Rule 34 - Charles Stross [105]
Father-son bonding experiences among the neurotypically diverse: putting the “fun” into “dysfunctional.” You didn’t realize it at the time, but Dad was teaching you stuff you weren’t going to learn anywhere else: stuff like what you were, how to look “normal,” how to pass among the ants, how not to get found out. All Mom gave you was your looks and good manners. (She had a great ass, though: Dad had good taste.)
You cling to the memory of that afternoon: Unlike most of your history, it remains vivid and fresh, not fading into the cloud-banks of the imagination. You didn’t have many afternoons like that: Dad was always busy at work, buying and selling shit. He did it from an office suite just off Wall Street, and you and he and Mom and Sis lived in a fancy uptown condo overlooking Ninth Avenue when you were in Manhattan. Or maybe he had a room above a shop on Threadneedle Street and the maisonette was in Docklands? It’s hard to be sure. You do remember there being a nice beachfront when you were vacationing on the West Coast, and a house on Long Island for weekends, and lots of plane trips. Mom did the stay-at-home thing and looked after you and Alice; and there was an old woman who kept the condo clean when you weren’t there, and an ever-changing supply of kindergarten friends to torment experimentally. And Bozo the Cat (until he went away).
But that was before the car crash turned everything to shit.
You were nine. One day a year earlier, Dad came home early and pulled your mom into the kitchen and shut the door. There were words, loud words. Later, your mom came out to talk to you. Her eyes were red-rimmed, and her make-up was smeary. “Your daddy and I have agreed,” she said, with a funny little twitch. “We’re moving to California, to Palo Alto. He needs to be nearer where the money comes from.”
This was cool with you, as long as there was beachfront and sun and other kids to score off. Mom didn’t seem too happy when you said so. She got a bit too excited and shouted at you and cried because she liked the big city, Singapore or Hong Kong or wherever it was. Well, silly her.
What you only figured out much later was that it was February, Y2K+1. Dad’s dotcom portfolio had vaped, and he had to steal some more money. And this being Y2K+1, there wasn’t a lot of money in circulation to steal—at least, not from Dad’s friendly circle of day traders and stock-jobbers. So he’d been forced to diversify and got fucked over when someone’s Customs agency intercepted one of the consignments. They didn’t know it was him, but someone in town knew his face, and he wanted some distance. And there may have been something to do with the phone calls at odd times of day and night, and the threatening letters, but that didn’t really signify at the time.
(Or maybe it was the old enemy, even then, plotting their takeover. Spying and hounding your father because they knew they had to yank him out of the picture if they were going to get to you.)
Dad wasn’t stupid: He had a plan. He figured there’d be a lot of infrastructure left over from the dotcom crash, and all he needed to do was stake out some vacant office suite and sooner or later a team of double-domed nerds would show up to refill it (and, by and by, his wallet).
Well, Mom and Alice did the weak-sister thing and cried all the way to the beachfront house, but you were happy enough. School in the big town was boring, and anyway, a bunch of the other kids refused to play with you. The losers said you cheated. So you got to live in the sun-drenched sprawl off El Camino Reale and meet a whole new supply of interesting playmates, and Dad had a bit more time to play ball or take you hiking and do other dad things.
(But then there was the car crash.)
You were away at summer camp at the time. The camp counsellors