Have you lost your mind? the World AI asked Joe.

“That’s a bit rude, don’t you think?” Joe asked, washing down gooey caramel and chocolate with a swig of energy drink. “You asked for a one-liner and I gave you one that was a darn sight better than the crap your co-star AIs were churning out.”

Viewers - 3

You are now a thief! the World AI was ranting, but Joe wasn’t worried. Junk food was a great insulator from the stress of the situation.

“If you think about it, that isn’t an odd career choice given the circumstances,” Joe reasoned, capping his drink bottle to keep the rain out of it. “There’s precedent. Go look it up. You’ll see. There’s White Collar, Leverage, and even Aladdin. There are all sorts of plotlines that feature thieves, and it would have been an option for class in any dungeon setting, right? Granted I’m no Sean Connery in Entrapment, but who knows? I could get good enough for something like that if you cut me some slack. Imagine what I could do with the right equipment or partners?”

Go through the red door so we can talk about this in private, the World AI demanded, and the red door appeared in the woods off to the right of the little hiking trail Joe had found.

“Now wait!” Joe reasoned, pausing near the door as if he intended to follow directions. “You said I had another twenty hours. It’s going to take some time to see if the clickbait did anything, right? At least we’re not losing viewers anymore, though I can’t imagine that this conversation is helping with their immersion.”

The door disappeared and Joe got a few minutes of blessed silence. He didn’t think it would last. It couldn’t, right? Whatever. Joe slipped down another little slide of muddy trail and got his answer from the World AI. Was that? It was a picnic table area, and it was covered. Joe stood there blinking at the first oasis he’d seen since being eaten by spiders.

Joe had stumbled into a rest stop. The highway offramp was camouflaged by some trees, but he could hear the hum of cars rushing by over the rain that was starting to edge back from showerhead on full cold to the drizzle of a bent hose. What got his attention, though, was the covered picnic tables and public restrooms, something he had been secretly hoping for since he’d finished his first energy drink. Joe skip-ran across the blacktop parking area, a surge of desperate hope lighting his eyes for the tiny moment that the beast allowed his inner self to poke his head out. There were more tables here than in the grumpy woman’s diner, but there were fewer people. In fact, there were no people and that suited Joe just fine.

He plopped his wet butt down at one of the dry, stone benches and felt the water seep out of his pants and into the grooves on the seat of the table and then down onto the ground. Joe didn’t have any hope of getting dry anytime soon, but at least he wasn’t getting wetter anymore. He shrugged off his backpack and kept it close as he took off his jackets and shook them out to get off most of the water. Joe laid the jackets out near him to possibly dry out a little.

Feeling shaky from the sugar rush of two candy bars and that energy drink, Joe popped the top of a can of chips and hunched there watching for what came next. It was coming. Joe could feel it. He sat with his back toward the large stone women’s restroom, keeping one eye on the highway ramps and another on those woods. It felt like that moment between thinking that this time will be different right before the furry limbs of a giant spider grabbed him. That was why he also darted his attention back over his shoulder in case that thing was sneaking over the restroom at his back.

All Joe could think was, “Your move, asshole,” not that he said it out loud or even thought it very loudly.

He didn’t have to wait long.

A car sputtered down the offramp toward Joe, and he watched it come, even as he cast furtive glances at the rest of the panorama. Joe wasn’t a car buff, so he couldn’t tell if it was an Impala, but that would have been a reason to run right back into the woods. The car was old and beat up, the door barely closed on it, and the engine on it could sure use a Gomer. It might have made its way into the rest stop, but the way the engine glumped to a choking stall three feet before it rolled to a stop in a parking space made Joe think it wasn’t going to make its way back out.

There was a guy behind the wheel. He reminded Joe of that guy from Little House on the Prairie, but when he was playing an angel instead of a farmer. Netflix, the only streaming service he could afford, liked to run the old shows the minute they hit public domain, so Joe knew a lot of really old stuff. The guy that crawled out of the junker was kind of scruffy in a pair of Levi’s, work boots that belonged on a steel mill worker, and a plaid shirt that made him look harmless. The scruffy beard and crinkly eyes that beamed kindly? Those were missing. Instead, this guy swung back a foot and kicked his car with a roaring stream of curse words that about knocked Joe back on his heels.

“What the hell?” Joe muttered to himself.

You need a costar, the World AI replied smugly, not that its voice appeared on any screen anywhere. A sidekick or something that will allow for dialogue. You can’t very well always talk to yourself.

“Not that kind of costar!” Joe said into his hand around a sour cream and onion potato chip, as that Not-angel guy stormed off to the restroom, glaring at his phone and then cursing into it. Joe felt a little like a secret agent, talking into a headpiece and trying to be subtle about it.

Fine, but you will choose someone, the World AI sounded miffed, but not quite mad, so Joe stopped looking over his shoulder. That and he didn’t want the Not-angel guy to think he was trying to make eye contact. My research has analyzed the types of shows you suggested and aside from the Pink Panther, there are very few successful thieves’ characters that are loners. Leverage had a whole team. This guy might be your hitter if you change your mind.

Elliot from Leverage had been the guy who punched his way out of situations that couldn’t be conned or thieved. This guy wasn’t that. Joe was more of a hitter than this guy. A hitter was the guy who punched people if it all went terribly wrong. It was from a series called Leverage that had a hitter, a cat burglar, a con artist, a hacker, and a mastermind. On top of that, Elliot, the hitter from Leverage, was the kind of guy that had girls watching the show, unlike the swearing Not-angel guy. Joe was pretty sure that Not-angel didn’t, and couldn’t, fill any of the other roles either.

“Hard pass,” Joe thought to the World AI. If Joe wasn’t going to be the hitter, the closest Joe was going to get, with his antisocial behavior patterns, was the hacker and without a computer, he wasn’t even going to be able to fake that.

The next car came sliding down the offramp and Joe was getting the feeling that the World AI was going to keep sending potentials until Joe picked someone. Before the modern electric car came to a complete stop, the door was opening and a blonde bombshell tumbled out of the passenger side, shaking her fist at the driver and swearing harder than the guy with the busted-up car. She brushed off her too-short skirt and pulled a pack of cigarettes out of somewhere. Joe watched her bring a cigarette to fire-engine-red lips that looked too big for Botox and light up, and all he could think was being stuck in a car with her chain-smoking choking him half to death. No, thank you.

“Next,” Joe thought, shaking his head and chomping on another chip.

Quest: Find a Partner in Crime

You can’t do it all on your own and now that you’re a criminal in this area, you’re going to need to find a ride to another town sooner rather than later.

Rewards: 100xp/cohort and probably transportation.

Automatically Accepted.

What came next was a veritable parade of AI co-stars that Joe could pick from. The blonde bombshell walked over to one of the vending machines behind the women’s restroom and bought a coke and some mentos, then settled into a table near enough to Joe that he put away his chips, the smoke from her cigarette making his chips taste bad. Joe didn’t care how red her lips were, that mouth was going to taste like an ashtray and that didn’t appeal in the slightest. Even he had standards. When it was clear that she wasn’t going to get the part, the blonde took a cell phone out of her miniscule purse and called someone named Charlie to come pick her up. As she carried on a loud conversation, Joe's next potential partner puttered into the rest stop in an SUV. Four kids, ages ranging from eleven to seventeen-ish, loudly poured out of the vehicle like what comes out of a barfly after a night of getting lucky. The Soccer-mom in charge was hollering at them to go in pairs and Joe was wondering what the heck the World AI was thinking with this one. She also pulled out a phone and had a conversation with a deadbeat ex-husband who was supposed to pick up the kids and was late. The two conversations blended in a way that made neither intelligible.

Meanwhile, another car pulled off the highway, and Joe's mind was glaring at that quest. A hundred points per cohort? He hadn’t been able to complete any quests and was still looking at a pathetic xp of less than 50. Joe looked around and his eyes must have had xp signs popping out of them as each of these people, permanent or not, represented a gold mine of xp. The beast stirred greedily, and that sparked a conversation as the blonde yelled, “Fine!” into her phone and shoved it back in her purse with an eye-popping pout.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

“Man trouble?” Joe offered a conversation starter to the Blonde-bombshell, and she blinked at him like he was an oasis in the storm.

“You know it!” she threw up her hands, as yet another car threw out the next pitch.

“Tell me about it,” the Soccer-mom joined into the conversation uninvited, but that was okay. “I was five minutes late, and he says he was here but went off to get lunch since I was late.”

“He wasn’t here,” Joe told her. “I’ve been here for a while, and nobody was here before that clunker pulled up and died a few minutes ago.”

“Men,” the blonde tossed her agreement in there as if Joe wasn’t there. It wasn’t all that surprising. Joe had one of those faces or physiques or whatever that automatically friend-zoned his ass into the men-hater conversations like he belonged there. He’d learned a lot of what women hated that way. It wasn’t like he minded being friend-zoned by Ashtray-mouth or Soccer-mom, neither of whom appealed to him anyway.

“He just wants to stick me here trying to keep them occupied while he gets a quicky in with his girlfriend this morning,” Soccer-mom scowled. “I can’t believe he lied to me.”

“You get used to it, sweetheart,” the blonde waved her cigarette around.

“Ask that guy,” Joe waved at the Not-angel coming out of the bathroom, wiping his hands on his jeans with another scowl at his phone. “He’s been here almost as long as me, and there wasn’t anybody here.”

“Hey!” Soccer-mom called out to the scruffy Not-angel like that was something she’d do every day. “Did you see anyone else here about five-ten minutes ago?”

“I’ve been here fifteen minutes and nobody here but this guy,” Not-angel called back, pulling a pack of cigarettes out of the pocket on his shirt and a lighter out of his jeans.

Joe got it then. Product placement. Ever since Infract had invented a cigarette that supposedly didn’t cause cancer, smoking had made a comeback. The vapes that had taken over the smoking market had turned out to be worse than cigarettes with all the additives the Food and Drug Administration made manufacturers add to be fair to the failing tobacco industry. The media assured the US citizens that the US hadn’t turned socialist, but big business had been forced to become more fair and less cutthroat by the AIs that oversaw world improvement back in the early 2020s. It was yet another sub-clause in the contract that saw 1%ers bailing out of the US and into more small-world countries. They hadn’t thought that through all the way, though, because half of those countries were run by dictators who didn’t like the very people who’d been using them for their sweatshops. The resulting financial crisis was aborted by those same 1%ers being forced to bail out thousands of small businesses in order to be allowed back into their respectable countries. The whole thing resulted in what the AIs euphemistically called the Levelling Era, but that’s all old history. Anyway, cigarettes were back and semi-healthy with additives that actually helped your lungs fight cancer as it manifested due to the additives that made cigarettes bad to begin with.

The reason all this wasn’t socialist is that they’d redefined the word socialist so that it now meant anti-American or anti-democratic. This trend of redefining things so that they mean what the average moo-verse person wanted them to mean started around the 1980s when the word theory was defined by Webster, the dictionary standard of the time, as a serious guess about what may or may not be factual yet. By 2020, Webster dictionaries, the paperback ones and the online ones, had updated the definition of the word theory to be a widely accepted fact of science based on valid evidentiary experiments. This “shift in language” was done so subtly that no one saw it until one college student lodged a complaint which was also when dictionaries became tertiary sources of fact. That’s what made it the gold standard of language shifts. We were taught how to do this in high school English so that our expectations of language wouldn’t be set in stone.

“Can I bum a cig?” Soccer-mom parroted the tobacco industry tag line, and Joe nearly rolled his eyes out loud.

“Sure,” Not-angel gave a friendly grin as he tapped out a cigarette for Soccer-mom. Everyone was all for sharing cigarettes because that was the sociable thing to do. Joe just thought the things stunk, so he never picked it up. Not-angel offered him one too, but Joe declined with what he hoped was a friendly smile.

The new car that next came down the offramp wasn’t a car but rather it was a beat-up truck instead. It belonged on the back roads of some ranch or farm somewhere, but here it was in this little neck of the woods. The woman who climbed out filled the stereotype of the truck and matched Joe's idea of an Eye-candy costar a little better than Not-angel. This was the farmgirl from next door that even got Joe’s breath hitched a bit.

“My ex said he was here not five minutes ago, but left because I was late,” Soccer-mom was complaining to Not-angel. “This guy said you’ve been here that long, at least.”

“That dog,” Not-angel popped off another string of curses. “I’m not normally so foul, but my husband said he fixed the car before my big trip, and he didn’t. I’m no stranger to dog-boys.”

Way to hit a dozen demographics all at once, World AI, Joe thought to himself, watching the Eye-candy as she ambled over in her daisy dukes to the vending machines. Joe could happily watch that girl walk around the set all day. She moved like liquid cat and Joe shifted uncomfortably to adjust. Then the beast smacked him upside the head and brought his attention back to their little group. Still, if he had to pick one or two, Eye-candy was on his list. He pulled out a pack of powdered sugar-covered donuts, just in case.

“Y’all having a picnic?” Eye-candy strolled up to the table and gave a smile that would definitely make Joe the costar. Would that be so bad?

“Want a donut?” Joe offered up the pack like the others had offered up cigs, only he had half a mouth full of donut and a mouth covered in powdered sugar.

“Sure,” and she gave Joe the smile that melted mental capacity. How did she look sexy with a smear of powdered sugar across her lips that made Joe want to do a slow-motion wipe away with his bare fingers. “Thanks.”

“Ya,” Joe swallowed quickly and smeared even more of the powdered sugar across his own jeans that were too wet to dust off.

“I’m on a diet,” Soccer-mom refused Joe's offer like he’d been offering his treasures to anyone other than Eye-candy.

“I’ll take one,” and Not-angel dipped dingy fingers into the pack with a nasty wrinkle of plastic.

“Here,” Joe just handed him the rest of it, treasure becoming trash as soon as not-hand-washing Not-angel stuck his fingers in there.

“Thanks,” he said. “I haven’t eaten a thing all morning because I was so rushed to get on the road and now I’ve got to wait for a tow. It’s all a disaster. I’ll never get to my reunion in time so I might as well tuck into some calories.”

“Where’s the reunion?” Soccer-mom asked, keeping one eye on the men’s restroom where half her brood of children had disappeared. Had they all been the same sex? Not that it mattered nowadays. The signs proclaiming men’s and women’s restrooms were a mere suggestion for old folks who bothered to read them anymore. The stalls were all individual anyway since the middle of the 2040s, and since no one could enforce who went where, no one really cared who went where. Even the urinals were blocked into claustrophobic cubicles in these rest stops.

“Two hours south on the highway,” Not-angel answered.

“I could probably swing you by there after my useless ex gets here to pick up the kids,” she offered. “This is our halfway spot and I have to drive back that way anyway. My ex might be faster than a tow truck.”

“Could I get in on that ride?” Bombshell popped into the conversation. “My boyfriend just dumped me here. If I don’t get a ride, I’ll have to hitch back to town. It’s not like I can walk in these things.” She pointed out the high-heeled black boots she wore that were barely held together with a safety pin and black marker.

“Men,” Soccer-mom ground out angrily, then cast an apologetic look toward Not-angel and Joe. “Not you two, obviously.”

“Of course, present company is always excluded?” Eye-candy objected, but her eyes danced distractingly with good-natured mirth.

OMG, Joe thought with a sudden douse of cold shower on his crush. Eye-candy was the romance angle. Soccer-mom was another demographic. Hooker with a heart of gold was such an old trope, and dusty gay guy was the new demographic angle for disrupting gay stereotypes. This was sick. Joe's heart shriveled as he abruptly pulled his stupid hormones out of the game and the beast was allowed to take back over. Joe took a mental step back.

Everybody laughed like Eye-candy had made a great joke, bringing Joe's attention to the four hundred xp surrounding him. Joe had started the conversation, but now it was running away from him. He laughed a little late for comfort, but they all laughed again, trying to gloss over his bad timing like it was a natural flub. Joe was going to have one hell of a blooper reel.

“Hey, where’d you come from, boy?” Not-angel was saying, and Joe looked up to find him feeding his last donut to a waist-high golden retriever with lively eyes.

“Is he limping?” Bombshell asked, cooing at the dog like it was a baby.

“Poor thing,” Soccer-mom put in her line of dialogue.

If they were in the real world, this dog would be AI-assisted, like all their pets had become. They didn’t have strays anymore, but some people liked to harken back to the good old days when dogs and cats littered the streets as little vagabonds of a society that didn’t take care of their fellow mammals. Even gerbils were equipped with AI-assist so that they were perfectly harmless to children, no matter how awful they were to them.

“It doesn’t have a collar,” Eye-candy knelt down next to the dog and put her face right into the shame-faced dog. “I’ll take him with me. We’ll find your owner, won’t we, boy?”

Joe had a line here. He was pretty sure the pregnant pause was because he was supposed to speak up.

“Uh, I’ll go with you,” Joe offered. “Maybe we should all go?”

And then they had to put up resistance. Why? Because drama has conflict.

“I would, but my kids…” Soccer-mom started. “If they see a cute dog, I’m done for.”

“Better yet, we can get the kids in love and then sic the dog on their dad when he finally shows up,” Joe suggested, not thinking too fast.

Another pregnant pause as the AIs struggled to come up with something to say to that. Then Eye-candy laughed, and the dog barked like it was laughing too and the tension broke. Yeah, it was a joke. That’s it.

“Could you imagine his face?” Soccer-mom stubbed out her cigarette and stomped on the butt of it. The cigarette butt disintegrated into a harmless sawdust-like compostable material at the action, another thing that made Joe think that the tobacco industry hadn’t really changed its ways.

“We could just sit back and wait until he shows up and then we could do a road trip in the van together,” Joe suggested, causing a scramble for answering dialogue.

“I’m afraid that makes me odd woman out,” Eye-candy said, and Joe averted his eyes from her casually sexual shrug. “I can’t leave my car. I can take the dog to the authorities, though. Maybe we’ll meet again someday.”

“Nonsense,” Soccer-mom waved her concerns away with a flirtatious wink. “I’ve got to be back here on Monday to pick the kids up anyway. Come have an adventure with us. I’ll have you back here in a few days.”

“Where would I stay?” Eye-candy smiled at Soccer-mom. It seemed that if Joe wasn’t going to take the eye-candy bait, the World AI would work in a romantic angle somewhere. Soccer-mom and Eye-candy? Yeah, that could work. Of course, she would swing that way if it meant hitting some demographic.

“I’ve got room,” Soccer-mom blushed. Ugh.

“What about my tow truck?” Not-angel asked.

“You mean that one?” Bombshell pointed to the offramp that Joe really should have been keeping an eye on, because if his eyesight was to be trusted, that was Gomer with the tow truck coming into sight.

“That’s my cue,” Joe muttered and grabbed up his stuff in a big handful to head toward the men's bathroom. He pulled his cap low over his face even as he realized it was Gomer’s hat. Would Gomer notice?

Exp +500 (Find a Partner in Crime. Quest Complete!)