Blue Water

Chapter One

The Game

Central USA

Friday morning, 07:22 A.M.

The town of Andersenville was typical of many small farming rural communities. A mixture of urban and country, the folk were level headed, conservative and mostly old. There were more pickups than cars, and more cattle than people. It was a quiet town, with a small school that boasted a good athletics program, a computer lab and not much else. Since the school was so small, there were barely enough athletes to field a basketball team, but they managed, and the town took pride in their modest achievements.

Most of the houses in town were timber, but the buildings on Main Street were all brick. Same for the high school. It had once been the local headquarters of the company that had mined coal as well as some gold in the hills west of town. Of course, that had long ago proven unprofitable, especially after the disaster that closed the mine and almost closed the town. But people had hung on in Andersenville, and the place maintained a grim existence for several decades. Then things picked up, people moved back, mostly to farm, and some new stores opened up on Main Street, including a movie house.

Kids were bussed to the school from all over the district. The headmaster of Lincoln High, Mr. Morgan, had created a learning establishment that was one of the best in the state, in terms of academic achievement. It was Andersenville's Jewel in the crown. The school was a magnet for parents, and the school board members were already discussing the need for more space.

They had some high achievers in the school, but none more so than Jacqueline Dreyer—Jack to her friends. Not that she had many of those. Well, she had Shawn. He had been her friend since she was a little girl. She had had other friends, once. There was a time when she was popular, but that all changed after her mom died. Jack became withdrawn, and only Shawn made the effort to get through the walls she put up. Now she had to admit that he was the only one that really knew her.

The early morning sun was already making its presence felt in the town, and light streamed in through the open window of Jack's house, a white three bedroom colonial, on one of the nicer residential streets. The houses were widely spaced, with tall chestnut trees lining the road and providing welcome shade in the afternoon. But they did not help this early in the day, as the sun managed to find the exact right angle to glare off Jack's computer screen.

Jack lowered the blind on the window, returning her bedroom to the almost permanent state of twilight she preferred. She was not a great fan of the sun; her pale skin and dark hair a stark contrast to the other girls in school who were all tanned, and more often than not, blonde.

She sat back at her desk and peered intently at a revolving icon on her computer screen. She clicked the mouse and it shrank, falling back into place amongst a stream of other odd symbols. It was a curiously shaped icon, but an experienced eye would see that it appeared regularly amongst the dense block of text that could almost be writing. Except no writing system ever used these symbols.

Jack tapped her teeth idly, then started typing a comment in a box on the right of the screen. On the other side of the world, a kid somewhere in China read her words and responded and the two of them had a brief discussion.

Jack typed quickly: This sigil repeats consistently. I think it is either a determinant denoting an instruction, or simply marking the end of a statement.

A reply was not long in coming.

Statement? Like a programming code?

That made Jack stop and think. A programming code? Was it possible? She had been puzzling over this language for almost six months, and had been under the impression that it was a coded cipher of an actual language, like English or French, for example, but that did not necessarily hold true.