By the time the sun rose over Jake and Laura’s Oceano home the next morning, a multitude of computer savvy people who had received copies of the email had copied the photo of Jake, Laura, and Standish out of the original email and used it to compose their own email. Again, none of these people were doing this with any maliciousness in their hearts. They just wanted to pass on the picture of a celebrity, his wife, their cool plane, and whatever loser that was standing with them in a more convenient fashion. This was an age where most internet users were still on dialup service and it took forever to pass along the entire email full of jpegs when they just wanted to show off one of them. Most composed a brief explanation of the shot that was along the lines of “Jake Kingsley and his wife Laura pose next to their Avanti airplane during a visit to Idaho”. No one identified Ron Standish by name and only a few even mentioned that he was a ramp worker. Very few identified the actual airport.
These new emails began to circulate far and wide as well, quickly passing up the original in sheer number of forwards since it was much faster and easier to pass on the single jpeg version than the original. By the time Jake and Laura sat down to a meal of Elsa’s chicken parmesan that night, nearly two hundred thousand copies of the photo were in circulation in eighteen different countries.
The next morning, while Laura slept in late in her own bed for the first time in weeks and Jake got up early to make the flight to Whiteman so he could check on the progress of KVA’s latest project, one version of the email landed in the inbox of a man named Daryl Broker, who lived in Tucson, Arizona.
Daryl was twenty-four years old. He was a computer nerd who liked to refer to himself as a “hacker”, but he had never actually hacked anything, he just liked the image that being a hacker represented. He was the youngest of three children and the least successful of the three in all aspects of life. His two older sisters were both college graduates and both were independent and working at good paying jobs—one in the computer industry, one in the financial industry. Daryl had never been to college. He worked at the local Walmart making just a little more than minimum wage. He still lived with his parents in the room he had grown up in. He had never been laid, had never even really come close to being laid, truth be told.
Daryl absolutely hated the band Intemperance and everything they represented, with a particular hatred for the band’s former lead singer, Jake Kingsley. This was primarily because Kingsley was everything that Daryl was not.
During Daryl’s early adolescent years during junior high and early high school, Intemperance had been all the rage among his classmates. The males thought that Intemp, as they called it, was the baddest-ass band since Led Zeppelin and Rush, that Matt Tisdale was the best fucking guitarist ever to throw down a riff or a solo, and that Jake Kingsley was the deepest lyricist to ever compose a tune. The girls all thought that Jake and Matt were the sexiest things on two legs, declared that they would gladly give it up to either one of them if only given the chance. In the circles that his two sisters had run in, Intemperance and especially Jake Kingsley were right up there with living gods. His oldest sister’s closest friend Debbie Mack, a bleached blonde party girl with incredible tits and a premium ass, whose image Daryl had jacked off to almost exclusively until the premier of internet porn (and who had always looked at and treated Daryl as if he were a cockroach crawling on her shower floor) even claimed that she had managed to get backstage during the It’s in the Book tour stop in Tucson and had almost fucked Jake Kingsley but had ended up having to settle for Coop the drummer instead.
In Daryl’s mind, he might have had a serious chance of getting into Debbie’s pants had it not been for her infatuation with Jake Kingsley and Intemperance. Nor was Debbie the only one he had these thoughts about. Through his high school years and his years of working at Walmart, he had become infatuated with multiple females that he thought he had a chance with, several of whom had ended up actually enjoying his strange company to some degree but who inevitably kept him firmly in the friend zone. And it seemed that all of these females had been really into Intemperance and Jake Kingsley, going on about how hot he was when the subject was discussed, about how his voice—especially on songs like Point of Futility or Insignificance or South Island Blur—made their respective panties wet. Like with Debbie Mack, he assumed that a primary reason these girls would not give up their sexual favors to him, even if it was just a pity fuck, was primarily because of their obsession with Kingsley.
This is why when a forwarded email appeared in his inbox with the subject line: Jake Kingsley and his wife fly their private plane into a local airport!!, he automatically began to feel his blood boil and the familiar hatred started to surge through him. He checked to see who had sent him such a forward, a part of him thinking it was yet another sick joke played upon him (in addition to being a perpetual virgin and computer geek, Daryl had been subjected to cruel bullying most of his life and tended to assume that anything negative was simply more of the same). He saw that it was a mass email from a guy named Steve Jeffery, who lived in Florida and was a member of the online Dungeons and Dragons club that Daryl was a member of. Daryl had never met Steve before, had never even played D&D with him. They were simply part of the same email contacts list. Nevertheless, though the email had been sent to hundreds from Steve’s account, Daryl still took it personally. It was just his nature.
He almost deleted it without opening it, but some kind of sick, morbid curiosity compelled him to take a look at it instead. The body of the email was simple and provided little detail.
Jake Kingsley and his wife Laura pay a visit to a local airport after flying in in their Avanti-180 twin-engine turboprop. What a cool plane! And how fucking hot is Laura Kingsley?
That was it. No mention of what airport they had flown into, what the purpose of their visit had been, what they had done after flying in, or any other detail.
“Who gives a rat’s ass?” Daryl muttered in disgust.
Again, he almost deleted the email without even looking at the attached jpeg file, but that same morbid curiosity compelled him to open the attachment. It downloaded relatively quickly since Daryl had talked his parents into paying for a DSL line instead of simple dialup (they were under the impression that Daryl was using the high-speed internet access to take classes and work on research). He stared at the picture that appeared on the screen, feeling that familiar hatred start to churn almost immediately.
The photo was of decent quality. It was not a scan of a photo but a digital copy of the original photograph. Kingsley and his wife were dressed in winter clothes and had winter hats on their heads. Behind them was a futuristic looking airplane. Standing between them was what Daryl assumed was a young girl with long black hair dressed in a work sweater of some sort. She was not terribly attractive. Her body seemed to lack feminine curves and her tits could not even be discerned beneath her bulky clothing. Who in the hell was she? Daryl wondered. Some ho they were sharing? He had read that Kingsley’s wife—if they were, in fact, actually married—was into chicks. It had even been suggested that she and Celia Valdez—who’s picture Daryl had masturbated to on occasion—regularly got it on when they were out on tour together.