-9-

Casper was on his way to steal a very nice car, and he repeated, “Rascal eats a carp, rascal eats a carp.” Otis had given him the mantra before he left Otis's rooftop cargo container in the FEZ, where he'd been staying in a hammock, smoking Otis's stash, and losing at holographic boxing on FragNet for years. The mantra, Otis's crude anagram of the phrase, “Casper steals a car” was supposed to keep Casper calm and focused, but he just kept wondering what it meant.

A custom-made network jammer, built by the mysterious Carlos himself to quiet automotive anti-theft transmissions, was already turned on and doing its job inside a black nylon, euro-tourist, man-purse slung over Casper's shoulder. Casper thought the bag looked too much like a handbag with some tactical flavor, like Hi-5's purse with added pockets for grenades and clips.

He reminded himself of the network jammer's ability to neutralize the anti-theft signals that today's target, a Z-class Lenz luxury sedan, would undoubtedly generate once he stole it, and he couldn't argue with the ninja powers of the device, even if they did come with a stupid-looking, paramilitary-fashioned man-bag like this one. As Otis had told him, the point of this afternoon's exercise wasn't to look good; it was to get away clean with a stolen flagship Z-class sedan, and make many, many thousands of Amero.

The network jammer was, as Otis had put it, “A Carlos original, man. This, here is one real-time signal decoding, spectrum hopping, adaptive, uber-masking, badass piece of hoo-haa. Don't hold it near yer' nuts.”

Carlos was the friend that Otis never said anything about, except once when he said that if Casper ever need to buy some privacy, then he should go to Carlos. Casper never really understood what Otis had meant. All he knew was that Otis would disappear, presumably to hang with Carlos, and then he's show up later with money.

Whatever, Casper thought. He knew it was some hacker cracker gig that Otis wouldn't let him in on, and since Casper really didn't have that skill set, he couldn't complain.

Casper stole cars, that was his gig.

As he walked to the targeted vehicle's location, he noticed several other people on the Downtown District streets actually carrying the same bag, but he still wished there'd been time to find another one so he could do this dirty in proper style. He wanted to call Otis and bitch, but he'd left his mobile phone and anything else electronic and trackable back in Otis's rooftop Jin Corp cargo container. His phone wouldn't have gotten a peep out to the Network anyway. Not with Carlos's jammer reading, decoding, and putting the kaibash on any and all signals. It didn't limit itself to blocking anti-theft beacons. While Casper carried Carlos's jammer he was a walking electromagnetic dark zone with a twenty-five foot radius.

He snickered, watching his fellow pedestrians chatter away about anything and everything, only to have their calls dropped in mid-blather, as he passed. They stared dumbly as their phones were cut-off from the Network and briefly turned to oversized digital watches. They swore and cussed.

One man, clearly having a narco-derm withdrawal issue, expressed his frustration by throwing his phone to the concrete sidewalk with all his might, only to see his tiny, flattened ovoid, rubber-reinforced, MeePhone bounce into the street and be turned into an aerial hockey puck. First it bounced in a high arc off the windshield of a Northbound vehicle, then into the path of a Southbound vehicle, that passed it back to the oncoming traffic. Casper watched the mobile device knocked back and forth in a volley that lasted almost ten seconds, involving twelve cars and a creeping garbage bot. After a bad pass, the rubber MeePhone struck the vertically faced grill of an oncoming truck and skittered across the blacktop. It was well ruggedized, wasn't the least bit phased by the impacts, and now that it was out of the range of the network-jammer, it rang with surprising volume, demanding rescue.

The withdrawal-challenged executive who had spiked it to the sidewalk stared at it and began a series of foolhardy, immediately aborted and reinitiated motions to run into traffic and rescue his discarded prized possession. After seeing his ridiculous display, Casper felt better about the stupid euro-bag, the dirty, and just about everything. That was good because he was only a block from the Cosmetic Medical Center parking lot, where today's target Z-class Lenz luxury sedan was parked.

Otis cracked the owner's uncrackable MeePhone, and through a cloud of exhaled smoke, noted that she'd scheduled herself for a new form of outpatient liposuction today. Otis's quick, last-minute MeePhone cracking incursion this morning confirmed that the owner had driven the 300,000 Amero sedan to the Cos Med Center, where it would be parked, and left confidently unguarded, thanks to its Net-squawking, supposedly unjammable anti-theft system.

Casper's eyes found the target Z-class Lenz in the unattended lot, right where it was supposed to be. He paused in the thick stream of Downtown District pedestrian traffic and took a pull from his jade bowl for luck.

The only one guarding the narrow parking lot was the AniLux displayed, hundred foot-tall, Hi-5, Queen of PornoPop. Casper stared up at her and tried to figure out which sex she'd been born. Nobody knew for sure. The rumor was that Hi-5 was once Spy-5, and that her ginormous tool was grown in a secret U.S. Army research lab, could penetrate body-armor, and had been grafted on for a secret mission that she'd bugged out on to become the first PornoPop star in history. Casper didn't believe that one, but her lack of an Adam's apple was suspicious.

The megastar Queen of PornoPop was doing a plus-size model doggie-style, directly above the target Z-class Lenz, and with every thrusting action there was jiggle, wiggle, and shaking Newtonian reaction. The model's face was directly in the foreground with bare-breasted Hi-5 over her, silently mouthing, “Baby, 'O...O, Baby.”

Casper's neuro-transmitters were working overtime from the burst of sativa, and he was trying to use his Locko Loco decoder to get his pick on with the Lenz's locks, but the jiggly model's face was reflected, inverted, and crystal-clear in the surface of the sedan's racing-green painted roof. Every time he tried to work the cigarette-pack sized contact decoder on the sedan's lock, his eye caught some of the model's ridiculously mannered facial sexpressions.

The way she was hamming it up was making it tough to concentrate, but with the added rear-drive thrust from HI-5, and the jiggle that traveled all the way up the model's body and through her cheeks with every flesh-on-flesh impact, Casper was giggling hard enough that he a tough time holding the Locko Loco decoder still. He couldn't keep all thirteen contact prongs in even roughly the same area of the door, let alone directly over the electronic locking mechanism.

Casper nearly pissed himself when, in apparent response to Hi-5's undeclared hole-in-one, the model's sexpression became wide-eyed, and her lips rounded out so that Casper heard her voice, despite the silence of the AniLux billboard video, cry a synesthesic, “Woooooooooo!” It was all the worse, since Casper thought the plus-size model was pretty hot, and a stiffy was the last thing he needed to help him look inconspicuous while stealing a car.

He gave up trying to hold the Locko Loco in place himself. After affixing it over the Z-class's driver's-side door lock with duct tape that he always carried just-in-case, he was able to slide, hunched forwards to hide his uncontrollable woodie, down against the door of the Z-class, to lie on the parking lot's warm asphalt surface. There, he held his aching belly and tried to forget the scene above him that repeated in an endless, paralyzing, two-minute loop.

After twenty seconds on the asphalt, Casper heard a soft triple-beep from the decoder, and looking up, he saw all six of the LEDs on the Locko Loco blinking bright green. Three seconds later, the Lenz sedan's impenetrable door unlocked itself with a soft, “ph-thunkd” noise that he felt on his back.

Casper rose. Making a point to ignore Hi-5 and her jiggly co-star model, he opened the driver's side door. There was no audible alarm and the word, 'Recognized' flashed across the dashboard along with the name, 'Shauna Aziz'. If the luxury car was calling on the Network for help, thanks to Carlos's network jammer, nobody would hear its cries. Casper slid into the real leather seats, and after reading his body shape and weight, the seat molded its shape to a perfect custom fit for Casper's form. Cool air caressed his body, blown through apertures too small for the naked eye to perceive. The car spoke to him in a soothing woman's voice with a British news agency accent, “Welcome back, Ms. Aziz. Did you enjoy your...appointment at the Cosmetic Medical Center on 325 Worthington Ave?” There was a barely perceptible break in the rhythm of the Lenz on-board computer's delivery as it failed to connect to the Network and was forced to rely on the memory of its last conversation with Ms. Aziz's MeePhone to know where it was.

Casper was overjoyed that a tactical team had not descended from a silently hovering helicopter, apprehending the arrogant cur who dared to steal a flagship Z-class Lenz luxury sedan, and he exclaimed, “Fuck, yeah!”

“Do you wish to visit a sex club, Ms. Aziz?” The car's onboard computer hadn't learned profanity yet, and being cut-off from the Network by the jammer left it a little confused.

Casper wore his finest 'n widest shit-eating-grin and explained, “Uh, no... I'm just really happy, 'ya know?”

“Fuck, yeah.” the car agreed, in its classy Englishwoman's voice, “I am really happy, too. Shall we go?”

“Fuckin' A!”

“Agreed, Ms. Aziz, Fucking A.” The engine roared to life, then immediately settled into a purring idle that gave Casper goosebumps. “I am experiencing a network interruption... Always Net Navigation systems are offline... Do you mind driving?”

Casper sighed. He wouldn't have it any other way. “I would Love to drive,” he said. The steering wheel moved itself into a position more comfortable than the one Casper would have selected for himself. He was in love.

“Music?” the car asked, as he backed the sedan out of its parking space.

“Sure, whaddaya got?” Casper pulled out of the lot and turned right, entering the brisk flow of Worthington Avenue traffic.

“Would you like to hear the audio soundtrack of the video chart-buster by Hi-5, Queen of PornoPop, that was playing above your vehicle?” Casper started laughing again, remembering the plus model's sexpressions. He knew hearing Hi-5 and the jiggly model goin' at it would not be a Good Idea while driving.

Casper told the car's computer, “Sure, let's hear it!”