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K. Johnson, the founder of the Flat Earth Society; a history of the oyster in New York; a discussion on international tariffs; an interpretation of David Hume’s “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding;” and some lines from Thomas Hobbes on the concept of commonwealth. There was no rhyme or reason to what he collected, he just
    knew that at some point he’d work it into a speech.
    One article from the Wall Street Journal caught his attention. It
    was about the Global Positioning System — the constellation of 24
    satellites that sit in geosynchronous orbit above the earth beaming
    radio signals to the U.S. military, shippers, truckers, hikers, and rental
    cars. The article pointed out that the signal coming from the satellites, which had to travel 11,000 miles, was so weak that by the time it
    arrived on earth, a single Christmas tree light was about 1,000 times
    as bright. The article went on to say that the signal could essentially
    be altered by anyone possessing a jamming device that they could get
    off of the Internet for $40.
    “A Christmas tree light,” Hayden mumbled to himself in amazement.
    “What’s that, my friend?” Aaron said, cupping the receiver of his
    cell phone.
    “Nothing. Just talking to myself, Aaron.”
    “Don’t do that.”

CHAPTER TWO

    Rebecca’s is the kind of place where you pay $25 for an egg salad sandwich and a bottle of root beer. But to the inhabitants of Southampton, Long Island, it’s just their general store.
    Rebecca’s reminded Jack Braun of McMillan’s in Michigan’s
    Upper Peninsula because of the décor – spartan walls, fresh produce, homemade dills, tins of beans neatly stacked on pine shelves. Aside from the prices, everything else was pretty much the same - people coming in to pick up their daily newspapers, the owner’s daughter behind the counter, an American flag waving out front.
    Jack had fled Michigan a long time ago. He was Wall Street now. He had always yearned to leave the simple folk behind, somehow sensing there was more to life than eating Dinty Moore stew out of the can while ice fishing. When he got the math scholarship to Princeton, he took it, thanked his parents, and never looked back. And he never once made apologies for what he now had.
    Funny thing, jealousy. That’s what he sensed on the rare occasions when he went back to Michigan to check up on his parents. He had money, cars, a house in the Hamptons, a $6 million apartment in Manhattan, and a couple of horses that he raced, the sort of things that men and women back home only saw in movies or talked about derisively over cups of strong, black coffee in the diner. He was living the American Dream, but it wasn’t good enough for them. They still found a way to make him feel inadequate, to let him know that the secret to happiness wasn’t actually in attaining the things you wanted, but rather in the dreaming and the praying and the hoping that if you were good enough and God fearing enough, you’d find something special in your stocking one day.
    Bullshit. That’s what it was. Simple-minded, backwater bullshit. If there was one thing that he knew he had going for him that those cowards back at home didn’t, it was that he tried to limit the amount of time he spent dreaming. He preferred action. And as a telecom analyst in the mid-to-late 90s that’s what he got. When he started, they paid him $250,000 a year. At the height of the party, he was getting $10 million a year before bonus. They fired him after the telecom meltdown; said he was getting “too close” to the companies he followed. The real reason was that he was expensive, and that he had become too much of a poster child for an era that they wanted to put behind them.
    When they let him go, he took a year off to travel the world in his plane. Along the way, he picked up an assortment of 90s superheroes doing the same thing. In Norway, it was the former general counsel for an online property that provided answers to