Dead Snupe Read online

  And that’s why I think Bobby got sent to Long Wait Prison in the fall of that year, in the autumn of 2034.

  Of course, that’s not what the government reported at the time. How do I know? My Boney informant told me about Bobby after I slipped him a medium-well, Yoshida-marinated New York Strip steak with a baked potato and a side of greens.

  And I’ll be durned.

  The Federal Government had told the world that Bobby Griffin was dead.

  Chapter Two

  I knew then that our new boy was something dead serious to the government. So serious that, for Bobby, Long Wait would be the end of the line. There’d be no magic number for him. That was the way of it. When they killed you out there, they’d kill you in here. Of course, they’d get their tax dollars’ worth out of you first, squeeze you for every Bitcoin they could get. They’d school you, make you smarter, and put you to good use here at Long Wait doing whatever they told you to do. And then? Well, who knows where you went after that. And, like I said, no magic number for Bobby.

  My Boney informant said there’d been one hell of a battle, literally. Cyber International had been the target of a leveraged buyout by a subsidiary of the Federal Government. That subsidiary was none other than the Internal Revenue Service. Cyber fought back in the courts. Fought the Beltway elites, the top one percent, the enlightened – but all that meant was that they were fighting the Federal Government bureaucrats, people whose only means of keeping their jobs was to see to it that taxes were always going up and that businesses got raided in a timely fashion.

  The trial had gone on for weeks, Cyber’s defense being argued by Bobby’s father and his legal team. But all the while, so it seems, Cyber was buying time. In the three weeks it took to decide the fate of the privately-owned company, Curtis Lane Griffin and his people had destroyed nearly all of Cyber International’s research data into Artificial Intelligence (AI). Decades of work went up in smoke. By the time the IRS had gotten hold of Cyber – a victory that shook the country – all that was left was a flame-ravaged skyscraper in Memphis and two thousand badly-burned corpses. After a Katie-bar-the-door gun battle outside the Griffin house, in which it was reported the entire Griffin family had died, the entire block was flattened.

  Curtis Lane Griffin, it was reported, had detonated a bomb.

  I don’t doubt that most of what I read on that Boney’s smartphone was true. If the government was behind Long Wait Prison, and all of the other secret schools in what later became known as the Schoolag Archipelago, they could seize a private business, too. Heck, they were already taking kids. The trick was that nobody on the streets knew much of what was going on at the time. But I suspect Curtis Lane Griffin knew. And I guess Cyber International had something the government wanted for its own purposes, something Curtis Lane Griffin couldn’t let them have. And what that something was, the world at that time could only guess.

  None of the kids or teachers knew a whole lot about Bobby when he arrived. The Boneys would have known, and so would have Miss Zoe Miller, the headmistress. Though the kid was only fourteen, they would certainly have known he was a genius of the first magnitude. But it’d be a stretch to say anyone expected him to know anything about Cyber’s top secret AI program and just how far Cyber had taken it. As far as the world knew, Cyber International and all of its research had disappeared in a cloud of smoke, blood, and good old government overreach.

  But, like the rest of us in Long Wait, Bobby had also committed a crime. And it was one heck of a bum-clenchingly tense crime, too. Something extraordinary and inventive, something that shook the nation like a rag doll in a pit bull’s mouth.

  Bobby figured out a better way to analyze a person’s speech, body movements, facial expressions, writing style, opinions, shopping habits, preferences, actions – you name it – to predict a person’s proclivity to crime. He called his little science fair project the Enhanced Crime Proclivity Assessment Program (ECPAP). Not a new concept at the time, but a definite step forward. But that wasn’t the bitchen twitchen part of the story, and I still nearly crap my pants when I remember Bobby telling me about it. I’ll just say right now that what happened that day at Bobby’s science fair was something a Hollywood scriptwriter couldn’t have made up. Everything just seemed to come together – the perfect electronic storm: Bobby with his computers all set up, linked to all kinds of publicly-accessible databases, records, and videos, the science fair judges gathered around, and Senator Frank Forbes and his media pals visiting Bobby’s school for a publicity shot.

  Everybody knew Frank Forbes, the senior Senator from Florida. It wasn’t any secret that, at the age of seventeen, Senator Forbes had been convicted of drug and human trafficking. And there isn’t a person in the world who doesn’t know that he’d stashed millions of dollars in offshore accounts where it couldn’t be touched. Frank Forbes served his time, gave half of his money to fund drug addiction recovery programs, and became the philanthropist of the century. He ran for Congress – felons by this time were eligible – won by a landslide, and, like every other elected official, he knew he could never lose his seat. Not even in a fraudulent election.

  And get this:

  Senator Frank Forbes was the chairman of the committee overseeing the Internal Revenue Service.

  Now, Senator Forbes never hid his past from people, simply because he couldn’t. “Out with it!” had been his campaign slogan over the years, and he even went as far as exposing some of the shadier deals going down in Congress, some of the fraudulent wheeling and dealing. And no doubt all of it had been staged by government officials for Senator Forbes’ benefit.

  So what did Senator Forbes do? After looking at some kid’s project about why odd numbers of ice cubes obliterate in a blender more efficiently than do even numbers of cubes, he walked up to Bobby’s project booth. Bobby was standing there with his father, dazzling the visitors and science fair judges. He had just finished up his explanation of his entirely new crime proclivity algorithm, and the judges were utterly speechless. Senator Forbes, with his news crews right behind him, stomped up like he owned the place and interrupted Bobby’s presentation.

  “Alrighty then,” Senator Forbes said with his hands in the air like a stupid fool. “Given the resources, time, and opportunity, I could have become Josef Stalin! I mean, who wouldn’t?”

  General laughter all around.

  “I guess this program will rank me a solid one hundred on the criminal proclivity scale!” And he turned to the cameras and smiled. Then he looked at Bobby and said, “Tell me if I’m right, Mr. Bobby Griffin!” And he asked for it, just like that.

  To this day, I’m convinced that Bobby’s Dad – if not him, then someone in Cyber – had intended to put a warning shot across the bow of the Internal Revenue Service who, you remember, had been closing in on Cyber International. Though Bobby told me otherwise, I don’t think a fourteen-year-old could’ve pulled this off all by himself. If you had asked me, I would’ve said that the kid had been set up big time. And I mean, BIG TIME.

  Somehow or another, Bobby’s ECPAP program had learned to detect murder in the first degree if there was at least a 69% probability. That was something new, powerful, and unsuspected, something I believe Bobby never intended for ECPAP to do – well, not initially. Anyway, ECPAP worked its magic by using the standard, publicly-available data first. Things like Facebook, Twitter, email, shopping habits, how fast you typed, your spelling, your search engine searches – all the social media. Stuff like that. But ECPAP went a step further after that. It also illegally tapped into the Health Insurer’s Risk Assessment Database (HIRAD), the well-secured, top-secret, government-mandated medical apps data center which had collected data from every single person’s smartphone every second of every day for the last thirty years. How the program tapped into HIRAD nobody ever actually found out. But when Bobby’s program mixed all of that data together with other, easier-to-acquire data, it became capable of whipping up one heck of an intel milkshake on just about
anybody who was a murderer.

  Maybe Bobby was the first person in the world to have stumbled onto that recipe. He’d written the code to ECPAP and, somehow, it just all came together. Like I said, it was one incredible electronic storm. Maybe the insurance companies had already foreseen the possibility of such a program but had managed to keep it under wraps. But my guess is they were just as surprised by Bobby’s accidental discovery as anyone else.

  The supposed accident? Bobby’s program averaged every rate, level, and output of every physical function in murderers’ bodies recorded over the last thirty years. Things like heart and breathing rates, stress levels, nervousness, voice pitch, adrenaline levels, blood-sugar levels, brain waves, emotions, urinary let down, bowel movements, orgasms – you name it, ECPAP had the numbers down. And it knew those body numbers up to a week, a day, a minute, and a second before a premeditated murder. It also had those same numbers for the body during and after a killing. Far too complicated to be an accident, if you’d asked me then.

  Senator Forbes became the ignorant guinea pig that day at the science fair when Bobby’s program – or was it Curtis Lane Griffin’s? – ran the numbers on that sorry SOB. And the whole world watched when Bobby’s algorithm went to work on a fifty-six-inch TV screen hanging from the ceiling on two strands of metal wire. Did I say Bobby’s little program could accurately predict a murderer that had at least a 69% probability? I did. But when the five-minute scan was over, the likelihood that Senator Forbes had committed murder sat at a whopping 79%.

  Dang.

  Bobby Griffin’s little science fair project nailed the time and day of Mrs. Marjorie Forbes’ brutal death at the hands of her husband, the Senator, to within a fraction of a second, a year and a week earlier. And get this: ECPAP and HIRAD knew that Forbes had been holding a handle of some type in his hands when he’d committed the deed just by analyzing muscle contractions in the man’s arms.

  The next morning, Senator Forbes, along with five other people on Capitol Hill, was summoned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to appear in the District of Columbia to face charges of first-degree murder. A week later, three juries handed Senator Forbes and two of his aides death sentences. One aide turned state’s evidence and disappeared, and the senator’s personal assistant, Karson ‘Nice Guy’ Burlison, became – get this – the head Boney at Long Wait Prison.

  I’ve always believed that God never sends somebody to earth without giving him a unique set of gifts to use. And although Bobby – or Bobby’s program – had broken all kinds of laws the day the coffin lid got pulled down on Senator Forbes, he did bring five lowlife scumbags to justice. And that, I think, was God’s work.

  Bobby was innocence-in-the-flesh. Some might call him a fool, or call him easy and naive. But not me. He was something right out of the Good Book, somebody who would always credit others with having nothing less than the noblest of intentions because, despite the laws he’d broken at that science fair, his intentions were, and always will be, pure. And if he were ever accused of being wrong – about anything – he’d humbly admit that his accuser might be right.

  He’d told the congressional committee a week after the science fair that he’d gotten into HIRAD a year before he’d written his new criminal proclivity program. The morning he got into the database, he’d received an email from someone calling themselves Override (0v3rr1D3). In that email was the password needed to access anything in HIRAD: Human Resources, Accounting, Billing, Health Data – names, dates, times – you name it, Bobby got access to it. “I had never once thought of hacking into that database. But I did send an email to Health Insurer’s Risk Assessment the day before with a list of questions about the data I wanted.” He told them he used the password the moment Override sent it and that he spent the rest of the day examining and downloading the materials he needed. “As far as I’m concerned,” he’d told the committee openly and honestly, “I asked for information, and they sent it to me. How was I to know that I’d end up getting into highly classified information and revealing to the world what was really going on at HIRAD?”

  Bobby reassured me time and again through the years that he had in fact gotten an email containing the front door key to HIRAD’s secret information. But he also shared with me the questions he had about Override, the person who had sent him the email. “So this person sends me the password,” Bobby said to me in my office in the kitchen late one night, “because he knows who I am, and he knows what I might be able to do with it. He knows I’m working on a crime proclivity upgrade program – he has to, right? – and he’s thinking, ‘Why not jump it up to a higher level?’ He knows that what’s in HIRAD – all that secretly-obtained data – is the key to nabbing murderers, but he knows it's good for a bunch of other things as well. I mean, why not use the data to catch rapists, thieves, drug users, and the rest?”

  I told him he had a point.

  “But that’s only the positive side,” Bobby said as he sipped his soda. “Let’s say this Override person knows something’s up at the IRS. Maybe he thought they were coming after HIRAD. And you know what that means, right?”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “It doesn’t necessarily mean the government was after HIRAD because they wanted to get a handle on crime in the U.S. It means they wanted it so they could cover their own rear ends and extort people. Override, whoever he is, thinks that’s just what’s going to happen. That the IRS is going to weaponize HIRAD. So, he sends me the password to the database using HIRAD’s email so I can’t be prosecuted for hacking. Like I said, I asked for information. HIRAD sent it. I didn’t commit the crime. Override did.”

  I nodded.

  “Then, somehow or another, HIRAD linked itself to my Enhanced Criminal Proclivity Assessment Program at just the right time for me to bash Forbes with it.”

  I grabbed another cola from the fridge and handed it to Bobby. He popped the top and drank it down to half. “And Congress has to reluctantly agree that you’re innocent,” I said.

  “But there’s more,” Bobby said. “Override thinks the IRS – under Senator Forbes’ leadership – would be coming for HIRAD eventually, so he decides to go to war. But that can’t be the only reason for a fight because Congress can just take HIRAD anytime they want it. They’re the ones who legislated it into existence.”

  “And Senator Forbes?” I said.

  “Murder one,” Bobby said. “The courts had to give him the death penalty to save face. Senator Forbes didn’t walk into an accident. He got taken out by Override. But that’s not what’s got me all tied up in knots. You know what I think? I think Override was trying to kill two stones with one bird.”

  I smiled. Bobby was always saying stuff like that, so I laughed. “Two stones?” I said.

  “I don’t think Override was concerned only about HIRAD. He was also concerned about Cyber International’s research into AI. HIRAD was only a tool, and really only a small one at that, if you think about it. That doesn’t mean that HIRAD can’t be weaponized – we’ve already seen that it can be. But Override used HIRAD to slap the world silly, to get them to notice what the government could do with it. And – like you once said – Override wanted to put a shot across the bow of Congress. And, at the time, Senator Forbes was the lead man at the IRS with his sights on Cyber International. Override did this because he —”

  “She?” I said.

  “ – knew the IRS – under Senator Forbes’ leadership – was coming for Cyber International’s work in AI. Think about it, Shorty. Nobody in the government had made a move in HIRAD’s direction that we know of. But they were coming for my Dad’s research. Everyone knew that – I mean, they were in court, it was all over the news. Override just gave the government a little heads-up that it wouldn’t be so easy to just take what they wanted.”

  I just shook my head. The kid was a thinker alright – but I’d always known that. I never told him that most of what he’d said had flown right over my head. “Are you telling all of this to the big
bonehead? Karson ‘Nice Guy’ Burlison?”

  Bobby went dark and silent for a moment. I don’t know why I asked him that question, and I suddenly felt sorry for having asked it. In the end, my knowing the answer wouldn’t have made a hill of beans’ worth of difference. And I knew the answer anyway. I’d seen the bruises on Bobby’s face at times, the dark blue places on his back and stomach, the cigarette burns on his arms. And so I looked down at my can of Coke, feeling a wave of shame falling over me. I could save Bobby most of the time, keep him from the bullies by giving some thug the Hershey squirts in a piece of chocolate pie. But I couldn’t be there for Bobby all of the time. That’s just the way it was at Long Wait Prison.

  A few seconds later, Bobby answered me. Not with words. But with a mischievous smile that told me he had this whole mess under control.

  And it finally hit me like cold water on a hot summer day. Bobby knew I was the go-to guy for information, favors, and protection by this time. I’d helped him already: kept the bigger guys away from him, gotten him a pizza once after he’d spent the day with the Boneys – stuff like that. But I didn’t think for a moment he was here to use me. That just wasn’t Bobby. What he was all about, what he had going on behind that crazy smile, I hadn’t the foggiest. But I felt darned sure something powerful and fast was lining up behind that starting gate in his head. And if I’d had to bet on a racehorse right then and there, at that very moment, Bobby would’ve gotten everything in my wallet. He was gonna run, eventually. I could see it in the boy’s eyes. And when he did, I wanted to be there in the saddle with him.

  Chapter Three

  It wouldn’t be until a year later that Bobby would open up about his feelings. By then, it seemed, he needed to. Maybe it was because he was growing up, like the rest of us, or maybe it had something to do with Karson ‘Nice Guy’ Burlison upping his therapy sessions. Maybe it had to do with a whole lot of other things, like the fact that Bobby and April Olson, one of my workers in the cafeteria, had started hitting it off pretty well. Not to mention that I’d let Bobby in on the little secret I’d told you earlier: that if they kill you on the outside, you end up dying on the inside. Now, I didn’t say it in those exact those words, so take a breath. By then, Bobby and I were hanging out more – and April had been making herself conveniently available – so I thought I needed to say it, that’s all. That’s what friends do. And Bobby, April, and I were good friends by then.