Below The Fold

She was 88 years old.
You’ve no doubt already head all about the important facets of her life; how her book changed the face of children’s literature in a way that was never matched until The Boy Who Lived came ’round. How that book was rejected two dozen or so times before finding a publisher and eventually winning the Newberry Medal and running through 69 printings and millions and millions of copies.
Three weeks ago, I started work on what will hopefully become a novel that people will want to buy and read. Many, many people. The subject matter is obvious and driven by some of my deep-rooted libertarian fears. But it’s also going to hopefully be an adventure.
The protagonist in that book is named Wally Charles. Wallace Charles.
Charles Wallace Murray was the hero in A Wrinkle in Time, which is probably my most favorite book that I read as a child, next to White Fang and Stranger in a Strange Land. I hope to draw Wally Charles much as Charles Wallace was drawn; forthright and intelligent, strong and honest.
Ms. L’Engle’s writing engaged me as no other book had. A read the rest of her works, like A Swiftly Titling Planet, and Many Waters. They all gave me a wonderful place to retreat to, far away from this world, where adventure and hope loomed huge.
Here, in tribute to Ms. L’Engle, are the first two chapters of my most recent attempt at a novel. It has no name yet. Enjoy. Then go re-read A Wrinkle in Time.

Chapter One
Oct. 21, 2012

“Until they become conscious, they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled, they cannot become conscious.” – 1984, George Orwell

In 2012, a small technology company in Denver, Colorado developed a new algorithm that enabled the hyper-compression of digital video streams in a manner exponentially greater than the world had ever seen.
That, in and of itself, was quite a feat, but nowhere near as amazing as the indexing intelligence behind it that allowed text-based string searches to index and provide video results from what the video had captured.
“For this demonstration,” announced Jeffrey Alan Sanderson as he spoke to a consortium of private investors his financial team had brought together in Aspen to witness the unveiling of the new technology, “we’ve been videotaping this entire room with four cameras since you’ve walked in this morning.”
A video stream flickered on to a large screen on the wall behind him. The crowd shifted a little uncomfortably as they recognized themselves, broadcast in real time in four different angles, in High-Definition on the matte. Sanderson opened a lap top computer on the podium in front of him. To the right of the screen with the live video feed of the appeared an image of Sanderson’s desktop. He pointed his finger at an innocuous little icon of an eye and he double-tapped it.
A new screen opened up with the live video feed in a large box in the center of the screen over a light blue background. At the top corner was the logo of his company, an image of the Earth suspended in a net and the letters DVI superimposed over it. The letters stood for Digital Video Indexing Inc., the name of Jeffrey Alan Sanderson’s little software start-up that had already been valued on the ’Street at somewhere around $48 million, simply from the conjecture that they had made a new video search tool that had some eyebrows cocked at Google.
Indeed, Google was in the room, as were some major financiers and fund managers from some of the biggest money firms left after the crash of 2009 and subsequent consolidation of Oppenheimer and Janus Funds, Charles Schwab and Capitol One, and Chase Manhattan and Citibank; along with another dozen or so lesser-known but equally-rich companies that existed purely to create money from money, much like a dam creates water from water. Only with less distribution to the folks downstream.
Underneath the large box with the live video stream in it was an empty text field, cursor blinking, waiting for input. To the left of the box was a toolbar of some sort with several other icons.
“This version is brandless,” Sanderson said. “We can place any kind of skin or branding you can think of around it.” Heads nodded in the audience. “Now, I’ll just type in something simple. ‘Red tie.’” He clacked on the keyboard and hit enter.
The video stream multiplied into a total of seven smaller boxes. Centered in each one was a tight shot of a different red tie. Each tie was hanging around the neck of a different man in the room. There were audible gasps.
“Now,” Sanderson said, “comes the fun part.” He double-tapped on one of the images. The others went away, replaced by the four steady camera angles of the room, all zoomed in on the one person whose tie Sanderson just selected. Trevian Sjalbergh laughed uncomfortable at his own mealy and doughy visage beaming back at him, along with HD views of his right profile, left profile and the back of his head, all on the screen at the front of the room.
Sanderson tapped an icon that looked like a small timeline and then clicked on the front view of Sjalbergh, who was, by the way, a representative of a bank out of South Africa which had made its fortune largely on the blood diamond trade of the late 20th century.
The four boxes went away and were replaced with one stream of Sjalbergh’s face and a long timeline underneath it; three other, smaller boxes containing the different angles of Sjalbergh stacked to the side of the main one. Sanderson touched the end of the timeline and slowly began to drag it to the left. As he did, it quickly became apparent that the images on screen were slowly running backwards in time. More gasps.
“As you can see, with one command, and two clicks, I can now follow every moment of Mr. Sjalbergh’s time since he stepped into this room…” he slowed his finger on a shot of Sjalbergh picking his left nostril briefly, much to Sjalbergh’s chagrin and the delight of the rest of the audience, “as slowly…” he dragged his finger much more quickly to the left and the images reacted in a hyper rewind until Sjalbergh first appeared in the doorway of the room, “…or as quickly as I would like.” The audience was riveted, amazed at how seamless and simple this process appeared to be.
“And that’s not the end of it.” Sanderson tapped on another icon, this one a small picture of what appeared to be a kangaroo. Suddenly the main image jumped to a stream from another camera, obviously placed in the hallway leading to the conference room they were all seated in. Two small text fields appeared underneath the image. Someone whistled low in the back of the room. Sanderson dragged his finger across the timeline and Sjalbergh walked backwards out of the frame.
“And I can do this for every…single…camera…” he paused for dramatic effect between each word, dragging out the presentation. “…we have feeding into this software.” Sanderson typed, “13:43:04_10/21/12” into one field and “05:22:00_10/21/12” into the other. Sanderson quickly dragged his finger all the way to the end of the timeline, and Sjalbergh yelped as the image of him getting out of bed wearing just his boxers flashed onto the screen. Sanderson smiled down from the podium at him.
“That’s okay, Mr. Sjalbergh. We have the same imagery on every single person in this room.” Lots of uncomfortable seat shifting.
“Excuse me?!” shouted Erika Carollo, one of only a few women in the room. Around 40 years of age and conservatively dressed, she was also very well built; thanks to an hour-long daily Pilates routine followed by a 30-minute run.
“Mrs. Carollo, relax, this was included in the NDA you all signed when you agreed to attend. And we’ll destroy the footage once this presentation is complete.”
“I thought the clause about video taping was only for the presentation.” she shot back.
“Yes, however, we didn’t specify how long the presentation actually ran,” Sanderson laughed jovially. “Which is basically the duration of your visit to Aspen.”
Mrs. Carollo started to say something, thought better of it and just glared at Sanderson.
“It looks nice,” piped up a red-headed man a few rows back from the stage. “But we can do all of that with today’s editing software now. How do we know that’s not just what you’re doing here?”
Sanderson smiled. “Well, Dan, glad you asked.” He tapped on a left arrow icon at the bottom of the page a couple of times and the original live shot of the conference room came back up. He typed “red head” into the text field and two boxes came up, focused on images from Dan (O’Neil, the man who spoke up) and one other older woman in the back of the room with an expensive red dye job. He double-tapped on Dan’s image and went through the same exercise, except this time, he only went back as far as the point where Sanderson first brought up his laptop. He switched angles and views and demonstrated a couple of “Fun-filters” that added effects like grain or trails.
“And here’s the capper,” Sanderson added, after he’d sufficiently hooked each and every person in the room. Sanderson navigated back to the desktop, clicked on a drive icon and then selected Get Info from the file menu. “Everything—each and every single moment of each and every person present’s day today is all captured, in high-def, with all of the angles, from cameras all over this hotel, right here. He zoomed in on the section next to the word “Size.” No one present could believe their eyes.
It read, “72 MB on disk.”

Chapter Two
June 5, 2017
”Remind me to write a popular article on the compulsive reading of news. The theme will be that most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the unnecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the troubles and sins of five billion strangers. The title is ‘Gossip Unlimited’ — no, make that ‘Gossip Gone Wild.’” —Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein

Wallace Charles was on time for his shift.
He was a punctual man by nature. One of his father’s favorite clichés was, “ninety percent of life is being there.” He said it many times over the course of Wallace Charles’ life, and it stuck. Wallace Charles wasn’t an overly regimented person, but he was a person nonetheless, and people are creatures of habit. Wallace liked his habits and the order around them, and chose, when he could, to plan things out. He stuck to schedules, even on his “free” time, which may not have a particular plan laid out, but did have a certain block of time to be left unrestricted. Like Sunday evenings.
Last night had been such an evening. From 3 pm on, Wallace blocked off the time on his calendar, restricted all calls to his personal lines, turned off his welcome assistant at the front door and dimmed the window tinting to blackout. Wallace loved to watch old movies, and was particularly fond of John Wayne westerns. He pointed his remote at the reproduction of Van Gogh’s Starry Night on the wall and pushed a few buttons. A moment later, the painting dissolved to a friendly-looking menu with a search functionality.
He spoke aloud, “Wayne comma John.” The menu flickered and an image of the Duke, circa Big Jake appeared in the right corner. Beneath it was a brief bio of his career and across the screen were tabs that read, “Filmography,” “TV Appearances,” “Citations,” and “Pop References.”
“Filmography,” Wallace said.
The screen blinked and John Wayne’s movie catalogue was displayed in chronological order. Wallace pointed the remote at the screen and clicked on the down arrow, scrolling through the choices until he found the one he liked.
The rest of Wallace’s night was spent enjoying “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” followed by a quick run on the treadmill, shower and then bed.
It was unfortunate that Wallace was as regimented as he was (even though he wasn’t overly regimented), because when his director tried calling him a few times over the course of the evening, the calls were automatically diverted to his voicemail. Since Wallace was committed to his “free” time, he also disabled the caller ID notification on his home screen and shut down his cell phone completely. He effectively wrapped himself in a cocoon, shutting out the world for a few hours. The only thing that might have distracted him at all would have been some sort of a natural disaster, or someone actually physically knocking on the door, and no one did that anymore, except on Halloween or in the case of the elderly. And the only old people Wallace knew were his family a few thousand miles away, and his next door neighbor Sofia who was in a wheelchair and wouldn’t have been able to navigate the path to the front door without assistance anyway.
So, Wallace Charles had no way of knowing—when he left his home the next morning—what lay in wait for him at the office. That being said, Wallace was also an observant man, and even a blind man would have needed a paper bag over his head to avoid the screaming headlines and blaring reports coming from every station the next day. Wallace strode directly into Director’s office with a mixture of horror, fear and anger on his face.
“Where the hell have you been, Wally?”
The Director was young for the role; one of the youngest to hold such a high post, in fact. He was 44 years old, a graduate of Harvard Law, former editor of the Harvard Law Review, and had been trained at the Farm. He moved directly into CIA-Intelligence, and rocketed up the ranks there, thanks to a politically-savvy mind, squeaky clean background, and extremely high level of intelligence. He had his sights set on Director there when the Homeland Surveillance Act of 2013 was passed and this separate Department was created. The sitting President tapped him to head it up.
The Director wasn’t too keen on the idea, but when the President offered him carte blanche to run the unit as he saw fit and oversight only by the Executive branch, he couldn’t pass it up.
“I went off the grid last night, Jake,” Wallace said. “It was one of the quietest weeks in a year. I figured we were fine.”
“Yeah, well, show’s what you know.” Wallace ignored the barb.
“How the hell did this happen, Jake? We haven’t been breached since DHS was created. SCOUT is infallible.”
“Well, Wally, I’d contend that last night’s events would imply SCOUT is imminently fallible. And we’ve got a body count numbering somewhere around 700 that would agree with my sentiment.”
Wallace slumped into the chair opposite the Director’s desk and let out a low groan.
“That’s the worst since nine-eleven.”
“Yep.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Appropriate reference,” the Director noted, wryly. “Because we’re gonna get crucified.”