First published: Interzone 37, 1990

(Length: 5000 words approximately)

Sometimes you have to make speed, not haste. I made twenty kilos and moved it fast. Good old dex is an easy synthesis but the polizei had all the organochemical suppliers bugged; when a speed stash hit the street without any blat they’d be through the audit trail fast. They’d take a cut — my lungs, heart and ribosomes. Only idiots push psychoactives in Paraguay: only idiots or the truly desperate. I burned out via Brazilia and crashed into Ant City. Jet-lagged all the way across Australia, I considered my futures; it was time to move on to something bigger.

My first impression of Ant City was of being roasted, slowly. The blistering humidity was outflow from the huge heat exchangers run by the city reactors. Palm trees in the airport lounge, a rude, chattering spidermonkey loose among the branches. No power, no Ants, a simple equation: I was in Antarctica now, and wondering what the hell to do about it. It was another world out there: I could feel a grating closeness between my shoulder blades, the crush of humanity around me.

Alleyways of light lured me through the customs interface, briefing me on local lores. Digital fingers rifled my flesh with radiation but I was clean and mean — nobody with any sense takes bugs into the ant farm. It’s a ticket to redirection, and I need my inputs remoulding like I need a concience. My scams are all cortex-ridden, locked in by mnemonics until I’m ready to bring them out like a card sharp. Sleight of memory. The security goon smiled sweetly, her eyes asking me if I was really alive, and w aved me past the desk.

The shuttleport is half a klick above Ant City proper; I took the lift down. It was a medium sized lift, with only a medium-sized shopping mall. Shop, shop, expend, expend. A glaring incitement to —

I shut my eyes and as I was trying to pin down a plan this kid tried to lift the chips from out of my skull. Which was his bad luck: I didn’t have any. I opened my eyes and shifted my grip on his wrists so he had to face me.

“Nice way to greet tourists,” I said. He squirmed fearfully, muscles like metallic glass beneath his warm brown skin. “You know what I should do with you?” He looked as if he didn’t, and wasn’t interested in finding out either. He’d forgotten to feed the cat or something else important. I looked at the inside of his wrist; the node was there.

“You eat shit,” he said. I glared back at him.

“Yeah, every day just like you. I should bust your fingers. You want to tell me why not?”

“No,” said the kid, looking like trouble warmed over the next morning; “you break my fingers then my friend come and break yours.” He managed to ignore me and look contemptuous concurrently. He couldn’t have been topside of twelve years without maturity-mods. Neomacho, cued-up by background video. For the first time I looked at his tribals. He wore a one piece suit, ice camouflage militia-surplus. His wrist node was well-worn. Classic case of heroin from six years, riding the horse out from under the shad ow of future shock; it’s the kids who suffer most, these days.

“That would be kind of a bad idea,” I said, “for your friend. I got no chips. My wallet’s armed; tell your sister to put it back before she gets gluey fingers. You want me to give you some money?”

“You what?” said the kid. I felt butterfly fingers slip something that buzzed into my pocket; it stopped buzzing when it sniffed me again. I’m touchy about where my wallet goes without me.

“I repeat myself,” I said; “you want to earn some money?” I leaned forward. More suspicion.

“You want I should go to bed with you?”

“No. I want some names, nothing else. Like who shifts your stuff.”

His face cleared, magically. “You want some?” he asked, happily. “I sell you — “

“No,” I said, “I just want a name.”

“Oh.” He looked disappointed. Then, “are you polizei?”

I weighed my chances. “Would you believe if I said no?”

“No.” His eyes narrowed.

“Then get lost.” I gave him a push and he went. His sister had vanished into an open shopfront selling gauzy somethings under spotlights; for the moment at least they were zero factors in my equation. I stood alone for a while, wondering what I looked like to the local talent and whether I needed a new line; some nagging doubt kept telling me that I was getting too old for this game. Trying to quell my worry I crossed to the observation deck and looked out.

The mall was descending towards a park with a lake around it, and a landscaped garden at one end of the lake. Ant City floated like a submarine in an inclusion of melt-water beneath the ice cap. Kept from freezing by the tokamaks, the water acted as a buffer against icequakes; also as central heating. The lift was just now dropping out of the roof of the city, and the view was dizzying; the city curved with the horizon. Suddenly I had a sense of imminence, of seeing a new frontier opening up before me eve n though the underground was actually closing in for real, like the dizzying megatonnes of ice overhead: it was shaping up to be a classic revelation. The kind of sensation you get when a new idea is coming up hot and hard. I took stock of my situation —

So consider me: male, self-contained, intelligent, age twenty-seven. The product of an expensive corporate shockwave education, designed to surf over new developments on the cutting edge of R&D. I’d freebased from my corporate owners: only time and independence had cost me my flexibility. I had bank accounts in Liechtenstein and Forties Field, no commitments, but I was unable to access the big company AI’s, my knowledge was going rusty in the face of informational explosion; I was staring career burnout i n the face at thirty. I had pushed every synthetic narcotic I could make, but only in small-to-medium scale production: I had always managed to skip out before the blowback. Hit and run. I didn’t use them myself, but supplied a demand; I made people happy for a living. What could be better than that? I liked to consider myself to be a moral anarchist, Kropotkins’ heir. Only where was I going to go next?

There’s always time for another drug or craze; time for it to reach peak saturation, to maximize the number of receptors … every drug has its day! But in this age I was slowly turning into a classicist; I sold old clean shit with none of your new hoodoo metabolic mania to retool the human genome for optimal thrust. That made me techo-obsolescent. Things were moving too fast for people like me to keep up; not every dealer wanted to turn their skull into a gene-machine for the recombinant receptor-affinit y tuning that passed for heavy shit these days. Frankly, I was lousy at genetic programming; as likely to come up with a new disease as a saleable product. But there was a blindingly obvious solution staring me in the face, and I knew just where to find it; all I needed was a link.

I found a phone and used it to find a list of rented accomodation; I chose a flat, furnished, four rooms, monthly payments, good view of the park. If I hadn’t been speeding a week ago it would have cost an arm and a leg, or at least a kidney. Now all I had to do was make the right contact; and that, for some-one of my background, was easy.

We met in a cafe on the edge of a drained swimming pool, where the penguins jostled excitedly for scraps from the tables. She looked nervous, which was to be expected. I was, too. I didn’t even know how much she wanted for the job! Just that she was as desperate as I was.

“What you’re looking for … ” she said; “dangerous, you know? The temporal annealing processes aren’t really mapped out very well, and the moles are kinda touchy about nosing it about. I mean, this is military surplus, right?” She dragged on the hookah nervously, watching the surveillance cameras for blind-spots. Concentrating on the long-lost lover bullshit for the digital polizei, I smiled tenderly before I replied.

“Look,” I said, “this is SDI spin-off material, right? After the third world war came out biological all the Pentagon defence contracts lapsed, leaving you with a heap of junk and no budget, right? So why not use it to make some quick cash? Face it, you’re damn near starving. Now I — ” I leaned back in my chair — “I’m a potentia customer. With currency. The PERV was designed to let them know when to zap missiles before they torched off, and the Interactive Reality Transformer was built to open a hole in spacetime. So why can’t you turn them into a time machine for me? I’m willing to pay! And I mean to say, if the old Unistat government trusted that rig with their lives, what can go wrong with it now?”

She coughed. “Lots,” she said drily. “Just look what happened to them. You’re forgetting that this stuff was never used … only tested in simulation. Nobody ever did get round to firing smart rocks through a time window, did that escape your attention? This is highly, uh, dangerous.”

I sighed. “Look,” I said, “for the final time, that’s your speciality. Not mine! I mean, I like the idea of supporting higher education, I really do, but I can’t afford to throw money away without any come-back on the investment, right? But if you and your university department do this for me, I’ll see about .. uh, endowing a Chair in perpetuity, maybe?”

“The College authorities might be doubtful about naming a chair after a semilegal drug dealer,” she said dubiously. It was the first sign of her fall from grace; so she was desperate! I pushed on.

“Yeah,” I said, “but you can call it whatever you want. I paid for your flight here, didn’t I? When was the last time your government gave you any money for anything? Look, just do this for me and I’ll make an endowment you won’t forget.”

“Um, right,” she said, almost smacking her lips. Then she made her decision; the right one. “Okay. Fly up to Oxford in the first week of next month. I’ll have one of our post-docs meet you in; we should be ready to test by then.” A faint cloud crossed her face. “You’ve no idea how bad things have got up there,” she added softly; “You were a good student, on that exchange program. Try not to get shot before we’re ready, right?”

“Sure professor,” I said, waving for the waiter. “That’s, like, one of my life’s ambitions.”

She unwound a bit. “What’s the other?”

I grinned widely. “To fuck Ronald Reagan.”

While I was waiting for the call from the Hawking Laboratory I crashed out in front of the video, reading graphic novels and scanning reruns of twentieth century docudramas. The condenser burbled in the makeshift fume cupboard I’d built in the bathroom and the gene-spinners clicked intermittently as I soaked up Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Leonid Brezhnev. Creatures of another era, when the universe was just about beginning to fill up and society was teetering on the edge of a baroque tomorrow; fasci nating cut-outs in a past that was truly another country. Twenty years earlier still everything was so naive, so pre-technological; but the timezone I’d picked was already on the brink of today, unsophisticated bug-ridden systems powering up for the remorseless march into a post-modernist present. People were waking up to changes, beginning to notice the end of industrialism. Yeah, I figured I could hack it; gather protective coloration, not look too out of place, but be so far ahead of the p ack th

t I could hit them with a dose of double-barrelled futurism and make my getaway clean-heeled and rich enough to retire …

“Just say NO,” I mimicked, and threw an empty beer can at the screen. Good jokes are made of this, I thought. Then the phone coughed.

“Yeah?” I asked.

“It’s for you,” it said, extending the handset. I took it and listened. “Twenty mil? That’s steep … okay, yeah, so it’s never been done before … how much? Oh, right. I’ll figure a way … day after tomorrow? Fine. See ya.” The phone grabbed its’ handset back and wiped it furiously. I tried to stare it down, but it didn’t seem to notice. In my experience when domestic appliances get uppity the only answer is to shoot them; but I didn’t have a gun on me so I leaned back and thought irritably abou t what the good professor’s news instead.

The weight restriction on the time jump was going to be tight. It worked out at ten kilograms, plus my good self. That’s not much, is it? Clothing, a portable kit, some raw materials — not much. Compute-power no problem; you can only cram so many mainframes into a false tooth, but back where I was going even one of them was going to give me an unfair edge. The real problem was going to be currency for investment. I frowned. Credit? Did they have credit in those days? Or did they have to carry metal coins around? What could I use instead?

Ah. Good idea. Why not do it right now? I sat up and grinned wildly, then staggered through to the bathroom. My gene-machine was sitting on the floor, humming to itself. I bent down and plugged myself in, figuring out the ideal stash. Something they’d never check for; something better than money, a dirt cheap commodity to vector on the market. Like the goose that laid the golden eggs, I was going to make a one-man heroin fortune in the eighties! I was going to be so successful the market pri ce was going to bomb! Yes, I’d seen the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The pot of yellow snow …

Yellow snow is a handle for a kind of cheap dealer shit; nobody falls for it these days. All it takes is a gene-machine and the nerve to use it on yourself. You engineer a retrovirus that makes a minor alteration to your enkephalin receptor’s tertiary structure, thus changing it’s substrate affinity; then you engineer another that adds a small peptide tag to the stuff your own receptors get off on, so that they match. Customise your pain/pleasure complex, right? That leaves you free to use another ‘virus, one that makes some of your peripheral tissue — pancreas, say — go into endorphin overdrive, pumping out the real McCoy in such volume that you literally piss heroin analogs away whenever you go to the toilet. Now — this is the cool bit — you add some acetic acid to neutralise all that ammonia and urea, then you partition it out in organic solvents and dissolve it in a sugar solution and re-crystalise. You get natural heroin in your kitchen sink! Indistinguishable from gold triangle authentic, exc

pt that it’s better. Only trouble is, there’s a certain stigma attached to its source, hence the handle yellow snow; nobody wants to be pissed on by their dealer, hey? Anyway, these days customs computers don’t look out for hidden stashes; they’re on the scan for designer genes. So any time after the naughty ‘nineties yellow snow would be a non-starter. But where/when I was going …

“Just say no,” I mimicked. Then I slurped another beer can. “I’m gonna piss on you, all, junkies!” Good joke for an anarchist businessman, teetering on the edge of burnout, to ride the elevator back to where it all began. I wondered why nobody had done this before; it seemed so cool!

Maybe I was going to find out.

I hitched a Zeppelin ride for Ancient Britannia to give me time to assemble my time-travel survival kit; also time to take it slow and easy and get my head screwed on in preparation for the jump. I locked myself in my first-class stateroom and ignored the long, stately cruise across icy wastes and the ocean gulf to the Cape of Good Hope. The passengers were socialising frenetically, holding balls and orgies in the gas-cell auditoria; I didn’t need it right then. I don’t like have people rammed down my thr oat, en masse: I need to retreat into my personal space, to maintain a distance between myself and the burning wilderness of raw nerve endings that constitutes a global culture for ten billion naked apes.

As we crossed the Azanian coast I went on a shopping spree. The latest databases from Grolier; a repo’d personal dialysis machine from Squibb; a very compact mainframe from Bull-Siemens. Everything to be collected when I got where I was going. In a mail-order feeding-frenzy I ordered anything I thought I could use that weighed less than fifty grams; then I crashed out for a relaxed sybaritic binge, dragging on designer silks for a bar-crawl around the kilometer-long airship. There was a lot of entertainme nt to be had, watching the desperate writhings of the jet-stream set on their slow intercontinental cruises through the new millennium; being rich beyond belief they travelled as slowly as possible, in order to flaunt their leisure time. As a handsome dowager told me on her way through my bed and my affections: “But dear, only the poor have to hurry to keep up! Speed is no substitute for real life.” No, but it sure could enhance my credit status …

A week to cover fourteen thousand kilometres and we were on final approach into one of the main British airports. One which still had a runway. I shook my head, looking down through the transparent deck. I was going to get something unique out of that? Even the ruins looked dingy.

The arrival zone was dirty yellow; beggars displayed their wounds beside a kitchen selling curry from the pot. They had a scared-looking goat tethered nearby to show how fresh the meat was. I pulled on my shades and walked fast, kept walking until I came to a concourse. Somebody grabbed me; I looked round.

“Mister Agonistes?” I saw naked fear in his gaunt face. Polizei leaned on their guns outside, sniffing for the spoor-signs of money. I nodded. “I’m from the research centre; I was to take you to the laboratory … “

“That’s good,” I said. “Where’s our chopper?”

“Our what? Oh … I’m sorry. We couldn’t possibly afford one,” he said lamely. Gaunt beneath threadbare tweed clothing: The public rice ration had gone downhill, I noted. “We could get a rickshaw … if you could pay … “

I paid.

The lab was a decrepit concrete cube, unpainted for decades, glass-faced windows nailed over with boards and a makeshift wind-turbine bolted to the roof. Only the satellite downlinks were clean, desperately polished to the shimmery finish of metal that was about to wear through. He led me inside, up a staircase in which trash had drifted deep. “We can only run the lift for two hours a day,” he apologized; “the turbine is for the big stuff.” He glanced over his shoulder furtively, as if trying to guess how much meat there was on my bones; I shivered. Maybe I’d grown too fat on the airship, and too slow.

“Here we are,” he said, pushing open a fire door at the top of the stairs. “Here’s where we stored the IRT modules. The PERV is hooked into our system next door; the stuff you ordered … it’s all here.”

“Where’s Professor Illich?” I asked.

He shrugged uncomfortably. “She’ll be here soon,” he said. “I’d better go now … “

He retreated through another door and I took stock. Everything I’d ordered, plus a cheap nylon rucksack of dubious vintage. I searched through it, assembling and ordering, then opened my wallet. Three small glass vials lined up like so many menacing soldiers; diseases of the imagination. I hoped I’d debugged them properly. I sat down on the dusty floor beneath a hulking piece of machinery that resembled a half-melted fusion reactor and contemplated them. My future: the past. I sat for a long time before I pulled out my works and fired them up.

Professor Illich arrived half an hour later; she looked just the same as she had in Ant city, except that now the hungry eagerness underlying her veneer of professionalism was nakedly obvious. I imagined her rotting in these dank, woodwormed buildings for decades, chances of the Nobel prize slipping through fingers without the financial grasp to obtain that vital extra funding … I kicked aside the empty vials. They clattered off the concrete as I stood up.

“Does it work?” I asked.

She smiled tensely, and rested one hand on the smooth ceramic side of the malnourished reactor. “It works,” she said. “One Probabilistic Eigenstate Reorganisation Viewer, in full working order.” She looked over her shoulder; “Steve … go tell Anwar to power up the Cray, there’s a good boy.” She turned back to me. “The account,” she said.

“Here. You tested it?” I kept my fingers on the folio as she paused.

“A cat. We sent it back six months then retrieved it. Alive.”

“How long was the delay?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Six milliseconds.”

“Six milliseconds!” Incredulous, I nearly grabbed the megadollar envelope back from her. She nearly exploded.

“Look, mister Agonistes, we’ve gone to all this trouble for you ..! Don’t you know anything about temporal annealing? There are limits to how far we can test it. Spacetime is a continuum, an interwoven fabric of superstrings; you can unravel it for a moment and see through to a new pattern … then it re-weaves itself, anneals into a new structural arangement with minimal potential energy. The wave-function always collapses — you ever heard of Schroedinger’s cat?”

“Yeah!” I said. “But six milliseconds?”

“You wanted a trip into the past. We wanted to prove that you could make it alive, not prove that you could make it and come back as well. That’s what you asked for, right? We had to go on half-rations for a week to afford the power for the one trial! There was no second chance. As it is we know you’ll make it alive, but there’s no guarantee that the past you come out in is our past — it might be another configuration, another local minimum in the energy diagram. We’ll try to bring you back … ” I held up a hand wearily.

“Okay.” I turned and looked up at the IRT module, squatting on concrete blocks streaked with rust like some prehistoric lunar module with cancer. I was loaded; I felt light-headed, almost feverish, as the retroviruses went to work in my brain and pancreas. “I’ll take it,” I said. “Try to bring me back one year downstream and I’ll double your money. After the event. You know why I’m trying to make this trip?”

She nodded mutely, trying to contain herself. What I’d just said — twenty million pounds more would keep her and her department running for ten years. Ethics could take a back seat for that kind of hope. I almost felt sorry for her for a minute.

“Okay,” I said, “let’s do it. Where do I go?”

She looked at me critically. “Here, in this circle.” White spot on concrete, right underneath something that bore an unpleasant resemblance to the exhaust nozzle of a big rocket motor. “Remember … when the eigenstate collapses, there are no guarantees. You might wind up in our past … then again, if there’s a local entropic minimum you might find yourself in a universe which has changed subtly. Less entropy; more information. That’s the curve, you see, randomness versus order. We’ll dragnet for you a y ear down the time stream from your target — April first, eighty four, wasn’t it? — as long as you keep holding onto this tag — ” she passed a gadget to me that looked a bit like a quaint digital watch ” — and hope for the best. Jump in thirty seconds..”

With that she retreated rapidly, leaving me standing in a dusty circle with a small pack on my back and a feeling that maybe I’d been tricked, when there was a low growling noise and the naked light bulb dimmed, flickered and went out. Violet shadows seemed to flicker at the edges of my vision, dancing across the shadowy form of the IRT: then PERV counted down to the launch window, and in a sudden burst of shocking blue flashed out —

Darkness. Feeling giddy, I staggered, and kicked something that fell over with a terrifyingly loud clatter. Where was I? Fumbling in semi-panic I felt cold walls beneath my fingertips, then the inside of a door —

Light. Leaving the broom-cupboard I stumbled downstairs. The door: fresh green paint glared at me beneath recessed fluorescent lighting. AN ALARM WILL SOUND … I pushed through. Outside, the grass was neatly mown and the concrete apron was full of archaic-looking vehicles with squared-off edges and too much metal. Elation seized me; I’d made it! I headed for the street and reached a bus shelter — unvandalized — where I put my pack down. Fumbling, I pulled on my datashades and eyeballed a glittering cur sor into the middle of my visual field. There were few people about, and nobody seemed to be staring at me; I looked round, correlating visual parameters. Everything seemed to be in order, there were no visible anachronisms; it felt as if time had healed all wounds, as if the clock had wound back to deposit me gently in the tail-end of the last century when civilisation was a function of humanity rather than machines. I felt safe in my uniform of jeans and sweat-shirt and back-pack: camouflage for the urba

fox. Safe and sly and hungry, ready to take on the forces of this sleepy little city … I began to walk, a spring in my step.

Street corner shops bustled with grey people in archaic clothing: mass production fashion victims filled the mall like so many mannequins of times gone by. Remember how everyone used to look the same? Vehicle traffic was thicker here/then, as I discovered when I crossed the road. Polizei … I tensed, then realised that there were no guns and I could actually see their eyes. There were no beggars, either. The skin on the back of my neck crawled. Without beggars, how do you know how rich you are? My shades were slowly caking over with graphics as their sensors correlated textual overspill, scanning ads for familiar campaigns. I hadn’t expected it to be quite like this, quite so disorientating. Not only did everyone wear more or less the same stereotyped costumes, they also seemed to be on an economic par with one another; as if poverty didn’t exist at all here.

I cancelled my video program and took my glasses off. People seemed to focus around me, avoiding contact, eyes downcast. I felt sweaty, in the first bout of a low grade fever as my immune system targeted surplus viral vectors. Disseminating the news, data for the public … how did they do it? Oh, archaic paper form. Remember … I dug into one pocket for my precious supply of antique coinage. It was time to buy a newssheet.

The shop was wired, but the systems were so primitive as to be untouchable; no EPOS magic touch here, no files to tamper with for a bonus redirection of products. Anyway, I wasn’t a black disc merchant to begin with; what was I thinking of? I looked at the racks and selected a fat-looking wedge of paper, then paid for it. The assistant — human — looked at me curiously, but was too busy with other customers to bother me; I nodded distractedly and strolled outside into the sunlight and shoppers.

Putting my datashades on I began to read the headlines, leaving my machines to deduce the social context from the references. Argentina was protesting to the UN about something called the Malvinas; there was widespread concern over a disaster at some place near Kiev; inflation was coming down. The computer pondered for a bit then reported a classic match. This was the past, okay. The incredible sense of elated freedom returned — it was true! I was going to make it! Burnout reversed by the futurist accel eration; coming from a time when progress was incremented in microseconds, how could I fail in a time where product lifecycles came and went in years?

This was going to be good. Shark-hungry for profits I glanced round, looking for nightlife stakeouts to make my pitch from; haunt a small market and connect with the local yardie zone-boss. Show them the colour of profit; yellow snow. Flash out snowflakes of sugar-coated ecstasy on a captive market at ten eurodollars — pounds — a hit. Set up a still in a cheap rented flat; drink, eat, refine a hundred grammes of peptides a day. Then invest the profits for my triumphant return; computer-assisted share bu ying for artificially intelligent deals. I looked to the finance pages, seeking commodities in which I knew I could make a profit, and that’s where I finally noticed the dissonance. Marihuana and opium futures were going down for the third successive year …

It’s been six months now.

I spent my first night, exhausted and hungry, on a park bench. Junkies shot up around me, cheap shit and clean needles available in a brown bag from the off-license stores; I watched, envying them their high, until one of them staggered over to me glowering and shaking a wobbly fist as he mouthed inaudible curses at me.

I began to notice signs beyond the financial pages. There’s less crime, less moralizing; less fear. Less wealth, too. All the narcotics have been legal since ‘thirty-three, when prohibition crashed in America and the rest of the world followed suit. Suicide is legal, too, and abortion, and anything you want to do to yourself in private. These people are so free! I should have guessed; what Professor Illich said about local minima in the curve of entropy, incomplete annealing of the wave-function, a time when things haven’t gone quite so far downhill as in my own days’ past …

I remember pissing in the gutter; pissing yellow gold that sparkled in the cold sunlight. But what use is the Midas touch in a world of floating currencies? For a while my urine ran red, an unexpected side-effect of the infections; I had a terrible headache, and my teeth chattered continuously. But I’m better now. Much better. Got over my fear of brain damage; I’m not that incompetent.

Shit may be legal but there is a Problem with it. I heard the Prime Minister talking about it on the news yesterday. The Police want Something to be Done. I’ll second that.

After a week, the Salvation Army took me in. They deal with a lot of junkies, try to rehabilitate them half-heartedly. I went overboard on the old ‘seen the light’ number, sang hallelujah! to their choir and mopped the floor after supper. They seem to like it.

Anyway, I have seen the light. Now I sleep in the hostel, clean floors in the evening, and parade the streets with a sandwich board by day. DRUGS ARE THE DEVIL’S TOOL, it says in big letters. I made it myself. I sleep on a narrow, hard bunk bed and dream up scams, but it’s so very hard to figure out how to turn a megadollar profit when you’re as broke as I am now; with no ID I can’t even claim social security benefits. Kind of embarrassing. Meanwhile, I keep on with the only scam I know, pis sing in the wind. You never know, I might get lucky. They might re-criminalize it tomorrow …

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