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Modem Stud
Modem Stud
Amazon
Category:
Literary Fiction
Type: Fiction
Pages: 299
Copyright: 2014
Price: $2.99 (eBook)
Before the internet there was the Lemur Connection, followed by the Speak Easy the first massively multi-user system. Read about the original bloggers, cyber bullies, software pirates, and hackers.
Instead of attending school the younger brother wrote the system, kracked the wares, and the older brother figured out how to monetize the operation. This is not a 300 baud read. This canard involves ass-kickings, heisted hardware, truancy, and the Jewish mafia.
Excerpt
He placed his briefcase at the end of the table, and in unison unlatched the case’s automatic openers. Before the latches came undone, my hand was inside of my breast pocket. Simon waived off a purple velvet cloth formerly on top of whatever was in his briefcase. Before the cloth unveiled the contents below my finger was on the trigger of my starting gun. The briefcase was loaded with rows of five and a quarter inch disk carrying cases.
I took off my imitation jacket and placed my piece on top of the Apple II+’s disk drive. Simon took off his red Member’s Only jacket and placed his switch blade next to my piece.
“I thought your brother might be here.”
“Don’t think too much. You’ll just get more confused.”
Simon offered me the disk carrying case on top of all of the other disk carrying cases in the briefcase. Without looking at the writing on the labels, I thumbed through the collection of single sided disks.
“Old wares!” I exclaimed.
I threw the disk carrying case down onto the den’s clay colored terrazzo.
Simon passed the next stack of disk carrying cases, a few more, and then offered me another disk carrying case. At least holes were punched in the sides of the disks. Maybe the wares on the double sided disks were newer, but I had seen the trick before.
“Simon, you’re trading with the Lemur Brothers. Haven’t you seen my list of wares?”
He went towards his Member’s Only Jacket. I leaped for my piece. Before he reached into his jacket pocket, my piece was pointed at him. Luckily, all he did was pull a heavily folded list out of his jacket pocket. Immediately, I recognized the paper was an outdated list of the Lemur Brothers’ Wares.
“Save us some time and let me reach into your briefcase,” I said.
He backed away from his briefcase. Until I was two levels from the bottom of the briefcase, I threw disk carrying case after disk carrying case onto the Naugahyde couch the dogs had eaten a hole. Simon’s best wares were bought, uncracked games.
“What is all of this trash?”
“It’s everything. It’s everything I have. I also brought everything Michael and Conspiracy have.”
“How many games are here?”
“I don’t know. You can have them all.”
“Fuck you! First of all, I have most of this garbage. Second of all, keyboard controlled games from 1979 are not of any use to me.”
“You can put every one of my games on your list.”
Simon had a point.
“I have to count the actual wares on your disks. The disks are badly labeled. Not the sort of thing the Lemur Brothers would do. If I spend the rest of the night putting your ancient disks into my sped-up drives, by morning I might be able to see which of your wares I want. You’ll have to leave everything here.”
“Everything?”
“Some of the other members of the Lemur Brothers, the more junior members, will have to come here tomorrow and copy all of these games. There’s a party tonight I have to be going to. I have to change because as you may or may not know, studs wear sweaters to parties.”
“Can I at least see Chaos?”
“Before we get into that I am going to need you to sign an agreement. The agreement is the standard form Lemur Brothers trade embargo, printed on a letter quality printer for your ease of reading. You will be prevented from trading with anybody the Lemur Brothers doesn’t authorize.”
“Lately, I mean in recent times, has Lemur Jr. cracked anything other than Chaos?”
I let a lot of air out of my lips, thought quickly, and then laughed.
“You can also have Seizure.”
“What’s Seizure?”
“Try a game Broderbund hasn’t even released yet.”
Simon agreed to leave his briefcase of games if I showed him Chaos. I went over to the lamp by the burn hole in the ply-paneling and turned off the wobbly floor lamp.
“There are so many pixels in the graphics, I am isolating the colors. The game utilizes a new technology where there are more than sixteen actual colors. For instance, you will see cyan and dark green mixed together.”
I unlocked the putty colored file cabinet that matched the color Simmonser spray-painted the Apple II+’s add-on floppy drive. Inside of the cabinet was a locked, opaque brown disk storage case. During the afternoon, I used Windex to clean the disk storage case. The case contained the single disk I used a red felt pen to neatly label, ‘Chaos.’ Simon drew closer to the color television that functioned as a monitor when on channel 3.
The Apple II+’s full spectrum of sixteen colors appeared one by one until colors scattered the screen. Green screen asterisks “*,” at signs “@,” and number signs “#” appeared in random locations on the screen. I hit the Return Key, the screen garbage went away, another screen loaded, and the face of the Lemur appeared. The pitch of the Lemur’s roar intensified. Brown graphics stated, “A LEMUR BROTHERS HEIST, CRACKED BY LEMUR JR.” I hit the Return Key and a new screen appeared. In purple, it read, “THIS WARE HAS BEEN DISTRIBUTED BY CAPTAIN LEMUR EYES.”
At last, a spider appeared that swung from a purple vine. Parts of the bug were red and parts were orange. The lines were thin enough the bug appeared a color outside of the Apple II+’s pallet of sixteen. Soon, a synthesized version of the most significant lyrics to, “Mr. Roboto” played.
Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto,
You’re wondering who I am-machine or mannequin
With parts made in Japan, I am the modern man.
“Oh yeah,” I told Simon. “There’s one more thing. This crack allows you to control the bug even at the title page. Just use the up and down arrows and he will go up the vine. Try the arrows.”
Simon’s gold bracelet dangled on the keyboard when he used the arrow keys to move the spider up the vine. When the spider came near the top of the vine, a dark blue bug outlined in pink appeared. Luckily, Simon had seen enough because the title page was the end of the line. Had he pressed the Return Key again, the Apple II+ would have gone endlessly to the floppy drive.
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