In Those Days

A Short Story

The rain drummed the plastic awning and sluiced through the kudzu-encrusted drainage ditch behind the discount grocery. Gideon logged on from his phone and opened up the turking job forum, double checking to be sure his jailbroken vpn package was running. Everything loaded up slowly behind layers of defensive packet routing, giving him time to get annoyed at the humid fog of pavement steam and pre-ban Marlboro Reds swirling past. Some of the cashiers were taking a break, and a decade of living in the BirmAtNash triangle still hadn’t gotten him used to the constant companionship of tobacco fumes. He grumbled to himself quietly as the last wallet check passed and he was in.

It had taken Gideon months of careful maneuvering through increasingly bizarre and troubling online communities to obtain his passtoken for this particular turk board. Lots of people ran small anonymous jobs for whoever would drop tokens, what with the Huntsville space boom starting to dry up. But this was different. A parallel world waiting for only those with the right real-world web of relationships and a couple of innocuous-looking art tokens in their wallet. You could drop through the floor and find the real bottom. Nobody else on the mold-blackened back stoop of this Super Winn-Dixie knew that he had killed four people that month. But if they did, he hoped they’d understand why.