Picks and Shovels Chapter One (Part 6 — CONCLUSION)
It’s a deal.
Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.
This month, I’m serializing the first chapter of my next novel, Picks and Shovels, a standalone Martin Hench novel that drops on Feb 17:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels
The book is up for presale on a Kickstarter that features the whole series as print books (with the option of personalized inscriptions), DRM-free ebooks, and a DRM-free audiobook read by Wil Wheaton:
It’s a story of how the first seeds of enshittification were planted in Silicon Valley, just as the first PCs were being born.
Here’s part one:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/09/the-reverend-sirs/#fidelity-computing
Part two:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/10/smoke-filled-room-where-it-happens/#computing-freedom
Part three:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-rich/#a-lighter-shade-of-mauve
Part four:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/13/wanting-it-badly/#discovering-e-discovery
Part five:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/14/contesting-popularity/#mister-25-percent
And now, onto part six — the thrilling conclusion!
I opened and shut my mouth. If the figures they’d discussed were real, then my billables would come out to a fraction of what I’d get if they got their way and absorbed CF. I reminded myself that I’d been ready to leave, to forgo all the money, just a moment before. But against that: the sense of how much I’d regret it if I took this deal, helped Fidelity Computing recapture their tearaway competitors, and picked up a mere $1,500, while five or ten times as much money could have been mine.
Imaginary regrets were no basis for doing business, I told myself. “That’s a deal,” I said.
Bishop Clarke clapped his hands together once. “I knew we could find a way to work together. How simply wonderful.”
“I can’t wait to see what you find,” Rabbi Finkel said.
“We pay net ninety,” Father Marek said. “The girls in payables can get you set up with an invoicing template.” He cupped his chin in one hand. “Which reminds me, I don’t suppose you have a Fidelity system, do you?”
“I’m afraid I don’t,” I said.
“That’s not uncommon, for a secular person,” Bishop Clarke said.
“We’ll loan you a refurb,” Father Marek said. “Stop by the loading bay after you speak to payables. Tell them I sent you. I’ll have my secretary call down to them.”
Shlomo came and got me and steered me out of executive row and back into the cavernous room where the customer-service reps murmured into their phones. They all stiffened as the door to executive row opened, and their conversations took on a hush.
I had a friend when I was growing up in San Diego, Marc Reyes. Marc’s father was an angry man, the kind of person who’d shout at his wife and kids even when there was a young stranger in the house. I’d seen him punch a wall hard enough to crack the plaster, over nothing — a failure to bring in the afternoon paper.
The hush in that bullpen took me back to the Reyes household, the tense silence that would fall over it when Marc’s father would come home.
I humped the banker’s box full of CF floppies through the bullpen and into the accounting department, where a middle-aged Orthodox man with sidelocks and a wide-brimmed hat gave me a floppy disk with an invoice template on it. I slipped it into the box, then put the box into the back of Art’s van, and drove around to the loading dock, where I signed for a quartet of battered cardboard boxes containing a Fidelity 3000 (their 386 system), a monitor, a printer, and two floppy drives.
I pointed the van back to Art’s place and put my foot down on the pedal.
Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#sunk-cost-feeling
