Different Circles

“Well ... uh ... I was wondering if you ever thought about ... you know...” She trailed off.

“No,” he said. “I don’t know.”

She giggled nervously. “Oh ... never mind,” she said. “I’m just having weird thoughts.”

“Come on, hon,” he said. “Tell me what’s on your mind. Obviously, something is.”

She nodded. “Something is,” she said. “You see ... uh ... spending all that time with Everett ... it stirred something in me.”

Jake looked over at her, his eyes widening a little. “Stirred something in you?” he asked carefully.

“Yeah,” she said softly. “Something very powerful. Something ... well... maternal.”

“Maternal,” he said. “As in ... uh...”

She nodded. “We’ve never really talked about this before, sweetie, but, well ... what do you think about you and I ... you know ... having a baby?”

The email that Ron Standish, the ramper who worked for the FBO at Pocatello Regional Airport, sent to his photography club was a big hit among the members. The Avanti-180 that was seen in all of the attached jpeg photos was exotic looking, sleek, pleasing to look at. And the single picture with Jake Kingsley, Laura Kingsley, and Ron himself standing next to the Avanti—a shot that had been attached impulsively—was quite interesting in its own right. Not only did it show a really cool aircraft, it showed an actual celebrity and his wife. Of the 312 people in the photography group, 289 of them saved the email and forwarded it on to other people in their contacts list, most to multiple contacts, and not a single one of them harboring bad intentions. They just wanted their friends and family members to see some cool photos. And those second-generation contacts—there were well over a thousand of them—sent their own copies of the email to other contacts, increasing the number in circulation exponentially. At the moment that Jake was sinking his erection into his wife’s body thirty-two thousand feet above the spot on the Earth where Idaho, Utah, and Nevada all touched each other, there were more than forty thousand copies of the email circulating around the United States, Canada, and several European countries. And virtually no one in possession of that email at this point even knew who Ron Standish was.

By the time the sun rose over Jake and Laura’s Oceano home the next morning, a multitude of computer savvy people who had received copies of the email had copied the photo of Jake, Laura, and Standish out of the original email and used it to compose their own email. Again, none of these people were doing this with any maliciousness in their hearts. They just wanted to pass on the picture of a celebrity, his wife, their cool plane, and whatever loser that was standing with them in a more convenient fashion. This was an age where most internet users were still on dialup service and it took forever to pass along the entire email full of jpegs when they just wanted to show off one of them. Most composed a brief explanation of the shot that was along the lines of “Jake Kingsley and his wife Laura pose next to their Avanti airplane during a visit to Idaho”. No one identified Ron Standish by name and only a few even mentioned that he was a ramp worker. Very few identified the actual airport.

These new emails began to circulate far and wide as well, quickly passing up the original in sheer number of forwards since it was much faster and easier to pass on the single jpeg version than the original. By the time Jake and Laura sat down to a meal of Elsa’s chicken parmesan that night, nearly two hundred thousand copies of the photo were in circulation in eighteen different countries.

The next morning, while Laura slept in late in her own bed for the first time in weeks and Jake got up early to make the flight to Whiteman so he could check on the progress of KVA’s latest project, one version of the email landed in the inbox of a man named Daryl Broker, who lived in Tucson, Arizona.

Daryl was twenty-four years old. He was a computer nerd who liked to refer to himself as a “hacker”, but he had never actually hacked anything, he just liked the image that being a hacker represented. He was the youngest of three children and the least successful of the three in all aspects of life. His two older sisters were both college graduates and both were independent and working at good paying jobs—one in the computer industry, one in the financial industry. Daryl had never been to college. He worked at the local Walmart making just a little more than minimum wage. He still lived with his parents in the room he had grown up in. He had never been laid, had never even really come close to being laid, truth be told.

Daryl absolutely hated the band Intemperance and everything they represented, with a particular hatred for the band’s former lead singer, Jake Kingsley. This was primarily because Kingsley was everything that Daryl was not.