26. Cazimer
E veryone’s eyes turn to the laptop as its old fan motors whir and cough, the screen—an older but still familiar operating system; presents a login screen—a square photo of a family of three stands out on a plain cornflower blue background.
Beneath the square image reads ‘Penny Fam PC,’ a small fillable box for a password with a green check mark button beside it.
The irony is not lost on me. With my wealth of hacking skills and computer security knowledge—I have most likely been made obsolete by Louise’s presence when it comes to penetrating this device and unraveling its secrets.
That’s when I notice Louise is shaking so badly she looks as if she might fall off of her chair.
“Hey, you ok?” I reach up from my place on the floor in front of the wooden trunk that’s been re-fashioned as first a coffee table, and now my temporary desk—placing a hand over one of Louise’s furiously bouncing kneecaps.
“No, I’m really not.” She shakes her head solemnly. “I’m not sure I wanna know what’s on this thing… I’ll never be able to unsee what I’m about to look at,” Louise breathes hoarsely.
I let her make the next move, scooting back from the keyboard to allow her access.
Louise eyes the keyboard warily before cautiously rising from her chair and taking her place, kneeling before the machine. She stops and starts a few times before ultimately deciding on her first password attempt.
She holds her breath. And presses the enter key. All of us wait as the screen turns over. Processing her entered password. You could hear a pin drop, but within another few seconds the screen cycles back to the login, a message in red informing Louise that the password was incorrect.
“Let me try something else,” she says before moving on to another attempt.
As she types, we sit in silence. Louise rounds through several guesses unsuccessfully until she blows an exasperated sigh and sits back on her heels, shaking her head and muttering to herself.
“It wouldn't be something that stupid, would it?” she mumbles under her breath.
Hands flying to the keyboard. “It wouldn't have been something that stupid if anything was important on it,” she says aloud to herself as she strikes the enter key.
There's only a brief moment to processing before the crunchy, distorted sound of the startup tone crackles through the old speakers.
“That was it! The fucking name of my first gerbil—Sugar, that was it!” she shouts, momentarily delighted by her success.
The computer screen loads in, the standard cornflower blue in an abstract geometric pattern background turning over into a photo of Louise and her parents at what I’m guessing was Louise's high school graduation.
We stop and stare silently at the photo that takes up the entire desktop background, Landon and Margot Penny dressed smartly in khaki, seersucker, and pastels—the two of them perched behind a teenage Louise.
She’s smiling, tall, lean but still girlish and green–fresh faced and grinning in a shiny white mortarboard cap and gown—her high school yearbook clutched against her chest along with her diploma.
The family resemblance is striking. Both Landon and Margo share different shades of red hair mirrored by their daughter—open expressions with bright smiles highlighting Landon’s thin, upturned nose, Margo’s full lips, Landon’s constellation of freckles—but it's Margo's beautiful red-brown eyes, nearly perfectly replicated in Louise’s own face that are the most arresting.
“Oh god,” she chokes. “I remember seeing my dad on this computer the last time I came home from grad school.” Louise lets go a captive sob before clapping a hand over her mouth.
I can tell by the tense, loaded way that Frank sits at the edge of his chair that it's taking all of his power not to urge Louise to begin exploring the machine immediately.
Even I have to sit on my hands to keep myself from pouncing on the free keyboard and trackpad mouse—desperate to see what is inside after such a long time searching for the secrets it may hold.
Though Louise is going through an entire range of emotions in this moment, so are we. I’ve been looking for the answers inside this laptop almost as long as I’ve been with the Saints.
When Sébastien and I first met, it hadn't been under the pretenses of working together for the vigilante group known as the Saints. In fact, when he initially offered me an opportunity to collaborate, Seb sold me on the notion that there was somebody that he really wanted me to meet; a man who had inspired him—who had changed the course of Sébastien’s life.
That man just so happened to be Francis Stone.
There was a job Seb had established as a good entry point for me to prove myself to the group—a small one; the retrieval of some records for sigmas and omegas who had gone missing; all of them not-so-coincidentally from a pool of substance users and other marginalized groups who had received care from large, mostly urban clinics.
Frank wanted me to help, to follow up on where, if anywhere, these people existed in the system after such a point that they attempted to get treatment or were admitted to various rehab programs post incarceration or overdose.
Without context, this seemed to fall into somewhat of a questionable moral area.
I asked Frank why he wanted me to gather this information.
What use could it serve him? That’s when he told me about his time as an FBI agent, a ‘boy scout’ and true believer who witnessed corruption at the highest levels of government firsthand.
Corruption of the powers that be, in conjunction with the virus—ultimately destroyed Frank’s professional career, forced him to live a lie after the Feds covered up a fatal accident in the field with his supposed death and hero’s burial—along with the actual death of Frank’s only known fated mate at the time, who Frank now seeks to avenge by exposing the very systems that robbed him of his future, of his happiness.
The tale was as heartbreaking as it was compelling. So of course I found myself suddenly fighting for the cause—for Frank. I began trying my best to help Frank get his revenge, to keep anyone else from suffering as Frank had suffered.
Of course, my findings, as I began to plumb the depths of the Penny’s research and development, only further ensnared me.
The more we dug, the more we seemed to uncover instances of foul play.
Clear evidence of the government hedging their bets on the future of commercial applications for the fated mate testing, the designation prediction and switching; and, of course, the introduction of the mysterious virus into the omega and sigma population, most likely via illegal drugs.
When I had first begun researching the Penny's work, I never once dreamed that one day I would sit alongside their daughter when the Saints made this very important discovery.
Quentin, as if sensing the tension in the room, speaks—his voice soft and gentle.
“Louise, darling, would you do the honors?”
Louise shakes her head slowly and turns her face to me, her cinnamon eyes pleading—her hands balled into fists, clutched against her chest.
“Caz,” she manages to croak out, her voice dry and thin. “Can you? I don't think that I….” she trails off, her knuckles going white and bloodless as she clenches her fists ever tighter.
“Yeah, yeah, sure. Of course.” I shuffle on my hands and knees until I'm in front of the machine once more, Louise watching hesitantly from over my shoulder.
There's not much on the desktop. Only the standard icons for email, recycling bin and two folder icons: one labeled ‘Resources,’ the other labeled ‘For Louise.’
As my mouse hovers over the folder icon ‘For Louise,’ she draws in a sharp breath next to my ear—her chin resting in the place between my neck and my shoulder. I turn my face, my lips nearly touching hers as I drop my gaze to her—raised brows and pursed lips asking for permission.
She takes a steadying breath and nods, urging me on.
I open the folder, several video files laying in wait.
The first video, a thumbnail of Louise's parents, sitting on a couch, simply labeled ‘1’.
I hold my breath and double click.
The screen brightens, the sunlit living room glowing on the screen in the close, dark cottage.
Margot and Landon, softly smiling, fill our vision. Louise pushes away from me, nearly doubled over in front of the screen, both hands cupped over her mouth as tears stream down her face.
“Hey, Louie,” Landon says softly, crows feet creasing the corners of his blue-green eyes.
“Hey Honey.” Margot’s voice hitches slightly as she forces the greeting out sweetly. “It seems so dramatic to say, but if you're listening to this there's a very good chance that we're already gone, dear.” Margot’s voice is at once comforting and mournful.
Louise closes her eyes, allowing the tears to fall, struggling to breathe in through her nose, hands still clamped down hard over her mouth as her parents continue to speak on the recording.
“While it's entirely possible that somebody else may have gotten to this machine before you did, we’re hoping that everyone was so distracted with all the other inevitable fallout—in the event of our…” he trails off for a moment before starting up again.
“That this managed to slip by,” Landon’s voice quavers and Margot offers a weak smile into the camera, her fingers interlacing with her husband’s as they cling to one another.
“There's a very good chance that your mother and I have been eliminated due to the nature of our discoveries while working for the government and the Department of Reproduction,” he clarifies before Margot begins to fill the ensuing silence.