“So you’re trying to figure out what all those random things are?”

“Right. The fun part is, some of them don’t even mean anything.” Jax turned to look at Runstom.

Runstom must have given the operator a confused look, because Jax laughed. Or maybe he was just giddy from the side effects of Drunk-B-Gone. The operator’s hair was frazzled, matted in some places and spiking out in others. His eyes seemed to burn with intensity and when he blinked it was almost like he was blinking hard – squeezing his eyes shut tight for a second then springing them open again. No further explanation came, so Runstom was forced to say, “I don’t follow.”

“Okay, first let me show you a real simple operation.” He wrote on the notebook:

LET BLOCK_NAME = “23D”

“All I did there was set one variable, BLOCK_NAME, to have a value of ‘23D’.”

“Let block name equal 23D,” Runstom read aloud. “I guess that makes sense.”

“Exactly, it makes sense like that, but watch what happens when we do some obfuscation.” Jax scribbled several lines of nonsensical math-like code into the notebook that caused Runstom to feel seasick.

10 LET X1 = “3”

22 LET X2 = “2”

30 LET X3 = “7”

34 LET X4 = “9”

40 LET X5 = “A”

51 LET X6 = “D”

60 IF 1 > 0 THEN GOTO 80

70 LET Z1 = X1 + X2 + X3

80 LET Z1 = X2 + X1 + X6

“There, you see?” Jax said. “This is a bit of a contrived example, but anyway. This Z1 variable, that’s the same as our BLOCK_NAME above. But instead of a simple variable assignment operation, we have all this extra junk in here. First of all, we have these line numbers that don’t exactly fit a logical pattern. That right there is going to send a well-disciplined programmer running screaming for the hills.”

“Running for the hills sounds nice right about now,” Runstom muttered.

Jax ignored him and continued. “Anyway, if you were scanning this code, visually, you might see this line 70 here and think that the Z1 variable was assigned to X1 + X2 + X3. Well, then you’d look back at those X’s,” he said, pointing to the first couple of lines and then writing “3” + “2” + “7” just above the X1 + X2 + X3, “and think that Z1 was given a value of ‘327’.”

Runstom added the three numbers in his head. “I would think it’d be 12.”

“Oh yeah, well that’s another confusing thing. These are numbers, but when you put quotes around them, that makes them strings. A string can be any number of characters, and when you use a plus operation on two strings, you concatenate them.” He held out his palms facing upward and slid them together, so that his pinky fingers touched. “The two strings become one long string.”

“Right, of course,” Runstom said and took a step back, pulling his eyes away from the maddening notebook.

“Anyway,” Jax continued before Runstom could come up with a reason to escape. “This line 70 never even gets executed. Because if you look at line 60, it says, ‘if one is greater than zero, then go to line 80’. Well, one is always greater than zero!” he exclaimed, throwing up his hands. “So this code right here is always going to skip line 70 and go straight to line 80.”

Runstom was filtering out most of what Jax was saying, but a thought crossed his mind. “So it’s like a smokescreen.”

“Yeah, pretty much.” Jax seemed to chew on that for a second or two. “Or more like a big wad of tangled-up wires, that all need to be unraveled so you can figure out which ones are connected to anything and which ones aren’t.”

Runstom was quiet for a moment. “Well,” he said, shrugging. “I don’t suppose there’s anything I can do to help.”

“Nope.” Jax’s fingers tapped away violently. “Probably not.” With that, he hopped up and sprinted to the bathroom.

The ModPol officer went out for a couple of hours. He knew he probably shouldn’t be out wandering around, being that Space Waste was on the hunt for him, but he figured that since he knew they were looking for him, he had the advantage. He watched his back for tails and crisscrossed through the crowded streets of Grovenham, sailing his way through the sea of stout, white-faced people.

He came upon a park block and thought that maybe the artificial groves of trees would help clear his mind. He went inside and was surprised to find it much less crowded than the street. A few people strolled down the faux dirt pathways, many of them in their later years. Runstom trekked through the park and after a few minutes, found himself caught in a light, artificial rain.

It wasn’t particularly cold, and it wasn’t heavy, but the general wetness was mildly uncomfortable, so Runstom headed for a gazebo he spotted farther down the path, sitting in a clearing of trees. As he walked up and found himself a seat on a bench, he started thinking about the rain talk he once had with Jax. He realized that the rain he was caught in was probably a scheduled event, and that would account for the low occupancy of the park.

An older couple approached the gazebo and sat down on a bench across from him. Apparently Runstom wasn’t the only one to appreciate a light rain and a vacated park. They spoke in soft tones to each other from time to time, but mostly they sat quietly, hand in hand, staring out at the rain. He tried to share their sentiment in spirit, tried to enjoy the rain, but it was too much like water from a faucet, smelling clean and lightly metallic and chemical-like. Not like the wet, musty smell of genuine planetary precipitation.

Runstom felt a little awkward now that someone else was there, and he felt a compulsion to find something to be occupied with. He dug out his notebook. He had lost his original notebook back on the prisoner barge, but had made copies of all his notes for Jax, who, thankfully, managed to hold on to them. During the few weeks they spent on the superliner, Runstom realized the benefit of having a backup copy of the notes and began to re-copy the important bits into a new notebook. Ever since then, he and Jax would periodically lend each other their notebooks, so they could make their own copies up to date. Of course, their copies differed. Runstom’s notes contained details about people that in all likelihood were extremely trivial, but could possibly be identifying elements. Jax had no such interest in tracking such an intricate level of detail on individuals they’d encountered, but he did track technical details that Runstom couldn’t even understand, let alone see their importance. In the interest of being thorough, he asked Jax to mark the most relevant and valuable information so that he could copy it without losing his mind trying to duplicate everything.

He turned to the pages where he’d last written, as that’s where his bookmark was, but then realized he didn’t really want to review recent events. He felt like he’d had enough going around in circles with the few solid facts they knew right now. He flipped back to the beginning of the book. The notes he took from the initial investigation. The event seemed to have happened a whole lifetime ago.

Thinking about the investigation at block 23-D made him wonder what McManus and Horowitz were up to. He wondered if they missed Runstom, or if they were just glad to be rid of their awkward, green-skinned co-worker. He thought of George Halsey, and allowed himself to be sad that the galaxy lost a few good people on that prisoner barge. Halsey was always an asshole, but on the inside a good cop was buried under defense mechanisms and stifled emotions originating from years of always getting the short end of the stick, despite all the dedication and loyalty you could ask for. He hoped that back on some Modern Policing and Peacekeeping outpost, they recognized Officer Halsey for his better qualities posthumously. A hole appeared deep beneath his sternum as he realized that their friendship may have been born from some kind of bond between rejects, but it had become a lot more than that. He cursed himself for not realizing it while the man was alive.