by Lee Perry
“It’s not that late,” Catherine wrapped her arm around her waist and gave her a squeeze, “We can stop for a pizza dinner on the way home, he’d love that just as much. I’d rather we all slept in our own beds tonight.”
They walked on in companionable silence until they reached the trees and Jordan pointed, “See the car? I hope the tires haven’t sunk in the grass, the ground is pretty wet.”
Catherine had stopped and was looking back down the driveway at the house and garage.
“It looks just like your sketches, doesn’t it?”
She nodded, “It’s so strange.” She said, sounding distracted, “Actually seeing it from above, physically, with my own awake-eyes… gave me goose bumps like you wouldn’t believe.”
Jordan nodded, watching as she began slowly walking back down the driveway, looking at the ground. Her brow furrowed, “Looking for something?”
“I guess not.” Jordan looked at her disbelievingly and she shrugged, “White feathers, I saw one when I was dreaming from this vantage point.”
“Oh.” Jordan’s brows arched, “Find any?”
“No…” Catherine returned to the car, “it’s okay.” A soft chuckle escaped her, “I’m sure we’ll see more.”
Epilogue
“The righteous care about justice for the poor, but the wicked have no such concern.”
- Proverbs 29:7
“The first request of civilization ... is that of justice.”
- Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
Millburn, NJ
“May all beings be happy, content and fulfilled. May all Beings be healed and whole again. May all be protected from harm and free from fear. May there be peace in this world, and throughout all possible universes.” Jordan was grinning when they finished, it still made her smile when Cam said, pottible newnipurses.
They always took turns sitting on the edge of Cameron’s bed during the bedtime ritual and Catherine watched from the doorway, Jordan looks exhausted.
“Okay, mom…” Cam called her, “hug.”
She joined them in a family hug on the bed and when she and Jordan stood, he slid down under the covers and tucked in his teddy bear and glowworm next to him. “Ready?”
“Yeah,” he peeked under the covers and after fumbling for a moment, placed two white feathers on top of his bedspread covered with pictures of Dug and Kevin from the Pixar movie.
Jordan and Catherine’s jaws dropped, “Where’d you get those?” She asked.
“They’re under the covers sometimes.” He snuggled back under, “Mostly they’re in my toy box.”
“Really?” Catherine rasped hoarsely and cleared her throat, “Are they coming from your pillow?”
“I dunno.” He shrugged.
Jordan snorted, “I believe Chelsea and your grandmother sent them.”
He sounded unsurprised, “That means I’ll see them when I dream tonight?”
Catherine’s jaw dropped again and she clamped her mouth shut briefly before asking, “Do you dream about your sister?”
“Yeah,” he said, rearranging his teddy bear and glowworm companions under the covers, “we play.”
“Oh, that’s… that’s great, Cam.”
“Yeah,” he looked up at them, “can we go to the zoo tomorrow?”
“Wanna watch TV before bed?”
“Can’t,” Jordan shook her head, “if I sit down I’ll fall asleep.” She shuffled to the kitchen, “I’m gonna do the dishes.”
Catherine followed, “I’ll dry.”
Jordan twisted the stopper in the drain and turned on the hot water, “He doesn’t have a goose down pillow, you know.”
“I know,” Catherine snickered, “I remembered that as soon as I said it.” She got a towel and stood next to her, watching the suds rise when Jordan added dish soap to the rushing water. “It occurred to me what’s happening in the stock market really is like when we play Jenga. Brandon Kimura keeps saying in these interviews it’s not a question of if but when the next flash crash happens… like Jenga; it’s the high frequency traders who are pulling out the sticks that will eventually make the whole thing come crashing down. Except when it does, they’ll be the winners and have all the money.” She shrugged, “It’s funny in a way, all it would take is someone smart and either crazy or angry like Alden to upload infected code that’s really hard to crack… and Wall Street could, absolutely, self-destruct in a millionth of a second and it would all be over.”
“I know Bea is fed up with trying to get anything done anymore…” Jordan industriously scrubbed a dish, “She said she feels like she’s beating her head against a brick wall; everyone’s fighting the bureau and the Department of Justice to keep our hands off Wall Street, and not just the stock exchanges, it’s politicians too.” She rinsed it and let the water drip from it for a moment before handing it to her, “They’re all protecting Big Money and Big Banks so it’s just not profitable for Wall Street or the United States Congress to protect either American Business or the investor.”
“Well, Alden clearly had a screw loose, but he was right; no one with any power is interested in justice or fair play in the stock market.” She dried the dish and returned it to the cupboard, “But he certainly did quite well for himself when he shadow-hacked Mitch Ryan and made a pile of money copying his investment strategy. He wrote about his outrage at how the ordinary investor was being screwed, but he still kept the money… I think I get what motivated him to start killing high frequency traders, he wrote a lot about how mean and nasty they were to him on a daily basis year after year, but mostly he wrote about was how corrupt they all were and how he was cleaning out Wall Street like an infected wound… And then, every once in awhile he’d mention how the victimized investors were being screwed but his sympathy for them seemed to stop there.”
“Yeah,” Jordan scrubbed a glass, “for an apparently non-religious person he really had a thing for his messed-up Christ metaphor; feeding his catches to the fishes from his boat.”
“That was creepy. It never ceases to amaze me when they interview the neighbors of these murderers on the news and they all say how nice and unassuming a person the murderer was.”
“You mean his neighbors at the marina?”
“Yes.”
“That boat of his is really nice though.”
“Are you saying that like you want one?”
“Hell no,” Jordan snorted and handed her another dish, “I’m still working on finding a riding school for us and Cam… when he’s bigger.”
“Ooo,” Catherine grinned, “aren’t you sneaky.”
“Not really, since I just blew it and told you.”
“Sam been able to match that arm to a victim yet?”
“The fisherman’s arm, yeah, she’s pretty sure it matches Chris Thackeray; third killed, second torso found. She’ll confirm it when the DNA matches.”
They washed and dried pans and breakfast bowls for a long minute before Jordan said, “I think Alden’s understanding of revenge was too twisted to be equated with justice. He kept such a detailed record of how to stalk and kill and render his victims down to emasculated torsos, I think his killing spree was more about a brilliant person with the potential for insanity being pushed over the edge by bullying asshole co-workers than him being some demented righteous crusader. Maybe you can’t put a person like Alden in such an aggressive environment and not expect him to snap… I’ll have to ask Lianna what she thinks.”
“So…” Catherine steeled herself, “you’re going to talk to her?”
“Yes.” Jordan handed her a plate.
“About Alden killing himself in front of you?”
“Yeah.” She drew in a deep breath through her nose, “I didn’t see it though, when he raised the gun to his head I knew what was coming…”
“So you didn’t see it.”
“No,” she handed her another dish, “I really didn’t.”
Catherine exhaled heavily, relieved, “Thank god
.” She took it, thoughtful for a long moment while she slowly wiped it dry. “He had a copy of the company’s high frequency algorithm…” She put the dish away, “I saw it, there was an error in his upgrade that caused the flash crash that day.”
“So so it wasn’t the algorithm, it was an upgrade?”
“Well, yes and no, his code, and here I mean the upgrade he wrote, was fine by itself. It had something in it, an instruction to make a slight adjustment in the algorithm to make it ever faster when making a particular type of trade, and when he uploaded it, it interacted with the company’s algorithm and the mix of code, so to speak, created the error that made it implode. Alden didn’t deliberately intend for the algorithm to go rogue, but he may have been right when he called the portion that triggered it, Digital Life.”
Jordan gave her a look, “Really.”
“I found a folder on his laptop filled with notes about his belief in something he called Algorithmic Biogenesis. He thought algorithms were living things, or at least had the potential to become living things, anyway, he wrote quite, uh… extensively on the subject.” Jordan gave her a comical look and she added, “He did seem to ramble a lot.”
“Well, that sounds crazy.”
“Yeah,” Catherine sighed, “crazy… I really hope so. The glitch in his code is an interesting one in that it gave the algorithm the power to be unpredictable and do unexpected things; like going rogue. There are behavioral scientists today who would call that consciousness.”
Jordan stopped again and looked at her, “You’re kidding.”
“I wish I was. Some of the smartest neurobiologists in the world have decided the mind is the product of a web of neurons in the brain so now they’re asking the question; if the Internet were a brain, how would its complexity stack up against a human brain?”
“I don't like where this is going…”
Catherine emitted a harrumphing sound, “Me neither, and after reading Alden’s notes…” she shook her head at first then nodded; “he may have been onto something.”
“So that’s what he meant by the Adam and Eve reference on his program?”
“And changed it to Atom and Eve?” She chuckled, “Probably.” Jordan handed her the last glass to dry and drained the sink. She dried it quietly and put it away before saying, “I read where the hostage said Alden had a thing about himself that he recited; he had a file on that too, it was a mantra… a list of meanings for his first and last names, Jonas and Alden.”
Jordan rinsed and squeezed the sponge until the water ran clear, “In the second before he shot himself, he started it…”
“‘I am a peaceful being?’”
“Yeah,” she nodded, “that.” She took the towel from her and dried her hands, “He said, ‘Don’t you know who I am? I am a peaceful being,’ then… ” She tossed it over the long oven handle, spreading it out to dry, “It makes you wonder how many people are out there who are desperate to be seen, heard… listened to,” she shrugged, “acknowledged, maybe, but nevertheless so desperate they snap the tether and their minds go rogue...”
“Well,” Catherine hooked her fingers in the waistband of Jordan’s jeans and pulled her close, draping her arms around her waist, “You certainly heard the hostage and kept him from being killed by Alden too.”
She cocked her head to one side, thinking, “Oh, yeah, I heard that poor guy crying.”
“Jordan,” Catherine tugged at her, “how was it possible for you hear that man crying when you were, one; parked so far away, two; it was raining,” she added, “by your own account loudly, and three; the windows were rolled up in the car?”
Jordan sniffed and stared into the dark living room and beyond, considering her words, “I don’t know…” Her nose wrinkled in concentration, “When you say it out loud like that it doesn’t make sense that I could have heard him… but I did.”
Catherine let go and took her hand, leading her from the room, “Maybe you’ve got a psychic thing going too.”
She laughed, “I really don’t think so, that gift is all yours. You’re the one who heard him first in one of your dreams.”
She pulled her down the hall and into their bedroom, “I did…” her voice faded.
“What?”
She shrugged, closing the door behind them, “It… seems like something happened on that one, huh? I heard that man crying in a dream well before it happened, then you go there and hear crying in your car it turns out was parked really close to where I was standing when I dreamed it…”
“So, what do you think happened?”
She snorted, “I don’t know.” She flopped on their bed, “So, can we go to the zoo tomorrow?”
“We can…” Jordan began undressing, “you’re done with Alden’s data for a couple of days and I already submitted a bunch of reports on audio files I made on my phone while I was waiting for you to get to the house….” She yawned hugely, “And who knows? Maybe the three of us will go to the zoo tonight in our dreams and your mom and Chelsea can meet us there.”
“And we can still plan for a long weekend somewhere?”
“Absolutely.”