The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 451: 451 | The Acoustics of Laughter

Percy looked up from the cup with his brown eyes sharp and warm and carrying the specific quality that surfaced when Percy Mendoza found a variable he hadn’t accounted for and decided it was worth investigating. "Show me the one with the best input-to-output satisfaction ratio."

I led Percy to the racing simulators first because they provided the most direct correlation between skill and result, a relationship Percy’s brain could map without the intervention of randomness or claw machine physics. The two full-sized motorcycle cabinets sat side by side, identical in construction and identical in the faded quality of their screens, which displayed a Tokyo track selection menu in font that had been modern in 2019.

Percy climbed onto the motorcycle with the coordination of someone who had never sat on anything resembling a motorcycle and whose body was still negotiating the appropriate posture. His feet found the pegs after a delay that his notebook would later document. His hands gripped the handlebars with the force of someone who had been told this device operated at high speeds and had taken the warning personally.

"Relax your shoulders," I said from the adjacent cabinet.

"My shoulders are relaxed."

"Your shoulders are at your ears, Percy."

Percy lowered his shoulders by approximately two inches and immediately looked more comfortable and less like someone being electrocuted in slow motion. "This is a different input interface than I anticipated. The response curve between handlebar angle and on-screen trajectory is nonlinear."

"It’s a ten-year-old arcade machine. The response curve is whatever the machine feels like that morning."

"Noted."

We raced. Percy crashed seventeen times during the first lap, his body fighting the inputs his brain was generating because the delay between processing and execution remained his fundamental weakness in every context, academic, social, combat, and now recreational. The motorcycle wanted faster decisions than Percy could deliver, and every corner that required commitment before full information was available produced a wall impact and a timer penalty.

I won the first race by eleven seconds.

We raced again. Percy crashed nine times.

I won by seven seconds.

The third race Percy crashed four times, and the crashes had a different quality, a precision to them that suggested Percy was now crashing deliberately at specific corners to test the physics engine’s collision response. His muttering had shifted from anxious to analytical, his lips moving rapidly as he processed the track’s geometry in real time and fed corrections back to his hands with increasing speed.

"The hairpin at sector six requires commitment point four seconds before the visual cue suggests," Percy said without looking away from his screen. "The game rewards early input over accurate input. This is a design philosophy prioritizing action over analysis."

"Welcome to arcade racing."

"I find it philosophically distressing and operationally instructive."

I won by two seconds. Percy placed his hands flat on the handlebars and stared at the results screen with the expression of someone who had just discovered a new language and wanted fluency before the day was over.

"Again," Percy said.

We raced six more times. On the ninth race, Percy crossed the finish line zero point four seconds behind me, having crashed exactly once, at the hairpin in sector six, where his commitment point arrived one tenth of a second too late and his body delivered the correction one tenth of a second after that, the gap between knowing and doing that defined everything Percy struggled with and everything he would eventually overcome if someone kept standing next to him and saying again.

Percy set down his empty token cup and looked at me with the quiet intensity that most people confused with timidity and that I had learned to recognize as Percy preparing to say something he considered important. "Thank you."

"You would have beaten me in another three runs."

"I am aware. The gratitude is not for the competition." Percy’s pen appeared from somewhere and he opened his notebook without looking down at it, a gesture so reflexive it had long since stopped requiring conscious direction. "The gratitude is for the forty dollars."

I would have responded but Eden’s voice erupted from across the arcade at a volume that qualified as an environmental event, accompanied by the sound of a bell that suggested a high score or a jackpot or the activation of some mechanism that the basketball machine’s designers had installed specifically to reward the kind of person who put every available resource into a single activity.

"SO MANLY!"

The words rang off the low ceiling and the purple carpet and the exposed ductwork and landed on every person in VOLTAGE with the force of a man who felt things enormously and expressed them at matching scale. Two children at a claw machine turned to stare. The staff member who had opened the door earlier put down her phone and looked up for the first time. Marco, standing somewhere deeper in the arcade, made a sound that I identified through pure familiarity as chip-related choking.

Eden stood at the basketball machine surrounded by a cascading waterfall of prize tickets, his arms raised above his head and his red hair catching the overhead fluorescents and his face split by a grin so wide and so genuine that it made my chest do something I did not have time to examine.

Caden appeared from behind a row of racing simulators with his hazel eyes bright and his grin matching Eden’s in scale if not in sincerity. "We are never telling anyone about the strip club."

"Agreed," I said.

"I will tell exactly one person about the strip club," Percy said, his pen already moving.

"Percy, who?"

"Rina."

"Why Rina?"

"Because she will find it hilarious, and because her finding it hilarious will produce the laugh whose acoustic properties I have been studying, and because hearing that laugh in response to my story rather than someone else’s story is a data point I have decided to prioritize."

Is he really using us to get a laugh out of Rina?

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