Kandude and Tanemahuta got themselves oriented and decided to go to a nearby café for breakfast. While waiting for veggie scrambles, they took a look at the debit device, which was accessible to each of them using a combination of biometrics. Scrolling through, they were stunned to discover that 100 minervas was worth more than a million dollars. Reeling from their sudden wealth, they agreed that never had they heard of such generosity. They reflected that for a single individual in America to suddenly score such unearned fortune required millions to spend hard-earned dollars that might have been used for food and medicine for their children on lottery tickets.
The device hooked up wirelessly to the café cash register and they were on their way lickety-split. But to where? Kandude resolved to head to Texas to find Cardoshia to rescue her from her predicament, even though he knew he would himself be in great peril from Squire K and his army. Without hesitation, Tanemahuta swore to stick by Kandude in this perilous quest, noting that their sudden resources would no doubt enlarge their possibilities.
The two friends found their way to a used car lot and bought a Subaru Forester. The salesman, noting that they expressed no resistance to the listed price, added numerous markups to cover state, local, neighborhood and city block taxes, dealer administration, special undercoating developed by NASA for space vehicle atmospheric reentry, dealer administration of dealer administrative costs, key delivery for each of two keys, transport from the parking lot to the office located 50 feet away, and other miscellaneous charges. Thus, they took possession of the stickered $12,000 car for a mere $27,642.99. Kandude and Tanemahuta were a bit taken aback by the out-the-door price, but neither had ever purchased a vehicle in America, and the salesman was extremely friendly and seemed to know exactly what he was doing.
The duo, relying on Kandude’s prior travel experience, resolved to go from one Flying Q truck stop to another to accomplish the swiftest transit to Texas and his beloved Cardoshia. They stopped for supper in Idaho, tired but confident that a modest motel would, as always, be found nearby. As they were considering the meatloaf special, they noticed a sad looking man sitting at a nearby table who appeared to be in his early 40s. He was shutting down his smartphone as a tear rolled down his cheek. The small, dark-complexioned fellow had horn rim glasses and wore a tweed sport coat, button down oxford shirt, corduroys, and suede shoes, all neat and clean but more than a bit worn. He had only a cup of coffee in front of him.
“Sir, have you some trouble?” asked Kandude, concerned. The man quickly brushed away the tear and, in a melodious foreign accent, quietly assured them that all was well, except that his 1986 Toyota Corolla with 437,000 miles on it had broken down in the parking lot, the offer arising from his 600th job application had just been rescinded, and that he was basically broke and stranded at the Flying Q in the middle of Idaho. Kandude and Tanemahuta immediately invited him to join them for dinner and take a brief respite from his tribulations.
The man said that his name was Morton. He was a Doctor of Philosophy in philosophy, who had taught college for many years. Failing to land a tenure track position, he had wandered the country taking whatever temporary teaching appointments he could get. His trajectory gradually descended from prestigious private and major state universities to middle and lower tier state and local colleges, and finally to junior colleges in obscure rural locales. This last turndown was for a position to teach 13 courses in a single year for $14,500, or roughly $3.65/hour, at the Kawpowkee Springs Community College and EPA Superfund Site in Florida. The problem was apparently that his specialty was Critical Space Theory, which concerns itself with the relationship between geography and socioeconomic conditions.
“Indeed,” said Morton, “my dissertation was constructed on the fact that Swedish mothers enjoy full reproductive rights as well as childbirth and postnatal care at no cost, along with lengthy maternity leave that can be shared with the other parent. Meanwhile, in Appalachia, criminal reproductive restrictions, limited health care access, higher childbirth and infant mortality rates, and significant maternal poverty are considered the necessary features of a moral society and the free enterprise system. Of course, my research showed that both communities passionately love both mothers and children. However, the newly disinfected KSCCEPA Board of Trustees, consisting of an outboard motor mechanic, a pesticide applicator, the local chapter president of Mothers for Purity, and the married co-owners of a small portable toilet company, all of whom are friends of the county’s biggest local citrus farming family and hereditary Justices of the Peace, thought my research specialty sounded like a doctrine that made White people feel bad. As educational leaders, the Board knew that this sort of thing had been criminalized in Florida by their great hero, and eminent political leader Kon Falangist.”
“I am basically an itinerant metic, an academic hod-carrier, an educated peon,” said Morton. “This is how higher education in America works now. Most of the so-called faculty in the country are also in my shoes. We are all on food stamps.”
“This seems very inappropriate,” said Kandude, “for as my preceptor, the late excellent Professor B always said, ‘next in importance to freedom and capitalism is education, and without education, especially in business and finance, the others cannot be maintained.’ Though a great scholar, he also championed the notion that the best of all education ultimately came not from books or in the classroom but in the fierce jungle of market competition.”
“It seems that your professor had a very particular philosophy,” said Morton.
“Indeed,” responded Kandude. “He was an immensely learned and nurturing teacher. He believed that all was for the best in this best of all capitalistic worlds. But that suggests that your plight is for the best. I must admit that my recent experiences are filling me with perfidious doubts.”
“Well,” said Morton, “in my experience, the greedy, the violent and the ignorant govern the larger course of so-called civilization, no matter the decency one might observe at smaller scales. Even if there were a God, he seems to have abandoned this blue sphere to some malignant being, who has placed his degenerate demons in charge of countries, legislatures, courts, Florida-based members-only clubs, and corporations everywhere. I have seen few countries that do not desire the subordination and exploitation of all the others. Everywhere, the weak gravitate to the powerful, before whom they either cringe or to whom instead they become fanatical disciples, even if those figures are despicable and utterly careless of the people’s lives.”
“The powerful exploit both the weak and the sycophants like the sheep whose wool and flesh they sell, even as they swell and glow in both the unmerited devotion of the ignorant masses and false praise of cynical parasites. Even in those places where they seem to enjoy peace, the inhabitants are devoured by as much envy, care and uneasiness as those experienced by a besieged town. Anger has risen to a warlike boil against fabricated enemies, contrived betrayals of a nostalgic past that never was, and trumped-up threats to a fictional and unjust state of racial and religious privilege to which many feel entitled. Those willing to tap into this anger for power and profit are legion and utterly without shame. All that I have seen and experienced has made of me a veritable Schopenhauer.”
After a moment’s reflection and glance for approval from Tanemahuta, Kandude said, “Morton, why don’t you come with us. We are headed, for better or for worse, to Texas. Perhaps we can exchange thoughts and experiences and formulate plans for the good of one another.”
Morton, finding the company of the two friends agreeable compared to most, and the prospects of living penniless at the Flying Q in the middle of Idaho unappealing, readily agreed. When Kandude was paying at the cashier, the device began making a persistent dinging sound, and even as the transaction went through, lines of code began streaming across the screen of his cellphone. A young fellow at a nearby table leaped up, looked over Kandude’s shoulder at the screen, and told him to immediately shut the device off.
“Your accounts are under attack!” said the young man, a thin fellow with thick glasses wearing jeans and a Link-in Park T-shirt.
“But who are they? What do they want, and how are they getting into this amazingly sophisticated device?” asked Kandude.
The young man waved them over to his table where he was working at a fancy laptop and drinking a 36-ounce Mountain Dew. “It’s an arms race,” he said. “Millions of hackers, including vicious state actors, criminal syndicates, Wells Fargo account executives, and amateur tech terrorists are working around the clock all over the planet to get into everyone’s stuff. Let’s take a look at some of that code. If I can recapture some screen memory offline, maybe I can see what kind of black stuff is going on here.”
The young man, whose name was Elliot, played around with the device for a bit, taking a couple of screenshots with his smart phone. He got on his laptop and his fingers flew across the keyboard like Mozart playing a piano concerto on speed.
“This looks like a fairly garden-variety phishing attack. Somehow your account lit up somewhere, which in cyberspace these days is the same as everywhere, as a target of opportunity. It doesn’t look like your account has been compromised, which I can test with a couple of dummy transactions, but you need to be hypervigilant because apparently you are now on the cybercriminal radar.”
Kandude thanked Elliot warmly. They exchanged stories. Elliot had gone to TechCal as a young teen, and even before graduating was bombarded with job offers from intelligence agencies, hedge funds, high frequency trading operations, and international crime syndicates such as the Tantor Organization.
“Goodbye to all that,” said Elliot. “I am deconstructing everything I’ve created since age 6 and getting off the grid. I’m headed for the Methow Valley. But Dude, tell me more about your plans to rescue your girlfriend.”
“My dear Cardoshia was last in an alarming situation at a sovereign citizen redoubt in Texas. I don’t know if she is still there, but I must find her.” Kandude showed Elliot his precious picture of Cardoshia.
“Holy guacamole, Dude – that’s Kitty Belladonna of Laguna Beach! She’s a megastar in the computer science program at TechCal, which, admittedly, consists largely of incels. Or at least she was – she dropped off the web two or three months ago,” said Elliot. “I had a premium subscription that’s actually still paid up, darn it. Hey, let me see that picture again.”
Elliot took a picture of the picture with his laptop camera and ran it though a facial recognition software program. In short order, he found several matches to advertisements on a platform called PrayerBuddy. There was Cardoshia, as beautiful as ever, in photos with the captions “Find Your Holy Spirit” and “Get the Scripture in Your Picture.” Cardoshia, now apparently going by the name Zipporah, modestly dressed and tastefully posed, was handling a God Bless the USA Bible in one ad and several snakes in another.
“I can’t tell much from these posted pics,” said Elliot. “But they are recent, and from the context, it looks like she is participating in some kind of old timey church thing. I’m not religious, but I might be down.”
Elliot did more stuff on his laptop too quickly for Kandude to follow. “I’m going to say there is a better than 50% chance that these ads originate in the Nashville area. Lots of serpent churches there, I’ve heard. Sorry I can’t do more with these for you gents. Take my advice – keep your device shut off except for brief transactions. Get a couple of burner phones here at the Flying Q trucker mart and only use them in an emergency.”
Kandude and Tanemahuta thanked Elliot warmly and wished him a successful journey.
As the three men resumed their journey east, they noticed that a red Cadillac had fallen in behind them. It seemed to be following them, as it stayed in position no matter how they varied their speed. The Cadillac, in turn, was joined by a silver Audi sedan, then other late model vehicles. When they pulled into the Flying Q for gas in Utah, the Cadillac and the Audi pulled in nearby, just as a dozen other recent model cars wheeled swiftly into the station, arraying themselves around the Subaru. Men and women with brief cases and portfolios leapt out of the cars and rushed up to Kandude, Tanemahuta and Morton, urgently trying to sell them precious metal futures, stocks and bonds, cryptocurrencies, Caribbean islands, prepaid funeral arrangements, Ukrainian brides, quintuple point credit cards, time shares, whole-body CAT scans and other products too numerous to absorb.
When the tank was full, Kandude, Morton and Tanemahuta jumped into Subaru, forced the doors shut against the many grasping hands, and sped back out to the highway. The salespeople leaped back into their cars and followed, jockeying wildly for position in a frenzied peddler’s Peloton. Tanemahuta, studying the map, directed Kandude to veer suddenly off the highway up a rough dirt road into the hills, taking advantage of the Subaru Forester’s superior off-road capabilities. The mad hawkers plunged after them, partially blinded by a plume of dust. But when the giant Suburban that had captured the lead position suddenly rolled over, the rest of the vender’s phalanx thundered into a violent pileup, scattering wreckage for half a mile along the road. The trio worked their way back to the highway and continued east, dismayed by the hell storm of capitalism unleashed by the cyberworld’s discovery of their newfound fortune.