---

The Last Oracle of Atlantic City

by C. H. Irons

Even without the AI chattering in the back of his mind, Baz can tell his customer is upset.

It isn’t that hard to figure out as she glares daggers at him over the plastic folding table. The tools of his trade are spread out in front of her: three decks of scattered tarot cards, an empty mug crusted with tea leaves, assorted imitation crystals, some ceremonial knives, and one bowl filled with still-smoldering chicken bones.

To be fair, he just predicted her fiancé is going to leave her.

“Give me something else,” she snaps. Her head is wreathed in pungent incense, swirling in the late afternoon sunlight.

Baz tries to remember her name. Rosalyn sounds about right, but he wasn’t paying attention when she told him.

“It’s Rebeccah,” AyGee offers, its silent, staticky machine voice tickling his frontal lobe.

He nods, just barely, in acknowledgment, though he doubts AyGee expects thanks. “I’m sorry, Rebeccah, but I’m all out. That was my last deck.”

“Bullshit.”

“Look, don’t shoot the messenger.” Baz holds up his hands, the tapestries behind him rustling in an ocean breeze coming off the boardwalk. “If it’s not in the cards, it’s not in the cards.”

Full disclosure, Baz has no clue what his cards have to say on the subject. That’s all part of the act. But AyGee calculated based on his customer’s inflection, body language, and social media activity that her relationship has a ninety-eight-point-nine percent chance of imploding in the next week. And Baz would take AyGee’s word for it over the will of the spirits, conveyed through a pack of cards he stole from a strip mall pharmacy.

“Fuck this.” Rebeccah grabs her backpack as she gets to her feet. “And fuck you. I want my money back.”

It’s an empty threat, one Baz has heard a hundred times before. He gestures to the hand-drawn sign taped over the door. NO REFUNDS.

Rebeccah’s nostrils flare, her lips forming the beginnings of a comeback that never arrives. “People were right about this place,” she growls. “Your fortunes suck.”

She spins on her heel and storms out of his booth, beach coverall snapping in the wind, strands of incense swirling out after her.

Baz keeps his expression blank, kicked back in his lawn chair. Meanwhile, his knuckles have gone white beneath the table.

He can already tell — again, with AyGee’s nudging — that this might be a problem.

The money, that isn’t the issue. She paid upfront, and he doubts any private school prima donna is going to contest the twenty-dollar transaction on her dad’s credit card. The problem is that nobody says his fortunes suck.

Sure, people don’t always like AyGee’s predictions, but nobody disputes their accuracy. That’s the whole point of having an AI do the work.

AyGee quivers, as if it senses the accusatory neurons firing. “The hell was that about?” Baz asks.

“Probably nothing,” AyGee replies. “A harmless insult. Probability exceeds ninety-seven percent that she fabricated the existence of such rumors.”

“And the other three percent?”

The machine voice goes silent, replaced by neural static. AyGee is thinking. “Unclear.”

Baz gnaws on the inside of his cheek. The techs may have hardwired AyGee into his brain, but it still has a mind of its own. It never keeps secrets — at least, Baz isn’t sure why an AI ever would — but it can only give him information when he wants it. Keeps him sane, that way.

And right now, AyGee’s murmuring makes him feel like there’s something it isn’t letting on. Or maybe it has insights he doesn’t know to ask for.

He’ll figure out what’s going on with AyGee later. First, he needs to see for himself about these rumors. He’s behind on rent as it is.

AyGee offers a wordless signal of agreement. So Baz gathers up his cards, his crystals, his knives, snuffs out the burning incense. He slips off his shoes and unplugs the dollar store LEDs strung along the ceiling, keyed until now to a deep blue.

“Let’s go find out.”

---

It’s half an hour to sunset, and on either side of Monsieur Marquel’s House of Clairvoyance the first advertising holos are flickering on up and down the boardwalk.

The shadows from the beachfront condos are growing long, the clouds turning rosy with twilight. Across from the arcade, some preacher is setting up a poster depicting a children’s book version of heaven and hell. It’s high tide, and the beach is all but deserted, except for a few stubborn surfers still trying to ride the breakers.

A bit of a chill on the breeze, Baz notes, but otherwise a beautiful night.

“It will start raining soon,” AyGee chimes.

“Thanks.” Baz scans the near-perfect sky — a perfect match for the day’s forecast — and wonders where AyGee pulled that prediction from. It would tell him, but he likes to figure these things out for himself sometimes.

 He hops the railing down to the beach and angles himself toward the nearest pack of surfers. They gather in their usual place, beneath a half-collapsed amusement pier left to rot after Hurricane Gina. A daring few perch on the pier itself, or scramble up the rusted flanks of a rollercoaster clinging to the waterlogged boards.

Mack catches his eye as he approaches.

“Monsieur.” She flashes him a chip-toothed grin, tugging at the collar of her bodysuit. The faded outline of a stingray sprawls across her torso. “Joining us today? The surf’s pretty good.”

Baz suppresses a smirk as another surfer staggers out of the water, bruised and shivering. “Not today, Mack. You got a minute?”


“Sure.” She shrugs. “I got a few.” 

“You hear any rumors about me lately?”

“Nothing but the usual.”

She cocks her head in a way that says the second part for her, which AyGee translates: “Nothing but the rumors you paid me to spread.”

Baz isn’t worried about those rumors. He invented them, after all. In a town where everybody has a gimmick and advertising holos don’t run cheap, mythmaking is just a cost-effective form of marketing. Besides, he likes having an air of mystery about him.

“I mean anything new,” he clarifies. “Complaints about my fortunes, maybe.”

“Now that you mention it, yeah. The other day I heard some kids down toward Giselle’s saying your predictions didn’t work out for them.”

Again he feels AyGee’s quiver of warning. “And what did you say?”

“I told them fortunes don’t come true overnight. They can just wait and see.”

Except his fortunes do come true overnight. They’re supposed to, at least. He never makes predictions more than a few weeks into the future. The act’s more convincing that way, plus it’s easier for AyGee to account for all the variables. 

If that business model stops working, he’ll be just another boardwalk hack — and his booth will go belly-up by summer’s end. 

His eyes drift up the amusement pier, to the surfers dangling from the rollercoaster’s corroded girders. Some are leaping over to the adjacent Ferris wheel, taking up roosts in the abandoned cars with one-night lovers and bottles of cheap vodka.

“They should come down,” Baz says. His vision sways with sudden sensory overload as AyGee pumps him full of probabilities, the odds that each surfer will fall and shatter their spine against the pier or the shallow tide below. Odds now exponentially rising.

“Whad’ya mean?”

And there he feels it. The shifting of the breeze, the atmospheric twitch that indicates a storm blowing in. “I mean they won’t want to be up there when this rain hits.”

Mack pauses, tasting the breeze for herself. “Ah, they’ll be fine. A little water never hurt any of us.”

“And the lightning won’t?”

Mack’s eyes go wide, her throat bobbing. “Point taken, Marquel. I’ll let ‘em know.”

“And if you hear anything else—”

“Of course.” She nods, slips him a wink. “I’ll pay you a visit.”

Someone yells for Mack across the beach. She shouts back, grabbing her board and sprinting back out into the waves. Baz catches himself watching her go, a stupid grin on his face, and turns away. 

He knows Mack will find a reason to visit, whether there’s news to share or not. She does most days, dragging him out of his booth at peak hours to surf or get drunk in one of the dingy little seaside bars her surfer friends frequent. He pretends to put up with it because she knows people, and that’s useful for his business. Truth is, human company can be hard to come by on the boardwalk, and he gets the sense that she’s lonely too. So some part of him looks forward to her drop-ins. Even if he’ll never get the nerve to tell her that.

Baz plods back up the sand, back toward his booth. The steady trickle of beachgoers walking the boards has grown into the usual midsummer crowd, the regulars and the daytrippers changed into their evening clothes to frequent the bars, the shops, the casinos.

The preacher’s still there, waving his poster over a table-sized holo playing scenes from Revelations. Raining hellfire and plagues and all that. He meets Baz’s gaze as he walks past, scowling and shouting about damnation for soothsayers.

Baz ignores him and returns to his booth. He asks AyGee to activate his own holo, a ten-foot-tall projection of a blinking third eye, orbited by zodiac constellations and the stylized name of his shop.

The eye snaps open, its ultraviolet pupil sweeping across the boards, just as the first rumble of thunder crackles over the Atlantic.

---

Baz was seventeen, three times expelled and five times fired, when the cops snatched him up for possession of microtrips with intent to distribute.

Guilty or not, made no difference. It was the height of Philly’s narcoware epidemic and they weren’t going to take it easy on him.

Silver lining was, the DA had just launched this alternative sentencing program with some tech company’s cybernetics subsidiary. Volunteer for implant beta testing and you could shave up to a decade off your sentence, no strings attached.

The judge offered Baz seven years or the operating table. He took the table.

And it seemed like an all right gig at first. Most of the volunteers Baz encountered walked out with augmented appendages of varying functionality — six-fingered hands, spring-heeled feet, the occasional fishbowl eye — plus a few stitches, that was all. Worst case, mild disfigurement, nothing your local back-alley clinic couldn’t fix.

So he wasn’t even nervous when they strapped him down. Almost a bit excited, like Christmas morning.

Just his luck, the last thing he saw as the anesthesia dragged him under was the techs dropping the bone saw and reaching for a cranial drill, and he woke up sharing his skull with a brand new tenant.

It drove him crazy for a bit. The techs had to restrain his head so he didn’t bash his brains out against the table, and stuff a rag in his mouth to keep him from muttering the intrusive thoughts flooding his mind in razor-edged machine language. Incessantly introducing itself as the A-G11 Neuroaugmentation Processor, at your service.

By the time they wheeled him back to his cell, the cold static ricocheting around his frontal lobe had condensed into words. A-G11 agreed to become AyGee. Baz was still Baz. Together, they negotiated a tentative understanding on access to his brain.

They also came to an agreement that they were in danger.

Apparently, AyGee had picked up some snippets of tech chatter Baz hadn’t heard over his own schizoid gibberish. Plans to vivisect their unruly test subject to determine what had gone wrong with the installation. Probability of survival, almost zero.

And since AyGee’s primary function was to ensure user safety, it followed it should help him escape this situation, and as such it had taken the liberty of plotting the guard movements, identifying some escape routes, giving his nervous system a crash course in Muay Thai and Jiu-Jitsu…

Thirty minutes later, still drunk on the overload of information, Baz staggered right out the front door, a trail of unconscious techs littering the hall behind him.

His memory goes fuzzy after that. But he can recall bits and pieces, strobing still images that flit through his dreams sometimes like carnival lights.

Stumbling through trees toward the outskirts of some mid-sized city. Getting directions east in a language he hadn’t spoken before. The lights of the Garden State Parkway peeling by outside the windows of an overcrowded, overheated bus, as the smell of saltwater undercut by diesel fumes filled his nostrils.

Eventually he woke up under the boardwalk. Back sunburned, face crusted with sand and brine, the day’s first beachgoers shooting him odd looks as they laid out their towels and pitched their umbrellas.

It seemed like a nice place to stay, he thought. AyGee agreed.

---

“And how do you know that, huh?” Baz’s teenage client leans across the table, holding up one of his crystals to examine. “How could this junk possibly tell you my future?”

A muscle twitches in Baz’s cheek. He hates customers like these — the bitter kind, possibly angry at some past fortune, who use their entire ten-minute reading to pick apart his craft. Usually they back off once he leans into his act, once the myth takes over and doubt creeps in, and by two minutes into the session he makes true believers out of them.

Not this one.

Baz sees it in his eyes. There’s no myth for him, no whispered rumors, no overheard legends about the oracle of Atlantic City, the infallible Monsieur Marquel.

He tries not to let it shake him. Maintains eye contact while AyGee runs his fingertips on autopilot, shuffling a fresh deck of cards. “Nobody said you have to believe it. That’s just how it is.”

His customer scoffs. “That’s your explanation?”

“I listen to the spirits.” Baz taps at his temple. He laughs inwardly when AyGee informs him the kid doesn’t even register the gesture, the closest he’ll get to the truth. “And the spirits are never wrong.”

“All right.” The customer drops his crystal, lets it clatter off the table and fall to the floor. “Hit me again.”

The crystal shatters at Baz’s feet. He almost snaps at the punk for breaking it, but it wouldn’t do him any good to chase off his only customer for the day. Unconsciously, his gaze flits toward the drawer where he stashed his landlord’s past-due notice.

“Fine,” he says through gritted teeth, setting down the deck. “One more.”

“I’d suggest an energy reading,” AyGee interjects. “It’s likely this customer has studied other methods to identify inconsistencies.”

Noted. “Give me your hands,” Baz says. The customer offers them, and Baz curls his fingers around each palm, closing his eyes in a mock trance. “Now, what do you want to know about?”

“I’m waiting to hear back on a college application. Do I get in, or not?”

A thin smile creases Baz’s lips. It’s the perfect question — plenty of public data for AyGee to work with, minimal potential for error. He just needs to do a bit more prodding. “Which school?”

“Why does that matter?”

“It doesn’t,” Baz lies. “Just curious.”

“Cornell.”

“Ah.” There it is — the last piece of the puzzle. AyGee sets to whirring, its frantic calculations dancing against the backs of his eyelids. “Excellent choice.”

AyGee thinks for only a moment before producing an answer. It crystallizes in his mind, clear as a casino holosign on a cloudless night.

“I hate to say it, but it seems your future lies elsewhere.” He opens his eyes, releases the kid’s greasy palms. “Sorry.”

“Wait, but—”

On the table between them, a kitchen timer trills, its dial reset to zero. Baz raps a knuckle on it. “Time’s up.”

“Like hell it is,” the customer says. “How could you know that?”

“Pay for another session and I might just tell you.”

The punk’s jaw flaps open and shut, bulging eyes darting between Baz, the timer, and the table. He swears and gets to his feet. “Whatever, man. This place is a scam anyway.”

Five seconds later he’s gone, storming out of the booth to join the pack of teenage boys waiting for him outside.
Baz gathers up bits of broken crystal as they shuffle away. “You sure about that one, AyGee?”

“Almost certain,” it replies, re-running its calculations so he can review them in detail. Almost like it’s second-guessing itself. “His academic performance, online activity, and general demeanor indicate he has only a point-five percent chance of admission.”

Normally Baz wouldn’t question a surefire prediction like that. But he can still feel that murmuring sensation, some fragment of machine noise biting at the edges of his perception. Like AyGee is holding some crucial piece of information in RAM, just waiting for him to access it.

“Are you sure there isn’t something I should know?”

“I provide you with knowledge as you seek it.” AyGee’s response is straight out of the instruction manual, one Baz practically knows by heart. “I can’t give you insights you do not ask for.”

“Right.” Baz sighs, checking if any more customers are lined up outside. He finds none. There’s only the preacher, setting up in his usual place on the other side of the boardwalk.

He hooks a thumb around the drawer handle and slides it out. The past-due notice lies torn open on top of a few spare tarot decks.

Final deadline: two days. And unless his decline in customers picks up in a serious way, he won’t have half the money to pay it.

Mack visited him earlier that day. Said she’d run into more people with complaints, all recent customers. What she didn’t want to tell him, AyGee could infer from her inflection — that the rumor mill, by now, has turned fully against him.

Baz isn’t sure how much he can trust AyGee anymore, but he could figure that part out for himself.

His legend is gone. And unless he can find another way to make rent, his business will be, too.

---

One hour, his landlord told him.

Three years he’s been in this booth. Three years of faithful service. Three years of building up his name, honing his act, crafting his brand.

After all that, he has one hour to pack his shit and get out.

Baz can barely bring himself to get started. A few of his most important belongings are piled in the corner, but the rest he hasn’t touched. The beads and the tapestries and the LED strings still hang from the ceiling, his candles and religious figurines sitting in their usual spots.

It’s not like he can bring it all with him. He’ll have no use for this junk wherever he goes next.

“I’ve compiled a list of the items that will be most useful to you, if you’d like to see it,” AyGee’s voice slices through him, emotionless as always.

“Will you shut up?” Baz growls. “This is all your fault, anyway.”

He hesitates. Was it?

Of course it was. AyGee showed him proof of that this morning, in a few dozen posts pulled from across social media. A slideshow from Rebeccah’s wedding. A selfie of that punk holding his Cornell acceptance letter. Plus several others from his recent patrons, all captioned with veiled insults toward the fortune-telling abilities of Monsieur Marquel.

He hasn’t seen a customer in days.

“I can’t explain why I generate the predictions I do,” AyGee answers. “My purpose is to provide information that advances the safety, security, and––”

—self-interest of your user. I know.” Baz shakes his head. He’s been hearing that line ever since he woke up on the operating table. “But you aren’t exactly helping me now, are you?”

AyGee goes silent. In a whisper, it adds: “If you would like, I can enter my dormant state.”
“Your what?”

“My dormant state. If you no longer require my services, I will run on minimal power and stop providing you with feedback.”

Baz’s lips part in shock, but no words come out. All those early nights he spent in his cell, clawing at his restraints, desperate to split his skull open and expel the intruder that had wriggled its way inside — and he could’ve just told AyGee to go?

Maybe he wouldn’t be alive if he did. But that doesn’t mean he owes AyGee anything. And he certainly doesn’t need its help now.

“Yeah, do that,” Baz snaps. “As long as you’re out of my head.”

“Are you sure?” AyGee’s voice sounds almost strained. “There’s a chance I won’t be able to power back on.”

“Just go!”

For a moment, nothing changes. AyGee clings on, as if waiting for the right neurons to twitch, signaling a change of heart.

Then it’s gone.

It doesn’t say goodbye, but Baz feels it leave. The neural static fades, retreating inward until it’s too small, too faint to detect. The machine voice gives a final whimper and goes dead.

For the first time in years, Baz is alone in his own mind.

It feels cold. And strangely quiet.

He stumbles around in the unsettling silence, gathering up what remains of his life. Shop gone. AyGee gone. All he has left is this trash.

The third eye above his booth closes for the last time as he flicks off the holo, leaving afterimages of constellations mid-orbit. Softly, he eases the door shut behind him.

He turns around and finds the preacher standing in his way.

Baz blinks in the wrinkled, sun-weathered face hovering inches from his own. “You want something, old man?”

The preacher rubs at his wrist, clutching his poster board sign under one arm. Baz gets a closer look at it now. On one side, a sulfurous underworld choked with sinners, and on the other, a green paradise where white-robed saints lounge under flowering trees. A cross bridges a chasm between the two.

“I want a reading,” he croaks.

“Isn’t that against your rules?” Baz snorts. Even if the money still made a difference, he wouldn’t sit through ten minutes of empty proselytizing. “Anyway, the shop’s closed.”

“Oh.” The corners of the preacher’s mouth turn down. “And when might I come back?”

Baz claps him on the shoulder as he starts down the boardwalk, not sure exactly where he’s going. Anywhere but here, he supposes. “Try again tomorrow.”

---

The tarot card arcs into the fire, still spiraling through the air as the flames begin to blacken and devour it.

Baz draws another card from the deck, flips it over. A gap-toothed grim reaper brandishing a sickle sneers back at him. He briefly wonders what the design is supposed to mean before tossing it in with the others. Sparks stir from the pyre, kissing the underside of the boardwalk.

What’s left of his belongings are strewn about him on the sand. What he can’t carry or sell, he’ll burn. The rest, he figures he’ll take with him. Buy a bus ticket somewhere west. On his own this time, without AyGee pushing him this way or that.

Much as he hates to admit it, the thought petrifies him.

Whatever, he thinks, hugging his arms tight around his knees. He doesn’t need AyGee, anyway. He never did.

Out past the breakers, the glassy surface of the Atlantic bleeds into a starless horizon. It’s getting late, and the next bus is leaving in half an hour. Looks like it’s time for him to say goodbye.

He bids farewell to the beach, starts to his feet — and pauses. He hears something, over the heave of the waves and the distant chatter from the boardwalk. The sound of feet slapping on wet sand, and a hoarse voice calling out, calling towards him—

“Marquel!”

He turns, taking in the bodysuit-clad silhouette sprinting down the beach. “Mack?”

She braces herself against a support beam, doubling over to catch her breath. Her hair is soaked from a midnight ride, and when she looks up at him she’s sputtering, eyes wild. “Marquel—I’ve been searching everywhere for you—it’s your shop—they’re—”

Blood rises to Baz’s face. He looks away, stoking the embers of his makeshift campfire.

He didn’t want to see her before leaving. Didn’t want to see anybody, really. Vanish without a trace, that was his plan. Leave behind one more mystery for them to unravel. A souvenir in his style.
Or maybe he just didn’t know how to tell her goodbye.

“Not my shop anymore, Mack,” he says. “I’m skipping town.”

“You’re—what?”

He doesn’t say anything, mostly because there’s nothing left to say. Just dumps the rest of his tarot deck into the flames and starts gathering his bags. He keeps his gaze fixed on the ground, afraid to see the hurt in her eyes.

“Does it have something to do with them?” Mack asks. Baz furrows his brow, and she clarifies: “The cops, I mean.”
He freezes mid-stride.

Mack quirks an eyebrow. “You didn’t see?”

His focus slides inward, searching for AyGee’s explanation. He finds only the dark, quiet spot in his brain where the AI used to hang out, accompanied by a sudden pang of guilt.

He stomps out the fire, drops the assembled bags at his feet. “Show me.”

And she does. Leads him two jetties down, past the bars and the casinos, their holos extinguishing one by one as the boardwalk shuts down for another night.

A few bands of stragglers remain scattered on the sand, but they’re all moving in the same direction, toward some commotion farther down the boardwalk. Their heads turn as he sprints by, followed by a flurry of whispers.

He scales the side of the amusement pier after Mack, takes up a perch on the rollercoaster’s second incline. At first he’s not sure what he’s looking at, without AyGee to fill in the gaps for him. Spotlights render the scene in stark, blinding white. There’s frenetic movement in and around his booth, dark figures surging through the door, dragging out the contents, shouting back and forth.

A familiar face stands guard at the entrance, barking orders. A vest and tinted aviators are swapped in for the sweat-stained rags Baz saw him proselytizing in. He ditched the poster board, too.

And it’s like the breeze has shifted in his face, carrying cold air and the smell of rain with it.

He sees the signs he’s been missing. What AyGee was trying to warn him of all along.

Panic and regret surge through him as he searches again for the AI. Trying to summon it, but finding only dead cold.
“AyGee?” he says aloud. Mack looks at him, bemused.

More silence.

He mouths a silent prayer, then tries again. “You there, AyGee?”

And now he feels it — a stirring of the neural static, with a familiar voice bubbling up through the cracks. “Yes. I am here.”

“Was this you?”

“I do not understand.”

“This.” He waves his arms at the raid unfolding below. A crowd gathers around the barricades, jostling for a view of the action. “Did you know about this?”

A moment of hesitation. “I did predict the authorities we escaped would locate us eventually,” AyGee admits. “The appearance of certain suspicious characters near your booth led me to believe they were closing in.”

“And you didn’t tell me?”

“You did not ask.”

AyGee trails off, but the pressure in the back of Baz’s skull hints that it has something more to share. It goes on, with what he imagines is a note of shame: “I also calculated a high likelihood you would not act on my guidance if I advised you to leave.”

The line about AyGee’s primary function echoes in Baz’s memory. “You drove me out of business. Because you were trying to make sure they didn’t find me.”

“That’s correct.”

A wave of anger swells inside Baz, then crests and breaks. After all this time, he’d been thinking the techs gave up on him. He hadn’t even attempted to hide.

The hardware in his head must be worth something after all. Too bad. He had his doubts, but now he plans on keeping it.

“Can I ask a favor, AyGee?”

“Anything.”

“The holo. Turn it on from here.”

The sign flares to life at AyGee’s command, throwing up the electric blue third eye and its backdrop of spiraling constellations. But it lingers only a moment before cutting out — replaced by a projection of Baz’s likeness, draped in beads and mystic robes, with its lips twisted into a smirk.

Hologram Baz winks and wags his finger at the cops swarming below. The murmurs from the crowd grow into roaring laughter as they go into a frenzy, fanning out to search the neighboring booths.

And AyGee says it can’t read his mind.

Satisfied, Baz starts back down the side of the rollercoaster. He might still have time to catch that bus.

“Hey!” Mack’s head appears over the ledge, wet hair falling in a curtain around her face. “Where are you going?”

“Like I said, I’m skipping town.” He throws a glance toward the pier where he left his stuff. “Sure as hell can’t stay here now.”

“All right.” She crosses her arms. “I’m coming with you.”

Baz blinks up at her, uncertain. Before he can make a decision, AyGee volunteers its input. Not words, not calculations, but something else. A feeling. Trust.

“Next bus leaves in ten,” he says.

---

Salt marshes roll by outside the fogged bus windows. Sunlight sparkles on the winding streams and channels and inlets, separating them from the outline of another shore town on the horizon, and the gray ocean heaving beyond.

It’s like a bad case of deja vu, Baz thinks.

Mack stirs in the seat beside him. They’ve been jammed a bit too close together for his liking, stuck shoulder-to-shoulder on a packed bus trundling down the Parkway.

“I’ve been thinking,” Mack yawns, her eyes half-lidded. Her knees are braced against the seat in front of her, a bag balanced on her thighs. “If we’re traveling together, I gotta know—is Marquel even your real name?”

“Of course it is.” He keeps his gaze on the window, wondering if he’ll spot any dolphins in the water. AyGee says it’s unlikely given the weather conditions. “What, you think I lied about everything?”

“Not everything,” she says. “Just about your name.”

Baz shifts uncomfortably in his seat. He can’t remember how long it’s been since he told anybody. Even for Mack, it feels strange to say it out loud. “It’s Baz,” he admits. “My real name is Baz.”

“Baz. Interesting.” She mouths the name to herself a second time, like she’s testing it out. Her eyes slide shut again as she nestles deeper into the stained upholstery. “So, Baz, who were you talking to back there?”

His heart gives a little jump. “What do you mean?”

“Come on, don’t act like I couldn’t hear you. Who’d you tell to turn the sign on?”

Baz holds onto that question, rolls it over in his mind. It couldn’t hurt to give her the truth. Besides, AyGee has shown it trusts her, and whatever con they run next he’ll want to have her in on it. 

Soon, he decides. But not yet. For just a little longer, he’ll keep that particular mystery alive.

“Just the spirits, Mack,” he answers.

“Yeah? And what’re they saying now?”

“That there’s another town in two more exits.” At his beckoning, AyGee replays the images it showed him earlier – visions of pastel-painted, hurricane-battered houses and high rise condos spilling over into the Atlantic. A town he’s never visited, whose name he’s never heard, but that still feels familiar down to its bones. “Good surf there. Nice boardwalk, too. And the spirits think it could use a fortune teller.”

---

Host Commentary

Once again, that was The Last Oracle of Atlantic City, by C.H. Irons.

The author had this to say about the story: This story is a tribute to the Jersey Shore and the music of Bruce Springsteen, both which helped provide the backdrop to my childhood. It borrows its premise from a single line in the song “4th of July, Asbury Park”: Did you hear the cops finally busted Madam Marie / for tellin’ fortunes better than they do?

Frederick Pohl once said, “…a good science-fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.” A corollary could perhaps be that we should be able to predict not the shiny, idealistic promises of new technology, but how crooks, punks, hackers and grifters will twist it to their purposes, for better or worse. Predictive algorithms are nowhere near accurate enough to truly predict the future now, but it doesn’t take an oracle to see why someone like Baz would use his AI head-tenant that way to survive. And because this is fiction, the AI fulfills its core function by behaving in an unpredictably predictable way, to save Baz’s life. This story evokes not only a sense of nostalgia for lost innocence and pleasures on an oceanfront boardwalk ravaged by time and tides, but also the resilience of those who deal with change and decay, not by giving up, but by adapting. It reminds us that for every rusty skeleton of a roller coaster abandoned to entropy, there are daring people ready to climb its girders, to sit among the bones and watch the storms roll in.

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Our opening and closing music is by daikaiju at daikaiju.org.

And our closing quotation this week is from Bruce Springsteen, who said, “I come from a boardwalk town where almost everything is tinged with a bit of fraud. So am I.”

Thanks for joining us, and may your escape pod be fully stocked with stories.