by Dan Koontz
From that moment on, he worked on nothing but gaining access to Avillage’s network. He immediately created a continuously-running dummy program to give the appearance that he was working on programming a new app, in case he was being surveilled, but he stopped working on apps altogether, made excuses as often as he could for missing both school and Avillage-directed education, and ignored his adoptive parents to the point that entire days would pass in which they wouldn’t see each other.
After three months of near constant effort, he finally made it into their system. But everything was coded. It took him another month to find his personal files, which were all password-protected. Then another six weeks passed before he eventually hit the jackpot.
A directive had been issued after the first board of directors’ meeting to look for creative ways to keep Dillon’s father away from him, as he was seen as “a potential barrier to profitability.” A few weeks later someone had dug up something “substantive.”
On October 10, a letter with no return address had been sent to both the FBI and the department of homeland security, detailing the accessing of an anti-government website from Kuwait the day before a major terrorist attack, complete with explicit directions on how to verify the information. The new charges had been brought on October 17; Dillon’s stock had soared 7% that day.
It didn’t appear that anyone at Avillage had doctored anything; someone had actually discovered the information, so Dillon had no leverage legally. Still, from his point of view, their motive for profit would be the reason he would likely never see his dad again. That was an unforgivable offense.
Capital and a team, he thought. Back to developing apps. For now.
~~~
As he crossed onto his next door neighbor’s lawn, Ryan noticed a package on the front doorstep. Having deliberately misspelled his neighbors' last name on the online order form, he knew this one had to be for him.
He dumped a little dry food into Mr. Purrfect’s bowl, changed his water, and gave him a couple strokes on the head, which turned out to be all the affection either he or the cat were looking for that day. Then he got busy with the package.
Inside was another box, packed in a mess of tongue-in-cheek toilet paper. On the outside of the inner box was written, “No charge. Really. Truly. Justly.”
Using the front door key as a blade, Ryan sliced down the seams of the smaller box. Wedged inside was a used copy of Dinosaurs and Aliens, a disastrous flop of a multi-player role playing game that had been released about ten years earlier. Along with the game were detailed instructions on where and when to meet up with a warrior by the name of VillagePariah.
Ryan recognized the game title. An otherwise successful software company had produced it and had regretfully, in their original packaging, committed to running the web version of the game for online play for a full ten years. As soon as they’d recognized that the game was a bust, the company had tried to pull the plug on the site, but a few disgruntled players had taken them to court to have the site put back up, and they’d actually won the case. In retaliation, the company stopped online sales and removed all copies of the boxed game from store shelves, drying up game play on the site almost completely.
The ten-year deadline was approaching in a matter of days, and the company was itching to take the game offline permanently and purge all of their data. This was as secure a mode of communication as the sender could come up with on short notice without revealing his identity or creating any permanent log of their conversation. After this, if things went well, they’d have to figure something else out.
That night Ryan loaded the game onto his computer and entered multi-player mode. Per his instructions, he created a princess character by the name of Hot4Higs and entered the cheat code he’d been provided to gain access to the higher levels.
After navigating around the ridiculous game for half an hour, killing dinosaurs and aliens with the invincibility afforded him by his cheat code, he finally stumbled upon the The Time Traveler’s Portal, which was the designated meeting point.
And there he waited. At first he could hardly contain his excitement. But his anticipation gradually turned to boredom as he waited for VillagePariah to show. Every few minutes he glanced down at the bottom left corner of the screen to see how many other players were online. Each time, the answer was the same: zero.
After nearly an hour had passed, the number of other online players suddenly blinked to 1. Ryan sat up straight in his chair. Then, from the right edge of his screen he saw a burly armor-clad warrior approaching, the moniker above him flashing "VillagePariah.”
"VillagePariah is requesting to chat. Do you accept?" read a message in the center of his screen. Ryan anxiously looked back at his bedroom door, making sure it was still closed, and clicked yes. A text box popped up at the upper left corner of the screen.
VillagePariah: Hello
Hot4Higs: Hi
VillagePariah: Can you please delete the picture of the handwritten note on your digital frame?
Hot4Higs: Done.
VillagePariah: Good. one more thing. the black writing on your mom’s purple shirt that gave you the amazon address... it’s actually the photo AFTER the one with her teaching you to ride a bike. I superimposed it with an animation effect. I can’t actually edit or delete photos remotely – can only add them. can you delete that one too?
Hot4Higs: Done.
VillagePariah: Thx. those frames have no permanent memory. when you delete files, they’re gone – unlike text messages or emails. This game sucks doesn’t it?
Hot4Higs: Big time. I guess there’s a reason only 2 people on earth are playing it. what’s this about?
VillagePariah: I think we may have something in common. what do you know about Avillage?
Hot4Higs: Its a stock exchange for orphans – like I used to be
VillagePariah: Like WE used to be
Hot4Higs: You’re on the exchange too?
VillagePariah: Yep. I’m glad you already know about it. that makes this easier.
Hot4Higs: Let me guess... Dillon?
VillagePariah: Why do you say that?
Hot4Higs: I’ve tracked down about half the exchange. you’re – i mean Dillon is a computer guy. and look what you made me name my smokin hot princess character
VillagePariah: Not bad. that was supposed to be an inside joke to myself. anyway, I have ALL the names matched with ALL the symbols on the exchange. I want to end Avillage – get rid of it. not just for me. for everybody.
Hot4Higs: Why?
VillagePariah: They’re evil. they’re manipulating things behind the scenes. taking away our freedom – and of course our money
Hot4Higs: They definitely manipulate things, but I’m not sure they’re evil. I’ve actually got things pretty good
VillagePariah: That’s what a neutered dog in a fenced in yard would say too. trust me. I’ve been all through their private intranet. there’s nothing concrete, but there’s smoke everywhere. I need you with me, Ryan
Hot4Higs: Why?
VillagePariah: Because you’re the poster child. you’re the initial IPO. and you’re smarter than me
Hot4Higs: smarter than I – just kidding. And I’m definitely not smarter than you. I couldn’t have thought of
VillagePariah: I’m not guessing. I’ve seen our files... I have a question. did you have any other relatives besides your parents?
Hot4Higs: No. my grandfather died a few months before my parents. he lived on the west coast. I didn’t really know him that well.
VillagePariah: Sorry about that.
Hot4Higs: It’s ok
VillagePariah: Did he die before or after you took the IAT?
Hot4Higs: ?
VillagePariah: The initial aptitude test you took in september of first grade.
Hot4Higs: Would have been after. I remember it was Halloween night.
VillagePariah: Hmmm...
Hot4Higs: What?
VillagePariah: Avillage has the full
list of IAT scores from your year. not sure how they got it. your name’s at the top. the file is dated mid-October. don’t remember the exact date.
Hot4Higs: My grandfather had pretty bad diabetes. his death wasn’t too big of a shock to my parents, if that’s what you’re getting at.
VillagePariah: OK. do you know what the policy is on orphan adoption? I mean how long a kid has to be in an orphanage before he’s available to Avillage?
Hot4Higs: 3 months. it’s in their company profile
VillagePariah: Did you ever think it was strange that you lost your parents almost EXACTLY 3 months before the opening of AVEX? Or that they confirmed the opening date of AVEX two days after they died?
Ryan’s cursor flashed for a full 30 seconds with no reply. Dillon kept an anxious eye on the lower left of his screen, continuously checking how many other players were online, hoping he hadn’t scared Ryan away with such a sensitive topic; the number remained stuck at 1.
VillagePariah: It strikes me as odd. I’ve dug pretty deep into this. opening day was an absolute make or break for Avillage. Ryan, you were it. there was no plan B.
There was another long pause.
Hot4Higs: We need to meet.
CHAPTER 6
A natural leader with a tireless work ethic, strong motherly instincts, and endless optimism, thirteen-year-old Annamaria Olivera had been invaluable at the orphanage in the 3 months since a catastrophic 7.9 magnitude earthquake had nearly leveled her home city of Colón, a working class town at the Caribbean entrance to the Panama canal. Her district, Rainbow City, had been the hardest hit.
She had been on her way to school when the quake had hit, walking in a small clearing between two more densely populated areas. First, she’d felt a curious vibration beneath her feet, almost as if they were starting to fall asleep. Then before she’d had time to consider what exactly the odd sensation might be, she was hit with a thunderous force that threw her to the ground, split the road in front of her lengthwise and crumbled the rickety bridge up ahead, sending its splintered remains into the swollen, muddy river below.
Rattled in every sense of the word, she turned back toward her home and watched helplessly as the low-rise apartment buildings began to crumble, one after another. Plumes of dust twenty stories high formed a haunting new skyline in their stead.
Two days of round-the-clock rescue work would pass before a Red Cross disaster counselor finally confirmed what she pretty well knew to be the case: no one in her family had survived.
But with more work to do than there were able-bodied people to do it, she never took the time to grieve. She got busy the moment she set foot in the overcrowded orphanage, nursing minor wounds of the other children when the staff didn’t have time, warming bottles and feeding the babies when she heard them cry out at night, and routinely helping out with the cooking and cleaning. But her most impactful contribution was her unique ability to soothe with little more than a look, especially when the aftershocks hit.
Her large dark eyes were deep yet bright and expressed a sensitivity and simple sincerity that couldn’t be replicated by the harried staff at the orphanage. Her soft, full lips came together in a sweet smile, and her flawless bronze skin radiated warmth. Her beauty wasn’t lost on the younger children, who naturally gravitated to her, even if they weren’t sure why.
But another quake was about to rock her world. Her appearance – and two recent policy changes at a stock exchange a world away – would soon set her life on a drastically different course.
~~~
After three years of mostly rousing successes, Avillage was slogging through a third consecutive quarter of flat growth when James Prescott, without notice, eliminated the position of vice president of operations in the Orphan Identification Division, and ordered its employees to report directly to his Senior Executive Vice President/Henchman Aaron Bradford. While the move had dealt a serious blow to the section’s morale, its productivity did increase. Temporarily.
As it turned out, the problem really wasn’t internal; it truly seemed to be a lack of qualified orphans.
In response, Bradford had pushed through two controversial changes in the Avillage recruitment plan. The first was to offer orphan-referral incentives, by way of a 1.5% ownership incentive for each orphan adopted by Avillage, to be split 70/30 between the referring orphanage and the individual making the referral. The second was to pursue international adoptions, thereby increasing the pool of potential orphans a thousand-fold, effective immediately.
Explicit restrictions on foreign adoption, covering criteria from the marital status of the parents to the number of children already in the adoptive family to the ability of the parents to care for a new dependent financially already existed in most countries, so corporate adoptions never got off the ground in most of the developed world. But other countries, mostly underdeveloped and/or those recently devastated by war or natural disaster, were laden with so many orphans they didn’t have the systems in place to take care of them all. A post-earthquake Panama not only permitted corporate adoptions, they rolled out the red carpet for Avillage.
Two weeks after an official memo detailing Avillage’s mission (and its incentive program) had been sent out to all Panamanian orphanages, Carlos Villanueva, a conflicted Rainbow City headmaster, not expecting or even entirely hoping for a reply, had sent a series of digital photos of Annamaria to Avillage, which eventually found their way to the desk of Aaron Bradford. He was instantly mesmerized.
Avillage had had a modicum of success with models in their brief history, but Annamaria was on another plane.
Bradford had forwarded the photos to a talent scout at a major modeling agency, who confirmed Bradford’s suspicion, while dissecting her look more scientifically. Her face was perfectly symmetrical with high cheekbones and large dark eyes accentuated by similarly-toned hair, and her full lips and bronze skin gave her a somewhat nebulous ethnic profile – a major plus in the industry. While the full body shots were more difficult to analyze because of the baggy T-shirts she wore, she was clearly tall and thin with a long feminine neck, broad but delicate shoulders, svelte arms and long, runway-ready legs.
Already the chairman of Annamaria’s board in his mind, Bradford only had one thing left to do; he needed to see her in person. A couple of other longshot inquiries from Panama would justify the trip, including a thirteen-year-old pitcher with a supposed 85 mile-an-hour fastball. But that was probably a fairy tale. Annamaria was the sole reason he opted to make the trip personally.
~~~
The city of Colón’s Enrique A. Jimenez Airport was still closed due to runway damage, so after the five-hour flight from New York to Panama City, Bradford and his assistant were forced to endure another hour and a half in the back of an unairconditioned cab.
Wiping the sweat from his brow with an already soaked handkerchief, he finally peeled himself off of the vinyl seat as the cab pulled up to the orphanage and planted his new Salvatore Ferragamo wingtip in an ankle-deep mud puddle. Jaws clenched and eyes closed, he let out a long audible sigh, well past the point of regretting his decision to come to Panama in July. But as his eyes reopened, his scowl vanished, stopped cold by the splendor of Annamaria’s profile. She was even more stunning than she’d appeared in her picture. And taller. She had to be at least 5’9”. But as she turned to face him, Bradford’s expression tightened back up.
“Breasts are too small,” he whispered derisively, leaning in toward his assistant.
“Mr. Bradford!” his shocked assistant huffed back. “She’s a thirteen-year-old girl.”
“Look, I didn’t travel 3000 miles to tiptoe around important attributes,” Bradford shot back unapologetically through gritted teeth. “Make. A. Note.”
“Yes sir,” his assistant acquiesced.
After greeting Mr. Bradford, headmaster Carlos Villanueva called Annamaria over for a brief introduction.
She demurely bowed her head, looking up bashfully toward Bradford with a polite smile,
and extended her long slender arm, offering him a dainty hand. She had heard that someone from America would be coming to see her.
“Nice to meet you,” Bradford said, gently shaking her hand, contorting his mouth into a soulless smile.
Lacking confidence in her English, Annamaria just continued to smile and nodded respectfully.
“YOU ARE A VERY PRETTY GIRL,” Bradford shouted, as if her inability to carry on a conversation in English implied that she was also hard of hearing.
“Thank you,” she said softly with a thick Spanish accent.
The headmaster released her back to whatever it was that she’d been doing and invited Bradford and his assistant inside.
Carlos Villanueva’s office was a converted utility closet, furnished with a foldable card table that served as a desk, an overflowing filing cabinet and two metal chairs – enough to push the cramped space close to maximum capacity. The walls were covered floor-to-ceiling with faux wood paneling, except for a tiny window that looked out over the yard, and the floor was unpolished concrete.
The headmaster snaked between the card table and the filing cabinet to reach his chair, where he plopped down and gestured with an open hand over to the other one. Bradford quickly grabbed the remaining seat, leaving his assistant standing in the doorway cradling her legal-sized notepad, pen at the ready.
“I’m sorry,” Bradford sighed, looking back toward his assistant with a manufactured grimace, trying his best to look uncomfortable at the prospect of having to tell his assistant to get lost. “Would you mind waiting outside?”
Without saying a word or changing expression, she took a single step back and pulled the door closed in front of her.
“Thank you for sending me those incredible photos. She is beautiful, isn’t she,” Bradford remarked gazing out the small window at Annamaria, in the middle of a soccer game with a few of the younger kids out in the mud-soaked yard.
“Yes. She is,” the headmaster said, almost remorsefully. Bradford didn’t strike him as the type of person a child should be entrusted to.