"Come on in." Shane stepped aside, letting Lip into the bedroom.
Lip pushed the door shut behind him, pulled a laptop bag from his back, and dropped it onto Shane's desk. Shane sat on the bed while Lip dragged over the stool Shane had just been using and booted up the machine.
"Look at this, Shane," Lip said, pointing at the open page on the screen. "That inventory management system? I've got the prototype running. The logic is simpler than one plus one. I integrated the front-end register with the back-end inventory. As long as you can actually get your hands on that server you talked about, we won't have to rely on pen and paper for this messy bookkeeping anymore."
Lip kept talking, "I also wrote a little auto-reconciliation script. It runs by itself every morning at dawn and shoots out an email alert if anything's off. From now on, anyone who tries to skim a single cent from the account has to go through me first."
Shane leaned forward slightly, watching the code scroll rapidly across the screen along with a crude test page Lip had pulled up.
Gotta admit, putting aside all the stupid shit Lip did, the kid was a genuine STEM genius. Even though the interface looked straight out of a '90s DOS setup—a screen full of black-and-white text and pixelated boxes—the logical architecture was clean. No bloat.
"What about those website features I asked you to add?" Shane asked.
"All integrated." Lip switched to a mocked-up purchasing flow. "Now, any idiot who wants to buy your course has to check the 'I have read and agree to the terms' box before checking out. The key is, I set a mandatory reading timer. They physically have to scroll your terms—which look like the fucking Declaration of Independence—all the way to the bottom and wait a full ten seconds before the checkbox even lights up."
Lip chuckled. "Ha, I beefed up some of the clauses in there too. Now, even if these morons hurt themselves working out and try to sue you, a judge will see the back-end logs showing they were forced to read and stay on the page. We could drag it out in court until the end of the world."
Shane took the mouse, double-checked it himself, and nodded. It was detailed—way more bulletproof than his original request.
But before he could say anything else, Lip switched tabs again.
"And there's this," Lip said, clicking on a section. "I set up a delayed delivery and segmented transfer protocol. I noticed lately a lot of people were buying the course and immediately using platform loopholes to request a refund. Now, they only get the first half of the course upfront. The system won't push the second half to their email until the damn refund cooldown period expires. Minimizes your losses."
"Really good, Lip," Shane nodded. "Great idea. You did a seriously good job."
As Shane spoke, he took a good look at Lip. He noticed the bloodshot eyes and heavy dark circles. Clearly, the kid had pulled more than one all-nighter to get this done.
Catching Shane staring, Lip subconsciously turned his head away, but his tense shoulders relaxed a fraction. He rubbed his nose to cover the awkwardness, then pulled up the crypto wallet window used specifically for buying Bitcoin.
"Here. Your 'digital lottery tickets.'"
Lip looked at the long hash addresses on the screen and couldn't help but shake his head. "Spent the whole $500, just like you asked. Market price right now is around $0.25 a coin, though there's some end-of-year fluctuation. I swept up 2,184 of them for you."
With that, Lip fished a flash drive out of his bag and tossed it to Shane.
"Private keys are backed up on that drive. Seriously, Shane, watching 500 bucks turn into a string of garbage numbers sitting on this computer... I really think you've lost your mind."
Shane stared at the number 2,184 on the screen, his heart skipping a few beats despite himself. Over 2,000 Bitcoin! If he calculated it based on the future highs of tens of thousands per coin, this was a multi-million—maybe even multi-hundred-million—dollar asset!
But for now, they just sat quietly on a computer in a busted basement, dismissed as pointless garbage by a genius like Lip.
Shane forced his excitement down and kept his face perfectly neutral. "Alright, it's stored. Find some time later to transfer it all to my computer. You hide one copy, I'll hide the other, and we'll forget about it. Just pretend I threw that 500 bucks straight into Lake Michigan."
"What do you mean 'pretend'? You did throw it straight into the water," Lip muttered under his breath.
Shane pulled his pillow and blanket over, leaned back against the headboard, and looked at Lip with a teasing grin. "After everything you just said, Lip... is there an 'I'm sorry' stuck in your throat that you haven't spit out yet?"
Lip froze for a second, then forced out a tight, twisted smirk. "Sorry? Why the hell would I be sorry? I just figured if I didn't set this up right and you went bankrupt, I'd end up having to take care of your ass. That would be a disaster. You should be grateful you've got cheap labor like me in the house, Mayor Shane~"
Shane smiled. He dug a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, pulled out two, tossed one to Lip, and lit his own.
"Lip, I've never doubted your intelligence." Shane blew out a drag of smoke, his voice dropping slightly. "But you know the situation with this family. You know I need stability, not random surprises."
Lip stayed quiet for a moment, then nodded. "I get it. I really do."
"Alright, anything else?" Shane asked, figuring this brotherly bonding session was about wrapped up.
At that, the tight look vanished from Lip's face, replaced by something a lot weirder. He reached into a side pocket of his laptop bag, pulled out a dog-eared magazine, and handed it to Shane.
The cover featured a group of aggressively scantily-clad men.
Looking at it... wasn't this the gay porn mag Ian had been hiding? Looked like the earth-shattering Shameless plotline was finally kicking off.
Shane took the magazine and flipped through a couple of pages. Instead of the shock Lip was clearly waiting for, Shane just gave a calm nod. "Yeah, it is what it is. Lip, you gotta realize the Gallagher family is very diverse now. Look, we've got a traditional white guy like you, an Asian guy like me, a Black kid like Liam, and even a piece of dog shit like Frank squatting here. We have to learn to be inclusive, you know?"
Shane put on his best politician face and started preaching. "This is a personal choice, and we need to respect—"
"Shit! Stop, stop, stop!" Lip couldn't handle the self-righteous bullshit and cut him off. "Shane, quit preaching that crap. You really think you're the next fucking mayor, don't you? I brought this to you because there's a surprise waiting inside. Quit stalling and flip through it—you're gonna flip your shit!"
Shane looked at Lip's eager, conflicted face, genuinely confused. "What else is there? It's just a bunch of dude ass and pecs, right?"
Forcing down his mild discomfort, Shane flipped two more pages.
"There's nothing here. What, you into this kind of thing too? If you're seriously into it, I know a few jacked dudes online I can introduce you to."
Lip sneered, flipped him off, then pointed his middle finger down at the magazine. "Turn to the last page."
Shane flipped straight to the back cover.
The very next second, the image staring back at him choked the joke right out of his throat. He swore out loud, "Shit! Son of a bitch, why the fuck is this in here?!"