Ageless

Chapter 38

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Every story has two sides. The church documents their founding beliefs in the Ancient Texts, in the book titled 'Age of False Pontiffs', but there exists a second interpretation of the events with a much more sympathetic view towards the twin antagonists of the story. The book, canonized by cults that despise the modern church, was eventually banned in all formats.

Many existing copies of the ancient texts were doctored covertly, to trick the church into handing out modified texts to their parishioners. The cover of each edited book was secretly marked by gouging out the 'False Pontiffs' text from the title, a phrase which was viewed as a insult by devoted cultists. Hence, the modified texts simply became known as the book of 'Ages'.

-S. Gardwell, The History of Lentempia vol II, p. 746

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I was one of those people that prided myself in not being one of the jealous types. When Malcolm bragged that a waitress or a bartender or that girl from the laundromat with the crop tops had flirted with him, I used to muss his hair and tell him to go for it. "I guess competition is just an unfortunate reality of dating a modern day Adonis like yourself," I would say, and then pinch one of his thin arms before he wiggled free from me. Jealous? Not calm, reasonable Jill. She was secure.

Well, turns out that was a crock of shit.

Malcolm had never given me a reason to doubt his trust before, and now that he had, my world had been rocked upside down. I started to wonder if Nadia had been the only girl that Malcolm was seeing. He was an unfaithful King for God's sake, why not just go the all the way and take full advantage of the perks of the position? Like a young sapling, I nurtured the idea until it grew into something that dominated my head space, to the point where started to scrutinize other woman that passed me in the hall, wondering if it were possible that any of them had received a special visit from our dear, fearless leader as well.

Did you sleep with my husband too? Okay, maybe you're clear. But what about you? I see that smirk on your face. Just what secrets are hiding from me, you smiling bitch.

After a while, I admitted that I was starting to drive myself a little crazy, at which point I kind of just shut down. I didn't leave bed for the next few days after the Malcolm-Nadia incident. I pulled the blinds shut tightly, merging day and night into a constant, waning twilight. Sleep and reality blended together into one groggy fever dream. I had my meals were delivered to my room, and rarely left the Queen's apartments. A couple of times I heard knocks at my door, but pretended to be asleep and ignored them. There were also daily summons from the King, messengers carrying long hand-written letters filled with poetic, purple-prose filled apologies and desperate requests to meet him for a talk. Easy to laugh at those, now that I felt dead inside.

I couldn't say how much time passed this way, shutting myself away from the strange, foreign world existing just outside my window. Through it all, I kept Malcolm's smart phone close to me. If he realized his phone was missing, it didn't show. That was fortunate, because the intrigue of the phone was the one distraction that kept me from spiraling further into the depths my unexpected depression. Cracking the mystery of the network key became my new drive, an unrelenting obsession that consumed everything that was not otherwise dominated by wails of injustice at the unfairness of the world and self-pity.

I had to connect to the internet. Now that I had found a more worthy use of my time, I stopped attending the daily royal council meetings in favor of trying to crack the network key. Well that was what I told myself. In reality, I was afraid of running into Malcolm at the meeting, who attended them sporadically.

But the task at hand was important. Achieving access to the internet could potentially put me back in contact with the real world. I was this close to sending an email to my mom explaining that my now psychotic 1000-year-old lying cheat of a husband was currently holding me hostage as his queen in a medieval kingdom, and to please contact the authorities to send help at her earliest convenience, preferably in the form of a rescue team of trained Navy Seals pulling a Zero Dark Thirty on my bathtub. But that string of unknown of characters separated me from any contact with the real world, and until then, I wasn't going anywhere.

Of course, I had my own personal doubts about the effectiveness of requesting help via all-caps email. If Malcolm was to be believed, time passed much more rapidly in Lentempia than it did back in America. Therefore, it was possible that even if my cry for help did reach the appropriate party, it could take (by a rough estimate) thousands of years for them to attempt some kind of rescue mission. If that were the case, my circle of responsive texting buddies would be immediately limited to other subjects of Lentempia with working cellular devices, which I somehow doubted would be a large group of people.

Even so, establishing a connection to the vast wealth of knowledge that was the internet could be an invaluable resource in discovery an exit to this world. It was obvious that Gravative was intimately connected to this world in some way, so devising a way to scour their private communications for secrets about their involvement ranked high on my personal agenda. I remembered that my husband also had a work phone that he used to connect the company intranet, one of the first places I thought likely to have valuable information regarding cross-dimensional travel. The device in my hand might not have be Malcolm's work phone, but perhaps there was a way to use it to remotely backdoor into the network using the company sponsored wifi.

I picked up the phone again and opened the Wifi network search again. The familiar Gravative Network was still there, its signal strength indecisively wavering between two and three bars. I clicked the network again and the familiar prompt opened, asking me again for a network key. I had already spent days clacking generic phrases into the warped touch screen keyboard, in vein hopes that the company had left the network key on its default setting. My prayers to the Gods of Dumb Luck appeared to be falling on deaf ears, as '123456', 'password123', and 'changethispasswordmalcolm' did not produce any matches.

So close, yet so far away. I yawned, looking down at the screen with bleary eyes. The battery was registering at 100%, even after days of tinkering away at the phone. The small yellow orb seemed to have a very long life, whatever it was.

If I were a Gravative employee, how would I go about obtaining my password?

Companies these days were taking network security a lot more seriously. If Gravative was anything like my places of employer, they would have been rather meticulous with the information. My company changed their wifi network key fairly frequently, and only notified employees whenever they did, via encrypted emails.

Of course! Emails!

Malcolm had set up his phone so that he could access both his private and corporate email accounts. Many of his old company emails were probably still stored locally on his phone, meaning I wouldn't even need an internet connection to browse them. And perhaps one email contained information about a certain network key...

With trembling hands, I tapped the square envelope-adorned email icon, and back out of the private email account that automatically loaded onto the screen. The parent directory presented me with two options, Malcolm – Personal, and Malcolm – Work. I chose the second option and watched the screen fade to black.

A window prompt materialized onto the screen.

> Please enter password for malcolm.reynolds@gravative.com:

I snapped my fingers. At this point in my life, I knew most of my husband's personal passwords, a consequence of living and sharing everything with the man for nine years of my life. Unfortunately, I never asked for any of Malcolm's work-related passwords. He had signed enough non-disclosure agreements to sue us into the next lifetime should they be revealed, and the thought of accidentally blabbing out one of his precious company secrets and costing him his job frightened me more than him, so I had pointedly avoided snooping through any of his work related accounts. The password to his work email was not one I knew by heart...but if anyone was equipped to guess this password, it was me.

Most people have a system in how they set and remember passwords. Malcolm was never imaginative when it came to passwords, and hated forgetting them, so he had designed a system. Malcolm had several key phrases that he chose from when setting passwords, usually concatenated with a plus sign and the current month and year. Generally these were names of his anything ranging from notable laws of physics to names of his favorite professional wrestlers.

After eliminating the usual suspects, I started to reach back into the annals of my memory to try to remember older passwords that had since been abandoned by him. Nothing worked. Whatever phrase Malcolm had chosen for his work email password, it was either something really obscure from way back, or even worse, something that he never shared with me before.

I was wrenched out of my own thoughts by a loud knock at the door.