“Okay,” the manager said with a sigh. “Come into my place here. I’ll get things set up.” His fish-faced
wife watched Justin with wide, pale, unblinking eyes while he called the phone company and made
arrangements. The manager headed off with a vacuum cleaner. In due course, he came back. “You’re
ready. TV and stereo are in there.”
“Thanks.” Justin went upstairs to the apartment. It was small and bare, with furniture that had seen better
decades. The TV wasn’t new. The stereo was so old, it didn’t play CDs, only records and cassettes.
Well, his computer could manage CDs. He accepted a key to the apartment and another for the security
gates, then unpacked. He couldn’t do everything he wanted till he got a phone, but he was here.
He used a pay phone to call a cab, and rode over to a used-car lot. He couldn’t do everything he wanted
without wheels, either. He had no trouble proving he was himself; he’d done some computer forgery
before he left to make his driver’s license expire in 2003, as it really did. His number hadn’t changed.
Security holograms that would have given a home machine trouble here-and-now were a piece of cake
to graphics programs from 2018. His younger self didn’t know he’d just bought a new old car: a gray
early-’90s Toyota much like the one he was already driving.
“Insurance is mandatory,” the salesman said. “I can sell you a policy . . .” Justin let him do it, to his
barely concealed delight. It was, no doubt, highway robbery, especially since Justin was nominally only
twenty-one. He’d dressed for the age he affected, in T-shirt and jeans. To him, though, no 1999 prices
seemed expensive. He paid cash and took the car.
Getting a bank account wasn’t hard, either. He chose a bank his younger self didn’t use. Research paid
off: he deposited only $9,000. Ten grand or more in cash and the bank would have reported the
transaction to the government. He didn’t want that kind of notice. He wanted no notice at all. The
assistant manager handed him a book of temporary checks. “Good to have your business, Mr. Kloster.
The personalized ones will be ready in about a week.”
“Okay.” Justin went off to buy groceries. He wasn’t a great cook, but he was a lot better than his
younger self. He’d had to learn, and had.
Once the groceries were stowed in the pantry and the refrigerator, he left again, this time to a bookstore.
He went to the computer section first, to remind himself of the state of the art. After a couple of minutes,
he was smiling and shaking his head. Had he done serious work with this junk? He supposed he had, but
he was damned if he saw how. Before he was born, people had used slide rules because there weren’t
any computers yet, or even calculators. He was damned if he saw how they’d done any work, either.
But the books didn’t have exactly what he wanted. He went to the magazine rack. There was
aMacAddict in a clear plastic envelope. The CD-ROM that came with the magazine would let him start
an account on a couple of online services. Once he had one, he could e-mail his younger self, and then
he’d be in business.
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