Notes From the Internet Apocalypse Read Online Free PDF Page B

another cigarette. “Just one, actually. I think. If he’s still here. He started pulling away even before the Net went down.”
    I watched her smoke, liking the way she held her Marlboro Red too much. The purple lipstick stains on the filter were impossibly distracting.
    “Not to be offensive,” I said after bumming a smoke, “but you seem far too sharp to spend your time being a webcam girl.”
    “I have to shower anyway. Why not get paid?”
    It was hard to argue with that logic.
    “Besides, what’s more degrading? Being seen naked or having a boss?”
    I raised my flask. “To showering for profit.”
    “See that, Gladstone?” Tobey said. “Oz here has a perfectly legit reason for being a dirty cyber hooker.”
    “Oh, excuse me, sir,” Oz said. “I didn’t realize making fart jokes online was God’s work.”
    “Well, it beats a real job.”
    Oz had to agree. “Fuck, yes. Seriously, Gladstone, how do you do it?”
    “Well, I’d prefer not to,” I said. “Actually, I’ve been preferring not to so much that I’m out on disability.”
    That made Oz very happy, and she took the flask from my pocket. I felt her nails graze against my chest.
    “Cheers, daddy-o,” she said with a hearty swig. “I knew you were too together not to be batshit. It’s always the straight-laced customers who get their freak on.”
    Tobey laughed. “Daddy-o. See, Gladstone? You gotta change that outfit.”
    Oz shook her head. “Nah, it’s kinda exhilarating to see someone dress like a douchebag in earnest,” she said. “Too much irony these days.”
    “You look too young to know anything other than ‘these days,’” I said. “You think things used to be different?”
    “Christ, I hope so.”
    We sat there a little while, the three of us, smoking and drinking, letting the park pass in front of us like a full-scale IMAX screening, and it was nice. There was a level of comfort that should not have been and we didn’t feel the need to ruin it with acknowledgment. In time, our talk came back to what started it: seeking help from 4Chan.
    “Seriously, Gladstone. Have you ever even been to the /b/ boards on 4Chan? These are not people you want to know in real life.”
    “No, Tobes, I haven’t. I don’t even pretend to understand the connection or the difference between 4Chan, the /b/tards on its forum, and Anonymous. But I know something out of that mess smoked the cyber counterintelligence agency that tried to bring down WikiLeaks. And that’s the kind of mojo we need now. Not loudmouths from Digg and Reddit.”
    “So say we all,” Oz said, nodding her head.
    “Was that a Battlestar Galactica reference?” Tobey asked.
    “Yarp.”
    Tobey and I tried to conceal our intense nerd arousal.
    “Anyway, you’re both right,” she said. “I would have sought them out already, but they’re not the kind of people you want to be alone with.”
    I didn’t blame her. Overt sexuality without the distance and anonymity of the Internet was dangerous. She stamped out her cigarette, but even when she was done, she kept her head down, as if inspecting the significance of the crushed filter on the ground. She was waiting for something. Something I would have realized instantly if it hadn’t been so long since I’d spoken to a woman.
    I remembered my first date with Romaya, if you could call it a date. Sitting on her dorm room bed listening to Nick Drake’s Pink Moon . Me trying to find an opening. She looking too intently at the CD case.
    I spoke one soft word and waited. “Hey.”
    Oz looked up with more innocence than I thought possible.
    “Would you like to join us?” I asked.
    “I guess I could do that, yeah. I mean, if it wouldn’t put you out.”
    She looked to Tobey, who thankfully just nodded, although I would bet anything he was suppressing something like “Oh, cool, you’ll put out?”
    “Well, then, okay, gentlemen,” she said.
    I raised my flask in a toast. That’s when I noticed the black ops