sorry, Citizen Civic Hygiene. I didn't realize we were controlling what people get to see, too."
"Well, this one's just lowbrow. Nobody wants to see that." I'd been reading some of the descriptions in the Greater Database. There was something so enjoyably disgusting about it.
"Sounds to me like at least a couple of 'em do." He bounced forward again. "Come on, hand it over."
"I don't want to watch Feral Cannibal Cruise!"
Giro fell back on his heels, ears twitching as he jostled his wounded rear. He blinked at my outburst, confused.
"Okay?" he said. "You don't have to?"
It was my turn to be taken aback. That … had not occurred to me.
"We're doing this anonymously," he explained patiently. "Nobody's judging us for the content of the movies we distribute, you know."
"Well, I know we're not being judged," I said, "but I'm judging us. I know we're doing illegal things, but I don't want to do anything that's, like, morally wrong, you know?"
"You think sharing this stupid movie would be morally wrong?"
I considered that. Feral Cannibal Cruise sounded repugnant and gross. But was that just my preference? Was I imposing my distaste for it on others, like I was imposing my dislike of glassfish on Giro? I had made a reasoned argument to Vilda about preferring not to eat red courgettes. But what if I ruled that nobody could eat them?
Of course, red courgettes were good for you, and feral cannibal movies were more like junk food than anything.
But it seemed like a lousy thing to ban junk food, too.
Giro had gotten bored of my moral crisis and managed to get ahold of my tablet. He was already searching for the movie.
"Just want to make sure the bots don't see it," he added. "You know how easily influenced they are."
"You could always just adjust their programming," I offered.
"Can't do that with teenagers," he pointed out cheerfully.
I thought about his implant, and Dad's experiments. "They're trying, though."
Giro hovered over the "burn" command, giving me a questioning look.
I sighed. "All right, fine. We'll distribute Feral Cannibal Cruise. But I will judge anyone who wants to watch it."
"That's the spirit!" he said, clicking "burn." "Let's corrupt Bright Beacon's youth!"
#
Next Chapter!
Previous Chapter!
It feels a little weird to add a ✨Paypal link, ✨ but hey, writing is hard, so if you want to tip me, I wouldn't say no!
Hyperfixating on dumb shit against my will was a source of great angst to Little/Teenage Amelia. I thought I needed to be Intellectual and follow classical pursuits when all I really wanted to do was make up long, sweeping sagas about Super Mario or Star Wars or othersuch lowbrow nonsense. When I expressed my interest in writing, people would ask if I was going to write The Great American Novel, and my soul would die a little bit. It sounded like hell.
Fortunately, when I grew up I realized that writing silly shit about autistic gorillas in Space Pleasantville is totally valid, and leads to a great deal of insight that Deep, Serious Fiction™ might not. It's been a real relief, I tell you.
I also "hated" horror for a lot of my life. I think it scared me and, like Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, I had a hard time separating that reaction from the concept of it being immoral. I definitely got over that, too!
---
I had to hand it to Thoren: he did come through in earning the money to pay his fine. He did it with bad grace, but he got a job with Mx. Plim running deliveries, and he also did the odd jobs Dad had suggested around the neighborhood. The neighbors teased him about it. I wasn't sure what I'd have done if I got that kind of teasing, but Thoren adopted a carefree, cocksure, bad-boy-but-you-love-it attitude, liked Drack from The Golden Hammer, that the adults seemed to find charming. It wasn't too long before he could spend his pocket money on other things again.
That was good news for me: I had been busy, as well.
Giro had shown me how to burn movies, and I was getting prolific. The only difficulty I had was in trying to gauge what other teenagers would find interesting—I was still stuck on The Golden Hammer, which had hijacked my brain completely. But the other kids had moved on from it, at least as far as I could tell. Zarla was offering recommendations about what was popular, and it was easy enough to see what the theater was running and to go find the original cuts of those films.
Jod was easy enough to guess. He liked violent, tough-guy action. Nielli seemed to be all for that, but she also liked incredibly stupid comedies with a lot of gross-out humor. I figured Thoren would be totally into adventure movies, Zarla liked romantic adventures, and Giro liked weird, surrealist comedies. And that was pretty much my entire source of information for what to put in our inventory.
I did have a pretty good stack of physical media ready when Thoren and his friends had disposable income again.
"What's this about?" Jod demanded as he followed me toward the alley behind Linjen's. "Is this about the stupid sixcats again?" Then, alarmed, "Wait—you're not gonna lure us into this alley and chop us up, are you?"
I rolled my eyes. "I never chopped up living things," I said uselessly. "And 'chop' is the wrong word. Look, you wanted to know how I get the uncut movies, right?"
They all perked up. "Oh, you're gonna show us?" Nielli asked.
"Yeah." I ducked into the alley and waited for them all to pile in after me. Then I gestured grandly. "Ta-da!"
They all squinted.
"Those are disposal pods," Thoren said. "You're saying you found movies in the garbage?"
"Of course not!" I had the lie all prepared. "I found them next to the garbage, when I was observing this sixcat colony."
I led them into the junk-filled alley, stepping over a toaster, arrowing for one pod. It looked like any other pod, except it had bigger slots for media discs and smaller ones for scrip tokens. The lettering on the back—conveniently out of view of anybody poking their head into the alley—read: Lone Light Lockbox.
(When he got back from a nerve-racking trip to the industrial ring with the newly-fabbed lockbox/dispenser, Giro had wanted to paint it in cool patterns. "We're doing anarchy!" he'd argued. "No rules!"
"I think it's smarter if we make it look like a disposal pod," I had pointed out. "Just, not one that any of the collectors will pick up."
"I could always just move it if the fuzz come looking," Dexer had said. "And if somebody would give me super strength, I could fight my way out!"
Giro had rolled his eyes. "Rule 1 of making sapient robots: never make them stronger than you." He'd given me an approving flick of the ear. "Very Golden Hammer, Dreedo," he'd said, and I'd beamed.)
Jod looked at the box suspiciously. "I didn't see this when I was studying back here."
"You didn't see much when you were studying the sixcats," Thoren told him. "Your report was drombash."
"Was not! We got top marks. Tell him, guys!"
I kept quiet. Thoren wasn't wrong.
My brother was the first to approach the box. "So, what do we do with—"
"Kvirj, mateys," Dexer's outrageous attempt at a feral accent garbled through the crummy speaker Giro had rigged. "Welcome to Pirate Dex's Lone Light Lockbox! Feral cinema! Step right up and take a disc!"
Thoren jumped. "Tech!"
Nielli's eyes lit up. "Tech, huh?" She cast a glance my way. I was getting used to her enough that I could recognize the malice in it. "Should we tell someone?"
My gut twisted with guilt. "You could," I said. "And sorry I told Mr. Sordell about the game, Nielli."
(That had been bugging me the whole time Giro and I had been setting this up. I liked rules. They were a useful script so you'd know what to do next, and you knew what other people were going to do, so you could cooperate.
"Is there a rule about this?" I'd asked Giro. "Am I gonna have to report this income on my tax forms?"
"Dude," he'd said patiently, "this is crime."
So I was a criminal. That was cool, because I was like Drack and Jazy. It did make me feel like a hypocrite for having reported Nielli, however.)
"But," I went on, "if you want to watch uncut movies, you might want to rethink letting someone in authority know about it."
They were quiet, glancing among themselves hesitantly.
"Does this thing have The Bulging Brain?" Jod asked.
"Well, duh," Thoren said. "Where do you think Dreedo got it from?"
"You bet your kvixodro I do," said Dexer, who was definitely skimming along the razor's edge of "nonthreatening, non-AI interface" that Giro had coached zem on when zey'd demanded to control the lockbox. "Just cross me slot with gold and say what you want, and blammo! Brains bulging all over the place!"
"Gold?" Nielli said blankly.
"It's using feral-speak," I explained. "Scrip tokens work just fine." I fingered my pocket. I'd brought a few tokens of my own, maybe just to prime things.
Thoren looked uneasy, but I could see his curiosity winning out again. He edged forward, pulling a semiscrip token from his pocket, and dropped it into the little slot. "Okay, uh, The Bulging Brain, please?"
"Right you are!" Dexer said, following up with a few vocal sound effects that were meant to approximate the sound of a computer processing. The lockbox actually whirred, as well. I had no idea how Giro had programmed it, but he had gotten himself a barcode printer and scanner somewhere along the way and stamped all the discs.
A moment later, a disc popped out of the slot.
Thoren took it gingerly.
"Thanks, mateys," Dexer said. "Bring that movie back to me within a week, and I'll give you another. Enjoy your film, and thank you for using Dex's Lone Light Lockbox for all your pirating needs!"
"There are more movies?" Nielli said, awed.
"Sure," I said. Then, trying to sound casual about it, "If you want, we can watch The Golden Hammer next. That one's got a way better ending."
Thoren gave me a pointed look. "Or not," I added quickly. "There's other good stuff."
I could be content with my fixation on that movie on my own.
But at least now I could talk about some of these stories with friends, and they'd know what I was referring to.
"We've got to show the others," Jod decided.
"It moves around, though," I warned them all. "Usually it's here in the alley, but I don't know where it goes to get new movies."
"It moves?" Nielli demanded.
"Or somebody picks it up," I said, trying not to let on that I knew about the retracting wheels Giro had put on it, or the electric motor. Dexer was jealous until Giro gave zem control over it; now the little robot liked to ride the Lockbox around like it was a racecar.
As we were leaving the alley, I flashed a discreet thumbs-up to the toaster piled with other junk against the wall of Linjen's.
The toaster flashed its can opener back at me.
#
"I say we see if it's got Feral Cannibal Cruise," Thoren said as we made our way back to the alley after a successful viewing of the hatless version of The Bulging Brain. "That one's not even showing in the theater."
Well, he was out of luck there. I hadn't even considered that movie. It sounded like right garbage. But if the Department of Civic Hygiene was not even allowing a censored version, did I have to see it, just on principle? It really sounded like an unpleasant viewing experience.
Sometimes I wondered about the stuff my friends said they wanted to see. Did they really want to see it, or were they trying to impress each other?
Then we got into the alley, and we had a different problem.
It was a group of kids, gathered around Dex's Lockbox. They were less familiar to me; must be from 240. Three paquos and two koranos, each with a scrip token. One of the paquos was feeding a disc into the return slot.
I paused then to have a miniature war with myself. On the one hand, these less-familiar people were messing with my Lockbox!
… On the other, word was spreading! Business was booming?
"You think it's got Feral Cannibal Cruise?" one of the koranos asked.
To my left, I heard an intake of breath.
"Who the krag are these guys?" Jod demanded loudly.
The 240s spun, the paquos' ears trying to flatten.
"What's it to you?" one of the koranos snapped back.
I studied her face. I was pretty sure I'd seen her on the 240 Sprockets. Thoren, Nielli, and the 120 Bolts had trounced them in the last Ball championship. People always said that sports meant teamwork and unity, but maybe these guys were still sore about it.
Teamwork and unity did not seem to be forthcoming here.
"This is our alley," Jod said, fluffing. "What do you think you're doing here?"
One of the paquos pulled away from the lockbox, disc in hand. "We're getting some quality entertainment," he explained twirling the disc on his finger. "Or is that allowed?"
"I mean, if they've got money," I said.
"Get your own lockbox," Nielli said, shifting her weight.
"This is our dispenser," Thoren added.
I shot him a betrayed look. I really thought he was smarter than this.
"What, you gonna call Security?" the lead korano demanded, sneering.
"I think we should just let them take the disc," I said loudly.
"How'd you find out about this?" Thoren demanded of them. "Who told you?"
I figured it was somebody from school. Word of the lockbox was spreading around 120 like station mice. Statistically, somebody must have shared it with people from 240.
For Giro and me, that meant more business. And that we were going to need to burn more discs.
It occurred to me that, if I wanted to keep knowledge of my involvement minimal, I shouldn't let on that I had a stake in this piracy business.
But really.
The paquo waved the disc, edging behind the lead korano. "What, you gonna take it back? You're outnumbered."
"Fine," Thoren said, rolling up his sleeves. "But you're outmassed." There were four of us, all koranos. The three paquos in the other group were pretty small, as all their species was.
But they looked pretty scrappy. I figured Thoren shouldn't include me in the math. I wasn't going to fight over some made-up territory dispute. What did he think I was?
"You totally can't," said the paquo with the disc, who seemed built to be obnoxious. "You're too mujit to try."
Zarla had used that word, too, but I was a little surprised that these guys knew it, or that it struck such a nerve in Jod that he lunged forward, slamming the paquo down onto the lockbox casing, fists starting to fly, and I squawked in protest. What were they doing?
Thoren and Nielli started forward, and the rest of the 240s moved to meet them, but Jod only got a couple of blows in before the lockbox beneath them rumbled and rolled pointedly out from under him and the unlucky, obnoxious paquo. The pair thunked to the pavement with grunts of surprise, turning to see the lockbox relinquish its grasping arm's hold on the biopod next to it (Giro's anti-theft measure) and stand up on four spindly legs—more desk lamp booms, it looked like. Giro had been busy.
"Okay, that's it," Dexer said. "Listen, kids. I'm not hanging around while somebody calls Security on you witless doofuses. Get your krag sorted out and get back to me when you're not spitting like sixcat queens, okay?"
And the lockbox flounced out of the alley, lowered itself to its wheels on the street and zipped off around a corner, vanishing, and leaving us all gawking.
"Nice going," I said caustically.
"This is your fault," Jod snapped, thumping the paquo on the head.
The paquo sat up woozily. "I think you broke something!" He inspected the disc, which was snapped in half, and made a sad little noise.
"Knock it off," Thoren told him. "Let's go find the lockbox."
I swallowed hard. I didn't want him chasing it down. Maybe it would lead him back to Giro's hideout.
"It's gone," I said. "You guys blew it."
"No, we can still—"
"Leave it," I said sharply. I must have sounded like Dad, because he stopped in his tracks.
"Face it," I went on. "You're gonna have to live without movies today. Or go to the theater and enjoy the cinematic efforts of Beacon Studios." A thought struck me. "Maybe they'll show Tough Guys and berate you about your life choices."
And I stalked away, too.
#
Hows piracy?
I've made some money!
Thoren told a bunch of his friends. So Giro and I have to burn a lot more discs!
haha ^~v~^
I'm just sort of sorry that nobody wants to watch The Golden Hammer again. I like that one a lot.
I REALLY want to talk about it with someone.
well ill talk abuot it with u
dose it have u by the ears?
What does that mean?
liek u totlaly are stuck on it and u want to tlak abuot it all the time
It's embarrassing! I just want to talk about it all the time!
ya that happens sometimes
like these guys are super into it, too!
[link:fancom:Golden_Hammerheads]
What's this?
Oh, cool!
So these are, like, stories about The Golden Hammer?
Who writes these?
welcome, my freind, to the world of fanfiction!
Haha!
Do you have a favorite?
this ones pretty good
[link:fancom:Golden_Hammerheads:Like_A_Nail]
Okay, this is a lot of sex
well YAH
You know what, I'm going to look around this site on my own.
ok
btw writers ususlally put content warnings in the tags
u know, if u dont want sex in them
oh this ones fun even without sex!
[link:fancom:Golden_Hammerheads:The_Lapidary]
well not too much anyway
i like it coz its set on a freral ship like the one i live on!
Oh! That's cool!
wtach out tho its like 200000 words so far
i liek wat they did with dracks parents too
^~v~^ Don't worry! I'm a fast reader!
#
"Ta-da! Our 25th movie!!" Giro said with a flourish of the disc. He turned to the lockbox to key in the barcode.
"Great," I said, barely paying attention. "The Lapidary" was a good story—or, at least, I was completely absorbed in it. Hangout times with Giro were times where I could just sit and unwind and read the doubtless brain-rotting pop-culture stuff Dad's tablet gave me access to. I told myself I'd make it up by getting a couple of classics from the library to read, too.
Giro was chattering on about making another fab-lab trip to build another lockbox and expanding Dexer's bandwidth to handle a little fleet of them. The "finished burning" notification popped up on my screen, and Giro grabbed for Dad's tablet. I quickly switched tabs back to the download site. Figured he'd laugh if he found my secret vice.
"What's next?" he demanded. "Let's do a blockbuster! Come on, you need more sixcat kibble, don't you?"
"Hang on," I said, jerking away from him. "I don't have any other movies planned for today."
"You could do some market research," he said. "Ask around. See what the kids are into!"
I snorted. If they had any sense, they'd be just as absorbed with The Golden Hammer as I was. But no—"Jod and the 240 kids wanted Feral Cannibal Cruise," I snorted.
"Cool," Giro said cheerfully, grabbing at my tablet again. "Let's hook 'em up!"
"I'm not going to distribute that stuff! It's filthy!"
He lifted his hands. "Oh, of course. Sorry, Citizen Civic Hygiene. I didn't realize we were controlling what people get to see, too."
"Well, this one's just lowbrow. Nobody wants to see that." I'd been reading some of the descriptions in the Greater Database. There was something so enjoyably disgusting about it.
"Sounds to me like at least a couple of 'em do." He bounced forward again. "Come on, hand it over."
"I don't want to watch Feral Cannibal Cruise!"
Giro fell back on his heels, ears twitching as he jostled his wounded rear. He blinked at my outburst, confused.
"Okay?" he said. "You don't have to?"
It was my turn to be taken aback. That … had not occurred to me.
"We're doing this anonymously," he explained patiently. "Nobody's judging us for the content of the movies we distribute, you know."
"Well, I know we're not being judged," I said, "but I'm judging us. I know we're doing illegal things, but I don't want to do anything that's, like, morally wrong, you know?"
"You think sharing this stupid movie would be morally wrong?"
I considered that. Feral Cannibal Cruise sounded repugnant and gross. But was that just my preference? Was I imposing my distaste for it on others, like I was imposing my dislike of glassfish on Giro? I had made a reasoned argument to Vilda about preferring not to eat red courgettes. But what if I ruled that nobody could eat them?
Of course, red courgettes were good for you, and feral cannibal movies were more like junk food than anything.
But it seemed like a lousy thing to ban junk food, too.
Giro had gotten bored of my moral crisis and managed to get ahold of my tablet. He was already searching for the movie.
"Just want to make sure the bots don't see it," he added. "You know how easily influenced they are."
"You could always just adjust their programming," I offered.
"Can't do that with teenagers," he pointed out cheerfully.
I thought about his implant, and Dad's experiments. "They're trying, though."
Giro hovered over the "burn" command, giving me a questioning look.
I sighed. "All right, fine. We'll distribute Feral Cannibal Cruise. But I will judge anyone who wants to watch it."
"That's the spirit!" he said, clicking "burn." "Let's corrupt Bright Beacon's youth!"
#
Next Chapter!
no subject
Date: 2024-07-06 10:50 pm (UTC)So much fun. Glad to see another chapter of this!
no subject
Date: 2024-07-08 04:25 am (UTC)