Having realized that they were experiencing the perils of Mount Saint Helens from uncomfortably but not too dangerously close, the three of them found they weren’t in too much danger. Try not to breathe in any volcanic ash. Probably almost as bad as asbestos. But other than that, they weren’t in much danger from it.
“Well, so where is this developer’s convention?” Jon asked.
“You’re still thinking about that?! What difference does it make!?” Sarah responded, in increasing panic. “Can you not see we’re up shit’s creek without a paddle?!”
“It’s what we came here to do. We might as well do it,” he said matter-of-factly.
“And then what?! We don’t have any money Jon! And even if you do have some on you, what year was it printed in? We can’t even get a hotel! Oh, and to top it off, Jon, without me having any powers, to make a connector, you can’t even do it anyway! Take a look at the back of that xbox one Jon. Do you see that plug!? Do you know what that is Jon? That’s an HDMI port! Do you know what that is? That’s a digital video system that was invented in 2000 or 2005 or something! What are you going to do Jon, are you going to plug that into an analog 1980 cathode ray tube television?”
“Are you saying, that in 1980, this is just a piece of junk?” Jon said, looking at the game console in his arms.
“That’s right Jon! Not only do we not have any money, we don’t even have anything of value! If we just had some sort of converter, we may be able to sell it for a million dollars, but there is no such converter, and actually we’re so screwed! I want you to fully appreciate just how screwed we are Jon! Are you imagining? Are you imagining the world tearing our sorry asses off and presenting them back to us on a fancy platter?”
Frankly Jon was surprised Sarah was so knowledgeable.
“So, what should we do?” Karyn asked.
A car drove by, its music playing so loud it thundered even through the closed windows. But all 3 of them recognized the song. Y... M, CA! It’s fun to go to the, Y, M... ca...” they heard as it drove off.
“I have an idea!” Jon said. “What if we went to the... Yyyyyy...”
“m, ca!” all three of them finished together, in varying levels of enthusiasm.
It was tough not having social security numbers or identities. They eventually rented an apartment and got jobs together at a machine shop. It didn’t pay very well, but they didn’t ask questions. It also meant they had to stay in the shadows. Which also meant no college, or much hope for anything better in the future. They looked just old enough that no truancy officers bothered them.
They talked about what if anything they could do. The best idea, was to go to South America and follow in Jon’s grandfather’s footsteps and get the stone years before he did originally. Except that Jon didn’t exactly know where that was, and they couldn’t very well search a whole continent. Also, good luck getting a plane flight or crossing all those borders with a fake identity and a fake ID. The three of them became kind of a family. They also became lovers. But the details of that are kind of dry. They did sexual things together with protection so no one got pregnant. Enough said. But suffice it to say, all three of them were close, even Sarah and Karyn. They had to settle into the reality that they were stuck there and doomed to live through that era as young adults as if they were the boomers they were now the same age as. They watched history play out. The unusable xbox one console languished in a box, nothing they could do with it. If only there was something they could do with it.
Eventually, 5 years had passed. It was 1985. The year of Super Mario Brothers and Back to the Future. One of them recalled that the stock market was going to majorly crash in October 1987. So they were diligently saving money to get ready for that when the time came, to buy put options at the start of that month, but for now, they were investing in walmart. They didn’t have any better ideas before the big crash was going to happen. They knew Dell computer would be a big winner but that wouldn’t be until 1989. They knew yahoo would be a good idea in the mid 1990s. They knew another economic collapse would happen from 2000 until 2003. But for now, all they could do was wait. If only there was a clue about where exactly the stone was. But Jon just didn’t know even what country his grandfather had found it in.
