Once he was on his own, George started school again, in a manner of speaking. His major? Whatever he was interested in, which was mainly computers by then. All he needed was a library with a decent internet connection, the soul of a cat burglar, and a case of insomnia that came naturally after moving from family to family where nobody respected your stuff. Conveniently, George’s belongings had been whittled down to what he could comfortably carry in a backpack.
One of the things George had working in his favor was living at a time and in a place that had devalued books, objective facts, and pretty much anything that got in the way of blissful ignorance. Otherwise he may have had more trouble getting around the library’s security, which was, frankly, a joke. The computers were locked down six different ways, but that didn’t stop him from using them where they were. And as far as any other burglar-proofing was concerned, it fell somewhere north of a cemetery, one of the few places even less likely to get broken into, now that grave robbing had stopped being a thing. Dead bolts, two—those were the security system—and useless if you were already inside.
George’s MO was pretty simple: split his time between haunting the shelves and surfing the web until minutes before closing, when he’d dart to the men’s room, stand on the toilet seat, and shift an acoustical tile out of place. A steel-lattice support beam was close enough to pull himself up by and into the rafters, where he’d nudged the tile he removed back into place with the toe of his shoe. And then he waited for the lights to go out down there and the sound of the doors being locked. After that, drop down from the ceiling, pull a flashlight from his pack, and wander to where they kept the books on computer science, including all four volumes of The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth, volume one of which carried a blurb by no less a geek god than Bill Gates, offering to consider a job application from anyone who could get through all 652 pages of it. And that was just the first volume. By the time he’d be ready to hijack a certain CEO’s EV, George was nearly finished with volume three.
When living off geek discards wasn’t enough, George would collect cans and bottles for their California Redemption Value or CRV, basically a deposit dressed up as an incentive to recycle. With his hacking skills improving all the time, it might be expected he’d attempt something more lucrative, like identity theft. But George wasn’t interested in hurting anyone who couldn’t afford it. The owners of Trader Joe’s, on the other hand, probably weren’t going to bed hungry anytime soon.
And so he decided to maximize the efficiency of his CRV collection. He did this by printing a bottle’s bar code onto a strip of reflective bicycle tape he then wrapped around a Coke bottle he weighed down with small rocks. He’d take this to a bottle return machine, the neck lassoed with a piece of twine in case the weight wasn’t enough to keep it from being rolled into the crusher. And then he’d guard the machine as it spun the same bottle around, over and over, the CRV tallied in a do-loop until he reached the store’s daily limit and the machine spat out the receipt to take to the cash register.
George didn’t consider this stealing so much as an investment on behalf of society in himself, George Jedson, who’d begun seeing himself as the nexus of San Francisco’s past and its rapidly emerging future, from Haight-Ashbury to Silicon Valley. And if anyone had ever asked him what he wanted to do with his life, George would have summed it up so that it incorporated both: “I want to code the best minds of my generation.”
9
Their neighbors would tease her father about the satellite dish, which was nothing to rival Arecibo, but could probably give NORAD a good run. Nevertheless: “Whatchadoin’, neighbor? Lookin’ for intelligent life?”
“Well, given the local choices,” her father would say back.
And then they’d laugh, her father and the neighbor, because neither man counted the other as being included in the implicitly maligned “local choices.” Either that or it was another inside joke of adulthood Pandora was still waiting to get.
While the Lynches’ setup was ahead of its time for Fairbanks, it wasn’t like the locals lacked their own means for communicating with the outside world. Take Pandora’s grandfather. When he was still alive, Herman Lynch had shown his granddaughter what he called the granddaddy of that shiny new webby thing all the kids “down there” were talking about: ham radio.
“I can talk to anybody in the world,” Herman had said, “under the right atmospheric conditions. Assuming they’ve got a setup and handle and feel like talking.”
To Pandora, Grandpa Lynch’s setup looked like something straight out of James Whale’s Frankenstein, the DVD of which her dad played pretty much every Halloween, along with The Exorcist when she was older. And while her grandfather’s comms center lacked Dr. F’s zapping Jacob’s ladders and Tesla coils, it nevertheless had plenty of dials and boxes that leaked orange light from the actual vacuum tubes they had inside.
When she was little, Pandora would sit on her grandfather’s knee as he soldered. She liked watching the metal tip of the iron turn from yellow-blue-black to incandescent cherry red, a pencil-thin lick of blue smoke curling away from it before Grandpa announced it was ready. And then he’d bring it down on the powdery gray twist of oxidized lead, turning it with a touch into a quivering bead of silver. They’d get away from him sometimes—more frequently the older he got—the runaway metal rolling like a ball of mercury, off the edge of the worktable, leaving a silver splash on his work boots, every pair of which was as spangled as any Van Gogh night.
It was Herman’s ham-radio hobby that influenced her father to become a therapist who only saw patients long distance over the internet. As far as where Herman picked up the bug, he thanked the navy for that—the signal corps specifically. He’d served during WWII, where his job was to listen to static all day, running up and down the radio spectrum, trying to discern if there was any snow on the line that might be something else.
Herman Lynch hadn’t waited to be drafted—or even for America to enter the war. He’d signed up and was among the first to arrive after the attack on Pearl Harbor, an experience that stayed with him all his life and one of the reasons why, after the war, he “retired” to Alaska, where he planned to become a recluse—Herman the Hermit—fishing and hunting to keep his body alive, tinkering with homemade electronics, maybe a little astronomy because it was good for the soul. And that’s pretty much how it worked out—with the exception of being a hermit. Instead, he found himself with a wife, of all things, and before it was too late, a son, too, named after a common bit of ham-radio lingo.
“It drove me crazy as a kid,” Roger told Pandora. “I’d keep thinking my dad was calling me, only to find out he was just agreeing with somebody on the radio.”
Roger remembered a lot of the same things his daughter remembered about Herman, who’d been a lot more precise with his soldering when his son was growing up. For the boy Roger, the glowing iron was a magic wand, enabling his father to create all manner of miracles, like a clock with no moving parts, only a series of tubes with their own magical-sounding names—Nixies—their filaments twisted into a nest of numbers from zero to nine, each glowing in sequence as the minutes and hours counted up. Another time, his father built a sound recorder out of a couple of empty spools and a long strand of wire, winding and unwinding between the two, the magic happening somewhere in the middle, where the wire passed through what looked like the clippy part of a clothespin.