A.G.E's Joint

 Cyberspace The final frontier... No, it's not. It's a time sucking robot Leading down the primrose path The 21st Century Schizoid man Working for the puppermaster Selling out data And our souls  To the highest bidder.

The rain had begun to fall again, soft, steady, like a whisper against the glass. Julian was deep in thought. A fire crackled behind him, casting flickering shadows across the mahogany walls of the study. The smell of old books and expensive whiskey swirled, the kind that tasted like secrets. He stared at the portrait above the fireplace. Gregory Langston. To the rest of the world, he was a visionary whose products changed the world. Behind closed doors, a monster with insatiable lusts. Gregory was dead now. A heart attack, they said. Alone in his penthouse, surrounded by luxury and no one who truly loved him. What was the last thought as he descended into the darkness? Did he want one more minute? Probably not.  He was in his office the the call came. Julian had once admired him. Had once believed in the myth of the self-made man, the titan who built empires from dust. Gregory had taken Julian under his wing. Mentored him. Groomed him. You could say raped him. No. That wasn’t true...

  The windows were blacked out, but it didn't matter. No one could see in the new darkness anyway. The bosses called it the Scorpio Project and the details were nonexistent.  10:45 PM we took off over the water. Thirty minutes in, the plane banked sharply and then descended. When I got off, another suit handed me a tablet and put me in the back of a van. No words were spoken until I was let out on St. George Street and given the tablet to log corpses. I trip on cobblestones in the dim light but manage to keep my feet. Passing closed shops with their made in China trinkets, I note the displays designed to snare the tourist. Give them something to remember the trip with while lining the pockets of some far away factory owner.   At least they used to. Beggars were lined up for alms, burnt out from too much sun and too much booze. Only they were dead. with a press of a button, the program recorded the coordinates of each victim. The authorities deployed sanitation teams ...

The red convertible’s big V-8 roared down the Turnpike. The needle was inching near 100 with the joyous sounds of Beethoven blasting into the darkness. Trashcoast Parkway was fading into the rearview on this starry, starry night. The El Dorado was a congratulation present for me, a land yacht befitting a successful guy. And the polar opposite of the black Benz I’d been riding in. That was important. No more Mickey, the lifelong dream to stick it to the man had borne fruit. I had perfected a scam, selling vulnerable women the latest super anti-aging cream. The website was a fake, though. A perfect clone of the product original where I gathered more information than their Experian account. The individual accounts were useless to my scam. Sure, there were several million dollars over the thousands of accounts that could have easily converted with no trace. That was chump change, though. I stacked a backtrace virus inside the orders. During another scam, I had found a way to skim frac...