- CHAPTER 3: School Life- © 2.15.2007

While getting ready for the dinner date with Sarah and Mary, Shawn was a little bothered by the change in weather.  Why did it have to rain today of all days?  He had seen the girls off and biked back in the rain to take a shower before heading out.  Not having a car was only a problem if there was an emergency and none of his friends were around.  Otherwise getting around Los Angeles was just a matter of traveling light. 

Putting the weather on the backburner for the moment, Shawn was excited by the new software code his friend mysteriously unveiled to him last week.  It was a new algorithm designed to speed up the process of normal computations by 1,000%.   The code was so simple that Shawn was perplexed by how the entire field of computer science could have overlooked this minor change in machine language, which would have enormous repercussions on how memory chips conveyed information with their processors and co-processors.  Although he didn’t know how the machine language was embedded into this new language called U2ML – the ubiquitously universal markup language, Shawn realized that speed was the key to unlocking his own pet project.

Building the perfect voice recognition and replication software system had been Shawn’s goal since he first saw Mission Impossible while growing up in Evanston, Illinois.  Besides watching science fiction shows like Voyagers, MacGuyver, and the Transformers, Shawn was enthralled by spy movies like James Bond and television shows that featured all the just-out-of-reach gadgets and plots. 

One of the skills Shawn perfected while watching the Tonight Show every night, when Johnny Carson was still on the air, was the obscure ability to read lips.  He had to keep the television near mute levels at night since his parents were both very sensitive to sound, especially in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he spent his high school years after his family moved from Illinois.  It was the quietest place on earth after 10:00 PM in Tulsa, but it was always a carnival when Johnny Carson came to life at 10:30.01 every weeknight, rain or shine.

As he was perfecting the art of reading lips by listening to all the funny interviews Carson would do in between his hilarious skits, Shawn realized the other side of the coin was just as important to mastering any extraordinary skill.  Reading lips would give him a huge advantage in life, but what if everyone else could read lips?  Shawn asked himself one day in front of the mirror.  This simple question led Shawn to master his next skill even better: the art of ventriloquy.

Along with his ability to throw his voice and impersonate other voices with relative ease, it was after the move from Illinois to Oklahoma that Shawn developed an uncanny ability to think backwards.   Shawn began to see events flowing backwards, not necessarily in time, but in causality.  These extraordinary powers of observation would become invaluable resources later in life, when his memory would be challenged beyond all human capacity.

Continued...