Jack Be Quick Ch. 01

It's interesting to look back at some of the Mother Goose Rhymes we learned as kids. Like "Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the candlestick." That sounds like an interesting game, but if Jack isn't nimble and quick, he's about to get his balls burned. What an incentive!

The twenty-first century equivalent of candle jumping is international intrigue, with shadowy participants who play for keeps. Excel or die - the ultimate incentive. But games are made to be played by young people, and here we have a young couple who get drawn into a dangerous game. They don't really want to be players. They want to be left alone so they can get on with their education.

You'll come across a little sex, a little violence, and a little suspense, but these kids are no superheroes. The boy isn't six foot five and hung like a horse, and the girl doesn't need a bra with DD cups. What you might think about as you read on, is that one of these kids could be your son or daughter, and I leave it to you to decide if they would, or could, behave the way my characters do.

The boy, old enough for sex but too young to vote, tells their story. There's a reason he doesn't tell us about their sex life in minute detail - that's not how he was brought up. Even though he has decided to tell us a lot about their lives, he's aware of a fine line that a gentleman won't cross.

The story has come together over the past two years. It has been set aside, then picked up again, over and over. I sincerely hope you enjoy reading it. I enjoyed writing it, and rewriting it, but my feeling has always been that it was nearly ready to post, but not quite. Well, enough procrastinating - two years is the gestation period of an elephant. So ready or not, here it is!

My guess is that you'll either love or hate the story, with few lukewarm reactions. I'll be interested to read your comments.

Hans

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Jack Be Quick Ch. 01

YOU TAKE THE HIGH ROAD, I'LL TAKE THE LOW ROAD

"Hey Jack, how'd you get all the way up to level seven? We've been playing that thing since last month and nobody's got up to five. You got a secret move?"

"No, I've never even seen this game before. Seems pretty cool, but those zombies are hard to kill so they'll stay dead. I've been playing for over an hour. My thumbs are getting tired and my left hand's starting to cramp. Guess I'm done for today."

"An hour? Stu and I played it for about five hours straight the first day. He was ready to throw the control through the wall. I laughed at him, figured it couldn't be that hard. Boy, did I get a surprise!"

"Well, I guess I was just lucky. If I started again, I'd probably bomb out at level three. Here, why don't you take over for me? I've gotta be goin' anyway." I handed the control to Lance and gave a wave to the guys as I let myself out the side door. My car was at the curb and I was careful to leave without any commotion, like squealing the tires or blowing the horn. The last thing I wanted to do was call attention to myself and start a fuss over how well I could play a computer game. I didn't want any hard feelings with the guys. I had few enough friends as it was, and I was silently scolding myself for letting them see that I was so much better at it than they were. All you had to be was quick, and that was really my thing. But they didn't need to know that.

Look, I'll let you in on a secret - I'm sort of a nerd with an odd twist. When most people see a guy who's into science and math and computers, they jump to the conclusion that he's not going to be any good at sports, and he probably thinks very deliberately, slowly turning over every possibility in his mind before making a decision. I was just the opposite. Quick. From very early childhood I played on GameBoy and Xbox, and I've been quick enough to beat every computer game that I ever played.

I started with Pac-Man. When I was a little kid, way before Kindergarten, we had a little game table with Pac-Man built into it. It was just gathering dust in a corner of the family room by my toy box, and nobody messed with it. Well, nobody but me. I don't know how I got started on it, but I must've fooled around with it till I stumbled onto the way to make the moves. I was an only child, and had a lot of time to mess around with my toys by myself, so I guess I spent a lot of time on Pac-Man. My mother was the one who discovered me playing it, and watched the way I could manipulate the little yellow guy. One of my earliest memories is of my father standing behind my mother, watching me play. She made him be quiet while they watched, but I still remember him gasping when I'd make some super move, and at other times he'd make sort of choking noise.

What they were discovering was how quick I really was. Later - I think I was in fourth grade - Mom took me to be tested by a psychologist, over at the behavioral science lab at the university. We got to put a rough number on it. Everybody reacts differently to different sorts of stimuli, and I reacted quicker to visual stimuli than to things I heard or felt, but when all my reaction times were averaged out I was at least twenty times as quick as anybody they'd ever tested. Maybe even faster - they couldn't be exact because I was so far outside the range of their test validation. Why so fast? Nobody knows why our brains develop as they do, but mine just happened to be turbocharged.

Apparently I was perfectly normal in every other way, and I had a pretty normal childhood. I wasn't into sports much, but I did find out how much fun I could have with a bat. I was nine or ten years old when I went with Dad to a batting cage that had a computer controlled pitching machine. He set it to feed me the mixture of pitches that you'd get from a human pitcher, and gradually increased the speed. I'd just hold the bat up where the ball would hit it. I was too little to swing the bat very well, but I could hold it steady, sort of like bunting. I bunted fast balls, curves, sinkers, sliders, knucklers, everything the machine knew how to pitch. I was fascinated watching the ball come at me. I could watch it and tell if it was going to cross the plate in the strike zone, and I could follow its path as it curved and twisted and rotated between the pitching machine and home plate. By the time the ball got to me I had the bat right in front of it, and the solid thump of the ball hitting the bat was my reward for reading the pitch and making the correct adjustment before it got to me. I remember laughing as I did it.

Think of a fastball going 95 miles an hour. That's about 140 feet per second. So to go from the pitcher to the batter takes just a little under half a second. It takes most batters about a third of that time to read the ball so they know what kind of a pitch it is, and another third to figure where it's going to be when it crosses home plate. This is a critical period, because it involves reasoning and decision making, so a whole lot of your brain has to get involved, and poor hitters just can't do all that critical thinking that fast, so they guess instead of figuring it out. Then the last third of the time, about a sixth of a second, is spent aiming the bat and swinging it at that spot. One reason good hitters miss so often is that it's hard to adjust your swing and get the bat moving that quickly. But it seemed to me that I had all the time in the world. It was easy. And the proof was that I never missed!

Later, Dad got an old shotgun and had the stock shortened up and padded to fit my arm. Then he taught me to shoot skeet, and it was just the same as with the baseballs. I figured the clay pigeon could have been moving a whole lot faster and I'd still have plenty of time to nail it. In Phys Ed I found I could do all right in the hundred meter dash, because I was so good at getting off the blocks the instant the gun was fired. I couldn't run any faster than the average runner, so in a longer race my starting advantage didn't mean much. But Mom and Dad persuaded me not to go out for any varsity sport where my quick responses would make me stand out, because I would just end up being labeled as a freak and it would be hard for me to have any close friends. So I tried to keep it all to myself. It was hard sometimes. Like sitting around, trying not to act bored, after finishing an hour long test in five minutes. Or remembering to get hit once in a while when we played dodgeball in the gym, even though I had plenty of time to avoid every ball that came my way.

My unusual talent had its good and bad points in dealing with other kids. In every relationship there's an element of suspense, waiting to see how the other person will react to a situation or a remark. And while we rarely admit it, we go through life manipulating others and being manipulated by them. We usually call it 'tact' or 'careful choice of words.' Now suppose that you could assemble the clues and analyze what's going to be said, way before you really hear the words, just the way I analyzed the flight of the baseballs. That takes away the suspense, and when you can tell what your friends or even enemies are going to do or say, you have a lot of time to select your reply. So just by being quick, I was able to avoid being surprised or blindsided and I got kind of a Teflon reputation. That is, everything rolled right off me, just because I was prepared for whatever was coming. Again, I tried to play it down, and I'd pretend to be surprised once in a while, just to act normal. That's why I managed to have a few friends at school, which is more than Clark Kent could say.

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In my junior year in high school I struck up a friendship with Trudy. She was really cute, about five foot three, slender with a well rounded butt and medium sized breasts that were perfectly shaped and perfectly proportioned to the rest of her. Her dark hair was worn fairly short, framing her face but not coming down to her shoulders. She was an honor student, maybe I should say she was the honor student, good at every subject and interested in everything in the world. We made a good couple in many ways. We looked good together, we laughed at each other's jokes, we liked the same people, and as the year went on we spent more and more of our free time together. By the start of summer vacation there was a little hula dancer bobble doll stuck onto the dashboard of my Ford where Trudy sat, and the ribbons from a box of candy I'd given her for Valentine's Day were dangling from my rear view mirror. From then on, all through that summer and our senior year, it was clear to everybody who knew us that we were an exclusive couple. Of course, as we got closer in every way, we were eager to express our love for each other in sexual intimacy. She's a little younger than I am, so I was getting pretty antsy waiting for her to turn eighteen. It was the first weekend after her birthday when she let me take her cherry, and although sex causes problems for a lot of teenage couples, our lovemaking has drawn us closer together, right from the beginning. It turned out that just as in everything else, we both liked the same things.

Holy cow, was she hot! Who'd have guessed that this sweet, brainy girl would be the world's greatest lover! I found out that it's easy to feel like a super stud when you've got a super partner, and Trudy made me feel like one of those porn stars. Because of that and a thousand other reasons, I wanted nothing more than to have her at my side, 24/7, for the rest of my life.

Trudy's grades singled her out for success at any college, and she was recruited by schools I'd never even heard of, plus a bunch that are world famous. By Christmas vacation in our senior year, she had narrowed the field down to Harvard and Princeton, with Stanford bringing up a distant third. As happy as I was for her, the thought of losing her to some guy hundreds of miles away had me terrified. It even affected my appetite, which up to then had been voracious.

"Don't worry about losing me," she said one day after a workout in the back seat of the Ford. "I'll always be there for you. Remember, I need you as much as you need me. Separately, we're like lost souls, but as long as I know you're waiting for me, my world is still complete. I know you feel the same way. Hold me close. Feel my heart beat? Well, I can feel yours, too. That's how it'll always be for us, and being miles and miles apart won't stop the way we feel for each other." Comforting words, but still the thought of being separated left me feeling empty inside.

By spring break our decisions had been made. Trudy was headed to Harvard, 600 miles away. I'd be living at home and attending the Honors College at our state university, just three miles from my front door. We were excited but we gradually got more depressed as we thought of being apart. Could Trudy be that faithful? Could I? Were we really ready to face the world all alone? Romeo and Juliet couldn't do it, so what made us think we could?

To get Trudy moved to Cambridge, across the Charles River from downtown Boston, meant hauling her and her stuff a long way. Her father rented the biggest, longest Suburban I'd ever seen and jammed the interior and roof rack full, leaving just enough space for four people. I traveled with them and shared the driving. We stayed overnight outside Albany, and were unloading and toting stuff up to her apartment the next afternoon. Trudy and three other girls had a four bedroom apartment on the second floor of a big, old house, just a couple of blocks from the campus. When we all said goodbye she was very composed and confident in front of her parents. When she turned to me they tactfully excused themselves and walked to the car, giving us a few minutes of privacy. That's when she fell apart. She was crying so hard that her words were just garbled sounds, but I understood. At the end she held me at arm's length and simply said, "Miss me, Jack. Promise you'll miss me as much as I'll miss you!"

"Trudy, I'll always love you and I won't have a minute of happiness until you're in my arms again!" After one more hug and kiss I turned away to leave and she turned away to bury her face in her hands.

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The trip home was uncomfortable. I got along with Trudy's folks all right, but all three of us were choked up over leaving her in a strange place. She wouldn't have us to buoy her up, and we wouldn't have her either. You'd think that all the air had been sucked out of our lives and left back there by the Charles River. There wasn't much conversation. I felt bewildered, wondering how I could live without the constant company of my love. On top of that I felt angry at her for picking a university so far from home, and angry at myself for walking away and leaving her there all alone. When I got home I had very little to say to my parents. I went upstairs to flop down on my bed, and I wished I could cry to get rid of those awful feelings.

School started up two days later, and I quickly found out how state universities deal with the enormous crowd of incoming freshmen, and in the process I learned a little about how governments work. Most high school seniors have two parents and they're both old enough to vote. To keep on the good side of those voters, legislators make it clear to state university administrators that they expect every high school graduate who can read and write to be admitted, even if they're dumb as a stump. It's then up to the faculty to separate the scholars from the wannabes, so they load everybody down with an impossible burden of schoolwork and let the students sort themselves out. Some flee in panic, some change majors, some transfer to community colleges, and the ones with intelligence and good work habits stay the course. I was a little shocked by the workload at first, but I soon found it a blessing. I bored into it like a hardrock miner hot after the mother lode, as I tunneled into a mountain of books to escape my loneliness.

I discovered that a lot of college textbooks are written to show off the brilliance of the authors, not to teach students anything useful. But my quickness extended to reading and comprehension, and I could cram a lot more studying than the average student into the meager 168 hours of every week. I found time to go to the library to see how other authors had covered the ideas that were being thrown at me. I found out about other ways to handle a tricky problem, and I'd also read on ahead to see what was coming next, treating the course work like an interesting magazine article. With all that studying and with zero social life to compete for my attention, I soon percolated up to the top of the freshman Comp Sci majors. But there was always time for an email to Trudy, every night just before my head hit the pillow.

Meanwhile, Trudy had dug in just as hard as I had, but for a slightly different reason. She was a scholar in the truest meaning of the word. The whole idea of a university is to assemble the wisdom of the ages and pass it on from generation to generation. Universities in general - and Harvard is a great example - were intended for people with Trudy's broad love of learning. She missed me, but she had found her niche in the Ivy League. The Charles River basin, with Harvard and MIT on the north bank and Boston University on the south, plus a smattering of smaller specialized schools, is a haven for intellectuals, and although Trudy was lonely and homesick she found comfort in being among her kind of people.

I was at the airport to greet Trudy on her return home for Christmas. Her parents were content to stay warm and snug at home while I provided the taxi service. The flight came in an hour late in the evening of a cold, blustery day, with dry snow blowing across roads and runways alike. I was standing back from the choke point of the passenger exit, where I'd been pacing anxiously for hours. She spotted me and jumped up and down as she waved. When she got to me I wrapped her up in a hug that she snuggled into. We went down the escalator to baggage claim, holding onto each other. We didn't talk much, just let our body language say it all.

My car was colder than a refrigerator. I got the engine running to warm up, and pulled Trudy to me for a kiss that lasted either two years or two minutes, but who's counting? I can tell you definitely that it was below freezing in the car when our lips met, and warm enough to so we couldn't see our breath when we broke apart. Then the words came tumbling out, both of us wanting to blurt out the thoughts and feelings we'd been holding in for months. Personal thoughts, novel experiences in school, interesting people we'd met, what Boston was like, what was going on back home with our families and friends, which ones we wanted to get together with, until we arrived at a red light and stopped babbling to share a quick kiss.

As we broke apart to watch for the green light, Trudy said, "Now Jack, just listen for a minute because I think this might be important. You know I don't understand all the technical stuff you do, but I've heard talk about a new research program at MIT. It seems to be about computer security, protecting important information against hackers and spies and all that. It's got government money behind it, and people have been talking about it all semester, but like whispering or looking around to see if anybody can hear. I think they're trying to find people from all over to recruit for it, and they're trying to keep it hushed up, kind of like the Manhattan Project in World War Two. At least that's what I think is happening. Nobody has really told me anything, but I've been trying to piece all this together from bits of gossip and stuff I've overheard. I know you're good at hacking and encryption and cleaning up viruses and programming, and I wonder if you'd be able to get into it. The Comp Sci people are buzzing about it because they think whoever works on it will be in big demand after graduation."