The weather at Amusement Park is beautiful: crowds clog the footpaths and wrap lines around the rides. Callum and Jacinta lose themselves easily.
“We’ve got to lift more merchandise from Gift Shop next week,” Callum gloats.
“Yeah, security here is crap!” says Jacinta.
“Oh NOOOO,” replies Callum, as a mouse pointer picks him up and shakes him. AmusementBuxx scatter from his pockets; the crowd (Jacinta included) collects them with gusto.
Callum wanders around the prison enclosure, bumping into bars and yelling, until he gets plucked out and fed to the bears.
Amusement Park is pretty much the best park in State/Province.
School never ends.
That is to say, the process of schooling continues for others after you graduate: but education never stops stalking you, either. Central to the neuroses of every educated human is the fear, deep and real, that school will someday be back to get you.
You’ll be caught unclothed and unprepared, and you will be tested. You will fail, because you are meant to fail. This is what we all secretly knew about school: it claims to offer the keys to agency, yet it is designed for subjugation.
Anyway, this is why Withers usually reads naked on the bus.
The humming needle pauses. “You sure you want me to do this part?” asks Ursula.
Ariel inhales, exhales and flexes her toes. Her legs throb from the long session, and the tattooist’s towel shades pink to red.
“It’s going to hurt to walk,” says Ursula, “and it really won’t last longer than a month.”
Ariel nods, and even smiles a little.
The humming resumes; Ursula draws the fishscale pattern over her heels and onto the soles of her feet. Ariel breathes. Her tears are seafoam. You can always walk back into the ocean, they said; and all it costs is blood.
Tengra knows you die if they cut your silver cord; of meat and self, neither survives without the other. Not many things can do it (magic swords, petawatt lasers). But what if the cord frays? What if it parts? What if you just find it trailing behind you in the gray astral dust?
Tengra shivers, holding it, though out here there’s no such thing as cold. Time is weird, too. How long has she been wandering bodiless? Since loneliness; since exhaustion. Since she fled the prison of matter and friction, worn thin as an old hawser against a mooring of stone.
The old man’s not moving, but his beast still hums.
The problem with genius, Rhodes thinks as he straps himself in, is that it rarely concentrates on user-friendship. He thinks he knows where the triggers are, and the gravdamp’s kicking in, but his hud’s a mess. Bootup babble scrolls over his reticle. Something’s yelling at him about failures in block ASCII caps, but a line right under that says to ignore it. Hacker UI.
But Rhodes kicks off and the armor’s with him, huge and strong and beautiful. Bare metal, said the old man, is the only way to ride.
On Tuesday they turn off Wall Street. The end! Badass traders like Jethro have to get Main Street jobs instead.
“Twenty bucks says I’m the fastest stockboy here,” smirks Jethro.
His new coworkers laugh, then stock. Jethro checks his Blackberry.
“Pay up!”
“One sec,” says Jethro, “I bet Enoch ten grand I’d lose that bet.”
“What?”
“Just expressing my view of the market.”
“I don’t have any money,” shrugs Enoch.
“Whoops, that bet was too big!” Jethro tells their boss. “Front me eight Gs?”
The boss fires him via mouth-punch.
“Why did you do that?” cries Jethro. “That was mean!”
SWM should stop trying bars while Cirque du Soleil is in town.
“Yeah, I’m a web developer,” he says, nails buffed mirror-bright. “Mostly sites that work on your iPhone, y’know?”
“Can I see one?” says the only SF who’s shown interest all night.
“Sure! As soon as I get an iPhone–”
“Gut evening,” says Jorma, stepping in as smooth as butterscotch. “I speak three languages. I have traveled to feefty countries. My body is perfect, and I can fly.”
SWM opens his mouth. They’re gone.
“Need anything, sir?” says the kind bartender.
“Another Rogers,” SWM sighs, “heavy on the Roy.”
Murdock Vermilion exits adolescence better suited by name to be a wizard’s apprentice than to parking lot attendantship, or indeed any name-tagged position. She refrains from cursing her parents for this only because they are already cursed to a sufficient degree.
Yet more problematic for Murdock is the punishing lack of depth perception afforded via refusal to wear broken glasses. Parking by feel turns out to be rather a faux pas. Thus, one brisk midnight in November, she finds herself in disemploy and a black mood.
Note that Murdock Vermilion does not become a wizard’s apprentice.
Wizards are not real.