Zing! Zing!
The rhythmic sound of shovels slicing through the sand echoed beneath the wooden deck of the beach house.
"I mean, it just doesn't make any sense," Charlie complained, pausing to lean heavily on his shovel handle. "Why gold? Why bury it? Is he a pirate?"
Alan aggressively plunged his shovel into the ground. "Hey, you're digging in soft beach sand. I had to shovel through packed soil in my backyard to get the gold he buried out there."
Charlie stared at him, bewildered. "Wait, he did this before? Is this something he just does?"
"Just keep digging," Alan grunted.
"I mean, I just want to know why," Charlie groaned, wiping sweat from his forehead.
"Well, I have my theories," Alan said breathlessly. "I think he is acting as some sort of karmic financial entity. You know, do stupid things, win stupid prizes. But that's just a theory."
"Well, I didn't sink an $80,000 boat," Charlie shot back, clearly annoyed at having to do physical labor at his own house.
"Oh, no, you just spent it on hookers and gambling," Alan retorted.
"At least I get my money's worth!" Charlie snapped. "What about you?"
"Oh, yeah? Well, you—"
Ting!
The sharp, metallic clink of a shovel blade hitting something hard echoed under the deck.
Alan and Charlie immediately dropped to their knees, furiously clawing away the damp sand with their bare hands. They unearthed a heavy, reinforced wooden box secured with a thick padlock. Charlie scrambled to yank his keys from his pocket, forcing the lock open and throwing back the lid.
Inside sat perfectly stacked, gleaming rows of gold bullion.
"Now that's what I'm talking about," Charlie breathed, his eyes reflecting the shimmering gold.
By the end of the day, Charlie had officially made his ten-year-old nephew his business manager.
Before anyone realized it, March of 2004 had arrived.
Jake was sitting out on the deck, rapidly flipping through a thick book titled The Complete History of Stage Illusions. He wasn't reading it because he had a sudden, burning passion for magic tricks, but simply scanning the pages to store the raw data into Argus.
By cross-referencing the texts here with the digitized records from his original world, he was building an encyclopedic database.
Since he could easily read up to a thousand words a minute, the sheer volume of books he had fed into Argus over the last few months could fill twenty large, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.
He didn't actively comprehend the material as he skimmed it, he just stored the raw data for later retrieval.
The results had been fascinating. Across his massive sample size, he had found an average text similarity of 98.7 percent between this world's literature and his original timeline's.
It didn't seem like a huge discrepancy, but a 1.3 percent variance across the entire span of human history meant that millions of tiny, imperceptible details were different here.
It was like realizing that in this universe, George Washington had a slightly different favorite color, or that the recipe for Coca-Cola used an eighth of a teaspoon less vanilla. Trivial, but to Jake, it was the ultimate puzzle.
"Here you go," Charlie said, suddenly dropping a chilled juice box onto the patio table, yanking Jake out of his thoughts.
"Thanks, Uncle Charlie," Jake said, smoothly closing the heavy book.
Charlie leaned against the railing, sipping a beer. "So, when are you going to stop reading those nerdy books and let me take you out to do something fun? I feel like you're getting older by the minute."
"Well, I am going to be eleven next week," Jake said plainly.
Charlie froze, the beer bottle hovering inches from his mouth. "Next week?" he asked, completely clueless about his own nephew's birthday.
"Yep. March 14th," Jake answered, popping the straw into his juice box.
"Huh. Wait a minute here," Charlie muttered, suddenly realizing he needed to go pretend he knew this information while talking to Alan and Judith. He quickly turned and hurried back inside the house.
When March 14th finally arrived, Jake found himself sitting on the living room couch, unwrapping a gift from Rose.
"A magic set? Nice," Jake said politely as he opened the vintage, velvet-lined box.
"Oh, it's not just any magic set," Rose beamed proudly. "That is an original, 1920s parlor kit. It's a limited edition that actually belonged to one of Houdini's closest rivals. Notice the hidden compartments in the wands? Very rare."
"How lovely," Evelyn remarked from the couch, dripping with absolute disdain disguised as politeness. "Perhaps he'll grow up to be a carny."
Rose simply crossed her fingers and smiled innocently, either completely ignoring Evelyn's vicious sarcasm or genuinely not noticing it.
"Alright, have fun at the Magic Castle tonight!" Rose cheered.
"Okay. Thank you, Rose," Jake nodded.
"You're welcome! Bye-bye!" Rose called out as she happily skipped out the deck door.
"Thank you so much!" Evelyn called after her. The moment the door clicked shut, Evelyn scoffed. "Poor soul. I'm sure she means well."
She turned back to Jake, her eyes gleaming. "Now, open Grandmummy's present."
Jake pulled away the silver wrapping paper to reveal a sleek, incredibly expensive, tailored Calvin Klein suit.
"Oh, perfect for tonight. Thanks, Grandma," Jake said, standing up to give her a polite hug just as the front doorbell rang again.
He walked over and pulled the door open to find his mother standing on the porch next to her sister, his Aunt Liz.
"Hey, Mom," Jake said, hugging her, before turning to his aunt. "Hey, Aunt Liz."
"There he is! My favorite nephew," Liz grinned, aggressively ruffling his hair. "Happy birthday, sweetie."
She thrust a brightly wrapped box into his hands. Jake tore off the paper to reveal a brand-new, brightly colored skateboard.
"Cool," he said, forcing a convincing smile of pre-teen excitement.
"Hey, everybody," Charlie announced nonchalantly, strolling into the entryway as if he hadn't just been peeking around the corner, waiting for Liz to arrive.
Judith immediately eyed the skateboard. "I suppose you haven't bought him a safety helmet to go with that?" she asked Liz dryly.
"You ride with Aunt Liz, you take your chances. Right, Liz?" Charlie asked, flashing her a highly suggestive, lingering smile.
Liz slowly looked him up and down, her expression completely blank. She turned to Judith.
"This guy? Are you sure?" she asked, clearly having absolutely zero memory of aggressively hooking up with Charlie in the coatroom during Alan and Judith's wedding.
Charlie's suggestive smirk instantly melted into a look of profound confusion.
As everyone scattered to get ready for their evening out, Jake quietly slipped back into his room and opened his laptop.
He pulled up his email and clicked on a newly received PDF.
There, printed in crisp, formal font just below the abstract of the paper titled 'Refinements in Heuristic Search for Semi-Structured Graphs' was the byline: Co-authored by Jacob D. Harper.
Jake just smiled softly to himself and shut the laptop.