The Code of Happiness

by David J. Margolis

  The following day Jamie faces the conundrum. Creating happiness from drab faces. If he wanted to understand the experience of people beyond code then he should undergo the test himself. He waits until the end of the day when the lines are clear. Michelle approves, thinks it a good idea. She shows him the route into Test Room X where there's a faint and unpleasant smell of the unwashed. The end of week crowd she tells him, inferring the last hours were reserved for those on the streets.

  “Don't worry,” she says, “it's clean. Place your right hand inside the cup until it squeezes, and don't be alarmed if it's tight, it adjusts accordingly.”

  She sounds like Grace did on his first interview. They must've taken XXLI courses on how to speak corporation English. He slips his hand into the cup as directed and feels a sharp pierce through his middle finger. Jamie withdraws his hand. Ruby red blood spills down his palm.

  Michelle's unimpressed at his wimpy reaction. “You're not getting ten k,” she quips.

  “I think the machine's broken.”

  “You're a little sensitive.”

  Michelle's an ace at getting his finger to stop bleeding and dresses the wound. A minor cut is her summation. Jamie enjoys the attention. It brings a smile.

  “What?” Michelle asks.

  “Nothing. It's between me and me.”

  It's good for him to have a crack of insight. Happiness could be a smile. Pity the machines weren't recording this. They were limited, not encompassing every moment, just the select. He had to remind himself that was the point. It was specific moments not the whole, the totality of experience they were trying to decipher.

  “It's normal for this to happen,” says Michelle.

  “So it happens to everyone?”

  “More or less.”

  “You're taking blood?”

  “Not always. We're DNA sampling essentially.”

  This is news to Jamie.

  “Without their consent?”

  “People lie all the time. Even when they don't know. We're hoping this will prove a more efficient method.”

  “I'm missing something.”

  “Beta testing. We're searching for gene patterns related to happiness.”

  “That no one knows about?”

  “We're the only one's who need to know. It's the next step Jamie, the fine-tuning to provide an individualized code for each person. You can't argue with that.”

  He can't, but his head can spin. He walks over to the latte machine hoping for clarity. Buttons are pressed, the automated sounds louder and clearer. The cup glides out, smooth as ever, the smell potent. He sips. Michelle and the office of palm trees are a carnival. Her lips move and her words vanish before they reach his ears, and re-emerge somewhere behind him.

  “Michelle? Do you have my DNA?”

  “Of course.”

  Blaze grants Jamie an appointment. Temporary access to his floor via the bullet, the latest in elevator design. He's funnelled through white round plastered walls and kaleidoscopic images, their purpose to dazzle, hypnotize, and disorientate. Blaze's office itself is modest by comparison but made larger by the low couch Jamie sits on. He's forced to look up at the ceiling rippling with energy. Blaze the showman. No surprise. Blaze contents himself, pouring two single malts as his protégé acclimatizes.

  “Do you know what we do here?” he asks.

  Jamie's not sure if it's cheek or rhetorical. He waits to see and the lack of words forthcoming allows him to answer.

  “Provide the best of the best to feel the best. The best of the best.”

  It's a terrible response. Nerves have the better of him.

  “Five out of ten,” says Blaze, a little surprised at the fumble.

  “Happiness,” says Jamie correcting himself.

  “A continuum of happiness. You have a little dark moment, a little blip and there we are.” He hands a scotch over to Jamie. “I suspect you are having a dark moment.”

  “You've taken my DNA, and others without consent.”

  “Not really. People don't read the fine print. And there's so much more. Giving people what they want. Have you not experienced it?” He points to the scotch. “Lagavulin Distillers. Go on, drink it.”

  Jamie sips the golden liquid. It sears his tongue with a hint of burnt orange and Congolese chocolate nestled in with the peat.

  “Would you deny this to others?”

  Blaze is in the rhetorical old man lecture phase. Discussion is barred. All Jamie can do is sit and wait for the appropriate moment to leave, perhaps leave XXLI the unpronounceable corporation for good now he had a real connection with Grace. Blaze smothers him with jargon, how gain is a life experience and providing such encounters is worthy of any human being. They're becoming a happiness machine where profit is a by-product, not a dirty word. Blaze wants to be spared a morality tale but Jamie ultimately has one question. Why him?

  “Patience Jamie. Didn't Ray teach you?”

  The circle is about to be completed. Truth, if he could trust it.

  “Ray?”

  “He's usually more thorough in his training.”

  “Ray's involved?”

  The hardest part for Jamie was not letting his mind run away to conclusions and the what if's, but it was too late, the horse had bolted.

  “What did he tell you Jamie? Ninety percent neurons in your heart? Won't live long? Baloney! Look at me. Fifty-five years old and strong as an ox!”

  And to demonstrate his athletic prowess, Blaze catapults himself into the air where he spins and lands on his feet.

  “And you? Why you? Oh, come on. Everyone wants to know what happened to the fourteen-year-old super computer hacker, who he is, where he is. A feat never done before and never done since. A feat that got his family killed. Pity that boy—now a man—doesn't pay attention to the real news. He'd know that freedom of information has changed—freedom for those who know how to ask. It was just a question of who would get to you first. The feds couldn't keep you hidden forever. Oh, not their protégé who went on to kill the Darknet. Bet the underground loves you.”

  A partial truth Blaze shouldn't know. Jamie wasn't the only one involved. There were other bright lights. They had dismantled the systems that had protected whistleblowers and criminals alike for decades. And with a bitter irony he had spent the last ten years seeking the privacy he destroyed.

  “Ask what Ray really wants you for—the old pyromaniac.”

  Jamie's concepts implode. It was if he had walked in a world of blue, and now it was revealed as red. Safety was uncertain; his next step could swallow him whole. Ground was nonexistent. He is shattered. He is weak bewildered flesh. A pawn. Two men, real men, greater than him, were doing battle on some otherworldly plane. Both laid claims on him and he was powerless to choose to whom he belonged. He was no more than a ball to be tossed around their court. He throws up on the cold marble floor, dizzy to the smell of liquor still on his breath. If only he had a button he could press to reboot himself, or better, to erase the past few months.

  Blaze grips his arm sending pulses of life through his body.

  “Go see Ray,” says Blaze. “Your future is assured here. You will see.”

  *****

  Jamie was found, and would be forever chased. The feds had warned him in his final days with them of mafia and foreign governments wanting him to do their dirty work. Being watched was one thing, being hounded and having his life threatened for nefarious deeds was another. In front of him the late winter sky seemed to bend into darkness. He was on his way to Ray. Anonymity had been Jamie's only game, now it was over.

  Wire coils and cables hang disconnected. The Source Foundation is stripped of machines, the floors bare, the ceilings pulled apart. There's only Po to explain and her words are spartan and inadequate. She dodges questions but not with the force of Jamie’s hand grasping her. Jamie's unaware of the pressure he's applying in the squeeze for truth, and her begging for release goes unnoticed. She demands he look into her eyes, to reach in and see
her. His mind arcs back to the straps in the dentist's chair, here’s the chance to equalize the past. But he's not like her, he thinks, he gains no pleasure from torment. He's not the demon, and he relaxes his grip.

  The Foundation is finished, she tells him, and defends the parts that are true without ever revealing the specifics. It's all garbage to Jamie. Her deflection is obvious; to buy Ray more time for his disappearance. The defunct ionizer becomes her prison, Jamie her mad guard, computing events, trying to make sense of them. Everyone's trying to trick him, fulfill their agendas. All he wants is truth.

  “Tell me one thing, Po. Ninety percent of my heart isn't made of neurons, is it?”

  There's plainness in her refusal to answer. No teasing, gimmicks, or revelation. Her eyes won't speak. If he wants all the answers he'll have to ask Ray.

  “How do I know he's coming back?”

  The hours pass over midnight, Jamie's slumping, still clueless as to Ray's designs on him.

  “I calmed down,” he says to Po, “when I feared the most in the ionizer I calmed down and could see. Now I'm calm, and all I see is a mess.”

  “Then let go. Walk out of here. Walk away from Blaze.”

  “And hide again?”

  It was possible Po was in the dark about his identity. He allows her to kneel beside him. To touch him. A slither of humanity.

  “I'll drive you home,” she says.

  Project Happiness, he'll tell her he thinks, when the time is right.

  Exhaustion is a blessing. Nothing the body and mind can do except slip into rest. One flickering eye allows him to see Po enjoying the buttons of luxury in his car. She's not immune to the material.

  “Never said I was,” she says.

  His car. For how much longer? If it ever was. He sinks deep into sleep. He'd be home soon.

  “Nice ride.”

  Jamie awakens to the orange sky of first light and tumbleweeds passing through a desert highway. He offers Po a glare and steps out into a cracked and parched landscape, nothing for miles except a rickety old barn and a cold eerie wind grazing his face. He watches Po's hair twist into knots.

  “Glenhorn Forest,” she says.

  “Where the trees?”

  “Disappeared twenty-five years ago.”

  All he can do is kick the dirt and watch the barn door open. Ray holding onto a black Stetson beckons them in.

  “The morning wind,” he shouts, “Dies down in the afternoon.”

  Truths part two. A wood stove crackles, warming the three participants sitting on cushions. A kettle rattles away. Any cup of tea will do. The explanation is simple. The double crash destroying The Source Foundations funds, people too busy surviving or accruing to listen to their message, the Blaze Malone's of the world had won—or were winning, and John Charles Cavour, their benevolent billionaire, always understood all things come to an end. Jamie offers a little on Project Happiness in return, a code to be switched on.

  “We needed someone to help us,” says Ray.

  “Generating the affectus transfigurantes?”

  “Playing Robin Hood.”

  Ray opens a draw beneath his seat. Inside is a small flip chart with various schematics, the immediacy of its meaning strikes Jamie like a one-two sucker punch. A global plan to skim the banks of millions, and he would be at its centre, orchestrating with his ability to access the backdoor and beyond.

  “Yes,” says Ray, “I played on your ego. For the greater good.”

  “So I can get a twenty year jail sentence?”

  “Your little black box,” says Po.

  “They would fry that in a second.”

  “We all have our flaws,” says Ray.

  “And what's yours? Lying?”

  “Would you have believed me if I said you were just an ordinary Joe? No. You needed to be told you were special.”

  “So the stuff with the torus and the affectus transfigurantes is fiction?”

  “Everyone has the gift. Not just you. But not everyone can realize it because they don't invest the time.”

  Jamie could see how he was the perfect candidate. The disaffected boy living between the cracks of what society left. A nowhere man needing a role or a place to belong despite the denial he didn't, to find some kind of meaning in his existence, for without it he was merely a shell, a shadow, a pointless form of carbon. He was ripe to be plucked and placed in any cult.

  “Is there any difference between you and Blaze?”

  “We're non-profit,” says Po.

  “The ride to town leaves in thirty seconds,” he tells her.

  “Slow down. Think Jamie. If you can turn happiness on, then you could turn happiness off. What then?”

  He's too tired to consider the consequences, his brain mashed. For once being alone would have benefits, and Po reading that turns away and folds up a blanket.

  “The forest Jamie, that used to be outside,” says Ray, “its disappearance is replicated all over the world.”

  “Thank you for the tea.”

  He is cold fish.

  “Don't disappear.”

  “Goodbye.”

  “You have a choice.”

  Indeed he does. He was going from one sham organization to another. If he was out in the open, easy to find, what did it matter if he exposed the callous and secretive practices of XXLI. So what if he'd signed confidentiality agreements. The public had the right to know, to wake up from their slumber. He may be sued, but conceded it was more likely no one would be interested. Ray's truth struck him as pathetic now, almost benign. All he had wanted him to be was a petty thief—albeit on a grand scale. He ran through the moments when he could have said no to Ray. He was growing up; he wouldn't be so manipulated again or so asleep. His mind returned to the energy he felt from Blaze's grip, how it etched itself into his very being. He needed to hatch a plan.

  *****

  “There's weird shit going down here, Grace.”

  She's in the middle of an interview.

  “Oh, sorry,” he says. He turns to the female candidate, “Don't take the job.”

  Grace maintains her cool, her professionalism.

  “I haven't offered her one.”

  “What? I'm qualified,” says the prospective employee, a tad confused.

  “Did she pass?”

  “It's private, Jamie.”

  “Who are you?” asks the woman.

  “Doing you a favor. This place is toxic.” He turns to Grace. “Can we have talk when you're done?”

  “Why, of course. Please wait outside—where you should have been in the first place.”

  Jamie fires one more salvo to the stranger, “It's a mistake.”

  Jamie has enough time to think of all the ways Grace will bury him. He's cold at the thought she might be a spy, a stooge for XXLI. Trust is a new currency. It was about him as much as her. The female candidate walks past with an icy stare. He waits for Grace to follow. It's hard to be patient, but he needs access to Blaze. He runs through his plea to her. She must know something smells about project happiness. He's seen her human side, the approachable and friendly. They had spent the night together wandering a square of hope, of people coming together—and she didn't have embedded devices. They had a real connection. All she had to do was shed the behavior that came with the uniform of work.

  *****

  The master awaits ashen-faced for his best and brightest pupil to grasp the fundamentals. He guides him toward the real truth he had been searching for. Ray and John Charles Cavour only had part of the answer. What lay behind the walls of his office was destiny for all. Jamie's slow to Blaze's truth because the omnipresent one appears sick and weak. It's hard to vilify a man so ill. Blaze had wanted Jamie to see him like this. It would help him understand the power available to him. He slides his hand up the wall to press a button that opens a door. The gap in the doorway is filled with an impressive glow. Crimson and gold, a mix of the divine and the surreal illuminating a section of his office. Jamie follows Blaze to the
edge of the new room but chooses not to enter.

  “It's not complete, but it works,” says Blaze, “watch.”

  A giant orange and gold plasma orb hovers above a dish. Blaze slips his hands into a pair of silver embroidered gloves and places them inside the dish. The orb stills in recognition of this connection. Then light bolts from it to the gloves lighting up Blaze. Blaze, the sun god, whose brightness blinds Jamie to the point of dropping to the floor. Puzzle pieces of light float across his damaged retina and the protégé blinks in an attempt to refocus. He sees a hazy silhouette. Even with the abnormality he knows it's a rejuvenated Blaze.

  “The new affectus transfigurantes. My pet project you can help complete.”

  Jamie struggles to his feet, “I've read about people like you in comic books.”

  “Step back from the comic book—and your games. This is a chance to change the world for real.”

  “It always amazes me the crazy people never know when to stop. You and Ray were made for each other.”

  “We were, but he's stuck in the past. And you, you're stuck in nowhere. All our research, all our coding, has resulted in this.”

  “Using unauthorized DNA?”

  “To help people. Tap into it, Jamie, and your power to transform others will be greater. I've seen you do it... and I know you haven't a clue. Remarkable.” He shakes Jamie. “Grace. I've seen you with Grace.” He lets go of him. “Maybe you are truly special after all. Maybe you can resist what I have to offer.”