Switch Child 2

by David Howells

Kindly Inquisitor

  The Thursday work day was over, finally. Karl Hoffman sat in his Ford Taurus at the Facility employee’s parking lot. The furnace noise turned out to be a no-brainer, but his successor-in-training had learned some valuable lessons.

  First: listen to those who report problems to you, but be generous on forgiveness for lack of clarity of associated details. Their skill sets lay elsewhere.

  Second: the heart of the Facility’s heating system was a bit on the ancient side, to the point where Karl considered it another Facility patient at times.

  Third: the concept of budget constraints yielded the need to make do with what you had more often than what might be advisable. Karl’s advice was to pick your battlegrounds for funding to projects that would most likely keep the Facility from blowing up.

  Fourth: document, document, document. If you warned Administration that some widget was going to take a nosedive and cause a major calamity and they nixed it, then you’d better be able to prove you had warned them after said widget fritzed. PYA didn’t stand for Pretty Yellow Asteroids.

  Thoughts now shifted to this evening. Eight PM was when his apartment might be the site of either a pleasant visit from an attractive police detective, or the establishment of ground zero in a failed attempt to protect his son. The best bet was between those two extremes, but to which direction?

  “Dad, are you going home or not? We could catch a movie. Want me to pull up a list of matinees?” So sayeth the cell phone. Was Colin in the phone, or was he just making a call? It occurred to Karl that Colin had said ‘you’ instead of ‘we’, regarding going home.

  “In a sec. Colin, where are you right now? I mean, I hear your voice from the cell phone, but can you tell where you’re actually existing at the moment?”

  “I’m in your desktop. You can make general phone calls from here. I’m working more on the face-motion software and adding my neck and upper body. I’ve got your cell’s audio feed minimized to the side while I work on other stuff. Otherwise, I hang around YouTube a lot or throw on something from NetFlix when I’m not learning stuff.”

  Karl thought, “Review movie list, talk about what ratings mean, discuss violence, do I have to give him the sex talk?”

  Aloud, “I don’t feel like cooking, so I’ll stop off and pick up Chinese. Be home in about forty minutes.”

  From the cell came back, “OK, Dad. Drive safe. And I really am sorry about yesterday. Honestly. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Karl was waiting for his order, trying to figure out what Colin COULD do about the situation. In retrospect, having Colin pre-order his take out meal might have been nice.

  Maybe he was blowing things out of proportion. Maybe he could actually plead innocent to any involvement. When you got down to the facts, it was true. Mostly.

  It was almost seven when he got home. “Hi Colin. Held up in line at Mr. Kimm’s. How’s your day?” Karl sat down at the table and looked at the iPad. Colin’s face came to life, now sporting an upper body and wearing a green T-shirt.

  “Got more done on the image. What do you think?”

  “Pretty amazing. Son, how can you figure all this out? I mean, you’re six years old! What you’re doing normally would take training for years at a tech school.”

  The face cocked to one side, eyes looking off to the left, then back to face-front position again. “I’m not completely sure. What I’m doing doesn’t take any words or math skills. When you do CGI work, you’re reading from a computer screen and using a keyboard to speak to the programming. I don’t have a keyboard because I’m behind the screen. It feels like I’m making things happen by just thinking about them. The rest is automatic.”

  Karl scratched his chin, then used the fork on his rice, shrimp and vegetable repast (despite significant skills in dexterity, he found chopsticks annoying). Chewing helped him think, which is why he kept gum at the work place. “Hmmm. When you put it that way…you ever check out robotics when you’re looking through YouTube?”

  “Sure. I’ve seen some pretty wild stuff there. You wouldn’t believe what the Japanese are capable of now.”

  “Well, maybe it’s like that. A baby learns to walk without using a remote control or writing computer code. The brain just does it by thinking it. Robot manufacturers and inventors use math, calculus, physics, electronics and computer programming to get a bunch of machinery to accomplish the same motion that anyone might do with maybe half a thought. I can tie my shoe. Can a robot do nearly as good of a job even with a whole university punching the controls?”

  The expression on the iPad face looked contemplative, then it changed to something else. “Wow, Dad. You’re pretty smart. That makes a lot of sense. So, you know what you’re going to tell police-lady tonight?”

  “Sorry, Son. In this case, ol’ Dad is NOT pretty smart.”

  There wasn’t much more to say in the half hour before witching hour. Colin excused himself from the table, saying he wanted to play some video games for a while. Karl picked half-heartedly at his meal and wondered how someone played games on the other side of the computer screen. Maybe it was like that Tron movie. That gave him a chill up his spine. Characters (programs) in that movie who played their games wound up getting, what was the word, ‘deres’d?’ It was death by deprogramming. Now there was a thought. Karl knew nothing about how the internet worked. What kind of dangers might lurk out there? Could Colin, maybe, need a virus protection program? But the boy wasn’t a program, he was a sentient being.

  This threatened to turn into yet another mental battle of himself versus his own ignorance when there was a knock at the door. She came early!

  “Just a minute!” He tossed what was left of his meal back into the white wax-coated food container and put it in the refrigerator. He took a wet paper towel and did a quick policing of stray grains of rice. “Hang on!”

  Karl opened the door, half expecting the detective to be flanked by a couple of large and muscular back-up resources. Thankfully, it was just the detective. “Ms. Roland, please come in.”

  Entering the apartment, trained eyes took a snapshot. The subject had spoken of widowship. From the looks of it, there was the right amount of man-cave regression after a three year period of being without a woman’s touch. However, it wasn’t messy, so there was some level of keeping things in order. The smell spoke of some kind of oriental dish, and the ‘just a minute’ combined with the level of soy sauce smell in the air said that said meal had been hastily stored in the fridge or trash when she arrived. There was an iPad on the table, standing position. Nothing of note on the screen, other than a screen saver of some kind of Navy boat. That fit with his history folder. Coast Guard, one rotation. Mechanic.

  “Thank you. Now, you told me before to call you Karl. If it’s all right with you, let’s have first names for the time being. Call me Alice. Now, Karl, I have a few questions for you…oh, who’s the young boy on your iPad now?”

  Good Lord! He had allowed Colin’s image to stay on the wallpaper background. His old minesweeper from Coast Guard days had hidden it before, being a screensaver. He must have jostled the table and that dropped the saver’s coverage. Here he was, an older man, living alone, with a picture of a young boy on his computer. Now what would that tell a police-type person? Unprepared, he went for his default honesty mode.

  “His name is, or was, Colin Craft. It’s a grim story. Colin was one of the residents at the Granite City Facility. Kid was six when he was on a yacht with his folks down south somewhere. A rogue wave drowned his parents and gave Colin a brain injury. I used to stop in and read him some kid books when my shift was over. It was his room where that electrical anomaly had started in.”

  That sounded so sweet and sad, Alice nearly got misty eyed. Then her training to be suspicious took over. “That’s very sentimental of you. If I may, why is his picture on your comput
er?” There were some pretty sick people who worked in medical settings for some unspeakable ‘benefits’. All too many of such slime seemed very nice on the outside.

  “Sort of a memorial, I guess you could say. Colin’s body gave up the ghost not long after he arrived at the Facility. Before that happened, I wondered how much he could perceive, even with being brain dead, so that’s why I read to him. I’ve done that for other kids who wind up in our building over the years. If they don’t hear me, well, no one loses. If they can, maybe I’m the only thing they’ve got to hang on to.”

  Misty eyes started making a come back, but once again, the analytical brain wrestled for dominance. “That’s amazingly sweet of you, Karl. Shame more people don’t do that. But that picture…where did you get it? It looks so real, almost three-dimensional.”

  Karl felt just a hint of sweat on his palms and made a mental point of not wiping them on his pants. “Well, I’m no expert on image technology. A friend of mine put it together. When Colin died, there was a website set p by the funeral home that had a lot of family pictures. There’s a CIG, um, CGI program that can make a picture like the one you are looking at. I’m retiring soon, and that image kind of reminds me of all the young patients, residents, that I’ve seen at the Facility. I’m going to miss working there. The staff are really nice to me, and the work was always interesting.”

  Alice had a hard time taking her eyes off the picture. She leaned to the right and left, then scratched her head. It seemed like one of those images she had seen on the computer where, “You know, it’s spooky. It almost looks like his eyes follow you around.”

  Karl did the same maneuver. “Hmph. You know, you’re right. They do kind of follow you. I hadn’t noticed it before.” Should he turn off the iPad? If he did so, it might look like he was feeling guilty about something. “So, can I brew you up a cup of coffee? I promise it’s better than what comes out of your station’s vending machine.”

  There he was again, disarming her protective barriers. Is he honest, or just slick? Truth be told, sometimes it was hard to tell. “That sounds very nice. By the way, sorry to have interrupted your Chinese take-out dinner.”

  She knew that? How did she know that? Was his apartment bugged? Scary lady alert. Engine room, reverse full speed, evasive maneuvers! “Had the coffee pot set up ahead of time, just gotta plug it in. You like sugar or cream?”

  He didn’t react to the dinner ID. It had been an attempt to unnerve a subject. OK, she thought, it wasn’t that big a leap for him to figure out how she knew it. The ‘just a minute’ plus the smell would tell even a new recruit what had happened when she knocked, and she had come early on purpose. “He’s keeping cool about everything. Mr. Hoffman, be you saint or sinner?”

  Aloud, “You have half and half? If not, just milk would be fine. No sugar. While it’s perking, why don’t we discuss my cell’s text-message?”

  That was the show stopper, made worse because the detective’s efforts to destabilize him actually worked. He knew this was coming, and here he was caught on the balance of truth or lie. The more he geared himself up for a whopper, or for a simple denial of knowledge, his whole life’s worth of integrity began to twist his gut into a knot. The first perk sounds began to strike up a java beat. Time and perks passed. The allotted span for something smooth and believable came and went. She had to know he was bound up in this just from the brain freeze. Karl turned and looked at Alice, who kept watching him when he looked at the iPad image, which, winked at him. Oh, God.

  He sighed as he went to the cupboard and fridge to pull out the necessaries. Karl sat down at the table. At least her position at the table wouldn’t have a clear view of Colin’s image, should another wink be in the wings. He had to go how his parents had raised him, and prayed he could navigate a path around any revelation mines.

  “Alice, the honest truth is that I did not send that message. I’m not even sure what it said, more than what you told me when you called. It was a complete surprise to me. I know who sent it. It was someone who wants me to have a happier life, someone who thought you might be a nice person for me to meet. You have seen this person, and know that person’s name. My friend managed to get, by means unknown to me, your cell phone number and sent the text to you, knowing that I had planned to go to Disneyland after I retired. I had it out with my friend, and know with certainty that this will not happen again. I deeply and sincerely apologize for the intrusion into your personal life.”

  The body language suggested the truth. His eye contact was constant, breathing was slow and regular, verbiage didn’t have any of the red flags she’d been trained to watch for. But he was being clever in not revealing the gender of this ‘friend’. “I…see. However, your ‘friend’ managed to send that message on the station’s phone system, according to my caller ID. Yet, the station’s records couldn’t find out which of the station’s communication devices had been used to send it. Might this person be a hacker?”

  It was a small pot. The perking began to slow down, so he got up and unplugged the pot. He poured two cups, sat the pot on the table, then continued. “I’m afraid so. The person is a talented amateur. If I reveal the identity, it would give a very good-hearted person a very bad time of it. You have my word of honor this will not happen again. My friend is very young, and very sorry. The consequences of this action was made painfully clear yesterday. Please, I’m asking you to trust me, nearly a complete stranger.”

  He did it again, she thought. Were her sympathy buttons that easy to locate and push? Then something hit her that re-engaged her professional side. A hacker? But wasn’t that what so many people were afraid of regarding the recent strangeness across the state with the communication systems? Is there a connection here with the text message? She had to know. Her police-awareness also caught ‘very young’. Tie that into ‘friend’, and her protocols regarding pedophiles notched a little higher on priorities.

  “Karl, this friend of yours, was he the same one responsible for the fluctuations all over the state? I need you to be honest with me here. Is he?”

  That was point blank. There was no honest way out. “Yes.”

  “So, it’s a ‘he’, then. That narrows down my suspect list a bit.”

  Karl knew when he was outgunned. It was time for a strategic retreat and damage assessment. “Darn. Well, Detective, you are good at your trade. Yes, it’s a ‘he’. That is all I know, and all I am willing to speak to. I’m weary of this. I’ve committed no crime here. Go collect your evidence, make your case, arrest me if you must. But it’s time for you to leave my home.”

  She watched the curious man get up and clear the table, tossing the half-full coffee cup remains into the sink, and returning the milk carton to the refrigerator. What was it he knew, who was he protecting? Someone she was aware of, had seen? But that didn’t say someone she knew. No, he said she had heard his name…heard it? That suggested someone she wasn’t very familiar with. But it had to be either someone at the police station or a hacker good enough to get at the communications system from the outside.

  Yet, no one had been hurt, no systems down, no one even inconvenienced other than Karl Hoffman and Alice Roland. She wasn’t sure there was even a crime committed. But she knew she had overstayed her welcome, and that bothered some other part of her. Detective Alice Roland stood up, picked up her purse, and said, “I’m sorry, Karl. It’s my job. I…I’m not your enemy now, and I don’t want to be one in the future. I wish you would trust me and tell me what is going on. You may be hearing from me, very soon. Good night and thanks for the coffee. It’s a far cry from the station’s brew.”

  Karl walked to the door and opened it. “Good night, Detective.”

  Alice left after one more look at that young boy’s image. Strange. The facial expression looked different now. Almost…sad.

  The door was closed slowly and quietly behind he
r.

  Two hours later, Detective Alice Roland sat at her own dinette, noting absently that Karl’s table was nearly the spitting image of her own. Resting her cheek on her palm, she looked around at her own domicile. A woman’s touch, indeed. She had noticed that Karl’s apartment showed a lack of it. Taking now a snapshot of her own apartment, there wasn’t much you’d call ‘frilly’. Police work over the last thirty years had encouraged an attitude of comfortable and functional when it came to anything from home décor to underwear. Maybe that was something she shared, attitude-wise, with Mr. Karl Hoffman.

  The evening went as it had to, not as she had wished it to. Intuition said that Karl was a good and honest man. There had been a few oddities at his home, especially that three-dimensional tribute to a deceased child he had once read stories to. Even thinking about that made her tear up. Alice had seen injured and even dead children in her job, and it always affected her deeply. Just as much heart string power though was when someone displayed a quiet nobility, like what was displayed when someone read to damaged children. Such actions made her sinuses sting to hear them.

  But hacking was a crime, especially when it involved a police communications hub. Karl had admitted he knew who did it. His not admitting the identity of the hacker made Karl a potential accessory to the fact. Were he to be arrested now, the man would be in deeper trouble than he might think. There was still a strong current of nervousness throughout the state from the fluctuations debacle. Karl knew who did it, even if he didn’t know how it was accomplished. Yet fluctuations weren’t what hacking normally involved. Hacking made computers either go nuts or give up their secret stores of information. That didn’t happen here, but paranoia still ran deep on this issue.

  She pulled out her cell phone, after a sip of water with lemon, and brought up the message again; the message that, so far, no one besides she and her station IT friend knew about. For that alone, she might get in trouble herself. She was still in the data-gathering stage, and the event was so benign that it didn’t seem to warrant sounding the hack alert to the station’s higher ups. Not yet. Alice read the message again.

  ‘Very nice to meet you. Ever been to Disneyland? Might be fun to find our inner child again. Karl.’

  Police work was a funny thing. Many thought it was full of black and white, right and wrong, and clearly demarked action steps that produced a stellar boon to all involved, except the completely bad guys. The reality was that it was full of shades of gray, murky waters to pull your action step decisions out of, and there were too many sort-of-bad-guys getting off the hook, counter balanced with a lot of mostly-good-guys getting the shaft constructed from legal fine print. The only good thing this pollution offered those who plied the law enforcement trades was that there was room to maneuver.

  Alice thought about it for another twenty minutes, weighing all the parts, and then made a tentative decision. She had Karl’s cell number in her call history, so she pulled it up and began a text message. But would she send it? Alice wasn’t sure. Maybe writing it would help her decide, since writing used a different part of the brain than just musing while you swirled your lemon water.

  ‘Karl. I’m sorry things went the way they did. I think you’re one of the good guys. No one was harmed by electric disturbances or the phone hack. Maybe I can help your ‘friend’ toe the line. Level with me, and I will keep it between us. Promise. Alice.’

  She looked at the message, read it over a couple times, and then tried reading it while pretending she was Karl to get a sense about how he’d react. Undecided, she got up and got ready for bed, noting that an empty bed was yet another thing she shared with Mr. Hoffman. Alice stopped, briefly blushed, then took off for some penitential tooth brushing.

  The phone was still active and waiting. She stopped by the dinette table. Her index finger brushed along the keys of the cell phone, and it almost seemed to push the ‘send’ button of its own accord. Alice closed the phone, turned off the kitchen light, got into bed and snuggled in. The detective smiled and murmured, “Disneyland. Yeah, right.”

  Ten minutes before Alice spoke the name of the Magic Kingdom, Karl was putting the finishing touches on kitchen clean up.

  “She likes, you, Dad.”

  “She doesn’t like me. The lady’s a policewoman doing her job. She probably thinks I like little boys for reasons I’d rather not discuss.”

  The face on the iPad smirked. “I’ve seen some of the criminal-based websites. I know what you’re talking about, and I don’t think police-lady thinks bad about you. In fact, I think she’ll try to get with you again.”

  Karl shook his head as he dried his hands on the dish towel. “Son, listen to this old man. I’ve been around a lot and learned my lessons the hard way. Ms. Roland was booted out of this apartment by yours truly, and I was rude in the process. The next time I hear from her, IF I hear from her, will be with either a summons or a subpoena. Son, I’m dog tired and tomorrow is a work day. I’m hitting the hay early. Good night.”

  The phone chirped a text message sound. The face on the iPad showed a moment of detachment, then smiled. “I told you so. It’s her phone number. You might want to answer that.”

  “You also do caller ID? Crimeny, Son, what don’t you do? It’s her? I’ll bet it’s a summons. Maybe I shouldn’t answer it, pretend it didn’t come.”

  “Answer it, Dad. It’ll be fine, I’m sure. She likes you.”

  “No she doesn’t. Does she? Can’t be. Crud, now I’m afraid to open it.”

  “Be strong, Dad, like you tell me to be.”

  There was that mantra again, chanted to the tune of ‘the shoe is on the other foot, ah-ooom’. That made an action step unavoidable and any further hesitation unforgivable. Well, most of the time when you face the unknown, it was almost never the worst case scenario. Karl hit the ‘read message’ button, read it, and then read it again. He looked at Colin. “You’re six. You’re not supposed to know these things yet. She wants to meet me again, for me to level with her about everything, and she promises not to tell anyone. What am I supposed to do? I can’t tell her about you.”

  “Dad, maybe it’s time you told someone, someone you can trust. I trust her.” Colin didn’t mention that he knew about the message beforehand, having peeked into her cell phone while she was composing the message. If she hadn’t hit the ‘send’ button, he had decided to do it for her. Luckily, he didn’t have to.

  Trust? How could he trust anyone to keep a secret this crazy? One of the mainstays of Karl’s own silence was the firm belief he’d be sent to the loony bin if not believed, or to some government underground laboratory if he was.

  Alice Roland was a policeperson. She was a creature bound by law to preserve and protect. That duty took on fanatical proportions when you threw in an epic dollop of ‘the unknown’ into the kettle. But keeping this all to himself had its down sides as well. While seeming like a science fiction fairy tail on the one hand, it also had periods where it wracked his nerves. At his age, who knew…

  That stopped his line of thought and jumped the rails to another direction. ‘At his age’. The newspapers he was so fond of always featured that morbidly fascinating section called obituaries. Each year, he had noticed that more and more people were featured there whose ages were about his, or younger. Karl half-defended his inner fears with thoughts of cancer, heart attack, car accident, and other methods of mortality for those whose final year count on earth mirrored or undercut his own tally. Most of the entries didn’t mention cause of death; they only spoke of who survived the decedent.

  So who would mourn the passing of Karl Hoffman? Mainly Colin Craft occupied the ‘dependents row’ in his imagined funeral service. Karl felt sure that his friends staffing the Facility would shed a few tears, but they weren’t in the same ball park as Colin.

  The thought came to him that he was being selfish and irresponsible, thinking more of hi
s own little hovel of happiness than he was of his son’s long-term future. So many questions pivoted upon that subject, too. Was Colin’s mind eternal, at least while electricity was still used on earth? Would he ‘grow up’ into an adult…an adult what? An image came to his mind of the electric power grid’s mascot, Reddy Kilowatt. His body, arms and legs looked like red lightning, and he sported almost Mickey-Mouse-like gloves and shoes that were either white or banana yellow, as was his circular head which had three-prong plug sockets for ears and a light bulb for a nose. There were two tiny lightning bolts that came out of the top of his head, which Karl could never figure out whether they represented sprigs of hair, or horns.

  Horns. Derail the train again, Mr. Conductor. Colin was growing in awareness and abilities in ways no one had ever thought possible. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, the saying went. Did that apply to electrically powered personalities? Would some future freedom-fighter group band together to pull the plug on his son, the Digi-Despot?

  Alice was younger than he was. Perhaps she might take up the torch when his own time came to a close. He kind of liked her. She seemed trustworthy, or at least as much so as anyone else he could think of. What choice did he have?

  “OK, Champ. Maybe you’re right.”

  “Great, Dad. Shall I text her back?”

  “Sure. I’m slow on the key pad. But just put what I tell you, all right?”

  The image on the iPad looked a little disappointed, but nodded, “Fire away, Dad. Oh, and the sender will show up as your iPad IP address. It’s not as cramped to work in as your phone is.”

  Strange, Karl thought. Colin spoke English, but sometimes he felt his son was speaking in another language. Cramped quarters in cell phones? But, he wasn’t IN his cell phone. Oh, bother.

  “Alice. No, take that ‘Dear’ off. This isn’t a love letter. Now; I got your message. Thank you. Yes, I think it’s time I took someone into my confidence. If you’re sincere about your promise of keeping it between us, then tomorrow would be fine. I will assume eight PM again, unless your work schedule is different tomorrow. Let me know. Karl.”

  After the dinette chairs were scooted in, Karl headed to bed. While turning down the sheets, he heard, “Dad? She confirmed. Goodnight.”

  Tomorrow is Friday. At least he would have the weekend to recover from all this upheaval. He looked at the clock by his bed. Correct that last thought. Today is Friday. Karl chuckled to himself that his son had, once again, gotten him to stay up long past their bed times.