#and i think a lot of the radical-ness of Dickens' writing gets lost in the twee

[strangelittlestories]

On Christmas Eve, Ebeneezer Scrooge fell asleep in the server farm of his Cryptocurrency mine. In the background, the soft wash of LED displays and gentle hum of cooling fans filled the basement. He'd recently expanded his operation, having gotten a great deal on hardware in the Cyber Monday sales. So he was sung to sleep by the gentle guzzling of electricity and the slow accumulation of what might (by some) be considered wealth. Throughout the long night, he was visited by three ghosts. The whole business played out more or less as you'd expect, so we won't overly dwell on it here. Where things really started to go FUBAR was when Scrooge awoke… Looking out the security cameras on the snowy morning, Scrooge spied an urchin child. He pressed the buzzer on the speaker and cried out to them! "You, boy! What day is it?" "What? I can't hear you." "Hold on, I'll come upstairs!" Scrooge ran up the dingy stairwell of his minimalist and kinda grungy compound, stopping only to disarm his top of the line security system. He stepped out into the brisk winter, and very nearly forgot to reset the alarm in his excitement. Then he remembered he had prime numbers in there, damn it! So he did reset the primary alarm, but didn't bother with the non-lethal countermeasures, and that was something at least. "Thanks for waiting!" He huffed. "So, boy … what day is it?" "Not a boy!" Came the shrill reply. "Girl, then! What day is it?" "Not that either!" "Look, kid, this isn't a game of what's your fucking gender. Just tell me what day it is!" "It's solstice day, sir!" Said the urchin, looking up at a dishevelled Scrooge with their big urchin eyes. "Wait, really? …You're sure it's not Christmas? I fell asleep on Christmas Eve…" "I guess you slept for near a year, then, ‘cos I celebrate solstice and it's the gods-damned solstice." “I don’t know how to process that!” Cried Scrooge. “Maybe there’s a specific detail you can focus on to ground you?” Suggested the urchin, in a surprisingly helpful bit of trauma advice. “OH!” Exclaimed Scrooge. “Tell me, child, the butcher’s nearby. Does it still have that big turkey in the window?” “The butcher’s closed down six months back, I’m afraid! But I think there’s an Amazon Fresh around here somewhere?” Said the urchin. “That’ll do!” Scrooge rummaged around in his pockets. “Here, take this printout of a Jpeg of a poorly drawn frog and go buy me the biggest turkey you can find in Amazon Fresh. Then deliver it to Bob Cratchet!” “Even Amazon won’t take your NFT bullshit as currency, mister!” “Okay - I can give you cash.” Scrooge paused for a moment. “Do you have Venmo?” “I’m a street urchin.” Replied the street urchin. “Of course I have Venmo.” “Great. I’ll transfer you now - keep the change.” “I don’t mean to look a gift crypto bro in the mouth, sir, but aren’t you famously stingy? Like, your name’s literally a synonym for tight-fisted penny-pinching.” “That’s the old Scrooge. I got visited by three ghosts last night and now I’m a new man.” Said Scrooge, proudly, before added conspiratorially, “At first, I thought I’d just drank a bad batch of Soylent. But they were pretty convincing in the end.” “So you’re going to donate all your money to charity or start a non-profit or something?” The urchin said with open-mouthed awe. "I don't know. It's kind of ambiguous. I might do those things, or maybe I'll keep being rich and be a bit nicer? "Okay, so now you're closer to a Bill Gates rather than full Musk/Bezos on the scale of evil billionaires.” The urchin looked directly into the camera for a full three seconds. “And we’re supposed to celebrate that? “Look, it was pretty fucking radical for its time, okay?” Said Scrooge, snapping his fingers to stop the urchin breaking the fourth wall any further. “Are you gonna buy the turkey or what?" “I dunno, man. On the one hand, it feels like if you really changed your tune, you’d do more than buy one turkey for the single poor person whose name you know. On the other hand, you said I could keep the change. So this really is a bind for me…” “If I’m honest,” Said Scrooge, “I really didn’t think it would be this difficult to be charitable. No wonder Elon is the way he is.” “Sigh.” Said the urchin. Saying the word out loud, rather than just sighing, which I think tells you something about the level of frustration here. “You know what, this isn’t gonna work.” “Huh?” Said Scrooge, somewhat nonplussed. “Spot! Here, boys! Heel!” Called the urchin. In the distance, a low rumbling growl could be heard. Out of the shadows of the misty winter morning, a giant three-headed hound emerged, its jaws snapping at Scrooge in triplicate. “AAAARGH!” Yelled Scrooge, now so nonplussed as to be minused. The urchin pulled out a matte black flip phone, decorated with a few tasteful flowers, and made a call. “Hi Persephone, it’s me, Charon.” Said the urchin. “Yeah, I’m up here on psychopomp duty. Yup, it’s the Ebeneezer Scrooge case - y’know, the tech bro who drank too much Red Bull and had a heart attack? Well, we gave him another shot this year, but he’s still a bit of a dickmagnet. He’s made some progress - he understands basic empathy - but we’re still a bit stuck on the ‘myth of the benevolent billionaire’ stage.” In the background, the sound of screaming tech-bro and snarling monster dogs was fading into the distance. “I think we’re gonna call it for the day and give it another try solstice.” Charon continued. “Yeah, Cerberus is dragging him back to the underworld now. Yeah - he did a great job as the three ghosts too - definitely earned a treat. Cool - see you in a few.” Charon flipped the phone closed and took a deep breath. They took a pair of bronze coins out of a pocket of their ragged hoody, and placed them gently over their own eyes. “Hades bless us. Everyone.” They said to no-one, then disappeared.

#writing #short story #a christmas carol #dickens #mythology twist #honestly a christmas carol is excellent and really quite radical #this just felt like a fun update #and i think a lot of the radical-ness of Dickens' writing gets lost in the twee