Perfect People

65

John sat on a chair in the children’s room, preparing to read to them as he did every night. Over the past few weeks he had read them The Gruffalo, Pooh Bear stories, ‘Cinderella’, ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, and various Mister Men stories.

They just lay silently in their cots, eyes open; he had no idea whether they were listening. And they never gave any reaction when he finished.

After he had kissed them goodnight, he walked heavy-heartedly downstairs and mixed himself a drink in the kitchen. Naomi was on the phone to her mother.

A strange thought suddenly crossed his mind. Were the children punishing them for what they had done? For tampering with their genes? He dismissed that, instantly. Then he took his drink through to his den and sat down in front of his laptop, and watched a dozen new emails appear.

One was from his chess opponent, Gus Santiano, in Brisbane.

Damn. It must have been a week at least since the man’s last move. Guiltily, he opened it.

You bastard! Where the hell did you come up with a move like that from? Have you been taking some tablets this past week? Having coaching? Getting some personal help from Kasparov? I concede, mate. Your turn to open the next game.

John frowned. Had the man been drinking? His last move had been a defensive pawn against an early king’s bishop attack. What on earth was he talking about? Was Gus Santiano playing with another opponent somewhere else and got them confused?

He emailed him back, saying he didn’t understand.

To his surprise, ten minutes later he got a reply, with an attachment.

You must have early Alzheimer’s, John. These are the moves you’ve sent me this week.

John opened the attachment. To his astonishment, there were six emails from him to Santiano, dated daily during the past week, each giving a fresh move, as well as six replies.

Impossible! There was no way he could have done this without remembering, absolutely no way.

He called up the chessboard program, and keyed in the instruction for it to go sequentially through this latest game. The moves Gus Santiano had attributed to him were smart, he could see that clearly. Very smart.

But he hadn’t made them.

He double checked the emails again. All of them had been sent from him, from this computer. But no one else used this computer; and it couldn’t have been Naomi, she didn’t play chess.

Baffled, he pulled an olive out of his drink and chewed on it, thinking. Six moves. Was it a hacker? Possible, except he didn’t leave the computer online either here or at the office.

He did a search through his Sent Items box, and sure enough, found each of the emails. Next, he highlighted one and checked the source. It showed the email was sent from this computer at 2.45 a.m. last Saturday. The next one was sent at 3 a.m. on Sunday. The next at 2.48 a.m. on Monday. The following three at similar times on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, today.

Am I going nuts? Sleepwalking and playing chess?

He swallowed down most of the martini in one gulp. But the usual buzz he got from the drink didn’t happen. In the middle of the night someone was using his computer, playing chess for him. Either it was a hacker or He looked up at the ceiling. Oh, sure, John, your two-and-a-half-year-old son and daughter are creeping downstairs in the middle of the night and playing chess, beating the pants off a semi-finalist in last year’s Queensland open chess championship. Explain that?

He couldn’t. He didn’t have any explanation. He was baffled.