I doubt Johnny Robbins would go to the trouble to doctor these screenshots. Then again, he’s capable of anything, and I trust him less and less each day. Not that I trusted him much at all.

I’m back at my house, down in the basement where there isn’t any light, except for a dim bulb hanging over my head.

I’m sitting at a folding card table. It’s nothing like the luxurious wooden desks I usually work at—when I work, that is. Which is a lot, recently, but not a whole lot before this whole Simmons Algorithm crisis came up. I’m hunched over my laptop, enjoying the darkness and the small patch of light that this bare light bulb illuminates.

This is how I used to work before I was rich—hunched over the computer, in a darkened room.

Plus, I don’t like to get into my emotions much. Ignoring them and simply dominating them with sheer force of will is what’s gotten me this far… but something feels different.

And I know exactly what it is.

It’s Lily.

More like her absence.

The absence of Lily.

It’s still hitting me hard. It feels like a physical pain, like a hard punch in the stomach, or the absence of some vital organ.

How do I deal with it?

I fucking work, that’s how.

I’ve been down here in the basement for days, only retiring up to my room to sleep for a few hours, or to hit the kitchen to grab some beef jerky.

Everyone always told me to redo the basement, to make it inhabitable. After all, I have the money to do whatever I want to do to it.

But I never wanted to. Honestly, I prefer the completely unfurnished typical basement look. There’s everything a classic basement has here. There are cobwebs, an old washing machine and dryer (not that I use it, since I just send my clothes out), a water heater.

The floor is just a basic concrete floor. In one corner, there’s a big pile of some cardboard boxes that contain the possessions I had before I became rich. I’ve never looked back. I’ve never even opened the boxes.

The boxes contain all the regular stuff you would expect from a single programmer in San Francisco, who was living on people’s couches when he couldn’t pay the rent. Those were hard times, but I got through it.

The boxes also contain family pictures that I haven’t looked at in years. Hell, I’ve never opened the boxes since I moved here.

When I grew up, it was just me and my mom. I don’t have any brothers or sisters, and I don’t have a dad either. He took off when I was just a kid, leaving my mom to work as a secretary and a typist for years, struggling to raise me.

When I was little, she often had to finish her assignments at home. For that, she had a computer, one of those old basic ones.

But it provided me hours of entertainment. And she not only let me use it, she taught me how to use it. I knew all the commands, and she taught me how to program it a little, since she was also taking a community college course on programming in order to try to get a better job for herself, in order to give me something better in life.

I took to it like a fish in water.

Of course, I knew I didn’t want to be a nerd, much less a computer nerd, so I did every sport I could in high school. I started working out in high school, and everybody knew I wasn’t someone you’d want to mess with.

By the time I got to college, my mom had to stop working. She’d gotten sick and at first, and we didn’t know what it was. She didn’t have any energy and simply couldn’t get out of bed. The doctors weren’t any help. They told her to do exercises or something… and they told this to a woman who could barely get out of bed. And it’s not like she looked fine and healthy sitting there in the doctors’ offices.

But I wouldn’t give up. I kept taking her to doctor’s appointments after doctor’s appointments, even when she didn’t want to go.

They finally found something wrong with her and gave her a diagnosis. It was lung cancer, which was quite obvious when they put her in the MRI machine. She’d never smoked a day in her life, not a single cigarette. It just wasn’t fair. She died only a few months later. The disease had already progressed too far. And there wasn’t any treatment available anywhere… stage 4, the kind you don’t tend to recover from.

I blamed myself. I blamed myself for her having to raise me, even though that wasn’t my fault. And I blamed myself for taking her to the doctor who finally diagnosed her. I know it wasn’t my fault that she was sick, and the doctor only found the problem, instead of causing it. But maybe she would have been happier not knowing just how sick she was… happier until the end.

My eyes are blurry and my fingers are tired to the bone.

My mind’s been wandering to strange places…

I force myself to focus back on the computer screen. I’ve been looking over the evidence that Johnny gave me on that USB drive for the hundredth time. Johnny wouldn’t tell me where he got these, but they seem legitimate. Apparently these are the real tests that Simmons ran himself, and they actually show worse performance than my own algorithm.

So it’s true? Simmons faked the benchmark speed scores?

His algorithm is really just a steaming pile of shit? It’s not even not better than mine, it’s far worse?

But I need evidence. I need more than what Johnny gave me.

I need to figure out how Simmons could have possibly faked someone else’s benchmark scores. I really doubt he had any undue influence—the guys who run the tests aren’t the sorts of people who can be influenced by money. They’re huge nerds, interested in the technology itself.

No, it couldn’t have been that.

If Simmons did do it, he must have hacked their system. And those aren’t the types of systems that are easy to hack. He would have had to have some very specialized and highly advanced code… something like a worm that would be able to manipulate their data.

But how? How would that be possible? Nothing’s impossible.

I feel like my mind’s running in circles.

I can’t remember the last time I slept.

I rub my eyes.

My thoughts go back to Lily.

That’s not doing me any good. Better not to think of her. She’s convinced I’m just the douchebag billionaire, that there’s nothing else to me…

I look over again at the old cardboard boxes.

Something about them draws me towards them. Honestly, I haven’t opened them in all these years because it’s just too painful to look at pictures of my mother. That probably just makes me seem like more of a douchebag—that I don’t have pictures of her anywhere in the house. But she was the only family I had. How can I bare to think about her, and the way she looked when she died, emaciated and weak, completely confined to the bed?

Without knowing why, I get up out of my metal chair and walk over to the cardboard boxes.

I stare at them for a moment, considering the decision I’m about to make.

My heart is actually beating faster as I grab a utility knife from a shelf of tools and make the first cut into the packing tape that seals up the first box.

This one’s just clothes, things I used to wear when I was broke and working on my now-famous algorithm. Honestly, I don’t know why I didn’t throw these out years ago. They’re all dated, but also cheap.

Basically, I never had an extra cent until I made my fortune, and I knew I could get girls just with my body… the fancy clothes weren’t necessary. They still aren’t… not that I want anyone except Lily. I haven’t been hitting up my contacts list, and I haven’t been hitting the clubs. I don’t want to admit it, but it’s all because of her.

I toss the first box aside before cutting into the second one.

This is it.

A single tear starts to well up in my eyes as I pull out the framed pictures of my mother. Here’s a picture that shows me as a little kid, probably ten years old. My mother was beautiful, with long blonde hair that came down past her shoulders. She dressed a little like a refined hippie, or something like that, when she wasn’t at work. I can remember the day the picture was taken. It was a day trip to the beach.

I spend another hour looking through the pictures and thinking about my mother. I feel guilty as hell now that I have these pictures out. I couldn’t deal with the sight of her pictures, and that’s why I kept them down in these boxes in the basement. But how ridiculous is that, that I can’t confront my feelings? I’m supposed to be able to tackle anything, anything at all, emotions included.

After a while, I can’t keep looking at the pictures.

But they have an effect on me. I don’t know what it is, but it’s like looking at them let something out of me, or freed me up somehow.

My mind, of course, finds its way back to Lily again, and her tight ass and her perfect tits… but there’s more to her than that. There’s more than how she can suck my cock and take me all the way in…

There’s something that I haven’t been able to admit to.

I know she’s not going to pick up the phone.

But, to my complete surprise, she does.

“Come over,” I say.

“Why? You just want to fuck me.”

“Yeah,” I say. “But there’s something else…”

I’ve got her attention now.

I know what she craves and what she needs.

“Something else?” she says, her voice barely above a whisper.

“Yeah,” I say. “I’ve got something to tell you.”