The Nation of Dick.

"Dude!" I said, running into the middle of the road, almost getting hit by a car, and snatching up a tiny little rectangle with a string hanging from it.

"What the fuck are you doing?" Jim asked, while Corey laughed from the curb.

"It's a jump drive," I said, holding it up for the both fo them to see.

"Great," Corey replied sarcastically.

"Yeah. Maybe it has the next set of winning lotto numbers saved on it," Jim said and Corey laughed even more. I took a quick look at the jump drive, inspecting it to see if it was still in good shape. It looked okay...well, almost okay. I might need to bend the metal flange around the connectors to get it to fit in a USB, but other than that, it looked good.

"Russian nuclear launch codes," Corey said, snapping his fingers.

"Lotto is up to like, twenty-five million," Jim said. "You buy tickets yet?"

"No," I said, slipping the battered jumpdrive into my jeans pocket. "I picked the winning numbers just last week," I said, turning to head towards the restaurant on the corner.

"Oh yeah?" Jim asked. "Where's the money?"

"Show me the money!" Corey shouted.

"Yeah King Dick!" Jim shouted even louder, drawing every stranger's attention on the entire block. "Show us the money!"

I shook my head and continued on, not slowing in the slightest, not even when both Corey and Jim shouted for me to wait up for them.

Some time later that evening, after staying out way too late, and spending way too much of my hard earned money, I found myself back at home, alone.

Living alone isn't bad. It's actually pretty fucking nice, but it also leads to long bouts of extreme boredom, and a lack of motivation. I have everything I need. I have extra money. I have a lot of extra time. I don't need to work extra hours, or support anyone else. I'm just, independent. My boss calls me and asks me if I want to pick up extra hours, and I say, "nope". He tells me he needs someone to cover someone else's shift, and I tell him Other people need the hours more than I do... and he hangs up and calls someone else.

I know a lot of people think I'm a dick. I'm okay with that. You know why? That's my name. Dick. Did I mention my name is Dick? If I didn't before, I am now. No, my friends weren't being mean to me. Nah, my parents were mean enough when they named me "Richard". My mother says she named me after King Richard, and I made the mistake of telling my friends that, and so now they refer to me, in public, as often as they can, as "King Dick." You'd think it would make me popular with the ladies, but it hasn't.

Anyway, I have this living alone thing pretty set. I close the door, lock it, hang my keys. I start taking off my clothes as I walk down the main hallway and I'm naked by the time I hit the kitchen. I toss my clothes in the washer, throw in detergeant, scent booster bullshit, and start it up. Head for the shower. Dry off, throw on some Pajamas... nah, just underwear. Who am I kidding. Single adult dudes do not wear pajamas. We do everything in our underwear, including driving to work half awake/half asleep, before we realize we're not wearing any pants. Been there, done that.

This night was nothing different from any other and every other night. As soon as I was out of the shower I got on the computer and started trolling the social media sites, responding to stupid people, giving them my two cents. After that, a quick game, some chat on Omeagle -Jesus you can find some freaks on there- and then I was ready to read more of the latest Sci-Fi contributions on Vocal Media. Yeah, like, one and the same dude.

So anyway, I read and read until I feel like I've got a pound of sand weighing on each eyelid. I'm ready for bed. I get up, close my laptop, head for the bedroom, and then...I remember. I've got some rando jumpdrive in my pants pocket!

"Oh shit," I say, running to the washing machine and pausing it. I reach in, fish out my jeans, stick my hand in the soapy pocket and pull out the tiny half an inch long drive. I blow the soapy water out of it, hoping it's not completely fucked. I dump my jeans back in the wash and restart the cycle before taking the jumpdrive to the kitchen where I dry it off with paper towel and inspect it some more.

It's super tiny. Like, just the metal connnector, and then a blob of dark plastic on the end. It looks completely sealed. I try to wipe it out as best I can, and then put it in a zip bag with one of those little dessicant packs you get in electronics. I just happened to have some from the last hard drive I ordered. I let it sit, and then go to sleep, hoping whatever is on the drive, hasn't been destroyed.

So, let me first start off by saying, a few things. One, I'm a curious person. Two, if I find something in the road, I'm goign to pick it up, and look in it. Doesn't mean I stole it from you. I'm a firm believer in "finders keepers" if you know what I mean. In addition, a lot of people just throw shit out their windows, or drop stuff. And then, they're looking around for it like crazy. How does one person recover something like that? Well, someone else finds it, and then they look at it, and maybe they recognize the person. In some cases, that might not be the best thing....

Remember Jim? Yeah, Jim and his girl got into an argument and then Jim lost his phone. He didn't really loose his phone. His girl got ahold of it, found all those pics of some other woman on it, and after that, Jim was single, again. Did I mention Jim is stupid? I stay outta his personal life, and I hang out with him after work every now and again, but he's not a "friend" friend. He's a work friend. He's an asshole, but he's funny...sometimes. Do I loan him money? Fuck no. Do I ask him for directions? Nope. Do I invite him to my place? Hells no. Jim, is a looser. Corey on the other hand, is cool.

Corey is one of those guys who, you really have no idea who they are. You go out to eat, dude orders something new every time. He has no favorite color, no favorite food, no girl friend, nothing. Dude has absolutely NO IDEA how to drive. I got in a car with him ONE TIME...the LAST TIME. No way. I'm really lucky to be alive when I think about it. Anyway, I don't loan money to Corey either. I try to live up to my name afterall. No sense in running from it. If I'm gonna be a dick, I'm gonna be the best dick there is.

So anyway, I go to sleep with the worst intentions for morning. My plan is, as soon as I get up, I'm plugging the jump drive into my laptop, doing a virus scan on it, and then I'm gonna find out what's on that sucker. I know I didn't mention this either. I've found a number of other jump drives and none of them, not a single one of them, has let me down. As I climb into bed, I pull out the drawer on my nightstand and take a glance at my jumpdrive collection. To date, I have fifty-two discarded jump drives. Fifty-two caches of secretive data that people never wanted to loose, wanted to keep on their person, never intended to share, and then dropped or lost.

What could be on a jump drive like that? Well, I'll tell you. Most of those jumpdrives have nudie pics and videos. Guys cheating on their girls, girls cheating on their guys. Some are guys with other girls -or guys- and a few are girls with other girls. In all the cases, the people who owned these drives didn't want to get rid of the pics or videos, but didn't want anyone else to find them either. I consider it something akin to a sickness, the way a serial killer keeps a trophy of his victims, but in this case, it's sexual evidence.

One dirve I found has numerous videos of a guy, the same guy, who looks a little olders, business type, clean shaven and descent looking, but what he's doing in the videos is anything but. I call this guy "Mr. Business" because he looks like a business guy. In reality, Mr. Business, should be called Mr. Bitch, because Mr. Business likes to take it in the ass. He also likes a woman named Debra, his Dominatrix, to slap him with a leather riding crop while she ass-fucks him, and Debra likes spitting and slapping Mr. Business. The drive has about fifty videos on it. Sadly, I've watched every one of them. Not because I particularly enjoy them, but because, as a hobby, I feel I must. I am a purveyor of secrets. A collector of evidence that could absolutely ruin... a lot of people.

Another drive has a bunch of women on it. Pics and a few videos. They all look like they're taken with a cell phone. At first I thought the pics and videos were something someone might have accumulated online. There's so much free to watch porn on the internet, you really cannot be sure, until you watch the videos for the fifth or sixth time. The one thing I noticed, not that I'm a dick specialist -it's-just-my-name- I noticed the guys dick, was the same. Same dick, different women. Lots of women. I mean...tons. If I slept with one TENTH of the women this guy has, I'd be comepletely drained of semen. That is how many this guy has been with. And his log, his evidentiary catalog of past conquests, fell into my hands. Well, not fell. It fell, but then I picked it up out of the grass in front of a cell-phone repair shop. I wonder if he works there? I used to call him Mr. Dick, but then I stopped. I'm Dick. So I call him Mr. Mc. Spurty. Fitting.

Another drive I have, or used to have should I say, had a single video on it. It took a lot of prying and a bit of data manipulation to get the video to play. I really worked on restoring it for like a week before I finally got it to render, and then it was choppy as all get out, and then... all I could see is some thirty-year-old latino woman bent over on a couch, and she was being mounted by... a non-human. I know, I...need brain bleach. Once you see something like that, you can't un-see it. Obviously this was horrible. Either is was some sort of leverage, or a ransom, or some degrading bullshit, or maybe someone was using it for something else. Whatever it was, it's gone now. Not only did I delete the file, but I crushed the jumpdrive with a pair of channel locks and tossed it in the trash. I'm all for snooping in people's discarded, abandoned and lost jumpdrives, but I don't go for sick illegal crazy stuff... which leads me to the next jumpdrive I found.

Jumpdrive number six, because it was the 6th one I ever found, had documents on it. At first, it was just random bullshit and I thought it might be taxes or something like that. But after a bit of sleuthing, I realized it was something a lot bigger. There was a specific list of companies and numbers next to each. Abbreviations. Stock identifiers. Some of the companies were big, others were small. There were hundreds. At first I didn't think anything of it, but then, as time went on, the pieces started fitting together. Well, it wasn't that simple but I figured it out. It was a Saturday morning and I was at a local coffee shop spending my ten-bucks on a grande caramel coffee with tons of caramel loaded whip-cream, when I heard someone on the news talking about the stock market. Something was said about Newtech having a bad day. Stock was down to the lowest it had been in years. I remembered, somethign in the drive saying, if the price hits five dollars a share, then $$$, which I assumed meant, buy it. Buy the stock. I looked up and the stock had closed the day before at $4.79 a share. I thought...could it be that easy?

Needless to say, I dismissed the notion and waited until Sunday night, when it was still nagging at me, before going online and finding a broker through which I could buy some stocks. I checked my bank account, and figured I could blow $500 on it. That's a hundred shares. I put in my order and come Monday morning I got an email saying I was the proud new owner of 100 shares of stock with Newtech. Cool, I thought. I hoped I hadn't just thrown away $500, but if I had, so be it. It was a hunch anyway. A guess. A gamble.

I forgot about the stock until Thursday afternoon when someone at work mentioned they had to buy chicken stock, and that reminded me that I had actually bought some stock. I looked it up on my phone and saw that the price of Newtech was now at seven dollars a share. I could, potentially, sell that stock, and make $200, minus the taxes on what I made, but...something else was telling me to wait. As soon as I got home, I put the jump drive in and started reading. I searched for every instance of Newtech and soon discovered that whoever had owned the jumpdrive, had put a range for NWTK. $5 to $25. If the stock fell below five, it was a buy. If the stock went above $25 a share, it was a sell. No shit. I would have sold at $25 too. And...I did.

After that, I was hooked. I was buying the cheapest stocks I could, as long as they were less than the lowest threshold price, and selling as soon as they hit the higher limit. The jumpdrive had a lot of info on it. The more and more I watched the numbers, the more I learned. I even bought a few stocks in other companies not listed, but they never did as well as the ones on the jumpdrive. And then, I slowly started to figure something out. The jumpdrive, and the information on it, was... life threatening. Let me just say that.

Who buys and sells stocks, is public information. You are not annonymous. When you suddenly figure out, that a number of companies, publically traded companies, are shell companies that are designed by shadow governments and billion dollar cartels, and that they have set these companies up to have stocks that fluctuate from highs, to lows, so that they can launder billions of dollars each month, and that you, somehow, stumbled upon this information and tagged along for the ride...until you found out...

My name is Dick. King Dick. And yes, I am a millionaire. And no, I don't spend a single penny of it. Nobody knows I have it. My money has jumped hands and accounts more times than Mr. Mc. Spurty has had female relations. I have done my absolute best to make all my past purchases, and sales, disappear. I even went so far as to create a shell corporation in Delaware, funnel all the money through that, and pay out to an annonymous account in Switzerland, which I control. Do I think I'm safe? Mmmm, maybe. Maybe, and only because, they have absolutely NO idea how I got ahold of a jump drive with their information on it. None. And, I'm going to keep it that way.

Now, as awesome as that all sounds, it is completely terrifying. Nerve wracking. Trying to keep it cool, and not loan Jimmy a fucking Benjamin every time he asks for a burger at ten-dudes, is hard. I really want to live up to my namesake, and be "King Dick", but, I might endanger myself and that is a complete and utter, no-go. So, for right then, King Dick had to simply stay, a name. I really had no choice.

Now, after finding and utilizing the information I had, I did kinda manipulate the system a bit. I bought discarded jumpdrives from as many different places as I could. When they arrived, I would virus scan them, open them up and, if they didn't have anything cool on them, I would shit can them. I would say, out of every hundred drives, I would find one that had something entertaining.

One drive had a video game on it. It wasn't the standard version either. Someone had taken a very popular video game, and had done some serious alterations to it. The graphics were amazing, the storyline was even better than the original. The game play was smooth, and the amount of speciliazation was breathtaking. It was so fucking good, I spent a month solid, playing it. And then, I realized, it was too good. I wanted to do nothing else but play that game, and that was when I realized, it was time to uninstall it. I love a good game, but when the game becomes all I do, it's time to stop. I considered leaking the game to the rest of thw world, but didn't, for two reasons. One, the Video Game Mafia. You think it's funny, but it's not. Game developers will END a dude like me, even with my hidden money, if they find out I leaked something that fucking good. And the shit ass developer who initially released the shit ass game that was used as the platform, would sue for every penny, and then they would control the game, and the market, without ever having done anything to earn it. So yeah, I still have the game, and I still play it from time to time, when I have a four-day weekend I wanna kill, and have some serious fun.

Another drive has some weird reverse engineering program on it. To me, it's stupid. When you launch the program on the drive, it asks you to enter two or more different results. So, if I enter the number 4, and the number 16, it will reverse engineer an equation that give you that result when you enter a number. Basically, 1, 2, 3, 4. That was a bad example, but like I said, it's stupid. I'm not a super duper math's type, so I don't get it, but I suppose it could be cool.

Drive fifteen is nothing but the sickest porn off the internet. I mean, like, 128 Gigabytes of the nastiest, most disgusting, most disturbing shit I have ever seen, and I've seen a lot. If I just sat there was watched that all day, every day, I would still not be to the end. That is how much porn is on that drive. I keep it around just in case I need to send a thank you email. You know, to that distant relative who just contacted me, asking for my help in accepting four-hundred million dollars inheretance from our long lost uncle Nogooboo. The one in Nigeria. Yeah, that one. I send them a very special thank you email. You know. I try to keep it classy.

Drive thirty-one is recipes. I think it was meant to be a cook book of sorts. Most of the recipes are just text files, but others have pictures and short videos. It's pretty awesome, and since finding it, I've added a few of my own. I keep it in the kichen, on a hook, attached to the front of my refridgerator. I cannot tell you how many times I've looked for something on that drive, and found a recipe so much better than anything else on the internet. One of my best finds yet.

I could go on and on, talking about what each drive contains, and where and how I came across them, but the most fascinating find of all, was the one I almost destroyed. The one I left in my pants pocket, and the one whch is currently plugged into my laptop. The virus scan has been running for the better part of the last hour. It's at 99.8%, and holding. I don't know what the deal is, but as soon as it finishes, I'm going to open the file manager and paste the contents here, no matter what it is. I know, this is a weird thing to do, but I wanted to try something new. Uh, a quick disclaimer. If it is the winning lottery numbers, I might play them first, before sharing. If it's a bunch of porn, I might not post. I don't want to get kicked off Vocal Media. If it's the coordinates to every Nuclear Missile Silo in Russia, I'll post them. What could it hurt, right?

The file is almost ready. Just one more minute...