The Bit Dance - Chapter 1

I am working on a new novel entitled The Bit Dance. Below is the first chapter in early draft form. I am about 80% of the way through the first pass of this story and wanted to share it with anyone who might be interested. This is a very different story from my first novel, Motes. There are no aliens and no deep musings into perspective or theology. It's just a story. I would put it in the "Technological Thriller" category with a dash of marginal science fiction thrown in for fun. At the heart of the story is the concept of hive intelligence as exhibited in nature by common honeybees. My uncle, Fred Ingram, kept bees in order to provide pollination services for his fruit trees. He had no formal training in beekeeping, but he was a real genius in that field. He understood the workings of the hive on a personal and almost intimate level. I remember sitting at the dining table at my father's house talking to Uncle Fred about bees. I was nearly hypnotized by his description of how they work together.

Later on, I did some research on my own about bees and, in particular, the "Bees Algorithm". I'll let you look that up on your own, but the combination of my conversation with my uncle and my subsequent research launched this story. I hope this chapter makes you want to read more. It's not very deep with regard to the plot because I use it to introduce my main protagonist and her family, but maybe your interest will be piqued anyway. And yes, a young person is at the center of my story once more. This is not a YA novel, but I really identify with youth and I have a lot of fond memories of a really terrific childhood. I guess that's why characters in that stage of life tend to dominate the landscape of my art.

So - without further delay, here's the opening chapter of The Bit Dance...

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Present Day

“Go!”

Whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

“Stop!”

Whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

“STOP! STOP! STOP!”

Bang. Whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

“Man! Stupid Bluetooth! Can't believe this. Stupid thing won't listen!”

Kayla Henry stomped sock-footed down the hall from the open doorway to her bedroom toward an overturned toy monster truck. The truck's drive wheels were still spinning, its controls oblivious to the juxtaposition of the surface of the wheels and the floor. Kayla unhooked the Bluetooth earpiece from the side of her head and placed the microphone directly in front of her mouth.

“STOP!” she yelled. The little electric motor continued unabated. Kayla growled and made a halfhearted and failed attempt to stuff the earpiece into the pocket of her jeans, resulting in it tumbling onto the carpet. She snatched the toy from the floor and flipped the power switch on the bottom of the truck to the “off” position. Bereft of electric power, the motor whined to a stop and the wheels finally ceased their fruitless spinning.

The truck was no ordinary toy. Sure, it started out that way. It began its existence as a Chinese-manufactured, radio-controlled prize found under the Henry family Christmas tree five years prior. It was a gift for Kayla's older brother, Seth. After about six or eight months, Seth’s enthusiastic play habits had managed to render the toy inoperable and it had gotten tossed into the trash along with its wireless controller. Seth's trash, like so many other battery operated offcasts from the Henry family, became Kayla's treasure.

Kayla’s treasure chest was a large cardboard box in her closet. The top edge was ragged all the way around - evidence of the hasty removal of its lid. It had once contained a twenty-five inch television from the era of cathode ray tubes. In its new life, it was a bin for anything Kayla thought she might be able to turn into something else someday. There were old remote controls, broken radios, electric motors salvaged from myriad toys and small household appliances, wire, battery compartments, light bulbs, LEDs and even circuit boards. Over the span of the most recent years of Kayla's young life, a remarkable parade of amusing inventions had been brought to life from the scraps in that box. Most of them involved battery power and sported lights of some kind. Without exception, they moved in some way.

Kayla’s creations started out pretty simple. A wind-up motor from a music box was repurposed to drive a little plastic car. No batteries or lights - but pretty impressive for the then nine year old Kayla. She was almost fifteen now. Each successive invention over the years had been more sophisticated and more complex than its predecessor. At thirteen, Kayla had discovered computer programming. It was a small leap from there to the understanding of embedded systems that controlled things like DVD players and mobile phones. She took to programming in the same way most young people take to basic skills like reading and simple mathematics. It was all intuition for her. She absorbed syntax rules as easily as she had memorized the alphabet as a preschooler. 

The monster truck experiment was a foray into hacking into a specific embedded system, that of a discarded mobile phone. Kayla had modified its functionality so that it could be hard-wired into the directional and drive controls of the toy. Input came via Bluetooth. If she could have figured out how to pair the phone with more than one Bluetooth device, she could have avoided the soldering required to get the phone to communicate with the truck. In the end, she gave up on this. Bluetooth could support up to seven slave devices connected to one master, but Kayla had not developed the skill to make this happen. Next time, maybe.

A solder joint turned out to be the culprit responsible for the current technical difficulty. Patience was not a virtue that Kayla possessed in great quantities. Her solder joints tended to be haphazard and insecure. A particularly insufficient joint had given way as the toy had sped along the carpeted hallway, bouncing on its knobby rubber tires. The phone had received Kayla’s simple command to stop the toy. Her software had recognized it thanks to the phone’s built-in voice recognition routines that Kayla had accessed. The problem was that the software had no way to get its message to the toy’s on-board controls. As a result, the last command received continued to be carried out. That command was telling the truck simply to go forward.

Kayla sighed and drooped her shoulders when she discovered the failed solder joint. She groaned with self-disappointment. She hated making mistakes like that. They plagued her. It was never enough to make her a more careful builder, however. The cycle repeated itself over and over. A seemingly brilliant plan would crumble under the weight of carelessness or be thrown off course by a weakness introduced by a shortcut. The ragged television box held remnants of dozens of partially successful, but ultimately useless inventions. Ninety percent there, ten percent from victory, doomed by self-inflicted discouragement.

And so the monster truck debacle became one in a seemingly endless line of near triumphs. Even though the project may have been salvaged by a half hour or so with a soldering iron, Kayla gave up on it and tossed the Frankenstein toy into the television box. Maybe she would scavenge it for parts later. It wasn’t good enough. Nothing was good enough. Not for Kayla. Certainly not for her father.

Alan Henry was Kayla’s father and a senior product engineer for Icarus Innovations, Incorporated, or I3 as everyone called it. I3 was the world-wide leader in the development of high tech toys. As the holiday season approached each year, reporters and stock analysts would speculate about what new wonders would emerge from the skunk works at I3. For over a decade, they had never been disappointed. Year after year, toy after toy shattered the previous season’s sales records. Just when you thought I3 could not come up with anything new or more innovative than what had already been produced, they outdid themselves again.

Alan was a big reason for this long string of successes. He was not only brilliant, but driven. It was no secret that he wanted the world to recognize him for his gifts. His dream was to have a research facility at a major university named in his honor. Fame and fortune were his goals - very much in that order. Riches would be nice, but fame would last forever. This is what drove Alan Henry.

Part of leaving a lasting legacy involved the production of high quality progeny. It was clear that Alan’s firstborn, Seth, was not about to follow in his footsteps. Seth was an average student who was more interested in sports and girls than books. Kayla, however, was different. She had an engineer’s spirit and a healthy dose of Alan’s intellect coded deep into her DNA. She was where Alan would invest so that his work, his name and his fame would live on. His obsession with molding Kayla in his own image bordered on psychosis, but fell shy of full-blown megalomania. It was probably best described by Kayla herself when she called it a case of severely annoying narcissism. 

So, while Seth plodded through adolescence and the teen years largely ignored by his father, Kayla received a steady diet of scrutiny, pressure and unrealistic expectations. Even though Kayla was clearly an exceptional kid, she never moved fast enough for Alan. Every time she came up with a newly invented creation or conquered some new programming hurdle, Alan would find a flaw and dash her enthusiasm against jagged rocks of derision. After a while, she stopped sharing. Someday, she hoped to come up with a genuine home run - a breakthrough or discovery or creation that would be so perfect and so amazing that even her father could not find fault with it. She promised herself that she would someday make her father proud. Someday, she would prove herself worthy to call herself the daughter of the incomparable Alan Henry.

***

Seth, on the other hand, could not have cared less about Alan’s approval of his accomplishments, modest as they were. He had managed to pass every grade in school so far without being held back, although there had been some close calls. He had pitched a two-hitter in Little League and had run for a fifty-seven yard touchdown as a running back on the junior varsity squad in high school. He had also successfully talked his mother into allowing him to get his learner’s permit to drive. He was especially proud of that one. It had been almost a year now that he had been practicing by taking his mom to the grocery store, the bank, the mall and any other place she needed to go. He was sixteen and old enough to get a real, unrestricted driver’s license. That was next on his list.

Alan thought all of these things were mundane and wholly unremarkable. They were mere necessities of life or meaningless competitions that anyone could conquer. He felt this way even though he could never master throwing a ball in any direction other than wildly off target and had barely triumphed over bike riding at the ripe old age of nine. Only academic pursuits amounted to anything in his ledger. Seth had nothing to offer in that area so he was essentially a lost cause.

Alan’s wife, Marie, had a much more even-handed attitude about her children. Both were equally precious and equally deserving of her love and attention. She attended all of Seth’s sporting events and cheered him on when he brought home a passing grade in a particularly challenging subject like algebra or world history. She tried to compensate for Alan’s dismissal of Seth by encouraging him whenever she could.

Marie felt compassion for Kayla’s plight as well. She saw the hurt in Kayla’s eyes whenever Alan would tear at her self-esteem. It cut her deeply that Alan seemed unable to see past his own arrogance and recognize the true value of his daughter. She knew that he would regret it someday when Kayla was grown and out on her own. The world would appreciate Kayla as an adult even if her father could not appreciate her as a teenager. Alan was missing his chance to walk alongside his child and relish in her growth and development. This situation was a source of no small amount of sadness for Marie. On more than a few occasions, she had attempted to reach Alan and change his attitude about his kids, but these efforts always ended in arguments. 

***

So Seth trudged on, making the best of his relationship with his father and leaning on his mother to keep him from spiraling into depression borne of rejection. Kayla wallowed in self-doubt and tormented herself trying to think of a way to finally live up to her father’s unrealistic expectations. Marie prayed for strength and for the right words to salve her children’s psyches. 

Meanwhile, Alan poured himself, body and soul, into his work at I3. Better. Faster. More advanced. More appealing. Higher sales figures. Work was everything. The holiday season was over half a year away, but six or eight months could fly by in what seemed like a heartbeat. I3 was frantically working on yet another blockbuster hit. Alan was right at the heart of it.