“Excuse me, sir, how did you make your first million?”
The white tee-shirt-clad teen beamed with a radiant positivity that nonetheless felt forced like poor media training. Joe, caught by surprise, stopped and did a double take. Three feet away, another boy was filming with their phone. Joe stopped his entourage from shoving the boys out of the way and turned to the kid with a friendly smile.
“How did you know I was a millionaire?” Joe asked.
“Your outfit is nice.”
“Do you know who I am?”
“No.”
“So all people wearing nice outfits are millionaires?”
The kid replied with a laugh, “Uh, in my experience, most people who walk along this street and have a nice outfit are millionaires. Am I wrong?”
“No,” Joe replied.
“So, how did you make your first million? I’m doing a show where I ask millionaires how they got their money.”
Joe Feinwacker contemplated before answering. In the span of a few seconds, a rough outline of his life played out; like a scrubbed YouTube video, it alternated between seemingly random events, in and out of chronological order.
But his first million? He was twenty-five when that happened. He was working at Walmart, dating his manager, a woman ten years older than him with lip, nose, and nipple rings that, try as she might to hide it, somehow protruded from every outfit she owned. Like the cool mom he never had, she treated him with strange preference that made him uncomfortable; but when he caught her showing off her rings to her boss in a storage unit where he was looking for an extra copy of a Kirby game on Switch, he felt the need to call things off. This led to her no longer treating him so well, with punishments including but not limited to “gun duty,” which consisted of dealing with the people who buy guns and ammo at Walmart, and “receipt checker,” which consisted of looking at people’s receipts and confirming if the things in their baskets corresponded with their alleged purchases. Fortunately for him, this latter job only resulted in three physical altercations and one hospital visit.
He quit.
Joe began to look for jobs but made the discovery that everybody, except the very lucky few, eventually comes to realize: he did not want to work. But work he must. So he began to apply to all sorts of jobs and all sorts of jobs rejected him.
Around the time of the AI boom, there was a simultaneous boom in gambling. What was once seen as a shady hobby for the socially outcast became mainstream. Comedians and athletes starred in commercials about the joys and fun of putting your money on whether or not an 18-year-old prodigy would hit a triple-double. Bored, Joe downloaded one of these apps and found that it also contained an online casino. He played slots, became addicted, sought help, couldn’t afford help, played more slots, lost all his money, and had to move in with his parents.
Despairingly he discovered that his parents lived in a state where you could not play online casino games. He would have just driven to a regular casino, but around this time, for whatever reason, loud noises and crowds of people made him nervous. So he turned his attentions back to the job hunt, hoping a new location might bring new fortune.
But he still couldn’t find a job. The nightmare that his college professors assured him would not come true was the only reality he faced. To soothe his sorrows, he began playing a fake slot machine on his phone. The money was not real, the prizes were not real, it was like non-alcoholic beer: deeply unfulfilling, making you wish you had the real thing so bad you might almost run out and grab some.
But before he could hop in the car and drive across state lines to wager more of his mom’s money, he had an idea. Perhaps inspired by his ex-girlfriend’s side gig as an OnlyFans cosplayer, or perhaps inspired by the poster of Nico Robin above his desk that he often found himself staring at for half an hour, he concocted an idea so radical it would, unexpectedly, lead to his first million.
“A gooner slot machine game.”
The kid paused to take this in. “What?”
“Yeah, you see I was 25-“
He could not code, so he asked his therapist at the time, a GPT model named Sam, how he should go about coding.
“Just ask me to!” It replied, “I can code just about anything.”
He asked it to “make a slot machine game for phones where you use fake money however you can also use real money to buy more fake money and the goal of the slot machine isn’t to hit a jackpot to make more money it’s to hit a jackpot to see anime girls with mega tits and dump-truck asses.”
In a matter of seconds, the code was in a decent place. He watched a few YouTube tutorials and refined the code that Sam had given him. In just a month, he licensed the game and put it on the App Store.
One of the problems with marketing anything highly sexualized is that, while many people may use it, very few would talk about it. The content was nothing hardcore, just half-clothed anime Waifus posing in strange AI-generated landscapes, a beach on the moon, a hospital with chefs in the background, and a suburban kitchen with fires emerging from the hills in the windows, for instance. But still, it was hard to market. So he began just sending it to everyone he knew. And everyone he knew told him it was dumb or perverted. And yet… downloads went up. Before he knew it, he was raking in real money, enough to buy groceries, then enough to pay the car payment.
He knew that Waifu Slots became something more when he was in an IHOP watching TV and eating a breakfast platter. The news station was going over a “phenomenon” among teenage boys in school.
“One child,” the reporter said, “used his father’s credit card to buy over $300 worth of Wai-Coin in the hopes of seeing a flash of a scantily clad anime girl riding a horse down New York City street.”
By the end of the year it became an in-joke among boys of nearly all ages to, in a knowing, half-ironic way, discuss Waifu Slots almost philosophically. But their irony was, like LeBron James advertising sports betting, somewhat slimy, for they were quick to open the app as soon as they got home and roll the slots until a glimpse of fan service (that they could very easily Google to see without paying) appeared before them alongside flashing lights and dinging noises.
More and more money came in. The amounts were becoming, to Joe, ridiculous. It felt less like he did work and more like he won the lottery. And as the history of lottery winners will show, a sudden rise in capital for those previously unacquainted leads to immense psychological distress.
If one were there for this moment, they would know the ubiquity of Waifu Slots, its influence on society. Politicians, men in high seats of power, played it and praised its merits. Divorce rates shot up. Children not even five years old with access to a phone or a tablet became addicted. You would sit in church and look over to your right and see a child tapping and tapping as the slots rolled around. The American education system saw the biggest dip in test scores and numeracy skills since the pandemic. Despite this, there was no moral panic, because nobody, at least, nobody with power, wanted Waifu Slots to go away.
That is, until Joe himself realized the immense damage he had done. He sat like Tony Montana, in a large mansion somewhere in LA (not even he knew exactly where), next to his model girlfriend and a pet tiger. Like Qohelet, he realized the vanity not just of his life, but of Life itself. He shut down the app, having made, at this point, more money than most will ever even get near in their lifetime.
When people woke up and found that Waifu Slots would no longer connect to a network and that it could no longer be downloaded from the shop, they panicked. Copycat anime slot games that used to be ridiculed boomed in popularity, but Joe rested knowing he was no longer the problem, though he may have started it. There is a strange issue in all art, whether it is literature, film, or mobile games; an oblique copy of a thing, even if it’s nigh perfect, never matches the aura of the original. A James Bond novel not written by Fleming is often just as good, but feels borderline immoral. A movie that takes every story beat and influence from Psycho is never Hitchcock. Ten-thousand Flappy Bird clone games cannot match the aura of the original.
So, too, with Waifu Slots. The original AI-generated insanity of the original, its sounds, its novelty, but most of all its paradoxical shared and open secrecy among old straight men and young straight boys, could never quite be replicated, as moments in time never truly can.
And the world moved on, and, as you no doubt know, the global rise of fascism gave people other things to worry about besides scandalous slot machines.
“So what do you do now?” The boy asked.
“I am the United Empire's Director of Health and Human Services."
