Read Soul Identity for Free Online Page B

=”, a triangle, “Is,” and a comma. Underneath this I had written “(that’s how).” Apparently I had woken up with a bright idea. I stared at it and tried to decipher it, but got nowhere.

    I had the coffee ready by the time my parents arrived for work. I poured out three cups. “Starting tomorrow we have a new customer,” I said.
    “You finished the airport report?” Dad asked.
    “All done, billed, emailed, and filed.” I smiled at their reactions. I rarely do the paperwork.
    “Who’s the new customer?” Mom asked.
    I pointed out the window at Berry weeding his flowers. “Santa dragged me into this. Did you know that his real name is Arthur Berringer?”
    “He goes by Berry ,” Dad said.
    “I wish I had your memory for names, Dad. Not knowing it almost got me killed.” I told them about Berry shooting in the air and Bob peeling away.
    “The same delivery guy from last week?” Mom stared at me. “Don’t tell me we’re doing business with those Soul Identity wackos.”
    “We’re doing business with those wackos. And they’re paying us a month in advance for round-the-clock work.”
    Dad almost choked on his coffee. “We charge so much for your time because you only bill ten hours a week.” He punched some numbers on a solar calculator. “The advance will be more than we made last year. Is this for real?”
    “I guess we’ll find out if the check shows up today,” I said. I relayed what Berry told me about Soul Identity’s bridges between lives, and how I promised that I would help him out, even though I didn’t like what I had heard.
    “Tough call on taking them as a client,” Dad said. “Though it’s a nice thing for Berry , and maybe they won’t be as bad as they sound.”
    “Maybe,” I said. “Hey, I need a favor from you two. Can you come and get your palms read with me this afternoon? There’s a place we need to check out.”
    They smiled when I told them how I followed Bob to the palm reader’s. “With money like this, why not?” Mom said.
    I remembered my dream, and I showed them the paper. “What do you guys make of this?”
    “Looks like you were programming in your sleep,” Mom said.
    “With lousy English, too,” Dad said. “What language ends its sentences with is?”
    “Maybe it’s not programming. Maybe it’s math,” Mom said. “Soul Identity equals delta is comma.”
    Dad said, “Maybe it’s not a comma, but just Scott’s lousy handwriting for an apostrophe. Try this—Soul Identity equals delta eyes.”
    I thought for a minute. “Maybe I meant delta of the eye images. Maybe these guys compute the soul’s identity by figuring out the difference between the eyes.”
    Dad shrugged. “I guess you’ll find out tomorrow.”
    “Let’s find out now.” I fired up my laptop and opened the bluefish eye images. “The spatial data can help to line up the eyes on the same axis,” I said. I rotated the left eye image until the numbers matched. “Now let’s get them the same size.” I zoomed up the right eye image until it matched the left.
    Mom looked over my shoulder. “How do you get a delta from that?”
    “They probably have a more sophisticated program than my photo editor. One that overlays the images and shows the differences.”
    “You’re not going to write all that now, are you?” Dad asked.
    “Of course I am.” I opened a new window and started coding. I grabbed a graphics library to manipulate the images and borrowed some old code to display the data nicely. An hour later I looked around, but my parents were outside on the dock. I went to work on the compile bugs.
    After another half hour I was close. I stared at my code. It loaded two images, calculated the delta, and then displayed it. Where was the bug? There: I was trying to display an empty buffer.
    I fixed and recompiled my code, loaded the images, and clicked the delta button. This time a new pattern came up on the screen. I added a slider that let me control the delta