Chapter 13

Normally Mat received several emails from Lucas per day, some with helpful articles most with instructions and suggestions. However, today there were none. It's been almost a week since the interview, so Mat thought nothing about it. Until Lucas showed himself at the front door around noon.

"Hello?" Mat said surprised and let him in.

"What do you know about the Molo company?"

"The Molo company? It's a mining, self-governed, biggest..."

"It's pretty cool, right?" he said with enormous sarcasm.

"What are you talking about?"

"You wrote an article about it, didn't you?"

"Yes? It is my job," Lucas said down and massaged his brow, making Mat annoyed and angry even more.

"What now?" Mat stood before him.

"You cannot praise the company so much! It looks bad! I did not expect that I will have to explain it to you, but the Molo company and others like it are our competition!" Lucas was not yelling or angry, more tired, and calm.

"I didn't write the article in spite...if you don't like it, give me pointers," Mat said in response.

"Or maybe you might change the job,"

"Yeah, or maybe you stop..." Mat said through his teeth.

"Yes, yes, you are right. I screw up, sorry," he said and looked at Mat.

"I got pressured from the top, but...it doesn't matter... I just read it on the way and made me angry. It is not the reason I came..." he paused and looked at the floor. "Please sit down," he said and made Mat slightly scared.

"What is going on?"

"You have been talking with your friends a lot about the planet and the lottery right?"

"Well with those that allowed me to connect to their chats..."

"I am not stupid, there are other ways to talk to people...like use your mouth!" he said angrily and pulled out his WW. It started playing a video with low quality and sound, but he could quickly see it was from his drunken party. Mat's face grew paler every second watching himself stumble like a drunkard from the pub. He thought that was over, that night was long gone and there was no backlash...every second he felt like his past I would say a slur or something worse, something anti-government. While Lucas was not showing any particular emotion, he didn't have to. The enormous pressure and fear were enough. Then it came, he said an off-handed comment to his friends about something not being great. He could barely hear himself and then the video played for five more minutes.

After it ended he felt dizzy and fell silent.

"It looks like you know this is not exactly great look, the quality is bad and you were barely saying anything, but just being so drunk looks bad for a celebrity of the lottery. That, however, is not the biggest problem,"

"W-what do you mean?" he asked completely ignoring the fact that he did not actually bad-mouth the government in the video or anything of such sort. Just typical drunk teenager.

"I got this video from one of your friends, so I felt like talking to you honestly. Ditch them. This is not some government dog talking, but just simple life advice. They cannot handle your fame and power,"

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"One person from your school send this video to the media, thankfully it was some amateur kid that didn't know we check those. Since this video was taken by your friends, you know that the only way it got out was because somebody leaked it. So I personally checked the chat from the drunk party again, however this time I checked your friends instead,"

"Do you know what privacy means?"

"I didn't hack in their WW, I checked their public pages. The only private data I got was after your WW was recording their conversations,"

"And?"

"Do you want to see?" he asked and before Mat could respond Lucas showed the chat on his WW. It was between his friends and few more people from his class.

----

So let's talk about the big question in the room. What to do with Mat.

What do you mean? He has a fricking planet!

He is a government dog! Poor guy is much less often online! They probably forced him into some shady shit!

Please tone down your conspiracy and focus on the fact he is rich as fuck!

We seriously HAVE TO force him to go to drink again, the attention he got easily spreads to us as well!

Do you think you can get your beak wet with him around? Wouldn't he take all the prize?

Nha, it's Mat, he would get drunk before he could grab a tit!

You know you can just say you're his friend and girls from class under us will talk to you, right?

Dude, he must be fucking everybody that is why he is not as much online.

Or maybe he just doesn't give a shit about us anymore.

But didn't he say something about working?

Why would he work with a planet? Trouble at home?

I heard that his sister had trouble at school, so maybe it's not all that pink!

----

Mat looked away and Lucas sigh.

"Look, this is just stuff they said a few days ago, they dedicated a whole room talking about you, and while they are not actually malicious per say..."

"They are trying to use me...." Mat said and Lucas nodded.

"It's a trend lately,"

"Look I can still help you, since you like writing articles I can make arrangements for you to talk to somebody online for some online article about the planet. It will be more constructive, about the laws and such. It will be less scrutinize, so you can be ignorant about the knowledge and it might help you,"

"What the hell am I suppose to do with that..." Mat waved at the closed WW.

"It's up to you, but this is sooo normal. It's just people show their colors during unexpecting times. You confront them, or ignore it...it is up to you,"

"Thanks..." Mat responded and Lucas said it was all and simply left.

Soon, Mat was laying on his bed looking at his WW. He wrote an email to Lucas to send him all the logs about his friend's bad-mouthing him but was hesitant to send it. On one hand, he felt betrayed, on another he felt slightly bad for reading their private messages. But the most prominent was the weird feeling of defeat and frightening yet calming indifference.

"I have other shit to do...just fuck it, fuck it!"