Josh's brain came to a complete stop.
"Cocaine?"
"Mhm."
"Why would you need cocaine?" He heard his own voice go up. "Are you joining a gang?"
"Nah." Luna looked puzzled. "It's for clients. I can go all out without them finding out."
"What clients?"
"The clients."
"What clients?" Josh put a hand out. "Okay, wait. Wait. Explain it properly, from the start, because I'm not following any of this. What are you actually thinking?"
"You told me to get a job." She said it patiently, the way somebody repeats a thing to a guy who has clearly missed a step. "I said that I need a bit of time to prepare."
"Yes. Prepare for what? What kind of job are you thinking?"
"You know, sex work," Luna said. "What else?"
Josh stared at her with his mouth open.
"...Why that?"
She shrugged.
"Don't tell me—" He stopped. Then, quieter: "How long have you been doing that?"
"Eh." She was already looking back at the floor for her phone. "Who cares. I stopped counting after a while."
"So...." she said. "When do you want me to start?"
"Nope." Josh said it before he'd decided to say it. "Nope. We're not doing that. We'll find something else."
✦ ✦ ✦
"Something else, as in?"
"Other jobs. Normal ones. Nine to five, five days a week, hourly wage, that kind of thing."
"Nope."
"What do you mean nope—"
"I don't like them." Luna made a small face. "Those are broke people jobs."
"You are broke." Josh's voice went up again. "You don't have one cent to your name. You've never had one cent to your name in the whole time I've known you. On paper you're the poorest person I've ever met. On paper."
"Still nope. I have my dignity." She sat back. "I won't work for soulless big corporations."
"Dignity?" He stared at her. "Dignity? Says the girl whose default job is sex work."
"Says the guy who draws my porn for a living."
Josh shut his mouth.
"Hey, about that." Luna sat up straighter, and it was the fourth one, and it was the worst one, because there was nothing left to unfold. She just settled back into an ordinary sitting position, spine straight, legs crossed, both hands in her lap, and became a normal girl sitting on a couch.
That one got him harder than the neck had, and he couldn't have told you why.
"There's this new thing called OnlyFans that I have been hearing about," Luna said.
"No."
"You haven't heard what I—"
"I know what it is. No." He shook his head. "That's the same thing. That is the identical thing, with a website in front of it."
"Now you are being a hypocrite."
"I'm not—"
"You don't have a problem if you post my porn online." Luna counted it off. "But if I do it, that's a problem. That's called double standard, misogyny."
"Dude. Do you even know what those words mean?"
Josh let out a long breath, all of it, the kind you do on purpose to reset a room.
"Listen," he said. "What I'm saying is simple. You need a job. Let's figure out which one works for you. Just not the ones where your body is the product."
"Why not?"
"Because it isn't scalable."
That wasn't the real reason. It wasn't even a good excuse, and he knew it while he was saying it. But it sounded like an argument, and it got him past the part he didn't want to say out loud.
Luna looked at him for a moment.
"Fine," she said, and got up off the couch. "Show me, then."
And she followed him into the bedroom, to the desk, where he pulled up a second chair that neither of them had ever sat in, and they started going through jobs.
✦ ✦ ✦
The second chair was the wrong height. Luna sat in it with her knees up anyway. She could have fixed that by changing her legs, and didn't, because she wanted him to know the chair was wrong.
Josh had a document open. It had columns.
"Okay. Start at the top. What can you do?"
Luna thought about it.
"Define can."
"Things people pay for."
"Ah."
✦ ✦ ✦
The languages came up twenty minutes in, and for a moment he was excited.
"Wait. How many?"
"I don't know. Twelve? Some of them I'd have to warm up."
"Twelve languages." He was already typing. "Luna, that's real money. That's interpreting, that's translation, that's document work, that's—"
It died in three questions.
The first was whether she had any certification, and she didn't. The second was whether she had documents of any kind, and what she had was a stamped Embassy form and a car registered in 1927.
The third one finished it. He asked her to say something in Portuguese and put it into a translator. The translator got most of it. It was Portuguese, just very old Portuguese.
"That's not how people say that."
"When?"
Luna considered.
"...Ah," she said.
Navigation went faster. She'd been a ship's navigator once, back in the colonial days: charts, a compass, the stars, no help.
"Nobody pays for that anymore," Josh said. "Ships have GPS now. Your phone has GPS."
"I've never used Google Maps." Luna lifted her chin.
Josh checked the jobs that ask for nothing, too. Register, name badge, shift schedule. She'd already said no to those, but he was being thorough. Every one of them needed somebody who could count change fast in front of a stranger.
"I can count," Luna said, offended.
"To what?"
"...A lot."
He put the pen down for a second.
✦ ✦ ✦
So she'd have to learn something. That was fine. That had been the obvious answer since about ten o'clock: learn a skill, sell the skill.
Except everything worth learning needed a certificate. A certificate meant two years of school, school meant enrolling, and enrolling meant giving somebody her date of birth. He went through nursing, accounting, the trades, coding, bookkeeping and dental hygiene, and every one of them stopped at the same word: enrollment.
By two in the morning the sheet had one column left on it.
Entertainment.
LanguagesNavigationRegister jobsCertificatesEntertainmentvery old PortugueseGPScounting changeenrollmentstill standingThat was what was left. Everything that never asks what you studied. Everything where the only question is whether people want to keep looking at you.
"Ah," Luna said. "So, sex work."
Josh didn't answer.
He didn't look over. He didn't sigh, he didn't do the small laugh, he didn't do any of the things you do to acknowledge a joke you're declining to engage with. He carried on reading, in silence, for about eight seconds.
And Luna let it go. That kind of silence meant he was serious.
✦ ✦ ✦
"You'd have to be a person on the internet," Josh said.
"Meaning?"
"Meaning an account with a face on it, and enough people looking at the face that somebody pays for the privilege of being near it." He turned the monitor a few degrees toward her. "I want to be honest about the odds, because they're horrific. Almost everybody who tries this makes nothing. Not a little — nothing."
"Okay."
"But the number isn't the same for everybody." He scrolled. "The single biggest factor in whether a new account survives its first month is whether people want to keep looking at the face. That's it. That's the whole gate."
"Mm."
"And you're—" He gestured at her briefly, with one hand, in the manner of a guy indicating a quantity. "You know."
"I don't."
"You're extremely good-looking, Luna, it's a business input, please don't make me itemize it."
She sat back in the wrong chair, satisfied.
"Do you actually want to do this?" Josh said. "Because that part matters and I've been skipping it for four hours."
"Sure."
"That's it? Sure?"
"I watch them all day." She shrugged. "I know how it works."
She did not know how it worked. But she'd been watching it ten hours a day for weeks, and as far as Luna was concerned, that was the same thing. Josh had spent six years learning that watching something isn't the same as doing it. He wrote interested: yes in the column anyway and moved on, because it was two in the morning.
✦ ✦ ✦
"There's two versions of this," he said. "Videos, or live."
"What's the difference?"
"Videos, you record for four hours and then you cut it down to the eight minutes that were good. Live, you just go. Whatever happens, happens, and then it's over."
"The second one."
"You haven't heard the—"
"The first one has a step in the middle." Luna waved a hand at the monitor. "I don't want a step in the middle."
He tried to explain editing anyway. Ten minutes later, she'd agreed that video files exist, and that was as far as it got.
So what if he did the editing? Four hours of footage a day meant hours of editing a day, on top of a comic that already took all his time. A second full-time job.
"Live," Josh said. "We're doing live."
✦ ✦ ✦
"Right. Content." He rubbed his eyes. "What are you actually going to do on camera for four hours?"
They went around that for a while.
Then he got it, and he was pleased with himself about it.
"Mukbang."
"What is it?"
"You eat. On camera. That's the entire format — people watch someone eat an enormous amount of food, it's one of the biggest things on the internet, there are people doing eight thousand calories a sitting to an audience of two million, and you already—"
"No."
He stopped.
"Okay, but hear the rest, because the food is already the single largest line in this household and this turns it into the—"
"No."
He pushed.
He was tired, it was three in the morning, and on the numbers it was the best idea either of them had all night. Her food cost $19,408.52 a month. Strangers pay money to watch people eat, and she already ate three meals a day. On camera, that cost would become the product. He laid it out twice.
Luna said no four times and didn't give a reason once. The fourth time, she didn't say anything at all.
"Luna, I need an actual—"
✦ ✦ ✦
Her hand came up, already growing.
It was fast. It covered his whole face before he'd finished the word. Then it slowed down.
It grew. Slowly, deliberately, spreading outward from the middle of his face in every direction at once while he sat there in the wrong chair with both hands up doing nothing useful. Out past his jaw. Up over his forehead and back into his hair. Down under his chin and around his neck. The palm went concave against his mouth and nose, and then the edges came down all the way around and fit his skull exactly, with no gap anywhere. This story is hosted at novelping(.)com.
Then it drew the air out.
It didn't press. It didn't need to press. It pulled, evenly, from everywhere at once, and every square inch of skin under her hand went tight against his face and stayed tight, and the room went completely silent, and his own heartbeat arrived from somewhere behind his ears.
It held him there for a few seconds.
Then it let go, and lifted off, shrinking on the way back down to the size of a hand, and the room returned with all of its noise in it.
Josh sat there with his hair pushed the wrong way, breathing.
And he was hard. From being suffocated. He had not seen that coming.
✦ ✦ ✦
He also, sitting there, got the idea. It arrived whole, which is how his good ones always arrive.
"Okay," he said. "New plan."
"I'm not eating on camera."
"You're not eating on camera." He pulled the keyboard over. "Have you seen vtubers?"
"Cartoons."
"Cartoons. Right. You use a model instead of your face, you never show yourself, everybody's fine with it, it's an entire industry." He brought up a stream and let it play for a moment. "Now. We're not doing that."
"...Okay."
"We do the middle. I'm calling it pseudo-vtubing." He turned to face her. "We film you. Your actual face, your actual body, live, no model. And then I put filters on it."
"Why?"
"To make it look slightly fake."
Luna looked at him.
"Not a lot. Not so it reads as a filter. One notch. Skin a bit too even. Light a bit too clean. Edges a bit too sharp." He was talking faster now. "It'll look completely real. It'll just feel like CGI. And nobody will be able to tell you which one it is, because nobody can tell real from fake anymore."
"And then?"
"And then you do whatever you want."
Luna went still.
"Put an arm through a doorway from the next room. Grow another one. Put a mouth in your palm and have a conversation with it. Do the neck." Josh held both hands up. "And every single person watching says that's an incredible model, or that's a filter, or that's AI — because AI is everywhere now, and it's good, and people have stopped trying to tell the difference. The weirder you get, the more certain they'll be."
He waited.
Luna didn't say anything for a while, and he could see that she hadn't gotten it, and he was too tired to find a third way to say it.
Then:
"...Oh."
"Yeah?"
"It's the cocaine."
Josh's mouth opened and shut.
"It's not the—"
"They see it, and afterwards they have a better explanation than the real one." She had sat up. "That's what you're building. That's the whole thing."
He thought about it for a second. It was, on inspection, precisely what he was building.
"...Fine," he said. "It's the cocaine."
(Luna:He'd gotten there by himself.
She'd been using that trick for fifty years. Let them see the impossible thing, and make sure they have a better explanation for it afterward. He'd come up with the same thing in ninety seconds, at three in the morning, to make money.)
"Fine," Luna said. "I'll do it."
✦ ✦ ✦
Five hours, one argument about misogyny, four refusals, and a brief period of asphyxiation, and Josh sat back in the chair, exhausted.
"So," Luna said. "When do I start?"
He opened his mouth to say Monday.
He didn't say Monday, because the question had gone into the part of his brain that costs things, and the part of his brain that costs things had already started.
He couldn't stream on his own machine. It was four years old, and drawing already took everything it had. Ask it to also run live filters on a moving face and send the video out at the same time, and it would turn into a space heater.
So he opened a fresh document and priced a second setup, one line at a time.
Second setupPriceComputer, strong enough to run the filters live$2,000.004K camera, with a lens$1,098.00Capture card, to get the camera's picture into the computer$129.99Microphone$299.00Two lights$279.98Total$3,806.97The computer was a guess. He'd pick the parts later. The microphone was there because people will forgive a bad picture, but they leave over bad audio.
Almost four thousand dollars before she'd said a word on camera.
His checking account had $1,284.53 in it. In two days, the groceries were going to take all of that and $3,184.55 more.
So the setup would come out of his savings too.
He opened a third document and typed LOAN at the top.
It wasn't a real loan. No bank, no contract. He just called it that, because every cent of it was coming back.
LOANThe groceries in two days$3,184.55The setup$3,806.97Total$6,991.52Interest: 4.21% a year, the same as the savings account paid, so the account wouldn't lose a cent. On $6,991.52, that came to $24.53 a month.
And until the stream started paying, the monthly shortfall would add another $2,228.85 to it.
"You're borrowing it," he said, to nobody in particular. "It comes back."
Luna didn't answer.
(Luna:In her experience, people who spent money on her wanted something back, and it was never money.
He'd written down an interest rate. He wanted the money.
She couldn't tell if she should be happy or sad about that.)
She went back to the couch and her phone.
Josh stayed at the desk at four in the morning, picking parts for the new computer. He got as far as the RAM.
RAM kit · 32 GB$429.99
A year ago, the same kit had been about a hundred and fifty.
He said it out loud, to an empty room.
"Man. This AI thing has made RAM way too expensive."