Without any discussion, Thomas strode onto the green and snatched his ball.
“I’ll get it close, and you sink it,” Thomas said with a wink, walking back down the green to where Ryan’s ball lay. Sure enough his putt rolled to a stop eighteen inches short of the hole. That would be a gimme.
Ryan then stepped up behind his dad and placed his ball back down on the fringe of the green. He’d tracked his dad’s putt the whole way; there was no break.
“No pressure, Ryan!” yelled one of the dads who’d long been out of contention, well into his fourth beer.
Standing to the side of the ball, his mind cleared of everything and everyone around him, Ryan took two carefully measured practice swings. He then shuffled a few inches forward, his head now directly over his ball. He glanced up at the hole, then back to his ball, then the hole, and again his ball, picturing the speed and trajectory of his dad’s putt. Slowly he drew his putter back, exactly as he had with each practice swing. The head of the putter slowed to a momentary stop at the peak of his backswing, and then, with the identical forward momentum of his two previous swings, he swung through the ball. He barely felt the club make contact with the ball, keeping his head down and softly closing his eyes. He didn’t need to watch. He knew it was in.
As soon as he got home, he uploaded the new photo of himself and his dad raising their second consecutive father-son trophy. Except for the fact that he was another inch and a half closer to his dad in height, it looked almost identical to their first picture.
He then scrolled back one frame and, slowly shaking his head, deleted the picture of him in his boxers from earlier in the morning.
“Check out your mom’s purple shirt,” read the message left on the frame.
His dad had seemed genuinely confused when he’d mentioned the picture earlier that morning, and the handwriting in the photo didn’t look like anything like his dad’s. What’s more the surface under the plain white sheet of paper certainly wasn’t to be found anywhere in their house – maybe laminate countertop or a particle-board table.
What does that mean?
he thought, trying to squeeze some secret meaning out of the message. As he was thinking, the pictures continued to scroll. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen his mom wear purple. Maybe one of their neighbors within Wi-Fi range had the same kind of frame, and the photo had mistakenly gotten uploaded to his frame. But the picture still didn’t make any sense; why would that scribbled-on piece of paper be worthy of uploading to
anyone’s
frame? And no one in their pretentious neighborhood would have had laminate countertops.
As he continued to ruminate, a flash of purple from the frame grabbed his attention, just before the picture scrolled forward again. He snatched the frame from the bedside table and frantically pushed the back button.
On the display was a picture of him riding his first two-wheeler, with his birth mother running right behind him, just letting go of the back of his seat. She wore a radiant smile – and a faded purple shirt. Ryan remembered that soft, worn purple shirt vividly. It had been her lounging shirt. She had changed into it almost every night when she got home from work and often slept in it. As Ryan continued to stare at the shirt, he noticed what appeared to be microscopic black print on the sleeve.
But that shirt didn’t have writing on it. He would have bet his life on it.
He placed his thumb and forefinger directly over the tiny black letters and spread them slowly apart. As the frame zoomed in, gradually the text became legible: “www.amazon.com/tp-roll/dp/S890=f238000”
Ryan grabbed his tablet and immediately keyed in the URL exactly as it appeared on his mom’s shirt. An item on the Amazon Marketplace loaded, featuring a picture of a half-full roll of toilet paper offered by a user with uniformly unfavorable customer reviews. The text read, “This is more of a social experiment than anything to see if there’s avillage (sic) idiot out there would actually pay $18.76 for half a roll of toilet paper. Anyone going to prove me right? I bet you will.”
The item had been posted just before midnight the night before. Ryan’s price at the market’s close that day had been 18.76. He had to pursue this. Without any further deliberation, he ordered it with the “bill me” option, selecting next-day delivery to the house next door. He knew for a fact his neighbors were going to be out of town through the weekend, because he was feeding their cat and collecting their mail while they were away.
For the sake of the seller, he marked the shipment as a gift with the card to read, “Here’s to social experiments. I am one. Love, RTJ”
~~~
Dillon had figured out that he was an Avillage listing before he'd even come to live with his adoptive family, and he harbored a deep resentment for it. While he tolerated his adoptive parents, he stayed on a cool first-name basis with them. There was only one person he would ever call “Dad,” and in just under 13 years, he expected to be reunited with him. He’d also made it perfectly clear that he was born with the last name Higley, and that’s the name he would die with.
Avillage wasted no time in getting him on a comprehensive computer-programming education regimen, seemingly intent on grooming the computer prodigy who would eventually destroy them, he thought. But they also allowed him significantly more free time than most of the other orphans, since he needed “creative time” for producing his popular apps.
In the history of the exchange, ironically, Dillon was the fastest to return a profit for his shareholders. His dad probably would have disowned him on the spot if he’d been aware, but Dillon had his eye on longer-term goals, and he knew he would need two things to overthrow a titan like Avillage: capital and a team.
The profits he kept from the apps would provide the capital, he figured. The team he had in mind was himself and his father, better than before with his added years of experience and his father’s heightened motivation, but that plan was about to be dealt a crippling blow.
“Dillon? Are you in there?” his adoptive mother asked, late one fall afternoon, tentatively tapping on his bedroom door.
“I’m busy,” he answered back indifferently, rapping away on his computer keyboard.
“Dillon, there’s something I need to talk to you about,” she said. The clacking of the keyboard continued uninterrupted. “It’s about your dad.”
With that, Dillon shot off his chair and flung the door open. “What?” he asked with genuine fear in his eyes.
“Dillon, why don’t you come downstairs and sit down so we can talk about it.”
“WHAT?!” he shouted desperately, the blood draining from his already pale face. “Tell me!”
“Well, your father’s case is being reopened. There are new charges – serious ones. I don’t know much more than that right now...”
Dillon slammed the door in her face, and raced back to his computer to see what he could find. Two years into his sentence, it appeared, his dad was being charged with
terrorism
. Dillon felt like he’d been punched in the stomach.
Apparently a radical Islamic terrorist had visited his dad’s website to learn the classified location of US troops the day prior to detonating a bomb in their midst in Kuwait. From time to time his dad had posted information about the position of various legions of troops throughout the Middle East, but his purpose had only been to uncover lies he claimed the pentagon had been feeding the American people to try to minimize America’s presence in the region.
If there was one thing Horace Higley hated more than a lying government, it was religious radicalism. He never would have knowingly worked with terrorists. At the same time, the information he’d distributed was classified, and its use did aid a terrorist, and American soldiers' lives were lost. There would be no chance of successfully defending the case in the court of law or in the court of public opinion.
Dillon’s thoughts quickly jumped to
why
someone would dig this up, two years into his dad’s sentence and over four years after the bombing. His suspicion, of course, immediately turned to Avillage.
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?