Read Online The Code of Happiness by David J. Margolis - Free Book Online

together. He didn't care if men and
women dressed the same, and if out there the world seemed bland and
monolithic, but in the hub of XXLI the unpronounceable
corporation he didn't want people to think the same way. He
identified Beanoe for leadership, to 'buzz up' the conformist lives
of those who thought they needed to behave in order to get ahead.
It was in this environment Jamie unexpectedly thrived. He was in
tune, his mind in sync with the flow of data.
     
     
    “What is it?”
    “I'm not sure.”
    “Go back.”
    He does.
    “Must be my eyes.”
    “Re-examine the last minute.”
    He does.
    “Nothing there.”
     
    “What do you think it was?”
    “I can't say.”
    “I trust you Jamie.”
    “Thought I'd seen the same reference before.”
    “Take a break.”
    He does. The perfect latte heart from the perfect
two-dimensional barista. For the first time he thought they should
be in 3D.
    “Too expensive for a coffee machine,” says Beanoe.
“Do you want to have another go?
    “It was a fraction of a second. It could've been
imagination.”
     
    He crashes at home. Lime chips sting his tongue. He
scrolls through the city's live venues unable to choose whom to
send his hard earned pennies to for an evening performance. The
mega bands were only available if the concert sold out leaving
bands who could only attract three men and a dog. There was always
classical now he was maturing, or maybe some light jazz. He stares
at the list and draws a blank. He's mind in a body, heart
forgotten, working in code now. And there it was again. A
nanosecond. The code. A code out of place, that didn't belong. Then
it was gone, into the ether, untraceable. Twice now. Was someone
trying to speak to him or just watching him? Old fears surfaced. He
could turn neurotic. While anonymous as an office worker, he had
lost a degree of privacy. Po could blab to the underground, or if
he had been sloppy they could've added him to a watch list after
capturing meta data. In the mix of good work they did they also
embraced baffling conspiracy theories, and some of the good work
was prone to bias. His firewall was intact. Safety for the moment
assured. He had no hard evidence of what or who, but vigilance was
required from this point on.
     
    The bus journey to work yields little, people of
course too occupied with their embedded devices. A man or woman
without would stand out. Like him. He was easy to spot. Jamie may
have promised to avoid neurosis but even in the glass atrium of
XXLI he felt exposed. It was the metal tube whizzing him to his
unknown floor that provided security. The office was home, a place
where suspicions could ease. Beanoe made his apologies for not
being able to play the night before—'the missus' as usual. Beanoe
was too old school for embedded devices, the only one other than
Jamie in department xH. All his colleagues had them but they were
required to be switched off in the great search for happiness,
proof enough his decision to forgo connectivity was the correct
one. Grace too, now that he'd come to think of it, was free of
incisions into the skin. How blinkered he was when he first met
her. He was finding he wanted to make excuses to go see her but was
running out of ideas, or at least the curiosities and weirdness of
life at unpronounceable to quiz. And Blaze? He may be
otherworldly, but he was embedded-free. The underground should know
things like that.
     
    “Jamie?”
    “Uh.”
    “Snap out of it.”
     
    He chooses tea from the Ashikubo valley in in Japan;
a rare sencha dried with wood fires.
    “That's a first.”
    “Guess.”
    “Where are you mate?”
    “I'm here. I am Beanoe. Really.”
    “Should be able to game it tonight.”
    “Great.”
    “Eight or nine?”
    “Sure.”
     
    No anomalies that day, or the next, just Beanoe
wanting to escape marital conversation in the evenings. He wanted
kids, she didn't. Life was at an impasse. Kids, thought Jamie,
people still do that. He didn't know anyone with