Chapter 21

I have no idea how long I was out. When I awoke I still felt exhausted, and wondered what had awakened me if I was so tired.

Mindy was still asleep, looking completely at peace. I watched her for a while, some part of my perverse brain comparing her to Karen, feature by feature. Karen still won, but I had to admit Mindy was remarkable.

I wondered about her tendency to hide her body in baggy clothes, maybe to fend off annoying guys like me trying to get her into bed, distracting her focus from her schoolwork. I dunno, just a guess. I could find out if I wanted to, but maybe another time.

I still felt tired, but now my mind was chugging away, processing something, and I didn’t seem to be able to relax enough to get back to sleep. I fought with myself for a few minutes, then gave up and slipped out of bed.

I found my clothes, more by feel than anything since they were in the shadows, and dressed quietly. I almost stepped on the baggie with the used condoms, but stopped just in time. I picked it up and stuck the sealed baggie in my pocket. No reason she should have to deal with it in the morning.

Walking around to her side of the bed, I knelt down and gave her a kiss on the cheek. She must have been a light sleeper, ‘cause her eyes popped open and she said, “Huh? What?”

“Go back to sleep, Mindy. I’m gonna go back to my dorm so I can sleep late in the morning. This was memorable.”

She grunted something, then closed her eyes. She probably wouldn’t even remember the conversation in the morning.

I closed her door quietly and made my way outside, past the snoozing guard at the desk. I dropped the baggie in a waste bin somewhere on the path back to my dorm. Back in my room, I found Larry snoring on his bed, one leg falling off the bed and resting on the floor.

In seconds I was undressed and under my blanket, and asleep shortly after. I guess I had needed the walk to relax enough to get back to sleep.

It was close to 10:30 when I awoke. Larry was gone, and I hadn’t heard him leave. I showered and changed, then found a late breakfast/early lunch.

Leaving the dining hall I could almost hear the voice of my conscience intoning, “Course prep. Research paper. Get going.” I’d been avoiding it, but it was always lurking just around the corner, waiting to pounce. I shrugged and grudgingly agreed with it.

So I fell into the rhythm once again, trying to keep up with everything. The actual memorizing was simple now, and only required some alone time with Brain Sponge and a textbook. The time sink was the homework that had to be passed in, the papers to be sketched out and written, and so on. We’d already had a few quizzes, which I’d aced, and bigger exams were on the horizon.

Larry, I was pleased to notice, had developed some reasonable study habits and no longer had those weekend panic attacks where he tried to fit several days of work into Sunday night. He spaced his study out over the week, though he still donned his party animal hat on Friday night and Saturday. Some casual questions had convinced me that he was up to date on his work.

Karen’s latest email had her sounding almost elated. She ... well, let her tell it.

It’s raining here, Tom. That seems like such a rare occurrence that I felt I should mention it. Not that we have much time to enjoy the sunshine when it is here. Too busy. Classes seem to consume all my attention, going to them, studying for them, doing problem sets, writing papers. Even when I have to collapse ‘cause I can’t do any more, there’s still stuff to be done. There’s just not enough time in the day.

And to add to the burden, get this: I ran into the woman CS prof I mentioned to you, who I’d done some scut work for last year. She stopped me and said that a new project had come in, funded by some company and to be designed by her and some others on the faculty. It involves AI and finding the best methods for allowing machines to learn -- what kinds of data, what form it’s in, how much of it, like that. And she asked if I could help!

It’s still scut work, but I’d really be contributing something to the project! I’d be analyzing data sets and figuring out what are the best scenarios. The main researchers would then focus on those things and fine tune it, try to do some projections about learning speed and so on. Can you believe it? I’m finally going to get to help with some research. Maybe I’ll even get my name in a footnote!

So I’m really excited about this, but worrying about how I’m going to fit it in with all my other work. But no way am I going to pass this up! I’m so excited. And I haven’t forgotten that it was you that suggested that I do this. So thanks for that.

Her email went on with other things about her life and school work, but that was the thing that stood out. I was happy for her. I thought that this would help her balance the life pressures, help her to keep her eye on what she eventually hoped to do, even if her grades suffered slightly as a result.

The next day, after Bio class, I stopped my the campus post office, something I did infrequently because I now had email to communicate with Karen. Most of the stuff I got in my campus mailbox were ads, usurious credit card offers and the occasional invitation to purchase a Florida timeshare.

But when I’d discarded those, I found one letter remaining. It took me a moment to make the connection to the return address and the name “T. Wallace”. Ted. Why was he sending me mail? Some tax form I’d forgotten to fill out? I tore it open. It was printed, not handwritten, and I smiled that he now felt confident enough with computers to do the letter on a PC.

Hello, Tom. I hope school is going well. Your replacement took some time to learn the ropes (longer than you!) but he’s finally got it mastered, mostly.

I’m writing because I had an odd visitor a couple of days ago. He asked if you had worked here, that he was trying to get in touch with you. Perhaps I shouldn’t have, but I did eventually say that you had been here over the summer.

He said he wanted to get in touch with you and asked if I could give him an address where he could contact you. I didn’t feel right about giving out that information, and said so. He looked a little miffed, but finally said that that was reasonable. But he did ask me if I’d forward his contact information to you so you could make the decision about whether to connect.

He said phones were not good since he wasn’t often at his desk, so he gave me an email address (see below). He said his name was Stan, I forget the last name.

I hope that it was okay to let him know you’d worked here, and that I haven’t inadvertently caused any problems for you. Please drop in and say hello when you’re back in Cleveland over the holidays.

P.S. New catalog’s at the printer’s, should be mailed soon!

Well, that was weird, Stan trying to track me down. I had never even told him my last name; he only knew me as Tom, so he must have gone into every storefront near that entrance and asked if someone named Tom had worked there over the summer. There must be some urgency if he was trying to get in touch with me so earnestly.

Still, I preferred that he not know who I am, where I lived, in fact nothing about me at all. Except for my first name.

But Stan was pursuing something that I wanted to know about, too: Beckham and his little science project. Why was Beckham back in town? What was he planning to do?

I put that in the back of my head as I walked to my next class.

That evening, after dinner, I thought again about Stan. I suppose my unconscious had been nibbling at the problem and had formulated a scheme to preserve my anonymity while allowing me to contact Stan. I sat down at my computer and created a Hotmail email account with a bogus name. I chose ‘TomTomThePipersSon’ from the nursery rhyme. Okay, so not very creative, but unlikely to have been chosen by someone else.

With that new moniker, I was able to send a short email via Hotmail to the email address Stan had left. It basically said, ‘Here I am, what do you want?’ But politely. I read for a while, then I went to sleep.

The next morning I got up later than usual, and had to rush to get some food in me before Statistics class. So it was almost noon before I got back to my room. I booted the computer, and out of curiosity logged in to Hotmail. Sure enough, there was something in my Inbox. It was from “Woj09@aol.com”.

Tom, I hope this finds you well. I apologize for the awkwardness in trying to track you down. Your boss was a little cagey about it, and rightfully so. I should have asked you for contact details directly but I didn’t know we wouldn’t run into each other again. Poor planning on my part.

You were very helpful in your discoveries about Beckham and McGuire, and you asked good questions, also a help. With that information we were able to dig out some basics about the two of them. And also get a general sense of their purpose in coming back to Cleveland, namely trying to ferret out the names of possibly affected people who were connected in some way with Wanamaker Labs.

You know about the spurious “psychological research” project with the questionnaires. We don’t have specifics, but we were able to observe a number of people who came in for “interviews”, some of whom I recognized from when I worked there.

And I have also found out that some of those people were asked to return for a second interview (additional honorarium for their time), though I haven’t yet been able to discover what was asked in the second round.

Nonetheless it seems clear that they are trying to isolate those who might have been affected before the lab closed down. I expect that they will attempt to determine what changes have resulted in the “subjects”.

I confess that I don’t know what to do next. Nothing they’ve done so far is remotely illegal or unethical, other than the bogus “research” questions, so we can’t report them. I don’t even know who we’d report them to. We will continue to monitor them and hope they’ll do something to indicate their true goals soon.

I don’t expect you to do anything with this new information. This email is mostly a courtesy because you were helpful at the beginning, and I thought you should know. I hadn’t had a chance to ask you before you left: Did you ever come to feel like you had changed somehow, or do you feel the same as you always did?

I check this email daily, so if you have any information you can pass it on here.

Best wishes, Stan.

So we had guessed correctly, it seems. Beckham and McGuire -- I had started thinking of them as The Gruesome Twosome in my head -- were trying to identify affected people and determine what new abilities they’d acquired.

It puzzled me because as I understood it he had been frustrated while the lab was still running because he couldn’t find any significant new abilities that could be exploited. That must have changed after the lab was closed.

Stan hadn’t mentioned any interest in the ones whose lives they had destroyed with their illegal experiments, such as Canary, so it appeared they were only interested in the ones whose new abilities might be worth exploiting.

I couldn’t see any purpose in even hinting to Stan that I’d felt some change. I preferred to keep that information to myself. And I didn’t see any way I could help him ferret out more information about Beckham’s new activities from here. In the end, I simply wrote back and thanked him for keeping me in the loop and said, no, I hadn’t felt any changes at all.

My focus had to be on school right now, and I put Stan out of my mind. And my routine returned to the boringly normal “classes, study, read, write” rhythm of my days. Every day or two I’d write Karen, answering her emails, and occasionally I’d go to a movie or a campus party, mostly to get out of my rut.

Periodically, I’d run into that Spanish guy I’d met, Alfonso -- no, Al -- Marquez. He’d say a quick hello, sometimes add a few words in Spanish because he knew I’d understand it. Seems like a nice guy.

Larry wasn’t entirely wrong about me becoming a school tool, though I hadn’t yet let him drag me to one of his usual weekend alcohol blowouts. I wasn’t that desperate yet.

Sometimes I’d see Mindy passing on her way to a class or lab, as was I. She’d smile, but there was seldom enough time to stop and trade small talk. But every time I saw her I’d get a flashback of her naked butt and I’d smile to myself. Great butt.

By the time midterms came around, I was in a rhythm that kept me current in all my classes, so the exams themselves weren’t that hard. I wouldn’t say that to the others in my classes, some of whom looked like they’d been hit with a croquet mallet afterwards.

“Brain Sponge” had allowed me to absorb everything in the book and the lecture notes, and I’d sometimes peeked into the lecturers’ heads to get a sense of the ‘grid’ that allowed me to connect all the disparate ideas into something that approached a complete understanding of the subject.

It was, of course, incomplete, because we hadn’t yet been given all the information that would come later, in this course or in future courses. So maybe more like a ‘complete understanding’ onto which we would continually add more detail and depth. I could live with that.

So I was feeling pretty good when exams were done, ready for the second lap that would take us up to finals and Christmas break. Karen again went through her self-flagellation that she hadn’t done well enough in her midterms, but somehow it seemed less desperate than what she’d sounded like this time last year. I was pretty sure that when her grades came back she’d again have mostly A’s.

One Tuesday morning between classes I again stopped at the campus post office and in addition to the usual ads and credit card solicitations there was an official form notifying me of a parcel too large to fit into the box. I went to the counter and handed over the form. The clerk disappeared and came back holding a large, thick package wrapped in brown paper. The return address showed ‘Wallace Specialties’. I smiled.

I carried it around with my books for the rest of the day because I didn’t have enough time between classes and labs to return to my dorm room and drop it off.

When classes finally ended for the day I was able to lay back on my bed and open the package. I had to hand it to Ted, the revised catalog layout was much classier, more inviting. I surmised that the previous catalog design had been his father’s baby. This was newer, more modern and relaxed.