Cash Crash Jubilee by Eli William

Author:Eli William
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Talos Press
Published: 2015-04-23T22:00:00+00:00

13

AMON’S APARTMENT

Amon sat hunched over a small fold-up table on a fold-up chair and devoured his food. With his left elbow propped on the tabletop, he used the chopsticks in his right hand to scoop up morsels of fish and spinach alternately with pinches of rice. He hardly paid attention to the taste as he ate. It wasn’t that it was bad, only that he could save creditime by packing it in without savoring. When he was finished, he tied the styrofoam plate and chopsticks in a plastic bag, put the bag on the floor near the door, and sat back down at the table to surf the net.

Making gesture commands with his fingers, he checked through all the major media sites for news about Barrow’s cash crash, but found nothing. Clearly Monju had been lying. The story wasn’t out yet, meaning he must have learned about it elsewhere. Where or from whom Amon couldn’t guess, but there was no point worrying about that, for Monju surely had a diverse network of sources privy to all manner of secrets. He was the PhisherKing after all.

Somewhere amidst the mindless flow of link-clicking, a 3D representation of the earth appeared before him. Unconsciously or by mistake, he had opened the website God’s Eye. Amon knew this site well. He could zoom out far enough to make the earth an infinitesimal dot in black, starry space or zoom in close on a section of land to watch ants crawl out of their colony in real time. The map was meticulously detailed, but certain regions were blotted out. As he twitched his fingers to rotate the globe from satellite perspective, he saw irregular black patches here and there on the surface of the blue and gray, like oceans of petroleum darker than the darkest night. The Southern Gobi Desert, Central America, parts of Bangladesh, the coast of British Columbia, islands in the Pacific, half the Arctic—numerous places were hidden from view—and it was these that interested him most. Amon had invested an enormous portion of his salary scouring the globe in search of his dream forest—looking from all different altitudes and angles—but had found it nowhere. The best clues were the sound of the surf and the green mountains. He had traced every shoreline looking for those mountains, from the vastest oceans to any lake big enough to make waves. The only places left were the ones he couldn’t see.

Of course it was possible to make them visible—in the Free World, anything was possible if you earned it—but the viewing rights were more than he could afford. Amon was only subscribed to a bronze search engine. It wasn’t clear to him exactly which areas of the ImmaNet were off limits for bronze users, but presumably silver, gold and platinum provided a wider range of access. For if the premium engines didn’t yield more hits and more content, why the difference in price? All else being equal, a higher-priced sports car usually had better handling; a higher-priced house a better location than a cheaper one.

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