Chapter 3: Rennie Awakens

Rennie quickly messaged Iris back, asking what was the matter. Almost immediately her response came, and it was rather long.

"That's weird", thought Rennie, "She couldn't possibly have written all this in a few seconds."  He read on, however, and became more puzzled. Her message was a reprint of yet another boring diatribe by one of the more annoying members of their P.G. Wodehouse fan group on Facebook.

As Rennie tried to make sense of the passage, and figure out how this seemed so important to Iris, his eyes kept being drawn back to the first word in the each of the first six lines of the paragraph. What seemed significant about those words? Taken in order of appearance, they didn't make any kind of coherent sentence, nor did they if rearranged in every possible combination. Rennie felt a vague sense of surprise that he was performing this mental exercise. Puzzles and brain challenges weren't really his cup of tea. Or...were they? Then something clicked in Rennie's brain.

And Rennie wasn't Rennie anymore. He couldn't say for sure who he was. That wasn't important. But he suddenly knew what he was, and what he needed to do. He clicked a sequence of keys on his Chromebook, and a secret function buried deep within this particular device wiped away all traces of everything he had ever done on it. Then the function removed any trace of itself, but not before initiating a sequence which would remove any public or private record of Rennie Hightower.

Rennie (for that name will do as well as any other) stood up. No grunting or difficulty this time, but he was now much more aware of his body and the effects that an unknown period of relative inactivity had wrought upon a formerly fine-tuned physique. He wondered idly how long he had been dormant. Oh, well, no matter. He'd quickly sort that out.

He walked to his closet and knelt and moved aside shoes and pulled back the carpeting, then worked loose one of the floorboards. From the cavity underneath he withdrew a lock box. From memory he punched the 32 digit pass code into the electronic lock's keypad. Inside the box were passports from several nations. All had his picture. Each had a different name. Also in the box were credit cards, with names to match the passports. Lastly he took out a phone and powered it on. This unremarkable-looking "smart" phone was connected to a very exclusive network, operated by a super-computer that actually was smart, in the sense that it was capable of highly intelligent thought.

Rennie selected one pair of passport and credit card and put them in the pocket of his jacket, the phone in another. He put the other items in a backpack and walked outside, where an Uber was waiting to take him to the airport.