Read Online Three Miles Past by Stephen Graham Jones - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Stephen Graham Jones
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with a jack-in-the-box zombie’ numbers, there’s always that download lag, where the server’s sneaking those hidden images across. It wasn’t so much that we were worried about people watching the progress bar, keeping a close eye on the running printout right above it—we would , but that was us—it was that, sneaking stuff into somebody’s memory like that, caching it they-don’t-know where, that was a porn move. And even if it was just a machine reviewing our app, not a real person, still, that kind of underhandedness, even if it was all in good fun: we were going to get filtered.
Never mind that, after our app cycled through all five sneak_up images, the joke’s tired, the app deleted, only rated on how it ended, not how it was.
We stole another beer, considered things.
No, a windmill wasn’t scary, even if it was three foot high and sneaking up behind you in the hall.
No, it wasn’t scary to see that same girl crawling along the side of the hall.
What we finally settled on, though it was going to slow the process down, was upping the array of stock images from five to a cool hundred, and rigging the recursion such that it would iterate through however many images we made available, really. We were in it for the long haul, after all, and RJ was a serious whiz with fake randomnocity, and me, my job was to strip each of these images down to the bare bones. My goal was to get each down to about five kilobytes, but the wall I ran into was, of course, pixelation, which, unless you’re somehow in the game, isn’t all that scary. So what I finally lucked onto was letting the images swell back up to a whole fifteen kilobytes—they were all greyscale, had some definite blur built-in—but then just scaling them down to micro. Bam: seven kilobytes per, about. We had to dial the smoothing up a bit to compensate, but all in all, it was working.
All that was left was to push these little sneak_up images into some buried directory online, .htaccess it for all time (though ‘Lindsay’ could probably break in . . .), and we were on to the second round of trials.
The app was light, it didn’t glitch, it had a hooky name, some promised fun, and we’d left some space at the bottom of each image for all the banners that were going to run.
“So?” RJ said, standing up from his bed.
“It’s Sunday night,” I told him.
Our eyes were bloodshot, our fingertips raw, our pores were exhaling cheese puffs—another weekend gone, lost forever between two curly brackets no one would ever properly appreciate.
But it had been worth it, too.
Screw college, right?
RJ walked me across his driveway, my dad’s security light popping on as soon as we stepped up onto the concrete.
The app was on both our phones, of course, and our laptops too.
“Don’t take any pictures I wouldn’t,” RJ said, stopping at the free-throw line to sail an imaginary one in, and I saluted him, spun slow and fake-drunk on my heels—just another sailor, looking for my gangplank home—and leaned into whatever my dad had waiting for me after not checking in all weekend again.
Tomorrow was the first day of senior year, though.
There was nothing he could do to me that would matter.
2.
By Wednesday, RJ was a ghost.
Not literally (not yet), but that was kind of just his place in the cafeteria, in the halls, in the parking lot.
Usually, I’d be right there with him, but somehow the Life Sciences I was having to make up from sophomore year, it had taken off. Mostly because I wasn’t the only one having to make it up.
Lindsay was in there too. My new lab partner.
It was taking me longer and longer to get ready each morning. My dad would grumble over the breakfast table about the girl I was becoming, and how pretty I was getting, and I’d just chew, swallow, and float to second period again.
I’d like to say I had no illusions about Lindsay and me, about homecoming and prom and life, but it went way past that. I
Never mind that, after our app cycled through all five sneak_up images, the joke’s tired, the app deleted, only rated on how it ended, not how it was.
We stole another beer, considered things.
No, a windmill wasn’t scary, even if it was three foot high and sneaking up behind you in the hall.
No, it wasn’t scary to see that same girl crawling along the side of the hall.
What we finally settled on, though it was going to slow the process down, was upping the array of stock images from five to a cool hundred, and rigging the recursion such that it would iterate through however many images we made available, really. We were in it for the long haul, after all, and RJ was a serious whiz with fake randomnocity, and me, my job was to strip each of these images down to the bare bones. My goal was to get each down to about five kilobytes, but the wall I ran into was, of course, pixelation, which, unless you’re somehow in the game, isn’t all that scary. So what I finally lucked onto was letting the images swell back up to a whole fifteen kilobytes—they were all greyscale, had some definite blur built-in—but then just scaling them down to micro. Bam: seven kilobytes per, about. We had to dial the smoothing up a bit to compensate, but all in all, it was working.
All that was left was to push these little sneak_up images into some buried directory online, .htaccess it for all time (though ‘Lindsay’ could probably break in . . .), and we were on to the second round of trials.
The app was light, it didn’t glitch, it had a hooky name, some promised fun, and we’d left some space at the bottom of each image for all the banners that were going to run.
“So?” RJ said, standing up from his bed.
“It’s Sunday night,” I told him.
Our eyes were bloodshot, our fingertips raw, our pores were exhaling cheese puffs—another weekend gone, lost forever between two curly brackets no one would ever properly appreciate.
But it had been worth it, too.
Screw college, right?
RJ walked me across his driveway, my dad’s security light popping on as soon as we stepped up onto the concrete.
The app was on both our phones, of course, and our laptops too.
“Don’t take any pictures I wouldn’t,” RJ said, stopping at the free-throw line to sail an imaginary one in, and I saluted him, spun slow and fake-drunk on my heels—just another sailor, looking for my gangplank home—and leaned into whatever my dad had waiting for me after not checking in all weekend again.
Tomorrow was the first day of senior year, though.
There was nothing he could do to me that would matter.
2.
By Wednesday, RJ was a ghost.
Not literally (not yet), but that was kind of just his place in the cafeteria, in the halls, in the parking lot.
Usually, I’d be right there with him, but somehow the Life Sciences I was having to make up from sophomore year, it had taken off. Mostly because I wasn’t the only one having to make it up.
Lindsay was in there too. My new lab partner.
It was taking me longer and longer to get ready each morning. My dad would grumble over the breakfast table about the girl I was becoming, and how pretty I was getting, and I’d just chew, swallow, and float to second period again.
I’d like to say I had no illusions about Lindsay and me, about homecoming and prom and life, but it went way past that. I
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