by Bell, D. R.
Jennifer went over and gave her mother a brief peck on the cheek:
“Hi, Mom.”
“Hi, baby!” answered Karen without getting up.
“Good to see you, Caroline!” smiled Jennifer.
“Hi, Jennifer! Wanna reefer?” Caroline giggled.
“No, thank you.”
“If you are worried about your husband’s political career, weed’s been legalized, you know,” Caroline enjoyed teasing Jennifer.
“No thank you anyway. How’s the dating life?”
“Oh, you know, men... Surfing is so much more fun. Although men are good for a couple of things. Replacing light bulbs is one.”
“And the other?”
“Oh, you know. Although I have tried one of these new virtual reality suits recently, so perhaps even that is no longer necessary,” laughed Caroline.
“Really? How was it?” Karen got interested.
“I’ll tell you after Nana here leaves.”
Poor Nana blushed, her face turning crimson.
“Don’t make fun of my granddaughter,” protested Karen, laughing. Then she turned to Jennifer:
“How are you holding up, honey?”
“OK, mom, OK. We are going to get the Secret Service protection in a few days. They assign it four months before the elections. I figured I’ll drive down here while I still can without supervision.”
“Life in politics must be hard.”
“Yes, it is!” a halting voice came up behind.
Jennifer turned and barely contained her gasp. Sam Baker aged noticeably, even just in the couple of months she had not seen him. A quick succession of his wife’s death and retirement from politics has left an imprint. A stocky, powerfully built man became frail, shuffling his feet and leaning on a cane.
Sam kissed his granddaughter and sat down:
“Who would have thought – me getting out of politics just as my granddaughter was getting into it. Pour me some of that ice tea, sweetheart.”
Nana poured him a glass and he noisily kissed her on the cheek as well.
“Yes, it’s not easy to be a wife of a politician. Your grandmother used to say that she is living in a glass bowl, with everyone looking in.”
“The attention has been difficult,” admitted Jennifer. “Fortunately, we live on a small dead-end street and the city agreed, with the neighbors’ permission, to block it for most traffic. But it’s been harder on Jeff than on me. He is a very private, shy person and all the attention and notoriety are not easy.”
“Your husband is the most apolitical politician I have ever met,” agreed Sam.
“He never wanted to get into politics. It’s just one thing led to another, and for all his shyness he is not the one to step away from a challenge. And the next challenge. He is stubborn,” smiled Jennifer proudly.
“Grandpa, why won’t you help my Dad?” asked Nana.
“Nana!” exclaimed Karen and Jennifer in unison. Poor girl recoiled.
“That’s OK, sweetheart, don’t let them shut you down. Asking tough questions is your constitutional right,” laughed Sam and patted Nana’s hand. “Why, indeed? You see, I walked out of politics two years ago and promised myself I’ll never get involved again.”
“Why?”
“I’ve been in Washington for almost forty years. I will admit that sometimes the power went to my head; there are some things I did that I am not proud of. But, for the most part, I tried to do what I thought was the right thing. Von Bismark once said that ‘Politics is the art of the possible,’ and that’s true. We were doing what was possible, hoping that the future will bail us out. We knew that piling on trillions and trillions of debt and obligations was wrong, but we’d been told this was the only way to save the country. And to get reelected. And that we just ‘owe it to ourselves,’ so it didn’t matter. We thought that we’d be able to control everything; we were wrong. I lost faith in knowing what the right thing is. That’s why I don’t want to get involved.”
The old man sat back in his chair and looked into the distance, over the ocean.
Everyone was quiet for a minute, and then Jennifer asked:
“Nana, do you need any help with the online math course?”
“Yes, mom, if you can take a look at the last two lessons. I really want to catch up before the next school year starts.”
Jennifer and Nana excused themselves and went into the house.
“Who does Nana look like?” asked Caroline. “She has some of Jennifer in her. Not much of Jeff, judging by the pictures.”
“She looks just like Pavel,” replied Karen. “Same eyes, same nose, same hair. His genes skipped a generation.”
“Your ex-husband?”
“My late husband,” corrected her Karen. “Pavel was killed before we got divorced.”
“The police concluded it was a suicide,” said Sam Baker.
“Dad, Pavel was killed. Let’s not even debate this!”
“Yes, of course,” conceded her father.
Karen turned to Caroline:
“You see, Jennifer still blames me and my dad for her father’s death. She thinks that if we did not split up, Pavel would not have gotten involved in whatever got him killed. She’s been cold to me ever since, for eighteen years.”
“Who killed him?”
“We don’t know. Just before his death, he made two trips to Russia, investigating some financial machinations. He also met with Jeff Kron, my son-in-law. Jeff was accused of murder at that time. He believes that Pavel was the one who set him free.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that story,” nodded Caroline. “And that changed Jeff’s life and Jennifer’s life, and now Jeff is running for President. Can you believe that?” Caroline turned to Sam.
“When you get to be eighty five, not much surprises you,” smiled Sam. “You change someone’s life and you just might change the world.”
“Sam, do you think Pavel helped to free Jeff?”
Sam sipped his ice tea, thought for a minute.
“Perhaps, but it does not matter. What matters is that Jeff is absolutely convinced of this. He told me once that he believes that his life was given back to him and thus is no longer just his. Jeff has lived for the past eighteen years to prove that he deserved that second chance at life. That’s why he does not shy away from challenges.”
“Dad, do you think he’ll win the election?” asked Karen.
“I don’t know. He is a most unusual politician. Jeff is more of a zealot with a mission, to right some of the wrongs that the powerful people of this world inflicted on the less fortunate ones. I would have been scared of him except that I know he does not believe in the end justifying the means. And I think that Jennifer provides a good, stabilizing influence on him. She does not scare some people off the way Jeff does. In a sense, she is a better politician,” smiled Sam.
“Amen to that, I would vote for her!” laughed Caroline.
Washington, DC, USA
By 2024, the Federal Bureau of Investigations operated on a $12 billion annual budget. For that money, it had almost fifteen thousand field agents and four thousand analysts. But the largest group of the FBI workforce was professional staff, a significant portion of which was dedicated to building and managing the data gathering and analysis infrastructure. The central hub was the vast classified data center in Virginia, to which high-speed communications networks carried hundreds of petabytes of data daily, to be simply stored or sifted through by powerful supercomputers.
The FBI data infrastructure interconnected with a similar infrastructure of the National Security Agency (NSA), forming a redundant, highly reliable web that tracked video feeds, phone exchanges, e-mails, captured verbal conversations, and more. Anything that was not encrypted was analyzed in almost-real time against target words, expressions, and data sequences.
Encrypted data was forwarded to the ‘Alan’ section, named after Alan Turing. Alan’s computers decoded effortlessly most of the standard encryption schemes. Only a sm
all percentage of the encrypted data that used specialized algorithms with very long, sometimes one-time codes, could not be broken easily. These messages were sent to a designated ‘brute force’ section of supercomputers that were churning through quadrillions of combinations daily trying to decipher the code. It was a constant battle between the ever-powerful data center and a few privacy-obsessed malcontents that stubbornly continued to come up with new algorithms and longer codes.
The data center had an electronic dossier on every adult American. Each dossier compiled many gigabytes of data including their addresses, education, work experiences, iris prints, encoded facial recognition profile, organizations they belonged to, tax records, history of internet searches and site visits, their virtual world encounters, captured video, audio, e-mail, and texting records, their purchases, their travel, instances of their license plates being caught by drones and ubiquitous cameras, and more. Even if the correlated data did not trigger any pre-programmed alarms, it was sitting there for later use and a more detailed analysis – if needed.
The FBI mined the data to prevent terrorist attacks. A great many attacks had been successfully prevented and lives saved. A significant number of people that had not planned any attacks had been harassed, intimidated, sometimes even convicted on unrelated charges because they have exhibited ‘disobedient and hostile’ behavior pattern. The IRS mined the data to catch tax avoiders. Very large amounts of money had been recovered. A few of the targets had been driven into poverty, sometimes suicide, over minor violations. Organized crime mined the data for blackmail purposes – one of the FBI computer engineers got himself in trouble with an underage girl and agreed to secretly download and provide the collected files to them. The blackmail business was booming.
Despite the substantial budget, the FBI was struggling to contain ballooning costs. Especially in the Information and Technology Branch where the shortage of qualified people and competition with the private sector combined to keep expenses high. A year ago, a solution was found – to bring in contractors from FreedomShield, Inc. Some protesting voices have been raised, questioning how come an external company could provide such services cheaper and, generally, the wisdom of using contractors in such a sensitive position. But FreedomShield had a stellar reputation, was a local Virginia company, their employees had Top Secret clearances and passed extensive background checks. And FreedomShield had many friends in Washington. They received the contract, the government saved money, everyone was happy.
When the FBI director Miller instructed his trusted lieutenant Rob Pulson to quietly initiate comprehensive surveillance of John Dimon and Jeff Kron, Pulson bypassed the head of the Information and Technology Branch and relayed this request to his protégé Mouli Chakrapani, the man in charge of special electronic surveillance projects. Chakrapani was loyal to Pulson. He had the surveillance set up and started passing the daily reports up the chain.
The man who actually programmed the surveillance, like most people in the Information and Technology Branch, was a contractor working for FreedomShield. Unbeknown to Chakrapani, the gathered data started going in parallel to another data center about a hundred miles away. It joined a large feed already flowing in the same direction. Normally, the data center’s security systems would have raised an alarm. But the person managing the network security alerts was another FreedomShield employee with the super user privileges and she exempted this particular connection as “allowed.”
Los Angeles, USA
Jeff was on the living room couch nursing a scotch when Jennifer returned.
“How was your day? How come you’re sitting in the dark?” she pecked him on the cheek.
“Letting my eyes rest a bit. Long day with Robert, plus we did four virtual townhalls.”
“Well, these townhalls are really working. We’ve been averaging seven thousand logins for each one in the past two weeks,” Jennifer stumbled around in the semi-darkness and poured herself a drink.
“At this rate, by the election time we’ll reach three million more people, about one percent of the population,” shrugged Jeff.
“Or about two percent of prospective voters,” Jennifer positioned herself in a recliner opposite of her husband. “And our research shows that each attendee potentially influences four others. Now we are looking at ten percent of prospective voters being influenced. That’s where elections are won and lost.”
“Oh, Jen, your glass is always half-full,” smiled Jeff.
“Figuratively and literally,” she smiled back, lifting her glass. “My goodness, you are doing so great! If someone told you a year ago that you’ll have a realistic chance of winning the presidential elections, would you have believed that person?”
“No, I would have told him to have his head examined. And you know, it’s all thanks to you. I just wouldn’t have had the wherewithal on my own.”
“Honey, you wrote the books, you gave the speeches, you fought for the California initiatives, you went on a hunger strike...”
“Jen, you went on that strike with me. You took charge of the social media outreach. You know that’s how everything started and took off like a brushfire.”
“All right, we did it. Together. But honey, after seventeen years I know a few things about you. Something’s bugging you. What is it?”
“You know me too well,” laughed Jeff. He bit his lip, chewed on it. “People ask me why I’m running and I give them my stock answer, the one we practiced with Robert for days. But I keep asking myself, why do I really run? What is driving me? I never planned to run, I just put one foot in front of the other and the stakes kept going up and up and now they can’t go any higher.”
“So, why do you run, honey?” using a term of endearment but sounding dead serious.
“You see, Jen, it’s like peeling the layers of onion. Every time you think you have the answer, there is something underneath. I had to go back to what put me on this warpath back in 2006, when I was released.”
Jennifer sipped her drink, not certain she wanted to hear the answer.
“What was it, Jeff?”
“Revenge. It was revenge. Not for me, for my father. You know, back in 2003, when I went to John Brockton’s house, I had a gun in my pocket.”
“I know. You’ve never used it.”
“No, I haven’t. I always maintained that I brought it to scare Brockton, that I just wanted to confront him.”
“And?”
“It was a lie. I wanted to kill him. Yes, I wanted to kill that man. For driving my father to suicide. For – I am sure – driving others into despair or worse.”
Jennifer leaned forward, put her hand on her chest to keep her heart from jumping out:
“But, Jeff, you didn’t kill him!”
“No. He was dead by the time I got there. But in my mind, in my heart, I did. I am innocent in the eyes of the law, but I am not innocent before God.”
He paused but Jennifer remained silent.
“So I set out with the revenge on my mind. And I could no longer take revenge on John Brockton. But what I came to realize that there were many John Brocktons. People that took advantage of the system. People that manipulated it to take advantage of others. And the system had become so infested that you couldn’t distinguish them from the system anymore.”
“They are the system,” said Jennifer flatly.
“Yes, they are the system. It’s not even greed but predatory use of others. Society can’t survive under an absolute individualism.”
“Honey, you need something strong to feed your fire to survive this. If revenge is the fire, so be it.”
“Thank you, love. But what I am trying to understand is whether this passion of revenge has turned me into Don Quixote, charging the windmills instead of real dragons.”
“What do you mean?”
“I keep trying to explain myself to people but I feel like I am failing. I don’t know if people want this change I am calling for or if they like the system as it is. Do you remember
how some years ago we were discussing George Orwell’s 1984 vs. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World?”
“Yes, I remember that discussion,” smiled Jennifer. “The grand debate: will the Big Brother be watching you or will you be watching the Big Brother?”
“Well, we know the answer now. We may have the 1984-style surveillance, but overall Huxley was right – we are being entertained into submission to the system. Remember the old movie Matrix, where the hero was offered the red pill for the painful truth of reality or the blue pill for the blissful ignorance of illusion? I think we have collectively taken the blue pill: we are glued to our immersion TV experiences and we don’t care to look for a wizard behind the curtain. And that’s why it’s so difficult to get traction: people don’t want to hear, they don’t want to know. They want to get home, turn on their 3-D immersion TV and forget the reality. They don’t care who rules them.”
Jennifer put down her glass, got up and moved to the couch next to her husband.
“Hon, I know it’s hard to get people to pay attention. So many turned inwards, disengaged from the larger society, stopped voting. Hard to blame them when we cart off to jail someone stealing a slice of pizza but people that engineer financial disasters get away free. But more and more are taking interest. You now have at least a quarter of the country behind you. We’ve always spoken about building a coalition; you’re doing it. Many aren’t tuning out, they want real change. They come from different walks of life. They believe in you. You have to keep fighting, for them and for your father. If it’s the revenge that feeds your fire, so be it!”
Jeff put his arm around his wife:
“OK, sweetheart. I have to be reminded from time to time. We’ll keep going!”
JULY 2024
Upstate New York, USA
A woman was kneeling by the gravestone lost in her thoughts when Jeff and Jennifer approached.