Chapter 1

CHARACTERS:
THE THORNBERRY’S:
36 JENNIFER
39 ROBERT
13 PRIEST
12 ELIZABETH
10 CHRISTINE
9 MICHAEL
9 JESSICA
7 MATTHEW
5 SAMUEL

Hey – my name is Priest! I know ... make all the jokes now?

Are you done? Maybe you’ll think of more as my rather incredible story goes along.

My last name is Thornberry, another item in my life I couldn’t do anything about. I had the idea of changing my name when I was old enough, but by then, everyone was calling me Priest.

Now, I’m 44, part of a huge family, but I’ve got a secret!

Back when I was thirteen, in 1989, working on my old Mac Plus, there was a storm, but it didn’t bother me. I was working last minute, adding to a document for 6^th grade and just when I went to save the document, electricity burst from the back of my computer and I was knocked out.

I woke up in the hospital, with my sister Betty yelling, “HE’S AWAKE!”

“I think God heard you, Betty, calm down,” I said. A nurse, doctor plus my folks and all my brothers & sisters came in the room.

Everybody but my mother and father were told to leave the room. I was given a complete bill of health, being told to come back if I have any severe headaches.

“Are you sure he’s OK,” Betty said coming back in, “He looks funny to me!”

After getting a lot of grief from my little brothers, I was taken home where I found my computer looking like it was hit by lightning.

After disconnecting the mouse and keyboard, I began to take it completely apart, using my entire school workplace to separate it into its parts.

When I picked up the processor chip, with non-ferrous picker-uppers, my brain seemed to assimilate quickly everything I was looking at. I left my room with all the allowance money I could find; I usually hid it pretty well. I told mom that I was going to the hardware store on my bike and did just that. I really went to the electronics store, asking, “Where can I find another one of these?” showing them the chip.

“This is really old, kid. Let me get you something from the back,” the eighteen-year-old said. He came back saying, “Here, it’s yours for twenty bucks.”

It was in an ESD bag. And he told me not to open it until I got home. He also handed me a free software upgrade.

I paid him and left, heading straight home.

With a headache starting, I worked very precisely taking the chip he handed me, and it fit as I put it all back together, using a soldering iron, wondering how I was able to do this since I never could before. I added the keyboard and mouse to the unit that had a very fine line that looked like a crack in the glass, but it powered up just fine.

I put the disc in and it self-started, installing system 6.0.3 – that was way cool! I had been using System 3.0, which only let you open one application at a time. I saw a symbol on the bottom right corner of the screen and was about to click on it when...

Betty came into my room asking, “Did it survive the attack,” adding a snort at the end of it.

“It’s working fine, sis. First thing in the morning, would you like to try it?”

“O-kay, why are you going to let me use it ... is it going to explode while I’m using it?”

“No, not at all. If you genuinely like it, I’ll let you use it as much as you want. If you’ll help me talk mom and dad into letting me get a much newer model, then I would give this to you. You deserve one of your own, for girl stuff.”

“OK, but if you are setting me up for some kind of joke, I will be pissed,” she said walking out of my room.

On the same street as us, but a few blocks down, were my mother’s parents, Ruth and Richard. Somewhere else nearby were mom and dad’s brothers and sisters along with spouses and lots and lots of first and second cousins. To give you all their names would be very redundant, with many Michael’s, Charles, Richards, but I was the only Priest of the bunch.

I had first cousins, second cousins, great aunts, and a few great-great-great grandmas still alive. You could say I had ‘Cousins by the Dozens.’

I was pretty good in school before my computer was killed by electrocution, but suddenly, the next day, I found myself comprehending the teachers a lot better, reading faster than ever before, and I didn’t need a calculator anymore. My head seemed to just know the answer to a math problem just by glancing at it.