Chapter 14: Chuck
Tuesday lunch.
Wallace dropped his tray onto the table with the energy of someone who had been holding something in since third period. "Okay. Have you guys seen this thing going around? The purity test?"
Simon looked up from his sandwich. "The one that's been circulating since this morning?"
"That's the one."
"Wallace." Simon set down his food. "You took it, didn't you."
Wallace's expression confirmed everything before he opened his mouth. "I'm just saying it's interesting from a sociological—"
"How much did you score?"
A pause. "Seventy."
Veronica looked up from her notebook. "Out of a hundred?"
"Out of a hundred."
"Wallace." She put her pen down. "For a girl, seventy is respectable. For a guy at Neptune High, seventy is going to follow you."
"I know," Wallace said. "I know, I know. I'm aware. Can we move on?"
Simon was already laughing. "I'm not moving on. This is the best thing that's happened today."
"What did you score?" Wallace pointed at him.
"I didn't take it."
"Seriously?"
"I didn't have to. I already know the answer and it's none of your business." Simon reached into his bag and pulled out his laptop. "But here's what's actually interesting about this whole thing. Did anyone read past the test itself?"
Meg leaned over. "What do you mean?"
Simon turned the screen so the table could see it. "There's an attachment. At the bottom of the email chain the test was forwarded through." He read aloud: "Not feeling so pure? Buy someone else's results. Ten dollars. Find out if the person you're seeing is an angel — or something a lot more interesting."
A beat of silence.
Then Veronica sat forward. "You can buy anyone's results?"
"That's what it says."
Wallace stared at the screen. "That's — that's kind of brilliant in a completely terrible way."
"Right?" Simon closed the laptop. "So here's what happens. By tonight, half of Neptune High has done the test. By tomorrow morning, the people who want leverage over someone have paid ten dollars for it. And by second period—"
"The whole school implodes," Veronica finished. A slow smile. "I haven't looked forward to a Tuesday in a long time."
"Same," Simon said.
Meg looked between them. "You two are genuinely unsettling sometimes. You know that?"
"We're curious about human behavior," Simon said.
"You're enjoying anticipated chaos."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive."
Wallace pointed at Veronica. "I cannot believe you, of all people, are excited about this."
Veronica shrugged with zero apology. "I spend most of my time watching people pretend to be things they're not. Anything that makes the pretending harder is professionally interesting to me."
"And personally entertaining," Simon added.
"That too."
Meg shook her head. "You're all going to be exhausting tomorrow."
"Probably," Simon agreed. "It'll be worth it."
After school, Meg headed to cheer practice and Simon drove to the Buy More.
He changed into his green polo in the back, clipped on his name badge, and headed toward the Nerd Herd desk where Chuck was bent over a tablet with a magnifying glass, which was either very thorough or very unnecessary depending on what was wrong with it.
"Hey, Chuck—"
DING.
Simon stopped mid-step.
[ System update detected. ]
[ Chuck Bartowski has loaded the protagonist module. ]
[ Chuck — Chuck series. First check-in available. Proceed? ]
Check in, Simon thought, still standing in the aisle like someone who had briefly forgotten how to walk.
What came next wasn't a skill selection.
[ Congratulations. Host has received: Intersect 1.0 (1% loaded). Check in for 99 consecutive days to receive the complete system. ]
[ Intersect System: A classified intelligence database developed jointly by the NSA and CIA. All data is encoded through a proprietary encryption method, converting classified files into tens of thousands of image sequences. When the host encounters relevant real-world stimuli, the corresponding data will flash into conscious access automatically. ]
Simon stood very still in the aisle and let that information finish landing.
He had just received — in fractional, incomplete form — the most classified intelligence system in the United States government. A database that two federal agencies had spent years and billions of dollars building, now sitting in his head at one percent capacity and growing by a percentage point every day he showed up to work.
He was going to need a minute.
"Simon? Hey — Simon."
Chuck was looking at him from behind the desk with the expression of someone who had been saying a person's name for longer than seemed reasonable.
Simon blinked back. "Sorry. Spaced out."
"You okay?"
"Fine. Long drive." He moved to the desk. "What's the situation over here? Saw everyone huddled up when I came in."
Chuck glanced toward the rest of the Nerd Herd team, who had mostly dispersed back to their stations. "Display laptop caught a virus. Someone was using the floor model to browse—" He paused diplomatically. "Websites that aren't appropriate for a retail environment."
Simon looked at Morgan, who was whistling quietly to himself near the gaming display and making very deliberate eye contact with the ceiling.
"Uh huh," Simon said.
"It's handled now." Chuck straightened up. "Anna isolated it. Lester tried to help and made it worse. Jeff admitted nothing. Standard afternoon."
Simon was about to respond when Morgan materialized at Chuck's elbow with the urgency of someone reporting a natural phenomenon.
"Dudes," Morgan said, in a reverent half-whisper. "Dudes."
"What?"
"Blonde. Walking this way. Extremely — I mean — extremely—"
"Morgan—"
"I'm just saying look up. Casually. Don't make it weird."
Chuck looked up.
Simon looked up.
A woman was crossing the sales floor toward the Nerd Herd desk — mid-twenties, blonde, the kind of put-together that read as effortless because a lot of effort had gone into making it look that way. She moved like someone who knew exactly where she was going and wasn't particularly concerned about what was in her way.
She stopped at the desk and smiled. "I'm not interrupting anything, am I?"
"Not at all," Chuck said, in the voice of a man who had briefly forgotten how vocal cords worked. "Completely — no. Nothing. What can we help you with?"
"I'm Morgan," Morgan said immediately. "That's Chuck. And this—" He gestured at Simon with the specific pride of a man introducing a rare exhibit. "Is Simon, who has a girlfriend and is therefore tragically unavailable."
Simon looked at him.
Morgan shrugged. "Just establishing the landscape."
The woman — who seemed more amused than put off by any of this — reached into her bag and produced a phone. Flip phone, older model, the kind that still had a physical keyboard. "My phone's been acting up. Someone recommended you guys."
"Absolutely," Chuck said, taking it. He turned it over once, popped the back panel, checked the battery connection, and nodded. "Back screw on the casing is loose. Causes the battery to lose contact when the phone flexes. Thirty-second fix."
He had a small screwdriver out before she'd finished processing that diagnosis, tightened the screw, reseated the battery, and snapped the panel back.
"Try it now," he said, handing it back.
She pressed the power button. The screen lit up immediately.
"Okay," she said. "That's impressive."
"We prefer Nerd Herd," Chuck said, then seemed to immediately question the decision to say that. "I mean — the department is called — it's a branded—"
"She gets it, Chuck," Simon said.
The woman laughed. "I'm Sarah, by the way."
"Chuck," Chuck said. Then, apparently forgetting he'd already established this: "I'm Chuck."
"I know," Sarah said. "You said."
Before Chuck could find a way to make this more complicated, a different kind of chaos arrived from the direction of the main entrance — a man in a light jacket carrying a camcorder, leading a small girl in a dance recital outfit by the hand. Both of them had the look of people experiencing an emergency that wasn't technically an emergency but felt like one.
"Excuse me — excuse me, I need some help." The man found the Nerd Herd desk with the relief of a shipwrecked sailor finding shore. "I filmed my daughter's recital. The whole thing, start to finish, I didn't miss a second — but now it won't play back. There's nothing there. I don't understand what happened."
Chuck took the camera with the gentle efficiency of a doctor receiving a patient. He turned it on, opened the media menu, and looked for about two seconds before he understood exactly what had happened.
He looked up at the man. "Sir — there's no memory card in here."
The man stared. "It's a digital camera."
"Yes. But digital cameras still need a storage card to save to. Without the card, the footage records to a buffer that clears when you power down."
The man's face went through several stages in rapid succession. Confusion. Understanding. The specific devastation of someone who has realized a mistake that cannot be undone.
The little girl looked up at her father, then at the camera, then at Chuck, and her expression did something small and quiet and devastating that cameras missed all the time.
Chuck looked at Morgan.
Morgan was already moving.
"TV wall," Chuck said.
"On it."
Morgan disappeared toward the back of the store at a jog. Chuck turned to the family with the calm of someone who had already identified the solution and just needed thirty seconds to execute it.
"I can't recover the footage," he said carefully, "but I can do something else. Give me two minutes."
Sarah, still standing at the edge of the desk, watched all of this with an expression that Simon — who had gotten reasonably good at reading people — clocked as something more than casual interest.
He filed that away.
Chuck had a way of making things better without making a production of it. It was, Simon had decided, probably his most useful quality and the one least visible on the surface.
The Intersect was one percent loaded and climbing by the day.
This was going to get interesting very quickly.
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