“Paypal”
by Marina Rubin
vice president of japanese equities, once upon a time my lover invited me out to lunch. between his stir-fried noodles and my beef negimaki he boasted about the pile of cash he amassed in the foreign markets. with a gallant wave of a hand and a fixed-income smile he said sweetheart why don’t you pick up the tab and then send me a PayPal request for my share. paypalpaypal with bits of wasabi and ginger fumed in my mouth as i tried to register, through secure servers, reading instructions, verifying passwords, bank accounts, screaming at the technical support. there was no response the next day, or the following morning. like a woman possessed, a prize fighter for principle, an urban samurai i sent the vice president a Reminder PayPal Request, followed by four more requests, an online warning, an angry voicemail and a threatening letter. three weeks later i received a PayPal credit for twelve dollars and forty-six cents from my lunch buddy, but there was no satisfaction in this little victory
“Romance”
by Jason Stocks
“Vigilante”
by Marina Rubin
Ivan Razvalkin, a Russian covert operative turned American computer programmer, found a job at a small retail company in Manhattan. three days later he got fired because allegedly he applied war interrogation tactics to gather data from the users. but Ivan didn’t go gently, before security escorted him out he deleted the entire database then escaped through the back door carrying the heart of the company on a floppy disk. next day the business of the firm was in a state of Hiroshima, the database that housed all the sales, shipping, distribution and accounting was gone. the CEO received a ransom note demanding that an envelope containing fifty thousand dollars in unmarked bills be left under an oak tree sixty five meters from exit eleven off the belt parkway at exactly 0600. when the FBI’s operations unit “Rescue Database” captured Ivan Razvalkin at the designated pick-up position, he screamed launching floppy disks in the air, power to the programmers
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