At least, not until he met Jade.
Jadyn of Crowley, your run-of-the-mill hybrid assassin from the future, arrived in 2017 intent on bringing Charlie to her time no matter the cost. She needed him. Her people needed him. The hybrid race, the race that Charlie Richard’s code would one day create, was plagued with a disease only he could solve.
Fixing the code he had invented could be the answer to at least thirteen of Charlie’s problems. It could get him out of his humdrum day job, make him a hero of the future, and win him a woman he probably didn’t deserve and most certainly couldn’t handle (see: hybrid assassin.)
Or, it could get him killed by the megalomaniac COO, Warren Relic, who’s looking for a way to take control of the hybrid industry, the city, and possibly even the world. All Warren needs is a gullible programmer who can fix the code and that no one will miss once he flips the kill switch.
And all Charlie Richards had wanted was an employee of the month placard.
Chapter 1
There lived in the Topeka of Kansas, in the seventeenth year of the 21st century, an unremarkable young man by the name of Charlie Richards; confirmed unremarkable by all associates, relative or not. To others, he was a man who lived beneath his possibilities. A brilliant computer scientist who used his talents to make an application reminding cat owners to feed their feline friends (aptly named Feline Friend Feeder™.) To exasperate the situation, he didn’t even like cats. So, it was pointedly remarkable that unremarkable Charlie Richards, of Topeka, Kansas, would make the discovery, which would change the world in greater ways than fire, gravity, online commerce and quantum theory combined.
In the year Charlie made this discovery, technological advancements had become increasingly senseless. The 21st century began with such titillating promise. Human innovation was on a roll, falling face first into the computer and virtual age. Nonetheless, somewhere along the way mankind decided to use these tremendous advancements to find different ways to share videos of cute babies and/or puppies. Sure, breakthroughs such as Wii Tennis or the automated-cleaning iRobot were important for generations to come, but they didn’t come close to fulfilling the potential humanity possessed. So, when Charlie, eighty-sixth ranked computer programmer (out of eighty-nine) at Bandicoot TechSmart Corp. wrote the code that would create the most important bridge ever constructed - a bridge to bond computers and genetics; a bridge to birth the hybrid race; a bridge to alter life, death and everything in between - its importance was noticed by virtually no one. Not even by Charlie Richards.
At least, not until he met Jadyn (Jade) of Crowley.
To say Jade stuck out like a sore thumb, as she stood there at the end of the bar inside the Lonely Tree Tavern, was a grave understatement. She stuck out like a throbbing red thumb covered in sirens and strobe lights. There were several obvious signs. One would be the sheer black leather clothes, which made her look like a sci-fi character from another planet. Another might have been that Charlie could guesstimate that her height and muscle tone put her somewhere in the range of “she could break him in two” and “she could break him in four.” Her physically intimidating strength was complemented by physically intimidating beauty, which surely had caused many a bar fight. She had sleek black hair that came to the shoulders. Her high, strong cheekbones ran under wide eyes of green. Or, usually green, occasionally they seemed to shift in color. All this made the woman stick out, but the simplest and most obvious reason was this was the Lonely Tree Tavern, and she was a woman.
Charlie quickly averted his eyes.
One could kindly describe Charlie Richards as “not polished with the opposite sex” and rudely call him “a god damn loser with women.” Either way, they both were valid points. Instead, he stared into the series of numbers and letters he was scribbling on his bar napkin. Scrawling code was something he did anytime he was nervous (note: often.) He wrote furiously, drank his beer furiously, and averted his eyes furiously.
“What you wanna to talk to him for?” The voice, thick with drink, could only belong to one man: Sal. Charlie cringed at the sound of it. Most people here just left him alone. To them, Charlie was just some weird guy who sat at the end of the bar jotting in his notebook and drinking fancy foreign stuff. Some of the regulars here were even nice to him, and wondered where he was if he didn’t come around a night. But Sal, when he had too many beers (note: often), he would become a right asshole. Charlie could generally just ignore it, but not always. Once, Sal took his notebook and Charlie flipped out. Long story short, while Charlie ended up losing the fight, he did get his notebook back.
Charlie couldn’t help but look up and see Sal standing beside the woman, both looking at him. Then, the oddest thing happened. One of the woman’s eyes went ablaze in red, and a smile came to her lips. She was smiling at him. Charlie. A woman was smiling at Charlie Richards.
“Don’t waste your time with that one,” Sal said gruffly. “Guy is off his rocker. Just sits there writing gibberish.”
At the far end of the bar came some grumbles and murmurs and a hoot. Sal’s cronies stood by a pool table, enjoying their favorite part of the evening when Sal caused some trouble. Time for another round.
The woman turned to Sal. “Don’t speak that way about such a man.”
Charlie blinked twice. Wait. What?
Sal chuckled. “Why don’t you come have a drink with me. I promise, you’ll have a much better time.” He placed his hand on the woman’s shoulder. It was one of the three worst mistakes Sal had ever made, in contention with the ’96 Dodge Ram he bought with a fucked-up transmission and his six DUI ’s (that collectively counted as one mistake).
In a blinding blink of an eye, the woman’s eye went from green to black. She grabbed Sal’s wrist, twisted it, and broke it with ease. Sal fell to one knee, screaming in pain. The woman grabbed his shirt and, like throwing a twig, tossed Sal across the floor where he hit the wall next to the pool table. It was, on any universally known scale, totally badass. And intimidating.
Dan the Man, the heavy-set bartender, knew it was in his job description to tell patrons that throwing people across the tavern was absolutely not allowed. Though Dan the Man was a sturdy man and no stranger to bar fights, as he approached the woman his face went from threatening, to considering, to something just north of fear. “Please,” he mumbled. “No more throwing customers.”
The woman gave a slight bow. “Of course.”
It was subtle, but Charlie could sense laughter behind her words. Sal crawled to his feet and yelling some derogatory words as he slunk away to join his cronies and no doubt plot his revenge.
The woman then did the one thing Charlie feared most. She looked at him, smiled, and made her way towards him. Charlie’s face remained blank, but his stomach was filled with a vast prairie of butterflies, including a purple one. The woman pulled out the barstool next to him and sat herself down. “What are you drinking?”
Charlie Richards had been coming to this tavern several times a week for, well, it had been quite some time, and the total number of female voices that had asked him what he was drinking totaled one. His mother. She had rudely stopped by and asked the question in an accusatorial tone. This was not the same tone. This was not his mother. This woman was, by any past, present, or future scales, hot. She also, it should be remembered, had just thrown Sal Thompson across the bar. While time is relative, no one could deny that Charlie spent a long time looking stupidly at the woman with no words coming out of his mouth. Finally, the answer to her question came to Charlie. “Um, it’s an Amstel Light.”
After a long pause, the woman finally asked. “Well?”
“Um, well…what?”
“Aren’t you going to buy me a beer? It is the custom of the times, right?” The woman smiled a beautiful smile. She held out her hand in friendly greeting. “My name’s Jade.”
“Oh. Oh, yes. Right.” Charlie ignored her hand, slapping nervously at his pockets for his wallet, before realizing he had a tab open. He waved
Dan the Man over, still not making eye contact with Jade. “A drink for, um, the lady.”
Dan the Man was at a complete loss as to what was going on in this world anymore. He looked at Charlie. Then at Jade. Then at Charlie. Then at Jade. He knew this Charlie, he was a regular - a regular loser (zing!). He was the guy who just sat at the end of the bar and work in his notebook, scribbling down random numbers and letters. This woman, on the other hand, was so hot you could fry an egg on her at midnight and she could tear anyone to shreds. This did not add up.
“I’ll have what he’s having,” Jade said, breaking the awkward silence. Dan the Man stood up straight, eyeing them suspiciously a second longer. “Sure.” He nodded an incredulous an alright I’ll play along. “Sure thing.”
Dan left to pour a draft and Charlie sipped his beer to avoid having to talk to the woman. It was clear Jade would have to lead the conversation, and she did so in the most surprising way.
“You’re Charlie Richards,” she said, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.
Charlie’s eyes grew wide. “What?”
“I can’t believe it.” Jade grinned, shaking her head in the classic ‘I can’t believe it’ shake. “I – me! – am sitting next to Charlie Richards.” Forget bar fights, empires have contested over smiles like the one which graced her face. “Charlie Richards.”
Charlie’s mind was doing poorly orchestrated gymnastics. Who the hell was this woman? Why was she talking to him? How did she know who he was? How had she thrown big ass Sal like a peanut? How much was he going to have to drink to get over how awkward he felt? He decided to tackle the final question first and gulped down half his beer.
“What are you working on?” Jade asked.
“Huh?”
“Charlie, you’re a genius. It wasn’t a difficult question.” Jade pointed down to the open notebook in front of him where the writing scrawled to the edge of the page and onto the bar napkin next to it. It was pure chaos on paper, zeroes and ones and dollar signs and such. It was the ramblings of a drunk man at the end of the bar.
Jade pointed to the end of the page and a bunch of text. “See, this is where it gets good.” It read in part:
1.//Loop and create individuals
2.For ($i=0, $i
3.$new person = new individual ();
4.$new person > generateIndividual(count(fitnessscale;$solution) );
5.$indvidual = person ($new hybrid);
“It’s nothing,” Charlie deflected. “Just some random thoughts I had in my spare time.”
“Those are some specific random thoughts,” Jade said, the smile never leaving her face.
“I assure you, it’s pretty random.”
“Right now, yes, but just wait. It will be the most specific 4,282 characters ever written.”
Charlie looked up from his beer. This was going from awkward to weird to what the fuck super-fast. “Excuse me?” he said, this time not timidly.
“I mean, I wish I could change a few characters, would have saved us a lot of heartbreak. And probably I could have been taller. But if I told you what to change it would have drastic effects. Still, all things considered, it’s the most impressive 4,282 characters the world will ever see.”
“Who are you?”
Jade finished off her beer and eyed him playfully. “No, Charlie. That’s the wrong question.”
Charlie didn’t respond.
“The question, Charlie Richards of Topeka, Kansas,” Jade continued, “is who are you?”
Chapter 2
Who was Charlie Richards of Topeka, Kansas? Well, he wasn’t much of anything. Not yet, anyway. We could start with this fact, the most cliché trait of mid-30’s loserdom, he lived in the basement of his mom’s house. His life at this point had all the makings of a bad joke. A hot woman walks into a bar, beats up the rough and tough regular, and sits down next to guy who lives in the basement of his mom’s house. Charlie wasn’t sure what the exact punchline was, but he was sure it involved him.
He cringed as Jade looked at him. Could she tell he’d only had sex three times in his life and two of those times were historically awful, with crying involved… and the crying was him. The highlight of his life thus far was winning a free trip to the Grand Canyon to look at a giant hole in the earth. He even bought a fridge magnet to memorialize the trip.
But then there was this; he knew in his brain of brains that something was different about his mind. And he hated himself for it. He just wanted to be one of the cool kids. All through school he just wanted to throw a kegger and get laid, but instead all he could think about was building machines, or how to improve existing technology. In college, he’d invented a way to store information remotely on servers instead of individual computers, but he didn’t do anything with the invention. Years later, of course, the term “cloud” was everywhere. Charlie could have made millions. But it wasn’t who Charlie was meant to be. Charlie had studied genetics at Georgetown. One of his instructors, Professor Deakins, said he had the most brilliant medical mind he had ever known and he could be in the forefront of genetic engineering. This alone inspired Charlie to drop out. Charlie was not about be at the forefront of anything.
Charlie took an online class in programming and became a Bandicoot employee. The companies ranking system helped ensure Charlie kept himself ranked close to last so that no one would bother him. It would be less stressful. This was his style.
And he wasn’t about to change his style just because some kick ass demigoddess walked into his watering hole.
“Right,” Charlie said, “Let’s focus on my question. Asking who you are is quite valid. You seem to know things. You beat up Sal. You’re talking to me at a bar. You’re, um, quite pleasant looking.”
They had downed about six beers each at this point and Charlie was getting loopy. Jade, on the other hand, was her same twinkling-eye, smiling self.
“You don’t seem the Lonely Tree type, if I do say. In fact, you don’t strike me as from Kansas at all.” Charlie shrugged.
Jade looked around at the dark walls and crooked frames of the Lonely Tree. “Well, Charlie, you don’t really seem the type either. Not from what I’ve seen in the museums.”
Charlie blinked blankly eleven times.
Before now, the oddest conversation Charlie had ever had was in a park. It had been with a duck. They had argued over Mr. Duck stealing a piece of bread out of Charlie’s lunch bag. The duck had quacked back, thus defining it as a conversation and not a lecture. They had earned some peculiar stares when Charlie starting quacking angrily back at him. It was an odd exchange. Still, it was roughly 1.2 lightyears behind the oddity of this conversation.
To be fair, Jadyn of Crowley was a bit surprised at the conversation herself. Here’s a tip: when one travels through time, leave your expectations in your present. Print out this fortune cookie wisdom and tape it to your time machine. Then highlight it. I will make this whole-hearted promise, that no matter how many Renaissance Festivals you’ve done research at; your expectations are wrong.
This was a lesson Jade should have heeded upon meeting Charlie Richards. Here was the god of hybrids. In a few centuries from now, monuments would be built to this man. Jade was from those centuries and knew it to be true. It would be said that Charlie was a mountain of intellect, an ocean of knowledge, a lightning bolt of invention. Also, that he had adequately large biceps. Upon meeting Charlie, however – suffice to say, leave your expectations in your present.
But she needed him. Her people needed him. And Jade of Crowley didn’t fail her missions. She didn’t fail her people. She didn’t fail herself.
Vooosh!
A loud rumble boomed through the air and shook the bar. Several bottles of liquor fell to the ground, crashing and sending liquid and Dan the Man across the floor. Jade held her fingers to her temple and closed her eyes tightly. Charlie regained his seating and looked around at the patrons in the bar, mumbling in wonderment of what caused the noise. W
hen Charlie looked back at Jade, her face became anxious.
“What was that?” he asked.
In a flash, Jade’s face went back to its charming self. “Why don’t we get out of here, Charlie? I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”
“Why don’t you tell me right here?” Charlie said with a slight drunken slur.
“You will become the most important person in the world, Charlie.”
Charlie knew this woman was clearly insane. However, he didn’t seem to care at the moment. If she thought Charlie was someone else and, even better, that he was important, well who was he to argue? He didn’t get many chances at this, crazy girl or not.
“Come on, Charlie.” Jade continued with a mischievous grin. “I’ll show you everything you want to see.”
“’Intrigued…”
Jade’s delightful smile came out in full force. “I’ll do things you’ll appreciate.”
“Dan the Man!” Charlie yelled to the bar drunkenly. “Close out my tab, good sir!”
They left quickly. Charlie sensed it was important to this woman, but he also knew he had to take the opportunity before she changed her mind.
They stepped out into cool Kansas night. It was late fall, Charlie’s favorite time of year, and the stars were particularly bright this evening. Ad astra per aspera, Charlie thought. To the stars through difficulty. His state motto was fitting tonight. The stars teamed up with the moon to cast significant blue light over the streets.
“Jade,” Charlie said, smiling. A drunken smile. This whole night had been fun. Mostly because it wasn’t ordinary. And all of Charlie’s nights for as long as he could remember had been ordinary. “Tell me, what do you want with me? I don’t think I’m who you think I am.”
“The code in your notebook says differently,” Jade pointed at the book with Marvin the Robot on the cover. “We need the code. You said so yourself, four pages before you wrote it.”
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