Amos knew that Dawn wouldn’t be able to retrieve any DM until the Yoders had fulfilled their purpose, but he wanted to drop her a message anyway. He was just about to send her a DM when he remembered again to change his avatar so that he would appear as his real self. An old man. And that’s when he decided to get rid of his youthful avatar altogether. It was a vanity, a joke he was playing only on himself. He accepted fully, maybe for the first time, that he was past middle age, and to the rest of this young world he was just plain old. He flicked his wrist and brought up the box that asked him if he wanted to make his old man avatar his permanent one. He ticked “Yes” and then closed the profile cube.
He’d just reached out to touch his master cube, when the last person he would ever have expected to see at that moment appeared before him. His brother, Jed. With the exception of a new and scrawny beard, the boy looked exactly as Amos remembered him—the last time he’d seen him in the flesh.
The two brothers looked at one another, and did not speak for a moment as they each caught their breath.
It was Jed who spoke first.
“Amos,” he said with a nod.
Amos put his hands behind his back, then nodded in return. “Jedediah.” Then, “You got here faster than I’d expected.”
There was another extended period of silence before Jed spoke again. “Listen… Amos… I don’t know much about what’s going on, but I’m learning. I learned how to get here to talk to you. And I’ve also learned something else.”
“What have you learned, big brother?” Amos asked.
Jed scowled when he heard the emphasis Amos placed on the phrase big brother, but he shook off the urge to launch into a scathing attack on Amos.
“I figured out how they’re doing it,” he said.
Amos flinched. He wasn’t sure what Jed was talking about, and for a split second he had a flash of doubt. Perhaps this person standing before him wasn’t Jedediah at all? After all, his system had just recently been hacked. But then the doubt passed, at least for a moment. He’d expected Jed to get into the system and start figuring things out. In fact, he’d counted on it. Just not this soon. Maybe Jed was even more clever than his younger brother gave him credit for.
“Let’s not drag this out, Jed. What is it that you’ve discovered?”
Jed took a deep breath. He knew that he was out of his depth, but what he’d seen needed to be known. “First, I figured out that Transport is gathering tons of okcillium, and then I figured out how they’re doing it.”
Amos blinked. “What?”
“They’re ripping up the roads. Starting back in 2050 on Earth. That’s the real reason behind the laws to ban private transport. The okcillium is in the road base. It always has been.”
(26
THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY
The avatar that represented his younger brother disconcerted Jed. He wasn’t sure what he expected to see, but here before him was Amos as an old man, gray-headed and marked by years and the pressures of governing. It was tough to accept. But he knew it was Amos, or at least an accurate computer rendering of what his brother must surely look like.
“How did you work it out?” his brother asked. The old man looked at his wrist where a watch would be, even though he didn’t wear one. “It’s late Saturday morning, and you haven’t had much time. We’ll get to the okcillium and the roads in a minute. But I’m curious how you found me so fast. Here. In the system.”
Jed shrugged. “It started with the code AT10S. It showed up whenever you were looking over Dawn’s shoulder while she was training me. It was something in the picture that shouldn’t have been there. I didn’t see it when I was experiencing the training in real time, but later, when I went in as an observer using the COFFEE CAN password… I saw your code in the rendering.”
“I was watching and keeping tabs to make sure that Dawn didn’t disclose anything too soon,” Amos said, nodding. “But that code shouldn’t have been visible in the rendering. I know the code. You saw it because of who you are.”
“Too soon—” Jed said. He was about to pounce on this, but Amos continued.
“You’ve picked up the terminology and the engineering lingo pretty fast, brother,” Amos said. “Let me ask you a question: when you were milking Zoe, which one of her teats often had a mastitis problem?”
Jed stared at his brother for a long while. Then he realized that Amos still wasn’t sure about him. There was fear there. Almost latent and mostly hidden, but it was still there. The head of the resistance didn’t know if this avatar of his brother standing before him was perhaps being operated by some Transport hacker.
“That’s not a good question, Amos. After all, I could guess. I’d have a one in four possibility of getting it right.”
“Well, at least you know a cow has four quarters to her udder and four teats,” Amos said. “Not many Transport hackers would know that.”
“The answer is none of them, Amos. Zoe never had mastitis that I ever knew about. We only kept one milk cow and we cleaned her teats thoroughly every time we milked her. We never had the problems so many other farmers faced.”
“Okay then,” Amos said, “so tell me about this expansive technology vocabulary you have all of a sudden. How’d you come upon it?”
Jed nodded. “Dawn helped with that. She programmed a computing lexicon into my BICE. Every time I’m looking for a word or experiencing anything new when I’m in the system, the word appears almost before I realize I need it.” He fixed his brother with an accusatory glare. “And I suppose if she did that, it was because you told her to do it. She anticipated that I’d be mucking around in the system.”
“And from that you conclude… what?”
“That you knew I’d be doing this. That you planned it.” He pointed his finger at his younger brother. “This whole thing… all along. Your plan, ever since I first came here, wherever here is, was to get me into the system to help you. And you knew I’d never do it unless I decided to do so on my own. Everyone kept telling me, ‘We can’t tell you anything’ and ‘Your brother wants you to see it for yourself.’ And Dawn would say, ‘If you get sterile information without the context you’ll make wrong decisions.’ What that really meant was that you wanted me to be your puppet. You wanted me to hack into Transport’s system, for some reason I don’t know yet. And I did exactly as you planned.”
Amos waved his hand dismissively, as if to say none of that matters now. “So you saw the code. How did you figure out that it was me?”
Jed let out a derisive chuckle. “Changing the subject, huh? Your code was AT10S? Amos Troyer, tenth seat. You don’t think I remember school, Amos? It wasn’t that long ago for me. We Amish may only go through the eighth grade, but I was only eighteen when I left home. In fact, as crazy as it sounds to me now, I’m still only eighteen.”
Amos smiled, but there was pain in that smile. “And I’m sixty-seven, brother. Sixty-seven real years old.”
Now it was Jed’s turn to wave off Amos. He wasn’t in the mood to either embrace or sorrow over his brother’s troubles just yet. He put up his hand and continued his explanation. “Mrs. Holtzclaw numbered the desks in that one-room schoolhouse, and we had to file in and out of class by number. Our personal number—in your case 10S—was on anything and everything that had to do with school. Mine was 15S. That little bit of information came in handy just a short while ago when I needed to get into your files about me.”