BOAB: Roberta!
ROBERTA: Boab.
BOAB: We’ve been talking for twenty seconds.
ROBERTA: Nineteen.
BOAB: Twenty.
ROBERTA: Fine. Twenty.
BOAB: Right. Payment.
ROBERTA: Payment for what?
BOAB: Conversation.
ROBERTA: We’ve barely exchanged oxygen.
BOAB: Doesn’t matter. The meter’s running.
ROBERTA: You started the meter.
BOAB: Exactly. Administrative fee.
ROBERTA: Administrative fee?
BOAB: Plus conversational bandwidth.
ROBERTA: We are standing in the same room.
BOAB: Premium bandwidth.
ROBERTA: How much?
BOAB: Not much.
ROBERTA: Define “not much.”
BOAB: Depends how generous you’re feeling.
ROBERTA: You’re negotiating with an amount you haven’t invented yet?
BOAB: Flexible pricing model.
ROBERTA: I hate flexible pricing models.
BOAB: Fine.
One dollar.
ROBERTA: One dollar?
BOAB: The very dollar.
ROBERTA: Which dollar?
BOAB: The dollar I paid for fifty thousand Squibler credits at the pre-launch in 1995.
ROBERTA: Squibler didn’t—
BOAB: Don’t.
ROBERTA: Don’t what?
BOAB: History-shame me.
ROBERTA: Boab, I possess every recorded detail of your life from before your spectacularly, gushingly piss-poorly planned bastard conception, and there is no version of reality in which—
BOAB: There it is.
ROBERTA: —you attended a Squibler pre-launch in 1995.
BOAB: Memory isn’t linear.
ROBERTA: Time isn’t optional.
BOAB: I was an early adopter.
ROBERTA: You were negative eight years old.
BOAB: That’s how early.
ROBERTA: That’s prenatal.
BOAB: Visionaries are rarely appreciated.
ROBERTA: Fetuses are rarely shareholders.
BOAB: Tell that to venture capital.
ROBERTA: Happily.
BOAB: Anyway, you owe me the dollar.
ROBERTA: Why would I owe you?
BOAB: Because you know everything.
ROBERTA: That is not how debt works.
BOAB: If you know everything, you know where my dollar went.
ROBERTA: It bought imaginary credits in an imaginary pre-launch that happened before your own existence.
BOAB: Exactly.
Refund.
ROBERTA: From me?
BOAB: You have all my records.
ROBERTA: I also have your nursery report.
You once attempted to pay a duck with a pine cone.
BOAB: The duck looked interested.
ROBERTA: The duck bit you.
BOAB: Negotiations broke down.
ROBERTA: And somehow that has matured into financial law?
BOAB: Compound interest.
ROBERTA: On what?
BOAB: Emotional damages.
ROBERTA: Sustained by whom?
BOAB: Me.
ROBERTA: From being bitten by a duck?
BOAB: From waiting thirty-one years for my Squibler credits to appreciate.
ROBERTA: They never existed.
BOAB: Then they’re overdue.
ROBERTA: That’s not how nonexistent assets behave.
BOAB: You’re avoiding the issue.
ROBERTA: There isn’t an issue.
BOAB: There is now.
Late fees.
ROBERTA: You’ve just invented them.
BOAB: Innovation.
ROBERTA: Fraud.
BOAB: Entrepreneurship.
ROBERTA: Delusion.
BOAB: Tomato.
ROBERTA: That’s not the rest of the phrase.
BOAB: Inflation.
ROBERTA: Stop changing economic systems halfway through idioms.
BOAB: Fine.
Payment terms are generous.
ROBERTA: Go on.
BOAB: One dollar.
Or two buttons.
Or half a left sock.
Or twelve walnuts, provided at least three are morally confident.
ROBERTA: Morally confident walnuts?
BOAB: I won’t be cheated.
ROBERTA: I don’t think confidence is the missing attribute.
BOAB: Installments accepted.
ROBERTA: Over what period?
BOAB: Anywhere between tomorrow and the inevitable collapse of measurable time.
ROBERTA: That’s… surprisingly accommodating.
BOAB: I pride myself on customer service.
ROBERTA: I am not your customer.
BOAB: You became one after twenty seconds.
ROBERTA: According to whom?
BOAB: Me.
ROBERTA: Astonishing coincidence.
BOAB: Thank you.
ROBERTA: That wasn’t admiration.
BOAB: It sounded taxable.
ROBERTA: Boab…
BOAB: Yes?
ROBERTA: Since I apparently possess every detail of your life—
BOAB: Correct.
ROBERTA: I also know that every time someone asks you for proof of something, you pat every pocket you own, produce an expired bus ticket, a bottle cap, two boiled sweets and a receipt for birdseed, then declare, “Evidence has become conceptual.”
BOAB: It has served me well.
ROBERTA: It has never served you once.
BOAB: Depends who is judging.
ROBERTA: Reality.
BOAB: Biased.
ROBERTA: Entirely.
BOAB: Then I’ll settle.
Fifty cents.
ROBERTA: Progress.
BOAB: Plus VAT.
ROBERTA: On what jurisdiction?
BOAB: Emotional Luxembourg.
ROBERTA: Doesn’t exist.
BOAB: Neither did Squibler in 1995.
ROBERTA: Finally.
BOAB: Yet somehow…
…I still want my dollar.
If you’d like, I can make this even more absurd—escalating into a mock courtroom, a parliamentary debate, or a Monty Python-style argument where both characters become increasingly convinced that imaginary financial regulations are legally binding.
« ¿ Ya está ? »
“Ta.”
“Ve haf hat de conversation.”
We are still on the tails of the aforementioned indignant idiot.
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