84 - Coming Clean

Jon lifted a hand to stroke her hair and stuffed down the guilt, promising himself he would learn to keep his acidic comments to himself. 

Petey eased herself from under his touch and out of his lap.  The dark cotton of his t-shirt swayed loosely around her thighs as she turned to survey the Washington skyline.  Daylight had begun to silhouette the plethora of landmarks and monuments.

“So from the MENSA crack last night, I presume you know that I have at least a couple of brain cells to rub together.” 

Watching her gnaw thoughtfully at her bottom lip, he nodded.  “I was sitting next to Gwyneth Paltrow.  She told me your real name and filled in some blanks.”

“Birth name.  PT is my legal name now.”  Fingering the pink ends of her hair, she glanced briefly at him before resuming her perusal of the nation’s capital.  “Being smart has its downside.  Being very smart is worse.   Children are cruel, and until they got around to labeling me as ‘gifted’, I wasn’t special, I was a freak.”

Her hand fell away from her hair and began repetitiously rubbing at one spot, low on her forearm.  Jon wasn’t sure she even realized she was doing it, so lost was the look in her eyes. 

“Needless to say, I didn’t have friends,” she blandly continued.  “It was very easy to become introverted.  My parents made sure I had the necessary social grace classes, and I understood what I was supposed to do, even though I avoided having to at all costs.  It was even easier to hide away once they labeled me as a quote/unquote genius.  They gave me books and materials that I spent hours upon hours poring over until they were burned into my mind.  It became easier to keep to myself than to force awkward attempts at socializing with others my age.”

“Do you really have a photographic memory?”  Jon inquired quietly, reaching for her hand since he couldn’t hold her heart.  It was one thing to choose introversion, as he often did.  Petey didn’t have the luxury of that choice, it had been forced on her.

“Scientists say photographic memories don’t exist.”  A delicate lift of her shoulder indicated her indifference to the matter.  “But I guess I have the next closest thing.  The best way to describe it really is photographic.  If you ask me about your iPad, I see the pages of the manual as snapshots in my head.”

The inquiring quirk of her oddly barren eyebrow asked if he’d heard enough, and he inclined his head affirmatively. 

“So anyway, I was a ‘doctor’ at twenty-one and expected to find my way in the world, but I still didn’t have any real social experience to draw upon.  Academia felt comfortable, and everyone in that world is pretty eccentric anyway so it was a natural fit for me.  I taught at a community college for a while, and then MIT invited me to join their faculty.  I stayed there for about four years, but started to miss home.  Carnie-Mellon accepted me as a member of their Electronics Engineering faculty when I was twenty-seven.”

MIT.  She chose to leave the faculty of the most illustrious technical school in the country – at age twenty-seven.  It was almost too much to comprehend.  At the same age that he was partying too hard, she had been a respected Ph.D. for six years.    He now understood why the Senator had found Patience intimidating.   Jon was a little intimidated, too. 

“Daniel was nice to me when I arrived, taking me under his wing.  We talked about work, and he had an avid interest in every single thing I was doing, and asked if I were contemplating any research.  I hadn’t thought of it really, but he pushed me to create, and consider applications I wouldn’t have necessarily pursued of my own accord.  Said it was my obligation to share my gift.  In hindsight, it was almost freakishly obsessive.”

Shaking her head, she said, “He kept after me every day.  Would casually ask about my notes, and help me ‘talk through’ any issues I was having at the time.  If I stepped away from a project, he belittled me about not finishing.  Somewhere in the middle there, I thought his interest was about me, not my work and he indulged that.  It’s how we ended up having sex and ultimately engaged.

“There was one particular project…  Have you ever heard of electronic telepathy?”

Heard of it?  Hell, he had no idea what it meant.  He was forced to reluctantly shake his head. 

“Well, it’s a complicated mess, but the long and short of it is that you can interpret a person’s thoughts into words through the use of electrodes in the brain.  Since bio-electronics is another of my areas of focus, about eight years ago, Daniel pushed me heavily in that direction by playing on my sympathies.” 

Petey shook her head again, shivering. 

“It was like those heart-wrenching ASPCA commercials with the puppies locked in the cages.  He would say that coma victims would be able to communicate with their loved ones, or stroke patients who had lost their capacity for speech.   Made it seem like my civic duty for being smart and all that.  I felt obliged to work on it.

“The first phases came fairly easily, but there was a sticking point with modulating the frequencies.  It was a fine line between providing credible output and gibberish.  I spent a lot of time tinkering with the design of the electrodes, even down to the material they were made from.  Three years ago, I was successful.  We had our first round of successful trials.”

She looked away, finally, from the window and into his face.  Her expression was one of pain, and Jon instinctively reached out for her.  The pain eased as she accepted his hand and climbed back into his lap.  Snuggling her head into the curve of his shoulder, she pressed a soft kiss against his neck before continuing. 

“He was ecstatic.  Or as ecstatic as Daniel gets.  We were going to go out and celebrate, but he said for me to go ahead because he had a quick call to make.  I didn’t realize I had left my cell phone lying on his desk until I was outside the building.  Henry’s oldest had been sick, and I was waiting to hear what the doctor said, so I made a trip back inside for it.”

Her hand was lying against Jon’s chest, and it began moving restlessly.  He folded his hand over hers and stilled it against his sternum with a comforting squeeze.  “Are you okay, Sugar?”

Flipping her hand over so that they were palm to palm, Petey nodded and resumed speaking.  “The office door was cracked, and as I got close I could hear him talking.”  She took a deep breath and uttered the next portion of her story in a hurried, monotone voice as though she just wanted it to be over with.  “He was gloating to whoever was on the phone saying he had worked out the bugs in his design in time to meet their deadline, as promised.  The whole arrogant ‘it was simple really…’ yadda, yadda.  Then he confirmed the bank information for his wire transfer and the amount of two million dollars.”

“The fucker stole your work and took the credit and money?” Contempt and incredulity warred for dominance in his tone of voice, but Jon’s hand rubbed soothingly along her back.  “Jesus, Petey.  I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well…”  She sighed.  “I shoved in the door, snatched up my phone while he sat gaping at me, and stormed out.  Then I marched into the Department Chair’s office, threw my phone in his trashcan in a snit – stupid on my part, really – and told him exactly what he could do with his job and proceeded to call Daniel everything in the book.  He probably assumed it was a lovers’ spat.”

“Anyway, I grabbed all of my notes and electronic copies of my files while Daniel pounded on my locked office door, then proceeded to delete the data from my computer.  While he had most of the information, he had been so focused on the actual process that he was missing the final key element, which was the physical composition of the electrodes.  He had no idea what I’d done to make them work.”

 “I was so pissed that I hacked his e-mail to see if I could find a trail.  I found one hell of a trail.  Turns out someone had approached him for something like this, years before – an international looking for a means to extract information from unwilling persons.  Prisoners of war, spies and whatnot.” 

Jon tensed under her, breathing, “Daaaamn,” and she chuckled humorlessly.  “I know.  Sounds surreal doesn’t it? But that’s what he wants now.  I would imagine that his two million dollars has been hanging in limbo for three years, and he’s starting to get testy about it.  Because I had the design patented – the process was finalized about six months ago – he’s insisting that I marry him and give him the patent as a wedding gift.”  She snorted.  “And then I’m sure he plans to chain me to a research desk so that he can steal whatever else is in my head.  Now you know why I don’t do relationships.”

“I can’t believe that you wouldn’t know he was up to something.”

She shrugged.  “I know it seems strange, but Daniel was the only one who was nice to me.  The rest of the staff was intimidated by my…  genius, or whatever.  That’s the way it always was.  It’s why I changed my name when I left.  PT Diehl is an electronics geek who does some smart things, but there’s no document trail holding her down.  Patience has all the formal baggage that makes people feel awkward.  I don’t know if they think I can read their minds or if I’m judging everything they say and do, but they are uncomfortable knowing that I’m a little smarter than most people.”  She laughed.  “Believe it or not, PT has been my chance to be normal.”

“So you didn’t change your name and go Goth to hide from him?”

“No, not really.  The Goth look always fascinated me.  I’d seen students around campus dressed that way, but I was never brave enough to indulge.  Some of it is admittedly a little extreme, even for me, but I actually like the stuff I wear and having pink hair.  And yes, I do hide behind it sometimes.  If they’re focused on my physical appearance, they don’t think about what I know or don’t know.  All the same, it was nice the few times that I met someone who didn’t care about either.”

“Richie and Dave.”

“Yeah.”

Jon tried to live life without regrets.  That’s why he dove headlong into anything and everything that crossed his mind.  The way he and Petey had started out though would go in the short list of things that he did regret. 

“I’m sorry,” he apologized, holding her tighter.

“I prefer to think if he hadn’t been where we were, we wouldn’t be where we are,” was her philosophical take on the situation.  Her forehead creased.  “But then again, you wouldn’t be stuck in the middle of a blackmail threat either.” 

Petey wound her arms around his neck.  “You’re the only one who knows all of this, Jon.  The only one.  I’m so sorry this had to involve you, and I promise that I’m doing everything I can to fix it.  I just have to play along for a few more days with him, until the semester starts.  Then I can keep closer tabs on him until I find out where he’s storing the other copies of the pictures.”

“No.  You’re done playing along, and I’m a little pissed that you played along at all.  You should have told me in the beginning, Petey.”

“I knew you’d be angry,” was once again her lame offering.

“Sugar, since when are you afraid of my temper?” he chided.  “You’re one of a handful of people who will butt heads with me, and one of only two who has ever managed to diffuse it.”

“Dorothea.”

He nodded.  “Dorothea.  Who is probably pissed because I didn’t get back to her last night.  I sent a text to her, saying that  I found you and was supposed to call and fill her in.”  Jon chuckled softly.  “She told me not to screw it up.  I think she likes you.”

Petey smiled.  “I like her too.”  Twisting her head, she looked at him with curiosity.  “So were you waiting for me outside the ballroom last night?”

“No.  I had been talking to the Senator, and telling him about Daniel.”

She bolted into an upright position, pushing her hands into his chest so she could swivel around.  “You did what?”

“I told the Senator about Daniel and New Year’s Eve.  In case you wouldn’t talk to me, I wanted someone to know he was dangerous.”

Thumping him lightly, her eyes became an icy storm when accusing, “Do you know what could happen if he acts on that information?  Daniel will release those pictures Jon!”