Roseanne's Summer Vacation- Chapter 34
“Here’s your Pooh, stop crying.”
Natasha did her best to quickly gather around Thally, Nika, and Milena in the parking lot. The girl in glasses, however, again lost her composure—this time because of the shooting. Natasha had to sprint upstairs and get her the plushie, so she could calm down. Thally and Nika were smoking cigarettes, sitting on concrete steps.
The girls had no idea about the receptionist in the toilet. The woman regained consciousness and, suffering a massive headache, strolled back to her workstation. Natasha passed her on the way out. The receptionist’s memory from the past few hours was a complete blank.
“That Cowboy Bebop was a bad apple from the start, I tell ya,” Thally said, letting out the smoke through her nose. “I think he’s the guy I saw the other night. Bet he was dealing condoms in those boxes.”
“Those weren’t condoms, but hard drives for Pete’s sake. I’ve seen them today with my own eyes,” Natasha corrected her.
“Hard drives?” Nika asked. She bit her lips, thinking about something.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Miss G.I. Jane. I haven’t read the latest brief.” Thally stuck out her tongue.
“Damn you. Damn you, all!” Natasha lost patience. Her finger began pointing at each girl. “You watch too much of Netflix. You smoke too much. And you… You cry too much. The three of you wouldn’t survive a day in the military class. Which profile are you on? Let’s hear it. Come on.”
“Psychology,” Nika answered quietly. “But they also learn medicine.” She looked at Thally and Milena. “We’re in the same class, but mostly spend time exchanging fags on breaks.”
“They smoke. I just stand with them,” Milena clarified.
“God, how are we going to get out of this mess?” Natasha sighed.
Roseanne returned, completely out of breath. The crusade for the backpack took her actually twenty minutes, but what mattered was that she got it back.
“I have it.” She demonstrated it to everybody.
“Let me show these hard drives,” Nika said with genuine curiosity.
Roseanne opened the backpack and passed everybody a box. Thally and Milena had no idea what they were looking at, but Nika carefully examined a label on a hard drive.
“It’s a Toshiba-made internal hard drive. It was removed from a laptop for sure. This thing’s older than us. Manufactured in 2007, see?”
“So what? It’s electronic junk,” Thally sighed.
“But for some reason, it has value to that K-Pop wacko.”
“We need to check what’s on these drives. We may be handing over nuclear codes for all we know,” Roseanne said.
“Right,” Nika nodded. “And I just happen to know how to read those.”
“How?”
“I’m a data hoarder.”
***
The girls squashed like sardines in an Uber. Nika instructed the driver to take them to the Riviera Centre. They needed to do some shopping at an electronics store. The chain smoker warned them it ain’t gonna be cheap.
“One of us will have to pay by card, is that right? Who’s going to do it?” Natasha asked.
Nika and Thally immediately looked at Milena.
“Why me?” The girl whimpered in the backseat.
“Because your mom is the richest parent in school. Heck, I would marry her if I were a lesbian, and then hope to snatch inheritance.” Thally embraced her out of the blue.
“Don’t worry. This will be a small penny for your mom. She won’t even notice the balance has changed on the account,” Nika tried to be reassuring.
The Uber arrived, and Milena’s card was immediately used to pay the fare. They headed to Media Markt, where Nika carefully selected a mid-range laptop. Not too shabby, but not too packed with advancements. Her choice became the Lenovo Ideapad 3 with an Intel i5 processor inside and 8 gigabytes of RAM. The price for it was 2000 Po credits; a discount because this was the last model in stock. Nika also searched for a SATA to USB adapter.
“You say you want what, little lady? We don’t have an adapter like that. Only available online,” a seller in a red jacket said.
Nika grunted with annoyance. She searched on her phone for another shop in the vicinity. She had to have that cable.
“Come on, let’s go,” she said to others while taking the laptop wrapped in a shipping package.
Milena gulped when paying with her credit card.
Outside the Riviera Centre, they turned left and walked along the sidewalk that led past a construction site to an underground passage. It wasn’t an entrance to a subway, but a wide track for pedestrians who wanted to reach the nearest public transport stations. The passage accommodated street musicians playing familiar tunes and artists writing comforting proverbs on walls.
Roseanne immediately winced at the sight of these. One of the proverbs proclaimed: Happiness happens when you let go of the unpredictable. Give me a break, the girl thought. I’ve got to save Mr Orville.
The passage narrowed halfway through and became significantly darker. The sides were now populated with tiny shops, highlighting their presence with bright neon signs. There was everything for everybody: a news vendor, a barber, a kebab stand, and an IT shop.
“Are we in the world of Blade Runner or something?” Thally asked, trying not to lose the group in the dark.
Nika approached the IT shop with the sign PC Sick Bay, the front of which had a buzzing refrigerator with sodas.
A man appeared in a white booth behind the refrigerator. “You want to buy soft drinks? Go ahead. Choose anything you like.” He encouraged.
The booth could only fit one customer. Nika went in.
“I’m looking for a SATA to USB cable.”
“SATA to USB cable? Right…”
The man bent over and looked through his stock. After a minute, he found what Nika requested.
“It’s a Miralco brand. Would that be fine?” he asked kindly.
“Perfect. How much is it?”
“100 Po credits.”
“Please count a Pepsi to it. I’m thirsty,” Thally said suddenly, taking a can out of a refrigerator.
Milena gulped once more when Nika took her credit card and put it in a terminal.
“That’s it. Thank you,” the man handed the receipt.
“Thank you for your kind service. It’s a rarity these days,” Nika complimented him upon leaving.
Roseanne rushed the chain-smoking girl. “It’s not the time to be a sweet talker. If you have the tools you need, then get on with it.”
They remained in the dark passageway. It was better than standing on the street covered in sunlight, because Nika didn’t have to struggle with screen brightness that way. She proceeded to unwrap the laptop.
“Okay, it’s time to do my thing,” she said, winking with a touch of a smile. It was probably the first time in the entire trip when Nika looked happy.
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