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kids or what it
was like to be one. It was so far off the radar, another planet. He
had no idea how to relate to Beanoe so listened to him pine after
his need to be an alpha male who didn't want to have regrets, or
find himself in ten years divorced on a scrap heap, or worse,
impotent. Jamie pondered. The code anomalies occurred after Po's
accusation and her futile attempt to woo him back. It had to be
more than coincidence. He knew The Source Foundation didn't have
resources—at least people wise—unless they were hiding. The lab,
the pod, and the ionizer sans bloodstains were meticulous but
everything else was worthy of cobwebs. Billy knew how to siphon off
power from the grid but couldn't resolve server issues. And for all
their talk of heart and happiness, well, look how they had treated
him. They had blitzed him with information and made sure he'd never
had time to think the experience through. They were full of
contradictions. It was plausible they had accessed XXLI data banks
through 'fake' purchases. Chips were in every product. They could
have reverse accessed. It was in the realm of possibility. What if
their purpose was to bring XXLI down, and he was no more than a
stooge using him to infiltrate unaware? His watch had never worked
properly since Ray returned it, and Po could have been speaking in
half-truths about the disappeared five. It was time to play them.
The weekend was upon him. All he needed was a good reason to
justify an appearance. He returned to Beanoe whose melancholy had
settled on the thought of his wife not loving him. Jamie listens
for a few seconds finding the thread on which to connect. He
reminds Beanoe of his strong persuasive powers, and the boss is
appreciative. Time for chips. The pantry calls, normality
returning. Jamie chomps on the junk, his eardrums reverberating. It
takes a second to hit, Beanoe's disappearing into code, a binary
sequence alive for a few seconds, then a coding language unfamiliar
to Jamie.
    “Boss?”
    Nothing. The holograph is dead. He flicks it on and
off, tries voice activation, then drops to his knees and thumps the
box with an appropriate force. He hopes it's a glitch, a piece of
crap equipment and not what he thinks. He sits trying to remember
the code he saw. The firewall didn't protect. Someone is watching
them. Either it's incompetence or so brazen, whoever it is, wants
them to know. Behavior designed to unsettle. Next would be warnings
followed by threats. If purely a message, there was a third party
Jamie had to consider, the most alarming to him, those who had
power over him for half his life, the Feds. A bad decision on his
part and jail time for the next twenty five-years would be his
reward. It had been a decade since he'd tumbled out of their
program and silently into private life. They had wanted his
abilities too. Kids like him were rare, they said, and he served
until his nineteenth birthday. He had hidden well, laid low,
avoiding the wrath of authorities. As required, he had remained a
nobody.
     
    His life continues with gaps. He's back at the indie
mart with bags of chips consumed by thoughts. No memory of the walk
over. Since working for unpronounceable he had gone
elsewhere for supplies, the company offering convenience to its
employees in the form of a well-stocked store on the eleventh
floor. Sight of the oxygen masks triggers memories of the old man.
He had completely forgotten about him. On leaving the shop he
wanders in darkness toward the ramshackle houses, or at least where
they used to be. He's met by a blue wire fence. Behind it the brown
house stands with black streaks curving up its walls from shattered
windows. Jamie's hit with guilt and confusion. He should have
known.
     
    It takes a security guard to rouse him back to the
present. He tells Jamie the story, about how some old guy freaked
and tried to burn down the house taking the street with it.
Inexplicable really. Jamie's hit in the gut, he knows it was 'his'
old man. Behind