The Parallel Universality

We pursue our dreams in a high-tech world that blurs fact and fiction, love and loneliness, even confidence and craziness. In this modern-day version of The Twilight Zone, imagine if you will, a hologram of Rod Serling welcoming us once again into the parallel universe of our deepest dreams and nightmares. The more we rely on technology, the more vulnerable we become. First and foremost, this series would focus on the inevitability that mankind will be, at best, kind, but more than not maniacal. Welcome to The Parallel Universality.

Episode One: The Dead Balls-On Perfect Plan

I got in the game of "life settlements” by accident. A client of mine, Frankie Fortunato, was into me for over a hundred large. The jamook liked the horses, and we was at that moment of truth. The old fart couldn’t come up with the juice, and he knew the rules. He was about to lose a kneecap when he screams out something about selling me his life insurance policy.

“Why do I want your friggin’ life insurance policy?” My terms are cash on the barrelhead.

Frankie replies, “If you forgive my debt and keep paying my monthly premiums, I’ll sign over my policy to you. Then when I die, you’ll receive a death benefit of a half-million bucks.”

Now, this caught my attention. “This is legal?”

“As legal as life insurance,” he says. “You win, I win. It’s a dead balls-on perfect plan.”

I agree and we cut the deal. Ironically, Frankie gets creamed by a bus a few weeks later. On my mother’s grave, I swear I don’t know the bus driver. Otherwise, I’d buy him a drink. I net out around four-hundred large. It would take years to wrangle that kind of moolah in the juice game, so I seize the opportunity and become a life settlement broker.

Just like a pawn shop, I cater to folks who need cash fast and pay them as little as possible over the policy’s cash surrender value. I only accept policies where the death benefit is at least six figures. Oh, and the older the prospect the better. It’s kinda like handicapping the horses—the odds always favor the house. I gotta hand it to Frankie, it was truly a dead balls-on perfect plan. Like P.T. Barnum once said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

I form the Spend It Now Corporation and business is booming. It’s just as legit as the life insurance racket, which to me oughta be called “death insurance.” When some schmo buys it, he’s insuring that he’ll die, not live. In the same sense, life settlements are “death settlements” ‘cause that’s when I make the money. I got old people dying left and right, and for the first time in my life, I’m making a killing, legitimately.

I modernize the biz and launch an on-line portal, which soon represents three-quarters of my profits. Schlubs flock to our site like lemmings running off a cliff. People are dying to get in. I’m printing money. I’ve got mansions, girls, prestige. I only wear custom suits and alligator shoes, not the crap I used to buy at Marshalls. I take the company public and in no time flat, I’m rubbing elbows with the rich and famous.

As God is my witness, 2021 would have been a banner year, except some bio-pharmaceutical company called “Innovolution” launches a friggin’ miracle drug called “Perpetulum.” You know those drug commercials on TV that portray some goof traipsing across a grassy field while a fast-talking announcer rattles off all the side effects of the drug he’s taking? Well Innovolution ain’t like that. There are no side-effects. For a few hundred bucks a month, any person can take one pill a day and live longer—maybe decades! Nobody knows how long, because nobody’s dying, including my clients!

Spend It Now stock goes in the tank and my company’s hemorrhaging money, my money. Creditors are knocking at my door. Ironically, I feel just like a jamook in their juice game, ‘cause I don’t have the scratch to cover my debt. So I go to my favorite bar and drown my sorrows. The place is empty except for this millennial geek who’s bartending that night. The guy’s name is Winston. What the hell kinda name is that? He’s wearing jeans and a gray hoodie over a Prince t-shirt. In a way, he looks like a white version of Prince, except for the black horn-rimmed glasses and a ridiculous man-bun. Anyways, I pour out my soul to Winston. I tell him I used to make money in the juice game, yet now I’m losing my ass in a legit company. He asks me if I’d rather be legit or rich? I don’t even blink. “Rich,” I says.

Turns out Winston is smart—real smart. He knows computer programming better than any hacker I ever seen. He comes up with a genius idea. Over three-million people living in the states wear a pacemaker, and another six-hundred thousand more units are implanted every year. Every pacemaker is connected to Wi-Fi for purposes of monitoring. Winston says he can figure out how to hack into ‘em. Turns out, all applicants for our life settlement policy are required to fill in their medical history including if they have a pacemaker implant! Am I lucky or what? I tell Winston it’s a “dead balls-on perfect plan,” and he agrees. I can tell he likes the term.

So, business goes back to normal. Shareholders are happy including Winston who now has twenty-percent of the company. He’s the vice-president of technology for the Spend It Now Corporation. That should be enough, but like all the other millennials he feels he’s entitled to more than he deserves. Forget about it. I keep riding his ass for still wearing hoodies when he could be dressed to the nines. But he’s a backroom kinda guy, not the face of the company, so I let it go. Winston is working on website innovations, phone apps and emerging technologies. Not my thing, but I’m pleased that he likes his job. He even wants to expand the business with a new idea using drones that can deliver untraceable toxins. He says it may come in handy should we need to terminate a particular relationship with a long-living client who doesn’t have a pacemaker, if you catch my drift. Winston is a whizbang.

I catch wind that consumer complaints are piling up against Innovolution Pharmaceutical—that the drug may be causing heart attacks in some of its users. The FDA gets involved and, low and behold, they determine that most of the heart attacks occur in patients who have pacemaker implants. This confounds the FDA. After months of studies, they realize that it ain’t the drug’s fault, but that the pacemakers are fouling out on their own—regardless of make or model. It’s only a matter of time before the Feds start to smell a rat.

I can feel the noose slowly tightening around my neck. I tell Winston we’re done. It’s time to dismantle the operation before the FBI starts nosing around. Instead, the geek has the balls to reply, “No worries. There’s no way to trace what you’re doing.”

“What I’m doing?” I says. “Pal, we’re in this together!”

Winston says we got a dead balls-on perfect plan and must stick with it. I should add that Winston just bought a yacht the size of Delaware.

I says, “Look, I run the company around here.”

He says, “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. It’s time we became fifty-fifty partners.”

I laugh at him. No punk’s going to tell me what to do. “I’m the boss!” He disagrees, and our exchange gets rather heated. I’m about to work him over, just like the old days. I’m chasing him around, swinging my fists. It’s time to put a little “fear of God” into him. His eyes are wide open. Twerps like him never use their fists for a living.

All of a sudden, I start feeling sick to my stomach. I ain’t felt this awful since I ate some bad clams a few years ago. My heart starts racing and pressure builds in my chest. I feel like I’m going to explode. The next thing I know I’m on a stretcher being carted into the ER. There's all kinds of doctors and nurses in surgical blues hovering over me. I remember fumbling through rosary prayers I used to recite in Sunday school. I lost the beads a long time ago, so I used clenched fingers just before I saw the blinding white light.

I wake up in a critical care room. Winston is sitting by my bedside, hunched over his cell phone as always. He wants me to sign an amendment to our shareholder agreement where he gets eighty percent of the company! He says he’s being generous and calls it my life settlement. I grind my teeth and break a crown. An attending nurse walks in and tells me I’m a “lucky man”—that my heart had something called “arrhythmia” and they fixed it by installing a pacemaker in my chest. She removes the heart monitor and leaves. Winston smirks. He tweaks an app in his phone, and my heart begins to race. Another flick of his finger and my heart slows down to a crawl. He continues to play my heart like a yo-yo until I sign the papers. Winston was the better businessman and earned the right to run my company. After all, the wise guy had a dead balls-on perfect plan.