Chapter 14
Terri rode in the limo with Natalya. They sat facing each other. As the limo left the gravel of the Green Inn parking lot Natalya said, “Wow, just wow. I mean wow.”
Terri kept silent.
“I say again…wow. Let’s talk about table manners, or should I say, lack of. I mean, he ate with his mouth open. How does someone do that? I mean, someone over the age of five.”
“He’s always done that. He says it makes the food taste better, something about the air and the taste buds.”
“Yes, but wow. I was staring at his food-covered uvula all night. It took everything I had not to gag. And what’s up with the knife? He didn’t pick up his knife all night long. He was trying to cut everything with the side of his fork, even the meat. Just pushing down with the fork. I wanted to yell at him and say ‘Pick up the fucking knife!’ Did no one ever let him use a knife before? Wait, is he not allowed to use knives? Was he institutionalized and has only eaten with sporks? Should I be worried?” Natalya grinned.
Terri just shrugged.
Natalya’s grin became a scowl. “And what was up with that talk about calling the police? You know what I’m trying to accomplish here. That was a sketchy move.”
“I’m real worried about his dad. I just thought it was the best thing to get him back safely. I still think so.”
“Well you’re wrong. I’m the best bet for finding his father. And that 3CV shit is brilliant. I know now what we’re going to do with him. Fuck that Eliza Doolittle shit. And no SugarBear, Anyway, SugarBear wouldn’t touch Conrad with a ten-foot pole. He’s way too far gone for that. No, I have a better plan. Something brilliant. 3CV. That shit is priceless. It’s gold. This is something that will get me places.” She smiled slyly.
Terri knew it was her queue to say something. “What’s your plan?”
Natalya bounced on her seat excitedly and sat up straight. “I am going to bring ethics back! I’m going to make 3CV a thing. The next big thing. Listen, what am I? I’m just some rich brat surrounded by other rich brats. Sure, I’m smarter than all of them, but when it comes right down to it there’s nothing, except for my raw awesomeness, that makes me stand out—because we are all fighting each other with the same weapons. But now, now I have something that no one else has. And it’s a weapon that people had been using effectively for centuries but lately everyone has just stopped using it for some reason. Ethics! I’m bringing them back. You know how in school they keep saying we’re living in a post-ethical society? Who wants to feel guilty, right? Technology and bureaucracy and institutions have made personal ethics obsolete. You can’t do anything wrong without getting caught. Well maybe that’s a bad thing. 3CV. It even fits on a t-shirt. It’s perfect! You have this ex-hacker prophet who has a manifesto proclaiming a new ethical system. He disappears off the face of the Earth, leaving behind his teachings, and his son—a son who goes on to proclaim to the world that it has lost its way because 3CV is out of balance! He will proclaim to the world that we are all dicks because we don’t follow 3CV! And I will be his sponsor! As his sponsor, I will renounce my evil ways, and this will give me the hammer of ethics to pound my enemies into submission. Guilt! Right? If you make people feel guilty you can get them to do whatever you want. Hell, it’s the oldest trick in the book.”
Terri was horrified. She hoped that it didn’t show on her face. “I don’t think all that many people are going to fall for it.”
“They don’t have to. One percent. All I need is one percent and I am a global force. Even if someone doesn’t believe in 3CV, just by calling them out and saying they’re evil is going to affect other people’s impression of them. I mean, look at Marja’s uncle. He runs VuDyne. VuDyne! And what does VuDyne do? It makes sure everything on the net conforms to copyright laws. It monitors everything! It knows everything! According to 3CV it is just about the most evil force on Earth. Ragnar Kekkonen is going to be the Satan to Conrad’s Jesus!”
Natalya was giddy. But something she had said filled Terri with dread—about Mr. Hicks disappearing off the face of the Earth. “What happens when we find Conrad’s dad? What if he doesn’t approve of the way you’re using his ideas? What if he even denounces you as an unfit sponsor for 3CV?”
Natalya’s eyes became ominous slits. “Well maybe we just won’t find him.” She then made a bubbly laugh and said, “Of course we’ll find him. And when we do I’m sure he’ll appreciate us spreading his ideas. Conrad said he tried to spread them himself when he was younger. Of course he’ll be fine with me.”
Chapter 15
Jerome Miller awoke to the voice of his mother saying “Good morning sleepy head, time to get up!” Her Jamaican accent was filled with its usual sunshine. He opened his eyes and she was seated on the edge of his bed, looking at him over her shoulder, already dressed for work in her tan slacks and light blue polo shirt.
She was a morning person, always perky and smiling immediately after waking, and when he was a teenager this caused him daily aggravation. Now, a little older, he found he appreciated it and her nearly perpetually sunny disposition.
“You need any help getting up?” she asked as she always asked, even though he hadn’t needed her help getting out of bed for six years now—ever since he was fifteen—when he got his armchair.
“No thanks, I got it.”
She patted his out-of-control afro. “Let me give you a proper haircut tonight after dinner.”
“No Mom, I like it like this. It’s the eccentric genius look. I call it the Einstein fro.” Actually, what
he liked about it most was that it covered the surgical scars on his head.
“Hm. I call it the ‘I don’t have a mamma who’s looking after me fro.’” She got up off the bed. “I have to get into the office early, so I’ll be gone by the time you get out of the shower.”
“Okay, have a good day.”
She left him in his neat and sparsely decorated bedroom. On the wall across from his bed were three black and white framed photographs of his heroes; Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, and Edgar F. Codd. People from the Twentieth century looked so much more serious and mature than modern people, with their suits and formal expressions. They were people who could achieve great things. Jerome wasn’t sure if people were capable of achieving great things anymore. Clever things, certainly, but great things? The age of achieving greatness was over.
In the corner of the room was his armchair. It was a leather chair with two shoulder strap seat belts and three very rugged tires sprouting from the single metal leg that supported it. It had two robotic arms that hung limp from either end of the back rest. Jerome closed his eyes and with a small mental effort took control of the chair. He was now looking at himself from the chair’s point of view. He got that familiar disembodied feeling, seeing himself, a lump in the bed. He took control of the arms and lifted them in view of the camera. He flexed the delicate looking black glossy fingers to make sure the connection was good between his brain implant and the chair computer. Everything a-okay. With another mental effort he made the chair roll to the edge of the bed.
Using the robotic arms, he pulled down his blanket and sheet. He slept in just briefs on his armless, legless torso. He didn’t like his face—he still looked twelve. His dad had a great face—powerful jaw and formidable brow—a man’s face. Jerome had inherited his mom’s pixie face. He wished he had inherited more from his father—arms and legs would have been nice.
He placed each robotic hand underneath the nubs of flesh that protruded from each shoulder and lifted himself out of bed onto the chair, spinning himself to face forward and strapping himself in.
After showering and putting on some clothes he went into the kitchen. His father was seated at the kitchen table in his bathrobe, sipping coffee and staring into space.
“Morning Dad,” Jerome said.
“Good morning Jerome,” his father replied, not looking at him. He was probably working intensely on some difficult software problem, but even when h
e wasn’t working he tended to avoid eye contact. His father was at about twenty-five percent on the autism spectrum. This had been frustrating for Jerome when he was growing up, trying to find some point of contact, until he discovered that he could relate to his father with talk about computer programming.
“Hey Dad, I was wondering if you could take a look at some legacy code for me. It’s something for the city power grid. I’m supposed to rewrite it in C# but it’s such a horrible mess I’m thinking about just encapsulating it. There’s no documentation and I’m having a hard time figuring out what it’s even supposed to be doing.”
If anything made his father happy it was badly written legacy code.
“What’s it written in?”
“C++.”
That elicited a barely perceptible smile from his father’s lips. “Time to call in the marshal. Send it over.”
Jerome and his parents lived in an apartment in Shadyville, just outside of Stanwich. Jerome didn’t have to commute to work but he did anyway—having been stuck in his house most of his life, he enjoyed getting out each day. There was a train station on the roof of his apartment building—the elevator took him right to it—very convenient. He rolled his chair onto the train and took off with his fellow passengers through the sky toward McGee’s Rocks.
You could tell when most people were interacting with their computers through their hand gestures. Having no hands, Jerome had a brain implant that was wired directly to his sensory-motor cortex. By shutting off his arms, his computer knew he was now using his virtual hands, called phands. Two blue phands were visible in front of him and he used them to check his messages and see what kind of work he had for today. Jerome was an independent contractor who was known in the industry as a reliable fixer. He generally got called when software projects were out of control and behind schedule. There was never a shortage of work.
After he was finished checking the day’s schedule he clicked an icon of a small cartoon dragon. A blue dragon, about the size of a cat, materialized on the floor in front of him. He spread out his wings and shook them, looking around at the train, darting his alligator-like head left and right. He was checking out their fellow passengers.
“There’s a cute one,” he said with his high-pitched growly voice. Brunette in the blue blouse.”
Jerome subvocalized so the other passengers wouldn’t hear him. “Yeah, Digby, she is cute.”
The dragon flapped his wings and floated onto the girl’s shoulders. She was looking down at her lap and moving her finger every minute or so, indicating that she was probably reading a book.
“I wonder what she’s reading?” the dragon said, looking where she was looking. “Find out what she’s reading.”
A few years ago Jerome had learned all he could about programming artificial intelligence. Digby the Dragon was the result of his work. Digby had decided that it was his mission in life to get Jerome a girlfriend.
“She doesn’t look like she wants to be disturbed,” Jerome said.
“Her name is Hazel,” Digby said. “Her current book on Goodreads is The Fire Above. I can get you a quick synopsis and you can talk to her about it. It’s an action romance. You are an expert in romance novels. Uh-oh, her Facebook profile says she’s in a relationship. He’s a dork though. You want to see his picture? Total dork. She likes dorks, so you have a shot.” The dragon smiled and exhaled a smoke ring that floated slowly to the ceiling of the train and faded away.
“I’m not going to steal some dork’s girlfriend.”
“Probably for the best, he probably couldn’t find another girl. You’re being nice now, aren’t you?”
After getting off the elevator at Market Street Station, one of the few bullet train stations in McGee’s Rocks, Jerome drove his chair to Starbucks for a dark venti, extra sugar. He then traveled the two blocks to his warehouse. He owned a business called Daisyfield Publishing. Daisyfield published several books a month, all of them falling under the category of Young Adult Holiday Romance, or YAHR. None of the novels were written by humans. When he was in his early teens Jerome wrote a program called Romance-a-tron that could create a convincingly readable novel conforming to the usual formula found in most young adult Christmas romances. He had tweaked the program over the years so that it could now handle just about any holiday he requested of it. His Halloween series was by far the best seller, although the new Ramadan books were surprisingly popular. All of the books were published under a variety of pseudonyms, never in his own name. The books were distributed electronically, although with each publication he ordered a hundred paper copies that he had shipped to his warehouse in McGee’s Rocks. It was a small warehouse, somewhat dilapidated and nondescript. He had two part-time employees who would take in the shipments and stack them on pallets. If anyone ordered a physical book, which happened a couple times a month, they would pack it and mail it out. The profits of the enterprise did not nearly pay for the expenses, but when you owned a business with a physical location and tax-paying employees, you were much less likely to raise suspicions if you were sucking down the petabytes of information that Jerome sometimes needed for his real job.
His office had large posters of some of his more popular publications on the walls. The cover of his most successful book was hanging on the wall behind his desk, Scary Hot, showing a Halloween party with a girl dressed like an angel looking coyly across the room at a guy in a tight devil costume. His latest poster was from the Ramadan series. When he had first started his publishing business he put together the book covers himself, but lately he’s been letting Romance-a-tron do it. He was actually impressed by this one. It showed a sunset seen through a window, a figure of a man silhouetted in the distant desert landscape. The title was in Arabic-styled Roman letters—Hungry, I Wait for You.
Jerome’s desk, secondhand and chipped, was empty except for an archaic video monitor and keyboard. Next to the desk was the only other piece of furniture in the room—a shiny black baby grand piano. One of the first things Jerome had done when he got his armchair was to learn to play the piano. A metronome was propped on top of the piano. Rolling his chair behind the desk he phanded through his list of contract jobs. Digby floated onto the desk and curled up in the corner to sleep.
Jerome’s usual routine was to work feverishly on one programming job, doing in a few hours what most software engineers needed days to do, and then when he became bored with it he would switch to another. When he was comfortably ahead of schedule on his legal jobs he would switch to jobs that someone who wanted to put it politely might refer to as “less legal.” If his parents knew about his extracurricular activities, they would be shocked. Black hat hacking had been his outlet for teenaged rebellion. When you don’t have any arms or legs your outlets for rebellion are extremely limited. It had made him nervous at first and he really hadn’t expected to be a black hat for long, but when his alter-ego Metronome started gaining a reputation in the hacking community he found that the boost to his ego was irresistible.
Especially when he started getting jobs from a girl as incredible as Natalya Borgan.
Having a good grip on the legitimate jobs he had to do, he took control of his robot arms and turned on the desktop computer. It was connected to the Hardline and that was where he got most of his ‘less legal’ work.
He grinned. Another job from Natalya. He was always pleased whenever Natalya had a new job for him. Although they had never met in person (he never met his ‘less legal’ clients in person) dealing with her made him feel he was a part of her life in that rarified air of fame and fortune. He also had a serious school-boy crush on her—he was perfectly cognizant of the futility of the crush, but he found himself cherishing the giddy despair he felt when thinking about her. Of course the crush made him do stupid things, like giving her a zero-day exploit to peeper which could have been used much more imaginatively and profitably. Oh well, it had made her happy, and that made him happy. He could justify it as much as he wanted to by saying it was ea
rning him guanxi with someone who was going to be a power player, someone who was going to hit the world like a tsunami—and by hitching his star to hers he was guaranteeing his part in her world. But, essentially, he just got warm and tingly thinking about how she knew that he was the one making her happy.
He couldn’t wait to see what her next job for him was.
Chapter 16
Natalya had been summoned to see her father. Walter Borgan was currently staying at the local Denizen Hotel, that luxury hotel chain being one of his major properties. He was working out of a small windowless office on the second floor. When Natalya walked in Walter was standing over the glass desk on which were spread nearly a dozen tablet computers, all with spreadsheets and graphs glowing from their surfaces. Walter didn’t wear smart glasses or contacts; they gave him headaches.
Walter was a small man, bald with liver spots dotting his head. He was ninety-three years old and had been in constant motion for every one of those years. He was walking around the desk on the tan carpet, moving from computer to computer, scrolling one screen, zooming in another. His suit was the same color as the carpet, that shade of tan being the signature color of the Denizen brand. He always wore the official employee suit while working, name tag and all.
When Natalya entered he moved behind his desk but remained standing. Natalya often wondered why he had chairs in his office at all. He spoke without looking up from his tablets.
“Natalya, I hear you are insisting on pressing charges against Marjaana.”
Natalya also remained standing. “She assaulted me. She knocked me to the ground. Of course I’m pressing charges.”
Girl in a Fishbowl (Crowbar Book 1) Page 9