Christmas with the Heroes

Chapter 1

Chaos Theory

Lincoln Bollinger

(Son of Baby & Quinn Bollinger)

The back room at Linear Tactical had terrible heating, a bed that was more suggestion than furniture, and the strongest Wi-Fi signal in the building.

Lincoln had claimed it as his own when he was eight years old, back when Wi-Fi mattered for different reasons—online games, research rabbit holes, early experiments in code.

Now it mattered for other things. But the room remained his, a small pocket of quiet in a building that hosted chaos on a regular basis.

No one else wanted it. The heating issue alone was enough to deter most people.

Lincoln ran cold anyway. The temperature didn’t bother him.

Through the walls, he could hear the muffled chaos of the Linear Tactical Christmas Adam gathering—December 23rd, the day before Christmas Eve.

Someone had coined the term years ago, reasoning that Adam came before Eve, so Christmas Adam should come before Christmas Eve.

The logic was flawed—the naming convention of Christmas Eve had nothing to do with the Biblical Eve—but the tradition had stuck anyway.

Humans were sentimental about their invented rituals.

Voices layered over voices, punctuated by children’s shrieks and the occasional burst of laughter that could only belong to Uncle Finn.

Someone had put on holiday music, though the competing conversations rendered it more texture than melody.

A baby was crying. Graham, probably, based on the pitch and duration.

Callum and Sloane’s toddler had strong opinions about everything and the lung capacity to express them.

Lincoln checked his watch. 8:54 PM.

Six minutes.

He’d already done his duty. Two hours of circulation through the main room, contributing to conversations about weather patterns, vehicle maintenance, and the structural integrity of the new obstacle course Bear had designed for next year’s camp.

He’d consumed adequate dinner—strategically selected from the main dishes brought by people whose cooking he trusted.

Desserts would come later, as they always did at these gatherings—usually at around 9:30, then everyone tended to head home.

Lincoln would’ve already gone home if it wouldn’t cause more trouble than it was worth. It was easier to just stay than justify leaving early. He considered it doing his duty.

He’d also allowed his mother to hug him twice and his father to clap him on the shoulder three times.

Sufficient.

Now he sat on the narrow bed, laptop open, waiting.

8:56 PM.

His fingers hovered over the keyboard. The secure chat window was already open, cursor blinking in the empty text field. Waiting, like he was waiting.

Almost two years. Seven hundred and two nights of exchanges.

Mercury.

He didn’t know her real name. Didn’t know where she lived, what she looked like, what she did for a living. Those were the rules—unspoken but inviolable. He and Mercury existed in this space, two minds meeting in the digital ether, uncontaminated by the complications of physical reality.

But he knew other things.

He knew she quoted poetry the way other people quoted movies—casually, instinctively, as if verse were simply another language she happened to speak. Dickinson. Yeats. Eliot. The Romantics when she was feeling wistful, the Modernists when she was feeling sharp.

He knew she typed faster when she was excited—her responses arriving in rapid bursts, sometimes fragmented, thoughts outpacing her fingers.

When she was tired, her cadence slowed, her sentences growing longer, more measured.

When something was wrong—and he’d learned to recognize this, though she never said it directly—her rhythm became almost mechanical. Too perfect. Too controlled.

Tonight, he suspected she would be somewhere in the middle.

The holidays did something to her. Last year, their Christmas exchange had been quieter than usual.

More reflective. She’d quoted Dickens—not the Christmas one, she’d said, the other one—and they’d talked about time.

How arbitrary it was, marking the year’s passage with feasts and rituals. How humans needed the markers anyway.

8:59 PM.

Lincoln straightened. Positioned his fingers on the keys.

9:00 PM.

Binary: The binary stars have aligned.

The response came within seconds. It always did. In two years, neither of them had ever been late.

Mercury: And the mercury rises to meet them.

Mercury: Right on schedule. I find this unbearably comforting, you know. The reliability of you.

Binary: Consistency is undervalued as a virtue.

Mercury: By most people, yes. But not by us. We’re the patron saints of predictable behavior.

Binary: I’m not certain saints are supposed to be predictable. Isn’t the whole point divine unpredictability? Miracles and such.

Mercury: You make an excellent theological point. Perhaps we’re more like... very dedicated postal workers. Rain, sleet, snow, existential despair—nothing stops the 9 PM delivery.

Lincoln felt his mouth twitch. Not quite a smile, but close.

Binary: I’ll accept postal worker. It implies a certain quiet dignity.

Mercury: And sensible shoes. Very important, sensible shoes.

Binary: Do you have sensible shoes?

Mercury: Binary. Are you asking about my footwear? That’s dangerously close to personal information.

She was teasing. He could tell by the speed of her response—quick, playful. Her fingers were moving fast tonight. Excited, then. Or at least not sad.

Binary: You’re right. Forget I asked. Your shoe choices remain shrouded in mystery.

Mercury: As they should be. A woman’s relationship with her footwear is sacred.

Binary: Is that from something? It sounds like it should be from something.

Mercury: I’m choosing to believe Jane Austen said it and no one can prove otherwise.

Binary: Your commitment to apocryphal attribution is admirable.

Mercury: I learned from the best. Did you know Einstein never actually said that thing about insanity and repetition?

Binary: I did know that. It bothers me more than it should.

Mercury: Everything inaccurate bothers you more than it should. It’s one of your more endearing qualities.

Endearing. Lincoln turned the word over in his mind. She used it casually, the way she used most affectionate language—lightly, like it cost her nothing. He’d never been sure if that meant it was meaningless or if it meant she felt safe enough to be careless with her feelings.

He suspected the latter. He hoped for the latter.

Binary: How is your evening? Beyond the obvious holiday proximity.

Mercury: Ah, the obvious holiday proximity. You make it sound like a weather event. “Looks like we’ve got holiday proximity moving in from the west, folks. Better batten down the emotional hatches.”

Binary: That’s not inaccurate.

Mercury: No, I suppose it isn’t.

Her typing slowed. He watched the indicator that showed she was composing a message, waited longer than usual for it to arrive.

Mercury: I’m doing the thing I always do this time of year. Tea. Fire. Dickens.

Binary: Not the Christmas one.

Mercury: Not the Christmas one. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Feels appropriate, somehow.

Binary: Tale of Two Cities. The duality of human experience compressed into a single opening line.

Mercury: You’ve read it?

Binary: I’ve read everything. My retention isn’t as complete as I’d like, but I’ve at least processed most of the major works.

Mercury: Of course you have. I sometimes forget I’m talking to someone who probably alphabetized their childhood bookshelf by author’s birth year.

Binary: Publication date, actually. Birth year seemed too arbitrary.

Mercury: I genuinely cannot tell if you’re joking.

Binary: Neither can I, sometimes.

Mercury: That might be the most honest thing you’ve ever said to me.

Was it? He'd never admitted that to anyone before—not even to himself, really. The words had just... arrived. The way things did with Mercury.

More vulnerable. More real.

Binary: The holidays make me philosophical.

Mercury: “And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so?”

Binary: Did you just quote Dr. Seuss at me?

Mercury: I did. And I’m not sorry. The Grinch has hidden depths. His whole arc is about learning that connection matters more than stuff. That’s basically the entire human condition in a children’s book.

Binary: I never thought about it that way.

Mercury: Most people don’t. They just remember the dog with the antler and the roast beast.

Binary: Roast beast is memorable.

Mercury: It really is. I want roast beast now. I don’t even know what roast beast is, but I want it.

Binary: Probably beef. Possibly venison, given the Whoville aesthetic.

Mercury: You’re applying logical analysis to Dr. Seuss.

Binary: I apply logical analysis to everything. It’s a character flaw or a superpower, depending on context.

Mercury: I vote superpower. Though I may be biased. I have a weakness for people who can’t turn their brains off.

A weakness. For people like him.

Lincoln’s fingers paused over the keyboard. Outside the room, someone had turned up the music—he could hear it more clearly now, something about chestnuts and open fires. The baby had stopped crying.

He should go back out. Rejoin the gathering. Be present for the family that loved him, even if they didn’t always understand him.

But Mercury was here. In this liminal space between them, she was here.

Binary: What would you be doing right now, if you could do anything?

Mercury: That’s a dangerous question, Binary.

Binary: I’m aware.

Mercury: Are you? Because that question is about three steps away from “what’s your deepest desire” and we have rules about that sort of thing.

Binary: We do. But you can answer abstractly. Hypothetically.

A long pause. He watched the typing indicator appear, disappear, appear again.