by Dan Koontz
Age eleven saw a gradual shift toward more pictures with friends and fewer with his parents, although he did pose proudly next to his dad as co-champions of the Father-Son Invitational Golf Tournament at their country club.
After a single picture from his twelfth birthday party, a new picture he'd never seen before popped up in the frame, featuring a sheet of plain white paper with a hand-written message in pencil: "Check out your mom's purple shirt." He didn’t get it.
In the final shot before the loop restarted, he was lying on his stomach on top of his sheets, the back of his Cleveland Browns boxers prominently featured, craning his head up and back to squint perturbedly at his parents as they entered his room. His dad must have already wirelessly uploaded the photo from just a few minutes prior. Ryan couldn’t help but laugh. But that was not staying on the frame.
After finishing up his breakfast, he reached over and hit the sleep button on the frame, stood up to stretch, and then took a long nostalgic look around his room. The pirate bed had been replaced by a mundanely conventional queen-sized bed. The desk and chair were no longer kid-sized, the huge closet, stocked with far fewer clothes, seemed even bigger in its emptiness, and the color of the walls had changed. But for a brief moment he could see the room just as it had appeared that first day. The unique smell that every house has, which he’d become so accustomed to that he hadn’t noticed it in years, came back in a wave, and he sniffed it in with a long deep breath, gently closing his eyes as a lump began to develop in his throat.
He shook his head, embarrassed by his emotions, forced a half-smile, and headed for the shower.
Ryan still hadn’t told anyone what he knew about AVEX ticker symbol RTJ, which was now hidden in an alphabet soup of symbols representing former orphans on the half-full back page of the New York Times Business section.
Strict rules restricted the press from revealing the identities of publicly-traded minors, but it had dawned on him after watching his stock price rise five percent the day after he’d won the spelling bee that his identity was not an especially well-kept secret.
A week or so later, he’d convinced one of his friends at school to request a prospectus on each and every symbol on the exchange, to avoid having the material show up at his home address.
In his sparse free-time, usually after his parents were asleep, he’d begun to track down other orphans. Some were easy – like J’Quarius Jones. Others were harder. Some seemed downright impossible. One poor orphan he was never able to locate had been relegated to penny-stock status after her prospectus had revealed that she’d been diagnosed with “an aggressive hematologic malignancy.” Never having learned her identity, Ryan could almost feel her struggle as her stock price bounced around under ten cents a share for the next two months. His heart had sunk one morning when he noticed SUZ had dropped off the exchange altogether.
So far, he had a list of close to a hundred names matched with their probable symbols. None of them were in Cleveland, and he had yet to try contact any of them.
“Ready?” Thomas asked, as Ryan deposited the breakfast tray on the kitchen counter next to the sink.
“Time to go back-to-back!” Ryan said, looking forward to the defense of their father-son golf championship. “Bye, mom,” he yelled to the living room. Then he turned back to his dad with a perplexed expression, “She’s not wearing a purple shirt. What were you talking about?”
“Uh... I have no idea,” Thomas said, looking every bit as confused as Ryan.
“Yeah, right. Those pictures you uploaded this morning?”
“I don’t know anything about any pictures,” Thomas answered with a sarcastic grin, but still not fully clued in. He had only uploaded one picture.
“Whatever,” Ryan said rolling his eyes. He still didn’t get it.
~~~
Dillon Higley knew something terrible was about to happen when the power went out in the Boston townhouse he lived in with his dad. The mid-September weather was picture perfect, and their house was equipped not only with a backup generator, but a separately-housed backup to the backup generator. And his dad religiously checked the fuel status of each one twice a week, whether they had been in use or not.
Dillon crept over to the window and peeled back the lower corner of the curtains to see if the traffic lights were out. No. And the lights were still on at the bike shop across the street.
As his gaze shifted away from the bike shop, out of the corner of his eye, he just caught sight of an oblong black object about the size of a soup can hurtling toward him. A fraction of a second later the sound of glass shattering was followed by a heavy thud, as the black pill-shaped object struck the living room floor and began to spin, spitting out a thick cloud of caustic smoke.
Coughing, wheezing, tearing, Dillon pulled the collar of his shirt up over his nose and ran for the back of the house, yelling for his dad as he caromed off furniture and walls nearly blind, helplessly trying to blink away the irritants.
Just as he finally reached his dad’s bedroom, a battering ram punched through the back door, splintering the wood around the bronze door knob, which fell to the floor next to his feet.
Before he could get the door to his dad’s room open, he was snatched by a masked FBI agent in full assault gear and carted off to a field unit half a block away to have his eyes irrigated with sterile saline.
The next time he would see his father, they would be separated by an inch of plexiglass and fifteen years, minimum. His father would be convicted on every count brought against him, ranging from piracy in his early days to more recent (and far more serious) theft and distribution of classified United States government documents.
Aside from being a closeted anarchist, Horace Higley had actually been a pretty great parent. Dillon’s mother had left without so much as a goodbye to either of them when Dillon was six months old, so Horace was the only parent Dillon had ever known.
Horace genuinely loved his son, and he’d done everything he could to try to give him a reasonable, almost typical, childhood. He’d signed him up for soccer on his sixth birthday, since that seemed to be what other six-year-olds were doing. He’d even brought the post-game snacks and drinks once per season for the two seasons Dillon had stuck it out. But after wasting a dozen fall and spring Saturday afternoons sitting on the sidelines of the soccer field, Dillon on the bench, Horace in a lawn chair, they quietly bowed out, accepting the obvious fact that sports weren’t Dillon’s thing.
Next he tried music. But it took only two months of formal piano lessons and regular at-home practice on the small keyboard that Horace had bought him to convince Dillon, his father, and his piano teacher that music wasn’t where his talents lay either. It was really by exclusion, environment, and quite possibly genetics that Dillon ended up following his dad into computer programming.
Horace had tried his best to shelter Dillon from his more clandestine interests, but there were only two of them in the house, and they shared a rare gift for coaxing computer-based systems into giving them what they wanted. By the time Dillon was ten, Horace had unintentionally taught him most of what he knew, not only about programming but also hacking. Dillon had even occasionally proven himself useful with fresh perspectives on what had been persistent problems for his dad.
Horace had always tried to tone down his anti-government, anti-military, anti-corporate rhetoric in front of Dillon, who already saw him as overly bitter. Dillon was too young to be indoctrinated with such cynicism.
But that all changed when Dillon’s doting father was suddenly taken out of his life by federal agents, and, through a cruel irony, Dillon was placed in the state’s care. Horace confidently assured his son during one prison visit that an unassuming introvert with a laptop and no designs on recognition or fame could be a very powerful foe – even for the most powerful country on the planet.
An orphan at the age of 12, Dillon was blessed with patience – and a poker face. After a year under close surveillance, he dropped off the FBI’s w
atch list.
In the orphanage, he’d spent most of his time quietly and independently developing innocuous apps for smartphones and tablets. He was even making a little money at it.
Eventually, one caught the attention of a junior Avillage associate in the Orphan Identification Division.
His father’s criminal history had been dubbed a red flag by the higher-ups, but Horace’s testimony had convincingly absolved Dillon of any suspicion regarding knowledge of or involvement in any illegal activity. Plus he had a two-year track record of being an all-around good citizen at the orphanage. His age was another strike against him – nearly fourteen at the time of identification, but a set of prospective parents was already in the Avillage queue, seeking a technologically gifted teen, and the bigwigs at Avillage were sold on the risk/reward ratio of grooming the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Larry Ellison or Larry Page or Sergey Brin or Mark Zuckerberg – the list of high-tech billionaires went on and on.
In the end, to heap insult onto Horace’s injury, Dillon was taken out of the state’s custody and adopted. By a corporation.
~~~
The defending champions walked confidently up to the 18th green needing a birdie to win the best-ball format tournament outright and avoid a playoff. A gallery of ten other father-son pairs trickled down the slope from the clubhouse patio to watch, debating which ball they’d play. Ryan’s lay just off the front of the green and would leave them a relatively straight fifteen foot uphill putt to the hole. Thomas’s shot was significantly closer, but would break down and to the right – a tough putt for righties.
Without any discussion, Thomas strode onto the green and snatched his ball.
“I’ll get it close, and you sink it,” Thomas said with a wink, walking back down the green to where Ryan’s ball lay. Sure enough his putt rolled to a stop eighteen inches short of the hole. That would be a gimme.
Ryan then stepped up behind his dad and placed his ball back down on the fringe of the green. He’d tracked his dad’s putt the whole way; there was no break.
“No pressure, Ryan!” yelled one of the dads who’d long been out of contention, well into his fourth beer.
Standing to the side of the ball, his mind cleared of everything and everyone around him, Ryan took two carefully measured practice swings. He then shuffled a few inches forward, his head now directly over his ball. He glanced up at the hole, then back to his ball, then the hole, and again his ball, picturing the speed and trajectory of his dad’s putt. Slowly he drew his putter back, exactly as he had with each practice swing. The head of the putter slowed to a momentary stop at the peak of his backswing, and then, with the identical forward momentum of his two previous swings, he swung through the ball. He barely felt the club make contact with the ball, keeping his head down and softly closing his eyes. He didn’t need to watch. He knew it was in.
As soon as he got home, he uploaded the new photo of himself and his dad raising their second consecutive father-son trophy. Except for the fact that he was another inch and a half closer to his dad in height, it looked almost identical to their first picture.
He then scrolled back one frame and, slowly shaking his head, deleted the picture of him in his boxers from earlier in the morning.
“Check out your mom’s purple shirt,” read the message left on the frame.
His dad had seemed genuinely confused when he’d mentioned the picture earlier that morning, and the handwriting in the photo didn’t look like anything like his dad’s. What’s more the surface under the plain white sheet of paper certainly wasn’t to be found anywhere in their house – maybe laminate countertop or a particle-board table.
What does that mean? he thought, trying to squeeze some secret meaning out of the message. As he was thinking, the pictures continued to scroll. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen his mom wear purple. Maybe one of their neighbors within Wi-Fi range had the same kind of frame, and the photo had mistakenly gotten uploaded to his frame. But the picture still didn’t make any sense; why would that scribbled-on piece of paper be worthy of uploading to anyone’s frame? And no one in their pretentious neighborhood would have had laminate countertops.
As he continued to ruminate, a flash of purple from the frame grabbed his attention, just before the picture scrolled forward again. He snatched the frame from the bedside table and frantically pushed the back button.
On the display was a picture of him riding his first two-wheeler, with his birth mother running right behind him, just letting go of the back of his seat. She wore a radiant smile – and a faded purple shirt. Ryan remembered that soft, worn purple shirt vividly. It had been her lounging shirt. She had changed into it almost every night when she got home from work and often slept in it. As Ryan continued to stare at the shirt, he noticed what appeared to be microscopic black print on the sleeve.
But that shirt didn’t have writing on it. He would have bet his life on it.
He placed his thumb and forefinger directly over the tiny black letters and spread them slowly apart. As the frame zoomed in, gradually the text became legible: “www.amazon.com/tp-roll/dp/S890=f238000”
Ryan grabbed his tablet and immediately keyed in the URL exactly as it appeared on his mom’s shirt. An item on the Amazon Marketplace loaded, featuring a picture of a half-full roll of toilet paper offered by a user with uniformly unfavorable customer reviews. The text read, “This is more of a social experiment than anything to see if there’s avillage (sic) idiot out there would actually pay $18.76 for half a roll of toilet paper. Anyone going to prove me right? I bet you will.”
The item had been posted just before midnight the night before. Ryan’s price at the market’s close that day had been 18.76. He had to pursue this. Without any further deliberation, he ordered it with the “bill me” option, selecting next-day delivery to the house next door. He knew for a fact his neighbors were going to be out of town through the weekend, because he was feeding their cat and collecting their mail while they were away.
For the sake of the seller, he marked the shipment as a gift with the card to read, “Here’s to social experiments. I am one. Love, RTJ”
~~~
Dillon had figured out that he was an Avillage listing before he'd even come to live with his adoptive family, and he harbored a deep resentment for it. While he tolerated his adoptive parents, he stayed on a cool first-name basis with them. There was only one person he would ever call “Dad,” and in just under 13 years, he expected to be reunited with him. He’d also made it perfectly clear that he was born with the last name Higley, and that’s the name he would die with.
Avillage wasted no time in getting him on a comprehensive computer-programming education regimen, seemingly intent on grooming the computer prodigy who would eventually destroy them, he thought. But they also allowed him significantly more free time than most of the other orphans, since he needed “creative time” for producing his popular apps.
In the history of the exchange, ironically, Dillon was the fastest to return a profit for his shareholders. His dad probably would have disowned him on the spot if he’d been aware, but Dillon had his eye on longer-term goals, and he knew he would need two things to overthrow a titan like Avillage: capital and a team.
The profits he kept from the apps would provide the capital, he figured. The team he had in mind was himself and his father, better than before with his added years of experience and his father’s heightened motivation, but that plan was about to be dealt a crippling blow.
“Dillon? Are you in there?” his adoptive mother asked, late one fall afternoon, tentatively tapping on his bedroom door.
“I’m busy,” he answered back indifferently, rapping away on his computer keyboard.
“Dillon, there’s something I need to talk to you about,” she said. The clacking of the keyboard continued uninterrupted. “It’s about your dad.”
With that, Dillon shot off his chair and flung the door open. “What?” he asked with genuine fear in his eyes.
“Dillon, why don’t you come downstairs and sit down so we can talk about it.”
“WHAT?!” he shouted desperately, the blood draining from his already pale face. “Tell me!”
“Well, your father’s case is being reopened. There are new charges – serious ones. I don’t know much more than that right now...”
Dillon slammed the door in her face, and raced back to his computer to see what he could find. Two years into his sentence, it appeared, his dad was being charged with terrorism. Dillon felt like he’d been punched in the stomach.
Apparently a radical Islamic terrorist had visited his dad’s website to learn the classified location of US troops the day prior to detonating a bomb in their midst in Kuwait. From time to time his dad had posted information about the position of various legions of troops throughout the Middle East, but his purpose had only been to uncover lies he claimed the pentagon had been feeding the American people to try to minimize America’s presence in the region.
If there was one thing Horace Higley hated more than a lying government, it was religious radicalism. He never would have knowingly worked with terrorists. At the same time, the information he’d distributed was classified, and its use did aid a terrorist, and American soldiers' lives were lost. There would be no chance of successfully defending the case in the court of law or in the court of public opinion.
Dillon’s thoughts quickly jumped to why someone would dig this up, two years into his dad’s sentence and over four years after the bombing. His suspicion, of course, immediately turned to Avillage.