Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

more that she just hasn’t had the time. She’s been so busy looking for something in the killer’s recent past that she hasn’t thought about other ways to peer into his immediate future. Plus, all Moretti seems to be interested in are details about crime scenes and timeline reconstructions. Maybe that’s the problem with having access to so much information. Everyone always assumes that the challenges with “big data” revolve around storing, retrieving, processing, and making some kind of sense of it. But maybe the bigger problem with having access to more information than anyone ever dreamed possible is that it distracts you from asking the simplest and most obvious questions of all.

Given that the most exotic place Quinn has ever been prior to this was Diagon Alley at Harry Potter World during her daughter’s spring break, the fact that she is now on the Arabian Peninsula trying to catch a serial killer while blowing her nose into a cocktail napkin after imagining herself getting kneecapped in the basement of a luxury hotel by a man she fantasized about both torturing and sleeping with is just too funny not to laugh at. Even Tariq seems to be relieved by the dissipation of international tensions.

“You know what?” Quinn says. “That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

“Good,” Tariq says. He stands, but rather than offering his hand, he pulls his sport coat across his silk shirt and buttons it closed. “We’ll take care of all of this. Get yourself cleaned up, and when you’re ready, go catch your killer.”

There is the slightest of smiles in Tariq’s eyes as he turns.

“Hey, Tariq,” Quinn says. “One more thing.”

The hotel manager turns with eyebrows cocked.

“Can you please tell me where I can get some decent American food around here?”

17

  PITCH-ROLLING

IF RANVEER WERE the type, he could boast about any number of feats, deeds, and flukes, not the least of which was having been present for the inception of one of the most ambitious and significant enterprises of all time. This was back before he was a practicing airline monogamist. After booking a last-minute seat on a shared charter from San Francisco to Doha, Qatar, he witnessed a troop of Soylent-drinking, health-hacking, microdosing Silicon Valley bros expound upon their vision for disrupting every last aspect of innovation by first disrupting its very foundation: sovereignty.

“Pitch-rolling” it was called. It was when you tricked potential investors—who would otherwise sooner have a colonoscopy than take a meeting with you—into hearing your idea. Struggling entrepreneurs ran up hundreds of thousands in credit card debt purchasing open seats on shared transpacific private jets in order to ensure captive access to affluent capitalists. Once in the air, they typically stoked their courage with a Red Bull and vodka, pushed the sleeves of their hoodies up past their skinny elbows as they stood, croaked a few polite interjections until they had everyone’s attention, and then unleashed a myriad of improbable schemes for achieving their spectacular utopian dreams.

It was kind of like a Shark Tank flash mob, or like having a timeshare spiel unexpectedly sprung on you at forty thousand feet, but since it was usually much more entertaining than anything else there was to do, you went with it. At least initially. Pitch-rolling was also kind of like open mic night in that the second you started misfiring, the audience let you know. Therefore, unless you wanted to get booed back into your seat—or worse, right there in front of everyone, get offered a check for a thousand dollars to sit the fuck back down and shut the fuck up (which you sheepishly accepted)—you had to make your time up there count. Like the senior-year promposals most of these Harvard and Stanford dropouts were plotting just a few years prior, originality was as essential as the message itself.

The ultimately successful pitch for The Grid by the band of eager young geeks to a jetful of bearded, austere, and discriminating sheikhs went, more or less, like this….

—

Micronations aren’t really a thing. Despite what Reddit might have you believe, you and your libertarian cohorts can’t build an artificial island out of dredged-up sand or sail an old cargo ship bought at auction out into international waters, declare sovereignty, name yourself His Excellency the Royal Ninja Emperor Cobra Commander for Life, use a pirated version of Photoshop to design a flag with your spirit animal on it, print commemorative postage stamps, spin up your own cryptocurrency, compose a national anthem on your Casio synthesizer, pass a law requiring citizens to dress up as furries on Wednesdays, and give the rest of the world the middle finger. Either your ship will sink and everyone will laugh at you, or you will be invaded by a boatful of sleepy troops from the nearest actual nation, who will laugh at you and seize that sweet synthesizer. Or, even worse, nobody will even notice your audacious act of defiance, and you will return home in under a week, hungry and sunburned, only to be further insulted by the fact that the shelter where you surrendered your cat won’t give him back because you are no longer considered a suitable feline custodian.

If you’re thinking you are going to do any of this in space, then you are even more delusional. Now, if your plan is to promise a bunch of societal misfits one-way tickets to Mars in hopes of selling a new reality TV show, or to use the lure of a self-sustaining, zero-g, perpetual utopian orgy to swindle a few chumps out of their life savings, fair enough. But if you’ve managed to convince yourself that you are the chosen father of the very first off-Earth evolutionary branch of humanity, you are almost certainly destined for a premature and very fiery death.

All that said, you do have options. If you already own an estate or two, a private jet, a mega-yacht with its own microclimate, a smattering of buildings, and one or more sports