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I’d tried to talk him out of it. I hadn’t wanted to look his name up in the quantum computer, afraid I’d see it on a KIA list, or worse, MIA. I suppose it’s hard to say worse, but for some reason, being missing always seemed worse than being dead. At least if you were dead, everyone knew it. If you were just missing, no one could get on with their lives for years, maybe never. I’d done a light look-ahead though, and what I found wasn’t good.

What I’d read, anyway. I gave up after the second paragraph of an article that talked about the
U.S. invasion of Syria
, which is what all of the world’s news sites were calling it. Of course, in America, it was called
The Syrian Liberation Resolution
. Back in May, al-Assad broke out a secret or hidden stockpile of WMD’s, but instead of chemical weapons, these ones were apparently biological in nature.

America had finally armed the rebels, but weapons and radios weren’t much good against invisible microbes or viruses that ate flesh, caused the lungs to fill with fluid, or brought about bloody dysentery that was communicable to the point that entire enclaves had been decimated. Then there were the growing majority of the rebels who were actually Al-Qaeda or some other extremist group that seemed to be terrorizing the population worse than al-Assad had.

It should have been a bigger deal to me, but it was one of those things that I could do nothing about. War wasn’t in my ten year plan. I didn’t want to save the world with guns and bombs, and that shit never worked anyway. I was more focused on places that had been hammered by typhoons, tornadoes, earthquakes, famines, tragedies like that. When Cyclone Hilda nearly washed an unknown place called R
ajakkamangalam on the southern tip of India into the ocean, I’d anonymously donated a quarter of a million dollars to the Red Cross, with the stipulation that all of it was to help the victims, along with the threat that I’d never donate again if I found out a single dollar had gone towards anything else.

I had no way of checking of course, and I was being an idiot by moving that kind of money around, even anonymously. I found it too hard to stay an objective observer, especially when a helicopter flyover of the area showed before and after pictures, and the after pictures were nothing but piles of bodies. Bodies that seemed to stretch on forever, though I’m sure that was just my mind making me feel guilty.

The only thing harder than ignoring such human tragedies, for me anyway, was watching those awful commercials that show abused animals and the animal shelters that were desperate for funds. Those commercials made Kassi and I both cry, and anytime we were watching television and the song started to play, we’d both panic and dive for the remote to change it. I had silently vowed that one day I would be able to make that commercial go away by solving the problem after throwing enough money at it.

I heard the organ begin playing, and everyone stood up.
Don’t lock your knees, you fucking moron
, I thought.
Don’t ruin this for her, this is her day
. I couldn’t remember if those were my own words, or those were the stern words of warning from my mother. I heard a chorus of gasps and turned around, and almost let out a gasp myself. I’d seen Kassandra in a nice dress before, but it was always the casual type of dresses, stuff that business professionals or school teachers would wear. Nothing like a formal wedding gown.

Like almost everything that involved money, she’d fought me tooth and nail over the dress. I had finally given up, and told my mom to deal with her, that I couldn’t. Surprisingly, it was my father who convinced Kass to give in, telling her that it was the day she would remember for the rest of her life, and because of that, it would be the day
Tyler
would remember for the rest of
his
life. Didn’t she want to be even more beautiful than she already was, the
second
most beautiful woman on the planet (to be fair, he’d had to say that since Mom was within earshot)? Didn’t she want her husband to see her in the most beautiful dress money could buy and realize from that point on that no woman would ever be her equal in his eyes?

My father made her cry, but they were tears of joy. It’s a good thing my father had a lot of experience with women, or at least one woman for more than two decades, as I was still learning the ins and outs. He’d assured me that her tears were from happiness, while puffing out his chest in victory. I couldn’t help but think my father had every right to puff his chest out now that I finally saw the dress. I’d never seen anything like it, not that I was a big wedding dress connoisseur.

I couldn’t stop staring. It was like a skin-tight leotard, yet it was this big, frilly, puffy, diaphanous thing that looked like delicate insect wings. Her curves stood out, yet were hidden by the layers of material that seemed to be made out of spun spider’s silk. I heard a snort behind me, and turned to my groomsmen.

“Stop staring at my wife’s tits or you both are going to eat a hitman’s bullet,” I warned.

Dave and Joey both stifled a laugh. “She ain’t your wife yet,” Glenn Stanley said, my third groomsman.

I made the hand signal of a pistol being cocked and put to the back of his head while he kneeled in front of me. My father cleared his throat to let me know to stop fooling around, and when I looked over at him, he was giving the death-stare to my friends, wiping the smiles off their faces instantly. I pulled the trigger on my finger-pistol one more time while glaring at the three of them, then turned around. I felt someone’s finger in my back, probably Joey, since he was the biggest clown of all my friends, but I wouldn’t bite, and kept my eyes on my soon-to-be bride.

I don’t think I stopped staring at her until after our first dance. The whole time she stood across from me while we exchanged vows, I never once broke eye contact with her, not even when I foolishly locked my knees long enough to almost pass out. Thankfully, Dave saw what was about to happen and grabbed my elbow. I don’t think anyone in the audience saw it, but I watched Kassi’s eyes follow Dave’s hand for just a second before meeting my eyes again. The small smile on her lips let me know she’d caught me, and I’d never hear the end of it once all of this pomp was over.

I couldn’t even smile back, which probably made her nervous. I was so infatuated with her in that moment that I wanted to fall to my knees and shout to the world that no one was happier than me, and no one would ever be happier than me for the rest of eternity. When she said “I do” and then we slipped modest rings on each others’ fingers, I fell into her eyes and became lost within a kiss that I hope to never forget.

CHAPTER 10 - Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction

September 30, 2015

“Are you sure this is what you want to do?” Kassi asked her cousin over the video link.

“It’s a little too late for that, isn’t it?” Nico smiled, but we both could see the nervousness about him.

“Just be careful,” she said, looking away so she could hide the fact that she was about to cry.

“Take care of your buddies,” I said, hoping I was being helpful.

What did you say to a man who was about to invade a foreign country? Half of America had already told him to stay home, calling it an illegal war, that we were getting too involved in the Middle East. We’d barely extricated ourselves from Iraq, were still in Afghanistan, and had been lobbing hellfire missiles at the Revolutionary Guard in Iran for three months to let them know that their nuclear program was going to stop, or be stopped by force. The ground invasion had been pushed back by almost a month, and for a while there was hope it would be completely avoided, but that hope crumbled after another WMD attack on rebels and civilians, this time a deadly chemical nerve agent.

“Take care of my cousin,” he said with a grin.

“Just come back home, Nico,” Kass said, touching the screen as if she could somehow feel him through it.

She did cry for a few minutes after we ended the call. I held her and said nothing, understanding that this was one of those times it was best if I kept my mouth shut. We sat on the couch, holding each other, each lost within our thoughts. I’m sure she was thinking of Nico, of the vitriol that was being spewed on the news channels about the ground invasion that would begin in a few days.

I’d tried to let her know a week ago that it wouldn’t last very long, and that Nico would more than likely come home safe, probably without even having to get off the ship that carried his Marine unit through the Mediterranean. America was decent at war, but we were the best when it came to bombers, fighters, and drones to take care of problems remotely. Since war was inevitable, everyone was hoping our air superiority would pound al-Assad’s remaining forces into submission before a single American boot ever touched Syrian soil.

My mind was full of whirling thoughts about whether I should finally tell her about the computer. I’d made up my mind to do it on our wedding night, but I never got around to it. For the first few days, I’d genuinely forgotten about it, an easy thing to do when sleeping in a top-floor penthouse in downtown Chicago, only putting clothes on long enough to go sightseeing. By the time we were boarding the plane to come back to Idaho, my mind was hard at work fighting with itself over whether or not it was the right time to tell her.

She’s your wife, and you love her more than you love life
, my rational brain would say.
She’ll demand to use it for her own personal wants
, my ugly, mean brain said.
Bullshit
, said rational brain,
she’s been nothing but stubborn when it comes to money and personal gain since we’ve known her
.
That’s not who she is.
To which my ugly brain would sneer,
it’s all a ruse, a trick. She’s a woman, latching on to a very rich man. She’ll show her true colors soon enough
. I’d almost screamed, “SHUT UP!” while we were somewhere over Colorado, but I knew it would not only freak Kassandra out, I’d probably end up spending the rest of the flight in the steward galley with a U.S. Marshal’s gun in my mouth, the three hundred very frightened passengers barely able to contain themselves once the news cameras were pointed in their faces after we landed.

For the last two months, I’d warred with myself. The ugly part of my brain finally relented and gave up with the nasty thoughts, but it remained in the argument, giving me reason after reason to keep the computer to myself. We were building a new home up in the foothills above the city, a fantastic ten-acre plot with a basement, three-car garage, and a view overlooking the valley that was breathtaking. Within the plans was my own personal little “man cave” that would house all of my gaming consoles, guitars, computers, and a pinball machine that I’d been unable to stop myself from buying. I could keep the quantum computer in that room, stuffed amongst everything else, and she’d never know. She barely remembered it from the time it was on my desk at Thanksgiving.

“Baby?” I asked, deciding to get it over with before ugly brain woke up and figured out what was going on. “Kass? Can I talk to you about something?”

Her face fell into sadness once again, afraid I was going to heap on some more bad news.

“What’s up?” Her voice was steady, but it sounded as if she knew something terrible was coming.

“We need to talk about the computer,” I said.

“Your laptop? What’s wrong with it?” she asked, puzzled as to why I would bother talking to her about it. She wasn’t a Luddite, but she used the laptops and tablets for school, for normal things like social networking, shopping, looking at new tattoos that she dreamed about getting.

“No, not the laptop. Remember the desktop I had? Have?”

“Which one?”

“You know, the one in my room at Thanksgiving. The crazy looking monitor, the dude on the screen firing his gun when I touched him?”

“Oh, yeah,” she answered. “The one you almost ended up masturbating alone for a while over?”

I laughed. “Yeah, the one I was gaming with too much.”

“What about it? You can put it in your man-cave.”

I frowned. “No, it’s not like that. We need to talk about what it can do.”

“What it can do? Like, browse for porn better than other computers?”

I sighed. All the times I had played out this scenario in my mind, the million things I’d thought of, thought ahead of, as if I were plotting out moves in a game of chess, it was all worthless. Conversations never went the way I imagined they would.

“No. It can browse better than other computers, but not for porn, and not in the way you think.”

“Tyler, why are you being so cryptic? What is it about this computer that you want to talk about?”

“This computer can… uh… see into the future.” There. Just throw it out there. What can go wrong?

She narrowed her eyes at me. “I don’t get it.”

“Don’t get what?”

“I don’t get it. The joke. Or have you not said the punchline yet?”

“It isn’t a joke.”

“I know. I’m not laughing. I don’t get it. Your computer can see into the future and…?”

“Kass, how do you think I won the lottery?”

“Your parents won the lottery,” she said, her expression changing to annoyance, like I’d told her a bad joke and was now trying to explain it to her.