The Code of Happiness (7 page)

“
A souvenir,” she says as she
slides it across to him. He takes the hint. There's unfinished
business. But his life now is all things
unpronounceable.
The Source Foundation is where it had always been, in the
shadows
.

“
You've been eaten up by the
machine,” she says.

He wouldn't expect less. She's never been on the
other side. It's always easy to criticize from the outside, and he
was there not so long ago. He watches her button up her camel coat,
his compassion in danger of becoming patronizing. Another
disappointing end. Po can't help a snide remark about the
fireplace. It's real, but somehow they've made it look fake. Funny
little creature, he thinks, the closer you get the more elusive she
becomes.

Walls up, relationship regressing, Jamie tries a
direct approach. “What's with you and Ray?”

Her small frame hovers over him. It doesn't deserve
an answer.

“He helped me once. Nothing in it for him. Just
helped.” She slips her hands into her pockets, ready to leave, her
mind stuck on something she hasn't found the right way to say.
Jamie's perceptive side picks up.

“Are we going to do this again?”

She gives it some thought.

“Those five who disappeared? The one's they've
linked? All of them worked for Blaze.”

It's a touch melodramatic for Jamie.

“Half the country works for him,” he says.

“All at his HQ?”

“And how do you know this, paranoid Po?”

Her eyes are about to strike home. “Because, like
you, they all came through the doors of the foundation.”

“Anything else?”

“If you must. Ray's the father I never had.” She
coats her lips with what's left of her Burgundy and delivers a
coquettish glance. She's taking the piss.

It's bull, he thinks, as he watches her leave. People
make stuff up. She and Ray just want him back. For what, who really
knows and, frankly, who cares. It's the emphasis though on the
father she never had
that grates. She's touched a nerve. He
races to the door, surprising her.

“What do you know about me, Po?”

She meets it with a shrug.

“You've never said.”

He lies on the white sofa; Po the manipulative on his
mind. True. He's told them nothing. What they had was a facsimile,
recorded history found by means foul or fair. She can't expect him
to believe her spurious claims about
the five
. There was
nothing in the news, not that he read much beyond headlines. Surely
there would be some coverage, at least investigations at XXLI. It
couldn't go unnoticed, or unreported; it was too obvious. As for
all of the five disappeared going through the foundation, it was
merely coincidence, and that's if he believed her. With trust gone,
realization dawns; they had played him. Like good cop, bad cop. He
laughs at his naiveté, how blind he was. Po's accusation was the
final break he needed from her and Ray and their archaic beliefs.
It had plagued him since he left. He could never quite be shot of
John Charles Cavour and his theories. They had crawled around his
subconscious like a truth always denied. Now, at last, the knot was
severed.

*****

Where one line fades another emerges. Grace is late
and Jamie is early for their bi-weekly session. Their worlds
collide in the corridor, in part because Grace is wearing a dress
of red polka dots on cream and not black and gray. She's guessed
Jamie's noticed and sparks an exchange by pulling at her new
outfit. “Thought I'd give it a try.”

“It's great.”

“You think so? I don't know what came over me
yesterday; it was if it was calling out 'buy me.' So I did.”

“It's the sort of thing we work on.” He winks. He
truly likes this. The change. It gives him hope. Grace had thawed
over the weeks. He can't pinpoint exactly what happened but regular
meetings incubated the familiar and hostility receded. It had
occurred to him these were appointments other employees didn't seem
to have, but as he was using them to balance out his workweek he
didn't seem to mind and wasn't going to question. In the vastness
of the corporation both needed an anchor however unlikely the
attachment. Relationship building hadn't been his strong suit, and
this was opportunity to redefine himself before he got stuck in
middle age. The idea of turning thirty had gone from dread to
enthusiasm as he saw himself maturing as a human being. All that
thrashing around in his twenties seemed passé as a clear path
presented itself. Every day was a step further from his past, and
he welcomed it. Still, he was wary about missteps though and allows
Grace ahead of him into her office.

Unbeknown to them, Blaze was watching, accidentally
at first as he turned a corner. He saw something they didn't and
couldn't be expected to see, the sprouting of an office romance.
There was something else too, an occurrence that could wait for the
appropriate time.

In the weeks that followed another unlikely ally was
found in Beanoe who connected with him over games. With his new
holograph Beanoe was practically in his living room when the 'old
lady' allowed. Jamie became part of the steel elevators gliding
through the heart of XXLI, a fixture in Department xH. He
identified anomalies and falsities faster than anyone else. The
programs he developed became more accurate at weeding out redundant
data, and they were appreciated as the incoming data increased
exponentially. The company owned what he created, but creation and
sharing of ideas was encouraged. What Jamie had thought was a
department several years old, was in existence barely eighteen
months before he started, most of which was beta testing. It
explained the vibe when he first arrived. Most were uncertain about
the future and they were crossing boundaries in attempting to do
what the world outside considered unethical, if not mad. They were
in a pressure cooker, needing to find the new, and it had to take
its toll in some way. The botanical floor on which they worked was
designed to be a sanctuary to allow the craziest idea on the planet
to flourish. Beanoe loosened his grip, as he grew more comfortable
and less threatened. They all knew he wasn't there for expertise on
code but to foster a good time. Dated he may have been—only
relating to old texts on group motivation—but it had charm and
seemed to work. Ideas thirty years old were fresh and relevant
again. It was part of Blaze's approach to have people from
different backgrounds work 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 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.