Rose chuckled at Fran’s flippancy as she saw the women out and locked the door behind them. Then she came back into the room to find Howard silently weeping in abandonment. “There, there little one. Don’t worry! Rose will take good care of you! Would you like your ba-ba?”

Howard’s feeling of being abandoned overwhelmed him, causing the anguished wails of a lonely baby to fill the air. At first Howard didn’t know where the sound was coming from. His emotion-clouded mind thought that somehow Rose had brought a screaming infant into the room without his knowing it. He didn’t care about the other baby or its woes. His universe centered on himself, not the minor frustrations of another woman’s infant. Anita had left him in the care of a stranger and had gone out on the town without him. The teenaged hireling she engaged to look after him didn’t have any reason to care for him. She’d sit around watching TV while he languished in his playpen or crib in dirty diapers, unfed, uncared for and unloved. Anita didn’t love him anymore! Who knew what would happen to him in her absence? Obviously, Anita didn’t care. Since he wasn’t a man anymore, his feelings were beneath consideration. Anita must have decided that his rejuvenation effectively annulled their marriage. She had gone out to find a real man to fill her life and make love to her. Once she found her new paramour, he would be pushed aside and forgotten. She might even put him up for adoption! Howard’s despair was unbounded, he had reached the nadir of his existence. He closed his eyes and let the baby’s cries wash over him and cover him like a dark blanket, protecting him from the demons that pursued him in his waking nightmare. He was alone in his pain. His wife had left him to survive without her. Images of his imminent death coming in a multitude of forms filled his mind; without his wife, he would die of thirst, starvation, exposure, and simple neglect.

As Rose’s angelic face framed in its halo of golden hair neared him, he realized the infant’s pained keening was coming from him. He looked up at her with the awe of a man who beholds a heavenly manifestation being sent to save him from the consequences of his all too human iniquity. As she bent down and picked him up, he felt liberated from his fears. The angelic creature would save him from oblivion. She held him close to her breasts, rocking him gently by turning her torso slightly from side-to-side as she cradled his tiny diapered bottom protectively in her hand and patted his back comfortingly. As his cries died down to whimpers of relief, he realized that he was the infant who had been crying. He huddled his tiny nose in the crevasse between her breasts in shame at his weakness and began weeping again from the depths of his being. This time, it wasn’t the child in Howard who cried, it was the man. He had finally realized what he had become and sought solace in the bosom of his caretaker. Memories of the past two weeks flooded his mind. He had been an infant in thought and deed. He had sucked on his toes and enjoyed the sensation of laying on his back and satisfying his oral urges while he pooped and peed in his diaper freely. Rose was the catharsis that he needed. She would nurture and care for him no matter what he did. She expected nothing in return, not even his love. He relaxed in her arms and let her take command of his life. The maturity of her comely eighteen-year-old body made him feel like an insignificant creature who she deigned to pet for her amusement.

After a time, she sat down on the couch and sat him up in her lap while she used the remote control to find a program on SatNet that she liked. Rather than “surf” through the six hundred odd channels that the satellite offered, she used the menuing system to arrive at a choice quickly. She selected an Internet channel that would allow here to view her email from her friends without actually downloading it to Anita’s DVD disk. She perused it quickly, made a decision and wiped the evidence cleanly without leaving a trace. In the old days of the Internet, she would have left caches and unwitting records of what she had done. But the constant attempts to invade personal privacy by both the government and business had made everyone a little paranoid.

In the Dark Ages of the Internet, the government had tried to censor the content with the Communication’s Decency Act. When twenty thousand members of the Internet had gotten a permanent injunction against that law, the government had tried again with a FBI-spawned amendment to HR 695, titled the, “Security and Freedom through Encryption Act” or “SAFE”, to force Americans to provide guaranteed law enforcement access to their private online communications and business transactions. In essence, the law guaranteed that the Federal government would have the “keys” to all private communications on the Internet. The proposals required that every part of the Internet, from the software on an individual’s computer to the ISP (Internet Service Provider) that carried an person’s messages to the world, be quietly modified to allow the FBI instant access to whatever the individual did on the Internet. The intent of the FBI’s plan was to create an invisible National Surveillance Infrastructure that could spy on the public whenever the FBI deemed it necessary, i.e., all the time. Freedom of expression and communication wasn’t consonant with the FBI’s view of how a crime-free society should be managed. When the business community realized the import of what the FBI planned, they howled in protest. Under the amendment as it had been proposed, the government could effectively outlaw encryption by fiat. The law would have granted executive powers to the FBI to certify encryption programs and to make the distribution of uncertified programs a Federal crime. In order for a program to be certified by the FBI, the programmer had to write a “secret” backdoor into the code. Of course, the same requirements would have been applied to business transactions over the Internet as well, giving the FBI the “keys” to everyone’s bank accounts and savings. In short, the act would have granted the FBI the power not only to monitor communications, but the right to make purchases and to disperse the funds from a person’s savings without their knowledge and consent.

What the FBI refused to recognize was that their so-called “official hackers” weren’t very knowledgeable. If they had truly known what they were doing, they wouldn’t have needed such a draconian law. Expert hackers had been reading people’s email and “reallocating funds” from commercial banks for years. Businesses were well aware that there were superlative hackers on the Net who were more than capable of finding the “backdoors” in the code. hundreds of millions of dollars had already been written off the books by subtle geniuses working the sausage scam. The “sausage” was a neat little scam that exploited the bank’s own perfidy with investor’s accounts. The banks would promise continuous interest on an account rather than annual interest. This wasn’t done because of some altruistic change in banking’s avaricious thinking, rather it was a consequence of the introduction of computers into banking. Rather than consult a “lookup” table to compute annual interest, it was quicker to use an exponential equation to compute an individual’s account on a continuous basis. Given the cost of computer time, it was cheaper to give the customer continuous interest than it was to pay using the time-honored annual tables. The banks made money on the deal. however, since bankers always want a little more in the kitty, they weren’t precisely honest about how they managed the deposits into their investor’s accounts. Since the equation was mathematical in origin, it yielded interest down to the fractions of a cent. Fractions of a cent could not be paid to customers since that wasn’t a valid currency. The bankers weren’t dismayed by the news, all the extra money could be diverted to the bank’s own accounts as a rounding error. A small investor never noticed the penny’s difference, but when the total investment in the bank was multiplied by billions of dollars, the money became serious indeed. Tens of millions piled up in the bank’s coffers with no one the wiser. Except, of course, for a few very clever hackers. All they did was divert the bank’s ill-gotten gains into accounts they set up for themselves. It is a principle of common law that a thief shall not gain from their theft, so the hackers took it for themselves. Justice had been done. When the annual audits came in and revealed the loss to the bank, the money managers were beside themselves. Not only had they lost hundreds of millions of dollars, they couldn’t admit it without admitting that they themselves had been cheating the public. The perpetrators were discovered and threatened with extra-legal bodily harm if they continued in their unauthorized “redistribution” of the bank’s wealth. When the miscreants pleaded innocence and demanded a public trial, the banks demurred and let them keep their ill-gotten gains. The managers knew it was better to write off a few hundred million dollars than let their lack of diligence become public knowledge. Besides, it wasn’t really the bank’s money anyway, they had been trying to “steal” it too!