Real World

I'll call him Pippin. He always looked a little like a hobbit: short, with bright eyes and determinedly curly hair. He dropped out of high school when he found a hack for a popular piece of hardware. He traded the hacked hardware for a car which he selected because he'd recently seen it in a movie. Driving that around was fun for a while, but he sold his toy pretty promptly when he found out the price of an oil change. He tried college for a year, then started bumming around Umbrella, and rooming with Carne, which is how I met him. A year later I ran into him in Vegas and he hitched back with us to California to sleep on the couch. Now he sat in the living room couch of Alpha, sprawled in the pile of clothes he dumped out of his backpack.

"I need a job," I said, "Acad's ending soon, and I don't know what I'm going to do."

"Jobs suck. You're smart, why should you have to work 8 hours a day?"

***

Green actually finished school, but that was mostly because he enjoyed it. Writing apps for the iPhone had always been his real source of income.

I met him when he emailed a list of about 400 some people asking if anybody could give him a ride from the train station to the Torii. At the time I was sure I didn't like this kid who couldn't figure out how the public transit worked, but it is hard to stay mad at anybody who always smiles and means it. He stayed with Nexus for a week then disappeared, to return for one of Tynan's lectures. We asked him how long he planned to stay in the area, and he shrugged.

In reality he lived on our couch for about a month. Pretty sick deal for us, since he kept cleaning the house for us during that time.

***

"Hey," Ray says into the phone, "You should come out here." He puts his hand over his other year and tilts his head to smile at the phone, "You'll never guess who's here." There was a pause, and the bounty hunters in the lab and I looked at each other. "She says she knows you," he continued, "honestly, I didn't even know you knew Pika."

Pippin arrived from Chicago two days later. Apparently he'd been bumming around there buying beer for a fraternity in exchange for a spot on the couch to sleep. During the day he snuck into classes at the local university, sometimes to learn things, but mostly pretending to be an English major in order to pick up chicks.

"Good to see you again,"

"You too," he smiled, "you still working full-time jobs?"

***

"I'm going to Vietnam," Green said.

"Why?"

"Frozen yogurt?"

"What?"

He laughed a little, "my friend is opening a frozen yogurt shop there, I figured I'd come up for the grand opening."

I didn't get it.

"Cost of living is low there, and I'm self-employed, so I can work from wherever I want really."

There was a pause.

"Don't look jealous like that. Why don't you come with me?"

"I... can't program iPhone, I don't even have one."

"You'll figure it out, and if not that something else. You just need to believe you can really do it."

I sat, and I thought about it, but his plane was leaving before I had really gotten together the nerve to do it.

"I'm leaving this book with you," he said, "I want you to believe you can do it."

It was called "The four hour work week" and had a picture of a man on the cover laying in a hammock under palm trees. It called people like Pippin and Green 'the new rich.'

***

It's one of those relaxed evenings, and we're both sitting on couches staring at the ceiling in Alpha. I'm playing with a ball, and Pippin is idly turning a new Defcon blackbadge over in his hands.

"Do you think you could go back to the real world if you wanted to?"

"I live in the real world."

There is a funny sort of pause as I raise my eyebrows and catch his eyes.

"Ok, so I don't, but why would I want to go back there? The real world sucks."

"Yeah, well lets say you wanted to."

"Of course. I can do anything if I want to."