My phone rings.
“Hello, this is DownToBuck.”
The voice on the other end is angry. “You take that video down right now or I’m calling the FBI.”
I am no stranger to threats. NBA players do not appreciate the strange brand of truth that I provide. Without even asking the caller’s name, I know immediately who the voice belongs to.
“Kevin, Kevin, Kevin,” I say, with the air of a parent who is about to explain something obvious to a small child. “You’re done. Over. I don’t care how many All-Star games you went to or how many rebounding titles you own. What matters now is that you’re a role-player, and you had a good game, so I made a video out of it.”
“You don’t understand, idiot,” snarls Kevin. “I’m Kevin Garnett. I’m still a superstar. You say it yourself: superstars don’t belong on your channel.” He pauses there, breathing heavily in his anger. “I’ve got the CEO of YouTube, ‘account delete’ button in front of him, on one line and the head of the FBI, ready to send a SWAT team, on the other. What’s it going to be?”
I put on my World War 1-era military helmet, open the dresser drawer that contains a cache of grenades, then run the script that will encrypt all my data and send it in fragments to hundreds of data centers around the world. The decryption key is located on a microchip implanted on my left kidney. I locate the number of a Romanian friend who knows the ins and outs of YouTube’s servers, the friend who can recover things that are thought lost even by YouTube’s data technicians. The cigarette in my mouth dangles lazily.
“Bring it.”