Happy Birthday Lexi - 7 Years Old

Last week was my daughter Lexi's seventh birthday. Lexi is my child that has the most creative mind. We homeschool our children, and one of the subjects that I teach is Music Appreciation. We take all three kids, and play different styles of music and talk about the music. We will talk about the genre of the music - with entire blocks on classical, rock, jazz, and most recently R&B. One of things we focus on (especially for classical, jazz, new age, or soundtracks - with no words) is to listen to the music, and close their eyes, and tell a story about what you think happens while this music is playing. Lexi is the most creative, and she often comes to me and tells me a story and asks that I paint a picture of this story. Here are some examples of paintings I did that were inspired from Lexi's mind.

The Code of the Eight - Chapter 1

This excerpt is the first chapter of my first novel I completed fifteen years ago called The Code of the Eight




Chapter 1


"In a few minutes a computer can make a mistake so greatthat it would take many men many months to equal it."

Merle L. Meacham




October 17, 1990
Washington DC

The early morning sun filtered rays of light through the partially opened blinds. The sunlight illuminated the office above a storefront in the Georgetown section of Washington DC. The office was decorated in ornate cherry wood, with dark hunter green wallpaper accented by cherry wainscoting. Matthew Barber held the phone to his ear, leaned on the sill of the window, and looked out over the streets of old Georgetown. The shops across the square were already active. On the corner, a shop called the Banana Republic had a steady stream of traffic in and out. Several tourists wearing khaki hats and coats exited the store. Across the street, a fight had broken out between several artsy people with shaved heads and pierced body parts and a man dressed in black leather.
Matthew Barber barely noticed the commotion below as he waited impatiently for someone to answer the phone. Barber was in his early fifties and wore a conservative dark blue suit that looked as if he slept in it. Indeed, the suit had been slept in for several days in a row.
Simon LeBaron sat at a computer terminal. He was furiously tapping away at the keys. Simon was a tall, thin man in his early forties. His hair was curly brown, with just a hint of baldness. He had spent several days staring at this computer monitor, his eyes were straining to see the screen. The green letters on the black background of the mainframe emulation were becoming a blur now. He rubbed his weary eyes.
"Return code of 00," Simon said as he read the TSO environment processing messages on the computer screen. "It passed to the CPU."
"Damn it," Barber said. "Did we even slow it down?"
"No," Simon said. "It's too sophisticated for me to stop with an ad hoc COBOL routine. Whoever created this knew what they were doing. We're talking about a JCL running a proc with an imbedded routine running an encrypted COBOL program. I can't even read the code the encryption is so damn complicated."
"Damn it," Barber said again.
"What about the hardware infiltration?" Simon asked.
"No answer yet," Barber said. "I don't know what the hell is..."
Barber stopped in mid sentence, spun away from Simon, and listened intensely to the telephone receiver. "You've done it? You've got it? Good job. Now get the hell out of there."
Barber hung up the phone. "They removed the hardware from the unit. Try the program again," Barber said to Simon.
Simon pulled up a screen filled with cryptic green letters. Simon typed over several of the variables to modify the “run parameters” for the change in hardware. When he completed the necessary changes to the edit screen he typed the word "SUB" at the command line at the top of the screen. The two men impatiently leaned over the terminal, waiting for the results.
"How long should this take?" Barber asked.
"It shouldn't be too long. I adjusted the params to zero in on an anomaly that I already know will happen."
"When this is all finished, I'll ask you what that meant," Barber said.
Simon typed at the command line on the top of the screen.
=S.DA OJOB G711UC1*
The computer screen changed to display the statistics of the program Simon had just submitted. Simon continued to hit the enter key to check the progress of the program. The top of the screen displayed the total amount of the CPU utilized. "I'm at an exception count of 619. It should end around 800. My program is chewing up the CPU usage. We're at 94% right now. It shouldn't be that high. I don't think that's a good sign. That could mean the encrypted code is multiplying exponentially."
"How long will that be before it's done?"
Simon hit enter one more time and the screen went blank. A message in red text appeared at the top left hand corner of the screen:
JESLIB JOB 9483 COMPLETED WITH CONDITION CODE 00
"It's still going," Simon said.
"It can't be, the hardware is no longer in place," Barber said.
"I should have thought of that."
"What?"
"It doesn't matter in this situation that the hardware has is gone. The host system has the program in resident memory in its CPU. It doesn't matter that the hardware has been removed. Nothing has happened to clear that program out of memory," Simon paused. "Because of its encryption, I can't touch the source code, nor can I touch the extract files it creates."
"Why can't you?"
"It's a production based job, that's our protection against anything in our standard jobs. We used to have problems with programmers changing programs in the IRS system to give them a lessened chance of a random audit."
"They really did that?"
"You bet, and they were getting tens of thousands of dollars back in refunds."
"Is there any other way to clear it out?" Barber asked.
"There is the way we talked about before," Simon said.
"That's dangerous."
"Yes it is," Simon said. "But so is allowing this to continue."
"Shutting down the entire system is the only solution?"
"Yes," Simon said. "Otherwise, the program will always stay resident in memory, because these CPU boxes are always running. They never get turned off. This system is unlike most others in our government main frame network. Because the banks and investment institutions rely on information from this system at all hours of the day, it never shuts completely down for daily maintenance. It simply shifts off certain modules for a few minutes at a time while it runs maintenance. It's a process that takes most of the day on and off."
"You realize the fallout, don't you," Barber said.
"I can imagine worse if we don't shut it down," Simon said.
"I can't even begin to imagine all the ramifications, the iterations, or the permutations that could result because of this. It would be chaos," Barber said.
"We have to," Simon said. "But, it's your call, Director Barber."
Barber sighed and shook his head. "Do it," he said. "Shut down the Federal Reserve System."




New York Times
Headline
October 18, 1990

Stock Market Crashes
Bloody Monday

New York (UPI) - The New York Stock Exchange plummeted to new lows yesterday. An inexplicable series of events sent investors and brokerage houses scrambling to sell stock as prices plummeted to new lows.
Not since the great depression or the market crash of 1987 has the market suffered so much in such a short time. Analysts and technicians are uncertain exactly what happened. It appears there was a glitch in some computer systems early yesterday morning. Computer systems in the large brokerage houses are set automatically to buy or sell based on certain events, such as low prices, or lack of funds within a customer's bank account. The systems had trouble accessing any of their customers account information within the Federal Reserve System. This action triggered computer systems of many brokerage house's immediately to initiate selling stock short. When all the brokerage house's system began selling, the entire stock market and other financial markets went into disarray. Stock prices began to plummet to lows seldom seen in this century, even for ultrastable stocks such as IBM, Intel, and Microsoft. All the time this was happening, the brokerage house's computer systems were still trying to sell, thus driving the prices deeper because of the surplus in the supply of stock...


Washington Post
October 18, 1990

Two Men Found Murdered in Georgetown Office

Washington, DC (UPI) - Two men were found murdered in a Georgetown Office Monday night. Both men shot at point-blank range to the throat with a .22 caliber weapon. The two men are unidentified. Authorities do not have any clues about the identities of the two men.
Police Detective Robinson said in a statement. "Fingerprints, dental records, personal belongings in the office, none of them give us a clue about whom these men were." The names in which the men used to rent the office space have also proven to be false and a dead-end. The company name that rented the office was Sarah Douglas Services, who took possession only the previous week, paying cash. There is no record anywhere of any such company. It appears that nothing was stolen from the office. The only damage noted was a destroyed personal computer.
Authorities currently do not have any suspects or motive in the killing...

Back to Writing the Fenian Avenger (with a new concept painting)

A combination of a holiday at the beach, the kids crazy fall schedule of events, and health issues at home (and surprisingly, not mine) caused a break in my writing of the first draft of The Fenian Avenger. Perhaps it was a much-needed break. I was stuck on Chapter 34 for weeks.

But, all of that seemed unimportant as my wife Alicia started having some pretty scary symptoms from an irregular heartbeat. She was under a great deal of pressure, probably mostly because of a tennis event she was helping coordinate in Asheville. She was set to leave on a Friday morning, when she came down with this on Thursday night and wound up in the ER (a feat we repeated two days later). Between that and starting the kids on their home school program for the fall (which is more than a full time job in the first place, I’m a major slacker compared to her), that may have enough to raise the stress level to an all-time high. During that time, I scaled back on some things, came into the office a little earlier, got home a little earlier, helped take the kids to afternoon and evening events. We had tremendous help in the form of dinners and help babysitting the kids from our friends at ECPC and JFBC HSG (I feel like the government – that would be East Cobb Presbyterian Church, where we attend, and Johnson Ferry Baptist Church Home School Group, where the kids attend classes and are involved in sports and extracurricular activities. See, that’s too long, and exactly why I abbreviated).

Alicia is doing much better now. I wish I could have taken the last week or so off, as we used almost the last of my vacation time three weeks ago to go to the beach. I think one of the most relaxing holiday’s I’ve had was last year when we were supposed to go to Asheville (you see, it seems to be tied into going to Asheville) when Alicia required emergency surgery. Instead of cancelling the holiday, I just took it at home and took care of her. It was one of the most relaxing holiday’s I can remember (not for her, though).

But, it was nice this time scaling back and not being so busy, watching DVD’s of TV seasons that I picked out (I think she would grade me an A- on Burn Notice, an F on Mad Men, and an incomplete bordering on C- for True Blood). We spend time talking with the kids, talking with each other (Thought, I think she is sick of my stressing about Eamon Malone and the Fenian Avenger and that lousy Chapter 34 that won’t finish).

Now, I’ve returned to writing the Fenian Avenger now. And the break was just what the doctor ordered. As usually the case with me, I lose sight of what the first draft of a novel really is: A rough start-to-finish treatment of your book, if the moment leads you to write prose and dialogue, then go for it, otherwise terse explanations of what is happening in that passage or chapter will suffice.

Chapter 34 was a passage that was critical to the book, and I was becoming entrenched in the description of what was going on when it wasn’t truly necessary. The Fenian Avenger is a story in which a fictional current time Ireland that is mired in a deep depression in which one of the few industries that actually turns a profit is that which caters to Irish-Americans finding their roots. These people (that I am one of, though only a generation removed from being an Irish citizen) are often called Plastic Paddies, and desire to see the Ireland of their fantasies with happy Irish people dancing and signing in shiny green clothes. This Ireland is full of corruption in government as well in the police force, which is not called the police, they are the Garda (pronounced GAR-ad-ee), which is short for Garda Síochána na hÉireann, which is Gaelic for Guardians of Ireland.

Eamon Malone is a boy that was raised by a juggernaut corporation in Ireland called KOD, lead by the charismatic Kieran O’Dowd. Eamon is off the charts in IQ, physical activities, and artistic sense. His education and training are part of the mysterious Sons of Ireland by KOD. Eamon has parents, his father is a detective in the Garda, but it’s KOD that calls all the shots. When his father learns that Eamon is being trained in combat and how to kill, he threatens to pull his son out of the program. Well, what would any large corporation do in this case? Well, of course, remove the parents from the picture.

When this happens, Eamon escapes the training facilities. Angry and alone, he vows revenge against KOD and Kieran O’Dowd for parents. He meets up with enterprising Angus Shannon, a computer and electronics genius, and fellow Kieran O’Dowd hater. Angus wants revenge because KOD killed his parents and stole their scientific breakthrough which was the most complex and complete mapping and study of the human DNA (as Eamon learns this, warning bells go off in his head). Angus is limited in his pursuit of Kieran O’Dowd as the accident that killed his parents left him paralyzed in a wheelchair.

Together with Eamon’s fighting skills and Angus’ technology and hacking into every system, Eamon becomes the Fenian Avenger, fighting Garda corruption against the Irish people and hero of Ireland.

Okay, that sounds a little comic book-ish, but the more complete concept is quite long to go into. Thus, I really have to work on my 60-second elevator speech and query letter pitch for this book by the time it’s done.

Chapter 34 is right in the middle. It’s the crucial scene where the Fenian Avenger breaks into KOD corporate headquarters, which is secured the max like a fortress. Eamon and Angus were also forced to use the help of John Q, a former Sinn Fein lieutenant, who was able to get them access to the building in the form of an employee ID. Unfortunately, John Q used the Fenian Avenger smokescreen to steal company secrets on mergers and was able to profit by short-selling KOD stock.

Once inside, he discovers important clues about what Kieran is up to, and who is really is. Using Angus’ help, he is able to get by all the security systems. However, he misses one off-line security measure in Kieran’s office, a video camera that is motion activated and tied into an isolated computer. And it captured perfect images of the Fenian Avenger breaking into Kieran’s office and rifling through the files. Oops. Between that, and the evidence that someone stole inside information on a merger, that made the Fenian Avenger look like a criminal, rather than a hero.

Once this chapter was done by first draft standards, I was able to roll along and rip off another few chapters over the weekend.

I even revised an earlier concept image of the Fenian Avenger. Initially I was uncertain as to what he was going to look like, and the first image he had a fancy cape. I started to think to myself that this is a depression-era Ireland. I changed the cape for a long coat, and I think this makes a big difference. The Fenian Avenger is not a TV hero, he stays in the shadows, and he only reason he wears a mask is that he doesn’t want the Garda’s facial recognition software to spot him (as KOD is still searching for the lost Eamon Malone to finish creating the next generation of Irish men).