Once there was a boy named Fred. His parents died in a boating accident and he was raised by a variety of relatives. Occasionally, he spent the summer with wealthy friends Michael and Paul, heirs to real estate conglomerates. Quick witted and intelligent, Fred was the favorite of his Uncle Bill.
On his eighteenth birthday, his Uncle Bill gave Fred a huge trust, and departed for Europe. Fred moved into his uncle’s house, and kept busy studying ancient languages and Icelandic poetry at the local university. Bill’s gardener was a younger man named Sean. Bill helped Sean get his landscaping certificate. After Bill departed, Sean worked for Fred, who loaned him the money to open his own landscaping business. Bill also had this weird thumb drive, which could hack into any computer in the world. Bill left it with Fred, with a caution to never use it. One day, Bill's friend Mr. Gary showed up. He was rather mysterious, with an undefined job in the State Department, who visited Bill and Fred from time to time. On this trip, he revealed to Fred the thumb drive was the property of a powerful Russian gangster. The thumb drive was actually intelligent in a way, and was the source of the gangster’s power. He had learned its location and would send his bratva to take it by force. With the power of the AI in the drive, the gangster would conquer the world. Mr. Gary tells Fred the thumb drive is highly encrypted and protected by the AI that controls it. It had copied itself to the internet, and if the drive was destroyed, it would download itself to another thumb drive at random. If he tried to erase it, the same thing would happen. The only way to destroy it was to take the drive to the computer that created it, at a small college in Kharkov, in the heart of the Russian gangster’s power. But the first step was to set out for England and try to reach an MI6 safe house. Fred and Sean try to slip away unnoticed, but Fred’s wealthy friends Michael and Paul catch up and insist on coming along. The bratva find them, but the timely intervention of Army Green Beret Captain Andrews helps them escape. If my tale of Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, Merry, Pippin and Aragorn sounds unlikely, well you now know what I’m talking about. None of the halflings were raised as warriors. Frodo was basically a trustifarian! Merry and Pippin were scions of wealthy families and neither put much energy into anything. (You might think how all the warriors that met the halflings and consider their reactions in a new light.) But during the War of the Ring, they did great things. Pippin and Merry brought news of the outside world to Treebeard, and he decided to attack Saruman. Pippin endured the siege of Gondor and saved Faramir and Merry’s lives. Merry rode with the Rohirrim and saved the life of Eowyn. Frodo and Sam saved the world from total evil. Not a warrior among them. Just courage, self-discipline, justice, faith, hope, and love.
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