*** Authors Note: Any similarity to real persons or places described within this story is probably not an accident, although I've made the effort not to expose anybody too much. The story circulates around a girl I met once, who told me some of her story. I will always regret not having spent more time with her. Enjoy & please leave your comments, good or bad!
NB: If you haven't already, read the back story or a lot of the dialogue will be difficult to follow.***
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Wondabyne on the Hawkesbury, Australia, Feb 29th 2020
Well then, here we are.
It is 2 years, almost to the day, since I had found out all about my man of mystery. Ever since the magical night that had followed between he and I, he'd cast off the curtain of night that surrounded his presence and truly bloomed. As a man, a husband and a father, not necessarily in that order though. The fatherhood for a second time some nine months after the night I lost my virginity to him. How's about that then?
Over time I also found out a lot more about his business interests as well, which have since come to intrigue me almost as much as they did him, I suspect. Though it was true that I would never really understand the mathematical genius behind his algorithms.
Very soon after he had said goodbye to Charlie and Kate and Sarah headed off to her period of internment, his newly appointed lawyer had put him in touch with an old school pal whom he knew had some dealings funding such endeavours as Conor's. This was none other than Kelly's dad, who had already made a minor name for himself in the investment banking industry picking successful technology related initiatives to back financially. None of those came near the scale of what he was about to develop with Conor though.
After a relatively short period of time Kelly's dad, Simon Barclay, had steered Conor away from his original work with Charlie; that was the development of a series of algorithms that could successfully forecast the daily movements of any particular capital market to reliable accuracy of 72% or more. Simon believed that this kind of tool had the potential to destroy the free movement of the world's markets if it got into the hands of too many of the wrong folks and he wasn't willing to play with that kind of fire.
Instead, they had licensed the algorithms to a small number of not-for-profit superannuation funds and charities, tightly secured so they couldn't be copied or distributed. They felt this was an ethical way to garner enough revenue to develop other uses for Conor's skills.
In the end, the simplest solution proved true. Conor just adapted his original work with Charlie to enable research programs to predict the most successful outcomes and adapt their automated research systems on the fly. Artificial Reasoning as Conor called it, and much faster than the human brain could compute the multitude of problem/answer equations and come to the same accurate conclusions. Multi-nationals such as pharmaceutical companies couldn't get enough of his work. In some cases, research programs that might have taken years had been reduced to a few months.
It was this solution and its various offshoots that had made Conor, Simon and his solicitor David Howarth, very rich men. It had also been managed in a way, at Conor's request, that almost no one outside of their tight inner circle had even heard Conor's name. Conor wouldn't have had it any other way, as he jealously guarded his privacy and that of his daughter.
"His new wife is also thankful for that!" I thought to myself, not for the first time. The idea of ending up like those folks in the glare of the media spotlight day after day terrified me. Especially now that I was a relatively new mother myself.
And then there was Halligans.
I was particularly curious about that and Sarah's enigmatic reference to Conor's mother Grace on the disclosure of his purchase of Halligans. As Conor ended up explaining to me one night, Grace's dad had made his wealth from owning a string of pubs throughout Ireland. He had hated the poor Irish Catholics of the land he shared with them. But at the same time, he apparently had no issues with emptying their wallets in his pubs and sending them home drunk to continue the cycle of domestic violence that was the centre point of the Irish family's troubles throughout the 20th century.
I believe that Conor had it in mind as a way of saying "I am your da's equal now and you didn't run for nothing mama." He didn't quite put it this way when he told me his reasons, but I read this intent clearly between his words. I'm not sure what Grace would have made of it though. I think it was just something he needed to do.
Thankfully for us too. Mr and Mrs Walker, only a year into our marriage. If it wasn't for Halligans, we might never have met.
So anyway, after a couple of wonderful years together, we had finally decided to gather up our new little group of family and friends and escape to where Conor had grown up in Wondabyne for a few days.
The strangest thing about the place was there was absolutely no reason for it to even to have a name. It consisted of a now defunct stone quarry, a train station and a half dozen dilapidated houses spread along the opposite side of the inlet from the station. As Sarah had said to me that night, "such a beautiful and abandoned place you never did see."
Over the few years he was building his business, Conor had built a new cottage right next to the tiny fibro shack where he had grown up. The owner of the property had been the son of the old oyster farmer who had let Conor and his mother stay there rent free for so many years. Conor had refused to pay him less than triple the value of the property.
He had also learnt to fly and had bought an old seaplane from a struggling tour flight operator that ran flights out of Sydney harbour. It allowed him to fly from his place at Greenwich up to Wondabyne at whim, so he could escape the real world and spend his spare time reliving the all too brief period of happiness he had with his mother, before she passed.
So, we had all come to celebrate his birthday, the first I would experience with him and the last for another 4 years, given the oddity of his being born on February 29th. We also had another mission to fulfil tonight, to, well.... let's just say get some other things out of the way.
Conor's voice interrupted my reverie as I watched the last train from Gosford trumble away along the waterfront tracks of the Hawkesbury towards Sydney.
"We're ready for you wife. Are you sure you want to do this?"
