How to go to the Bank, for Kids. -by Jim Wylder
_
“Okay, but read the note.” The lady at the counter just
stared blankly. “Are you here for withdrawal, deposit, to set up an account
close an account, or other buisness?” He slammed his fist on the counter, “No! Just,
read the note damn it!”
“I’m sorry, but national policy requires you to state the nature of your visit to the Gongen national bank before any transaction may occur. Are you here for withdrawal, deposit, to set up an account close an account, or other buisness?”
I hadn’t wanted to go to the bank. I didn’t want to be at the bank. I wanted to be at home, watching the holo projector while surfing the internet on my datapad. The dog kept changing the channels, looking up at me with its little adorable eyes. “No, I’m not falling for it.” It cocked its head and barked. “Okay fine, watch what you want. And learn to talk back some time.” It barked again. “Fine. But we’re having Salsbery steak for dinner. With rice. And Milk.” It whined and shook its head, that was just a little too cute and mad-scientist smart for its own good. Or, well, I probably just assume that. It changes the channels, and that is the mark of a man.
Getting up, I went to the fridge, and sorted through it: Salisbury steak, check. Leftover rice, check. Milk… Milk… Okay, damn it, we were out of milk. I just kind of stared at the fridge, and my lip curled into a sneer. “Who… Used up the milk.” I looked at my doggie Deigan, “Et tu, Deigan?” It put its paws over its eyes. “Hotaru!” I yelled, “Do we have any more milk?” She ran down the stairs, pushing her hair back behind her ear as she did so. “What’s up Ki-san?” She always said Ki-san. I mean geez, this isn’t a most honorable vacuum sales place, where everybody is most valuable customer. Being that the customer is always right, I wanted to answer wittily. No I didn’t. “We’re out of milk. I like milk.” Hotaru’s eyes got big, and I think I might have blown her ideas of what reality was. “You drink milk Ki-San?” If this were a pretentious French-Earther film, there would have been a montage of important landmarks and objects from her life breaking or bursting into flame reflected in her eyes. I mean, there wasn’t, just the kitchen counters and sparkling new government sanctioned appliances, but I imaged it. Well, I didn’t then, but, whatever. Anyways, so I was all like, “Did you think I only drank coffee?” and then she started apologizing for not having enough milk, as though it had been her personal and sacred duty to keep the fridge stocked with some milk in case I wanted some or something. I wish she was as chill as the fridge.
“Ki-San, I will make this right, right away.” I just kind of stared, and the dog stared at me, and everybody was staring. Then Hotaru’s comm went off. She spoke into it a few times, glancing up and me, her lush black hair falling in perfectly coordinated clumps in front of her eyes, and shut it off. “Ki-San, I am going on a date. With a boy.” She tilted in a weird way, like she had asked a question. For a few seconds I wondered if someone was playing a prank and had made me deaf and I’d missed the question. Or maybe I’d been kidnapped and this wasn’t really Hotaru. Or maybe we were in a computer simulatation. Then I thought, screw it, I have no idea what she’s talking out. “So, Ki, I’m going to leave for that, the date, with another boy, who isn’t you,” geez, I caught that the first time. I can take a hint lady, “but if you wanted to go to the grocery store, with me, you could ask me to.” I thought about it. I could walk. It wasn’t that far. Anyways I didn’t want to spoil her plans or whatever. “Naw, I’m good, I’ll just walk on over there.” She looked hurt. I tried to figure out why as I walked over, but nothing seemed to jive right. “What do you think Deigan?” Deigan just lowered his lil’ doggie head. “That’s what I thought. No advice.”
I’ll skip the walk over. There was some really hot sunlight, and there were a lot of people. It was awful.
I wish I could go for Hotaru someday. I mean, I like her. But I’m not exactly qualified to be anybody’s anything. At least not until I got some milk. I grabbed the milk out of the eternal compression refrigeration and storage unit, Ecrasu for short, and walked over to the check out. Or tried to. “Sir, you can’t bring your dog in here.” Deigan was nobly following at my heals, and also as I figured out quickly lingering in front of vents so his fur shimmered as he walked. Show off. “I’d like to buy this milk.” The man shook his head, “I’m sorry sir, but there are no pets allowed in here.”
“Oh, that’s okay, Deigan is family.”
“I don’t care what you call him sir. No non-humans allowed.”
“Don’t we have like, an alliance with some Quay? Do you like pissing them off? They are really tall, and they will put armbands on you.” He gave me a blank look. “If they put the armband on you, they kill you? No?” I suddenly realized nobody would get that reference. I didn’t even remember it. “Look, sir, Gongenized Quay are welcomed as one of our own.”
“Can I just buy my milk?”
“Its against the policy of our public food dispensing service.” I sighed. I really didn’t want to do this. I could be at home, just not drinking milk, and being mildly liked and mostly useless. “If you don’t leave, I’m calling security.”
“Oh come on!” He called security. My eye twitched.
Fine. Fine. He wants to go, I’ll go. We can do this. I pulled my sleeve up, and began typing on the computer on my left arm. It only took me a few seconds to alter the protocol documents for running grocery dispersal buildings going back for the last 5 years to all affirm that dogs could be brought in side as long as they didn’t pee on anything, and that employees obstructing dog owners should be held for interrogation and charged with treason. As the security bots dragged him off, I scanned the milk, and put my credit stick into the machine. Then the words I had been dreading subconsciously came up on the screen.
“ACCOUNT ON HOLD- PLEASE CONTACT BANK.”
Maybe I should have just hacked the bank. But the thing was, I was tired of doing stuff today, so I just walked over there.
And that’s how I got in line behind this guy.
“Just read the note already!”
“I’m sorry, but you need to state your reason for being here. Are you here for withdrawal, deposit, to set up an account close an account, or other business?” The man’s eye twitched. And his mouth twitched. There was a lot of twitching. “Okay. Fine. This is a hold up.”
“Yes.” Said the teller, “You are holding up the line.” He held up a gun. “Oh, that kind of holdup!”
“Yeah that kind of- EVERYBODY GET ON THE FLOOR!”
The other two robbers pulled their high end plasma rifles from their coats, and the one at the desk jumped over the counter and started pounding the ceiling with bolts of energy, causing little bits of melted rebar to drop down onto the crowd at the bank.
“This is a hold up! You are going to remain on the floor, or you will be shot. If you get up, you will be shot. If you move, you will be shot. Now, remain where you are, and this will all end simply.” I was wrong, there were actually two more robbers, bringing the total to 5. I was wondering why the whole team of them hadn’t been taken out by snipers, when I saw that one nice young gent was going around placing what looked like triggered mines hastily attached to chains to make a cheap necklace around everybody’s neck. I tried to be inconspicuous as I found the wireless signal, and disabled all the mines. Close one. I then called the cops.
Now, the fact that I managed to do all that is really more up to the incompetence of the robbers then me being super awesome. They were already walking through the crowd, grabbing headsets and computer pads, making sure that they totally showed those people who already reported their numbers and placement to the cops that they were in charge, dammit!
It was here that things went south. One of the Robbers came from the back and said the hacker they had brought couldn’t break the lock. I was busy counter hacking him, having managed to break into the banks “closed” internal systems through an outside email interface, and inserting a few lines of code to establish a permalink to my arm pc. However, you can only rapidly tap your fingers on a glowing computer on your arm before even the dullest of minds realized that you are busy hacking their hacking attempts. “Hey! You there.” I tried to look like I didn’t think he was talking to me. He pistol whipped me in the face. “Yeah you, I’m talking to you.” I had a dream once, a dream that guns had wireless signal interfaces, and I could skip through fields of soldiers and only worry about getting knifed. I have to live with cold hard reality though, and all I could do was sever all their communication so I could maybe get back in line and get my money so I could drink my milk. Gah. I shouldn’t have let Hotaru go on that date. I could have always just paid her back for the milk. Seriously.
“You’re hacking us.” I put on the straighted face I could. “No, I’m not.”
“Sounds honest to me Li.” The man who was apparently named Li looked over. “I’m not, the name you said, I’m Ground Hawk. Ground Hawk. Your name is Brazillian Elephant.” My pistol whippin’ buddy looked confused. “No, I’m Ken.”
“Dammit Ken, I mean, Brazil, get him over here.” They dragged me over, literally, as I let my body go limp and closed my eyes. I was not going to be expending any more energy on this situation
My body stopped moving, and I opened my eyes to see Li, who wouldn’t be winning any beauty pageants any time soon, lording over me with another gun.
“So, you’re the hacker that’s been causing us all the problems over the last ten minutes.” Well, couldn’t really argue with that, but I did. “Nope. Do not know what you’re talking about.”
“Look, stop messing around. We know you are Sang Ki, I saw you on the news once, with that Hero Tetsuya.” Shh. Hear that? Listen close. That, dear friends, is the sound of my street cred dying. “NO! Tetsuya is a liar and a Nazi sympathizer! All my associations with him were- oh shit you just wanted to see if I’d react like that didn’t you?”
“Yep.” Nodded Li, “open the bank vault?”
“Right away sir!”
I was working on opening the door when I asked the robber guarding me a question: “can you draw me a mobious strip?”
“Mobious?”
“Yeah, you know, it never ends.”
“Like a circle?”
“No, like it folds around itself.”
“I don’t believe in that.”
“Look, I’m not asking that, I just need to draw one to look at it so I can lay in the nona-decimal coding.” He paused, “I think that goes against my religion.”
“What religion would possibly not like that?”
“Whatever my wife’s is.”
“Well, Saint Bowie loves all that is mobious, after all, he titled a work, “the width of a circle!””
“I thought you said it wasn’t a cicle.”
“In the same of Space Pope John Paul the VIIIth! Are you going to draw that or not?”
“No.”
I looked at the lock, and made sure I had messed with it enough that the bank itself was going to have a pain opening it. “Well than I can’t help you any more.”
“Li, he’s not cooperating.” Li looked over, “Well, throw him in the janitor’s closet.”
The non-mobius man picked me up, and carried me over to the janitor’s closet, which smelled of cheap cleaning chemicals. I heard the non-electric door lock.
Now, sitting alone in that room, I thought I would finally be free to sleep. Just relax and wait for this whole thing to blow over. That isn’t what happened. Something I wasn’t expecting happened. I was angry. Really really angry. I wanted my Milk Dammit. Hotaru was out on a date- oh shit, and that whole thing had been her trying to invite me to go with her to the grocery store instead of going with him. Great. I’m and idiot. They’re indiots. Everybody is an idiot. And there is only one thing to do when that happens; you have to go mad scientist on them. I looked around. My eyes got keen and I was all of a sudden my own man. There were broken robots, a few porter bots, a busted diplomacy bot, a cleaning bot… perfect. I had my plan. I ripped the arms and legs off the porter bots. I needed six. Or maybe eight. I’d decide while I worked. I needed the arm from the diplomacy bot. I needed to modify it a little… Aha, and take cleaning fluid injector from the cleaning robot. Perfect.
As I stood in front of my creation, I felt real pride for the first time in years.
When it bashed the closet door down, and scampered down squeeling its fierce robotic war cry, the robbers were not expecting what they had earned. “Go my Robot Scorpian minion! Sting them in the name of all that is Mobius!” I heard one say he didn’t really belive that, before he was injected with toxic cleaning solution. The mechanical creature squeeled, and leaped ten feet in the air as it tackled Li and broke his arms and probably a few limbs. It stung the next robber, and chased the other two down, grabbing them both with its unholy arms and stinging them. As I stepped toward the main hall of the bank, the freed populace looked up at me and cried in joy. The cops gave me a medal, and I had to smile and take a lot of pictures.
When it was all over, I sat down back at home, and turned the holo projector on. “So how was your day?” asked Hotaru. I shrugged, and took a sip of milk straight from the carton. “Eh, it was alright.” Hotaru nodded. “Why is there a robot scorpion in the foyer?” The Dog changed the channel. I shrugged.
Oh, and turns out I was wrong, Li won best looking life sentence prisoner that fall.
“I’m sorry, but national policy requires you to state the nature of your visit to the Gongen national bank before any transaction may occur. Are you here for withdrawal, deposit, to set up an account close an account, or other buisness?”
I hadn’t wanted to go to the bank. I didn’t want to be at the bank. I wanted to be at home, watching the holo projector while surfing the internet on my datapad. The dog kept changing the channels, looking up at me with its little adorable eyes. “No, I’m not falling for it.” It cocked its head and barked. “Okay fine, watch what you want. And learn to talk back some time.” It barked again. “Fine. But we’re having Salsbery steak for dinner. With rice. And Milk.” It whined and shook its head, that was just a little too cute and mad-scientist smart for its own good. Or, well, I probably just assume that. It changes the channels, and that is the mark of a man.
Getting up, I went to the fridge, and sorted through it: Salisbury steak, check. Leftover rice, check. Milk… Milk… Okay, damn it, we were out of milk. I just kind of stared at the fridge, and my lip curled into a sneer. “Who… Used up the milk.” I looked at my doggie Deigan, “Et tu, Deigan?” It put its paws over its eyes. “Hotaru!” I yelled, “Do we have any more milk?” She ran down the stairs, pushing her hair back behind her ear as she did so. “What’s up Ki-san?” She always said Ki-san. I mean geez, this isn’t a most honorable vacuum sales place, where everybody is most valuable customer. Being that the customer is always right, I wanted to answer wittily. No I didn’t. “We’re out of milk. I like milk.” Hotaru’s eyes got big, and I think I might have blown her ideas of what reality was. “You drink milk Ki-San?” If this were a pretentious French-Earther film, there would have been a montage of important landmarks and objects from her life breaking or bursting into flame reflected in her eyes. I mean, there wasn’t, just the kitchen counters and sparkling new government sanctioned appliances, but I imaged it. Well, I didn’t then, but, whatever. Anyways, so I was all like, “Did you think I only drank coffee?” and then she started apologizing for not having enough milk, as though it had been her personal and sacred duty to keep the fridge stocked with some milk in case I wanted some or something. I wish she was as chill as the fridge.
“Ki-San, I will make this right, right away.” I just kind of stared, and the dog stared at me, and everybody was staring. Then Hotaru’s comm went off. She spoke into it a few times, glancing up and me, her lush black hair falling in perfectly coordinated clumps in front of her eyes, and shut it off. “Ki-San, I am going on a date. With a boy.” She tilted in a weird way, like she had asked a question. For a few seconds I wondered if someone was playing a prank and had made me deaf and I’d missed the question. Or maybe I’d been kidnapped and this wasn’t really Hotaru. Or maybe we were in a computer simulatation. Then I thought, screw it, I have no idea what she’s talking out. “So, Ki, I’m going to leave for that, the date, with another boy, who isn’t you,” geez, I caught that the first time. I can take a hint lady, “but if you wanted to go to the grocery store, with me, you could ask me to.” I thought about it. I could walk. It wasn’t that far. Anyways I didn’t want to spoil her plans or whatever. “Naw, I’m good, I’ll just walk on over there.” She looked hurt. I tried to figure out why as I walked over, but nothing seemed to jive right. “What do you think Deigan?” Deigan just lowered his lil’ doggie head. “That’s what I thought. No advice.”
I’ll skip the walk over. There was some really hot sunlight, and there were a lot of people. It was awful.
I wish I could go for Hotaru someday. I mean, I like her. But I’m not exactly qualified to be anybody’s anything. At least not until I got some milk. I grabbed the milk out of the eternal compression refrigeration and storage unit, Ecrasu for short, and walked over to the check out. Or tried to. “Sir, you can’t bring your dog in here.” Deigan was nobly following at my heals, and also as I figured out quickly lingering in front of vents so his fur shimmered as he walked. Show off. “I’d like to buy this milk.” The man shook his head, “I’m sorry sir, but there are no pets allowed in here.”
“Oh, that’s okay, Deigan is family.”
“I don’t care what you call him sir. No non-humans allowed.”
“Don’t we have like, an alliance with some Quay? Do you like pissing them off? They are really tall, and they will put armbands on you.” He gave me a blank look. “If they put the armband on you, they kill you? No?” I suddenly realized nobody would get that reference. I didn’t even remember it. “Look, sir, Gongenized Quay are welcomed as one of our own.”
“Can I just buy my milk?”
“Its against the policy of our public food dispensing service.” I sighed. I really didn’t want to do this. I could be at home, just not drinking milk, and being mildly liked and mostly useless. “If you don’t leave, I’m calling security.”
“Oh come on!” He called security. My eye twitched.
Fine. Fine. He wants to go, I’ll go. We can do this. I pulled my sleeve up, and began typing on the computer on my left arm. It only took me a few seconds to alter the protocol documents for running grocery dispersal buildings going back for the last 5 years to all affirm that dogs could be brought in side as long as they didn’t pee on anything, and that employees obstructing dog owners should be held for interrogation and charged with treason. As the security bots dragged him off, I scanned the milk, and put my credit stick into the machine. Then the words I had been dreading subconsciously came up on the screen.
“ACCOUNT ON HOLD- PLEASE CONTACT BANK.”
Maybe I should have just hacked the bank. But the thing was, I was tired of doing stuff today, so I just walked over there.
And that’s how I got in line behind this guy.
“Just read the note already!”
“I’m sorry, but you need to state your reason for being here. Are you here for withdrawal, deposit, to set up an account close an account, or other business?” The man’s eye twitched. And his mouth twitched. There was a lot of twitching. “Okay. Fine. This is a hold up.”
“Yes.” Said the teller, “You are holding up the line.” He held up a gun. “Oh, that kind of holdup!”
“Yeah that kind of- EVERYBODY GET ON THE FLOOR!”
The other two robbers pulled their high end plasma rifles from their coats, and the one at the desk jumped over the counter and started pounding the ceiling with bolts of energy, causing little bits of melted rebar to drop down onto the crowd at the bank.
“This is a hold up! You are going to remain on the floor, or you will be shot. If you get up, you will be shot. If you move, you will be shot. Now, remain where you are, and this will all end simply.” I was wrong, there were actually two more robbers, bringing the total to 5. I was wondering why the whole team of them hadn’t been taken out by snipers, when I saw that one nice young gent was going around placing what looked like triggered mines hastily attached to chains to make a cheap necklace around everybody’s neck. I tried to be inconspicuous as I found the wireless signal, and disabled all the mines. Close one. I then called the cops.
Now, the fact that I managed to do all that is really more up to the incompetence of the robbers then me being super awesome. They were already walking through the crowd, grabbing headsets and computer pads, making sure that they totally showed those people who already reported their numbers and placement to the cops that they were in charge, dammit!
It was here that things went south. One of the Robbers came from the back and said the hacker they had brought couldn’t break the lock. I was busy counter hacking him, having managed to break into the banks “closed” internal systems through an outside email interface, and inserting a few lines of code to establish a permalink to my arm pc. However, you can only rapidly tap your fingers on a glowing computer on your arm before even the dullest of minds realized that you are busy hacking their hacking attempts. “Hey! You there.” I tried to look like I didn’t think he was talking to me. He pistol whipped me in the face. “Yeah you, I’m talking to you.” I had a dream once, a dream that guns had wireless signal interfaces, and I could skip through fields of soldiers and only worry about getting knifed. I have to live with cold hard reality though, and all I could do was sever all their communication so I could maybe get back in line and get my money so I could drink my milk. Gah. I shouldn’t have let Hotaru go on that date. I could have always just paid her back for the milk. Seriously.
“You’re hacking us.” I put on the straighted face I could. “No, I’m not.”
“Sounds honest to me Li.” The man who was apparently named Li looked over. “I’m not, the name you said, I’m Ground Hawk. Ground Hawk. Your name is Brazillian Elephant.” My pistol whippin’ buddy looked confused. “No, I’m Ken.”
“Dammit Ken, I mean, Brazil, get him over here.” They dragged me over, literally, as I let my body go limp and closed my eyes. I was not going to be expending any more energy on this situation
My body stopped moving, and I opened my eyes to see Li, who wouldn’t be winning any beauty pageants any time soon, lording over me with another gun.
“So, you’re the hacker that’s been causing us all the problems over the last ten minutes.” Well, couldn’t really argue with that, but I did. “Nope. Do not know what you’re talking about.”
“Look, stop messing around. We know you are Sang Ki, I saw you on the news once, with that Hero Tetsuya.” Shh. Hear that? Listen close. That, dear friends, is the sound of my street cred dying. “NO! Tetsuya is a liar and a Nazi sympathizer! All my associations with him were- oh shit you just wanted to see if I’d react like that didn’t you?”
“Yep.” Nodded Li, “open the bank vault?”
“Right away sir!”
I was working on opening the door when I asked the robber guarding me a question: “can you draw me a mobious strip?”
“Mobious?”
“Yeah, you know, it never ends.”
“Like a circle?”
“No, like it folds around itself.”
“I don’t believe in that.”
“Look, I’m not asking that, I just need to draw one to look at it so I can lay in the nona-decimal coding.” He paused, “I think that goes against my religion.”
“What religion would possibly not like that?”
“Whatever my wife’s is.”
“Well, Saint Bowie loves all that is mobious, after all, he titled a work, “the width of a circle!””
“I thought you said it wasn’t a cicle.”
“In the same of Space Pope John Paul the VIIIth! Are you going to draw that or not?”
“No.”
I looked at the lock, and made sure I had messed with it enough that the bank itself was going to have a pain opening it. “Well than I can’t help you any more.”
“Li, he’s not cooperating.” Li looked over, “Well, throw him in the janitor’s closet.”
The non-mobius man picked me up, and carried me over to the janitor’s closet, which smelled of cheap cleaning chemicals. I heard the non-electric door lock.
Now, sitting alone in that room, I thought I would finally be free to sleep. Just relax and wait for this whole thing to blow over. That isn’t what happened. Something I wasn’t expecting happened. I was angry. Really really angry. I wanted my Milk Dammit. Hotaru was out on a date- oh shit, and that whole thing had been her trying to invite me to go with her to the grocery store instead of going with him. Great. I’m and idiot. They’re indiots. Everybody is an idiot. And there is only one thing to do when that happens; you have to go mad scientist on them. I looked around. My eyes got keen and I was all of a sudden my own man. There were broken robots, a few porter bots, a busted diplomacy bot, a cleaning bot… perfect. I had my plan. I ripped the arms and legs off the porter bots. I needed six. Or maybe eight. I’d decide while I worked. I needed the arm from the diplomacy bot. I needed to modify it a little… Aha, and take cleaning fluid injector from the cleaning robot. Perfect.
As I stood in front of my creation, I felt real pride for the first time in years.
When it bashed the closet door down, and scampered down squeeling its fierce robotic war cry, the robbers were not expecting what they had earned. “Go my Robot Scorpian minion! Sting them in the name of all that is Mobius!” I heard one say he didn’t really belive that, before he was injected with toxic cleaning solution. The mechanical creature squeeled, and leaped ten feet in the air as it tackled Li and broke his arms and probably a few limbs. It stung the next robber, and chased the other two down, grabbing them both with its unholy arms and stinging them. As I stepped toward the main hall of the bank, the freed populace looked up at me and cried in joy. The cops gave me a medal, and I had to smile and take a lot of pictures.
When it was all over, I sat down back at home, and turned the holo projector on. “So how was your day?” asked Hotaru. I shrugged, and took a sip of milk straight from the carton. “Eh, it was alright.” Hotaru nodded. “Why is there a robot scorpion in the foyer?” The Dog changed the channel. I shrugged.
Oh, and turns out I was wrong, Li won best looking life sentence prisoner that fall.