By Sara King

Sam, a.k.a. Slade Galvin Gardner as he was known to most official systems that he allowed to recognize his existence, was bored.

Boredom, for Sam, was akin to a slow, painful death fermenting in the bowels of Hell while steeping in his own funk, banished from the mental ambrosia of AC/DC and doomed to drink brews made of goat piss and stale tree bark.

The fact that his luggage had been lost on his last flight, leaving him in five-day-old sweats, using cheap earbuds that fizzled out the moment he plugged them in, and without his private stash of Hacienda La Esmerelda Geisha—as a result reduced to drinking the worst cup of coffee in his life—was not lost upon Sam as he sat in the local café whose name he never bothered to remember, staring at the forty billion new Congie credits in his accounts, wondering if he was in Hell.

It had taken him less than ten minutes. Forty billion, a nasty Huouyt corporation suddenly and mysteriously bankrupt, and an entire small country’s GDP transferred to forty of his aliases in ten minutes. He’d done the hack as a test to see how long it would take to crack the best of the best, hoping it would prove to be a challenge that would take several days. Seeing the funds now in his untraceable accounts less than ten minutes later, Sam was struggling with the desire to get up, leave his computer open at the café table, and stiffly take a long, slow hike into the desert to asphyxiate on sand and lizards.

And he’d picked a corporation with the absolute best security. The very best. Run by teams of Bajna and Huouyt working together. He’d been trying to challenge himself.

Seeing a fresh forty billion now burning a hole in his accounts in the time he normally would’ve taken to jack off, Sam had been hit with the sobering realization that he’d reached the apex of his life, and he might as well die now, with absolutely nothing to look forward to out of Life in the future but drugs, hookers, and mind-numbing boredom.

His illustrious brother, Sam knew with a wash of bitterness, wasn’t bored. Joe Dobbs, Hero of Congress, the Kaleu Superman, the Hero of Eeloir, the Tyrant of Tern, the Master of Neen, yada yada, probably had thousands of girls lined up on his doorstep every night. But Sam? Sam was lucky if he could find one compatible female a year, and most of those had to be paid. The rest wanted to talk, and Sam hated talking women. Since no woman could ever say anything he didn’t expect, they—just like every other human being on the planet—were boring, and he’d rather just pay them to keep their mouths shut so he could think uninterrupted.

He knew a lot of his escorts went home with their fresh wads of cash thinking he was a male chauvinist, one who liked women to look pretty and remain silent, but to Sam, it was really about the unnecessary verbiage that broke his train of thought. Having someone talk to him while he was thinking was like having an elephant charge into a delicate, exquisitely-crafted symphony and trample the conductor into a paste while spewing explosive green diarrhea on all the broken instruments and furniture.

“You’re in here a lot,” the petite barista said, scattering his startled orchestra with the chaotic bellow of a hippo in heat. Sam flinched as the woman sat down at his table, then squinted up at her, wrinkling his nose. She smiled, her blue eyes insipid and mostly-hidden by fake black lashes. “No one else around, slow day,” she went on like he cared, “so I’ve got a few minutes to talk if you need to take your mind off whatever’s bothering you.” She had arrived to deliver a second latte to replace the one he had complained about, her face bright, her lips stretched in a smile, clearly having no concept of just how little interest Sam had in prolonged trumpeting from the genus Loxodonta. When he didn’t respond, only scowled at her, she gestured at the computer Sam had been muttering at. “College assignment?”

The fact that she couldn’t even tell he was actually fifty-eight years old and not a college student made Sam groan and pound his prodigal head into the coffee-stained table-top. Like a moose that had burst into NASA under some self-delusion it had the ability to discuss escape velocity, she just blinked at his antics with an ungulate stare, smacking her black-painted lips as she loudly chewed gum, which Sam had found disgusting pretty much since getting a wad of Big Red stuck in his hair in grade school. Or was it something else? He frowned, remembering something about gum and a gypsy…

“That bad, huh?” she asked, shattering his symphony again with a grunting herd of deranged bison. She was still smiling politely, her long dreadlocks dangling over the tabletop as she watched him. “Which class?” Clearly, for some reason Sam could not fathom, she wanted to talk.

Combined with the fresh forty billion exemplifying his lack of anything interesting to do in the foreseeable future, it was too much.

“Kill meee,” Sam moaned, rolling his forehead upon the sticky surface.

The faux-Goth barista hesitated, his new cup of Joe still in her hand, lifting a dyed black brow as she watched him introduce himself to her table out of despair. “Bad news?”

“Oh for the love of Zeus’s electric cock—gimme that.” Sam grabbed the drink from her and made a shooing gesture. “Go chew your gum elsewhere. That shit is so distracting. Like listening to a cow having sex with its mouth.”

She stopped chewing, her mouth hanging open, pink wad clearly visible caught between her teeth and her ball-studded tongue. Instead of leaving, however, she closed her mouth and calmly folded her tattooed arms over the table. Then she leaned towards him, trying to catch a glimpse of his computer. Sam quickly twisted it away, scowling at her over his latte. “The fuck do you want?”

“You got a girlfriend?”

“Oh thank fuck no,” Sam said, taking a sip. “I can think of no bigger waste of time and money than—” Upon tasting the same goat-piss-tree-bark staleness in his ‘fresh’ cup, he immediately spat it back into the container and handed it to her. “If that’s the best you can do, you might as well burn this place down.”

The girl moved the cup aside and went back to leaning towards him curiously. “Not surprised.” She clicked her black nails on the table, looking almost thoughtful.

…if a cud-chewing ungulate could appear thoughtful. Sam was debating.

“Of course you’re not,” he said, distracted again by a new little warning ping on his screen, alerting him to a section of the Huouyt company’s funds he hadn’t traced earlier. With only half his attention focused on his unwanted guest, he started initiating the number-crunching algorithms he needed to figure out the proper access codes and said, “You should tell the owner to stop buying off-grade Vietnamese Robusta. Maybe if his coffee didn’t suck, you’d have more customers.”

“I’m the owner,” the woman said after a moment.

“Oh, that makes sense then.” The secondary hacking programs initiated, Sam squinted at her over his computer. “Why the fuck did you decide to start a coffee shop when you can’t make a decent fucking latte? This whole place reeks of ‘Ivy School Dropout.’ I mean, it’s a coffee shop, and you spent more money on the edgy Monique Gavant prints on the walls than you did on actual coffee beans. You one of those rich kids who took daddy’s money to start a business and drive it into the ground for the tax write off?”

She didn’t answer him for several minutes, so Sam went back to his work. He always liked to screw with the Huouyt. They deserved it, and Karma was a bitch.

Often, when he was feeling particularly good about something, Sam liked to think of himself as a self-made agent of Karma, a Robin Hood of the Congressional Era.

“You’re partially right,” the woman said, her pierced lip set in a tight line. “The place was my sister’s. I took it over for her, kind of a last request sort of thing. She loved this place.”

Sam, who had gone back to his accounts, considering the conversation over, had to shake himself out of his thoughts of Karma and humbling Huouyt billionaires to blink at her. “Huh?”

“She was an Ivy League dropout.”

“Good for her.”

“She got cancer.”

Sam squinted at the woman, wondering why she was still at his table. “So?”

“So…” the woman said, clearing her throat uncomfortably, “she made a good latte.” Her voice, Sam noted, was cracking. Almost as if she was sick or something. The woman wiped her nose on her tattooed forearm—disgusting—and said, “I never really had the knack.”

“Clearly,” Sam said. When she didn’t get up and leave, but rather, just stared at him over the tabletop as he worked, Sam groaned and looked back up at her. “I’m sorry…do you need something?” He cocked his head at the pretentious prints hanging on the walls. “Well, I mean, aside from a professional decorator?”

“So tell me about yourself,” she insisted, clicking her black nails on wooden surface of the table.

Sam, who had gone back to his accounts, slammed his palm down on the table in exasperation. “Oh. My. God. What do you want?”

“You ever had sex, dude? I mean, like, with a woman? You are into women, right?”

Sam stared at her. “Yes I’m into women. Quiet women.”

“I’ve got this weird thing for assholes and today’s the anniversary of my sister’s death and I’m feeling like a good hate-fuck.”

“With you?” Sam looked over her carefully-crafted persona of petulance, the nose-ring, the silver skull and dragon jewelry, the single strip of pink hair in a mane of black. He snorted in disdain. “I’d rather cram sardines up the asshole of a live walrus.”

“I’m not fat,” she said, frowning. She glanced down at herself as if to confirm the fact she was, in fact, very petite.

“No, but you talk,” Sam said, “and I have about the same interest in what you’re saying as I do with a walrus getting anally raped by fistfuls of sardines.”

She stared at him so long that Sam went back to his work. He was just about to relieve the Huouyt CEO of his backup stash of Congie credits, when the woman shattered his mental Mozart with her poddite goatfucker verbiage again.

“You know, for someone who lounges around in mustard-stained sweatpants that he clearly hasn’t changed—or bathed—in over a week, you’re kind of an arrogant asshole.”

Sam snorted. “And you’re a minimum-wage nobody doomed to waste the rest of her life on a failing business that serves shit coffee while surrounded by pretentious décor whose originals I could’ve bought with only about nine seconds of my time just to gleefully set them on fire in Times Square if it wouldn’t put my name in the paper.” He made the shooing motion again.

“You bought a coffee,” the woman said, chewing her disgusting wad of synthetic rubber and cheap elastomers. The gum paused in her open mouth as she raised a brow at him. “Not the right to treat me like shit.”

“I treat everyone like shit,” Sam said. “Would you mind not mucking up my mental ocean with your Manhattan-sized wad of garbage now?” Then, because his mother had always told him he needed to be nicer to people, he added, “Please?”

“You look familiar…” She squinted at him. “You ever been to the karaoke bar down the road?”

“No,” Sam said, going back to his computer. He moved some more credits, somewhat irritated that they had slipped past his initial notice. “Hate karaoke.”

And still she continued to sit there, tapping her black nails to her chin in thought. “You go to the local community college?”

Sam felt muscles in his neck twitch. “No.”

She continued to squint at him. “Maybe—”

“It’s my brother.” Sam slammed the lid of his laptop shut, scowling. “You want to fuck my brother, okay? That’s why you’re getting all those subliminal hormonal surges triggering your tiny pea brain to think I’m hot as hell despite the fact I’m skinny, dressed in sweats, and haven’t worked out since the last day I was forced to in middle school gym.”

She raised both eyebrows at him, but instead of getting pissy, her mouth fell completely open and she said, “You’re Zero’s brother?” Like Joe was some kind of deity. Never mind the fact that Sam could kill Joe with his brain from across the fucking galaxy. With his pinkie. No, Joe was the badass because he could aim a projectile and make things explode. Woohoo.

“He’s not as cool as they say,” Sam muttered. “Just an asshole, really.” Joe had read his message, and had fucking deleted it without replying. Screw him.

“Commander Zero? Really? You’re his brother?” Like Sam was mere refuse trying to bask in the glory of a god.

“Same DNA,” Sam muttered. “I got the brains. He got lucky.”

Really, really lucky. First Blekk, then Eeloir, then Orryth, then Rhiso, then Neen, Tern, Dorset… And that was just the publicized ones. On Eeloir, there had only been 2 Human survivors out of six million of the Human Ground Force to get dropped. The rest had been murdered and had their patterns taken, then used to infiltrate the headquarters, spaceport, and blockades… Joe and Rat had ended up leading a multi-species platoon of survivors that had not only saved the Ueshi Representative that had been caught in the war, but had reverse-infiltrated the infiltrators, retaking the hubs of control from the Huouyt before they could commandeer the locked-down Congie shipyard and complete their takeover of that sector.

Sam’s brother was, quite literally, a hero. A no-name nobody with nothing-special in the brains or motor-skills department who had somehow survived a brutal war that had killed every other Human soul that had had the bad luck to be thrown into it, and not by being a coward and devising a way to hide or escape, like Sam would’ve done, but by rallying a ragtag group of survivors and taking the fight to the enemy, and winning.

And Sam was a thief and a druglord who got upset if he got a hangnail after his weekly manicure.

Again, that thought tickled something in the back of his memory. “You will not be an accountant. You will be a thief and a gang leader…”