Player One: What Is to Become of Us Read Online Free

am.”
    “Huh. When is our celebrity supposed to arrive?”
    “Any time now. What about your Mister Hookup?”
    “Any time now.”
    Rick, disinhibited by the imminence of Leslie Freemont, threw out a conversation starter: “You know, I’ve been thinking about time a lot today.”
    “Have you?”
    “I have. Wouldn’t it be kind of cool,” he said, “if time stopped right now?”
    “How do you mean, if time stopped?”
    “Like this. I was in England once, taking my father to see my grandmother, who was dying of emphysema. So, one morning we were on a train headed from London to wherever, when suddenly the train stopped with our car halfway inside a tunnel, and then the conductor turned off the train and an announcement came on that we were to observe two minutes of silence, and everyone went still and looked at their laps, even the soccer hooligans and their cellphones — and it was like the universe had suddenly turned itself off and the world was almost holy, like life was suddenly religious, but good religious, and suddenly everyone became the best version of themselves.”
    The woman looked at Rick. “I’m Karen.”
    “Rick.”
    They shook hands as the trainwrecky guy down the bar stared, breaking the moment by asking for a neat Scotch.
    Luke
    Luke is nursing a Scotch and wondering why it is that having money makes people feel so good — medically, scientifically, clinically good . What chemicals does it release? What neurons does it block? And just why is it an absolute given that having money — some money, any money — always feels better than having no money? There was a quote at the bottom of the snarky email sent to him yesterday by the Bake Sale Committee, one of those automatically attached quotes from some Internet program, and, as it was written by Oscar Wilde, probably went unread by the dutiful committee member. It said, “The thing about being poor is that it takes up all of your time.” So true.
    But Luke is a pastor at a church locally known as “The Freeway Exit Church” more than by its proper name, The Church of New Faith, and so he has his own spin on money. He knows that what makes human beings different from everything else on the planet — or possibly in the universe, for that matter — is that they have the ability to experience the passing of time and they have the free will to make the most of that time. Dolphins and ravens and Labrador dogs come close, but they have no future tense in their minds. They understand cause and effect, but they can’t sequence forward. It’s why dogs in dog shows have to be led from task to task, because they’re unable to sequence. They live in a perpetual present, something humans can never do, try as they may. And the reason Luke is thinking about time and free will is because he believes that money is the closest human beings have ever come to crystallizing time and free will into a compact physical form. Cash. Cash is a time crystal . Cash allows you to multiply your will, and it allows you to speed up time. Cash is what defines us as a species. Nothing else in the universe has money .
    Luke — shaggy haired, a bit pudgy, and slightly rumpled, in designer garments nabbed from the church’s flea market the previous April — currently has lots of money, because just this morning he looted the church bank account. It wasn’t something he set out to do when he woke up, but now, with a few drinks in him, he understands that it was a long time coming, and that it took a specific incident to trigger the theft. The incident transpired like this: Late yesterday afternoon, Luke met with the women from the Bake Sale Committee to discuss the upcoming sale. Luke doesn’t normally like chairing these meetings and has long-time volunteer Mrs. McGinness do it, but Mrs. McGinness is still in Arizona, helping her meth-whore daughter through her latest divorce. So Luke was sitting there, ready to chair the meeting, and eight women were supposed to be