"Hey there. You're lookin' better".That's was the first thing I heard when I woke up. It was Junk, but Junk never talks like that. It was like he was talking to a kid or something, with a big smile pasted to his face."What's up Brah? Where am I?"I was on a bed in a hospital hooked up to a bunch of machines. There was a loud humming from one and Junk had to talk over it."Don't try to talk. You're gonna be fine, I know your throat feels dry. Nurse, get him a glass of water."That's when I realized, "Shit! He's right, and what's more I can't talk." My throat was all bandaged up and I was only mouthing the words, not pronouncing them."Why didn't you tell me you were on Thrust? That complicated things for us."I've always hated it when Junk talked way over my head. What could I say? How the hell would I know what shit I was patching. When it's free you don't ask.For us? What up?"I suppose you didn't know Zip works for Microdis. That was Th32-95 you patched, an alpha release that will hopefully never make it out if the FDA does right. The stuff really amplifies your cerebral activity. You were supplying 25milliVolts at your head port, it almost overloaded your cortex. It burnt out the driver.""Anyway, that really complicated things on the vault side. We only had 7-bit ECC chips expecting 15mV at most. We just lost too many packets so I had to harvest the short-term pieces we needed directly from your motor-skills memory. I only had to take out yesterday, we can correlate that with what was recovered from the vault and build the full database. I was able to save your diary entry though, so at least you'll have that."What the fuck was he talking about? It was true though, I couldn't remember anything after that shitty session surfing like a kook without the 2000. He saved the diary entry though, that was cool. I could scan it when I got home."That was a very fortuitous move you pulled, by the way. Chen-Williams was in the nacoustic. He's the VP of advanced wetware at Microdis. He's certainly on file in Seattle, but it'll still take them a while to rebuild his image. It's never easy doing a first build.The water helped, I was able to whisper at least."You were first to kill him, 'Rat. The Corpse is pleased. Oh, I think they also had most of their mutated recombinant DNA on board, it'll take them a while to grow a new batch for Whitey."
"Dude, how much for the memory?"Mex! I'm stoked! Shit, if Junk can get me to Mex, I don't know...just cool! No more shitty summers. Overhead and barreling every day. There's probably a barrel going unridden there right now! The gulls are supposed to be really stupid down there too, super-easy to catch."Well Rat, like I said, the Corpse is pleased. You could probably retire now if you liked. As long as it's not around here. You're gonna have to leave NorCal because of Microdis, who is already somewhat unhappy about you, and will become even less happy when we release Surfrat 1.0. That's what we needed the database for, in case you hadn't figured it out. Anyway, I've convinced the Corpse to send you to Mex. There's some great spots down there, I know you'll like it. I'll come by again in the morning. Try to get some rest now."
I wanna see that concrete barrel.
Writing and all photographs by Leonardo Dagum,
dagum@sgi.com.
Copyright (C) 1993, 1996. All rights reserved.