Forever Yours
66
Vacation
RYAN PICKED WILLIAM UP at the airport to go see their grandson, but Dr. Mikesel, the pediatrician, had already been in to check the infant, approve the paperwork, and pronounce Lisa ready to go home. Germaine and Cassie were waiting in front of the birth center to take them home and that’s where Ryan and William met them.
“I have a namesake!” William said. “I’m glad you used the Benoit name in the middle and not Hartman. Not a bad last name, but just no ring to it in the middle.”
“And Henry after my father,” Ryan said. Everyone looked from Ryan to his son, who was quietly laughing. “And my son, of course.”
“You know, both our children have the same middle name as me,” Lisa said to the excited grandfathers. “That’s so I can use my full name and be identified as a parent.”
“Well, yes. Of course,” William said. “Still, it’s nice to have a namesake. You aren’t going to tell me that William is someone else’s family name, are you? Your father, Chastity?”
“Unknown,” Chastity said. “Less said the better.”
“Chastity is our daughter now,” Sylvia said. “And yours, of course. So, you could say William is her father’s name, too.”
“Chastity,” Bill said, reaching for her. “It makes no difference who donated to your creation. You are our daughter now. We love you like we love Lisa.”
“Thank you, Bill. I always feel that when I’m with you and Jackie.”
Of course, the grandparents all wanted to hold Cassie as well as baby Will. Cassie was not sure what to make of the new infant. She wanted her mommy, and soon Lisa had a baby at each breast.
Beau and Solange waited a couple of weeks before they flew up to visit their newest great-grandchild. They were ecstatic about having another heir, but Bill had no intentions of buying more stock to put in the trust. He did, however, stay for the board meeting the following Wednesday.
“We have developed several prototypes of the self-charging desktop,” Henry announced. “The project has yielded a dozen new patents. Two major manufacturers have agreed to license and produce the device. I say ‘major manufacturers’ advisedly. You probably won’t recognize the brand names, but we have restricted licensing to computers made in the USA. There are not that many still manufactured here. One of the manufacturers will be making a server that we have agreed to purchase some 2,000 units of over the next four years to completely re-equip Page Services’ server farm.”
“That sounds like we are paying someone to license our technology,” Beau said in the meeting.
“Yes, it does. But Darla’s group has already been circulating the specs to other server farms who are waiting to see if we are successful in making the conversion before they start stacking up orders for their own farms—and most of those farms are much larger than Page Services. We’re still a pretty small operation by global standards. The big four operators of server farms have all ordered test units. They’ve finally awakened to the reality of power consumption as a limitation to their servers. They see this as a way to break free of the power monopolies that are constantly stretched to meet needs and are continually increasing the cost per megawatt consumed.”
“Megawatt? You mean kilowatt?” Beau asked.
“When we talk about home power usage, we can refer to kilowatts,” Henry said. “Server farms are consuming megawatts. A single server farm consumes as much power on a daily basis as a mid-size city. This development will break the stranglehold of the power monopolies on mass computing.”
“Why aren’t we rolling this out worldwide instead of just to the US?” Luke asked.
“We’ll get there. We want to show a return on investment before we start farming it out to cut-rate manufacturers. Get a head start on things,” Henry said. “There are a lot of issues, which include licensing the manufacture of the fuel cells. Currently, there is only one manufacturing location, but we will not be allowed to have a monopoly on them for long.”
“One manufacturer of the servers and one of the desktop?” Craig asked. As chief operating officer, he had a much closer relationship with the nuts and bolts of the company.
“Yes,” Henry said. “And for the first time, Open Cloak optimization, power management, security, search, and fuel cells will all be included in each system. Of course, we’d like to see our own corporate office convert to the self-charging computers, but that’s an area I think we’ll start seeing a lot of interest in as soon as we can license to the big manufacturers who assemble everything overseas.”
“What’s next?” Luke asked.
“We’ve completed the acquisition of LifeStory,” Craig said. “This will enable deeper integration of the memoir questions with Forever Yours. While LifeStory will continue to be a brand with people devoted to editing and producing memoir books, it will not be a separate company. The work will be completely integrated into Forever Yours. The team is working on integrating new filter technology into the application that Henry has been spearheading. Part of what it will include is some personality testing. So, when a user sets up their singularity, they will be asked a number of questions similar to some of the big names in personality testing.”
“If I was asked five hundred questions when I started setting up a piece of software, I’d throw it in the trash,” Izzy said.
“You’d be right to,” Henry responded. “The filters will be set up so that questions will be fed to the user along with their story prompts. They won’t face the entire test in a single sitting. It would make no sense to have the filters set up before there was any content present. It becomes integral to the recording of personal history.”
Of course, none of that had stopped Henry from inputting the content of not just one, but four different respected personality tests. These weren’t tests that had the user answer a dozen questions and then pronounce him a type A personality. Henry answered hundreds of questions and fine-tuned the filters to take the results into consideration.
He took time off work to stay with his children, holding them and telling them stories, even though they didn’t understand much of what they read. It was the voice and tone. He remembered an old movie in which four men tried to raise a baby. One had told the others that it didn’t make a difference what they read to the baby. It was all about the tone of the voice. He read the sports pages, making them sound like a fantastic adventure story. Well, it worked.
Since Henry read to his children with Forever Yours recording, he developed the habit of making sure he read the whole book, and not just the pictures or the simple story. That meant he held his children in his arms in a reclining chair so they could cuddle close, and read books starting with the cover. He read the copyright and dedication, the table of contents, the text complete with chapter numbers and headings, and then read any publisher information, acknowledgements, colophon, and author info that was in the back of the book. If there was a synopsis on the back cover, he read that, too. He wanted to make sure what he read was not somehow credited to him as the reader, but to the correct author and publisher.
He also began collecting books for the children’s bookshelf, not limiting the collection to what was age appropriate, but creating shelves of books for different ages. The shelves included many of his favorite books when he was growing up.
“I’m surprised that you keep bringing home paper books,” Lisa said as they sat in the nursery with the babies. “As buried in a computer as you are, I would expect you to have everything digital. eBooks and audio books. Online stories.”
“Yeah,” Henry mused. “I have just about every book on the shelves on my tablet as well. But, there’s something special about books. It’s the ability to see what the author accomplished. That’s one of the problems of being a computer programmer, you know? People can go to Pythia Speaks and ask a question. She answers, and they are disappointed or satisfied or even amazed with her response. But no one knows how many thousands of lines of code were written to make her what she is. They see the answer to their question. They don’t see what the developer, the UI designer, the AI programmer, or anyone else accomplished.”
“Do you not feel recognized enough? I don’t think anyone would care to look at a shelf full of your code,” Lisa said.
“No. Code isn’t meant to be read. People see it in the rendition it was intended to take. A question and an answer. But that’s not true of books. They are intended to be something you hold in your hand and feel the weight of, smell the paper and ink. Or in Cassie’s case, taste it. How much does a twenty megabyte book weigh? How is it different from a one megabyte book? Maybe War and Peace is or isn’t more valuable than Good Dog Carl, but one should know when they pick it up that they are different.”
“They have a different size and weight and thickness and texture,” Lisa said, nodding her head and shifting William to her other breast. Cassie looked at her brother a little jealously, but she’d recently discovered peaches and had a full tummy.
“I can’t help but think that when an author writes a novel—or even a textbook—that they have an image in their mind of what that book will look and feel like. It probably isn’t what we see on a screen,” Henry said.
“A bookshelf—not just the words on paper—is a glimpse inside the author’s mind,” Lisa agreed. “But so many of the books you’ve put on their bookshelves are so far advanced for them, don’t you think?”
“They won’t read books that are too advanced for them. No matter what the content, a child won’t read it unless it interests them. They self-select. That’s why censorship is an idiocy. The only person censorship helps is the censor. It protects that person’s beliefs and viewpoint. It doesn’t protect children. If Will picks up a book about sex when he’s seven and reads it, he won’t understand most of it. So, he will ask questions. Of whom? Of you and me and Chas and Germaine. We’re the ones who will need to explain what things mean.”
“I don’t think being a parent is as easy as people seem to believe,” Lisa sighed.
Cassie’s first birthday was July 25. Her brother was two months old the next day. The family only celebrated Cassie’s birthday. It was her special day. They decided there would be no birthday parties until they quit counting the children’s ages in months, weeks, or days.
However, Luke, Isobel, Paul, and Grace came to the Pascal home for a nice barbecue and to let the children play together on Saturday the twenty-sixth. The families relaxed and told stories of the latest developments in their children.
Once little Paul was present, Cassie forgot all about her brother. She was focused on doing whatever Paul could do. At five months older than Cassie, Izzy and Luke’s son was fully vertical and mobile. Cassie was steady on her feet as long as she had something to touch. While the children played, she took off across the middle of the room to catch up with Paul. She stopped about three-quarters of the way and looked around. Then she lost her balance and plopped down on her butt. That didn’t last long before she was up and going again.
“Cassie just doesn’t want Paul to be ahead of her,” Henry laughed.
“Oh, just wait,” Luke said. “Will is watching her like a hawk. He might not be able to walk yet, but the seed has been planted.”
“He’s rolling over already,” Chastity said. “I’m sure it took Cassie longer than two months.”
“Say, how’s your brother doing?” Lisa asked Izzy.
“Oh. Okay. My father tried to entice him back to Pittsburgh. Even offered him the use of Belle if he needed a woman. Can you believe it?” Isobel said.
“That is so gross!” Lisa said.
“Isandro pays Belle for her time,” Chastity said. “It makes no difference to her who it’s for.”
“What? How do you know that?” Isobel asked.
“I know who she is. I don’t actually know her. I just know who she is. As soon as she has all she thinks she can get from him, she’ll be out of his life like greased lightning,” Chastity said.
“He threatened to sue us for custody of his grandson,” Luke said. “And support. We got a no-contact order.”
“It doesn’t surprise me that he’d try to find a way to get your money,” Henry sighed. He’d already decided to look into the life of Isandro Perez. He was becoming a problem for his friends.
Henry sat in his computer room at home late at night. He thought he was through with this kind of crap. He swore he wouldn’t interfere in people’s lives again after he erased Chastity’s pornographic and escort files. But Izzy’s father was becoming a problem that threatened his friends and his godson. It wouldn’t hurt to look.
He started searches that were far more sophisticated than what he’d used in the past. The search engine had learned his preferences and the kind of information he was looking for. It was faster and the results were much clearer.
He didn’t make it to bed that night. He simply read the files.
Isandro wasn’t a pleasant person. There didn’t seem to be anything outright illegal about anything he’d done, though there were many things that seemed shady. Even some contacts who had been arrested for various crimes. Felipe and Isobel had both filed complaints against the man for harassment. Police didn’t pay much attention to them because it was a domestic matter. And they were Hispanic. Those people were constantly harassing each other.
But there was another option open.
In the new administration, there were many reforms announced in the treatment of immigrants and the misuse of executive power. But a simple truth of governance was that no incoming administration would ever voluntarily give up gains in power from a previous administration. It made no difference what party was in power.
The states had made significant strides in preventing law enforcement from showing up in masks and plain clothes. Some states passed new laws. A federal measure was advanced and rejected. Other states discovered laws on their books dating back as far as the Civil War, banning the wearing of masks, loitering, or congregating, except for masquerade parties, public parades, and theatre performances.
In spite of all this, arrests of undocumented aliens continued—whether or not the specific person was actually illegal or committing an illegal act. Once a power is given, it is impossible to take away.
It might do nothing more than make Isandro uncomfortable, but Henry leaked his name, address, contacts, and no-contact orders to ICE. It was all he was willing to do.
“We need that vacation,” Chastity sighed in September. They’d had the holiday weekend off and Henry had managed a couple of rounds of golf, carefully watched over by his caddie, Germaine. He’d grown used to glimpses of her handgun when she was watching over him. It was never present when she was with the children, though.
The weekend had been far too brief.
“What’s your suggestion, love?” Lisa asked.
“How about I find a nice resort where we can all go this winter? Isobel and Luke might want to go their own way, but I’ll bet they’d be happy to send Grace and Paul with us. Seems like we can find a beach and some pure white sand. I think with five adults we should be able to have fun with three babies. Don’t you think?”
“That’s a great idea,” Henry said. “We need someplace where we don’t think about work and can just focus on our family. I just want to play!”
“Well, with Germaine and Grace to watch the kids for a while, you should get a chance to play some,” Lisa laughed. “As long as it’s with us.”
Chastity was a great arranger. She found a resort in Fort Myers that could accommodate their extended family in a four-bedroom ‘beach cottage’ and booked them for a week in October. Henry and Germaine took on a different challenge: a comfortable car for the family.
They’d managed pretty well in the SUV, which would just hold eight people at maximum capacity, so it was very tight when either Beau and Solange or Bill and Jackie came to visit. It was fortunate they packed light. But to make a family trip with three babies and all their gear required a vehicle with more room.
Equipping a luxury van for the family took a while. Custom seats for the second and third row that faced each other was a top feature. A three-passenger fourth row still left ample cargo space for all the things needed when traveling with children. The nine-passenger capacity could be expanded with a removable fifth row bench seat.
They considered flying, but felt that would be more hassle than they could deal with. They’d need to occupy the entire first class section on some planes and that was an unlikely option. Henry immediately rejected Luke’s suggestion that he buy a plane. Luke, of course, was perfectly happy in his Escalade which had plenty of room for the four in his family, including Grace. Isobel loved her convertible sports car and Luke’s Corvette was kept covered in the garage. One of the company security drivers picked him up and transported both him and Isobel to work most days.
It was 1,150 miles from Pittsburgh to Fort Myers and they intended to relax the entire way. Even Luke’s father had to agree it was a great choice for Henry’s extended family and could even accommodate taking Luke and Isobel with them when they wanted to all travel together.
Luke and Isobel, however, decided it was an excellent opportunity for them to visit her brother in Los Angeles and watch him play for the Bruins. Chastity made their travel arrangements as well. It was one of the parts of her job at the company that she was no longer directly involved in. She’d hired people to handle booking the many trips Open Cloak employees took. She enjoyed the opportunity to make the family’s travel arrangements.
Seventeen hours driving was still a lot. Lisa and Chastity took turns driving so Germaine wasn’t behind the wheel all the time. Henry declined driving at all. He’d only gone with Germaine to choose the van so he could pay for it. He wasn’t even sure his driver’s license was still current. He only used his passport for ID.
They stopped overnight in Charlotte, North Carolina, and again in Jacksonville, Florida. Eventually, they got to the beach resort in Fort Myers where they had a four-bedroom house practically on the beach.
That evening, all eight strolled along the beach and watched the sunset, then had dinner in the resort restaurant. They could feel the stress melting away. Henry even indulged in a margarita, though no one else in the family drank. Lisa would, but not while she was nursing Will.
In addition to being a great nanny, Grace was accomplished in the kitchen and had breakfast ready when people started stirring in the morning. Germaine was conflicted when Henry joined a foursome on the resort’s golf course, but Chastity convinced her that he was a more likely target than the family, sitting by the pool, the beach, or in the resort’s children’s play area.
Germaine consulted with resort security, but then joined Henry as his caddie on the golf course.
Everyone was exhausted by dinnertime and sat on their lanai watching the sunset.
And so the vacation went. They talked to Luke and Isobel for a few minutes each evening, assuring them their son was fine and catching up on their reunion with Felipe. They’d seen him play on Saturday and were staying for a second home game the following weekend before flying home.
Paul and Cassie loved the beach, even when their parents erected an umbrella over them so they didn’t get too much sun. Henry, Germaine, and Grace took a walk at the edge of the water with them and pointed out the seashells. Paul and Cassie both collected handfuls.
“Mommy. Sells!” Cassie exclaimed when they returned to the umbrella.
“Oh, how pretty!” Chastity said. As soon as she’d examined the loot, Cassie turned to Lisa.
“Mommy, look!” Lisa smiled and touched the shells in Cassie’s hand. Cassie gasped as she let go of the shells. “Will sells!” The fifteen-month-old toddler took off at an amazing speed toward the water. Henry spun and chased his giggling daughter to the water’s edge where he scooped her up in his arms and motorboated her tummy. They picked up another shell and turned to head back to their blanket.
“We should go in now,” Lisa said. “I need a nap. I mean the children. Kiddos need a nap.”
“Potty!” Paul said. At nearly two years old, he was working very hard to use the toilet every time.
Grace turned from taking down the umbrella and nearly lost it. Chastity caught it and grinned at her. Germaine had her bag over her shoulder and caught Paul’s hand.
“I’ll take him up,” she said to Grace. “Go ahead and help pack up.”
“Who said five adults were enough to handle three children?” Lisa asked as Henry and Cassie returned to the chaos.
They finished stuffing blankets into their bag and Henry handed Cassie off to Chastity so he could carry the bulk of the beach equipment.
Just as she was nearing the cottage, Germaine was pushed by a man emerging from the shadows nearby. The man grabbed Paul.
“You’re coming with me, kid,” he shouted.
He rapidly headed for a dirty brown Taurus parked behind the family’s van.
Germaine’s actions were smooth and practiced. As she sprinted toward the man, her bag fell from her arm, revealing her Walther P22 in her hand. She pulled the clip from the pocket of her beach robe and slid it home.
“Stop!” She yelled. “Stop or I’ll shoot!”
Henry heard the shout and dropped the beach gear to run toward Germaine and Paul. He was still a few yards away when she pulled the trigger.
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
