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This One Might Be Different: Different-Chapter 9
"I have another email from Dr. Kempton in freshman math, Charley. He says he has two freshman who don't take notes and don't bring their textbooks to class."
"Is he reporting failure or poor performance along with those behaviors, Simon?"
"No, I get the feeling he's a little puzzled. We might talk to him at lunch one day."
"Sounds like a plan. I'm up for that."
"You're up for everything, stud."
"What is this? Flatter-the-billionaire Day?"
"No, it's Get-fucked-by-a-rich-guy Day."
"Oh, that's different then."
"It could be if you work it right."
Dr. Kempton told us that he had our memo in mind about reporting odd behavior and unusual study habits among the freshman students.
"I took the liberty," Dr. Kempton continued, "of asking their science and economics teachers if they had noted the same and was surprised to hear that this study behavior seemed to be the norm for John Lodge and Jayden Miller, a pattern.
"It's as if they have a competition going to memorize everything they hear and read. So far, they are neck and neck. Perfect, that is. Neither of them ever misses anything. All of us have tried to trip them up. No luck so far. This is very unusual. We all thought you should be aware."
The New Mexico graduation requirements had been beefed up for the school adding more science, more math, more advanced economics, and more required finance. John and Jayden were aware that their teachers were somehow interested in their performance.
"What did you notice different about school today, John?"
"Yeah, I know what you're saying. They seemed surprised about no textbooks, no notes and how well we remember stuff, Jayden."
"We've stayed 4 chapters ahead. Maybe they don't want us looking like we're putting ourselves out there as better than other students."
"We are."
"Maybe part of it is the team thing...I mean, how would I like it if another student had things easy while I was struggling, and they flaunted it?"
"I don't think we flaunt it," said Jayden.
"From our point of view, you are correct. From theirs, even showing some stuff could be taken as flaunting it. Perspective is what runs the world. The guy that understands how the other guy is thinking always has the advantage."
"Poor people want to be rich. Rich people want love and respect without regard to their money. Tall people want to be shorter and vice-versa. People who are proud of one aspect of their life want others to recognize that. Bargainers want bargains. Sellers want profits. Cold people want blankets."
"Sometimes really wicked people want to be seen as really good people while they control other people's lives... even before one starts to factor in the addictions, where need starts to trump want, a really rough biological syndrome."
"Yeah, my cousin could speak to that. He chose prison, essentially, for an addiction to excitement and danger and being on the edge and probably took some of the drugs he sold. I was lucky to get a break from that life before I rotted in some jail."
"Wonder if I'll have kids someday?" said John. "I think I'd just sit around and calculate their odds of being delinquents someday or something."
"No, you wouldn't, because you'd have to get a girl first who would put up with you in the library mooning over books instead of her. Good luck with that," said Jayden with a wry smile.
"Besides which," he went on, "you'd need a ton of plastic surgery to be as beautiful as me and I think girls prefer good-looking guys. Guess that rules you out, right?"
There followed a towel fight, both roommates laughing hysterically and rolling around the room.
Thousands of miles away in northern New York State, hidden from view to the nearest town and highway, known well by locals since many worked there, a large penitentiary for men sat on solid rock. A deep, wide, rushing river guarded its north flank. High rock walls surrounded its buildings, 3 stories all, radiating out from the center admin building like arms on a starfish.
Jayden's cousin, Malik, had been assigned to an adult male population against policy but the cop who had slammed into the door during the chase had suffered a concussion and that alone was enough to ensure that Malik didn't have an easy time. Although no charges had been filed about the officer's injuries, the system took note... from fellow cops to judge to department of corrections to guards.
About the only break Malik got was a decent roommate, a 40-year-old white guy, Clayton Rogers, who had embezzled money from a company in Connecticut.
The man's previous roommate had died of a foreign object problem.
Said foreign object had been sharpened by another inmate and inserted upward into his chest gently by said inmate in the shower room while Mr. previous roommate was held up by unfriendly inmates.
That cause of death wasn't too unusual at this institution and no one bothered to try and walk it back. Although there was a camera in the shower, the camera had 'malfunctioned' that morning.
Fortunately for Malik, Mr. Rogers took pleasure in directing what he called his family primarily and was old school. He had observed inmates dying of AIDS in the 90's and had decided that his oddly conservative moral principles suited him (the obvious prohibition against theft and mayhem notwithstanding). He didn't bother Malik as some inmates bothered their roommates.
Clayton Rogers, on the other hand, appeared to have friends and acquaintances everywhere. Friends in all of the various prison groups. No one was sure why this was so. 'Usually' the various prison groups didn't fraternize with members of rival groups; a more accurate word would be 'never'. Mr. Rogers was internally offended by the notion of a kid, a teenager, living in the rough and tumble. He passed the word to a guard who passed the word up that he was to room with Malik.
Mr. Rogers had known when Malik was sentenced to that penitentiary, had 'friends' in the department of corrections and was the de facto warden at the Upstate General Pen, as the inmates called it.
One strived to be Mr. Roger's friend. Nothing would happen if you weren't, but you certainly would miss out on some good things...and your relatives would suffer somehow. Sometimes viciously.
Malik's story in all detail was soon known to Mr. Rogers. Lord knows there was enough time to share stories. Everybody had time at Upstate General Pen. Malik eventually shared the fact that his cousin Jayden had split to somewhere. Mr. Rogers made a mental note to find out where, being a naturally curious kind of guy.
A couple of days after Mr. Rogers made the mental note, Jayden's grandmother received a neighborly visit from a lady she knew well. Mrs. Compton was a widow now with a son at Upstate General Pen, sent up for grand larceny.
During the visit Mrs. Compton and Jayden's grandmother talked about their families.
"You and I haven't caught up on Jayden recently."
"He split down to his uncle Ron's house about the time Malik got into trouble."
"Where is Malik these days."
"Couldn't say really. He hasn't called or written since he split from his uncle's house one day." .
Mr. Rogers pondered all that a couple of days later and consulted through channels with a friend in the Social Security office, gave him a first name only, and indicated that he wanted a social security number and a current address. The friend blanched when he got that message but managed to access a long list of 'Malik' first names and once the list was safely at his home, filtered the list by approximate year of birth and state of birth location (New York).
Three stood out as possibilities and those three arrived at Mr. Rogers' wholly owned 'private investigation' firm in Brooklyn within the hour.
The night supervisor took the email, decrypted it, and found that two of the 'Malik' candidates weren't likely. One had died. One was in detention. The third was just missing.
The supervisor loved 'missing' cases. Before working at the PI firm, he had been a cop working on the missing persons desk. Fired for missing too many days at work, he'd found the job of his dreams in Brooklyn.
He'd been a little surprised to find his new boss was in jail, but he had gotten the message that his family's address was known and missing shifts at the PI firm wasn't good for his family's health. He wasn't a bit stupid. The message was loud and clear, and he understood most of the realities of life, he thought. He didn't miss shifts and arrived precisely on time now.
He was even more curious about unsolved mysteries than Mr. Rogers. His mother's nursing home bill was paid by Mr. Rogers each month.
The supervisor sat down at a computer, brought up a program, entered the Social Security number and another tiny software program quickly spread through the Internet like a virus, seeking any and all instances of that Social Security number. The bot looked through the most accessible and largest databases first, then shifted to ever smaller databases and databases with more difficult access, more efficient firewalls, newer versions of antivirus software, etc.
Six hours later, just after midnight, a bell-like sound rang to announce a hit. That information, hacked from a server farm, a huge cluster of computers that held data for a search engine, displayed the social security number, name, a recent state of residence, the URL address in digits of the backup sender server into the server farm, the address of the server farm server unit and a few more incomplete digits that hinted at the source of the data.
The supervisor keyed in the URL, found the address of the server farm, brought up another program that printed out a forged set of documents that indicated a Federal subpoena from a real Federal judge whose mail was opened by a clerk who was a longtime friend of Mr. Rogers.
As it happened, the subpoena demanded any and all information from that server, including any information from previous backups of the server. The subpoena included the URL ready to receive the expected gigabytes of data.
An information security officer, new at the Alain School, had accidentally backed up the school's computer data to a URL address one digit off the correct URL address, realized his error quickly when he got back some computer windows asking him to create a new account and password, had shut that computer down immediately, but some information had already escaped.
The new employee was keen to appear competent so had not reported the event to his supervisor.
The server farm's policy was to dump data not associated with an account, did so automatically, but an ongoing backup had captured some data that policy couldn't or didn't reach. Even though the dump occurred, a trace of the record was in a backup file somewhere, a consequence having far-reaching effect.
Mr. Roger's supervisor in Brooklyn sent the fake subpoena by wire. The night supervisor at the search engine's server farm didn't blink an eye. He keyed in a few commands and the information traces plus the backups travelled along an optical fiber branch, several branches actually, of the backbone of the internet to Brooklyn in less than 5 seconds. Way less. Than 5 seconds.
The supervisor in Brooklyn asked his computer to scan the bytes and piece together items related to the Social Security number, location, and information source.
Jayden was somewhere in New Mexico, it seemed. Almost immediately the bell rang and further hacked information arrived from an airline, a limousine company in Baltimore, and 2 large national shopping chains.
Another bot with slightly different instructions was told to query New Mexico. The bot cloned itself and soon several thousand bots were racing through state and local databases and commercial databases in that state.
The name and Social popped up here and there. There was a surprising lack of data about location, however. An hour later, a friend of Mr. Rogers who worked for a credit card company sent a transaction to the supervisor that identified a company: Alain Industries.
The supervisor's heart rate began to race. His left coronary artery, more specifically the left anterior descending branch, had been gathering plaque from inflammation and high fat levels in his blood for many years. There were tissue walls between the 4 chambers of the heart normally. Through such walls, important nerve branches travelled to cause the heart to be normally.
Usually the left anterior descending artery supplied those tissue walls with normal amounts of oxygen, but that depended on how much relaxation time the heart muscle enjoyed between the 'squeeze' part of the heartbeat. That relaxation time between contractions of the heart muscle was when the artery could move oxygenated blood to the tissue wall and its all-important nerves.
Since the stress and excitement caused his heart rate to soar from adrenaline, the relaxation/oxygenation time decreased until certain vital cells in the tissue wall got less oxygen, then a lot less until some cells died, and a chain reaction began. Less oxygen, more cell death, less oxygen to important nerves, irregular beats, less oxygen, etc.
The supervisor's heart attack happened on the job in the middle of the night in his office, not observed by anyone else. No one disturbed his office unless invited to come in.
He felt a heavy pressure on his chest, felt cold and clammy, began to sweat and lost consciousness.
The cleaning found him stone dead in his chair in front of his computer the next morning. She wasn't impressed by the experience in any positive way.
The credit card company day supervision team met at 7 am every day of the world. This morning's meeting included a report from the night people that a bot of some kind had pierced theeir computer's defenses and sent a transaction to a computer with a URL address identified in the credit card company's computer as belonging to a private investigation company in Brooklyn. The computer also coughed up files related to that company.
It appeared that the credit card company had issued cards to the private investigation company under some strange circumstances. Some red flags had been waving at the time, but some person at the credit card company overruled the computer to issue the cards anyway.
This was starting to look like a problem with multiple issues for the credit card company. They didn't ever allow a cardholder's transaction to go to anyone but the cardholder, number one. No person at the credit card company could overrule a computer policy that had been established by top management, number two. They might have a rogue employee, number three. They might have liability, number four, worst of all.
By definition, this had to be shunted up to a vice-president whose job it was to organize the company's response and summon the team to fix the issue.
The aggrieved card holder was (God help us, the VP thought) Alain Industries, owned by his friends Charley and Simon.
All of which happened in the first 5 minutes.
Within the next 20 minutes the violated cardholder's account was cancelled and a new account number assigned to the old number's transaction and documents. Alain Industries was notified by telephone and all relevant new cards sent by courier to arrive the same day. An employee that had approved new accounts for the PI firm was fired and escorted off the premises. The credit cards sent to the PI firm were cancelled.
Charley, Simon, and the school security team met later that day. They had been alerted to an inquiry that touched their finances and the brother of one of their students incarcerated in a penitentiary in New York. They felt that caution was indicated. Charley had a personal team of security people that tore into the story like a tiger onto prey.
Within a half day, Charley and Simon knew a lot more about Jayden, Malik and his roommate at Upstate General. They weren't thrilled about the invasion of their privacy and couldn't imagine a single good reason why Mr. Rogers wanted to find Jayden save blackmail or something similar.
Money wasn't an issue. The warden at Upstate General had suffered long enough and with an order from the department of corrections chief after pressure from both New York senators from Joseph Schuyler, the de jure (now de facto) warden ordered Mr. Rogers moved to solitary confinement. Within 6 hours, Mr. Rogers was wrapped for maximum security transport to an Alaskan maximum-security facility. He never knew what hit him and his organization disintegrated, but an ongoing follow-up of his friends continued for a very long time.
Malik missed his nice roommate but was soon moved to a facility more suited to his age and crime.
The New Mexico state requirement for PE, like most states, required 1 unit. The high schools lured kids on to teams according to their skills and provided a lot of incentive. The Alain School taught a few PE courses but competed with no other schools. They were focused on entirely different ends. Both Jayden and John took swimming and golf lesson later after the course was built in their junior year. They also took a course in Principles of Physical Fitness, a junior year-long class that had a lab. The lab applied the principles of fitness, muscle growth, and cardiovascular health to each student through many different exercises. Both John and Jayden bulked up and their stamina improved. Neither used tobacco or alcohol. A clear head was their way of being different.
In their senior year, Paolo gave an intense seminar lasting a week at Alain School. Forewarned about John and Jayden, he had recognized their type at once. He was just like them and didn't need notes to memorize anything he heard or read. He took them to Albuquerque for supper. Sometime after finishing the mango sorbet, he told them what he did. They already knew. He told them what their mental strengths were. They already knew. He told them he was the same way.
That surprised them.
"I get to invest trillions of dollars and out-perform the Dow consistently, not because I guess stuff, but because I am able to remember like you guys do. Someday I will retire. You two will take my job if you want it. You are able to do the work and your incomes will be more than you could make in any other job on the planet. The only way you might make more is to teach others how you think like you do, but so far people have firmware problems in their somewhat limited brains due to genetics or abuse from substances or exposure to toxins or whatever."
"You will be able to live where you wish, love whomever you want, support any cause or charity you like, and solve global and national problems."
"The most important thing is that you will have the funds and the time to make people's lives better, some of whom are unable to do it themselves. It is true that many can improve their own lives. There are, however, physically and mentally and emotionally disabled people who cannot...and for those you may apply compassion to help make their lives livable. When your turn comes to retire way in the future, you will want to say the world was better off for your being in it. Trust me on this one."
John and Jayden were accepted at every college and University to which they applied. John went to Yale. Jayden chose Harvard. They called each other every day for a while, then less frequently. Their paths diverged until a Manhattan Conference on Investing put on by the Schuyler Trust in February during their junior year in college. All participants were housed at the Schuyler museum gratis. Neither had heard the other was registered but Paolo knew and wanted the two to meet for a bunch of reasons.
John and Jayden were both age 18 or over and Paolo's contacts at Yale and Harvard sent him information about their progress (stellar still) at school and their social contacts (both single with few external contacts) and decided to take their social life to a new level. Little did he know.
At the first get-acquainted formal dinner at the museum, John spotted Jayden at the table and waved at him to get his attention. Jayden's eyebrows lifted and John was glad for the recognition. After dinner, Jayden told John what suite number he had been assigned and within an hour there was a knock at the door. Jayden opened it and the two men took each other in their arms and awkwardly slapped each other on the back before releasing and talking half the night.
"Hey, what's your suite number, John?"
A couple of hours later a knock sounded on John's door. Jayden slipped in to find John, naked except for a towel wrapped aroundhis waist as if he had just stepped out of the shower.
Jayden thought John's scent was great; he became instantly erect as John dropped the towel. Both were wondering what was happening, liked it, liked being close to each other, and began to softly stroke each other.
John looked into Jayden's eyes, saw tenderness there and leaned forward at the same time Jayden did.
Their lips met and touched.
"I've missed you, buddy..."
"Shut up and kiss me some more."
"What are we doing? We're not gay."
"You're not. I'm not that I know about. I just have missed my best buddy and touching you is the most exciting thing I've ever done."
"I could hold you all night long and stay hard," Jayden didn't know John wore Prada Black. The man perfume made his brain go to 'stud' setting.
"You make me hard, man. Please, come in and lay down with me or take a shower with me."
"I want you to know that this dick doesn't get hard for just anyone. No other guy makes me hard... and come to think of it, no girl ever made it twitch either. But I'm not gay, you understand."
"As long as it gets hard when you see me, we can leave the labels for another day, Jayden. I see you've kept up with your physical fitness too. You look sexy."
"As do you. I think that may be because you are my best friend and because your fit and because, hell I don't know why I feel like I do right now."
"Have you kissed a guy before me."
"Hell no."
"Did you want to."
"No."
"Did you like it when I kissed you?"
"I almost came when you did."
"Let's skip the shower and just lay down."
"Sounds like a plan. Get naked, man."
"You sure you want to do this, Jayden?"
"More than anything."
Jayden and John smiled, a little uncertain what they wanted and when.
"We both know what to do," said John. "We've read enough books and magazines about sex and seen enough porn to model the behaviors."
"Now let's decide who's on first, so to speak, said Jayden. "If you don't mind, I'd like to be your top."
John's eyes lit up. "I'd love to have your hard cock in my ass-- use it. You could pretend that my ass is yours and I can dream that your cock wants to be just in me and tie you to me forever."
"I don' want my cock in anybody else, that's for sure."
"This is important to me, Jayden. "You are important to me. I've never loved a man so who knows if I love you or not."
Looking down as if trying to figure it out, John went on, "I want to be with you, think of you all the time, feel a lost when you aren't around and most of all, I know you. I get you, all of you."
After that speech, Jayden went a little nuts, licking, sniffing, and touching every square inch of John's body, sucking, sliding, lubricating and eventually fucking him, coming so hard his eyeballs jolted.
Jayden was still deep in his lover when he said, "I love you, John. What shall we do about it?"
After some sleep and a fine breakfast in their room, delivered by a younger, blushing footman, they had formed a plan.
Their immediate plan was to do that again.
Their long-term plan was for John to transfer to Harvard after his senior year and begin work for the Schuyler trust from Harvard initially. Their combined incomes would support a very nice apartment in Cambridge. If they wished, they could each earn a doctorate in finance from Harvard or a doctorate in computer science from MIT next door. The Schuyler trust would help them with that tuition and perhaps support a post-doc as well if Paolo hadn't retired first.
Paolo retired some 8 years later. John and Jayden finished their doctorates and took over Paolo's job. Jayden managed the Schuyler half, John the Alain half...
Jayden managed John's ass at home and John managed their household. They didn't live at the Schuyler museum but did their work largely from their superyacht 'The Alain-Schuyler', their homes in Cannes, London, Delhi, Portland, and San Antonio. While in New York City, they lived in the Jayden tower on Park Avenue, a phallic vertical palace which surpassed the other 'once was and now the has-been' towers of Manhattan. Jayden towers included a multi-story luxury hotel, penthouses for Jayden and John and guests, a huge number of luxury shops on several vertical floors beginning at street level along with gourmet restaurants on first floor whose kitchens served the penthouses, the hotel rooms and casual visitors to NYC.
Jayden installed a private branch of Schuyler Trust Bank in the tower along with Schuyler traders. The heliport cantilevered off a high floor as did a glass-bottomed swimming pool high in the clouds most days.
After Charley and Simon died, the Alain Trust went to Chocolate with Vanilla and Chris as co-beneficiaries with the express proviso that as long as John and Jayden lived and wanted to manage the money and investments, they were to do so.
In addition, the beneficiaries were to leave the management of Alain Industries to current personnel supervised by John and Jayden. John and Jayden's enormous salaries and benefits were specified in the beneficiary agreement.