CZM Book Club: The Flair by Nick Mamatas

Margaret reads Mia a sci-fi story about what people will do for free power and war. And about hacker clowns.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Book Club Club Club Club Club. It's the Cool Zone
Media book Club. That's the jingle. It's the same every time.
I don't know what you're talking about, it doesn't change.

Speaker 3 (00:21):
Welcome to Cool Zone Media book Club. I'm your host
Maria Giljoy with me as my guest as Mia.

Speaker 4 (00:26):
Woe he ya, Hello book club chanting. We are, we
are booking, We're clubbing. It's a good time.

Speaker 3 (00:35):
Yeah, that's right. Two weapons, books and clubs. Books are
weapons in the pen is mightier than the sword way.
But also if you put one in a big sock,
like ideally a hardcover and a big sock, that's also
a reasonable weapon. That's not what today's story is about.
In the slightest, Cool Zone Media book Club is your

(00:57):
weekly reminder that fiction is fun. Where I read someone
a story, and today I'm reading Mia story. I'm reading
Mia story by someone named Nick Mammaitas. Have you ever
heard of Nick Mammatas by any brandam chance? No, Nick
Mammotas is awesome. Nick Mammotas is a very hard working

(01:20):
fiction writer who writes just a honest stuff, especially short fiction,
but not exclusively. I guess I could just read you
their bio or his bio rather. Nick Mammatas is the
author of several novels, including The Second Shooter and I
Am Providence. His short fiction has appeared in McSweeney's Best
American Mystery Stories, tour dot Com, Weird Tales, Asthma, Science Fiction,

(01:40):
and many other venues. Nick is also an anthologist. His
most recent title is Wondering Glory Forever All Inspiring Lovecrafty
and Fiction. Nick's fiction and editorial work have been variously
nominated for the Hugo, Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, Locus, and
World Fantasy Awards. But the story is about clowns. It's

(02:01):
not really about clowns, but there's a clown in it,
and so that's why I'm reading it. That's not why
I'm reading the story. But I think it's clubby. This
is a story about space lasers and clowns and clown down.

Speaker 2 (02:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:15):
Yeah, didn't give you enough of a warning about what
you were signing up for. This story is called the Flare.
The Light Brigade has a flare for the dramatic, or
at least the absurd. What I can tell you is
that they're located somewhere in the western end of the
Great Basin in California, and that I drove to meet
them in a car I rented at what's left of
the Reno Tahoe International Airport. Ten flights daily and on

(02:39):
Sundays eleven, that one being a quick hop to Vancouver.
Just to hang on to the name International do not recommend.
I traveled north in the early evening, when the temperature
was bearable but not so cold i'd need to heat
the car and waste precious juice. There were no charging
stations once I passed Pyramid Lake, but the brigade promised
that they already had power sufficient to reach our my

(03:00):
model te They also promised that I would instantly know
where to pull off the highway and pick up my liaison,
and they were right. Desert roads are always lonely, and
when the sun finished its descent, the only light came
from a failing Beaklin TM low orbit billboard and my
ride's headlamps. They were not even any animals prowling the

(03:22):
bush near the highway. No quick flashes of glowing eyes,
no glintse of track or collars in the shadows. Nothing
suddenly there and then gone in a blink. Both literal
and figurative, just brush and a low sky like black slate.
There was, however, on the shoulder of the road, a
circus clown, complete with red nose, great flipper shoes, and

(03:44):
a comically oversized hitchhiker's thumb. She wore a pair of
reflective yellow genie pants, a floofy sleeved crop top just
as vibrant, and a single red rose upon her left breast.
The clown's hair was pale blue and pink and pointed
straight up, a bit like the flame from a gas burner.
Turned all the way up, going my way, I asked,

(04:07):
She docked and entered the car headfirst, like an animal,
or at least someone unused to being a passenger in
anything smaller than a bus. I almost ate a mouthful
of her cotton candy colored hair. It was stiff, coated
and dried glue quick clowning around funny face, Hong Kong,
she said, as she squeezed her funny nose. It was

(04:29):
half broken and sounded like a wounded animal. But she
did her best to compensate broken animals. But trying our best.
That's what life has been for the past fifteen years.
The light Brigade had invited me out to their secret
headquarters to witness and write about the launch of their
home brew laser satellite. Just two years ago, the Brigade

(04:49):
had created and uploaded open source plans for the improvement
of your backyard photovoltaic receivers to convert solar powered laser
energy into good old DC electricity. It was a provocative
move by this assemblage of hackers, engineers, and from the
look of the looks of the clown under employed performance artists,
especially provocative since there was and there is nothing for

(05:12):
photovoltaic receivers to collect that isn't just coming from the Sun. Already,
solar power satellites have been on the drawing boards and
some of the most hopeful PowerPoint slide presentations ever created
for almost seventy years. Indeed, there are a handful of
microwave transmitting satellites in low orbit right now, but they're

(05:32):
not pointed toward the Earth. Instead, they are oriented towards
the four long Wang weapons platforms located thirty five thousand
kilometers overhead, to keep them powered up and ever ready
for war. But that the Light Brigade wants you to
know is going to change. We didn't travel much more

(05:53):
than a mile before the clown, whose name was Elektra,
told me to pull over and get out of the car.
She pointed her novelty thumb at me, then dug it
into my ribs as if it were a pistol and
she a mobster. It was fine, all part of our agreement.
The night was frigid, but it's the kind of cold
that's a relief, like walking by the open door of
the store you could never afford to enter a freelance

(06:15):
journalist's salary. She kept me waiting outside, where I took
nips now and again from my flask while she programmed
a new route into the car's navigation system. Then stepped
back out and said, want to sniff my flower? Before
I could even say yes, it's squirted, and something sticky
that smells of lavender hit me full in the face.
I woke up blindfolded, still in the passenger seat of

(06:38):
my car, but definitely off road. A hard jostle sent
my head up to the roof and nearly lost consciousness
A second time, Easy said, Electra, we're close to the Shonzai.
I was intrigued to hear that bit of Mandarin. It
meant she trusted me. Shonzi distant strongholds beyond the reach
of the emperor in ancient times, Shonzi bandit bands resisting
centralized power. In the merely pre modern era, Shonzi underground,

(07:03):
non hierarchical factories for knockoff cell phones with extra features,
and spider Man action figures in turquoise and purple instead
of red and blue. In the recent past and today,
Shonzai meant all those things and something more. I had
a million questions, but I wasn't going to ask them
well blindfolded. It was another thirty minutes perhaps before we

(07:23):
pulled up to the Shanzai. Stay in the car for
one minute, please, the clown said. She stepped out and
closed the door. I could hear other people milling around,
and they made me wait for much longer than a minute.
But finally the passenger door opened, and a man's hand
pressed against my chest and told me one sec He
took off my blindfold and then stepped back and said

(07:43):
get out. There were six of them, including my chauffeur.
They introduced themselves. A couple shared their pronouns and won
a brief list of headmtes only the clown and a
woman with whom she was now holding hands, said welcome
to the Light Brigade. We launched at dawn. They spoke
in an eerie practiced harmony like creepy twins in a movie,

(08:04):
then broke into laughter. And you know what else is
like creepy twins in a movie?

Speaker 4 (08:11):
Man? You know, I thought you were gonna go for
the launching it done one, but that one's funnier.

Speaker 3 (08:16):
Oh yeah, no, launching it done. Oh I kind of no.
I feel bad. I feel like that should have been
the that should have been the ad pivot. Well, you know,
there's no going back. It's a forward only medium. That
they say classically about pre recorded audio. It's just like radio,
and that it's here's ads. Listen to them, or press

(08:36):
the forward fifteen seconds button a couple of times, maybe
six times, whatever, until you hear the jingle music again,

(08:57):
and we're back. The brigade's rules were simple, no photos,
no extensive physical descriptions. They let me know that none
of the communicative tech I might have, including my watch,
would work out wherever they were. I could only talk
to the clown, her girlfriend, and one fellow who agreed
to answer questions if I addressed them just to him,

(09:17):
and if they were sensible. There had been a vote
about my presence here, and it was a tie, so
everybody one, according to half the Shanzai, I wasn't there,
so why a clown suit? I asked, over a meal
of grilled grow meats and pine nut soup. We were
sitting outside a top military surplus sleeping bags on the

(09:38):
ice over floor of the desert. I wasn't allowed inside
any of the structures, but I am allowed to say
that they appeared to be hoop houses with opaque plastic
canvases stretched over the frames. We needed helium, said Electra
the clown. She casually confessed to a series of crimes
involving an illicit helium smuggling ring that caters to the
more nostalgic members of the ultra rich for their children's

(10:00):
birthday parties, her infiltration of the same, and a sudden
and perhaps violent hijacking of a truck of canisters. Her
girlfriend rubbed her back as she spoke of brandishing a firearm.
How she convinced the truck driver that helium was as
flammable as hydrogen through sheer force of will, And what
a challenge. It was unloading the truck in a safe
house and then slowly transporting the canisters in ones and

(10:22):
twos to this location. I kept the suit because I
knew you'd stop for it, she finished. Who could resist?
Nobody can resist, said the clown's girlfriend. Electra had told
me much about the plans of the Light Brigade, just
from sharing that one anecdote, the brigade would not be
launching a microwave transmitting satellite. These six people were likely

(10:45):
the whole of the organization. There was no broad movement,
no multinational organization stealing and smuggling, borrowing and building to
create the means to provide free power to the masses.
May I see your raccoon, I asked, Yeah, said the girlfriend.
You can call me Robin, by the way, Tracy, said Electra,

(11:07):
who finally took off her large wig and plucked off
her nose and tossed it into the wigs cap. The
other person, who agreed to speak to me only if
I asked sensible questions, identified himself as Lee. Though as
Lee was the one with the headmates, I knew that
agreement might be altered at any moment.

Speaker 5 (11:23):
It was like that.

Speaker 3 (11:26):
Raccoon is a portmanteau of rocket and balloon, a twentieth
century technology obsolete for a full century. A balloon hoists
the rocket up into the upper atmosphere, then the engine
ignites in the rocket, usually a solid fuel number can
get even higher without needing all that much fuel. In
the nineteen forties, raccoons were used for atmospheric and meteorological study,

(11:49):
but or quickly superseded by liquid fuels and rockets capable
of reaching orbit from the ground. Raccoons were still technically useful,
but the missile synic doocic of war. Even when there
was no possible worry that an upper atmosphere mission would
be targeted by an enemy, the very fact that raccoon
seemed easy to shoot down was enough to mothball the
inexpensive flexible technology. Tracy and Robin were happy to show

(12:14):
off the disused minute Mann silo. The moon was new,
and for obvious reasons, the Light Brigade kept its work
areas dark. We're not worried about the police, per se,
Robin explained. As we picked our way through the bush,
led by nothing but the lights of our wristwatches, my
little ball of light found a scorpion on the desert floor.
It didn't scuttle away or flex its tail, and I

(12:35):
too found myself frozen, both terrified and feeling the cold
of the night air for the first time. Tracy knocked
the iraqnet away with her oversized shoe. Be careful, she said,
but she wasn't talking about the scorpion. Not a minute later,
both women grabbed my forearms and kept me from taking
a fatal step down the concrete tunnel they were leading

(12:56):
me to. The silo wasn't capped, and the rocket sand's
nose cone was much smaller than the Minuteman for which
it was originally designed. There was a low concrete building
on the far side of the lip of the silo,
but it was dark enough, and I'd been focused enough
on where I've been stepping, but I hadn't noticed it
at all. They wouldn't talk about the missile very much,

(13:18):
except to saying that it was a solid propellant rocket
and that its fuel was environmentally friendly Hexa nitro hexa's
iso wurtzsustain, a word that danced on their tongues even
through their giggles, but that utterly confused my transcription software.
More importantly, and why this fuel was used during this
straight conflict, is that Hexa nitro hexa's iso wurtz tain

(13:41):
burning rockets don't leave much of a visible trail. Thanks
Nick for including that word twice in the story so
that I had to read it. Thanks good looking out.
I realized the ladies could toss me into the hole.
They both had strong grips on my arms. This wouldn't

(14:01):
be the first bunch of hackers or makers or burners
or post rats or socialists or whatever the Light Brigade
was hoping to be calm out here in the Great
Basin to simply devolve into madness. It's a good one,
I said, idiotically, not that I've seen too many up close.
The balloon the satellite. My clever idea was to give

(14:22):
them a reason to lead me away from the silo
rather than truck me down into it for whatever blood
baptism they thought would help the mission. We'll show you
everything except that which cannot be shown, Tracy said. Robin
giggled at that none of this was helping. Except for
the small cement pillbox by the silo. There didn't seem
to be any other buildings around their grips didn't lighten

(14:43):
up as they led me off into the night, like
two prison guards bringing a drunk to a holding cell.
I was a little tipsy. Robin began making an unusual
clicking noise with her tongue and cheeks. I opened my
mouth to say something, but Tracy put a gloved finger
to my lips. They stepped lightly, and I aped their
tentative shuffling, thanks only partially to the hold they had

(15:05):
on my arms. The beam of watchlight passed over something
and vanished into it. Then Robin disappeared for a moment,
only to come back, holding the Knight in her hands
and directing my attention to a flight of cement steps
going underground hyperblack. I said, you were echo locating drones

(15:25):
are everywhere, and satellite's too, the Tracy, as she nudged
me onto the top step. Satellites are everywhere. There's one
in the subterranean warehouse into which I was walked alone
at Tracy and Robin's urging. It was not quite as
dark as the hyperblack tarp's top side, but it was
pretty dim. Lee, the third member of the Shenzai who

(15:46):
deigned to speak to me, sparked an old fashioned cigarette lighter,
perhaps ten yards away. Everything from his eyeglasses to the
size of the room was bigger than I imagined it
could possibly be, except for the satellite itself. He wouldn't
show me the whole thing at once, but casually walked
a tight circle around an object roughly the size and
shape of a very nice propane gas grill, of the

(16:08):
sort your parents might have once owned. It's the kind
of thing you might look at and be compelled to say,
what a butte, and then offer a pull from a flask.
But I resisted, I should not have. This is just
the laser, Lee explained. His eyes were obscured by the
triple refraction of the firelight and the lenses of his spectacles.

(16:29):
A few more watts and he'd be the one shooting lasers.
Diode pump alkali. We get potash from the desert. How
do you know it works, I asked, How do you
know any of it works? The laser, the satellite, the raccoon.
Why are you asking me, Li said, because you think
I'm a man. Examine your biases, madame. He extinguished the
lighter with the top of his thumb. Somewhere behind and

(16:51):
above me, a clown nose honked for second after that,
I didn't hear the echolocational clicking behind me. Journalists say,
or they used to say, don't bury the lead, but
I have done just that. I simply wasn't expecting the
story I ended up living through. Here's the lead. Fifteen

(17:13):
years ago, third party transnational belligerents used laser satellites in
low earth orbit to attack both Chinese and NATO positions
along the Taiwan Strait during the Second Battle of the
Davis Line and now the Nutcraft. The satellites existed in
multiple sweet spots. Their orbits were too high for anti

(17:34):
aircraft fire or drones to take out, but too low
for the orbital platforms to target without possibly striking their
own forces on the ground. They were big enough to
pump out lasers, capable of melting flight decks and combusting
individual sailors unfortunate enough to be standing in the wrong place,
too small to be spotted amidst all the other war
drunk in the skies until they warmed up and started

(17:56):
firing deadly enough that both said I had scored propaganda
victories by blaming the other for violations of the laws
of war insufficiently destructive to be anything more than a
political anomaly. After the fact, ten fatalities, dozens of casualties,
mostly blindness and other vision impairments, some second and third

(18:18):
degree burns. A single human pictogram in the infographic detailing
the carnage of the battle, made special by the asterisk
explaining what had happened. The simple collapse of the world
petroleum supply brought both sides to the negotiating table soon enough,
and with the Treaty of Taipei, a significant population exchange,

(18:39):
and the launch of Long Wang, the peace of pure
exhaustion settled upon the world. But not here in the
California Great Basin. I asked Lee one further question, could
this be weaponized? And then I got a whiff of
Tracy's clown flower and fell down. Then woke up, this
time just before dawn, in my car and not where

(19:03):
I left it, parked on the grounds of the Light Brigade.
The car's controls had been locked and my hands cuffed
behind my back. I didn't think they'd knocked me out,
stuffed me into my ride and programmed it to make
a sharp right turn into a desert so that I
could be cooked like a potato and die. I thought
I was going back to the airport. The cuffs, I
guessed were the typical police issue that any security guard

(19:25):
with the universal key could unlock for me after I
rolled up to the parking lot attendants little box, probably,
and as a bonus, I was going to need to
pee before the car got me to my destination. Though
JA school one oh one, start with softball questions, as
the source might wig out or just end the interview
if you begin with provocations. But I was thinking of

(19:47):
this article as a puff piece more than anything else.
Check out the product and personalities, throw in a charming
anecdote or two, and post. The fact is that there's
never been a decent business case for peace full laser
transmitting solar powered satellites. Historically, they don't collect enough extra
solar radiation to make it profitable to build, launch, and

(20:08):
maintain them, no matter how dark the black one paints
their solar panels, no matter how much helium one steals
from the children of billionaires. In our post oil nineteen
degree celsius era, when a cloudy day is practically an
economical holiday and cheap and shiny photovol take collectors fill
the parking lots of most defunct strip malls. There's just

(20:29):
no profit to be had. The only laser transmitting satellites
that have ever been commercially deployed were used for space
to space communication or wide scale high detail mapping. Those
and the Davis line direct energy weapons fifteen years ago.
You know what else promises to be commercially for one

(20:50):
thing but feeds into a culture of war?

Speaker 4 (20:55):
Is it the space lasers you can buy from our advertisers.

Speaker 3 (20:59):
Yes, go buy a space laser because that's a thing
that you can do and would be moral and there's
nothing complicated about that.

Speaker 5 (21:16):
Here's some ads.

Speaker 3 (21:30):
Welcome back, unless you have cooler zone media, in which case,
well it's still welcome back. But it's just welcome back
for me talking about ads to me talking about coming
back from ads. Aren't you so glad that you pay
a small amount every month in order to not hear
ads but instead to hear Margaret toss to ads and
then come back, because really, tossing to ads is the
high point of her day because it's where I can

(21:53):
make sir joke. Anyway, here's the story. The sun begins
to bubble up on the horizon. In my rear view mirror,
I see a black ball dragging a gray arrow up
into the sky and tell the mirror to start recording.
If I'm a war reporter, now I might as well
get some good visuals from the model t's tiny hatch.
I hear a voice say, oh good, you're awake. Tracy

(22:17):
kicks out the armrest between the rear seats and unfolds herself,
legs first out of the trunk, then slithers into the
front passenger seat. Sorry, there was a coup. She glances
down at my wrists, ah, handcuffs. Also, they're after us
by now? Probably you uh? I start? I am a
legitimate master of the circus arts, Tracy says, who is

(22:40):
after us? I say, there's a lot to know, now,
who what when journalism is inscribed upon my nervous system? Robin,
the investors, Tracy says, not all of them.

Speaker 4 (22:52):
Of course.

Speaker 3 (22:52):
We raised funds to buy the silo via the blockchain,
so most of the people funding the project know little
more about it than already real estate guaranteed twenty percent return.
And no, not Robin. They are three on site investor
Onbud's folks tied us both up and went to get you.
Robin and I have built up a tolerance to the

(23:13):
spray they knocked Lee out with it, though there's not
much to do in the desert, so Robin taught one
of the investors how to echo locate. Sorry, also, I
talk a lot when I'm with a new person. Sorry
about that too, Where why?

Speaker 4 (23:28):
How?

Speaker 3 (23:29):
I should have been clearer, but I'm too confused to
make my question specific. How did you escape? Is answered
wordlessly as Tracy picks the lock on my cuffs with
a paper clip. Where were she and Robin locked up?
Hardly matters. Tracy probably just shimmied out of whatever they'd
bound her with. Why is a bigger question. Light Brigade
really isn't a weapons project. I promise it's just you know,

(23:54):
Tracy says before trailing off. Her face is as red
as the desert twilight. We're going all the way to
the airport unless you can pick the ignition or the
door locks, I say, so, just start from the beginning.
How do you prove to people that your laser transmitting
solar powered satellite actually works if all it does is
give randomly placed receptors a third more juice? Now and

(24:15):
then it's proof of concept. We need dozens of them
in sun synchronous orbits. So blow something up just once
for some venture capital funding layer for the dramatic. Well, ah, no,
I realize the truth of the business model. Blow something
up whenever one of the investors want something blown up.

(24:36):
Pollution free, energy efficient ninety five percent of the time
to pay fixed costs, and a profit center in privatized war,
not dramatic, absurd? And why me? In the rearview mirror,
the rocket ignited and took off a star and a
quickly faded star filled sky. It's mostly the car, Tracy says,

(24:58):
because it's easy to track. But I know she waved
a hand. Her fingers were very long and thin. People
hate journalists, and the ending one would make worldwide news.
He are, I am a Light Brigade's publicity person, but
my idea was just to bring in a journalist, not
to people hate mimes too. I found myself saying, I

(25:19):
am a clown and we're not going to her. Gaze
flicks towards the rear view. It's rare to see a big,
old gas or car on the highways anymore, since there
were few operational gas stations but a fast four to
three point fifty pickup is bearing down on us. Is
that Nambud's person's car? It is, Tracy says. They probably

(25:40):
figured out that I escaped with you. So how do
we stop the car? Can you pick the ignition like
the cuffs? Pick this, Tracy slowly the ignition? No, of
course not. You have to hack these things and I can't.
I came here to get you out the second the
car stops in the airport lot. She shrugs, exaggerated. A

(26:01):
stage performer can't resist an audience. They want witnesses, maybe
a terror angle to make sure you're on the news.
It's up to me to stop the car. Least have
my hands now. Of course, there's the issue of the
pickup truck on her tail. Circus arts are powerless, and
I'm no techi. What can journalists do except watch and
write what they saw for pennies. Ah watch, ah, pennies.

(26:27):
We drove far enough that my watch is in contact
with the rest of the world again. I take it off.
Put on your seatbelt, I tell Tracy, as I put
on mine. I hand Tracy my watch and tell her
to log in under her own account and report the
model t were in for drunk driving and drunk riding.
Her fingers are nimble. She does it in a few seconds.

(26:48):
It takes me to dig my flask out of my pocket.
The interior turns red, and out of the steering wheel
comes a breathalyzer tube, and a sickly sweet female voice
urges me to blow just a little a gulp. I
swish and gargle and swallow, then blow. The car stops

(27:08):
hard a clax and sounds inside, and the voice, now
with a testy edge to it, warns me that this
car is fully locked and will move no further. Into
a retrieval truck arrives. Try to stay loose, I say
more to myself than Tracy, who can certainly manage that
trick better than I can. Booze aside. The ford slams

(27:28):
into the rear. I see nothing but a white explosion
before me. I found out what happened immediately after the crash,
only weeks later. I broke my nose in three ribs
and really wrecked my back in those inexplicable ways that
can never fully be healed. Stuff happened to my literal
spinal fluid, one of the few substances we can't just

(27:50):
laidle out of a vat pour into someone. Tracy was fine.
She wriggled out over her airbag, kicked out the front windshield,
and then skidobtled around to see the ford. It had
pushed us a good half mile up State Route thirty six,
ate the back half of the Model Tea and nudged
up between my shoulder blades. The ombuds folk were alive

(28:13):
inside the wreck, unconscious and crushed between half a dozen
air bags. We'd had a few seconds to prepare ourselves.
They'd been completely surprised. Tracy pulled me from the wreck
and dragged me past the side of the road onto
actual desert sands. A streak of blood and other liquids,
like a great stroke from the paint brush, making a

(28:33):
trail behind me. It was good she would be able
to find me a few minutes later through all the smoke.
Then she dashed down the road and found my watch.
I came to fairly quickly. The thinnest sheet of ice
lay over the sand. In ancient Egypt, servants were sent
out each morning before dawn to ever so gently scrape

(28:55):
the millimeter of frost that would form upon the dunes
overnight and collect it into a small cup so that
the Pharaoh might have a small cup of Sherbert with
his breakfast. I got two licks in before every molecule
of H two O vaporized. With before my one good eye,
I guessed that the satellite had just then passed overhead.
As both my rental and the Ford F three fifty

(29:18):
burst into flames, I felt the soles of my feet blister,
the sense of having toes vanish as flesh blue flew
off bones. It was good. That meant my spinal cord
was still functioning. When I woke up again, I was
lying on the back of the cargo bed of their
trievil truck. I screamed at the sky for an hour

(29:39):
as Tracy negotiated with my watch in an attempt to
re route the truck away from the airport vehicle's rental
office and to a hospital. In her other hand, Tracy
gripped a mostly melted license plate. I remember that she
kept having to take a new pictures of it and
upload them to a satellite link in order to be believed.
When she and Robin visited me in the hospital a

(30:00):
week later, she showed me a scar on her palm
that was shaped like much of the letter. W Lee
sent my watch a JP three g depicting a big
eyed owl holding flowers and wearing a sash reading get
well soon. That was somehow worth four and a half
million dollars to a soft be auction bot on the
Worldwide Hive. Like all freelancers, I am uninsured, but that

(30:24):
gift paid for all my medical expenses save painkillers, so
I've had to find another way to get addicted to them.
I live in a tiny house on the roof of
an apartment building, the first story storefront of which is
the sort of very much not Irish pub that journalists
enjoy drinking in. I get my pills from sympathetic colleagues
and well wishers. It took me a long time to

(30:44):
file this story, but when it's posted, I'll have a
few extra coins to buy some rounds for the gang.
Other than the pub for pills, pints and peanuts, I
stay in bed, very much not healing. I can pay
my rent and buy my grow meats thanks only to
a peculiar fact. Somehow, the photovoltaic collector on the roof
of the shipping container I call home consistently collects a

(31:07):
third again of my energy needs at a rate twenty
percent over its own listed capacity. I'm able to sell
the extra electricity in my batteries back to the local utility.
Every three months. The electric company sends me a check.

Speaker 6 (31:23):
Yeah, that's a fun story. I feel like, Okay, before
I say anything further. As the child of people who
work with light, I need the issue of warning about lasers,
which is that they are very dangerous. They are very
very bad for your eyes. Even looking at a laser,
just being like pointed at a wall, like the diffraction

(31:43):
from that is enough to fuck up your eyes. Don't
mess around with them. You will go blind. Okay, it
may take a while. They're very bad for you.

Speaker 3 (31:51):
Okay.

Speaker 7 (31:52):
Yeah, now that I've issued the laser disclaimer, Yeah, no,
I like this story. Okay, so I asked, I asked Nick,
I'm going to start doing this thing where I asked
the authors to give us, give us a little bit
of a I was like, do you want to, you know,
say anything about your story? And Nick said, if, dear listener,

(32:13):
you have the sense that the flare is informed by
a deep skepticism of techies and burning man, you are correct.
It's really it's a really interesting synthesis of a bunch
of the worst ideas that any Wood had, Like the
it's called the murder market, that there was this whole
thing for a long time where there was supposed to

(32:35):
be this scheme where that there was like an assassination market,
oh effectively, uh huh, where yeah, you could like put
The theory was that you could just keep putting money
into it and eventually like the price would be high
enough that someone would do an assassination and kill the person. Yeah,
and everyone I knew insisted it was run by the FEDS.
I don't know if it was run by the FEDS.

Speaker 4 (32:55):
I think it was run by not very weird people
on dark web. Yeah, but yeah, this is this It
does sound like the exact kind of idea that these people.

Speaker 3 (33:07):
Would go totally They're like, oh, we're going to bring
free energy to the world, and the world's like we're
actually doing good on energy. Everything else sucks, and they're like, well,
free energy. It's totally not murder laser definitely not. No,
And I like the like you have the the people
who are genuinely excited and trying to do the good
thing and then like but the way in which they're

(33:29):
funded causes them to do bad thing. Yeah, I totally
don't have any sympathy for that. I totally don't know
what that's like at all.

Speaker 4 (33:38):
Don't get in bed with the crypto billionaires. It's always
a bad idea.

Speaker 2 (33:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (33:43):
Yeah, And I wonder I didn't I didn't ask exactly
when this was written. I wonderful it was before the
NFT crash or if this is predicting its return, But
like it fits within the context of this world they're
describing very well.

Speaker 5 (33:57):
So yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 3 (34:00):
I like stories that are just still I like stories
that just like accept that the world is going to
be very different very soon because of climate change, but
then like still have like relatable normal people within it.

Speaker 4 (34:14):
So the world may burn, but there will always be
only semi employable, incredibly broke.

Speaker 3 (34:20):
Journalists totally, and then the not really irish pub that
they all hang out at. Well, that's that's book club,
if Mia, if people, where can people find you? I
mean it's funny because like, most people probably are listening
to this on the feed of your podcast, but they
might be listening to it on the feed of my podcast.

Speaker 4 (34:41):
So that's true. Yeah, I host the podcast. It could
happen here. You can find it where presumably where you're
listening to this who also have it could happen here,
assuming that it's not already, It could happen here. Yeah, yeah,
I guess you can. You know what, No, I'm not
gonna plug my Twitter.

Speaker 5 (35:00):
Screw that.

Speaker 4 (35:01):
Don't go on there. I don't want to be responsible
for any of the people listening to this being on Twitter,
So don't find me now.

Speaker 3 (35:07):
Twitter is in the process of doing what this story
is making fun of. It is in the process of
becoming from tech utopianism to tech dystopianism very quickly. Okay, well,
you can find me on coolby Boulded Cool Stuff, which

(35:30):
might be where you're listening to this, or if it's not,
then that's where you can listen to me. Every Monday
and Wednesday, I tell you about history. And Nick asked
me to plug the the anthology he co edited with
Alan Datlow. It's called Haunted Legends, finally available as an
ebook at all Electrons stores, and that's the next phrasing

(35:54):
of it. After thirteen years of being print only, is
a good chance to bring back the spirits of ghost
stories for Christmas, so go check out Haunted Legends. Nick
is very good taste in stories as well as writing
good stories, and I will also hopefully have good taste
in stories because I'm going to keep reading them to

(36:16):
you every Sunday from now until I'm not doing it anymore.

Speaker 5 (36:22):
Bye.

Speaker 1 (36:24):
It could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources for It could Happen Here, updated
monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.