by Gary Dejean
“Hey, kids!” greets David, familiar with their faces.
“Hi, Mr. Abrantie!” they reply, all at once, calling him by his recently assumed name.
The content father smiles as he walks away. “Can Jake come play with us?” asks one of the children.
“I’ll tell him you’re here!” David replies over his shoulder.
He walks down the dirt path, up to a small concrete house rented with cryptocurrency. All his assets having being frozen as soon as they left Manila, David has since found ways to monetize his experience as an insurance broker, teaching online scammers how to maintain a low profile.
He climbs up to the second floor, where Chloe has turned the dinner table into a workspace, the remnants of the Little Blackjack lain connected to several computers patched together into a fortune parallel-cluster. Jake is sitting on the edge of the table, in a body assembled from disparate salvaged parts, missing only a leg, which David is bringing back.
“Did they have it?” the child asks as soon as his father returns, referring to the fixture for the knee.
“Yeah, they did,” David replies, handing the leg over to his son who clips it in by himself.
Jake gets off the table and flexes his knee a few times, the plug-and-play interface of the prosthetic linked to his central system. “Nice!” he rejoices. His cheap spatula feet might not compare to those of the Little Blackjack, but he can now run as fast as he did before his accident.
Feeling his need to exert, David points out the window. “The other kids are playing football by the bazaar,” he hints.
Jake answers with a smile, his mask of hard plastic still a work-in-progress, and rushes downstairs.
“Be back for dinner!” the father yells before Jake is out of the house.
He watches out the window as Jake run to his new friends, friends his age, with whom he can share something vaguely resembling childhood. When he turns back around, he finds Chloe smiling at him with similar contentment, and they share a chuckle. Both of their lives unexpectedly changed forever by the actions of her mother and his son, neither of them was expecting to find peace, at least not the way they’ve found it in this part of the world.
David looks down at his fingers, stained with oil and dust from his trip to the flea market. He looks at the broken half of the Little Blackjack, its tenebrous features bringing back nightmares. Having learned to deal with one issue at a time, he walks to the kitchen where he cleans up his hands.
“How long before you’re done with that thing?” he asks, over the sound of running water.
Sat at the dining table, Chloe takes a deep breath. She’s more than aware of all the discomfort she’s imposed on him, and now that she’s extracted the software from the prototype, it’s time to make a decision.
“I’m finished,” she admits finally, a little overwhelmed.
She hears David turn the tap off and walk back inside. Drying his hands with a rag, he stands on the threshold, himself taken aback. Chloe looks away from her screen, rubbing her natural eye with a slight headache.
“What are you gonna do with it?” David asks, worried.
It’s only been a few months since they went off the grid, and they’ve been expecting this moment ever since. Only now that their options are literally on the table, do they experience the freedom they’ve been looking for, which, grandiose and terrifying, keeps them both paralyzed. Displayed on the monitor, Chloe’s testimony and her recording from the fight, along with exabytes of decrypted data, are begging to be leaked.
Chloe takes a minute to ponder the question. She looks out the window, where Jake has joined the football game in the evening sunlight. She turns to David and looks at him too for a while. He shakes his hands, impatient.
The young woman can’t refrain from a smile when she finds herself admitting: “You know… I’m not sure!”
Thank you!
The writing of this novel has been made possible thanks to the generous support of its financial backers, during the month of October 2016.
Laure Assaf
William Astred
Clément Bourgoin
Thierry Braz
Matthieu Cahuzière
Sylvie Cahuzière
Georges Clarenko
Elisabeth Dejean
Jean-François Dejean
Marc Dejean
Mona Dejean
Raphaëlle Dejean
Romain Dupuy
Harley Fagetter
Alain Fondrille
Alexis Franco
Laura Geisswiller
Eve Jablon
Amandine Jacobi
David Jacobi
Florent Lamy
Alric Mabire
Paul Magendie
Igor Magot
Cécile Mahiou
Max Mathesius
Knujon Mapson
Alix Marie
Victor Milenovich
Alexis Moroz
Raymond Mullikin
Romuald Percereau
Françoise Poulain
Xavier Poulain
Camille Prunet
Benjamin Riado
Pierre Schweitzer
Camille Tournadre
Bruno Trentini
Germain Valas
Aurélien Villedieu
Christophe Waterlot-Buisine
Legal mentions
The unauthorized commercialization of this e-book is illegal, punishable by both fines and jail time, and will result in appropriate legal action.
Book cover illustration by Pablo Kerry (www.artstation.com/blayker).
About the author
Gary Dejean holds a PhD in Film Studies from University Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne) for his study of the representation of human suffering in international cinema. He's a teacher, writer and consultant.
In 2009, he became a founding member of the online Aesthetics review Proteus and assured the direction of publication from 2010 to 2013. He has since been occupying the position of treasurer of the associative research publication, and remains webmaster for the review.
A fiction writer since teenage, he completed two novels in the French language before it occurred to him that he should have been writing in English all along. In October 2016, he gathered crowdfunding for the writing of his first English screenplay and novel: H+ incorporated.
Now that the novelized version of the screenplay is out, he's working at making the movie become a reality.
Contact
You can follow Gary Dejean on Twitter @JeanChose
Or reach out by e-mail at the following address: [email protected]