Idempotency by Joshua Wright Page A

he cried out above a squealing engine.
    Dylan blinked as the large walls on either side of the autoTrans blocked out the tattered public buildings whose facades only served to hide the scores of lower-class civilians living in shanties in and around the crumbled buildings, people who seemed to have nothing to do but hang out and wait for something to happen.
    Thirty-one minutes later the car exited the autoTrans and ceded control back to Dylan. He had transmitted his destination to the car’s computer, and it proceeded to bark out directions in between complaining of proper shifting procedures for early—millennium-era automobiles. In anticipation of future excursions, Dylan vowed to do some research on possible ways to silence the computer.
    After another adrenaline-fueled five minutes, he reached the casino. It was an awesome sight; not so much due to its size—though it was large—but because of the structure’s image capabilities. The entire building was dynamic: the walls, the windows, the stanchions, the everything—one giant holoVid cube. Dylan had read about the building while on the autoTrans. It had been built just three years back and had drawn substantial attention in the Pacific Northwest, and the larger architectural tech crowd in general; at the time, it had been the fifth-largest holoVid screen in the world (the larger projects all residing in Asia).
    An older digital clock on the Boxster’s dash read 5:33. Dylan smiled and drove past the casino. He had the Boxster’s computer direct him toward a road that had the least amount of stops and the most possible turns, then ignored the computer’s warning about proper shifting technique.
    Around 7:20 p.m., after clouds obscured the sunset, Dylan pulled into the transport storage station for the Oyehut Indian Casino. The casino had just started their massive nightly display of holographic fireworks, each explosion morphing into some type of advertisement. Dylan loved it; he loved the moxie of the spectacle. One enormous, dynamic advertisement in the middle of a barren and drizzly sand dune. It was the finest exhibit of surrealist capitalism that Dylan had ever witnessed, and he knew the building’s insides would turn out to be as impressive as its skin.
    After parking in a spot that he surmised would bait people to take notice of his ride, he walked into a tunnel heading toward the casino. The tunnel was lined with strips of material hanging down from the ceiling. Each strip was showing a video of some kind, flashing media at a fevered pitch. At one point the strips began waving back and forth, as they simultaneously began showing video of a sea of seaweed, as if he were wading underwater. Seconds later, each strip of hanging video erupted into a different advertisement of some kind. It was a dizzying display of media—and again, Dylan loved it. Media was the heart of sales and Dylan was a salesman at heart.
    The tunnel opened abruptly into an expansive room in the center of the cubed structure. Strips of diaphanous, media-enabled material hung off the ceiling draping, just above the heads of the patrons, waving in the air. Slot machines buzzed incessantly. Holographic blocks above each machine danced convulsively, then spun on their corners like tops, seizing until they all suddenly came to rest with various lines of success or failure shooting through each block. Bells, whistles, and various cacophony would accompany the holographic show. Odors would spurt out of the machine to indicate particularly good or bad results. Some lucky people used extra spins to push the holograms around, desperately trying to coerce a different conclusion.
    Dylan had become momentarily transfixed to the point of forgetting the reason he had come here in the first place, though he was starting to affirm his decision. He was also itching to play a hand (or many) of poker. With the intent to get a drink and loosen up before gambling, rather than meet some mystery man, he headed