Poker Card Reader
Sat, 07 Nov 2009 09:16:39 +0000
This is Chas Hathaway’s 2009 Nano Novel. What is a Nano Novel? (IE Why does this story stink so bad?)
There was a brief moment of silence, and then Gerdie saw the blotchy redness in Roberta’s face, and rushed to her side, sitting beside her and putting her arm over Roberta’s shoulder. But instead of saying anything, Gertie started singing, “Oh, Home on the Range.” At first the song made Roberta feel utterly ridiculous, but after the third time through, she felt oddly better.
“Oh, Gertie,” she said, “What am I going to do? My daughter is out there somewhere. I don’t know whether or not to hope the police catch her. What do they do with minors? Do they lock them up? I know they don’t go to prison, but what is Juvenile detention like?”
Gertie rubbed her back, saying things like, “There, there,” and “It’s all right.”
“And what if those troublesome camp girls get her involved in drugs or alcohol? Is she doomed to a life of crime and evil?”
The women sat talking for hour – mostly Roberta at first, but after the first hour, the conversation led to other things.
“What you need is a man at your side,” Gertie said, “then you’ll have more time for your daughter. Just look at me! If John hadn’t married me, then Sall wouldn’t have been the great successful man that he is today.”
“You raised Scal?”
“Yes! Well… maybe not raised him exactly, but we made sure to visit my younger and his wife at least once a month, and while I was there, I was the mom!”
That poor wife! Roberta thought to herself, but she said, “and you and John didn’t have any kids?”
“No. But I always tried to be a good mother to Sall. He always needed a little extra attention – you know how it is. Now what about your husband, Max, what happened to him again?”
“He died when Bobby was five.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, dear. What happened?”
“Well, I usually just tell people he was in an accident, but the accident was falling into an aquarium at Sea World.”
“Oh!” Gertie said, “the poor man drowned.”
“No, actually he could swim fine, but… but… well, the Sting Ray swam faster…”
There was an awkward silence in the room, and then a single knock on the door. Roberta thought maybe something had just bumped the door, but she looked through the peekhole anyway. It was scal, scanning the parking lot perimeter. Had he remained outside this whole time, or was he coming back to take Gertie home? It was rather late – almost 10pm the last time Roberta checked the clock.
She opened the door just enough for her head to poke out. “And what do you want?”
Scal glanced both ways again, and then leaned in and whispered, “I just thought I’d let you know about the status of your position.”
“I see.” she replied dryly. “The status of my position.”
“there are two police cars off the northwest corner of the parking lot, one security car on the southwest corner, and a channel 8 news van tucked behind some hedges across the street.”
Roberta knew that the police had promised to watch the house, but Roberta was surprised at how many cars were watching. But she didn’t want Scal to know of her surprise. “Yeah, I figured. So?”
“There’s only one thing we can conclude.”
She nearly slammed the door in his face, but instead said, “Which is?”
“That the kids in the trees behind the apartment plan on doing harm to the place the minute the police car pulls away. Now if we…”
“Wait, what did you say?”
“That there’s only one thing we can conclude!”
“No, I mean about the kids!”
“Yeah, I’m sure they’ll break a window or something the moment the security and cop cars pull away.”
Roberta’s heart sped up. Could it possibly be her baby Bobby?
She pushed past Scal and ran around to the back of the apartment. The police car on the corner started its engine. Roberta realized that if it was her girl, walking straight to her would get her caught by the police for sure, and though she didn’t particularly want to harbor a criminal, she certainly wanted to talk to Bobby before deciding anything. Looking around quickly, she grabbed the small garbage can and took it back to her door.
“There’s no one in there,” Scal said, “I already checked.”
Ignoring him, she ran into her house and grabbed a full garbage bag out of the kitchen and took it outside, plopping it conspicuously into the can. Then she carried the can toward the dumpster in the back, trying to look as casual as possible. From the back of the apartment, the only one of the vehicles that was in view was the Channel 8 van. She huffed and looked around in the trees, looking for any sign of the kids Scal spoke of.
“Mom?” a young familiar voice said from somewhere above her.
“Bobby?” Roberta squeeled, “Bobby, baby, tell me that’s you!”
“It’s me mom! I’m coming down now!”
Roberta looked over at the van. If they saw her talking to the tree, they didn’t make it obvious.
“Okay, hurry down, but don’t make too much noise!”
When both girls were down, Bobby hugged her sobbing mother for a long time, but then her mom said, “What happened girl? Wait, we’ve got to get you inside – get you cleaned up. But there are police cars everywhere. We have to be careful!”
“Could you open a back window?” Cary said, “We could climb inside from back here.”
Roberta eyed Cary suspiciously, wanting to kick the girl more than help her. Bobby must have seen her jaw clinch, because she said, “It’s okay, mom, she’s my friend!”
Some friend! Roberta thought. Friends get friends into horrible trouble, almost killed, and take nothing in return. Still, the girl was right about the best way to get them inside.
She hurried back in the front door and through to the back window, ignoring the fact that Scal was back in the house. She opened it as quietly as possible, and the girls climbed in quickly, shutting the window behind them. Seeing her daughter muddy, ragged, and scraped, Roberta hugged her again, sobbing like before. “I thought I lost you, my baby Bobby! Oh, I was so worried!”
“Hey!” an aggitated voice came from the front room.It was Scal’s. They all braced, expecting him to say that the police were coming to the door. “Did you know there are fingerprints on these portraits? Fingerprints! This could be strong circumstantial evidence!”
They relaxed, but Roberta turned to Cary, venom in her expression. “What do you mean by this?! Getting my daughter to plant a bomb in a public department store? A Bomb?! Was it supposed to be a joke, or where you just trying to get my poor girl into trouble? I should throw you out that door now for the police to throw you into prison!”
Cary stared at her, completely dumbfounded.
“A bomb?” Bobby said, “What bomb?”
Roberta held her daughter back, looking into her face. “The bomb that went off at Val Mart, the reports say – the police and security guards say…”
“You talked to the security guards?” Cary blurted.
“They didn’t try to hurt, you did they, Mom?” Bobby’s voice sounded genuinely concerned.
“Hurt me? What on earth are you talking about?”
Cary and Bobby looked at each other, and both began speaking at once. It took a moment to get the conversation orderly again, but before long the girls had told her mom, and then Girdie, and then (much to Roberta’s annoyance) to Scal, the whole story.
When they finished, Roberta, Scal, and Gerdie had expressions of shear bewilderment.
Scal was the one to break the silence. “There’s only one thing we can conclude from all of this. That V…”
“Scal, will you please just stick a sock in it!” Roberta said, but Scal acted like he hadn’t heard.
“al Mart does not communicate well with Universal Product Code Database.”
“What do you mean?” Cary said before Roberta had a chance to interrupt.
“Well isn’t it obvious?” he said, looking from face to face, as if someone would fill in the rest of the puzzle.
“No, Sall, it’s not obvious,” Roberta said sharply, “that Val Mart’s phone system is malfunctioning, and the employees blew their own store up to make a point. No it’s not obvious that the UPC code blows up when you scan it – can we please forget the conclusions and start coming up with the questions?!”
Scall’s one eyebrow was raised – which was all they could see of his eyes, since he was still wearing sunglasses.
Then he scratched his chin. “Hmmm,” he said, deep in thought, “Actually, I hadn’t thought about that possibility.”
Roberta blew out her breath and sat on the couch, saying to the group, “Well what do we do now?”
Cary was looking at Scal. “But Mr…”
“Wag,” Scal said, using his suave business card motion to give her a card and shake her hand vigorously, “Scal Edward Wag, Private investigator, 3rd class.”
“Yes, well, Mr. Wag, I was just wondering what you were going to say – about the product database thing, I mean.”
“Ah, yes,” he said, sitting and putting his elbows on his knees and pressing his fingers together the way you might picture a mad scientist doing. “The Universal Product Code directory keeps a tight database of products with their corresponding code. Individual stores will enter these codes into their own database and then add their own code to the product to help them keep track of inventory. If a store does not enter the Universal Product Code (or UPC) into their database, usually the product will simply not be recognized by the store’s code-reader. But if, by chance, a code is entered wrongly, it may tell the computer that the customer is purchasing the wrong product.”
“I never should have let you back in the house,” Roberta said.
Ignoring that, Scal continued, “Val Mart took the UPC code reading system to a new level, allowing codes to read more than just the product information. Through their advanced system, they can use a UPC code to pass on any kind of digital information, such as an Internet URL, a digital photograph, or even a musical WAVE file. In fact, it’s possible, using an internal database, to store transferable data onto a particular UPC.”
“That is very interesting…” Bobby said, “So the UPC of a CD could have music on it?”
“Or more!” Scal said. His forehead was sweating, and his sunglasses looked fogged up. Apparently he wasn’t used to this many people actually listening to what he had to say. “Since the UPC is linked to the individual product, and the store code links to a private database, a product can be linked directly to an Internet Server with all the information on that server.”
Despite herself, Roberta was now almost as interested in what he was saying as she was shocked at his sudden intelligence. “Wait a minute, how do you even know all this?”
He straightened and his animated motions changed to a poker face. “I never reveal my sources. It’s bad practice.”
“But wouldn’t that require that the UPC have some kind of microchip or something?” Roberta said, shocked that she was actually asking Scal a question.
“No, because anything that scans the product already has one.”
“So it’s like an access code,” Cary said, “with all the steps to retrieve the information coded into the UPC.”
Scal bobbed his head. “Something like that.”
“So what does that mean for us?” Bobby said.
“Well, it means there is only one thing we can conclude from all of this,” he replied as Roberta squinted suspiciously at him, “that Val Mart sells things cheaper because their UPC’s change the product information to something cheaper than the product.”
Everyone looked around at each other with puzzled expressions. It was Roberta who said, “Huh?!”
“The cheaper stuff!” he said, as if this was the answer to everything. “Why do you think they put Wal Mart, the king of cheap, out of business last year? Cheaper stuff! Why do you think they are monopolizing capitalism itself? Cheaper stuff! Why do you think their product lines drive prices down while all around them products are going up! Cheaper stuff!”
He was standing on the couch now with his arms outstretched like a rally speaker. His voice was beginning to take on the quality of an opera singer, and if there had been varying pitch to his voice, Roberta would have thought he was practicing for a musical. According to the traditional approach to a musical play, he should break into song right… about… now.
Instead, he broke into a coughing fit. Gertie slapped him smartly on the back, and the group slumped back into quiet. Roberta felt that they were back to ground zero.
“Wait a minute,” Cary said, “If what he says is true – about the code, I mean, then maybe when I scanned the Santa, it was telling the computer more than the price.”
“Like maybe telling the store to fire me?” said Bobby, the mournful expression returning to her face.
“Well, maybe,” Cary replied, “or something like… oh! Didn’t you say, Bobbie, that they told you that you broke the store?”
“Yeah,” she said regretfully, her head pointing to the ground, “I broke my first job.”
Roberta stroked her daughter’s hair, saying, “it’s okay, my baby Bobbie, Mom will help you find a better job.”
“But I thought the newspaper said a bomb blew up the store,” Girtie said in an almost disappointed tone.
Roberta ran to her bedroom and retrieved all three of the newspapers she had collected. They took turns reading the articles out loud.
//////
Cary was confused. According to the newspapers, Bobbie and Cary had placed two bombs in the store: one on the inside near a main computer, and one in the parking lot. Store managers speculated that the bombs had been placed strategically to do the most harm to the most people.
“Some think that all you have to do these days to get what you want is to do a bomb threat, but then carry through with the threat.” says manager Margaret Glenard, “It’s dispicable, really, what kids these days will do for attention. I just hope those poor girls get the help they need in order to scrape up what chances they may still have in life.”
According to the report, the inside bomb shorted out just before ignition, causing only a minor electrical discharge, which burned out the wiring on the central computer, shutting down all of the systems computers. The second bomb went off in the parking lot. Obviously that one was conjured up from the smoke mess. But the bomb inside the store… could that have something to do with the price scanner?
“What did we ever do with that Santa?” Cary asked.
“I thought it was still in your pocket,” Bobbie said.
Cary reached in her back pocket and was surprised to find the Santa doll still there, fully intact.
The UPC was still there, too, though now Cary noticed that it looked a little odd for a UPC. Kind of primitive, somehow. She passed the doll around the room to let everyone get a look.
When Gerdie got it, she said, “This looks worse than the ones at the library.”
When Roberta asked her what she meant, she went into a fairly animated discussion about how much trouble she had scanning books, and that it was because the sticker was all scratched up. One of the techy guys at work told her that there were four different widths of lines on a barcode, which she had named the toothpick bar, the pencil bar, the hose bar, and the sewer-pipe bar, and if one got scratched the computer would think a thick bar is actually a thinner one.
“That’s when you have all the trouble,” she said, “then you have to jiggle it around and hope it finds the right size of line. It’s all a bunch of hogwash if you ask me.”
“But what’s wrong with this code? It didn’t look very scratched at all to me.” Roberta said.
“But it’s all messed up! It’s only got the toothpick bar and the sewer pipe bar. Personally, I think the scanner machine things just don’t care. Sometimes they just need a good bop on the noggin to remind them you’re in charge.”
Gerdie shook her head, and Roberta could see the obscenities on the motion of her lips.
Someone suggested they take that code to the library to try scanning it there to see what it comes up as, but then they remembered what had happened to the last scanner that had read that UPC.
Cary took the Santa back and looked at the UPC. There were only two bar widths. Maybe that was what made it look so old fashioned. “What does the letter in the code stand for?”
When no one seemed to know, they decided to get out the ol’ Internet connection. The speed was comparable to dial-up, though the landlord swore it was DSL high-speed.
It took them a while to find anything about UPC codes, but by the time they did, it was getting late enough that everyone felt the need for sleep. Not wanting to send Gerdie and (heaven forbid) Scal out with psychotic security guards watching, Roberta offered to let them sleep on the couch and fold-out guest bed.
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