Next History: The Girl Who Hacked Tomorrow

by Lee Baldwin

  “Arnie, could this be related to the Pentagon visitor? A force field? A portal allowing access to another place, another dimension?”

  “Well, for what it’s worth it fits our graph of anomalous events. But those questions are out of my area. I am investigating it as a collective paranormal experience. Other strange events are accelerating by the hour.”

  “So bottom line, you are saying…”

  “The Fish Jump happened, Ralph. For those few seconds, it was entirely real.”

  Silent Journey

  Clay enjoys a peaceful day among tall redwoods, if you call riding a bicycle wildly down twisty dirt trails littered with rocks and washouts a peaceful activity. When his wheat-straw hair flies in dusty breeze and everything’s a blur it’s normal life for him and a way to clear his mind of things, such as the unpleasant arrival of an old nemesis claiming to be Tharcia’s father. Her harsh indifference, their puzzling estrangement. The tough-guy homicide cop tracking a random lead. Leaving white rage behind in the autumn air on his KHS Tucson twenty-niner, he has a couple of hours to shake things off, sweat and feel normal.

  Cicero Clay was born in Manhattan Beach California 39 years ago to a couple who deeply loved one another and already had a boy aged four. Both parents now dead, his dad in a highway crash while Clay was in high school and the mom five years after, of inoperable cancer. The name Cicero was his dad’s fancy idea. An avid reader, a history buff, the elder Clay decided his second son would be named for the ancient Roman philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero. Call it fate, call it karma, but bad luck seems to follow Clay as often as the good. The unusual name had made him the butt of schoolyard jokes and turned him into a scrapper growing up.

  Clay’s long legs now a blur on the pedals. Eyes behind his Fossil shades can be gray green to clear blue. He runs a business out of his shop, buying and selling aircraft parts. He’s bought and restored two vintage airplanes and has a project on the go, a 1970s-era Formula One racer. He wants to complete it, maybe race it, trade it and move on. He does not get attached to things, loves his simple life in the redwood grove.

  At a particular spot, Clay leaves the trail, jinks the bike between rocks trees and brush a quarter mile to an overlook of Monterey Bay. Sits against a rock, removes the bicycle helmet. Takes a deep breath.

  A thing Clay learned in prison, aside from the hyper-aggressive response that had decked Porterfield, was to examine his social conditioning. During a month in solitary, he’d stumbled into a drifting bliss of transcendent silence. In it he’d learned to let everything drop away, to forget things that concern him. He seeks this state every day. When it clicks, Tharcia’s distance, the dark blot of prison on his life, all become part of a natural ebb and flow.

  A quote and a toothache had started him along that road. The quote, something his dad liked to repeat, from his namesake Cicero, about gratitude. The greatest of virtues and parent of all others.

  The toothache. Any disturbance or irritation while in solitary confinement soon grows out of proportion, there is meager stimulation in an 8-by-10 pen with only yourself. The steady throbbing in his jaw was knocking on the door of agony when Clay noticed that the pain receded while he focused on gratitude. The meditating was tricky to bring into focus. Keeping at it day after day, pushing the pain back and exploring his mind, Clay saw that gratitude is not about thankfulness for a thing, not about an object. It is about the joy of being. During months filled with negativity, the slam of iron bars and constant threat of lockup gangs, gratitude became his private oasis.

  Once out of the hole, the prison staff approved of his more malleable disposition. It was an illusion. Clay had become a better actor. Instead of losing his identity, he had found a vital grip on it. He stuck with gratitude meditation because it kept him sane. Sitting against the familiar rock, he finds his way back to gratitude now.

  Clay’s vision of being happy is being in a family. His birth family had crumbled to bits. Caring for his mom before she died had scared off a potential lady friend. Getting arrested and sent to prison had cost him another. Finding Tharcia’s mother again just weeks before she got herself killed reminded him of love’s intensity and closeness. He visualizes a home life with a playful and intelligent woman. One who could be close to Tharcia, help her grow as only a woman can.

  Tharcia. They’d shared a rapport before her mom’s death. After, Clay offered her a room in his house, thinking she would go back to university once she sorted herself out. He’d only the fuzziest idea of what would come after. For a time, they depended on one another emotionally. Circumstantially, they could be family, yet no father-daughter relationship has surfaced. Clay is far beyond expecting her to call him Dad.

  He has no idea how Tharcia manages her pain. Evidence of her struggle is everywhere, even in flashes of random anger directed at him. Mixed up, distant, haughty and rebellious. Reading, always reading. Her visits with alternative healers, psychics. Making friends with local witches. Wiccans, practicing Pagans. Studying foreign languages in her car. Always something going. He’d loved her mind, when he once knew it. But now.

  The quiet place hard to find this morning. Clay shakes his head slow, waiting for thoughts to drain away. He thought he could reach her. She’s often out late with girlfriends, pickup dates she does not discuss, sleeps until afternoon. Doesn’t talk to him, not letting him in.

  And then across his wavering silence flood memories of the morning with Porterfield, Tharcia in the too-thin top that barely covered her. His disgust at Porterfield’s insinuating presence. A vision comes, Clay lifting the blonde girl onto the porch railing, her bare thighs parting to let him in, her look not of derision, but of tender expectation.

  Mood shattered, angry with himself, Clay shoots to his feet. No such thought about her has ever entered his head.

  “What the hell are you thinking, man? She’s your kid!”

  Twilight of the Gods

  News and speculation about Annetka’s death encircles the planet, permeates the blogosphere, launches myriad tweet-storms, email threads, text nets and voice traffic. From a New York fashion writer’s blog:

  Annetka’s Clothing Habits Stuff of Myth

  by Carrion Gray, NYC Fashion Critic

  While the entertainment world reels at the loss of beloved pop singer Annetka, myth-shattering facts of her life are emerging into daylight. It’s a noble truth that superstars live in worlds of their own, private bubbles, where the oxygen is richer than most of us mortals ever breathe.

  For some A-listers, it is humiliating to have the props and stage sets of their privileged existence revealed to just anybody. For others, realizing that millions of ‘just anybodys’ constitute the worldwide fan base which pays good money for their albums, DVDs, pay-pers and theatre tickets, the eventuality of being seen without makeup is an inevitable fact of doing business. Show business.

  Annetka is dead, and will never know how rudely her secret life has been stripped bare. But instead of feeling a collective shadenfreude when someone great has been revealed as a made-up character, the sentiment following Annetka’s grim passing is burning a special afterglow for most of us around the world.

  First, there is that pesky autopsy report from the NYC Chief Medical Examiner’s office, leaked to this observer only minutes ago. Setting aside some of the more grizzly details, a careful read of the CME’s findings shows that Annetka’s upper back was physically developed in an unusual way. Wags and cynics among you will assume it was to balance her bountiful rack, but this observer is thinking on other lines.

  Coupled with this physical anomaly are assertions by the Brazilian phenom’s personal physician and Annetka’s own clothing preferences, many of which have been observed and idly mused over during her career, which this reporter makes as two years and four months since release of her breakout first album, Who am I? Rising questions chorus about who she was before recording that album, her childhood, her parents, her origins. Those will wait for a later post.

  We’
ll get to candid observations about Annetka’s many lovers in a jiff, but first, her personal physician. Dr. David Goldberg of Malibu, appearing in the 7th hour of the boffo Farewell to an Angel marathon talk show covering Annetka’s life and body of work, was quoted as follows in the press:

  “My examinations of Ms. Annetka were always superficial. Of course she was young, fit, and strong, so required little in the way of medical attention. She never had a full physical from me. I saw her for colds and flu, blood pressure, temperature, singer’s throat.

  “I never examined her upper torso, chest, or back. I never gave her a gyno exam. She was strict about those things. It was in our contract.”

  Do you see a picture begin to form? We have a beautiful young woman who doesn’t allow her doctor to see or touch certain areas and body parts. Not so unusual in itself, but plunge ahead, dear reader.

  I have complied a consensus from interviews with a few of Annetka’s lovers, and by a ‘few of’ I mean, at last count, seventeen of her lovers who have so far come forward with verifiable reports of intimate contact with the singer. (Hey - if your first album had gone platinum at age 22, and you were beautiful and single, a shining light on the world stage, what would you do? I mean, what would your sex life be like? Let me take a wild guess here - I’d say prodigious.) By verifiable I mean that aside from claiming quality alone-time with the superstar (dripping with detailed accounts) these people were also seen in public situations with Annetka, such as at clubs and restaurants, boarding private jets, vacationing at worldwide hot spots, attending the Grammys, Oscars, CMA, and the list goes on.

  We surmise from these descriptions that Annetka always wore some covering on her upper body. Her breasts were sometimes exposed, but her back and shoulders were always kept, shall we say, under wraps. A number of her lovers claim their wrists were bound while having sex with her, so they were not able to touch Annetka freely in any way. At least not with their hands – LMAO. Also we have looked through thousands of published photographs, and these show us certain areas that she kept covered 100% of the time… her upper back and shoulders.

  Lastly we have certain statements from the CME findings, observations relating to the scapulae, or shoulder blades. One M.D. osteo surgeon remarked about Annetka’s scapulae as “having unusual thickness and rigidity, resembling the density of ape or gibbon bones… the sternum with an anterior ridge… (providing) additional rigidity for superior musculature…”

  Most telling is this final observation from the CME report: “Marks on the scapulae… suggestive of healed surgical removals of bony projections… the bone in these locations was in the process of regrowth, projecting 2 cm. outward from the scapulae anterior surface. These projections would have been visible through skin and some clothing.”

  Why would a human being have such a deformity to begin with? How could a surgery to correct bony scapular projections go unreported in Annetka’s childhood, even though taking place before she became famous? Surely her friends and neighbors growing up would have some recollection.

  And why can we not find any trace of her foster parents? Why is it that her closest known relative is a cousin living in New Jersey? Who are her real parents? Why is it that no one in Brazil knows anything about the singer’s parents or family?

  This observer has a theory. The bony projections are the attachment-points for wings. Angel wings. It completely fits with her slutty, riveting dance moves, a lovely trained physique, her hypnotic eyes and illuminating vocal range. Annetka was an Angel on Earth. She gave up her wings, and brought her beauty here to share with us. But, if Annetka was indeed an Angel, why did she have to die?

  Your reporter is on the case! Subscribe to my RSS feed for late-breaking news on Annetka and related stories.

  Data Thrashers Anonymous

  In Alexandria, Virginia, at the offices of Next History, something unusual and archaic is taking place. It’s called a face-to-face meeting, or in text argot, f2f. The offices occupy an unassuming three-story office building less than 20 minutes from the Pentagon. The company relies on a distributed network of four dozen data scientists and mathematicians, and depends on no primary location. Except for the remote supercomputer at a secure underground data cavern.

  Strand is here, along with Sami Lang, Ph.D., a number theorist, Carl Vogt, Ph. D., encryption theorist and server coder, Gary Charlebois, Ph. D., a number theorist, Jerry Schumacher, Ph. D., primarily a game theorist, who’s also an inspired airbrush artist and the team’s chief linguist. Schumacher is also the company bad boy, having been caught with a flash drive full of IPv4 addresses that he could not properly account for. A cyber squatter, a domainer, one of tens of thousands of inventive lonely souls lurking in wait for their ships to come in, for the moment when some arriviste blue-chip wannabee discovers that the hyper-original domain name Marketing thought up is already registered. Oops. “Can't win the game if you don't spin the wheel, know what I mean?” Jerry put in fifty hours of community service, nothing personal, all big-city cyber-bizniz.

  Of the team, Strand alone knows the data center location. Next History’s big iron occupies an underground facility dedicated primarily to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. At that location, Strand’s team shares cycles on one of the most extreme supercomputer systems on the planet. Next History’s data partition holds 7 exabytes of storage, a number roughly equivalent to all words ever spoken by humans. The processor array executes 500 trillion floating-point operations each second. These levels of storage, pipe speeds, and compute power are what’s required to overlay a mathematical model on a dataset of huge proportions, containing 300 million items such as tweets, texts, blog posts, news releases, 9-1-1 calls, scholarly articles, weather stats, voice messages, and random captures, a mathematical model which can coax from that mass of information a picture of future events that humans can interpret as potential reality. What will be. Next History is aptly named.

  Many of Strand’s employees work remotely, in-person meetings are rare. General Solberg’s hyper-security around the Pentagon incursion, their inquiries into the Annetka murder and whale migration, the inevitable leakiness of electronic communication, make this face-to-face work session a must in Strand’s view. He has an uneasy feeling these wildly diverse events are connected, but as yet conceives no model that can prove it. His predictive data analysis often seconds his intuition.

  The informal workspace is decorated in soft tones, a wall of large flat-screen monitors, sleek workstations and comfortable chairs with flip-out computer trays, rolling equipment carts, a large electronic whiteboard, a well-provisioned kitchen. Aside from blacked-out windows, unseen security measures include sound insulation in walls and ceiling, and the electronic isolation mesh built into every surface. There is no cell phone, radio, or Wi-Fi reception in the suite.

  The team have rolled their chairs into a loose circle. Feet on an ottoman, Strand has slid so far down in his chair that his butt hangs over the carpet.

  “This meeting is face to face because of two things. We have to be absolutely black about the Pentagon intrusion, about Annetka. And we have to get ahead of the curve on this whale migration. We are collecting all traffic. I’ll share on the main monitor.”

  Everyone turns to the wall display as Strand’s screen view appears.

  “This is a photo of the blue whale that surfaced alongside the Japanese research vessel. The markings on it are Kanji. Jerry translates it as a latitude and longitude in the South Pacific, and a time. Day after tomorrow. We collected some Navy traffic and learned that several warships are steaming that way now. The State Department is talking to the Japanese government. The Navy doesn’t know what to expect but they are outfitting as a wildlife expedition. Or a battle group. A carrier with jump jets and fighters will be within several hundred miles, so they have the aerial part handled. The Navy has secured time on a NOAA satellite that’s got position.”

  “Chris, how big is that thing?”

  “This one is dec
ent size, for a blue. About ninety feet. Any theories?”

  “End of the world searches are up 11 percent boss,” Sami puts in. The pink T-shirt she wears carries a favorite slogan: The Singularity is Nigh.

  “Time period?”

  “Last seven days. Twitter twaff on related terms is growing, and not just from the usual doomsday posters.”

  “Specific focus?” Gary asks her, tapping keys and staring at his display.

  “There are twenty or so favorite topics,” she looks at her laptop. “Asteroid impact, Snowball Earth, Yellowstone super-volcano, Comet AG5, magnetic field collapse, pole reversal, uncontrolled global warming, a south-polarized solar flare, Biblical End of Days, The Rapture, and so forth.”

  Jerry gets a distant expression. “Why are people searching on doomsday?”

  Gary looks around at everyone. “What’s the traffic on the Pentagon appearance?”

  Strand looks at him. “This is Black Absolute, everyone, so I’ll keep it brief. A man showed up in the courtyard just before lunchtime. Witnesses used the term, materialized. Some mentioned a thunderclap. Everyone nearby felt seasick, and left. I was with General Solberg in my office when a couple dozen snipers fired heavy rounds on him for half a minute. We didn’t see where those rounds went. The man was completely untouched. He never moved or changed expression.” Strand puts a phonecam vid on the main screen for everyone to see.

  Sami wriggles her hips in the chair, “My God, hunk-o-mania.”

  “How’d ya pull the A-ring office,” Jerry asks with a grin.

  “Solberg,” Strand says.

  “This dude looks like an athlete,” Gary remarks. “How tall is he?”

  “Tall enough for me,” Sami whispers, chagrined at her open enthusiasm.

  “So he showed up directly in the courtyard without entering through the building, didn’t pass through security, and he’s just standing there?”