by Melody Clark
“Of course!” Wendell said. “What are they doing? Trying to drive a wedge between us? Didn’t I warn you? Didn’t I tell you that would happen?”
“Dad, please, tell me,” Edward begged him, “whatever it is, I’ll forgive you, but I need you to tell me the truth –”
“They’re doing that, aren’t they? I told you they wanted to lure you away from me, from Bakunin. Well, you remember what they did – what they have done, all along. They rejected you. I took you in. I gave you a home when no one else would. You had no one.”
“Dad, please, there are things you didn’t tell me,” Edward said, forcing back tears. “I have to know. Did Mom send them pictures? Did she send them news stories?”
“Of course she did!” Wendell replied. “I’ve told you that!”
“I know, but you said they sent them back –”
“Which they did, every packet ever sent, news clippings, photographs. Every single one, they wrote return to sender across the envelope. They never wanted any news about you, any information, any part of your life. Any of it, Edward.”
Wendell’s voice rattled on, in desperate half-tones and extended measures, playing out across his adopted son’s sympathies with a skilled prowess. Edward turned in desperation toward the room where he had spent the night. There was something there. Something that could prove the case, one way or the other.
Eddie swallowed a sob whole. “I know, Dad, you’ve told me,” he said, rushing toward the room where he knew the baby book lay, waiting to confirm or refute Wendell’s version of the truth.
“Then don’t listen to them now!” Wendell raged on. “They didn’t give a damn about you all those years ago. Or all the years since. Old Man Croftdon was into eugenics. I never told you that to spare your feelings. But he thought you were substandard. That’s why he made his son give you away.”
Edward quickly made his way into the room and to the dresser. He opened the drawer and withdrew the baby book. His vision clouded with a stinging warmth through his eyelids. He tried to not listen to the words as they spilled mercilessly out of the phone and into his ear. He was too busy trying to determine what he wanted to find when he opened the baby book.
What was in there was the truth. It would make one case or the other. As deeply as he knew what that truth would be, a little part of him still hoped for something less certain – for something equivocal.
Each page as he passed through held photographs – Edward as an infant, Edward as a toddler, Edward in grade school, Edward in junior high, Edward at high school –
Edward the chess champion, Edward the spelling bee victor, Edward the failed track star, Edward the computer wizard, Edward – Edward.
Edward battled the sobs to keep them silent. He turned away toward the window. He couldn’t hear anything at all at first, until the roaring in his head subsided. Then all he could hear was the blare of Wendell’s lies.
“Edward?” Wendell said, once Edward could hear him from the other end. “You believe me, don’t you? I have to know you’re on my team, son.”
Eddie swallowed the anger and the pain and the disappointment, the crushing and disorienting shock of it all, every bit of it, and then forced himself to say, “Of course. You know I’m on your team. Always. You know that everything I do is because I love you, right?
“Yes, of course,” Wendell said. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Dad,” Edward said, “Everything is fine now. I’ll talk to you sometime tomorrow. I love you. Good night.”
He clicked the phone off and placed it down on the desk. He tenderly lifted the baby book and slipped it back into the drawer, and then closed it.
“I’m so sorry, Eddie,” Thomas said from beside him.
Edward looked around in surprise. “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you.”
“Forgive me for intruding, but I –”
“No, I’m glad you’re here,” Edward said quickly. “There’s something I need to ask you. I’ve refrained from asking until now. I think maybe I was afraid to. I don’t think I wanted to know the answer. But now I must know.”
Thomas seated himself in the chair by the door. “You want to know why we gave you to Wendell?”
Edward sighed softly, sitting back on the bed where he had slept the night. He now sat across from Thomas, his father, where they could look at each other on the same level. “Yes. Wendell just told me you gave me away due to John Croftdon’s belief in eugenics, that when I was born he –”
“Good God, no!” Thomas snapped. “That’s a vile, disgusting lie, and Wendell knows it. There was nothing wrong with you. I was a 16 year old kid who got my 15 year old girlfriend, your mother, in trouble. I wanted to marry Faith, but our parents wouldn’t allow it. So I let my father talk me into a pact he hammered out with Wendell’s father, in order to keep the peace in the corporate world. Pure politics. A misunderstanding brought about from having been out of touch so long. Estrangement breeds contempt far faster than familiarity does.”
“And I was the bargaining chip?”
“Yes, I’m sad to say. Since Wendell and his wife needed a child and couldn’t have any, I believed you to be sent there for good reasons. It also helped restore accord, for a while, between them.”
Edward nodded. “But eventually you and Faith married?”
“Yes, eventually. I finally learned to stand up to my father. That’s why I’ve been so careful to be different with your brothers. I always knew I’d have to have this conversation with you, so I’ve tried very hard to be a good father. Although, I’m not sure what happened with Tad.”
Edward found himself laughing in spite of himself. “I’ve heard various theories.”
“I’m sure you have.” Thomas leaned forward toward Eddie. “You know, it would only be natural if you had mixed feelings about this situation.”
Edward smiled and shook his head. “No, I had seen this coming for a while. The breach between Wendell and I had widened. The more I communicated with Andrew, the more I realized Wendell’s psychotic fantasies were his own walking nightmares. And I think it was his misguided way of keeping me near. If we believed the forest was full of enemies, we’d stay near the campfire.”
Ken stepped into the room. “I can’t wait any longer. What the hell is happening?”
“We’re staging a counter-offense.” Edward stood up from the bed. “If Wendell calls back, don’t answer it. Call Arvo and convince him we’re still on board with Bakunin. Okay?”
“What are you going to do?”
“What I have to do, correct my mistake.”
“It wasn’t your mistake, Eddie,” Andrew said, as he filled the place in the room that Ken had vacated, to go and make his calls. “It was our mistake.”
“It was mine first,” Edward said. “I got you into it. I let Wendell manipulate me. I persuaded you of the reality of his trust. I believed what I knew could not be true, because I wanted to.”
Thomas sighed. “We all do that to one extent or another, son.”
“I know him better than anyone,” Edward said. “And he played me. I wrote the vulnerability they’re using to kill people into the system. Wendell suggested it and I wrote it in. A shortcut, he said, to expand its utility. I wanted his acceptance, his approval. And now we have this.”
“You figured out how they ghosted the program?” Andrew asked.
Edward nodded. “We couldn’t figure out how it knew our language, but that was how. It generated its own fly code. It just rewrote the program so it would accept the bridge without any glitches. The layout of the clubhouse triggered the memory. The indirect access was always part of the fucking design.”
Andrew leaned back his head as if in a swift and sudden realization. “Damn it. SAGE hands.”
Edward nodded again. “We envisioned people in remote regions performing skilled surgery through a link to the system while, the whole
time, they wanted to put weapons in their hands.” Edward’s voice cinched again in into a tight knot that sounded ready to split at any point. “Stopping it will be for Wendell’s own good, though I doubt he’ll see it that way. The only way to stop what they’re doing is to destroy our program.”
“You know I’m with you all the way,” Andrew said.
Edward’s lips bent into a small, sad smile. “Trust me, I appreciate that more than I can say.”
“Well, what can I do to help?” Thomas asked, standing.
“We need something to distract Wendell,” Edward said. “I have the element of surprise because he won’t see it coming from me now. He’ll think I’m just updating the server script.”
Thomas nodded. “I think I may be able to setup some negotiations between Croftdon and Bakunin. Maybe to continue your work here?”
“That could do it.”
“Then I’ll see about it immediately.”
“Mr. Croftdon – I mean, Thomas,” Edward said, pausing a moment, grappling for words, “thank you. For everything you told me. I mean, before.”
“It was only the truth, Eddie.”
“Yes, well, today, that was especially comforting,” he said.
“I’m afraid I can well understand that,” Thomas replied, leaving down the hall.
Andrew looked toward Edward, a myriad of possibilities seeming to filter through his expression. Finally, he appeared to zero in internally on the only possible course of action. “You’re thinking of uploading the Pandora packet to Epimetheus?”
“Unless you can think of a better solution,” Edward said.
Andrew tapped the table beside him in frustration. “No, and I’ve been trying. It’s a horrible thing to consider destroying something you’ve worked so hard to bring about.”
“But the alternative is even worse. I mean, that’s why we created the inert malware in the design. We foresaw the potential for the program to fall into less ethical hands,” Edward said, breaking up in a dry, humorless laugh. “We just had no idea it would be our own. Of course, we made it extremely difficult to access from outside. And it has to be uploaded from the outside.”
“I’ll be happy to assist, but there’s no better hacker on the planet than you,” Andrew said.
Edward laughed darkly again. “Oh, Andrew, there is so much you don’t know. But it’s better that it’s just one of us. No reason spreading around the blame. Wendell will have some hesitation about coming after me. He’ll have no similar compunctions about targeting you.”
“What do you think he’ll try to do to you?” Andrew asked softly.
“At minimum, fire me, disown me, probably try to destroy me. You’re either with him or against him. There is no middle ground. I’ve seen him pound bigger men into the ground like tent stakes. There will be very little left of me, once he’s finished. After I do what I have to do to him, I’m not altogether sure I want there to be anything left.”
“Then maybe we ought to just leave things as they are,” Andrew said. “You know I’ll go whichever way you want me to.”
“If I don’t stop this, I’ll do worse to myself than anything Wendell could do to me. And you’ll do the same thing to yourself. No, I started it. I have to stop it.” Edward murmured a soft, deep sound from the depths of his throat. “It’s so fucking ironic.”
“How do you mean?”
“The only reason I worked on this project was to win Wendell’s respect. His acceptance. His love, I guess. And Thomas’, too, if I’m honest with myself. And now it has all come to this.”
“It brought you back here to us.”
“Yeah, it did do that.” Eddie grinned. “For all the good that’s doing you now.”
Andrew shook his head. “Don’t be silly. But I would like to ask, since we’re being so direct and open, is it true, what Tad says? Do you really use reds and whites and all that to work like you do?”
Edward paused a long moment in consideration. He nodded. “Yeah. I do. With the schedule I have to keep. I’ve already told you that you’re every bit as good as I am. You just don’t drive yourself the way I do. Why, did you think I had a genii in a bottle or something?”
Andrew grinned. “Well, yes, sort of.”
Edward shrugged. “Yeah, I’m afraid the superhero thing was a total illusion. Sorry.”
“Oh, no, no, I like this Eddie a lot better than the old distant one I barely knew,” Andrew said. “I should tell you, though, you don’t look well. I have half a mind to call in Tad.”
“Please don’t,” Edward said, “I’ll be okay. It’s just been a difficult day. I know my system. I know when I’m crashing. I still have time. It’s important to me that Thomas not know anything about my habit.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, it just is. It’s embarrassing enough to me that you and Tad know.”
“James and Wilse, too, I’m afraid.”
“Wonderful,” Edward said, shaking his head to himself and the wall and then the ceiling. “Well, that makes it even more important to prevent the spread of information.” He checked his watch. “We had better get this underway if we want to take down the system in the time Thomas is giving us.”
Chapter Seven
Edward slipped into the library with a moist cloth pressed to his face. He had already consumed a third of an energy drink. He clutched at a wall to slowly make his way to the chair beside his laptop. His eyes were watering badly, and he wished he could think of a reason to blame it on crying. Allergies would have to do.
“Can you please turn up the heater or something, Andrew?” Edward asked, buttoning a sweater he had just pulled on.
“It’s cold to you?” Andrew asked, looking around in confusion.
“It’s not to you?”
“Not in the slightest, no.”
Edward shook his head, sat back in his chair and focused forward. “Never mind then, it’s probably just me. I’ll distract myself here shortly.” His attention centered on the ASCII text lines replicated on the screen. “All right, we won’t have a lot of leeway. Where is Thomas with the time window he’s opening?”
“He’s on the phone with his New York contact,” Tad said from the doorway. “He is cooking up some offer that he will fax the details of in 72 hours. He has experience dealing with Wendell. I’m sure he’ll improve on that window of opportunity. How long do you think you have?”
“Wendell was half-asleep,” Edward said. “He won’t start thinking clearly until morning there. His brain won’t start manufacturing theories until after his morning coffee. I’ll need a time aperture that will allow me access and allow the Pandora to follow through with the viral destruction of the program – Jesus, I can’t believe I’m even discussing this.” Edward pressed the cloth to his eyes. “Maybe 2 or 3 hours, tops.”
“I’ve loaded the pop paths for access points,” Andrew said. “I thought they might trigger the portal. Maybe through an access trip in a scutter script or something.”
“How many skips?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Andrew said.
Tad leaned down beside Edward, staring at him closely. “Why are your eyes watering?”
“Allergies,” Edward replied, glancing sheepishly at the other man. “If you don’t mind, I’m working here.”
“Isn’t that something? So am I. And you haven’t so much as sniffled since you’ve been here. I see not one sign of allergic rhinitis, especially the much-vaunted industrial strength kind from which you claim to suffer.”
“I don’t know, Tad, maybe the drugs are masking the symptoms,” Edward snapped.
“And why are you shivering?”
“I’m nervous. I’m trying to stop this thing. Will you please give me a chance?”
“Certainly,” Tad said. “I promised Andrew I would stand back until this is all over, however, I will step in if medically necessary. Oh, and
Eddie?”
“What?” Edward barked back, finally looking up at him.
Tad brandished before him a computer readout. “I have the results from your blood workup. So don’t even attempt to lie to me anymore. And the moment you’re done, I’m telling our father everything.”
“No pressure or anything?”
“Of course not. Just a reminder.”
Edward’s eyes slid closed. A residue of tears squeezed out through his lashes. He used the cloth to blot them away. He cleared his throat to whisper, “Understood.”
“What’s going on in there?” Thomas asked as Tad returned to the group of people that now consisted of Croftdons and Ken.
“A lot of staring at screens, muttering gibberish and typing strings of text that look like bloody hieroglyphics,” Tad said. “What did you find out on your phone call?”
