A Very Linear Tactical Christmas
By Janie Crouch
Chapter 1
Chaos Theory
Lincoln Bollinger
(Son of Baby & Quinn Bollinger)
The back room at Linear Tactical had terrible heating, a bed that was more suggestion than furniture, and the strongest Wi-Fi signal in the building.
Lincoln had claimed it as his own when he was eight years old, back when Wi-Fi mattered for different reasons—online games, research rabbit holes, early experiments in code. Now it mattered for other things. But the room remained his, a small pocket of quiet in a building that hosted chaos on a regular basis. No one else wanted it. The heating issue alone was enough to deter most people.
Lincoln ran cold anyway. The temperature didn’t bother him.
Through the walls, he could hear the muffled chaos of the Linear Tactical Christmas Adam gathering—December 23rd, the day before Christmas Eve. Someone had coined the term years ago, reasoning that Adam came before Eve, so Christmas Adam should come before Christmas Eve. The logic was flawed—the naming convention of Christmas Eve had nothing to do with theBiblical Eve—but the tradition had stuck anyway. Humans were sentimental about their invented rituals.
Voices layered over voices, punctuated by children’s shrieks and the occasional burst of laughter that could only belong to Uncle Finn. Someone had put on holiday music, though the competing conversations rendered it more texture than melody. A baby was crying. Graham, probably, based on the pitch and duration. Callum and Sloane’s toddler had strong opinions about everything and the lung capacity to express them.
Lincoln checked his watch. 8:54 PM.
Six minutes.
He’d already done his duty. Two hours of circulation through the main room, contributing to conversations about weather patterns, vehicle maintenance, and the structural integrity of the new obstacle course Bear had designed for next year’s camp. He’d consumed adequate dinner—strategically selected from the main dishes brought by people whose cooking he trusted. Desserts would come later, as they always did at these gatherings—usually at around 9:30, then everyone tended to head home.
Lincoln would’ve already gone home if it wouldn’t cause more trouble than it was worth. It was easier to just stay than justify leaving early. He considered it doing his duty.
He’d also allowed his mother to hug him twice and his father to clap him on the shoulder three times.
Sufficient.
Now he sat on the narrow bed, laptop open, waiting.
8:56 PM.
His fingers hovered over the keyboard. The secure chat window was already open, cursor blinking in the empty text field. Waiting, like he was waiting.
Almost two years. Seven hundred and two nights of exchanges.
Mercury.
He didn’t know her real name. Didn’t know where she lived, what she looked like, what she did for a living. Those were the rules—unspoken but inviolable. He and Mercury existed in this space, two minds meeting in the digital ether, uncontaminated by the complications of physical reality.
But he knew other things.
He knew she quoted poetry the way other people quoted movies—casually, instinctively, as if verse were simply another language she happened to speak. Dickinson. Yeats. Eliot. The Romantics when she was feeling wistful, the Modernists when she was feeling sharp.
He knew she typed faster when she was excited—her responses arriving in rapid bursts, sometimes fragmented, thoughts outpacing her fingers. When she was tired, her cadence slowed, her sentences growing longer, more measured. When something was wrong—and he’d learned to recognize this, though she never said it directly—her rhythm became almost mechanical. Too perfect. Too controlled.
Tonight, he suspected she would be somewhere in the middle. The holidays did something to her. Last year, their Christmas exchange had been quieter than usual. More reflective. She’d quoted Dickens—not the Christmas one, she’d said, the other one—and they’d talked about time. How arbitrary it was, marking the year’s passage with feasts and rituals. How humans needed the markers anyway.
8:59 PM.
Lincoln straightened. Positioned his fingers on the keys.
9:00 PM.
