Part 1: Character Creation / Chapter 11

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Around this time, Darla Cunningham was reeling at her discovery.

Moments before Dean Merrick’s visit, she’d found an entry in the TRS-80’s feed that read, “April 21, 2022: Flying Dutchman’s revolutionary operating system becomes the new standard for smart phones.”

The coincidence of Dean Merrick mentioning the company had piqued her curiosity, sending her Googling for facts after slamming the door in his face. She discovered that Goliath Enterprises had indeed acquired Flying Dutchman Digital with high hopes, but it turned out that the company had been covering up massive security flaws in their software. Far from delivering a new standard in smart phone operating systems, the newly-acquired business had crashed and burned.

Studying the Flying Dutchman entry again, she struggled with the question of why the feed would report news that was off-base. But as she stared at the entry, she realized that there was something else that was off-base. Until now, she had tuned out the numeric log date in the header, registering only the more prominent date spelled out in the body of the entry. Now she realized the two dates didn’t match. The log date was 11.16.2012, a decade before the events described in the entry.

The entry had appeared a decade before the events it described. Theoretically, that could be written off simply as a long-range forecast—it had, after all, not panned out. But according to Darla’s web searches, Flying Dutchman hadn’t even been founded until 2020—eight years after the log date. And that seemed impossible.

But as she’d soon discover, there was a lot of impossible in the feed. Because when she cross-referenced everything she could read with more web searches, she found much of what she saw in the feed correlated to subject matter that had hit the news months and even years after the records were logged. Most startlingly, most of the predictions had actually come to pass.

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There were various explanations to get around the obvious, fantastical implication. But her gut told her that none of those explanations were right. Her gut told her that what she was seeing was legit. The feed was telling the future.

However, there were exceptions. And those exceptions seemed to be growing in number in recent years. The inaccurate entry concerning Flying Dutchman was actually part of a trend. Of course, that only made her more sure that there really was some kind of digital magic afoot. If the feed was a prank or deception, why put forth inaccurate “predictions”?

No, this wasn’t a trick. This was something else—something inconceivable. And she realized that she was going into shock. But the biggest shocker was yet to come. Because as she scanned through the feed, reaching the most recent entries, she found that the focus of the entries shifted to something new. And that something new was her. There were things that were true and things that weren’t. But she didn’t have time to parse and process. Because based one of the most bizarre entries, she decided that there was somewhere she needed to be.

She tapped the print key on the old keyboard and one of the dot matrix printers on the other side of the room sprang to life, the whole machine jostling in place as the printer head trudged dutifully back and forth. Darla watched, mesmerized by what she’d learned, as the accordion-folded pile of perforated paper stored on the shelf below the printer was pulled through a sheet at a time, and regurgitated into the tray in front.

Was she really doing this? A secret fear glided beneath the surface of her psyche. It was a fear that she’d run from for most of her adult life—a fear that had only gotten stronger since she’d moved into the mansion.

Was any of this really happening? Or was her worst nightmare coming true? Was she, in fact, as crazy in the coconut as her uncle? She needed to know. And that meant she needed to go.