Chapter 2: A NIKO way?
Now I think it's time to explain this bizarre sidestory about NIKO, the Generalized Militia Campaign, and how my cousin Jin-ka figures into all this.
NIKO is a massive organization that sprung up a few years ago. You wouldn't have heard of them, the U. S. government has managed to keep their war with them a secret.
A man named Art Mawlind heads NIKO. Mawlind seems to have dedicated his life to the complete overthrow of the U. S. government, but at this time, no one was quite sure just what he was really after or why.
He had been leading a few scattered generals in myopic marches across this and other countries. What they did was they set up shop in a targeted neighborhood and proceeded to buy out all the local businesses. No one knew why.
I didn't know about this. No one did.
Then came Jin-ka.
Jin-ka was really my mother's cousin Jamie Calstar (who was only two years older than me). As far back as I can remember, he was always a quiet little kid who was always shut up in his room surfing the web. He usually locked himself in.
He 'officially' changed his name to Jin-ka (his web alias) on his thirteenth birthday. But the first time anyone noticed something really strange about him was on his first day of high school, when he sneaked into the classrooms before school started and scratched out his real name and wrote Jin-ka in the teachers' attendance books.
No one at school ever knew his real name. Not that anyone cared. He never talked to anyone, never signed up for any extracurricular activities, nothing. Whenever the teachers made him work with a classmate, he changed moods and became so rude, abusive, and occasionally violent that the classmate always agreed to work separately. Any other time, he was always slinking around like his mission was to get through school without being noticed, and he was doing an excellent job of it.
The instant he turned eighteen, he dropped out of high school even though it was only five weeks until his graduation, and he had already acquired all the credits necessary to graduate.
He spent the next year cooped up in his old room on his computer day and night. He ordered all his food over the phone, from take-out places. His poor mother (his father had died years earlier) had to pay the deliveryman with a check he would slip under the door. She then had to take the food up to his room and leave it outside his door.
The poor woman claims he 'didn't eat enough to keep a bird alive.'
He bought computer equipment as fast as he could buy, and his savings were dwindling at an alarming rate.
Then he won the lottery.
His mother bought a ticket at his request. He even specified the six numbers to enter. When it was announced that the ticket was worth a fortune, she ran up to his room in a panic and screamed "JIM! Uh, I mean, JIN-KA! YOU WON THE LOTTERY! ALL SIX NUMBERS RIGHT! YOU WON TWENTY-SEVEN MILLION DOLLARS!"
And then he opened the door. For the first time in nearly a year, the poor, tired old woman saw her son.
He hadn't changed much, except for his incredible thinness and slightly hollow eyes.
She didn't care about those. She was just thrilled to see him.
But his reaction puzzled her. He just smiled calmly and said in a low voice. "I know. Come on, we're leaving."
That was the last time she ever set foot in that house. He would never let her go back, even for her own possessions.
Before the number was even announced, he had already used the last of his savings on the down payments for a palatial mansion on the outskirts of town and a massive computer center in the basement. This computer network was the largest privately owned one in history by far, and he just kept adding little parts to it every day. He sent people to his old house to get his old computers to add to it, and scrounged around junkyards, garage sales and the like for anything extra. There were reports of massive robberies at computer warehouses across the state. Hundreds of thousands of computers of all shapes and sizes were stolen, and every day for nearly a year the pile in his basement got larger. He had to expand that basement three times to make room. After the second time, the measurements showed that the basement was bigger than the entire rest of the mansion put together, but he still was not satisfied.
But this never became publicly known, and we all saw his better side.
Jin-ka was a tall, thin, hollow-eyed little guy who went slinking around with his eyes open so wide they were almost completely round. He always wore a loose black turtleneck sweater and black sweat pants, even in the hottest weather. He walked with his back bent. And as he walked, he swayed from side to side as he trudged around with an embarrassed look. And when he talked, it was always in a breathless voice that made you think he was scared to death of something, but if you alarmed him, he started into this lightning-quick karate routine that chopped up anything in sight. He was so strange that it almost hurt to look at him.
He invited my side of the family up for lunch twice a week, and he was always very nice to all of us. Early on, he casually mentioned that he was joining a club for lottery winners called NIKO. But that was the only time he ever mentioned it, and we all forgot about it. He gave us gifts, he loaned us money, he laughed at our jokes, everything. And his smiles weren't forced. He had always been su ch an unbelievably horrible actor that he could never force a smile, or fake a tear, for that matter.But there were no tears. From that day on, there was never any coolness between us. This went on for a few idyllic months, until that one day…
While he was talking to my parents, I, then seventeen, had started to wander off looking around. Looking back on it now, I probably shouldn't have, but I was really curious about the half of the mansion I'd never been to. One day I wound up in a big walk-in closet with some computers. Also there was a bin with a big stack of papers. I knew better than to touch the computers, but I picked up some of the papers and began to read. They were just a bunch of bills for words that sounded to me like exotic vegetables, as well as some legal mumbo-jumbo from his lawyer to him about a petty theft charge he had just gotten him off of.
I would have read more of them, but just then Jin-ka himself burst in screaming at the top of his lungs and I slammed down the papers.
