Chapter 1 #2
He pulled into the garage, grabbed his laptop bag, and took the stairs two at a time.
It was 9:00 exactly.
His fingers were reaching for the keyboard before he’d fully settled into his chair.
The command center came alive around him. Six monitors arranged in an ergonomic arc, each dedicated to specific functions—security feeds, market algorithms, communication channels, development environments.
The dark web portal lived on the third screen from the left, its interface deliberately primitive to avoid drawing attention.
Lincoln navigated through three layers of encryption, past two security checkpoints of his own design, to their private forum.
Empty.
He typed, The binary stars have aligned.
Her response appeared almost instantly—9:00 and twelve seconds.
And the mercury rises to meet them.
Lincoln’s shoulders dropped. Right on time.
She was always right on time. It was one of the first things he’d noticed about her, two years ago when she’d first appeared on a security forum and dismantled a senior researcher’s supposedly unbreakable encryption with the casual elegance of someone solving a crossword puzzle.
His mouth curved—not quite a smile, but close. “There you are,” he said to the screen.
Her next message appeared almost immediately—a Shakespearean sonnet, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter that would look like pretentious literary discussion to anyone who intercepted it.
Lincoln’s fingers flew across the keyboard, extracting the embedded code: first letter of each line, shifted through their agreed-upon cipher.
Librarian conference tomorrow. Discussing digital archives. Thrilling.
Even through text, her tone came through—dry, self-deprecating. The particular cadence she used when facing obligatory professional tedium.
He crafted his response: a mathematical sequence that looked like a security algorithm but decoded into a haiku.
Conferences drone on Death by PowerPoint awaits My sympathies flow
Her reply came fast—too fast for normal typing.
She was laughing. He knew her rhythms now, after two years.
The way her messages accelerated when she found something genuinely funny versus the measured pace she maintained during serious discussion.
He’d learned to read her the way he read code: patterns within patterns, meaning beneath syntax.
You’ve clearly never experienced the joy of debating optimal cataloging systems.
I’ve argued relational versus non-relational until someone left the chat. Close enough.
Not remotely the same. Databases don’t have that new-book smell.
Smell is a poor indexing parameter.
And this is why I worry about you, Binary.
Back and forth. The intellectual dance they’d perfected over 743 messages—testing each other, challenging each other, sharing pieces of themselves encoded in poetry and mathematics.
Mercury was his. His secret. His something.
She went quiet for a moment—long enough that Lincoln checked his connection status twice—and then:
Packed my blue dress. The one that matches Montana sky.
Lincoln’s hands stilled on the keyboard.
His chest did something strange. A tightening, like code compiling too fast for the system to handle.
In two years, she had never shared anything this concrete.
No locations. No physical descriptions. No details that could identify her beyond the persona she’d constructed.
Their mutual anonymity was the foundation of whatever this was. Safety in shadows.
Montana.
A blue dress.
She’d given him something real.
His brain did what it always did—started solving for the unknown variable. Conference schedules, library databases, population cross-references. Montana wasn’t that big. He could have a real name by midnight.
But his hands stayed still. She’d shared something real, and that wasn’t the same as an invitation to find her. After two years of careful distance, she’d chosen to step closer.
But what did that mean?
Nothing matches the Wyoming sky. It cheats—uses colors that don’t exist elsewhere. He sent it before he could stop himself.
Three seconds of silence. Four. He’d given her a piece of real information too. His state, his location, a thread she could pull if she chose. Lincoln waited, pulse thudding against his ribs, for her response.
The Rocky Mountain states do have exceptional skies. I’ve always wanted to see Wyoming’s.
Lincoln leaned back in his chair. A reciprocation.
The tightness in his chest had shifted into something warmer. He didn’t have a name for it, didn’t know how to categorize it.
Perhaps someday.
It was the closest they’d ever come to acknowledging that this—whatever this was—might exist beyond encrypted forums and coded poetry. That they might be real to each other. That someday could mean something.
Her response came soft:
“Miles to go before I sleep.”
Robert Frost. She never quoted directly without purpose. Lincoln understood—she was pulling back to safer ground, signaling the end of tonight’s exchange before they wandered too far into territory neither of them had mapped.
He matched her retreat. Sleep is just system maintenance. Necessary if regrettable.
Tomorrow’s administrative tedium awaits. Save me, Binary.
Libraries are the original cloud storage. You’ll survive.
Conference continues at 7 a.m. with breakfast. A pause. Should encode some rest.
This was the part Lincoln dreaded—the sign-off that meant hours of silence, of not knowing if she was safe, if she was real, if she’d return tomorrow. Irrational. He knew it was irrational. She always came back.
But tonight, for the first time, he knew where she’d be when she woke up.
Montana. A librarian conference. A blue dress the color of sky.
Stay safe, stranger.
Stay strange, safety.
The forum went quiet.
Lincoln read through their exchange twice. Three times. The warmth in his chest hadn’t faded. If anything, it had settled deeper, taking up residence somewhere behind his sternum as if it planned to stay.
He saved the conversation to his encrypted archive—743 messages now, each one preserved with care. Maybe they were love letters, translated through a language only two people in the world could read.
Sometimes beauty IS the function.
He hadn’t understood what she meant, that first night. He was starting to.
His nightly routine took over, muscle memory and programmed habit. Security protocols checked. Perimeter sensors confirmed operational. Server logs reviewed for anomalies. Everything in order. Everything exactly as it should be.
Lincoln pulled up a weather application.
Searched: Montana.
Tomorrow’s forecast appeared: partly cloudy, high of 62, chance of afternoon thunderstorms in the western regions. He stared at the data for a long moment before closing the tab.
Opened his coding project.
Stared at lines of elegant function calls that suddenly seemed hollow compared to a Shakespeare sonnet hiding the words librarian conference.
The clock read 9:47.
Twenty-three hours and thirteen minutes until tomorrow’s conversation.
Lincoln returned to his code, fingers moving with their usual precision, and tried not to think about Montana. About blue dresses. About a stranger who somehow felt less like a stranger with every message they exchanged.
He failed.
But for once, the failure didn’t bother him.