Spaceland by Rudy Rucker

was wired like you wouldn’t believe.
    Here came my chance to reach a million. I bet two hundred thousand dollars. The dealer had a ten in the hole and a ten showing. I started out with an ace and a five, which was sixteen, counting the ace as eleven. I drew a four, and that made twenty, which still wasn’t enough to beat the dealer—they didn’t pay you for a tie. But my subtle vision had already told me I could do better. “Hit me.” A king, which still gave me twenty, now counting my ace as one. A step back? Not really, for now I had the chance to take one last hit and get that second ace waiting down there. Twenty-one. I had my million.
    â€œThat’s gotta be your last hand, sir,” said Sante the pit boss, tapping me on the shoulder none too lightly. His eyebrows were angled in this weird, stagy way. He looked like a weary, pissed off Dean Martin. “Nero’s can’t handle no more losses tonight.”
    I took my chips to the cashier and got paid in honest-to-God cash. A hundred packs of a hundred hundred-dollar bills each. Whoops, not quite a hundred packs. Seventy-two packs.
    â€œWhere’s the rest of my money?” I demanded.
    â€œFederal withholding, Mr. Cube,” said the cashier. “Twenty-eight percent. We’ve filled out the form for you. just sign here.”
    They already had my social security number written onto the form. I guess they’d been busy checking me out.
    â€œMy wife told me there’s no tax on blackjack!” I protested.
    â€œThere is if you win more than five thousand dollars, Mr. Cube,” said the cashier in a bored tone. “You could look it up. Section 3402 of the tax code. Paragraph Q.”

    To finish the transaction off, they sold me a shiny metal Halli burton Zero attaché case for nine hundred dollars.
    I was a big winner. But meanwhile my wife was nowhere in sight. While I’d been playing, she’d swung by my table once or twice to peek at me, each time looking more desperate. But I’d kept shooing her away. Who needed that noise? Being in a fight with her was ruining the joy of my big score! And now she was gone.
    I got a cab back down the Strip to the Hog; I didn’t want to be walking around this time of night with a million bucks in an attache case, minus taxes. But a million just the same! I was riding high. When I got out behind the Hog, I realized Did know our room number. I could have looked for a desk clerk, but I felt like I remembered well enough where the room was.
    I walked around in the maze of the motel streets for half an hour, getting thoroughly disoriented. Finally I thought of using my subtle vision to peek into the rooms and look for Jena. A lot of people were still awake, doing all sorts of sleazy Vegas type stuff. Sex. booze, drugs, you name it. One memorable thing I saw was a male stripper wearing nothing but a starched little bib-and-tucker thing and a red silk bow tie. He was closeted with a bachelorette party of three lumpy women from Wyoming. His dancing was over, but he was still at work, earning the little stack of twenty-dollar bills sitting on the TV.
    Jena was nowhere to be seen in any of the rooms near where I thought we’d stayed. And then I realized I’d been looking in she wrong alley. I went down to the next one. still no Jena, and then finally, with my regular vision, I spotted my Lincoln Navigator parked by our rooms. I used my subtle vision to peek inside.
    Jena was awake. She and Spazz had opened the door between our rooms, and Jena was in Spazz’s bed, naked, her eyes squeezed into lustful slits, her arms wrapped tight around him.
    Of course.

    I stood there on the asphalt watching for two or three minutes, struck dumb, filled with sick fascination. With my subtle vision, I was right in the room with them. It was hot. I’d never seen Jena so excited before in my life. I was, like, hypnotized. But when they paused to switch positions, I