Horace had tried his best to shelter Dillon from his more clandestine interests, but there were only two of them in the house, and they shared a rare gift for coaxing computer-based systems into giving them what they wanted. By the time Dillon was ten, Horace had unintentionally taught him most of what he knew, not only about programming but also hacking. Dillon had even occasionally proven himself useful with fresh perspectives on what had been persistent problems for his dad.
Horace had always tried to tone down his anti-government, anti-military, anti-corporate rhetoric in front of Dillon, who already saw him as overly bitter. Dillon was too young to be indoctrinated with such cynicism.
But that all changed when Dillon’s doting father was suddenly taken out of his life by federal agents, and, through a cruel irony, Dillon was placed in the state’s care. Horace confidently assured his son during one prison visit that an unassuming introvert with a laptop and no designs on recognition or fame could be a very powerful foe — even for the most powerful country on the planet.
An orphan at the age of 12, Dillon was blessed with patience — and a poker face. After a year under close surveillance, he dropped off the FBI’s watch list.
In the orphanage, he’d spent most of his time quietly and independently developing innocuous apps for smartphones and tablets. He was even making a little money at it.
Eventually, one caught the attention of a junior Avillage associate in the Orphan Identification Division.
His father’s criminal history had been dubbed a red flag by the higher-ups, but Horace’s testimony had convincingly absolved Dillon of any suspicion regarding knowledge of or involvement in any illegal activity. Plus he had a two-year track record of being an all-around good citizen at the orphanage. His age was another strike against him — nearly fourteen at the time of identification, but a set of prospective parents was already in the Avillage queue, seeking a technologically gifted teen, and the bigwigs at Avillage were sold on the risk/reward ratio of grooming the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Larry Ellison or Larry Page or Sergey Brin or Mark Zuckerberg — the list of high-tech billionaires went on and on.
In the end, to heap insult onto Horace’s injury, Dillon was taken out of the state’s custody and adopted. By a corporation.
The defending champions walked confidently up to the 18th green needing a birdie to win the best-ball format tournament outright and avoid a playoff. A gallery of ten other father-son pairs trickled down the slope from the clubhouse patio to watch, debating which ball they’d play. Ryan’s lay just off the front of the green and would leave them a relatively straight fifteen foot uphill putt to the hole. Thomas’s shot was significantly closer, but would break down and to the right — a tough putt for righties.
Without any discussion, Thomas strode onto the green and snatched his ball.
“I’ll get it close, and you sink it,” Thomas said with a wink, walking back down the green to where Ryan’s ball lay. Sure enough his putt rolled to a stop eighteen inches short of the hole. That would be a gimme.
Ryan then stepped up behind his dad and placed his ball back down on the fringe of the green. He’d tracked his dad’s putt the whole way; there was no break.
“No pressure, Ryan!” yelled one of the dads who’d long been out of contention, well into his fourth beer.
Standing to the side of the ball, his mind cleared of everything and everyone around him, Ryan took two carefully measured practice swings. He then shuffled a few inches forward, his head now directly over his ball. He glanced up at the hole, then back to his ball, then the hole, and again his ball, picturing the speed and trajectory of his dad’s putt. Slowly he drew his putter back, exactly as he had with each practice swing. The head of the putter slowed to a momentary stop at the peak of his backswing, and then, with the identical forward momentum of his two previous swings, he swung through the ball. He barely felt the club make contact with the ball, keeping his head down and softly closing his eyes. He didn’t need to watch. He knew it was in.
As soon as he got home, he uploaded the new photo of himself and his dad raising their second consecutive father-son trophy. Except for the fact that he was another inch and a half closer to his dad in height, it looked almost identical to their first picture.
He then scrolled back one frame and, slowly shaking his head, deleted the picture of him in his boxers from earlier in the morning.
“Check out your mom’s purple shirt,” read the message left on the frame.
His dad had seemed genuinely confused when he’d mentioned the picture earlier that morning, and the handwriting in the photo didn’t look like anything like his dad’s. What’s more the surface under the plain white sheet of paper certainly wasn’t to be found anywhere in their house — maybe laminate countertop or a particle-board table.
What does that mean? he thought, trying to squeeze some secret meaning out of the message. As he was thinking, the pictures continued to scroll. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen his mom wear purple. Maybe one of their neighbors within Wi-Fi range had the same kind of frame, and the photo had mistakenly gotten uploaded to his frame. But the picture still didn’t make any sense; why would that scribbled-on piece of paper be worthy of uploading to anyone’s frame? And no one in their pretentious neighborhood would have had laminate countertops.
As he continued to ruminate, a flash of purple from the frame grabbed his attention, just before the picture scrolled forward again. He snatched the frame from the bedside table and frantically pushed the back button.
On the display was a picture of him riding his first two-wheeler, with his birth mother running right behind him, just letting go of the back of his seat. She wore a radiant smile — and a faded purple shirt. Ryan remembered that soft, worn purple shirt vividly. It had been her lounging shirt. She had changed into it almost every night when she got home from work and often slept in it. As Ryan continued to stare at the shirt, he noticed what appeared to be microscopic black print on the sleeve.
But that shirt didn’t have writing on it. He would have bet his life on it.
He placed his thumb and forefinger directly over the tiny black letters and spread them slowly apart. As the frame zoomed in, gradually the text became legible: “www.amazon.com/tp-roll/dp/S890=f238000”
Ryan grabbed his tablet and immediately keyed in the URL exactly as it appeared on his mom’s shirt. An item on the Amazon Marketplace loaded, featuring a picture of a half-full roll of toilet paper offered by a user with uniformly unfavorable customer reviews. The text read, “This is more of a social experiment than anything to see if there’s avillage (sic) idiot out there would actually pay $18.76 for half a roll of toilet paper. Anyone going to prove me right? I bet you will.”
The item had been posted just before midnight the night before. Ryan’s price at the market’s close that day had been 18.76. He had to pursue this. Without any further deliberation, he ordered it with the “bill me” option, selecting next-day delivery to the house next door. He knew for a fact his neighbors were going to be out of town through the weekend, because he was feeding their cat and collecting their mail while they were away.
For the sake of the seller, he marked the shipment as a gift with the card to read, “Here’s to social experiments. I am one. Love, RTJ”
Dillon had figured out that he was an Avillage listing before he’d even come to live with his adoptive family, and he harbored a deep resentment for it. While he tolerated his adoptive parents, he stayed on a cool first-name basis with them. There was only one person he would ever call “Dad,” and in just under 13 years, he expected to be reunited with him. He’d also made it perfectly clear that he was born with the last name Higley, and that’s the name he would die with.