The next day at his diesel mechanic job, Darren talked again with the guy who was going to make the conversation band for him. “Hey Mike,” Darren said, handing him an envelope when he was sure no one was looking. “Here’s my second payment. I wish I didn’t have to do it this way. You know I can’t withdraw and carry too much cash at once. If I do and get caught by a scanner, it could impact my Score. But I have the money. Any chance you’ll give me the band before it’s all paid for?”
“I totally understand,” Mike replied. “I can’t carry too much cash at one time either so it wouldn’t do any good even if you could bring it to me all at once.” Mike looked distinguished with his dark skin, tall and lean build, and dark curly hair showing a little gray on the sides. With his glasses and bigger than normal nose it seemed like he should be teaching physics in front of a classroom rather than spinning greasy wrenches as a mechanic.
“How long do you figure it will take to pay it off at this rate?” asked Mike, already knowing the answer.
“About three more weeks,” replied Darren.
Mike thought for a moment. “Because I trust you, Darren, I’ll give you the band in two weeks. Oh, and I’ll give it to you then also because you’re going to show me the image of your lovely lady again.”
“Thanks, I can’t wait,” said Darren, smiling while he pulled out his palm screen and projected the full scale three dimensional hologram image of Amber in front of them. She looked fabulous in her short shorts and halter top.
“Nice,” Mike said, eyes glued to the image. It was funny how Mike now all of a sudden wanted to continue chit chatting.
Darren smiled. In two weeks he’d have the first part of his plan implemented. He and Amber both could use the conversation band, taking turns wearing it around the house and if they kept their right arms in close proximity, it could act on both of their Chips at the same time.
That evening at the news agency, Darren began his second night in the new Article Researcher position. He was fascinated by the fact that he had such easy, unsupervised access to the Line. He had received some on the job training the first night, consisting of a few hours explanation from a co-worker in that same position, followed by self-training videos. He was pretty much expected to be up and running after the first day.
Actually, Darren thought it was pretty easy work. Although the job involved research for information to help the actual article writers, the most mundane part that nobody seemed to like was manually uploading the completed stories to a long list of web sites for publication. So Darren’s first assigned tasks were not to research, but upload articles. He thought it was a stroke of luck that he would so quickly end up doing the very thing that gave him an inside track to the Line, and that no one else was even interested in doing, much less supervising him.