Exceptions to Reality_ Stories - Alan Dean Foster [31]
His pursuers went straight to the airport, but they were not sanguine about encountering their quarry there. In this they were right: Threerivers was too smart, too experienced to chance taking the first plane out of town now that his presence had been detected.
When the old bus finally rattled into Recife days later, he booked a cabin on a freighter and vanished into the Atlantic. They never caught up with him again. In the course of his travels, Threerivers had learned a lot about gambling. Despite his peculiar talent, he knew when to quit. If only his pursuers could have accepted his word that he would, his last flight would have been unnecessary. Seven figures, he decided, were of more comfort to a man alive than eight to a man permanently abed deep in the earth. He never set foot in a casino again—or, for that matter, in a city that boasted a casino.
They kept searching for him, of course, not willing to take the chance that he would keep his ability permanently under wraps. They did not find him. No one thought to look on the coast of the island-nation of Sri Lanka, a hundred miles south of its sultry capital city of Colombo. There it was that a certain expatriate Amerind lived in quiet luxury amid beautiful people who were darker than himself. He married and had four children, two of whom demonstrated the most curious propensity for fixing obstreperous computers and stereos, while the perfectly beautiful little girl spoke repeatedly of her intention to one day start her own software company. Her friends chattered instead about boys and music and movies and school, and sometimes they laughed at her behind her back.
But then, none of them could feel the Net.
Rate of Exchange
I once shepherded to the Grand Canyon a very talented and opinionated software engineer who worked for Symantec back in the Mesozoic era when having four megs of RAM and a real black-on-white screen on your home computer was considered cutting-edge technology. In the course of making conversation during the two-hour-plus drive from my home up to the national park, I asked him what he might like to do if he was not deeply embedded in the software industry. I forget his reply. (How’s that for a punch line?) He then turned the question back on me. Hoping to provoke an interesting response, I avowed as how I might be a trader in international currency.
“Scum of the Earth,” he replied tautly.
Marx certainly would have thought so. An ideal example of a profession that generates income while producing nothing in the way of real goods. Now, I confess that I do not personally know any currency traders. I do have a couple of friends who deal in international commodities and futures—everything from orange juice to iron ore—and these two gentlemen happen to be quite pleasant folk. But at least their work involves trade in actual goods and not just the wily adjustment of figures inside computer programs.
Every day, vast fortunes rise and fall on the predictions, suppositions, and manipulations of currency dealers. These individuals exist in a cyberworld of their own, have their own arcane tribal lingo, and must perforce possess a confidence beside which that of the most prominent sports stars pales into bumbling uncertainty.
As you can see, obviously a subject gravid with humorous potential.
Speaking of worlds that exist in cyberspace, this story first appeared as a promotional tie-in for America Online. This is therefore its first appearance on a portion of the corpse of a remanufactured coniferous Terran life-form.
Parker-Piggott’s morning had proven very profitable indeed, and he fully expected the afternoon’s business to go as well. While Wall Street shut down for the day and the Hang Sen went to sleep, the men and women who traded in the world’s currencies never rested. It was not true, as it was sometimes rumored, that there were certain