Lurkers Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE

  INDICIA

  DEDICATION

  QUOTES

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  EPILOGUE

  WHAT'S NEW

  LURKERS

  Written, Designed, Edited, and Kindled by Gremlin

  Catering supplied by Starbucks, The Royal Hilltop British Pub, Village Inn, and McCoy’s Family Restaurant.

  This is a work of fiction, intended only for purposes of education and entertainment.

  The opinions herein are not necessarily those of anyone, including, but not limited to, the author.

  All Rights Reserved

  The characters, institutions, and situations portrayed within this work are the products of the author’s imagination; any similarities to anyone, living, dead, or inebriated to the extent that it makes no difference, are purely coincidental, unintentional, and unfortunate; existing public figures, corporations, establishments, et cetera, are used in a fictional manner, and without malicious intent.

  All images within this work are the creations of the author or his affiliates, licensed for use by their respective copyright holders, or understood to be in the public domain; relevant copyrights apply to each image.

  Copyright © Gremlin 1998, 2008

  This work may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, known or unknown, including, but not limited to, mimeograph, photocopy, database, hypertext, reading each syllable dogmatically prior vapidly to chortling, or any electronic medium, without prior written consent by the author; brief excerpts used for the purpose of critical review are allowed for members of the press with proper credentials.

  This product is not intended for use by persons with mental ages under eighteen.

  By proceeding beyond this page, you agree to hold the author and his affiliates, known and unknown, harmless of liability; no warrantees regarding this product are expressed or implied.

  WARNING: this product is not intended for use by an idiot; we at Wasted, Inc. are in no way expert in the cognitive abilities of any given imbecile, and cannot predict what said moron might do to itself or others, given this or any other product, without the close supervision of the American Government.

  Published by Wasted, Inc.

  For Kristen

  Hit and rub, Babe....

  The History of every major Galactic Civilisation tends to pass through three distinct and recognisable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry, and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases.

  For instance, the first phase is characterised by the question How can we eat? The second by the question Why do we eat? and the third by the question Where shall we have lunch?

  —The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

  [Douglas Adams]

  PROLOGUE

  No one ever reads the prologue.

  Someone told me that once. I’m not sure I believe it; I might still be too optimistic for that. But, I can admit, I’m probably cynical and certainly realistic enough, living in the twenty-first century, to allow that the MySpace Generation at least, with its misspelled brevity, might likely tl;dr this whole thing in favour of whatever they hope to find in later chapters. Animgifs, maybe. MP3 controllers. Viral fucking videos. Anything to make this archaic pulpmatter more kinetic and interactive. The lucky ones will read it on a Kindle.

  Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m anything but a luddite. I was the guy wondering in 1983 why David Lightman was trying to crack NORAD’s frontend security [and what was that, 8bit?] instead of circumventing the login and invading through the binary basement. I was the guy wondering in 1988 why we couldn’t write books in pen and OCR each page into a MacintoshIIx to be molested into ASCII for formatting. I stared at the ToS for yahoo.com in 1995 trying to figure out why in hell they were charging money to plug URLs in by hand instead of writing a simple webspider to categorise sites into a RandomAccess database for logical retrieval. And, in 1999, I spent most of the year laughing at the panicky herd convincing itself that any computer using a mouse in place of punchcards stood any chance of rolling its calendar back to 1900 and erasing all hardcopy advances from those of the Brothers Wright to those of the Brothers Wachowski.

  Which in its way supports my hypothesis: that, all things being equalised, in Dolby 7.1, via HDMI, supporting 24bit discretion and LFE, it’s not always about 120fps Blu-ray; sometimes—just sometimes—those of us who can remember how to be mammals with mortgages might actually prefer the indelible marriage of polyvinylpyrrolidone and cellulose; which is to say that, while Web2.0 functionally began with BourneShell based UseNet prototypes in 1979, it has never to date managed to replace the simple, crossplatform, uncrashable format of ink on paper. In point of fact, being myself expert both in hypertexting evanescent RGB within the backend of a CMS and expatiating perdurable CYMK via notebook—be it 64bit or spiral—I remain appreciative of the latter’s lack of comment fora.

  All that said—whatever it was—there remains now the idiosyncratic and arguably idiotic process wherein I through clinical trials have established the irremediable practise of writing these bibliothecal artefacts in restaurants: coffee, ashtrays [to whatever extent those still exist in the Milky Way], and, customarily, precisely the calibre of people for whom I’m not writing a book. And this is where the fun begins.

  Now, to be entirely honest, the party for whom I’m writing a book—any book—is invariably singular: I write books for myself, if only to see what they look like once I’m done. That said, I do as I write consider that there will eventually be an audience; to which end, my admittedly intrusive sesquipedaliae notwithstanding, I’ve been known at least to strive to limit the internal gags which only I and the sorts of friends Andy Kaufman tended to collect would understand, let alone find entertaining. And yet there’s only so much I can do with that before atrophying into Ernest Hemmingway for the illiterate masses able somehow to find their ways to whichever eatery I happen to occupy on a given night.

  Therefore: the following story is true. So far as you know. The names have been changed to conceal my inability to remember any of them. The corporate establishments are used in a fictional manner because it’s hard to take any of them seriously as factual entities. The coffee is deplorable; the muzak is worse; the clientele—

  Well: you’ll see....

  tl;dr: i writed a book; lawl

  ONE

  It was a dark and stormy—

  Okay; I’m lying: it was the middle of summer—probably the middle of July—and still close to ninety degrees outside; if there were clouds in the sky, I don’t remember them now; I do remember that there was a full moon—you’ll get that later; and, as for any darkness—who to be real can tell how dark anything is anymore, betwixt the moonlight, streetlights, headlights, taillights, indicator lights, parking lights, map lights, squadcar emergency lights, fluorescent fuel island lights, neon open sign lights, animated construction sign lights, walk lights, don’t walk lights, red lights, yellow lights, green lights, Camel Lights, Marlboro Lights, satellites, DSLites, and the occasional vestigial lightning bug; it wasn’t d
ark, and it wasn’t stormy.

  Also, it was dusk.

  From orbit, as the sun begins to disappear behind the planet, North America resembles a massive, chaotic LiteBrite set, one of its larger clusters being this city; reentry to this spot at 9.81m/s2 [or, for the pedants, may = -kvy-mg] approaching terminal velocity, the blob of white light would shatter, resolving to various colours, identifying this structure once known simply as a diner but in recent years perverted into the politically contentious Family Restaurant to make it sound somehow more important; in fact, it’s a greasy spoon with a trademarked name and an advertising budget: not so much an eatery as an attractive nuisance in the night, calling to weary travellers like a Siren with Ebola.

  It’s the sort of place which never closes, though rumour perpetually has it that they’ll drop the graveyard shift and shut down from midnight to six any day now; it just never seems to happen. Which of course is fine with us. You know: we lurkers. We who wander in as the sun is setting and sit here until it comes up again, doing whatever it is that we do, which is rarely much. Officially, as the laptop suggests, I’m here to write a book; realistically, as the evidence has shown, I’m here to hang out and chat all night; and, if there’s ever anything to show for that, I’ve never seen it.

  There are those, who shall remain managers, who hate it when we do this. Apparently, so long as we exist, we’re costing the joint money. Nevermind that we spend at minimum a couple bucks each on coffee while actually consuming, at worst, a few cents in bulkpurchased product. And it’s not like a lot of people are waiting in line for a seat: this isn’t the sort of place people come to; it’s the sort of place they end up. It’s the last stop in town after all the good stuff has closed.

  We in this instance were myself and my coffeechick—who doesn’t drink coffee; it’s not where the term comes from: she was my coffeechick because, at about the time the rest of the world failed to fool anyone by ameliorating secretaries into Administrative Assistants, I went the other way, refusing to call a spade an Agricultural American Particulate Materiel Relocation Implement. They’re just coffeechicks. Possibly because I don’t need much more from a secretary than an endless supply of trimethylxanthines; probably because calling her an intravocational fuckbuddy would be crass.

  Reaching this glorified automat—I call it that because, as per the rules of regularism, the proclivities of managers notwithstanding, there eventually occurs the reasonable expectation from the waitress that, if we want more coffee, we know where to find it—we got inside, past the ornamental podium, to a booth, with minimal chitchat; the first real discourse ascertained that, yeah, I was good with coffee, and Leslie the Coffeechick was happier with Coke; no one was happy with the ashtray deficit, but the cattle had spoken on that matter.

  The booth in question was located strategically next to an electrical outlet, into which I plugged the laptop, battery technology failing to outpace CPU drains. At roughly that instant, the sun disappeared at the horizon, its struggling corona going rapidly acute, and quickly away. Or, for the pedants, the planet rotated by a hundredth of a degree. Accuracy and poetry are antonyms.

  Either way, night had now begun.

  TWO

  I don’t deny being...whatever I am. That I can’t identify it doesn’t mean that I deny it. I’d deny what the more illiterate would settle for while searching their little vocabularies for a label: I’m not a narcissist, because I don’t lose myself in mirrors; I’m not an elitist, because I don’t like people enough to tolerate a minority; I’m not an asshole, because I’m not stupid; I’m not a bastard, because Dad’s identity was never a mystery; I’m not a jerk, because I don’t prepare soda. Whatever I am, it’s not one of the boring words people settle for. Maybe I demand a new word; I might be that cool.

  What I am, I suppose, is aware. And don’t misunderstand that: I’m not pretending to know that the government of, by, and for the people are plotting, of, by, and for the people, to poison the people with fluoridated water, to impoverish the people into submission with inflated oil prices, or to rally the people against an unseen enemy by demolishing their own skyscrapers; I’m not psychotic. I’m simply aware that, insofar as the system might suck, it itself is a headless monster guilty not of conspiracy, but of incompetence.

  All of which rather liberates me to observe that, in a government of, by, and for the people, there displays no statistically significant difference between an imbecile sitting in the Oval Office and an imbecile sitting in a booth a few feet away. To the extent that any given president is a drooling moron, all people evolving from foetal sourcecode compiled with available molecules to be equal, he does necessarily represent the sum total average of the country he fails properly to lead. The shorthand: if your president is an idiot, count yourself lucky for possessing the intellectual acuity to grok that, if not necessarily the intellectual honesty to understand why.

  The irony, as most would misidentify it, is that, acutely aware though I might be that this country is little more—and often a lot less—than three hundred million plebeians exhibiting something of an atavistic remorse for a planet of seven billion, I at the same time remain able to regard each of them I meet as nothing more or less than people. Which brings me to the waitress, who in fact was just bringing herself, and my coffee, to me; in an efficiency of effort, she also brought Leslie’s Coke to her; and all was right upon this damaged planet for the moment.

  The waitress, according to her special little nametag, would have been called Jessica, in the unlikely event that anyone ever cared enough to find that out before calling her Miss. Resplendent in her pointless, demeaning costume, designed to impart upon the public that she was the wageslave to whom thoughtless orders were tactlessly to be given, she to me was clearly aware of her standing and able to accept the reality of the idiocy, though a small part of her still may have resisted subscribing to its philosophy.

  She was in her twenties, and likely aware that her actions—or her lack—were starting to shape her destiny now: that there’s a subtle difference between waitressing to stay alive during college and having got halfway through college before becoming a waitress for life.

  The percentage of college she’d got through was behind her now; this was her job until she came up with something else.

  ‘Here you go,’ she told us, setting the Coke on the table in front of Leslie and habitually filling my coffeemug from the pot she’d be leaving with me in a moment, ‘You okay with just drinks for a while?’

  ‘Yup,’ I told her, ‘I’m good.’ Leslie nodded to her, making eye contact but keeping her mouth fixed around her straw.

  ‘Let me know if you do need anything,’ she told us, ‘I’ll be around. I suppose you know that by now.’

  I nodded, smirking knowingly. And she was off again, also satisfied that the world made a perverse sort of sense.

  Regarding we lurkers: the waitresses—anyone beneath the manager, from the servers to the cook to the bussers, if they had bussers at night—all love us. Partly because we overtip them insultingly; partly because we don’t tend to look down on them. These aren’t robots, you know; they’re just people: just like presidents and drunks, each just one of three hundred million in a world of seven billion, each capable of fucking up dramatically and each potentially capable of learning from its mistakes.

  Robots, by contrast, tend to be predictable.

  The waitress gone, the cook in the kitchen, the busser unemployed, and the manager likely hiding in his office playing Minesweeper, the place was uncommonly empty now, apart from our table. Which is to say that it at one time would have been uncommon to see all these tables empty at nine in the evening, even allowing that this had never been a place to which anyone really aspired to go. The difference, of course, was that this city, like so many, had recently been disrupted by the antismokers: one nut per thousand whose fear of cigarettes had motivated it to convince the two per three, who simply didn’t smoke, to fuck over the one per three, who did, in general ele
ctions of policy to ban smoking in publicly accessible buildings amidst predictions that, the smokers being now less inclined to go to restaurants, the economy would hereafter be supported by those one per thousand antismokers who’d been avoiding these places to date, now that they could feel emboldened enough to seek out a cheeseburger in the middle of the night. In fact, the antismokers had failed to fill the gap left by the smokers, likely being too busy elsewhere conniving next to ban sugar and transfat in publicly accessible buildings; the simple nonsmokers had for the most part made no changes to their routines, apart from lacking the motivation to meet their smoking friends at the restaurants for coffee and pie; the smokers, already disinterested in paying ten bucks for two dollars in fairmarket value of food while paying five bucks a pack for a dollar in pretaxed cigarettes, became disinclined to frequent the restaurants which, as part of the restaurantoid guild, had supported the ban in the expectation of one antismoker per thousand replacing three hundred smokers per thousand in a fantastic universe in which mathematics are as dishonest as activists are.

  It was for this reason that I continued to write in restaurants, while employing a coffeechick to watch over my laptop whenever I retreated out into the night to smoke; the upside, as my readers will attest, is that I’ve become far less forgiving in all regards, and therefore, in a world in which all reality television shows are in application The Gong Show, also more entertaining. So I’m not bitter, outside all circumstances in which I am.

  The mall down the street having closed at nine, it now being after dark but before ten, George the Bum slunk in without a menu.

  Releasing her oral deathgrip on her straw for a moment, Leslie nodded to him. ‘Hey, George.’

  George replied only by pointing, wildeyed and accusingly, directly at her, staring down his nose at what for all I know appeared to him to be one of the Lizardpeople of Altair IV. George wasn’t sane, which I suspect had a correlation to his lack of residence: sane bums would at the least migrate, even on foot, to warmer places, spending their days on the lowrent beaches of Mazatlan and sipping drinks amounting to a small percentage of the monthly MoneyMarket dividends in their PayPal accounts—something I’ll admit I should probably be doing, myself. But George, being insane, probably thought that PayPal.com, being eBay.com, was whitehouse.gov, and therefore lizardpeople.gov. It would be sad, if I were the type who could be saddened.