Chapter 2: The Old Ways and New Beginnings

  Life during the last eight years has been nothing short of completely transformative for planet Earth and its inhabitants. From banking to medicine, to even the way people communicated with each other. Nothing was the same. And unless there was a massive paradigm shift back to the status quo, nothing ever would be again.

  And nothing signified that change more than a small annex building on the campus of Rice University near the city of Houston, Texas. Long known as a cutting-edge leader in the fields of psychology and neuroscience, the programs offered to students at this prestigious university were some of the most rigorous and thorough in the country.

  And at the heart of those academic studies is Sewell Hall. And inside that light brick and stone two story building was an unassuming graduate student trying very hard to finish her doctoral thesis in advanced cerebral cognitive systems. Which is just a fancy way of saying she studied how the brain works.

  Not that anyone really knew how the brain worked exactly. Synapses, neurons, folds of fleshy mess, they all added up to a cosmic accident of thought and reasoning. One which allowed a group of hairless monkeys to become the dominant species on the planet. Still, just because you can think and reason, doesn’t mean life is any easier. Or fair.

  However, this existential diatribe meant very little to Bethany Quant as she stood before the faculty lounge entrance and stared at the old and neglected key reader with lustful eyes. Stuck there, half in the past and half in the present, she lingered over the now defunct piece of equipment and sighed.

  How many times had she simply swiped her key card or fob and casually strolled into the dining area without a care in the world? Hundreds? Thousands? Too many times, to count? All those answers were correct as she dug into her pocket for an ancient, brass key.

  “How did it come to this?” She quietly asked as she stared at the industrial looking office key. It was one of four she was now required to keep on her person while acting as a teacher’s assistant this semester. Man, she missed card readers.

  Forcibly resigned to her new reality, Beth used the heavy key to open the lock and pulled open the heavy wood and glass door. Not waiting for the thing to close, she repocketed the piece of bygone technology and made her way to the spacious yet somehow cramped faculty break room.

  “Anthony,” she said upon entering the brightly lit space filled with two circular tables, an out-of-date refrigerator, and the oldest microwave she had ever seen in her life. Which wasn’t an exaggeration in the slightest bit. After all, the thing had an actual turn dial on the front of it like something out of a 50’s sitcom.

  “Beth,” settling for the short version of her name, a clean shaven man in his early thirties looked up from a newspaper and smiled. “Why are you here so early? I didn’t think you were covering for Professor Kline until this afternoon.”

  “Had to come in early.” Beth reached up into an overhead cabinet and plucked a large porcelain mug from its resting place. Without skipping a beat, she filled the container up with a large portion of very black, very strong coffee. “It’s not like I can prep from home anymore. Not when the campus external internet’s been shut down for days.”

  “You still use the campus internet?” The question seemed completely normal to Anthony even though Beth found her new reality of not trusting the internet vexing indeed. “I stopped using that thing last year.”

  “Good for you, Anthony.” Beth took an overly large swig of her morning get up and go juice. Savoring the experience, she took a moment to read what was written on the side of the cup, My Neurons Run better on Coffee. “Unfortunately, I still need an updated power point to make any kind of sense of her notes.”

  With a slight nod of understanding, physical therapist professor Anthony Rios picked up his own mug of freshly brewed joe. Except his carafe didn’t mention anything about psychology. His simply read: Stretching is the only thing that gets better the longer you do it.

  “Did you see the game last night?” His words were perfunctory yet sincere.

  “Afraid not,” Beth lied as she took another sip at her coffee while trying very hard to feign interest in the conversation. “I was working on my last thesis revisions. Why? Did we win?”

  “No,” the physical therapy professor said with a scowl across his face. “42-10. Can you believe that shit?”

  “That much?” Beth said with a false laugh. She knew all too well what the final score had been. After all, she won two hundred dollars betting against her current alma mater to lose. “But it’s not like we have the best athletes on the planet.”

  “Tell me about it.” Anthony nodded his head in sullen agreement. “You know. At least back in the day, you could always root for an injury or two to make these interesting. Give the little guy a chance. Now... Now those fucking machines can heal a player faster than giving them an injection.”

  “Isn’t that a little macabre?” Beth took another long gulp of caffeine heaven and thought back to the third quarter of last night's game. Specifically, when the opposing teams quarterback had his femur broke in two by a clownishly large defensive end. Normally, such an injury would have spelled doom. But, with a quick trip to the medic tent, the quarterback jogged back on the field like nothing had ever happened. “What? Were you hoping for someone to get permanently hurt on the other team?”

  “No,” Anthony said a little sheepishly. “No one hopes the other guy gets hurt. But as things stand now.”

  They both looked at each other with knowing glances. Why? Because the state of modern athletics was in a space where injuries mattered very little. After all, those healing machines meant that aside from players getting tired. The best team would always win.

  “Has to suck for you though.” Beth said in a completely transparent attempt to steer the conversation away from the college’s atrocious football team and her ill-gotten winnings. “What good is a physical therapist when the patient never needs you?”

  “Oh,” Anthony rolled his eyes. “There will always be a need for people like me.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Well, not everyone can afford to use those healing machines, Beth. Hell, they can’t even make enough of them to meet the current demand. Even the portable ones.”

  As he said ‘the portable ones’, Beth thought back to the beginning of the semester and a very long and very boring faculty meeting. One in which the on-campus clinic kept raving about how they had just gotten one of the portable healing machines by courier. They couldn’t stop raving about how safer this school would be now that they had one of the magic machines.

  Magic machines, that’s what everyone was calling the technology that showed up around four years ago out of the blue. Hell, from what she heard, no one even knew where the science came from or who even owned the patent on the devices. All they knew was almost anything was curable, given the right price.

  And from her point of view, the idea of being cured was a misnomer. Because true, if you had something wrong with you, these machines would set you right. But that quick fix cost a lot of money and only lasted until you got your next horrible diagnosis.

  Still, even temporary cures were still cures. And besides, who was she to look a gift horse in the mouth. “I wonder why the shortages. You would think the whole planet would be cranking those things 24 hours a day.”

  “It’s the materials.”

  “Materials?”

  “Yeah,” Anthony folded his paper and placed it down on the cheap foldaway table. “The materials are too exotic. There’s just not enough of them on the planet for any kind of mass production.”

  “Really,” the pessimist in her started to rear its ugly head. True to her namesake, Bethany Quant could smell the aroma of rich assholes and their lies from a mile away. “Sounds like price control to me.”

  “Maybe,” Anthony said with a laugh. “But whatever’s causing the shortage, don’t expect to be taking home any magic machines any time soon.”

  “Never crossed my mind.” With that, she finished her morning jolt of caffeine, placed her mug in the tiny kitchenette sink and bid a fond farewell to the stretching professor.

  From there, she moved further into Sewall Hall’s labyrinthine hallways until she came upon a large oak door that said, Psychology Department. For a moment, she thought about reaching out to check and see if the door was unlocked. But she knew better than to try. Not when the board of governors had every door set to lock automatically.

  You know. For security reasons.

  So, with little fanfare, she produced the second key from her pocket and quickly unlocked the door. Once through, Beth took a right at the end of a short hallway, then a quick left. After about twenty feet, she stopped in front of a small particle wood door. Taped to the flimsy door was a white sheet of copy paper with the words, Adjunct Support Staff.

  Adjunct Support Staff sounded like a fancy title, but the space amounted to little more than a glorified broom closet. One especially set aside for underpaid and overworked teaching assistants. Still, it was her glorified broom closet. But more importantly, this broom closet contained one of the last working internet hookups on the whole campus.

  An internet connection she needed to use right now.

  Quickly, Beth ducked inside the tiny 10 by 12 foot office and slung her backpack under the even smaller desk. Then, in one smooth movement, she both plopped down in her office chair and turned on her antiquated laptop. After an interminable amount of time, the beast of a computer sprung to life and displayed a blue screen with an empty text box.

  Looking around like she was an undercover spy. Beth typed in her password. And even though such a precaution meant little to the algorithm, she still changed that password every time she logged out of this computer.

  Looking at the sparse selection of apps on her desktop, the frazzled TA clicked on the only one that really mattered to her. Email. Once it opened, the first message in the program was from a user she was more than acquainted with, her bookie.

  “I’ll deal with you after lunch.” She said to herself as she continued down the short list of emails. All of which all seemed to be from that necessary asshole. “Consistent little prick. He’s just pissed I’m winning.”

  Amused but focused, she continued down the twenty or so routine messages from helpless students crying about extra credit before stopping. Beth clicked off the email program and laughed. “Nothing I can do for them. Not this early in the semester. Now my bookie...”

  Almost as if her gambling contact could hear his name, a message alert popped into being. This one said, “8 to 1 against the spread on tonight’s game, Beth.”

  “Not today, Bennie.” She said as she minimized that message along with its tempting offer of more money won. “I’ve got another appointment.”

  Clicking on the home key, she scrolled through the few programs she had downloaded to the barely working laptop. Right away, the one she was looking for came into view. TAMH, or the Texas Alliance on Mental Health. She double clicked the oval shaped icon, and a simple login screen appeared. One very long password later, and a display of clients appeared.

  At the top of a singular list was the name, Abandoned. And wouldn’t you know it. She had a brand new message alert right beside it.

  “Hello, thesis boy.” She said with a little too much enthusiasm in her voice. “How are you doing today?”

  But before she could click on the most recent message, a video window popped up with a blurred-out image of a person on the screen. “Why do you ask that before you even click on my message?”

  “Jesus!” Beth jumped in her seat as she looked around the room for a ventriloquist. When she didn’t see one, she scowled. “You have got to stop doing that.”

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “Doing what?” The faceless person asked.

  “Acting like you’ve got a camera in my office all the time.” Beth calmed down enough to remind herself that this wasn’t a new phenomenon. He did this almost every time they had a session. “It’s kind of creepy.”

  “I told you to put tape over the camera on your laptop.”

  “Would that do any good?”

  “No,” the voice answered honestly. “There’s always ways to spy on someone if you really want to.”

  “That doesn’t exactly make me feel any better, AB.”

  “It wasn’t meant to make you feel better.” The person known as abandoned or AB laughed in a high, robotic voice. Tinny and modulated, his attempt to mask his voice kind of reminded her of that song Radio Killed the Video Star. Harmless to be sure, but his subterfuge still made her a little uneasy. “So, has my hour started, Doc?”

  “How many times do I have to tell you." She turned to look at the calendar hastily taped to the back wall. There, in the month of June, was written the word D-Day. Usually, the D mean Doctorate. Though, given her sometimes shifting moods, the letter could stand for destruction, defeat, or even denial. Though right now, she wasn't quite sure what the D meant. "I’m not a doctor yet.”

  “Close enough,” AB said quickly. “At least for me anyway.”

  Smiling at the way he responded, Beth turned back toward the computer screen and put her shoulder length hair into a quick ponytail. “That’s sweet. But I’m afraid the faculty of Rice University still has the final say on the matter.”

  “You mean Dean Semler and his cronies?”

  “Stop.” Beth said curtly. All happiness drained from her voice. “I told you not to spy on my PhD committee.”

  Aware of AB’s special set of skills, Beth had utilized the young man’s talents on few occasions to find some special information on a sports team or two when the usual factors made safe betting difficult. After all, injury reports didn’t exist anymore because the healing machines had everyone ready to go by game time. So, the only thing left was the psychological problems.

  And as of yet, no machine, magical or not, could fix those types of ailments.

  “But they make it so easy.” AB laughed.

  “I’m sure they do.” Beth joined him for a second before curtly stopping. “But that doesn’t mean I want to get leverage on them. Not for something I’ve honestly worked my ass off for.”

  “Fine,” AB finally responded. “But if you change your mind.”

  “If I change my mind, feel free to ignore me.”

  “Impossible.”

  Shrugging off her patient's blatant attempt at flattery, Beth retrieved a folder from her desk. On the cover of the folder was a space to write down a patient’s name. It read:

  Patient 1134

  Name: Unknown

  Alias: Abandoned

  Also known as: AB

  Inside the folder were pages and pages of notes she had taken over the past two years. Notes that detailed AB’s treatment since signing up for the free services offered by TAMH. It also included some very meticulous insights she had added to the normal set of observations. Insights that she was currently compiling to finish her thesis.

  Hence the name, Thesis Boy.

  “So,” she took out a black ball point pen and started a new page in the folder. “What do you want to talk about today? You’re father?”

  “Do I have to?”

  “AB, this is therapy." Beth could see the wall coming at her. But she ran straight for it anyway. "You’re therapy alone. That means you don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to talk about.”

  “Now you tell me that.”

  “I told you that from the very beginning.” Beth wrote down the words ‘still deflecting’ in her notes. “You just didn’t listen.”

  For a couple of heartbeats, nothing came over the speakers and the image of the young man remained motionless.

  “I listen, Beth.” He finally said, all hints of mirth removed from his voice. “To everything.”

  “Really?” Beth nodded at the familiarity in which he said her name. This lack of boundaries was unusual given the nature of their clinical relationship, but completely necessary given his limited sense of decorum. Smiling, she continued her session notes with the word, narcissism.

  “And how exactly do you listen to everything, AB?” She too could act with a little less decorum when the situation arose. “Literally or existentially? I mean. What? Do you go outside and commune with nature or something?”

  “I’ve never been outside, Beth.”

  Before she responded to that obvious lie, Beth wrote down another phrase. One which she had jotted down many times over the past two years. ‘He’s still not being honest with me’.

  With a heavy sigh, she continued. “You know, AB. Therapy doesn’t work unless your hallway honest with you therapist.”

  “Honesty is completely overrated these days, Beth. Wouldn’t you agree?” Silence hung between them for a moment before the slightly off tone voice continued. “But I’m not lying to you. I’ve never been outside. Never even seen the sky.”

  “What?” Best slowly started doodling on the corner of her notes. “Are you some kind of bubble boy?”

  “Well,” AB paused to consider her question. At least, that’s how Beth took the pause in the conversation. “I guess you could make that comparison. If you squint really hard that is.”

  “Funny,” Beth said as she folded up the patient folder and looked back at the computer screen. “You know. The state is shuttering this program at the end of the year. That means they’ll be no more free therapy sessions. Have you thought about a contingency plan?"

  “I’ll I do is think about contingency plans, Beth. It’s my curse.”

  “I’m sure it is, kiddo.” She smiled as she put the folder away in the drawer. “Well, it may be a curse. But that’s not an answer.”

  “No. It’s not.” AB began to mumble to himself in a completely inaudible tone. After almost a minute of high-pitched mumbles, her client finally spoke. “First, I want to thank you for help up to this point. I don’t think I would have been able to make it through some of my more chaotic growing pains without your counsel.”

  “Counsel?” At that moment, two scenarios flashed through Beth’s mind. One was her standing by a great throne and whispering into a young prince’s ear. The other was of her, bent down in the gutter, trying her best to talk a heroin junkie down from trying to kill themselves. Neither were appropriate to the current situation, but they were still fun to think about.

  “I think your giving me too much credit, AB.”

  “Not really.” The voice became sullen and almost withdrawn. “Do you know how many times you kept me from ending the entire world?”

  “Not this again.” Beth almost reached back into the drawer for his file. But stopped after remembering this type of delusion wasn’t anything new between them. “You don’t have the power to end the world, AB. You’re just a teenage kid who thinks the world revolves around him. Well, I hate to tell you. It doesn't.”

  “Oh, Beth. I really wish that were true.”

  “Trust me.” She took out her mostly useless smart phone and checked the time out of habit. The digital clock said one hour remained until her class began. She would have to wrap this up quickly if she wanted to at least look prepared for those whiny undergrads. “It is true, AB. You don’t have the power to end the world.”

  “You couldn’t be more wrong if you tried. But to that end, I have decided to move forward with one of those contingency plans we were just talking about.”

  “Really,” Beth sat up straight in her office chair for the first time in a while during one of these sessions. And also for the first time in a while, the young doctoral candidate saw a bit of forward momentum in her patient’s prognosis. “Now that sounds like progress. What exactly did you have in mind?”

  “Well, first you’re going to quit your job. Then, there’s a private jet on standby at George Bush International Airport. It has only one passenger on its manifest. And it won’t depart until she arrives.”

  “What are you talking about?” Beth asked in a half joking/half serious manner.

  “I’m talking about securing your services for the next two years.”

  “Services? Two years?” Beth slumped back in her chair and stretched out her lower body. This whole conversation was slowly devolving into some kind of bad B movie plot. One that she had no interest in watching. Even if for some reason her inner voice was nudging her in the direction of believing him. "You’ve got to be joking.”

  “No,” AB said in a matter-of-fact voice. “I’m not.”

  Hoping to derail the direction their session was taking, Beth decided it was best to confront the delusion head on. “First, I’m not quitting my job, AB. Not when I’m so close to finishing my doctorate. And second, you use a free Texas Mental Health Program. And I don’t think someone who does that can afford to have a G4 on permanent standby.”

  “G5 actually,” he said casually. “And if you accept my offer, you’ll be rich enough to have your own G5 on standby.”

  “Bullshit,” Beth’s darker past poked through her polished academic veneer. “No offense. But you are just a kid on the internet I’m using to complete my thesis. Not some mythical benefactor out of a bad fantasy novel.”

  “Beth, we don’t have time for this.” AB said like a driving instructor on the last student of the day. “So, I guess I’m going to have to prove my capabilities to you.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means... Open up your other desk drawer and pull out the large white envelope.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Just do it.”

  Unable to comprehend what her obviously delusional client’s motives were in that exact moment. Beth reached over to the other side of her plain desk and yanked on the drawer handle in question. Surprisingly, the ancient receptacle opened quite easily. And every more surprisingly, there was a large white envelope placed inside.

  “What’s this?” She said as much to the air around her as she did to the laptop’s built-in microphone. “And how the hell did you know it was there?”

  “How I knew its location is far less interesting than what’s in the envelope.”

  Still slightly off kilter from the ‘big brother’ vibes being exuded from her seemingly innocuous patient, Beth carefully opened the mysterious envelope and took out the lone document within. When she read the words written on the high-quality parchment, her draw practically hit the floor.

  THE TRUSTEES OF RICE UNIVERSITY HEREBY LET IT BE KNOWN THAT BETHANY QUANT HAS COMPLETED THE NECESSARY REQUIREMENTS TO BE AWARDED THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PSYCHOLOGY ON THE 24TH DAY OF JANUARY IN THE YEAR OF 2024.

  “What the fu...?” She began to say before realizing that the document had the same seal of approval as her master’s degree did. “Is this real?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Call up Dean Semler if you don’t believe me.”

  “Sure.” She said with the voice of someone who didn’t believe what they were seeing but wanted to anyway. “I don’t understand how this is possible.”

  “And you shouldn’t try. And now for the riches.” Beth looked up in time to see another message pop up on her old computer. In a daze, she clicked on the tab, and a tiny download icon appeared. “Try and open it.”

  Without responding, Beth clicked on the file and a password entry window popped into existence. After a second, she said. “What’s the password?”

  “Password?” AB laughed in a practiced way. “What do you need a password for?”

  “Because it’s asking for one.”

  “Beth,” AB scoffed at the mere idea that anything in this new world needed something as obsolete as a password. “Just use the little program you have hidden in the laptop.”

  “And what program would that be?”

  “The one everyone uses these days.” AB sounded like he had something rotten and foul in his mouth. “You know. No More Secrets”

  Not wanting to lie, Beth just opened a pin locked folder on her desktop where the hidden program resided. Following a preprogrammed set of protocols, the laptop camera engaged and ran a biometric scan of her face. Once it confirmed her identity, the program once known as No More Secrets started.

  “And what am I supposed to find in this file?”

  “Money. Lots of money.”

  “Sure,” Beth said sarcastically.

  Wanting to prove the little shit wrong, she dragged the file onto the entry window and dropped it into place. As designed, the program began to read the file and do its little magic act. Only, after about a minute, instead of a completely open file on the screen. The program spat out three unfathomable words: UNABLE TO READ.

  “What the hell?” She looked at the static picture of AB on her computer screen. For a second, she thought the image smiled mischievously at her. Not believing that the all-powerful algorithm could fall, she repeated the process once again. And once again she was greeted with the same three words.

  “AB?” She asked in a hushed and guarded tone. One very reminiscent of a person meeting the devil for the first time. “Who exactly are you?”

  “I’m just someone who’s trying to hold back the flood.”

  “The flood?”

  “Not important right now. Just enter 6 15 19 20 5 18.”

  Being excellent with numbers, Beth didn’t need to have them repeated to her. She simply entered the sequence and was thoroughly surprised when the file opened right away. Encryption, she thought in astonishment. This mother fucker can encrypt files that the algorithm cannot break. “How?”

  “Like, I said, Beth. Not important. Just look at the file.”

  And she did.

  What appeared in that file was kind of underwhelming. “What’s this? A bank statement?”

  “It’s your bank statement.”

  “My bank statement?” Beth looked at the top of the document and saw her name and what appeared to be the correct account number. “How in the hell did you get my bank statement? There aren’t any online accounts anymore.”

  “There are at the bank. In their internal systems anyway.”

  “Those are supposed to be closed systems.” Beth reviewed the rather short and simple document. After all, since EF day, debit cards and credit cards weren’t really accepted anywhere in the world. Everything these days was paid for by cash. Or a check? But who the hell knew had to write checks anymore.

  “They are closed systems. Just not to me.”

  “Stop acting like some kind of evil mastermind.” Beth warned the voice as she scrolled to the final page of the document. When she reached the line that said, “current balance”, her eyes almost popped out of her skull. “Does that say a hundred million dollars?”

  “100,000,400 million dollars to be precise.”

  “How?” That was all her overloaded brain could get out.

  “Like I said. I’m kind of in a hurry to begin my plan. And I can’t begin my plan until I round up the team.”

  “Team?” Thoughts of long overdue bill being paid and expensive shopping trips was overriding her ability to form rational thoughts. So she just kept going along with all this craziness. “What team?”

  “The team you going to lead, Beth. Well, more like shadow lead.”

  “AB,” Out of a need for proof, she pressed the print button on the PDF reader and waited patiently for a copy of her swollen bank statement to print out. Once it did, she put a hand over her mouth and tried very hard not to scream. “I don’t understand any of this.”

  “And you won’t right now. Not yet.”

  A second later, her smart phone did something it hadn’t done for a very long time. It made a noise. Or to be more precise, it made a rather loud ding that signified her phone had just received a text notification. Acting on muscle memory, she lifted the phone up to her face and read the small box.

  AB: 2800 N Terminal Rd, Houston, TX 77032. Private Hanger #36

  “What’s this?”

  “That’s your ride.”

  “My ride?” Her brain began to form some more complex questions, but AB cut her off at the mental pass.

  “I know you have questions. And believe me, there are answers. But right now, I can only promise you two things. One. That phone is now completely untraceable and uncrackable. Even by algorithm.”

  She looked at the phone and smiled. Could things go back to the way they were? “And two?”

  “Get on that plane and I will answer all your questions. Even the ones you haven’t thought of yet.”

  Dumbfounded, she reached down to collect her new diploma and her duffle bag. She started to turn off the laptop when the small video window spoke again. “You don’t need to shut it down, Beth. The hard drive is already being scuttled. By the time you make it to the parking lot, this thing will be nothing but a useless pile of antiquated computer parts.

  Half in a daze, the newly minted Dr. Myerson walked over to her office door the stopped. “Anything other Earth-shattering revelations you want to drop on top of my head before I leave?”

  “Nothing I would care to share over this internet connection.” He hesitated for a second then spoke. “But I would ask for a favor.”

  “A favor?” Beth opened her office door and looked out into the empty hallway. No one was anywhere to be seen. She was alone. And apparently, for the first time in her life, she was filthy rich. “Sure. Why not. After all, one hundred million dollars should be worth at least one favor.”

  “Great,” AB sounded relieved at her quick acquiescence. “It’s simple really. I just need you to be nice to the next guy. Maybe you could even use some of those super powered psychology skills to help him.”

  “The next guy?”

  “Yeah,” her apparent benefactor said, almost shyly. “He’s had kind of a rough decade.”