Girl in a Fishbowl (Crowbar Book 1)

by Thomas A. Gilly

  Then she saw him. Sitting on a green park bench on the sidewalk. A boy. A strange boy because he was holding an old-fashioned hardcover book in his hands and he was reading it. It was not unusual to see people sitting and staring into space, because plenty of people online did that. It was unusual to see someone reading a real book, especially someone who was younger than seventy.

  She almost didn’t stop. She didn’t know what her mom would think about her initiating contact with some strange boy. But then she recognized the cover of the book. It was a book that she had read herself, and it was one of her favorites.

  When she stopped the bike in front of him he looked up. She liked his face—it had a thoughtful character to it—or maybe it was just the fact that he was reading a real book that made her think he looked thoughtful. He had sandy colored unkempt hair and his clothes were too baggy for him—and wrinkled—like he didn’t give a hoot about his appearance.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’ve read that book.”

  He just looked up at her and said nothing for several seconds. She was thinking that he wasn’t going to answer at all until he said, “I don’t think you’ve read this book,” tipping it toward her.

  “Sure I did, I just finished it last month.”

  “This book has been in my dad’s possession since he was a kid. If you read this book it would mean you broke into my house, stole it, and then brought it back when you were done without getting caught.”

  She laughed. “No, I read an electronic copy on my glasses.”

  “Oh,” he said straight faced. “That’s good, because our home security is pretty tight and if you were able to break in my dad would freak.”

  A really strange boy. She wanted to click on him and see if his dox were available, but that would mean she would have to reach out her index finger for her glasses to see it and tap in the air over him, and some people considered that rude.

  “What do you think of the book?” she asked.

  “It’s great,” he loosened up visibly and made a little smile. “Rowling really knew how to make her world come to life.”

  “I know it!” Terri said excitedly. “Reading it you really feel like you’re a student at Hogwarts. I can’t wait to read the rest of them. I’m glad the rest are so big ‘cause I zipped right through the first one. I would have started the Chamber of Secrets by now but I’ve been getting slammed with homework. I heard they did a good job with the movies. Have you seen the movies?”

  “No, I hate watching the movie before reading the book. I like to see what I imagine in my own mind first.”

  “Me too! A friend of mine thinks I’m crazy for reading the books first. She said, ‘But that will ruin the movies ‘cause you’ll already know what happens.’ But it works the other way, seeing the movie first ruins the book.”

  She had an impulse to take off her helmet. Her mom had just done her hair last night and she wanted to get off her bike, take off her helmet, loosen her hair in front of him, shaking it out in the wind, and then sit down next to him without being invited. Would that wow him? That would be really forward. It wasn’t that she was particularly interested in him, it was just that she was making a first impression right now and she was curious if she could wow him. Her heart was beating fast just at the thought of making such a move and she chickened out, keeping the helmet on. Instead she said, “Do you live around here? I’ve never seen you at school.”

  “I’m home schooled. My dad teaches me.”

  “Really?” Stranger and stranger. “I didn’t know you were allowed to do that.”

  “Yep,” he said.

  “Hey,” she said. “Do you have the BookClub app? It looks like you’re almost done and if you’re going to start Chamber of Secrets we can talk about it while we read. I like to talk about books while I read them. It’s like you’re in an adventure with someone. No one I know is reading Harry Potter now.”

  “I don’t have any apps. I’m not allowed to go online.”

  “What?” She wasn’t sure she heard right. “You’re not allowed? Are you being punished?”

  He looked down, and Terri felt bad because she guessed her reaction had embarrassed him. “That’s cool,” she said quickly. “My mom says people spend too much time online. She really monitors what I do, making sure I’m not wasting time doing anything stupid. Most of the time I’m doing homework or reading. She might be watching me right now.”

  He looked back up at her. “My dad doesn’t watch me.” He made a mischievous half-smile. “I can do whatever I want and my dad wouldn’t have a clue.”

  For the first time of this encounter, Terri thought she might actually like this strange boy. “I’m Terri,” she said. This would be the perfect time to try to wow him. She went through the motions in her mind of getting off the bike and taking off her helmet, but then she chickened out again.

  He looked around nervously. “My dad doesn’t like me giving out my name. He says, ‘That’s how they get you.’”

  “You just said you can do whatever you want.”

  “What makes you think I want to tell you my name?”

  Terri felt sudden indignation. If she wowed him he might want to give her his name. Chicken chicken chicken “I don’t care about your name,” she said. “What’s up with your dad, is he some sort of secret agent or something? Are you guys hiding from the mob?”

  He looked embarrassed again. “No…he just likes his privacy.” He looked ahead, at the alley across the street and squinted. “I guess I like my privacy too.”

  “Oh well excuse me,” Terri said and put her feet on the bike pedals. She rode past him. He can have his privacy, jerk.

  “My name’s Conrad.”

  She stopped the bike. She wanted to say something clever, like That wasn’t so hard, was it? or Stupid name, no wonder why you keep it secret, but looking back at him he didn’t look like a jerk—he looked sad, and alone. “Hi Conrad.”

  After an awkward pause Conrad said, “Hey, I’m usually reading here after my studies; you can come out here and we can read Chamber of Secrets together. I can find another copy and you can read a real book.”

  She shrugged as casually as she could manage, but felt a secret thrill, like being asked out on a date. “Yeah maybe. Maybe I’ll stop by again.” She felt awkward and didn’t know what to say. It was probably time to quit while she was ahead. Either try to wow him or get out. “I better get back home. See you later Conrad.”

  “See ya.” He went back into his book as she rode away. She couldn’t wait to see her friends at school tomorrow and tell them about this strange boy she met.

  But the next day when she gathered with her friends before home room, she realized that she didn’t want to tell anyone about Conrad. He was her secret friend. It felt exciting to know someone that no-one else even knew about.

  She went to the bench the next day after school and there he was—with two copies of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. He had finished Sorcerer’s Stone the night before. At first they sat in silence, each absorbed in their own book. Then Conrad said, “What is up with those Dursleys?”

  “I know it, right?”

  He was her secret friend that she had all to herself, and in the following two years they travelled to Hogwarts and then to Narnia, and then stopped at Pern for a while before going to Middle Earth. Sitting there they were disconnected from the rest of the world—and their bench became more of a magic portal than a mere bench.

  Chapter 13

  Terri was having trouble keeping up small talk with Sergei—her attention kept going to the interactions between Natalya and Conrad. It was during the Southwest fusion Peking duck that Natalya decided to turn the conversation away from small talk to the reasons why they were there. She had just finished explaining to him how to wrap the meat and vegetables and sauce in the little pancakes when she said, “It’s really good of you to join us here Conrad. I’ve been wanting to apologize for a long time about the way I treated you years ago when you c
ame to visit. I mean, it’s really embarrassing for me to even think about the way I treated you. I’m really sorry.”

  Conrad just nodded, his mouth full.

  “I mean, I was only fourteen and it was kind of shocking when you just showed up at my front door like that,” Natalya continued. “I was surprised that they even let you in the building.”

  “I told them I was a friend of Terri’s,” Conrad said after swallowing.

  “I know, but I mean, you surprised me and then when you said you wanted to see Terri…I just thought you were trying to take her away from me. I didn’t really mean all the things I said.”

  “You didn’t mean you were going to destroy my life and make sure I never got a job anywhere when I grew up and I was going to be homeless?”

  Natalya turned away. “I know I was really, really terrible. But I was scared. It’s inexcusable but I was scared. I depended on Terri. She was my best friend—is my best friend, and I thought you were going to take her back to the Rocks. I just want to say that I apologize and I want to make it up to you. I want to help you find your father. Will you let me do that?”

  Conrad nodded. “Yeah. I’m worried about him.”

  Natalya leaned forward, and Terri noticed that as she did so she put her arms on the table under her breasts to push them up. She didn’t need eye tracking software to see Conrad’s eyes flick toward her cleavage before moving quickly back to Natalya’s face.

  “Do you have video of the last time you saw him? If I see the video it might give us some clues, it will give us a starting point for our search.”

  “I…I have video but it’s private. Dad would hate it if I gave out videos of him.”

  “That’s okay,” Natalya said consolingly. “Can you just tell us about it? Tell us about the last time you saw him?”

  Conrad collected himself and said, “We had a fight. He hated the fact that I decided to get biometric glasses. We had a fight over it and he stormed out. He knows all the dark spots in the city, I think even the police would have trouble finding him if they tried.”

  “My people are better than the police,” Natalya said confidently. “If anyone can track him it’s my people. So do you have any guess where he might be? Staying with some friends maybe?”

  “He doesn’t really have any friends anymore. He’s become more antisocial over the last few years, I mean, even more antisocial than he used to be. I’ve contacted all of his work associates that I know of. They haven’t seen him.”

  “What does he do for work?”

  “He’s a software engineer, although he does electrical engineering stuff too. He mostly does work with the Hardline. There aren’t too many volunteers left maintaining the old physical cable internet; for a while there were enough hobbyists keeping the old routers working—maintaining the old anonymous internet—but a lot of people are giving up on it. When I was a kid the only internet I was allowed to connect to was the Hardline—playing ancient MMOs with adults—I don’t know, I guess I grew up in a time warp. There are some businesses that still use the Hardline, most of them are a little sketchy—maybe more than just a little sketchy. Anyway, they hire my dad to maintain their networks.”

  “That’s fascinating,” Natalya said. “You know; I have my own Hardline connection. Have you tried to contact him over it? You must know some of his accounts, you know, some of his anonymous personas.”

  “Yeah, I’ve left messages. No word from him.”

  It was killing Terri to see Conrad like this. The pain and worry was obvious on his face.

  “Is there anything else you can tell us about your father?” Natalya said. “I know he is into privacy, but is he part of a movement? Does he follow some ideology that other people follow?”

  “He made up his own ideology. He wrote a manifesto. Early on he tried to get people to follow it but now he’s mostly given up. I read it when I was younger…I mean, reading it, if you didn’t know him you’d think he was really really crazy, instead of just really crazy. He wrote it when he was in his twenties, when he wanted to change the world. He used to be a hacker—he’d tell me about the times when he was my age when he took down companies, shut down web sites, exposed the corruption of the wealthy and of the government. Whenever he would talk like that it was like he was asking me why I hadn’t shut down any companies yet.”

  Natalya leaned forward more. “So he took down companies? Which companies?”

  Conrad sighed. “He never told me details. He said he couldn’t, if anyone knew, the government would come after him.”

  “Fascinating!” Natalya said. “Tell me about his ideology.”

  Conrad winced, like someone had poked him with a needle. “It’s really…I don’t know, he shoved it down my throat when I was younger. I bought into it for a while, but I don’t follow it now, it’s not how the real world works.”

  Natalya nodded for to him to go on.

  “He calls it 3CV, the Three Core Virtues. The Three Core Virtues are truth, freedom, and compassion. He thinks that all ethics, everything that is good, can be reduced to the 3CV. He believes that if he could demonstrate to people that everything good they believed in could be broken down to the virtues of truth, freedom, and compassion, then he could get people with conflicting beliefs to come to a mutual understanding through the common reference to those virtues. He could show them that the beliefs they thought were good really weren’t good if they didn’t include the 3CV.”

  “Can you give an example?” Natalya asked. “Like, what is something good that can be broken down into 3CV?”

  Conrad thought for several seconds. “Well, like when someone believes in God and wants to convert other people to their religion. Dad would ask them why they wanted to convert people. I mean, they do believe they are doing good. But my dad would say ‘Are you doing it to score points with God? That’s selfish. That’s not good.’ Or if they wanted power by getting more converts, or money. But if they were doing it because they actually cared for people’s souls and wanted them to go to heaven, if they did it out of compassion, then it was good, because it could be reduced to an element of 3CV. And if an atheist who hated religion saw that the religious guy was acting out of compassion, then they could understand each other. Any disagreements would be about a different understanding of what the world was, not a different understanding about core ethics.”

  “Okay, I can see that,” Natalya said. “But what does this have to do with your father’s obsession with privacy? I mean, privacy isn’t one of the core virtues.”

  “My dad believes that the tricky part of following the 3CV is keeping the Three Core Virtues in balance. Sometimes you have to sacrifice one of the core virtues for the sake of another virtue—when they come into conflict. Like sometimes you have to sacrifice truth in order to protect freedom, or sacrifice freedom for the sake of compassion. For a stupid example, if someone asks if their butt looks big in a pair of jeans you can lie and say ‘no’, but only if you do it out of compassion—if you’re doing it to not hurt their feelings. The only time you’re allowed to lie is to protect one of the other two virtues. And the sacrifice of one of the 3CV has to be less than the one gained. Like it’s okay to restrict the freedom of a child if you do it out of compassion, you know they would hurt themselves if you didn’t. But it has to be balanced, you can’t beat the crap out of the kid to teach them a lesson. So, my dad considers all this lack of privacy that’s happening today to be advancing truth at the expense of freedom and compassion. If everyone knows the truth about everyone else, then the poor and powerless lose their freedom.”

  “How?” Natalya asked, looking intently at Conrad. “How do people lose their freedom from the truth?”

  “Well, let’s say you have a billionaire, and let’s say you have some poor schmuck. And the billionaire tries to pick up a girl in a bar and gets shot down. Then the poor schmuck, who happens to be good looking, buys her a drink and goes home with her. Now let’s say this billionaire is a real asshole about getti
ng rejected and decides he’s going to make the schmuck’s life miserable. Just by seeing his face he now knows everything about him—his name, address, the names and addresses of all his friends and family, what he likes to buy, his hobbies, everything. So he goes golfing with the schmuck’s boss and tells him he’ll invest in his company if the schmuck gets fired. Maybe he buys off some of the schmuck’s friends to keep away from him. Now, what can the schmuck do? He can’t influence anyone; he can’t buy anyone off. When there was privacy back in the day, all the poor schmucks in the world at least had safety in anonymity. But now, with everyone knowing the truth about everyone, real freedom is gone. Privacy is the armor of the poor. But now that it’s gone, there’s just raw power out there, and raw lack of power, and we all know where we stand. Kind of like when I went to visit you.”

  At the last sentence Natalya leaned back, still looking Conrad in the eyes. “That is so true,” she whispered. “I am so sorry. We will find your father and get him back to you. I promise.”

  Conrad looked down. “I just can’t shake the feeling that he’s hurt or in trouble or something, and that it’s my fault.” His voice cracked.

  Terri felt a surge of protectiveness for Conrad. He’d always been sensitive, and she knew he loved his father, despite all the complaining about him over the years. She decided then and there that she didn’t want Natalya to have anything to do with him. Natalya was not the best thing for Conrad, and quite possibly, she was the worst.

  “Maybe you should go to the police,” Terri said. “If he’s in trouble they would be the best people to help him. I know he would get pissed off if he was fine when the police found him, but we just don’t know. What if he is in trouble? You have to think of his safety first.”

  Natalya turned toward Terri and put a hand on her leg under the table. “I think we are in a much better position to find Conrad’s father than the police,” she said, and slowly dug her nails into Terri’s knee through her skirt. “Do you think the police are going to make his disappearance a high priority? Are they going to put all their resources into it?” She turned back to Conrad. “That’s what we’re going to do. We are going to use our raw power to find your father.”