Stub 8.9: Tim-Tom and AJ

Tim-Tom and AJ Cwiok were nursing their drinks in the bar of the newly opened “Bora Bora Island” paradise in Sedelia. They were both part of the Alpha class that was working the kinks out of the concept.

They had just heard the news of Mark Smothers’ death.

It hit Tim-Tom particularly hard. Tim-Tom worked for Smothers’ social media platform and had even been in a couple of “diagonal slice” meetings with him. Tim-Tom felt a personal connection with Smothers and felt as if somebody had cut one of his hands off.

AJ worked for Alf-Omeg, the world’s dominant data company.

Tim-Tom and AJ were fraternal twins from Illinois. They had been tagged as potential programming protégés while they were in fifth grade. Their scholastic careers had been subtly guided through middle-school.

Special scholarships had covertly been created so Tim-Tom and AJ could go to summer camps where they competed head-to-head with the best programmers from the US, Eastern and Western Europe and Asia.

Tim-Tom and AJ proved to both be academically brilliant, incredibly intuitive, ruthlessly competitive and to have a certain sparkle that raised them head-and-shoulders above all comers.

By the end of their sophomore year in high school the remainder of their academic careers had been charted down to which professors would teach which classes. They did not go to graduate school. The two corporations most interested in them did not want them to waste time swimming with the minnows.

Tim-Tom was slightly more devious while AJ tended to have a broader reach. There was no need to flip a coin to see who went to Smothers and who went to Alf-Omeg.

At age twenty-eight they had exceeded all expectations of the titans who had personally followed their development. Only one-in-four potential protégé successfully make the transition to corporate culture. Tim-Tom and AJ crushed the maximum expectations.

And that is why the were the very first to be rewarded by an extended stay at the Sedelia “Islands” project.

Tim-Tom, so named because his Kindergarten teacher could not keep his name (which was really Tom) straight, was very, very impressed by the project.

Tim-Tom and AJ did OK with the ladies of Silicon Valley. They were both young, articulate and fit. Smothers and Alf-Omeg both believed in protecting their investments and placed a VERY high priority in clean, healthy living. Both Tim-Tom and AJ worked out four days a week.

The problem was the girls. The girls in Silicon Valley were pretty. But then all reasonably healthy girls are pretty.

The issue was that the girls from Silicon Valley would always pull some bullshit Social Justice Warrior card just when Tim-Tom (or AJ) thought it was getting serious. It was if the girls felt threatened by Tim-Tom or AJ and had some insatiable need to put them “in their place.”

Frankly, any rational person should feel threatened by Tim-Tom and AJ. They were dangerous by virtue of their laser-sharp minds and doubly dangerous due to the vast responsibilities, and resources, that their employers had placed in their hands.

Tim-Tom and AJ got very tired of having girls with I.Q.s of 105 spasm into kung-fu dominance poses. Tim-Tom and AJ were off-scale with regard to I.Q., I.Q. was simply not a meaningful measure for people like them. And yet average Cali girl harbored some irresistible complusion to piss up their leg.

How-some-ever, the girls in the Island project in Sedelia were a totally different species.

Their eyes did not roll back in their heads when you explained that you were writing code to high-jack computation resources of near-by devices that were underutilized. They did not change the subject and insist that Hillary Clinton had been robbed of the presidency or that Maxine Waters had been robbed of the same by being born twenty years too soon.

And please trust me on this, no young man wants to have visuals of either of those women rattling around in their heads when they are intent on 'getting busy'.

No. The Sedelia girls leaned forward and asked, with totally absorbing interest, “How do you decide what level of encryption is most efficient?” or “How often do you poll location and decide when to pass back partially completed tasks.”

Oh, and they were so very, very beautiful! They GROOMED themselves. They did not have braided armpit hair. No dreadlocks. Any body odor was faint and athletic and, well, healthy smelling.

The girls were not sluts. You had to earn your way into their beds. But Tim-Tom and AJ were clearly the alpha males in this venue. They could have had five different girls every night. But Tim-Tom and AJ, being who they were, quickly sorted through the population and found great fits.

The eternal question is Ginger-or-Mary Ann. They both chose a Mary Ann. One Mary Ann. Not that any of the Mary Anns of the Islands were plain.

“It had to be the government.” Tim-Tom asserted.

“Why do you say that?” AJ challenged.

“The only people who have guns are the government, the gangs and the Cartel.” Tim-Tom said.

“The gangs and Cartel spray-and-pray from five paces. Only the government has people who can hit meat six-of-seven times from two hundred yards.” Tim-Tom said.

“Ok, I am not arguing with you.” Tory said. Tory was AJ’s Mary Ann. “But why would the government knock off Smothers?”

Tim-Tom said, “You gotta look at context. Azrael got killed. Those two guys got killed at the lacrosse game. Now Smothers gets knocked off. The government declared war on industry.”

Tim-Tom and AJ allowed themselves one drink a night. Tonight, they were working on their second and it made them both exceptionally loquatious.

“If you look at it from the perspective of gov-vs-industry, why aren’t you including Spirochete?” Radhika asked. Radhika was Tim-Tom’s girl.

“Spiroshete could be looked at as either gov or industry. But right after him, Bona-Brown died. Let’s be realistic. Unless he was snorting nose candy there is no way he would have a stroke at his age.” Tim-Tom asserted.

“It looks to me like somebody assassinated Spirochette and Bona-Brown and now the .gov people are mowing down the ranks of the industry.” Tim-Tom said.

AJ, who had been mostly listening because he knew Tim-Tom needed to vent, finally spoke up. “Any fool can come up with a theory that explains everything that happened in the past. The value of theories is their ability to predict what will happen in the future.”

“Given your theory, what will happen next?” AJ concluded.

Tim-Tom thought for a second. “I would expect industry to launch a round of reprisals. I would expect an exceptional number of government officials to die by violence in the next few weeks.”

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