Read Online Three Miles Past by Stephen Graham Jones - Free Book Online
Authors: Stephen Graham Jones
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downloads? With how many screen refreshes per session?
Probably a million impressions, easy.
And even at a tenth of a cent per—you could do some serious bank that way.
All we needed now was the app.
~
RJ’s great idea was “Naked Leapfrog.” I wasn’t against it, especially as it involved asking Lindsay from Chem to help, but when my mom found our storyboards on the kitchen table that night, we had to have another sit-down with my dad when his shift was up at ten.
It went the usual way.
The only reason I got to keep my phone was by arguing that I was testing code on it, for my college applications.
RJ chimed in too, and threw in a Corvette if the app really took off, if my dad was interested in looking cool.
“A sports car,” my dad said, and leaned back in what he called his Spartan chair. His no-nonsense chair.
RJ shrugged, the left side of his mouth eeking over a bit, and, as it turned out for the next twenty minutes, my dad actually had a thought or two about sports cars. Complete with anecdotes and horror stories and statistics. There was maybe even some kind of insurance quote in there.
I apologized to RJ with what of my face I could—we’ve been friends since third grade, so he got it—and then, slouching across the dark driveway to recompose ourselves in the bushes (one cigarette, maybe two), ash out on RJ’s old dog’s real headstone again, RJ said, “Dude, if only we could have seen that one in the rearview,” and I kind of looked behind us, had to agree.
People have gotten rich on worse ideas.
~
Most of what we needed for the app we could scavenge from stuff already on the market, though a couple of those took enough hours to crack that night that we probably should have just written them ourselves.
“And we can’t ask Lindsay?” RJ said, his game keyboard glowing up his face like this was a campfire story we were telling to each other, conditional by conditional, curly bracket by curly bracket.
“She’ll be all over us once the cash is rolling in,” I told him.
We hunched back to the coding.
The app we were building was going to be the definition of elegance. Just because it was so simple, or could be, if we wrote it straight. Not a game, not some stupid trivia, no overlooked system utility or navigation aid for amateur seamstresses, and definitely not another porn scrubber or privacy screen.
A camera.
Just that.
It wasn’t supposed to kill us.
~
What our app would have going for it was what RJ called the ‘chill factor.’ It was what he’d wanted to call the thing, even—nobody else was using it for an app yet—but I talked him down from that particular ledge, pulled us back to the realm of the sane: ‘No Takebacks.’ Even though takebacks was pretty much exactly what our app was about.
RJ’s complaint about wishing we’d seen my dad’s Corvette lecture coming? We were marrying that to a handheld device, then, if everything panned out, amping it up into a portable haunted house.
The idea was that, when you had that feeling somebody was behind you, just kind of lurking, waiting—Simms in Marketing taught us this last year: find something everybody alive shares, then winnow that down to a product they can buy—when you had that feeling, you could just ‘check your messages’ or whatever (this is you, calling the app up) then lower your hand back down, the phone still palmed there, and snap a pic of the world directly behind you.
Which you could already do, sure—the problem with global anxieties is that there’s usually a global fix already in place—especially if you had the know-how to re-assign your shutter to a mechanical button. But, as we tested and found, it took some pretty serious skill and no small amount of dumb luck to keep that camera straight up and down. Pushing that mech button, it turned out it wasn’t just your finger muscles that got involved. Your whole hand tensed up, whether you told it to or not, and
Probably a million impressions, easy.
And even at a tenth of a cent per—you could do some serious bank that way.
All we needed now was the app.
~
RJ’s great idea was “Naked Leapfrog.” I wasn’t against it, especially as it involved asking Lindsay from Chem to help, but when my mom found our storyboards on the kitchen table that night, we had to have another sit-down with my dad when his shift was up at ten.
It went the usual way.
The only reason I got to keep my phone was by arguing that I was testing code on it, for my college applications.
RJ chimed in too, and threw in a Corvette if the app really took off, if my dad was interested in looking cool.
“A sports car,” my dad said, and leaned back in what he called his Spartan chair. His no-nonsense chair.
RJ shrugged, the left side of his mouth eeking over a bit, and, as it turned out for the next twenty minutes, my dad actually had a thought or two about sports cars. Complete with anecdotes and horror stories and statistics. There was maybe even some kind of insurance quote in there.
I apologized to RJ with what of my face I could—we’ve been friends since third grade, so he got it—and then, slouching across the dark driveway to recompose ourselves in the bushes (one cigarette, maybe two), ash out on RJ’s old dog’s real headstone again, RJ said, “Dude, if only we could have seen that one in the rearview,” and I kind of looked behind us, had to agree.
People have gotten rich on worse ideas.
~
Most of what we needed for the app we could scavenge from stuff already on the market, though a couple of those took enough hours to crack that night that we probably should have just written them ourselves.
“And we can’t ask Lindsay?” RJ said, his game keyboard glowing up his face like this was a campfire story we were telling to each other, conditional by conditional, curly bracket by curly bracket.
“She’ll be all over us once the cash is rolling in,” I told him.
We hunched back to the coding.
The app we were building was going to be the definition of elegance. Just because it was so simple, or could be, if we wrote it straight. Not a game, not some stupid trivia, no overlooked system utility or navigation aid for amateur seamstresses, and definitely not another porn scrubber or privacy screen.
A camera.
Just that.
It wasn’t supposed to kill us.
~
What our app would have going for it was what RJ called the ‘chill factor.’ It was what he’d wanted to call the thing, even—nobody else was using it for an app yet—but I talked him down from that particular ledge, pulled us back to the realm of the sane: ‘No Takebacks.’ Even though takebacks was pretty much exactly what our app was about.
RJ’s complaint about wishing we’d seen my dad’s Corvette lecture coming? We were marrying that to a handheld device, then, if everything panned out, amping it up into a portable haunted house.
The idea was that, when you had that feeling somebody was behind you, just kind of lurking, waiting—Simms in Marketing taught us this last year: find something everybody alive shares, then winnow that down to a product they can buy—when you had that feeling, you could just ‘check your messages’ or whatever (this is you, calling the app up) then lower your hand back down, the phone still palmed there, and snap a pic of the world directly behind you.
Which you could already do, sure—the problem with global anxieties is that there’s usually a global fix already in place—especially if you had the know-how to re-assign your shutter to a mechanical button. But, as we tested and found, it took some pretty serious skill and no small amount of dumb luck to keep that camera straight up and down. Pushing that mech button, it turned out it wasn’t just your finger muscles that got involved. Your whole hand tensed up, whether you told it to or not, and
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