high price for the gift of intelligence. They built a shared reality based on paranoia and an over-inflated sense of self-importance. I’m surprised you got them to leave their compound at all.”
Dominic shrugged. “They said they missed you. How long has it been since you’ve seen them?”
“Are you honestly going to lecture me about family relationships?” He shook his head at the irony overload. “I don’t have a vendetta against my parents; I simply don’t have a close relationship with them. In fact, I find that the less time I spend with them, the happier we all are.”
“They didn’t seem that bad to me.”
“You didn’t grow up with them,” Jake growled.
Dominic smiled. “Are you getting angry about this?”
“No,” Jake gritted his teeth as even he heard the emotion in his denial. He took a calming breath. “Don’t be surprised if they refuse to help. If it doesn’t have to do with something they are working on-or apparently planting lately-they don’t usually spare any time for it.”
“They cared enough to come here, Jake. Give them that much credit.”
A bit too late for them to pretend to be doting parents. When Jim and Judy were together, they didn’t need anyone else – they never had. Why they’d bothered to have Jake at all still baffled him. He had been a responsibility that came after science, after each other, and after their growing distrust of the government. More times than he cared to remember they’d forgotten to pick him up from school, to make meals for him, to check that he had clean clothes. He’d learned early that the only one he could rely on was himself. At the age of eleven, he’d chosen a boarding school and enrolled himself. A small part of him had hoped that they would wake up and beg him not to go, but instead they had lauded his choice of schools and deposited him there with a disgusting amount of relief.
He’d found reasons why he couldn’t go home each summer – internships, study abroad programs. The reason didn’t matter to his parents, nor did his destination. They sent money when he asked for it and, he supposed, that was all that mattered in the end.
Holidays had always been the worst. In the beginning he’d had a choice between going home to parents who didn’t believe in celebrating days that they claimed governments or religions had arbitrarily chosen to give importance to, going home with a friend with a close-knit family who only reminded him painfully of what he didn’t have, or spending the holiday alone.
Meeting Dominic in college had offered a much better alternative…designing a company that would grow and one day dominate the computer market.
He never felt sorry for himself when he was adding another figure to his income bracket.
They say that money can’t make you happy, but it had made his life a whole lot more bearable. Until quite recently he would have said there wasn’t a single thing he would change about his life.
Now there was only one.
He wanted Lil in it. Lil and Colby.
He didn’t want to wake up Monday morning in his house if neither of them were there. He wouldn’t have to, though, because he’d already decided that they would be coming home with him at the end of the weekend. Lil would accept his proposal once she thought it through.
She’d have to wait to wait, though. His parents were the more pressing matter at hand. “I’ll talk to them, Dom, but get ready to aggressively begin the search for help again on Monday.”
Jake braced himself and opened the door to the study, “Judy. Jim. What a pleasant surprise.”
His mother broke her conversation with her husband and Victor Andrade when she heard her son’s voice. At first glance, she looked much the same as she always had; except perhaps that her dark, shoulder length hair sported a bit more gray. Her signature cream knit sweater and tan loose trousers were expensive, yet understated and unadorned with jewelry. Although both of his parents had been born into wealthy families, neither had ever looked the part; preferring to spend their money on their research rather than any of the earthly possessions most people collected. His father’s gray hair was too long for the style he’d attempted to brush it into, indicating that he’d probably forgotten his last trim appointment. He was dressed in the same dark blue dinner jacket and purple, striped tie that he’d likely worn to every formal event in the past twenty years. Not much had changed in the three years since Jake had last seen them.
“Jake,” his mother said in greeting. She didn’t walk over to give him a hug.
He hadn’t expected her to, so really there was no reason for the twinge of disappointment he felt. In about thirty seconds, his parents could do what no one else could; they could make him feel insignificant. He joined the group and shook the hand his father offered.
His father studied his face for a moment then asked, “Are you okay, Jake?”
Jake touched his one of the bruises on his cheek and said, “It looks worse than it is.”
Victor slapped Jake on the back and laughed, “And better than the other guy,
Jake smiled before meeting his mother’s look of disapproval. Even though she said nothing, he could hear her voice in his head.
He sighed.
His mother said, “Victor has been filling us in on what has been going on. I’m surprised that your company was using such a weak symmetric key encryption algorithm for your access codes.”
Jake defended their practice. “Yes, many of our protocols use symmetric encryption, but our more sensitive data transfers utilize an asymmetric, hybrid cipher. It’s perfectly acceptable to use the more secure to initiate access and not to relay the bulk of the data.”
“You wouldn’t be in this situation today if you had used quantum keys,” his mother chided.
“Your mother is right, Jake,” his father concurred.
“That wasn’t my decision. I am not a programmer.”
His mother interrupted him, “You should be. You’re wasting your talent. You are far too intelligent to be Dominic Corisi’s lackey.”
Every muscle in his body tensed and his reaction could not be contained. “I am a multi-billionaire. I employ hundreds of thousands of people all across the globe. Countries have entered the technological race because of the advances I’ve helped bring to them. I’m sorry if I don’t want to sit in a lab somewhere, tinkering with protons until I invent the perfect encryption key or, having given up on that, take up farming in some New England redneck town. I’m not you.”
“Show your parents the respect they deserve, Jake,” Victor said in a stern tone.
“That’s exactly what I’m doing,” Jake snarled.
Victor started to say something else, but Judy stopped him with a placating wave of her hand. “No, Victor, he’s right. I didn’t mean to belittle your accomplishments, Jake. Of course we’re proud that you’re rich. We just hoped for so much more from you.”
The verbal pat on the head did not lessen Jake’s temper, but Jake resolved to. He took a deep, calming breath. His parents would never see the value of what of what he did. It shouldn’t bother him. Inviting them this weekend had been a profound waste of time and he was about to prove it. “We have just over three weeks until our server goes online in China. Do you think you and Jim can find the cause of the compromised codes?”
His father answered, “We won’t know for sure until we’re given access to the program, but it sounds like there is something else going on. Some of your patches seemed to work initially and then were corrupted? That hints at either a Trojan virus or some back door access code. If your original hacker was good enough, those codes can be difficult to locate. Not impossible, but the process might be time consuming. There is no way to say if we’ll meet your deadline. It’d be a whole lot easier if we knew what we were dealing with.”
“Just say you can’t do it,” Jake goaded.
Judy Walton walked over to her son and raised a hand to touch her son’s check, but Jake pulled his head away from her touch. She let her hand drop to her side. “We want to help you.”
Jake ran a hand through his normally pristine hair, “But you’ve been out of the field for a long time, I know. Dominic should never have asked you.”
Jim joined his wife, putting an arm lightly around her waist in quiet support. “Do you know what we’re working on, Jake?”
“Farming techniques?” Jake said dismissively.
