Ash awoke, blurred and bleary, drank as much water as she could swallow, muttered, “I am too damn old for this shit,” and jacked in. Weekend time was good for working, the queues were shorter and you stood a better chance of grabbing the jobs you liked without getting jumped by hordes of other third worlders in the process. The best paid jobs went to the languid Americans, of course, but then, they weren’t getting as good a currency conversion, even after you’d cashed your tokens and black-market traded them for something the South African Revenue Services hadn’t blocked. Ignoring the porn trades, Ash grabbed a stream of image tagging tasks and then some rewrites; only stopping when she’d decided that thinking up one more synonym would turn her completely homicidal. Americans were still getting paid just to view ads, long after the rest of the globe had given up on direct advertising as a very pointless waste of time. Netheads filtered ads out using software and even the ones that got past that were just flies to be swatted. Making ads too obtrusive was futile, it turned everybody against the corp who’d made them.
With enough tokens to improve the standard conversion rate, Ash headed to a digital souk set up by Veto years before, to get the cash fed into an alt account she’d set up under a long-dead business’ identity. Apart from food and basic stuff, she did all her shopping online and picked it up down at Charmageddon. She usually bought electronics from Malaysia and sold or traded them locally.
As the sun set slowly into a polluted skyline, she grabbed a jacket and decided to head on over to Charmageddon, check her post, maybe grab a burger and see who was around and what was going on. She walked into a quiet bar, little Jacob’s Ladders swirling dust around old, stained wood. Boi and Skin waved her over, looked like they’d had the same cheap early evening meal idea as she had.
“Hey hey,” said Skin, “what’s new?” Ash shrugged, “Camera you wanted should be in soon if you want to make a deal?” Skin was good for a Nikon upgrade every few years; contrary to the rest of the world, she refused to reply on her wrist and eyefeed recording systems, building up a range of clunky old DSLR’s instead and a huge range of lenses to plug on to them. Their antique status made them pricey, but they appeared to make Skin very happy indeed.
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