The iris algorithm, p.1
The IRIS Algorithm, page 1
THE IRIS ALGORITHM
a novel
L.G. VanHuen
SKOODLUR BOOKS • 2015
PUBLISHED BY
SKOODLUR BOOKS
Copyright © 2015 by L.G. VanHuen
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-4951-8055-2
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
CHAPTER 63
CHAPTER 64
CHAPTER 65
CHAPTER 66
CHAPTER 67
CHAPTER 68
CHAPTER 69
CHAPTER 70
CHAPTER 71
CHAPTER 72
CHAPTER 73
CHAPTER 74
CHAPTER 75
Epilogue
For the day of the Lord is near upon all the heathen: as thou hast done, it shall be done unto thee: thy reward shall return upon thine own head.
- Obadiah 1:15
Love is fickle and fleeting, but family secrets last forever.
- Patience Skeffington
CHAPTER 1
HOUSTON, TEXAS – 2:31 A.M.
God hates me. When I was only eight years old, He showed me the secret to the universe. Whether killing my little brother was part of his plan or a careless byproduct, I do not know. It is hard to understand how God thinks.
In the small hours of morning, everything was deathly still except the numbers in my head. The numbers are always there, calculating what must be lost to save those I love. After all this time, and despite God’s own mathematics, I do not understand how I was expected to carry this curse of knowledge and secrets. God knew I would do anything to protect them.
I sat up in bed and scrutinized the shadowy crevices and murky lumps of the hotel room. What did I expect to see? The Dali Lama seated cross-legged on a pillow, floating three feet above the floor and holding a leather bound book with the answers to my lifelong questions would be nice: The Big Book of Answers: Rachael Logan Edition. The odds for illumination at 2:30 a.m. alone in the dark in a Houston, Texas hotel room were astronomically low.
The exquisite dance of the Turing cipher in my dream tortured me to consciousness in a feverous sweat; one of the ways my mind asserted itself over my better nature. I pulled the neck of my big tee shirt out and pumped it a few times to get some air flowing between my breasts. The beads of sweat rolling down between them tickled but not in a good way. They had not been tickled in a good way for ten years. I came to grips with the strange and disconcerting workings of my misbehaving mind, but the sweating was annoying.
My first waking thoughts were always of him. Ten years, yet the pain of losing him was as sharp and unforgiving as broken glass. God always takes what we love too much. He had done it to me before. “Is that how it works, God? It is okay, you can tell me. Get it off your chest. I’ll bet no one ever offered to hear your confession.” He was not listening. I laughed and hoped if I was wrong and God was listening that he knew I was joking.
Rolling over, I reached for my backpack, which I always leave within arm’s reach of the bed. Feeling nothing, my eyes opened wider. Like a blind woman begging for mercy, I groped the darkness. The blackout shades kept even the streetlights at bay. When my hands finally found the backpack under the bed, a neuron fired in my brain reminding me it was right where I left it. I yawned. I sighed. I shook my head in the dark.
At home, everything was where it was supposed to be. The thought stopped me short. My heart fell into the deep hole I had dug for it over the years. Not everything was where it was supposed to be. He was not at home. Apart from God, I had no one to blame but myself. I pulled my laptop out of the backpack and switched it on.
At times, I wondered if shadows were the absence of light or the presence of darkness. I knew the scientific answer, but science never answered the important questions in my life, the ones the Dali Lama could answer. Long ago, I made a pet of the darkness that accompanied me, but like a disobedient dog on a leash, it was hard to say who walked whom. As long as I kept the darkness on me and off the ones I loved, it was of little consequence. I closed my eyes, hoping for a moment of peace before I fully awoke.
The numbers got in the way.
The light from my laptop flickered and led me to the television remote on the side table. I might as well check the weather forecast while the computer booted up. I pushed buttons until the set came to life. When I checked into the hotel a few hours ago, I traversed the one-hundred-and-thirty-seven steps to my room, including the fourteen steps on the stairs to the second floor and the eight turns equally divided between left and right, though not in alternating order. In my room, I flicked on the television, elated to discover that Channel 100 continually repeated the local weather forecast. Having a channel to keep an eye on the weather around the clock was a good thing.
The television lit up the room, shimmering in the dark, wrestling with the shadows and murky depths surrounding me. I felt better, seeing the weather radar in real time on Channel 100 as opposed to listening to some weatherman’s guess. Weathermen cannot be trusted. That’s because weather cannot be counted on to obey the mathematics of the universe. Weather is God’s random number generator. Weather cannot be predicted. Weather must be watched closely.
When I went to bed two hours ago, the forecast was partly cloudy skies with a 10 percent chance of precipitation. Now it showed 30 percent chance of rain with the possibility of afternoon thundershowers. “Oh, that’s just great. What a bunch of morons. Why can’t I get paid for being wrong on a daily basis?”
God clearly hated the South, always screwing with the weather, so I changed my name and moved to Southern California ten years ago. Compared to lightning, earthquakes were no big deal. Earthquakes were general; lightning was specific and personal. Nothing was the same after a blinding flash of God’s infinite love reached down from the sky and touched you. If you survived, you were forever changed. It didn’t change me for the better.
Waiting for my laptop to boot, fuming about the weather forecast, I felt the strange emptiness I always do after my dreams. At home, in the darkness before dawn, I distracted myself, usually with work. I filled the emptiness with numbers, each in its proper place.
My son, Samuel, was my only true peace. Nothing else mattered. The numbers tried to remind me of my dismal relationship record with those I loved. I forced the numbers into submission. My logic was sound even if my methods were not.
If I thought it would do any good, I would get down on my knees and beg God again for forgiveness for the one big thing. It never worked. God and I have had only one quality conversation, and I was eight years old and unprepared. Now I did all the talking. God was quiet. I did not want to be sacrilegious. Lord knows, I have made enough mistakes, but I wondered if God’s silence meant he was listening hard or had elevator music playing in his head.
I thought of Samuel and joy consumed me despite my feud with God and the weather. How can love be that powerful? It was not logical. I was too grateful to care.
Marcy—my spunk-o-matic, programmer friend from work—suggested I take dancing lessons to help me relax. Never happened. The whole enterprise took place outside the home and involved too many people. I endured enough taunting in my childhood to fill a lifetime. In spite of my unfortunate inheritance of Dancing as a last name, dancing did not come naturally to someone like me. Other than our name, dancing was certainly not a part of my childhood. We ignored laughing, singing, and board games, at least after my eighth birthday. I pretended not to remember life before that, nor did I use that frivolous last name.
Any memories before my eighth birthday, before God punished me with knowledge, were probably trivial and pointless. Yet, I cherished them above all the mathema tical truths perpetually rattling in my head. The simple bliss and innocence of not knowing was a treasure beyond compare.
My laptop pinged to life. I stared at the screen. “Now what?”
The screen should have displayed my beautiful, midnight blue and gold, Lyapunov, logistic fractal and asked for my username and password. Instead, it was covered with hexadecimal gibberish that looked incredibly geeky, even to a geek.
I should not have left the house. “Don’t tell me you’re going to die on me.” This would never have happened if I stayed where I was supposed to be. ‘We just can’t do this trade show without you, Rae Lo,’ Jason said. ‘We’re working on some big deals, Rae Lo.’ I cannot believe I was conned by that little twerp. ‘We have to impress them with our technical capabilities, Rae Lo. Nobody knows the technology behind this like you do. Martin is counting on you, Rae Lo.’
“I swear if he calls me Rae Lo one more time I will castrate him with a butter knife and a salad fork.” Reaching for the lamp switch, I smacked the cheap clock radio bolted to the side table, jamming my middle finger. “Dammit! Who would want to steal the stupid thing?”
I clicked on the lamp and tried to understand what I saw on the laptop. “What the….” I felt dizzy and nauseous. Jumping out of bed, I stared at the laptop like it was road kill—a dead chupacabra brought in for DNA testing and a tabloid photo shoot.
“This can’t be happening! No, no, no.” I spun in a circle and stamped my feet. If I could find a pair of red slippers to click together, I would change this into a weird Technicolor dream, wake to find my laptop safely in my backpack. I took a deep breath and approached the blood-sucking chupacabra.
Slowly, I reached out my hand, considering that a dead chupacabra might still be dangerous, and pulled the laptop to the edge of the bed. The gibberish continued to scroll over the screen. I apologized to God for the whole elevator music thing and asked a really, big favor. Please let me be wrong. Kneeling, I laid my face carefully on the bed. Peeking with one eye, I gently lifted the laptop to see the underside. If I went blind from looking at the underbelly of the chupacabra, I would still have one good eye. Sometimes the things I did only made sense later. Much later.
“Oh, shit!” I jumped up and clamped my hand to my mouth. It was best not to curse when you just asked God for a big favor. I confirmed what I thought could not possibly be true.
“Oh, God. Please, no. This is not my laptop!”
CHAPTER 2
Jason Glunt lurched up in bed. He dragged his brain from the strange dream, but the pounding of timbales persisted. Wait. The drums were pounding on the door. In between each assault, he heard muffled cursing and his name. He looked at the clock, 2:46 a.m.
“Just a minute!” Jason shook away the disconcerting images from his dream—at the symphony with no pants, again. “Hold on. Jeez!”
He fumbled for the lamp switch, knocking the glass of water off the nightstand. Counting silently to three, he hauled himself out of bed. Water from the soaked carpet oozed up between his toes. Swearing, he padded to the door.
“Jason, open the door.” The muffled plea sounded like Rachael. “It’s me. Open the door!”
Jason looked through the peephole, shook his head, and unlocked the deadbolt. The door pushed back hard. Rachael burst in hitting all the light switches in the small foyer as she blew past.
“Good morning, Rachael,” he said. “Why don’t you come in?”
“It is gone, Jason. It is just gone. I do not know what happened. I woke up and the backpack…was not there. It is not possible. It is always with me. There is nowhere else it should be. What happened to it?”
Still groggy and squinting against the sudden flood of light, Jason tried to rub some life into his face. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Do you know what time it is?” He tottered past Rachel and retrieved his glasses from the nightstand.
“What I am saying, if you would shut up and listen for a change,” she took a deep breath, “it is gone…well I have one but it is not mine.” She shoved the laptop at him and turned her head aside as if were a plate of scorpions. “It looks just like mine, but it is not.” She squinted with repulsion and put it on the small desk. “I do not know whose it is, and I do not know how it got in my backpack. This is a big problem. What are you doing?”
“I’m putting on my glasses. I’m hoping they will help me shut up and listen a little better.”
“I am glad this is so amusing to you. This is serious. This is deadly serious. This is as serious as a heart attack on steroids.” Rachael stopped long enough to survey his long pajamas, light blue, covered with navy blue anchors. “Do you get a free teddy bear with a set of PJ’s like that?”
He wanted to say, ‘you obviously don’t get a bra with a tee shirt like that,’ but he was enjoying the view. The oversized tee shirt appeared to be all she was wearing. Under different circumstances, it might have made the conference worthwhile.
“Rae Lo, just take it easy, slow down, and let me wake up.”
Rachael closed her eyes and took another deep breath. Her bare breasts heaved against the well-worn shirt—the shirt barely long enough to cover her bottom. He was mesmerized and petrified at the sight of Rachael Logan—corporate ultra-geek—in long sexy legs. It was incomprehensible on two hours of sleep. Everybody knew she was a mathematical savant, but he doubted anybody knew about those legs. He would have heard.
“Jason, give me your whole mind, such that it is, and listen carefully to me. My laptop is missing. Someone else’s laptop was in my backpack. It is the same model as mine, but it is not mine. I hold you responsible.”
“Me? Why?”
For three and a half minutes, Rachael explained how she packed the laptop, arrived at the airport, and with the exception of going through security, kept the laptop with her the entire time. After confusion in the line with some other poor sap, Jason helped her through security. According to Rachael’s theory, Jason mistakenly picked up the wrong laptop.
Jason recognized her logic as numerically sound and calculated to the third decimal place, but he suddenly felt like he did when he worked in the engineering department. Rachael had a way of making him doubt himself. Her apologists, including CEO Martin Stafford, were fond of saying Rachael wasn’t wired like the rest of them, that her brutal honesty had no malicious intent. Anyone who could hide long slinky legs like that could hide a lot more.
Rachael abruptly changed the subject; her supercharged brain often shifted topics without warning. “I need you to go downstairs and get a key for my room.” Without hesitation, she shifted again. “They cannot log on to my computer, and they cannot find me based on anything on the outside. I removed the service tag. Afternoon thunderstorms, some possibly severe, are expected. Did you order room service? It is far too expensive.”
A conversation with Rachael was a tapestry of thoughts woven together by threads too fine for mere humans to see. When she talked, which wasn’t often, there was zero delay between the neurons firing in her head and the words flying from her mouth. It was hard to follow when he was awake. Forget following her now.
“They won’t give me a key to your room.” He sat down in the desk chair. From that angle, he almost had a view under her tee shirt. “For security reasons. Where’s your key?”
“Securely locked in my room.” Rachael paced in a tight figure eight. “There were thirty-seven people ahead of me in the security line when we arrived. The ratio of men to women is likely superfluous data, but it was 64.86 percent men. Even with the confusion, there were no more than five people collecting their belongings on the other side of our security checkpoint when my bags went through. You were ahead of me. The person in front of you must have taken my laptop when you took theirs.”
“Hey, I put your laptop back in your bag because we were backing up the line. We were running late for our flight—because of you.”
“I told you those scissors were not mine.”
“Whatever. They were in your purse. Are you telling me you actually counted how many steps it was between all the locations in the airport?”
“What?”
“When you first barged in here and told me, in minute detail, how this was my fault, you listed the number of steps between your car and the ticket counter, to the security line, how many people were in front of you in line, how many left turns you made getting there. You actually count and remember this stuff?”
