Chapter 7

Once the panel closed Jim could really absorb what had just happened. His long lost daughter had appeared in his apartment, an avid user of his creation, and was moving onto the next level. He had had trepidations of Mia being involved with him and Randi and the system, since the stakes had risen so much and truth be told if it was up to him he would not have invited her over at all because of this, but Randi saw something in the girl, inklings of the same spirit of her father, and knew she had to be apart of the next stage of the evolution of the system.

But for this, she would have to be much more educated, at least at level 200, and at her current rate this could take 5 or more years, in which time who knew what could happen. Jim could only watch the next sequence of events as Randi took Mia for a true behind the scenes initiation.

Could Mia really be subject to the true power of the system and survive happily the little girl that she is, Jim wondered. His whole life he had had this secret, that he fathered a child in a short lived relationship centered around the Presidential Range in New Hampshire, Ottawa, his hometown, and New York City. He was too immature then, before all his run-ins with the cops and his time at the Salvation Army, to bring up a child and refused to acknowledge her to her mother Jo Rodriguez, of Ecuadorian extraction.

But somehow Mia, as if by fate, had found her own way through Jim’s invention and was now subject to it.

Jim was scared for her and questioned whether it was the right thing to do, but he knew that with the coming intensification of the internet wars that with her initiation she would have an individual advantage. But would it be better if she was just cannon fodder, on the lower levels of the system and subject suddenly to a world without commercial internet? It didn’t really matter now as Randi had made the decision, Mia would be initiated.