Part 1: Character Creation / Chapter 7

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I believe around this time, Darla Cunningham was perched in front of the TRS-80—scrolling randomly through its feed, scanning for anything she could read.

She was optimistic that the whole feed would magically morph into English eventually, but she wasn’t going to just wait around for that.

Aside from the messages about an assessment and an anomaly, all the entries she’d come across listed an event of some sort with a date. Well, actually, there were two dates, if you counted the numeric log date in the header data.

Most of the entries concerned boring business stuff like, “January 23, 2021: Langford Corp buys ENR Industries.” She was beginning to think the thing was just a jumble of Wall Street Journal headlines when there was a knock at the front door.

She certainly hadn’t been expecting anyone, and her bizarre new pastime had made her a little jumpy as she crept downstairs to investigate.

“Hello?” she called out from behind the locked front door. “Who is it?”

“Miss Cunningham?” a guy said tentatively.

She peered through the peep hole at him.

“Yeah?”

“Are you gonna . . . open the door?” the guy asked.

“We’ll see,” she answered.

“Alright, well, I’ll just get right to it. My father was one of your great uncle’s business partners.”

Okay. Based on what her uncle had said, this guy’s father was one of two people.

“Was he the son of a bitch or the horse’s ass?” she asked.

The guy stifled a chuckle, bashfully.

“I’m . . . afraid he was probably the son of a bitch.”

“Merrick.”

“Yeah,” he answered, frowning at the lack of door-opening. “I’m Dean.”

“K. What do you want, Dean?”

“Well, I guess if I’m being honest, I want to offer a . . . superficial gesture to make amends.”

“Huh?”

“Your uncle was a genius. And, sure, I guess he . . . ”

“Went cuckoo?” Darla filled in the blank aggressively as if radical acceptance banished the stigma.

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“Yeah,” Merrick responded uncomfortably. “But Goliath Games and all the success that came after it was really only possible because of the work he did . . . ”

“Before he went cuckoo.”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“And my dad is gone now—he passed last year.”

“Sorry,” Darla said, scrunching up her face in regret. “About him dying. And about calling him a son of a bitch.”

“It was a fair assessment. Your uncle may have been ‘cuckoo,’ but he was a decent judge of character,” Dean assured her. “As well as a genius—and in the spirit of too little too late, I want to put together a little thing in his honor. A sort of museum exhibit? At corporate HQ.”

“Museum exhibit?”

“I want to tell the story of what he built. And I’d love to tell that story authentically. But we don’t have any of the vintage equipment we’d need to do it. My dad ran a very tight ship. A very tight, very nostalgia-free ship. It was always ‘out with the old, in with the new’.”

He paused, seemingly hoping Darla would connect the dots for him. She didn’t. So he pushed on.

“Anyway, I understand your uncle left a lot of old computer stuff in his attic.”

Darla’s eyes went wide. How the hell did this guy know about the attic? Merrick seemed to read her mind, because he went on . . .

“My dad mentioned it. He came to visit a lot after they fell out. Not really sure why. He wasn’t much of a ‘mending fences’ type. Anyway, I was wondering if I could take the stuff off your hands?”

“Take it off my hands?”

“For the exhibit.”

Was the equipment in the attic really so rare that he couldn’t find another source? It was enough to give Darla’s new-found paranoia some traction, despite the fact that the guy seemed genuinely harmless.

Apparently the still-closed door suggested to him that she wasn’t quite sold yet because he kept talking.

“But look, I want to be totally transparent. I’ve definitely got an ulterior motive. An homage to your uncle after his passing could give us some positive press, which I need. It’s been a little rough since I took over.”

“Rough how?”

“I guess the reporter covering the tech beat described it as ‘one boneheaded blunder after another, hastening the very public downward spiral of the Merrick family empire.’ And after my most recent acquisition went sideways, somebody set up an online pole that asked whether I should keep my job or give it to a brain-damaged chimp.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah. Stings a little.”

“Who won?”

“Huh?”

“The poll. Who won?”

“Oh, it’s still running. But . . . chimp’s ahead.”

“Ouch again.”

“Public sentiment has really taken a turn,” he went on. “People are making up all kinds of crazy stories about me. Supposedly, I had an affair with the heir to the Munchkin candy bar empire and I’m into the Russian mob for tens of millions in operating capital. Oh, and also, I’m trying to clone JFK. I mean why JFK? If I was gonna clone somebody it’d be Ghandi. Or Jesus. Or Bruce Springsteen.”

“Ooh!” Darla said. “Or Paul Newman.”

“Sure, him too,” Merrick agreed. “Anyway, I guess lesson learned. Never trust a Dutchman.”

“Dutchman?” Darla blurted out, snapping to attention. Suddenly, she yanked open the door as much as the security chain would allow and stared at Merrick.

“Did you say Dutchman?”

“Oh, hi,” Merrick said, seeing her for the first time. “Yeah, um, my acquisition that flamed out. Flying Dutchman Digital, in Amsterdam. Should have been big, but—”

“I gotta go,” Darla cut him off and slammed the door.

“Wait!” he called after her.

She pulled the door open a crack again.

“What about the equipment for the—”

“Oh, uh, no thanks!”

She slammed the door a second time.