Skip Tracer by Will Lennon

Author:Will Lennon [Will Lennon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Hare Press
Published: 2023-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

One nice thing about Chicago: dispensaries are legal here now, so you don’t need to buy skunk weed in the White Sox parking lot from a guy in an Avenged Sevenfold T-shirt. You can just hop in your car, still smelling like pot and last night’s takeout, and drive over to the happy-store.

They were actually playing Avenged Sevenfold when I got to the dispensary. The woman at the counter had green hair and a face full of black-bar piercings with matching black gauges in her ears. A black guy in a track suit, possibly a manager, said ‘hi’ without turning around. He was flipping through channels on a flat-screen set up in the corner.

“We don’t got G4 on this thing?” he muttered.

“Does G4 still exist?” the woman at the counter asked, staring down at her phone. “Oh, hi. Can I help you?”

I waved her off. I wanted to browse for a few minutes before I inevitably settled on what I’d been smoking since getting back from California: Pink Lemonade. It was a knockout indica, a temporary lobotomy I could use to dissociate until it was time to sleep. I used to smoke Tropic Thunder, a sativa, but it had started to grate on me that I could still form coherent thoughts when I smoked it—and those coherent thoughts often took the shape of Ben Euker’s exploding head.

The channels on the flat-screen kept changing as the guy looked for G4. A string of words jumped out at me: “tech billionaire suicide.”

“E-excuse me,” I said. I cleared my throat. My voice was rusty. “Could you turn back a couple of channels please? CNN?” The guy shrugged and flipped back to a news anchor with white-capped teeth and perfect hair plugs.

“...sending tech stocks plummeting yet again, coming on the heels of the livestreamed death of Ben Euker, inventor of the OSCOPE virtual reality headset…”

My eyes flicked to the image and caption on the upper left-hand side of the screen. It was Adrienne Keyes, a known member of the Euker posse. Keyes was one of the people Euker had brought with him from Berkeley to OSCOPE. He had stayed on throughout the launch of the original headset but jumped off after the sale to Google. The CNN chyron simply described him as an investor currently based in Hong Kong, next to a picture of Keyes peeking at the paparazzi over a pair of mirrored sunglasses with yellow lenses. He was wearing a slim-tailored, pink-pastel-colored suit with a mint green dress shirt and boat shoes.

“Oh, yeah,” the green-haired girl said. “Did you hear about this? Tech bros keep killing themselves. I’m into it. Do Zuckerberg next. I’ll never forgive his mannequin-lookin’ ass for scrambling my IG timeline out of sequence. Newest posts first, goddamnit.”

“They knew their stocks were gonna crash, I bet,” the manager said. “Decided they’d rather cash out fully than live on as NPCs.”

CNN cut to a line graph showing the NASDAQ: Tech Index going from a squiggly horizontal line to a straight vertical one over the course of the past couple of days.

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