Dear Diary:
I think my mother would approve of Stephen. She always asks if the men I go out with have jobs, how much money they make, are they polite, do they pay, do they open doors, all that non-egalitarian shit that pisses me off. Stephen doesn't precisely have a job, in the nine-to-five sense, but he makes good money, I think inventing things that he sells or maybe licenses. The details are not yet clear. He helps with coats, opens doors and insists on paying. He has a great ass, though, and is interesting to talk to and funny. I think I'll go out with him again. At least I can tell mom I'm seeing someone. That'd be nice for a change.
Dear Diary:
I can't believe I haven't written anything for over a week. And the last entry was so short!
I've been out with Steve four days out of the last week. I haven't had any time for George (which is a pity, since he'll be moving out of the city in a month, so if I put it off too long, I won't see him again before he goes, which would suck), or even Erik. Erik is starting to nag, in fact. That was supposed to be casual, but I think he's gotten used to seeing me at least once a week, and missing makes him a bit touchy. I've introduced Stephen to a couple of my girlfriends, Nancy and Tericia. Tericia doesn't like him at all, but Nancy has fallen hard. That's not a good sign. Nancy's judgment is usually terrible, and Tericia is psychic when it comes to losers (not that that stops her from sleeping with them, but she is good at ditching them when they become tiresome, which is more than can be said for Nancy, or, for that matter, me).
I've decided that this chivalry thing is not as bad as I had thought. Steve at no point denigrates my intelligence or abilities or anything bad-chauvinistic like that. He flirts a little bit much with my friends, and he brought up a fantasy of his last night that I am so tired of hearing about from men: he wants to have a threesome. I don't know how serious he was about it. I was noncommital. Maybe he'll back off. I told my mom about him, and she wanted to know what she'd invented. I'm not sure any more that he is an inventor. He talks a lot about the stock market, and he picked me up in a new car last night, a Boxster. It isn't like the Prelude he had before wasn't adequate, either. When I told Tericia about the new car, she suggested I should at least string him along long enough to get to drive the car a few times.
Dear Diary:
I'm doing a little better, I see. Only three days since my last entry. I remembered to write because I just got off the phone with mom. Steve used to be a computer programmer for some kind of government contractor, and recently started his own business. He says he's invented something that helps him invest really effectively in the stock market. Mom is skeptical. For that matter, so am I. He's very vague about what the invention is. I assumed, since he's a programmer (he always says was, but once a geek, always a geek, I say. I dated this musician once who said he hadn't written any code for the last five years, but put him in a room with another geek and they'd be wrangling about programming languages in about five seconds).
If it is a program, then this guy is probably a loser. Everyone has a system, for Monaco, for Vegas, for Wall Street. Some people win for a while, but eventually, they take a few too many risks and the environment changes and the system bites 'em in the ass when they least expect it. But when I said that, he laughed and agreed, and we swapped stories about head-and-shoulders formations, and candlesticks and moving averages. It sounded like he knew better than to believe any of that technical trend analysis crap. But if it isn't a program, what could it possibly be?
Maybe he's a drug dealer.
Dear Diary:
What a broken record I am. This time it's been a month. And exactly the sort of month I'll probably want to have had diary entries for. I'm going to try to reconstruct it.
About a week after my last entry, my landlady told me she was going to be selling the house I've been renting with Kevin and Darla and we'd all have to move out by the end of the month. Of course I had to scramble. Renting in this market really sucks. All those geeks out there thinking they're about to get rich and desperate for any place to live while they sock away the stock options. They don't negotiate, and prices are up everywhere. Oh well, I suppose that's what I should expect. A few years of recession and no rent increases; landlady gets to make it up now. She's looking to sell before the bubble bursts. Reasonable, but a pain in the neck for me.
Kevin and Darla had been planning on buying anyway. They got lucky and closed on a house. They'll have to live at her sister's place for a couple weeks, but then they get to move in a place of their very own. They got a good rate on their loan, too, but they don't need a roomie anymore, so I was on my own.
I whined to Steve, who had bought a house shortly before I met him. I'd seen the place a few times and wondered why he didn't have a roomie. It's one of those weird houses with two master suites and a lavatory downstairs, huge gourmet kitchen, bonus room, formal dining room, living room, the works. He's hired someone to rebuild the deck out back and install a hot tub, too. It's going to be fantastic, and even Tericia is starting to think that his sense of humor can be tolerated. She's taken to calling it "casual cruelty based in fact" instead of just calling him a viciously arrogant bastard with no sympathy for those less fortunate than him.
As I thought he might, he fell all over himself inviting me to move in with him. He's still being careful to respect my preferences for an even-handed relationship though, and when I said I couldn't move in without paying rent, offered to charge me what I was paying my landlady plus 10%, which is still dirt cheap in this market, and unheard of considering the amenities, but with that kind of offer, I didn't think I could explain to my mom or my friends why I'd turned him down, so I have moved in.
I feel like I should be a lot more enthusiastic about this arrangement. He owns that place free and clear. Even if he loses his shirt in the market, there's the car and the house to fall back on, plus he could work as a programmer anywhere in this market. But that's the stuff mom cares about, not me, and while Tericia can forgive some of his humor, it gets harder and harder for me to ignore.
Who am I kidding? If it was just the jokes, it'd be fine. But he flirts with Nancy nonstop, and his hints about a threesome are getting more heavyhanded by the day. I'm starting to dread the day that hot tub is operational. And that is just plain wrong.
Dear Diary:
Well lookee here. An entry the very next day.
The hot tub will be operational tonight. Steve wants it to just be the two of us using it for the first few days. Whoopee!
Dear Diary:
And again: an entry the very next day. I so want to say more about what happened last night, but honestly, one never knows who is going to find one's diary. Okay, I'll just make a few comments, for the enlightenment (and envy) of any unauthorized readers. First, hang onto the condom. Second, make sure you keep the lube handy.
Dear Diary:
Two days later, not too bad. Nancy and Tericia are coming over to try out the hot tub tonight with Steve and I. Joseph (one of Steve's friends) was over last night, and all Steve and Joe would talk about all night long was strategy for How to Get A Threesome. I kept my mouth shut. I've managed to keep my mouth shut on this topic, despite indirect and direct questioning on the subject, which increasingly convinces me that someone else has been talking. And all else being equal, the most likely candidate is Nancy.
First things first: this diary is private. No one else is supposed to be reading it, so if I write something here, it doesn't count as telling anyone else, right? Right. Second, Steve has obviously learned that I was in a threesome with another woman. Since he never met George, it must have been Nancy who said something. And since she was the one who was all over the idea of never telling anyone, well, having apparently spoken herself, I feel no particular qualms (well, okay, little teeny tiny qualms) about writing what I just did.
But didn't Nancy tell Steve that I just wasn't into it? It was part of my experimental phase, and part of a deal George and I had: we do a three-way with him and another guy, and then one with me and another woman. One shot each time, knowing full well George would be leaving town, and we each got veto power on the third person. It was fun, although things have been a little weird with Nancy since then but we got through it.
Steve is obviously trying to recreate it, and not in an honest and aboveboard way. And furthermore, he's talking more and more about polyamory, and triads and wanting this to be some kind of long-term thing. I like Nancy. I trust (sort of) Nancy (to less of a point than before), but I do not want to date Nancy.
And while things are complicated by the fact I'm living with Steve (and driving that car is truly an orgasmic experience, and the sex is good too and I looooooove that kitchen, which I will never be able to afford as long as I'm working for DCLU unless I start taking bribes, and having held out this long, I'm not sure I could start now), I am not so head over heels for Steve that I'm inclined to give it a shot to keep him around.
I just don't know. But I don't think I can preemptively break things off with him when he hasn't even gotten around to asking.
Dear Diary:
Next morning. Ah, Steve. He's so predictable. Flirting like mad with Tericia and Nancy, both of them flirting back. But where I'm sure Nancy would sleep with him, he only wants Nancy as part of a package deal and Tericia is just not going to step into my space without a written invitation including conditions and contingencies. So the three of them got drunk and a whole lot of nothing happened, because I stayed sober and I think he finds that a little daunting. The Boxter having only two seats, and me not being in a mood to give Nancy a ride in it, I drove them home in my trusty four door. He was passed out cold when I got home.
This is where it gets interesting. This too-huge place has a basement, which until last night I'd never been in. Steve hadn't been so unsubtle as to forbid me access, but it stayed locked and he never gave me a key to it. I made absolutely certain he was sound asleep (no way is Steve going to pretend to sleep through oral sex, so if that doesn't wake him up, nothing else is likely to, except possibly the fire alarm, which is one of those state of the art sound and strobe things that you usually only have to install in apartment buildings).
I grabbed his keys off the dresser and went down to the basement. It took me a while to find the right ones (two separate locks, believe it or not, both Medeco). Steve being a practical soul, he had long ago given me the codes to the alarm system, including the one to turn all of the alarms off, so I wasn't too worried about triggering anything. If I did, my bad, I guess I'd just have to move out in the morning, and honestly, after that pathetic display in the hot tub, I was tempted to do so anyway.
Do you know any geeks? I know a lot. You could almost say I specialize in them. I've dated Unix hackers and people who do what you might call bespoke software, if you spoke English English and not American English, that's custom software, or contract jobs depending on how declasse you are at the end of the day and if you are a programmer, you may well be very declasse, despite the money, despite the brains, despite the viciously effective negotiating tactics available to those who know the ins and outs of the most ridiculous technological developments of the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. I've always avoided Windows applications programmers. They believe their own propaganda and that offends me. Of course these days everyone (and their grandmother) develops their own web pages, so dating someone who writes HTML is no longer notable.
For reasons I have given up trying to understand, geeks may spend their days hunched over a keyboard, but their Saturday afternoons will probably revolve around one of the following nouns: anime (but also animation from other countries), manga (and other comic books), BurningMan, fantasy and science fiction (in numerous media, and also conventions), British television, mushrooms (oddly enough, not necessarily the psychedelic kind), home electronics (DVD and home theatre being the major current incarnation), martial arts (if they watch it, probably UFC, if they participate, possibly aikido, but the field is well-populated), SCA, ethnic cuisines involving very hot food and often hot sauces all by themselves, rock climbing, mountain biking, roller blading and cycling. While this list is by no means complete (the well-heeled geek may well SCUBA, and the more athletic probably ski or snowboard or both), appropriately deployed, it can get you connected (bonded with epoxy if you aren't careful) to a bunch of shy geeks faster than you can say Superglue.
I'm sure you'll understand, Diary, what I initially thought when I saw the British call box in the basement. I think, "Good lord, tell me Steve isn't the latest incarnation of the Doctor. Surely he hasn't gotten that lame since the show ended," adequately covers my sentiments on that occasion.
I needn't have worried. Blue phone booth or no, the TARDIS does not have a bunch of wires hanging out of it connected to a rube-goldbergian contraption that looked like a PC had gotten cancer that metastasized before effective treatment was deployed. The darn thing had tubes sticking out of it into a jar of bubbling solution. Frankensteinian, more than rube-goldbergian, really. Rube would have figured out a way to involve a hamster in a habittrail.
A separate box, unconnected to the mess, sat on a table at right angles to the contraption. It had a separate UPS, even, and looked pretty normal, so I risked activating the screen.
It's worth noting here that Steve's a black-and-white kind of guy (not unlike many programmers). While he's fully capable of installing a truly amazing security system, firewall, vetted periodically with the latest versions of Satan to check for holes, etc. etc., in general he'd rather rely on physical security and Not Being On The Net, which was exactly what this machine was. Because of that, and, as I started to realize as I browsed the documents on this box, he didn't ever want to be slowed down by having forgotten a password, there was no further security on this box.
What I read made the hair on the back of my neck rise and I went upstairs to check on Steve. Still out cold. After re-entering, I settled in for a few hours reading. He'd kept good records of his experiments at his previous employer (and the experiments other people there had been doing that he had built upon secretly). And he'd fully documented that ridiculous, Frankensteinian TARDIS, right down to the light on top (which had no function other than referential humor).
It couldn't fly through space. In fact, it didn't go anywhere. But it could sort through alternate time lines in the future, and things which fit into the space could go to those futures -- and you could bring stuff back, too. He had been cautious so far, only going into the relatively near future, and he had some weird scheme for keeping track of when he'd been to and how long he'd stayed so he'd make sure his equipment wasn't in the way there-then. That was going to take some thinking if I was going to fiddle around with the equipment, because anyone else experimenting with it and not documenting their activities could cause potentially some truly nightmarish problems.
Of course it's obvious what he'd done: sent a receiver/recorder through to record broadcast stock prices, whatever was available. He'd sample alternate timelines, and then only make relatively certain bets on the market. He still lost a few, but not many, and nothing he couldn't more than make up. He kept the bets fairly small and stayed away from startling stock price changes and so far had managed to avoid investigation by the SEC. I was a little surprised he hadn't triggered any of their checks for insider trading, but he was being very cautious, and if you believe in market geniuses, he was sure acting a lot like one.
It looked to me like he could have gone back as well as forward, but he had a good thing going, and apparently he just wanted the cool house, the hot car and a threesome with a couple of heterosexual babes and going backwards wasn't going to get him that so he hadn't bothered. Steve was surely a man of simple tastes.
I closed all the windows I'd opened. If he did even the smallest amount of checking, he'd know someone had been down here, but I was betting it wouldn't even occur to him as a possibility, so I locked up, returned his keys and went to bed.
When I woke up this morning, he was groggy and hung over. I grabbed my diary and took it to work with me, where I wrote this entry. I'm leaving it here in a locked filing cabinet for now, until I figure out what I want to do with this information.
Dear Diary:
Next morning, and still, Steve is acting basically like Steve, and he spent yesterday in the basement as per usual. He's chipper about a big move on the market that netted him a chunk of change, as he likes to say, and I think he's assuming that any weird behavior on my part is directly attributable to something he did while truly wasted night before last. He's going to take us out to a really nice dinner tonight. If I could figure out a way to knock him out, I'd sure be tempted. Good thing I have too much ethics to slip GHB into his drink; I might accidentally kill him and then where would I be. Other than in a big house with a time machine. Hmm.
Dear Diary:
I don't know how to say this, other than straight out. Steve popped the question last night. I was not expecting that. I stalled. He said we didn't have to pick a date, or even a time frame, so I'm a bit suspicious this is part of his ploy to suck me in far enough to agree to a triad. The fact that he kept talking about how the relationship could retain some of its "experimental character" and how fulsome he was in his praise of my tolerance of his flirtatious behavior I think is a solid sign that I'm right. He tried to insist I accept the ring while I thought about it, but I drew the line at that.
The sex was amazing, though. It's going to be hard to tell him no. I wish I could think of some way to give him what he wants in a way that I'd be happy with. I really don't want to walk away from that lovely little machine in the basement, either.
Dear Diary:
I have had an idea. It is diabolical. It might not work. If Timecop has the right idea about how these things work, it may yet kill me. But here goes.
The future has all these alternate threads (so does the past, but that's a whole other ball of twine, and since Steve hasn't experimented with it much, it's hard to speculate how it works so I'm leaving it alone. For now.). Any one of them could be my future. Some are more likely than others. But it seems to be possible to take stuff from one thread, and move it to another thread, and it doesn't obviously affect which one becomes the actual future (from my perspective, so to speak, I being a very theoretical construct for the purposes of this discussion). So the way I figure it, it should be possible to move stuff from one future thread to the present. Assuming the
Copyright 2013, Rebecca Allen. Created in 2003(?) Updated: July 17, 2013