Covert Coffee (The Serena Wilcox Dystopian Trilogy Book 2)

Covert Coffee Chapter 9

9

Paul didn’t mind his prison life. It was oddly liberating. No longer the puppet of his deranged older brother, Paul was free in a way that transcended prison bars. Besides, he had The Social Media Channel to keep him company: the voices of the masses, plus millions of published digital books. He could feed his mind and spirit with no limits – with no job and no house to maintain he had all the time in the world.

All the social networking, reading, meditating, praying, deep breathing, yoga, pottery, painting, and Zen gardening were clearly a big part of his therapy, but was only part of the transformative process. It was his spiritual awakening that was the most responsible for the man Paul was today. His life-changing epiphany: When one feels dead, there is nothing left to fear; how boundless life becomes!

Not content to keep such new-found wisdom to himself, Paul shared his secret to joyful living with anyone who visited him and in a series of self-help books that hit all of the important bestseller lists. His PR team had tweaked his now-famous quote to be more marketable: When one has no fear of dying; how boundless life becomes!

The book would have sold itself because naturally everyone was curious about what Paul, the man who blew up two American presidents, one former and one sitting, was thinking. Not that anyone mourned the loss of the two men who had perished under his hand: clearly the newly re-united nation was much better off without those misogynistic prigs. So, while Paul was a murderer and a terrorist, he was nonetheless an American hero according to The Social Media Channel polls, which Paul tuned into daily.

In fact, he never tuned out. The SM Channel was a television station devoted to a running stream of never-ending, seldom-slowing social media content. International, national, and state official tweets ran along the bottom of the screen like the old CNN tickertape. Opt-in and personal social media filled the main screen. Multiple users could view SM Channel together, a common situation in a household with a wide screen television, although most people hid their personal feeds when sharing a screen with others.

 Paul, alone in his prison cell, had no such privacy concerns. He programmed his own name into his customized SM Channel settings so that he was always plugged into what people were saying about him. The SM Channel drew tweets, blogs, statuses, blurbs, messages, forums – all of it – everything out there, every and any social media, into one screen. Paul tracked several keywords, or tags, all at once. He even kept multiple screens open, like a picture-in-picture TV. Some of his screens were stacked in multiples. And yet he kept up with all of it.

Paul heard a ping on one of his tags. Interesting, he thought. Haven’t seen that name pop up in a while. What’s going on?

The ping signaled that Nicholas was active on the SM Channel. Nicholas was the young computer genius that his brother Clyde had recruited for the computer lab – the lab had been Clyde’s baby, not Paul’s, but regardless of ownership the lab was seized by the United States government even before cuffs were chafing Paul’s hands. The news that Nicholas was apparently now working for Big Brother didn’t surprise Paul in the slightest.

But what was surprising was that Nicholas was reaching out into Cyberspace to dig for information. Why would he do that when he had access to the best security technologically possible? The SM Channel had only consumer-level encryption. A hacker could crack that wide open in minutes. So why was Nicholas using it? Why, indeed.

Paul spoke into his SM Channel watch. Most households were given an SM Channel pen, gratis from the government. The argument for providing SM pens, known as “digi pens”, to every household was the same as in the days of funding public television – every citizen should have access to information. All law-abiding Americans could access the SM Channel and cellular phone service via the digi pen, but inmates were not allowed to have such an instrument. They were issued watches instead.

Speaking into the watch was something Paul did every waking hour, a habit that grated on his fellow inmates’ nerves. And yet, certain inmates listened to everything Paul said, hoping for a tidbit that would interest a reporter. After all, there might be a book deal to the hangers-on.

“Show me location,” he said.

A map spread across the screen with a virtual pin over Hudson, Wisconsin. The pin lowered and the map zoomed in tighter, tighter, tighter, until Paul was looking right into the computer lab windows. He could see Nicholas at the window, as clearly as if he was doing a teleconference. Paul looked the kid over. Yep, that was the same kid. He had grown a lot since he had seen him last, but yes, that was him. Paul was about to zoom back out, but it was too late. Nicholas had apparently seen Paul’s signal pop up on whatever security application he had been running. Ahah, so Nicholas was using secret and advanced stuff all along. This makes sense now.

Paul read the message on his screen a few times, letting it sink in: PAUL – I SEE YOU! KNEW YOU’D BE WATCHING. THANKS FOR MENTIONING ME IN YOUR BOOK. I THREW YOU A SIGNAL, WANTED TO GET YOUR ATTENTION. NEED YOUR HELP, YOU IN?

What could he possibly need Paul’s help with? Paul was intrigued, to say the least. He replied, speaking into his watch, “Count me in, what can I do?”

CAN’T KEEP THIS LINE SECURE FOR LONG. SM CHANNEL NOT THE BEST PLATFORM. SERENA ASKED FOR YOU. YOU CAN ASK HER WHEN YOU GET HERE. SORRY, HAVE TO DISCONNECT.

Serena? Serena Wilcox? She was the last person he would have expected to seek out his company. Last he knew Serena was personal friends with the president of the United States, President Ann Kinji. So this was big. Very big.

Paul did something he had not done for months: he turned off the SM Channel. Then he packed up the few belongings allowed in the cell, made his bed, and brushed his teeth. He was beginning to floss, with a tiny inmate-approved flossing tool, when he heard footsteps approaching his cell door.