Joseph was in the throes of a mid life crisis, except he wasn't trading in his reliable truck for a sports car and he wasn't leaving a family to start one with some twenty something. Mostly, Joseph wanted to go by Jay. Not Joe, Joey, Jase, J or some symbol... just Jay. He'd be lying if he said a symbol wouldn't be cool, he just couldn't think of one for him. So Jay it was.

He was moving out of his shitty apartment. It wasn't really an apartment, it was the basement of his former employers 'headquarters.' They called it that, but it was the only building they had, unless you counted the steel cargo container that had been there longer than he had.

The rent wasn't much, but not much worked in the basement either. There was a bathroom, it had a beautiful walk in shower, a bidet, one of those fancy toilets with a build in seat warmer for cold days and a touchless faucet for the sink, but the was no plumbing hooked up to it. Apparently, there was a mix up and everything had been installed before the plumbing had been run.

There was also a fancy hand dryer, which worked, but wasn't useful without somewhere to wash your hands first. Joseph ... I meant to say: Jay had tried using the hand dryer with some of the hand sanitizer, but it made the whole apartment smell like a still. So really, there wasn't a bathroom... unless you counted the occasional bottle filled with urine that hid under the sink til morning. ... in hindsight, Jay realized it was more than occasional, but again, that's not really the focus of the story.

Jay had a mini fridge and a toaster oven for a kitchen; neither came with the apartment and both looked like something out of the 90's, bad retro 50's styling made from plastic that was easy to chip, scratch or just break chunks off of. The duct tape started as a sarcastic thing, but parts of the fridge were now literally held on by duct tape.

Jay also quit his job. Not because his boss was awful, but because the economy had gone to shit. Covid had nearly wiped them out. Jay had gone with out pay for months in the hope that it would pick back up, but his boss had just given up. They would have had a going out of business sale if they had any stock left, but the shelves had been empty for months as well.

Jay had recently created a stupid little android app that helped you get better prices from online retailers. It wasn't useful at first, but once there were a few hundred thousand users, some of the larger online retailers approached him with an offer. Give them the app, stop making apps and in return, get a fuck ton of money and a sweet ass ride to get on the road. Jay made them throw in a 'shit ton' of money for his former boss and called it a deal.

When the 'sweet ass' ride arrived, Jay nearly feinted. It was fuckin' fancy! Fully electric, built in h2o generator, solar panels, a god damn wind-kite for high flying wind power, a regular wind generator and a number of other features that Jay thought were just joke props. I mean seriously, a star trek style food replicator? what the fuck is that going to really do? A full wardrobe in his exact fit. A built in computer... which might also just be a prop. A working shower, sink and shitter! With actual toilet paper! It really was a sweet ass ride. It felt bigger on the inside too. The "Mr Fusion" garbage disposal was by far the best of the props... unless there was a Flux Capacitor as a night light. The refrigerator was pretty small too; just about the same size as the mini fridge he was leaving behind.

Enough of the background, let's get on with the story.

Jay had packed up everything that he wanted to keep from the apartment... all three boxes and set off for adventure. He'd head north first, he wasn't sure why north, but that was where he wanted to go... North!