Farnsworth’s Revenge

2. Pen Pals

Chapter Two

Pen Pals

When I had to ask Felicia for money, we didn’t use email. The sender would copy a plain text file to a node on a tame server account that I’d set up. The recipient would download the message file, then delete it from the node. It was a digital drop, about as low-tech as passing notes in class.

The messages used simple word codes. In our code, money could be any commodity—peas, corn, carrots. And the bank accounts I had in various countries were my rich uncles—Uncle Lars in Denmark, Uncle Hans in Switzerland, Uncle Jan in the Netherlands.

Uncle Hans bought 20 bags of birdseed.

That’s all I would have to say to ask her to wire twenty thousand to my UBS account in Zurich. Search engines don’t understand metaphor. A computer thinks a potato is a potato unless you’re dumb enough to tell it otherwise. If we ever wanted to signal a change in code or a new rubric, the concluding line of the message would contain the hint:

On Tuesday, remind me to tell you the joke about the rabbit who walked into a bar and asked for a cure for Lyme’s disease.

Tuesday, rabbit, bar, and Lyme (which would just as easily be lime next time) are the words that matter. Rabbit would be any subject, bar would be a codeword for the place, and lime would be the type of transaction. Any day of the week mentioned anywhere in the message in any context meant that a follow-up message would be sent on that day of the coming week, plus one. So since the message about the rabbit mentioned Tuesday, I’d look for a new message on the next Wednesday.

Although bots never sleep, I assumed that human investigators are too busy pawing through the thousands of everyday email messages that the bots pick out of the noise. Looking for suggestive snippets in the odd read-me text file in some protected folder on an obscure server would be a colossal waste of time, even for a dumb robot.

Or so I thought.

Judging only from the promptness of her responses, Felicia was eager to play the game, maybe because it was our only form of communication. I hoped she missed me, but then again I didn’t want to cause her pain or get her into trouble.

I truly loved her, and you could say that our separation was my punishment for misdeeds both known and unknown.

There were two vegetables with special meanings. “Sack of potatoes” meant I love you, and all is well. “Pickled beets” was a distress call (being a side dish I detested), and thankfully it never got used.

We’d come up with the code one night on a date in the early days, not long after I confessed to her I was a recovering hacker. Even then, we were joking about the then-hypothetical and presumably outlandish idea that one day, sooner or later, I’d be on the lam, dodging the authorities.

Even now, writing or reading “sack of potatoes” made me laugh because I couldn’t help thinking of “Joey Bag o’ Donuts,” the movie wise-guy name for a fat-ass.

It was a great joke. Until it wasn’t.

But Felicia persisted in her good humor, now and then inserting “hash browns,” “latkes and knishes” (which sounded a whole lot like “love and kisses”), and once even “chili cheese fries.”

She was my anchor, and I had no righteous reason to expect that the chains that bound us would hold.