The door of the office closed behind JD's parents and little sister aas they left.
"Well, that went better than I had hoped." Sherry slid off her desk and sat down on the sofa.
"JD, you're handling your mother's input well today." Millie nodded in approval.
"Well, Millie, having you running interference helped a lot."
"I really didn't do much."
"You did, and with you here I was able to avoid getting sandwiched between Sherry and my Mom."
"Hey." Sherry made mock complaint and she and Millie exchanged amused glances.
JD looked from one to the other, enjoying their amusement for a moment. "Yeah. So, Sherry, do you have time to go over this network we just proposed?"
"Can I help?" Millie asked.
Sherry glanced at the whiteboard. "Well, I'd actually kind of like you to work up three reports of the dual-purpose meeting we just had. We'll need one for the network hardware design, another for the house party support system proposal, and another for the house party rules."
Millie blinked and thought. "Nothing's really set, yet, so what I can write now will only be initial documents and vague outlines."
"Right." JD sighed deeply. "Paperwork. The least fun part about computers and information systems. Sorry. Is it okay if we ask you to get a start on those while Sherry and I work out some details? We want to be ready to talk when James is."
"Sure. Maybe half an hour to get something simple put together, then I can see where James is?" Millie stood up and collected her tablet terminal and other materials.
"Sounds good. Thanks."
Millie nodded and left.
Sherry and JD watched the door close behind Millie.
"We're going to be able to trust her, I think."
JD nodded. "I've had a gut feeling about her since my mom introduced us, that Mom had once again helped us in ways she was not intending." He half-grinned, then sighed again. "Unfortunately, no specific impressions as to what kind of help."
"Mixed feelings?"
"Be a lot less mixed if you'd only," he turned to look at Sherry, "be willing to go see that specialist."
Sherry met his earnest gaze and breathed deeply for few moments before looking away and digging around in her desk. "I guess I've got to find out if I'm going to do this house party thing." She pulled out a notebook terminal before continuing. "If I go as a guest and not just as a network engineer."
She turned to meet his eyes again, tilting her head ever so slightly. "You're surprised I'm giving in so easily."
"Maybe I am. Are you?"
Sherry didn't answer.
"Well, keep me in the loop?"
"Of course." Now she broke eye contact again and looked at the door. "So, we need two more engineers. Millie for one?"
"If she doesn't object. And we can try to get Hodge to be the other."
"Hodge. It's not too soon to reach out to him?" She put her notebook on her desk and started bringing files up on the screen.
"Too soon -- it's getting harder to stall my mom, and gut feelings aren't guarantees."
"Nothing's ever guaranteed."
"True. But we've got to move ahead." JD dug in his desk for a notebook terminal, then picked up one of the wall warts on his desk and pressed the boot switch. "Should we do the mock-up in the office or take it to a lab?" He set the wall wart down and initiated a connection from the notebook.
"Here is good." Sherry initiated a connection to the wall wart from her tablet. "I wouldn't be on board with the party at all, if it didn't give us the perfect excuse to give Millie a chance to figure out what she really wants." She put her tablet down and went to a closet to pull out a mostly empty equipment rack and begin loading it with more wall warts and network cable from shelves in the closet.
JD followed her and pulled out another rack, starting to fill it as well. "That's my thinking. I'm kind of hoping it'll give us a chance to reason with Hodge, too."
"You still have hope for him?"
JD shrugged. "You know I prefer to hope for the best from people."
"I know, and I know it makes it easier to manage our employees. But Hodge is not an employee. Not any more."
"Yeah. Not any more. Getting him here should be no problem, though. I'll make an indirect suggestion to my Mom, about whom to consider for the rich-boy crew, so that the invitation isn't too obvious."
"Mmmm."
"Can I take a moment for a prayer?"
"Go ahead."
JD offered a prayer of thanks for help, asking for more guidance. Sherry listened silently. Then they busied themselves preparing the hardware to simulate a small network appropriate for members of a house party to communicate by, stopping from time to time to diagram it on the whiteboard, and to transfer completed diagrams to their design files via the notebook terminals as they worked.
"But should Millie know before he suddenly shows up with an invitation?"
"Good question. You got an opinion on that?
"Not yet."
Millie looked in at the door. "James says he'll be ready in about a quarter hour if you guys are up for it."
"Oh. Nice." Sherry looked up from where she sat on the floor in a nest of network cables next to an equipment rack. "Tell him we'll be ready, too."
Millie looked around the office. "Should I chase JD down?"
"I'm here." JDs voice came through the open closet door.
Millie did a double-take. "I didn't realize there was a door over there."
"Many things you need to learn about this place." JD backed out of the closet, belaying network cable as he came. "Are you averse to using your engineering training to help us with the house party?"
"I already am, I think." She raised her notebook terminal. "The documents you asked me to make, remember?"
"Of course. But help in the actual design and implememtation." Sherry looked at the wire JD was holding and pointed to an empty port on the router on the bottom shelf.
"If you don't ask me to, I'm not sure I'll forgive you." Millie grinned lopsidedly.
JD chuckled as he sat on the floor so he could reach the router more easily.
Sherry grinned back. "Well, put that notebook down somewhere, go tell James to come up when he's ready, and come help us with this rat's nest."
Millie set the notebook on the stenographer's desk near the door and disappeared from the doorway. In a couple of short minutes, she was back.
JD reached over and pulled a stool close, but Millie pushed it back out of the way and joined them on the floor.
JD rubbed his forehead. "The servers on the middle shelf will be easier to reach if you're sitting on the stool. He looked down and noticed Millie's bare knees. "Oh. I'll handle the middle shelf."
Mille looked at her knees and shrugged. "Either way. I'll wear slacks tomorrow."
Sherry grunted in agreement.
JD stood up and took his notebook from his desk, then set it on the stool. He looked around for a moment, then returned to the closet. When he came back he was pulling a low test rack containing oscilloscopes, digital signal generators, portable consoles, and similar equipment. "Gotta be able to see what's happening," he mumbled as he got on his knees to attach a portable mini-console to one of the servers in the middle rack.
Sherry pulled the stool close and brought diagrams up on JD's notebook, showing Millie the parts of the network they were configuring. "So, did Hodge let you get your hands dirty when you were working for him?"
Millie started, barely noticeably, at the name, then continued tracing wires with her hands, comparing them to the diagrams on the screen. "At first, he'd only let me make documentation, but after he decided I knew what I was doing, yeah, he did. In fact, once he knew I could do the work, he'd give me a lot of his own work, so he could go knock balls around the greens or chat on SNS. Okay, I see the layout of this network segment. Are we going to put sniffers in here?"
"Yeah. Over there. Can you grab me one, too?"
"These are the sniffers?" Millie picked up two small boxes with network ports in them and offered one to Sherry.
"Right." Sherry took the sniffer and used a patch cable to insert it into the network. "We'll need consoles, too."
JD picked up two hand-held consoles and handed one to Millie and one to Sherry.
"So would you feel comfortable working with him at the house party?" JD traced a diagram on the screen with his finger, checking the wiring.
Millie set the sniffer in her hand down and looked from JD to Sherry.
"I'm not sure." She picked the sniffer back up and used a patch cable to attach it to the router. "Leave it dangling in a tee?"
"Dangling," JD confirmed. "That one's going to be listening to everthing in promiscuous/eavesdropping mode." He typed commands at one of the hand-held consoles already in place. "We want four engineers on location, but we don't want them attracting attention or getting in the way. Sherry and I will be hosts, so we will have a reason to be there anyway."
"So the other two should be guests." Millie nodded.
"Right. I figured Hodge might not mind joining us."
Millie snickered. "Hodge, mind? I think he'd jump at the chance once he knows what you're planning with the network. Not sure he'd behave himself, though."
Sherry chuckled. "Snake in the garden."
Millie dropped her jaw in mock horror and gave Sherry a sideways glance. Both smothered giggles.
JD shrugged. "I know. It might not work out, but we can let him test the waters while we're setting the system up.
Millie's expression turned serious as inner concerns began to show. "I don't know if it would be good to let him close to your company's technology."
"Do you remember signing a non-disclosure agreement?" Sherry glanced up at Millie with a sly half-grin.
"Well ..."
"We don't like secrets. That's part of why we work under libre/open licensing for the infrastructure, and even for most of the user-facing software. For this project, anything Hodge could see is nothing he can't already access over the internetwork network." JD typed another command and hit the return key. "Is that monitor picking up the network traffic?"
"It's scrolling off the screen now." Millie scanned through the output listing." But you can't trust him."
"You know he used to work for us." Sherry was watching her own screen.
"Y--yes." Millie took her hands away from the hand-held console she was working with and looked down, balling her hands into fists. Her face became a mask of frustration and her shoulders stiffened. After a full short minute, she blurted out, "I'm spying for him." She squeezed her eyes shut.
Sherry reached around her shoulders and took her into a hug. "We're being careful what we let you see. Don't worry about it."
JD took her fists in his hands without speaking. Shortly, the tension began to leave her hands. He reached up to lift her chin. When her eyes met his, he said, "We aren't going to let him hurt us."
Milie relaxed and looked down again.
"So, do you want to talk about it?"
"Talk?" Millie looked back up at JD and he brushed a few tears from her cheek. "Uhm, would it make a difference if he were blackmailing me?"
JD shook his head. "No difference. You should always do what you think is right. You can trust us, as much as humans can trust each other."
"He found out about my son."
"Do you want to tell us about that?" Sherry asked, quietly.
"I was raped in middle school. Maybe I should call it date rape, because I knew I shouldn't have been going to the guy's house." She paused. "He was a college student, a dancer, and he was good at it. He was also into martial arts. He was not into babies or into losing his scholarship."
Sherry and JD listened in silence, nodding slightly.
"I didn't want to abort the baby, so my parents arranged for me to stay with my brother and his wife until he was born, and they have been raising him." She smiled wistfully. "So he has three mothers, Karen, me, and his grandmother, and he may be a little spoiled. He's about Krystal's age, now."
Sherry gave her an encouraging squeeze around the shoulders.
JD tilted his head. "Nothing that doesn't happen sometimes. So Hodge found out and is threatening to spill the beans?"
Millie breathed shallowly. "Well, yeah, but it's not so much me that I worry about as my mother. She is way too concerned about her social place. But it would hurt her."
"We can understand. Thank you for telling us. Now that's two bad things Hodge can't do to you. Anytime you need to talk, either of us will listen, okay? And I'd like to meet Rodney sometime."
"Phht. JD." Sherry rolled her eyes.
Millie leaned out of Sherry's hug and looked at Sherry, aghast, then turned to look at JD.
JD looked down and rolled his eyes sideways. "Woops."
"You knew!"
JD scratched the back of his head. "My mother is very thorough. Now seems to be a good time to warn you again about her. Still, knowledge gives us freedom, right?"
Millie stood, putting her fists on her hips with anger, surprise, and confusion mixed on her face. She turned around, walked to the couch, and sat down heavily, resting her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands as she considered JD and Sherry through narrowed eyes.
"I'm not sure whether to be relieved that you two aren't just trusting me in ways you shouldn't or be mad because you've kept how much you know from me."
JD shrugged. "Mea culpa."
Sherry grinned ruefully. "Sorry. We kind of assumed the contract JD's Mom made you sign would have prepared you."
"I didn't take those clauses about agreeing to a thorough background check seriously. My illegitimate son doesn't worry you, JD?"
"There's no such thing as an illegitimate human."
"What Sherry says."
Millie looked from JD to Sherry and back again. "It's really hard to believe you aren't married to each other. Sherry, when are you going to explain the real reasons to me?"
"Hard to explain what I don't understand."
Millie thought for a minute, then shrugged and turned to JD. "I think maybe I'm crazy, but I guess I can go with the flow. Was Hodge ever the subject of your mother's interest?"
JD looked at Sherry, who shook her head. He nodded in agreement. "Not that we know of."
Millie leaned back and closed her eyes as if in deep thought or maybe prayer and no one spoke for a short minute or so. Then she opened her eyes and looked out the window.
"Really, what is it with you two? I mean, I sort-of understand as much as Sherry has told me, but you two are way closer than just best friends. And I think I sort-of understand about the Libre software movement, and I share many of your E-P-ist points of view about society in general, but you two simply don't seem to think about the things normal people think about. What motivates you two?"
JD and Sherry looked at each other and grinned wry grins, nodding in unison.
"You do deserve to know as much as we do." JD spoke, and nodded her agreement.
"Hey, I hope I'm not interrupting anything!"
The three of them turned toward the door.
"Ah, James." JD shook his head. "Sorry, Millie, we'll have to continue this another time."
"I am." James looked from Millie to JD, to Sherry. "I'll come back." He started to turn back out, but Sherry stopped him.
We don't have much time, let's hammer out the initial plans for the house party.
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Copyright 2019 Joel Matthew Rees
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