Sheepdogs: Keeping the Wolves at Bay, Gordon Carroll [howl and other poems .txt] 📗

He started crying. I let him. He sobbed uncontrollably, his whole body shuddering. He cried until he couldn’t get his breath and started hiccuping. He was hyperventilating. I stripped a pillowcase from a pillow and folded it down into a small bag. I held it to his mouth. A paper sack would have worked better, but beggars can’t be choosers. He got his breathing under control and mopped his face with the pillowcase.

“I killed my brother — I killed Shane.”

I put my hand on his shoulder. “Why don’t you tell me how this all started.”

He gathered himself, took a deep breath. “Sh…Shane and I started taking college classes last year. We both like video games, Mom and Dad don’t like us to play the violent or graphic ones, but still we did Minecraft and Superhero games and stuff like that. Dad started us learning computer languages when we were little and Shane and me smoked everyone in our classes at college. A couple of guys at school got us into the cool ones, like Dark Souls and Halo and Gears of War, and Shane figured out how to deconstruct the codes so we could see how they wrote the programs. After that, we decided to make our own game. We worked on it for a year, then Shane showed it to our programming teacher and he put Shane in touch with some people down at Micro Corp. We decided to keep me out of it so we could hide it from our parents easier.” He looked at me sheepishly. “I’m a bad liar. The game was still just a demo. It needed lots of work, but Micro Corp. liked it and said it would work perfectly with their new gaming glove that was in production. They said they’d pay Shane ten million dollars for the completed version. Ten million dollars… it sounded like a joke.” He looked up at me, still crying, the tears running into his mouth. “Shane couldn’t sign a contract though ‘cause he wasn’t eighteen.”

I shook my head. “But your dad…?” I left the question hanging.

“We couldn’t ask him. The game we made is called Whack the Pig. It’s all about killing cops. You get so many points for killing a regular street cop, say with a gun or by running him down in a car, and more points for spotting an undercover cop, or for using a makeshift weapon to take out a prison guard. It kind of goes with the whole Black Lives Matter riots and ANTIFA stuff. It’s topical. My dad would kill us if he found out.” He seemed to realize what he’d just said and buried his face in the pillowcase.

I patted his shoulder. “Easy, Joseph. Take it easy. What went wrong?”

Joseph wiped his eyes. “They gave us all new computers equipped with their new coprocessors and the thumb dot ports and a bunch of the new dots. The equipment was like nothing we’d ever seen. We finished the rough version in under a month and sent it to Micro Corp. They jazzed it up real nice, improved the graphics and sound and stuff. Then they sent it back to Shane for final checkout and approval. Only we started getting worried because we didn’t have anything in writing and we’d had to do everything in secret so our dad didn’t find out. It would be easy for Micro Corp. to just cut us out completely. We decided to keep the copy they made for Shane and we sent them back a copy with some corrections. Only they weren’t really corrections. We built in a worm that was designed to search out and destroy all files associated with Whack the Pig. That way once they introduced the worm to their system, it would clean all their files and we would have the only copy of our game. Then, when Shane turned eighteen, in two months, we could get our money without them cheating us.”

It was my turn to take a deep breath. Created a worm that would erase their game from a multi-billion dollar company’s computers? The kids must be geniuses.

“We knew it was wrong to go against our dad, but him and Shane were fighting a lot. Dad was really pushing God at Shane, saying he wasn’t studying about Him or going to church, or praying. Shane was mad because we’ve learned about God since we were babies and he was getting kind of sick of the whole thing. I mean here we had a chance to make ten million dollars and our game is really cool, but it wasn’t going to happen just because our dad didn’t think it was a Christian thing to do.”

“Go on,” I said.

“Shane met with Mr. Hepperman, he’s the guy we were going through at Micro Corp., and he gave him a contract that said Shane was the original creator of the game and that they were going to pay him the ten million once Shane came of age. Mr. Hepperman took the thumb dot, then laughed at him and said he wasn’t going to sign anything. It was like we thought. They were going to cheat us.”

Imagine that. I asked, “Did the worm work?”

“Yeah, it worked great. ‘Cause the next day Mr. Hepperman was waiting for Shane when he got to college. He was mad. He said he would sign the papers as long as Shane gave him the original dot. Shane told him to sign the papers and then he would decide what else they had to do before he gave it to him. Hepperman didn’t like it, but he signed. Shane took the papers and told him he had to talk with a relative that was a lawyer and he would meet with him in a week.” Joseph shook his head. “We didn’t really know any lawyers. We got all the contract stuff off the Internet. Hepperman called Shane