Free GEN13 - Version 2.0 by Unknown Author

late each day.
    Once his hair was arranged the way he liked it, J. B. pulled the keys from his pocket and unlocked his office door. J. B. smiled as he inhaled the musty odor from his cluttered office, then stepped inside and closed the door. He took off his heavy winter coat and held it in one hand while he took down a hanger from the hook on the back of the door. He was just draping the coat over the hanger when he jumped at the sound of a voice behind him.
    “Good morning, J. B.”
    J. B. turned to see Lynch leaning comfortably against a file cabinet. “Oh, it’s you, Jack,” he said with a playful smile. “You need to watch that. I’m not a young man, you know.”
    Lynch returned the smile, although his eyes still showed the seriousness of his purpose. “Now, now. You’ve still got a couple of good years left in you, at least.”
    In many ways, J. B. was a relic from another time, when newspapers relied on paper rather than electronic files. J. B. had run the morgue at the New York News for
    as long as anyone could remember, maintaining, updating, and indexing the archives of every single story the paper had ever run.
    As computers came to play increasingly large roles in newspaper production, it seemed as though the need for a morgue—or an archivist—would have faded into oblivion, right alongside linotype presses and teletype machines. Electronic filing of stories meant that every story from the day’s newspaper could be added to archival databases as soon as the editors approved them for publication. The days of clipping and filing columns of newsprint were long gone.
    However, while the technology might have changed, the need for someone who could organize vast quantities of information and find it at a moment’s notice hadn’t gone away. If anything, in the midst of the “information revolution,” the need had grown exponentially greater. J. B. had stayed on top of the new technologies as each had been introduced, adapting to each new direction as it came along and disregarding the ones that soon disappeared.
    If that weren’t enough to guarantee J. B.’s job security, there was also the fact that the electronic archive only went back eleven years. Most of the material from the newspaper’s 175-year history was still available only on microfilm or yellowing scraps of paper. J. B. had been given managerial responsibility for digitizing the entire archive, a project that, conservatively, was estimated to take until at least 2022, long after he was scheduled to retire. Not that anyone could imagine him ever retiring. It was far more likely that when the time came, he would pass away and be quietly filed under “H.”
    For, you see, J. B. was a self-confessed information junkie of the highest order. His head held a bewildering array of trivia that he could produce off the tip of his tongue without even having to think hard. Whether the topic was obscure quotes from past Middle East leaders or the winners of every Kentucky Derby of the twentieth century (win, place, and show, including their respective running times), J. B. was the man to call. And if there was a question on any topic that he couldn’t answer off the top of his head, he invariably knew where to look.
    Still, the fact remained that, with technology making access to past material increasingly easy, J. B. was one of a dying breed. When Lynch stopped to think about that point, it saddened him. Part of the reason stemmed from the fact that, after more than twenty years of occasional contacts, he’d grown to genuinely like the old man. On a more practical level, though, J. B. was one of Lynch’s most valuable resources for information, particularly when he didn’t want to go through more official governmental channels. Mystery novels so often made a big deal about alliances between intrepid detectives and crusading reporters, but the truth was that Lynch found reporters to be a pain.
    Especially the crusading ones.
    The main problem with