The Phlebotomist

by Chris Panatier

  “Yes.” She stood. “You’re the Locksmith?”

  He shook his head no. “I’ll take you.” He turned for the door through which he’d arrived.

  “Isaiah?” said Willa. “Come on, baby.”

  “He can stay here with the others, he’ll be safe,” said the man.

  “You have a keen sense of humor,” said Willa. “But I’m taking my grandson.” Isaiah came in with a one-armed action figure on loan from another child.

  The man looked at Everard, who shrugged helplessly. “She already made me quit cigarettes.”

  “Somebody needed to.” He waved her over. “Come with me, then.”

  Directly through the screen door in the back, across ten feet of yellow grass, was a shed slapped together with old 3D-printed corrugated panels, a cheap building material ubiquitous in the lowbloods.

  “I’m not going in there,” said Willa.

  “It’s not what you think,” said the man. He opened a section of panel revealing a second door that Willa recognized as belonging to a taxi drone. The shed was a tiny hangar, built snugly around the craft. The man opened the door and ushered them inside.

  “Where are we going?”

  He gave her a look that made her suddenly conscious of her naivete. They were taking her to visit a notorious hacker and probably weren’t keen on giving out the address.

  “Won’t we be traceable?” asked Willa, strapping Isaiah onto the bench seat.

  “This drone’s fugitive. Hasn’t been on-line for months,” he said, strapping himself into a utilitarian pilot’s seat secured by an arm to the wall. “It’s ours.” He tapped Isaiah on the top of his head. “Hold on sir, this cab’s a bit faster than what you might be used to.”

  “He’s not used to anything,” said Willa.

  They lifted straight up through the hinged roof, and stormed low over a range of ramshackle homes. Isaiah hooted at the thrill of acceleration.

  “Patriot can’t see us?” Willa said, still unsure.

  “They could see us if they had their eyes open,” he said. “But without a digital signature we might as well be invisible.”

  “I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Lindon.”

  “Willa.”

  “I know.”

  The trip covered only a few minutes and perhaps four or five miles, and the drone decelerated over another backyard shack. It snagged a series of wires as it dropped down inside, drawing them through pulleys that closed the roof overhead. Still in AB Plus, the new house, chipped paint and all, was a clone of Everard’s, just in olive drab. Lindon opened the drone, allowing Willa and Isaiah to push out from the shed and into another wasted backyard.

  Above them, a trellis woven tight with defoliated vines led from the shed to the screen door on the back of the house. The inner door opened as they reached it, and a short, stoutly built woman with an explosion of curly, burnt orange hair greeted them. She pushed a pair of dark-lensed welding goggles onto her forehead. “You’re Willa,” she announced.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You’re Isaiah,” the woman continued, extending a hand that Isaiah promptly yanked. “I’m Janet.”

  “OK,” said Willa, “where is–”

  “Come in, come in,” she continued, nudging the goggles farther up and into her huge hair. She was solidly in her fifties, maybe five years Willa’s junior, with dark freckled skin – that particular shade of deep tan that could be just as much from years spent in the sun as inherited.

  Inside they found a quaint kitchen in robin’s egg blue, with a kettle vibrating on a portable burner. It was clean and tidy, unfilled with children, and so well ordered it felt in stark contradiction to the world it occupied. It was domesticated, charming.

  “You work for the Locksmith?” asked Willa.

  “You could say that,” she said, her patched dress of many layers twirling as she spun. “Let’s go.”

  She led them to a door no wider than a broom closet, opened it, and began down the stairs toward a basement. About half-way down, she stopped, lifted a broomstick with a hook in the end from behind the hand railing, and extended it high above to a ceiling hatch directly over them.

  “Oh, that’s sneaky,” said Willa.

  Janet drew down the rope, opening the hatch and lowering the wooden stairs. “Up we go.”

  Isaiah spirited into the space. The day for him, Willa noted, had been the most exciting of his entire life. She followed, cautiously creaking herself up the steps. Once all were clear, the woman closed the hatch and flipped a light switch.

  The room immediately transferred Willa to the days of her childhood.

  All around, on shelves and tables, crates and TV trays, were radios, oscilloscopes, old televisions, arcane telephones and analog recorders – some even dating from before her birth – stacked atop one another in piles, or wired together into novel contraptions. Laptop computers and pads that had gone extinct when Willa was still in school lined wooden shelves around the perimeter. Miles of wire ran between them, which was, in a way, more unusual than the collection of dusty electronics. Nothing had used wires for four decades. Here, though, an entire era of computing power existed on a circulatory system of copper and plastic. A drafting table in the corner had the appearance of a workstation that one might use to build model airplanes, complete with precision razors, glue, soldering iron, and vintage hair dryer. On a shelf just above the table were bins upon bins of siphons, empty blood bags, and needles.

  Isaiah couldn’t believe his good fortune. It was a wonderland, and he went to prodding whatever he could reach.

  “Stop that,” Willa said.

  “He’s fine,” said Janet. “You can’t hurt that old stuff.”

  The operation was impressive, though Willa got the impression the equipment wasn’t just a collection. There was a vague logic to it, how the machines were stacked and wired together, though Willa couldn’t comprehend how it all worked. To think, though, that a single man had put so much effort into cracking the skin of a behemoth like Patriot was inspiring. “This is all his work,” Willa said to herself, caressing the keyboard of the very model laptop her parents had owned when she was little.

  “He’s quite prolific. Doesn’t sleep much though,” Janet said with an exaggerated yawn. She leaned back into an office chair and wheeled to the drafting table. Pulling down the goggles, she said, “Care to see what I’m working on?”

  “Sure,” said Willa. “You help him?”

  “Help him?” she said. “Willa, dangit – I am him!” She waited a beat for Willa to blink. “It’s alright, sweetie. You’re supposed to be surprised. It means my little ruse is working.”

  “But I caught you before at DS8. A bag-hack. You did time.” Willa’s brain was skipping now, trying to make sense. “You were a man,” she said, her confusion growing, “taller too.”

  “I was?” exclaimed Janet, slapping her legs and putting her hands up to the goggles like binoculars. “Are you telling me that there are copycat hackers out there?” she laughed. “Let us file our complaint with the local magistrate!”

  Isaiah laughed along, infected by the woman’s jocularity.

  Still putting the pieces together, Willa pointed at the begoggled woman. “You’re the Locksmith.”

  “I’m the Locksmith,” she said arms out wide. “But you can call me Janet.”

  “That’s your real name?”

  “It’s what you can call me, heh.”

  “Janet,” said Willa, hesitating.

  “Well, if you prefer, call me ‘The Locksmith’, then, or ‘The’, or ‘Locksmith’, or ‘Lock’. But don’t call me ‘Smith’.”

  “Lock!” said Isaiah.

  “Lock it is,” said the woman, tossing a thumbs-up and a wink to Isaiah. “Anyways, I’m glad you’ve decided to take me up on my offer.” She stood and scooped up a blood bag rig. “Check out this design, Willa. The inner bag for the decoy blood is nanoceramic and totally flexible. Patriot’s needles can’t penetr
ate through it and into the main chamber. They bounce right off the inner wall of the decoy pocket.”

  Willa shook her head. “I doubt that. The needle probes are inconel. They’d penetrate nanoceramic.”

  “Oh yeah?” Lock raised her eyebrows and sniffed. “Everard came through your line two days ago. You paid him for B-neg.”

  “So it’s true? He really did?”

  “Yeah. He really did, Willa. That bag was full of his own AB-positive. Those needles might be strong, but their moorings are suspect. Flexible. They didn’t pierce through to the main chamber. So, per my design, they assayed the decoy pocket.”

  “Which you filled with B-neg,” said Willa, completing the puzzle.

  “Correcto,” said Lock, beaming.

  Willa had actually been hacked. “But – I would have felt the pocket,” she said, trying to rationalize it and feeling guilty that she’d failed at her job even though she now had no job to go back to.

  “Look, I only half expected it to work, but it did,” Lock said, tendering a bag filled with water. “Tell me you’d be able to feel that.”

  Willa flopped it over her fingers as she had with thousands of other bags. “It’s very good,” she said. Because it was.

  “Right?” said Lock, inhaling deeply through her nostrils.

  Willa, still troubled by the hack she’d failed to stop, thought it through aloud. “OK, I get the bag, but Everard had to touchstone in. It would have reported his actual phenotype and the discrepancy would have been flagged.”

  Lock cocked her head to the side.

  “What?” asked Willa.

  “Well, did it?” said Lock. “Flag a discrepancy?”

  “No, it didn’t. Why not?”

  “Cause I’m a fucking hacker, Willa!” she laughed, plopping back in the chair and twirling back to the desk. “Touchstones are the one piece of hardware that Patriot puts in our hands. I hold something long enough, I’ll crack it.” She set her hands on her hips. “Wow, a real-life reaper up here in my workshop. So, you ready to do this thing?”

  Willa shook her head. “I can’t. They fired me today.”

  Lock’s face went stormy and she snatched away the bag with a finger strike. “Fired you? Then why are you here?” She marched to the attic door. Isaiah, who was playing with an early cellular phone, observed silently.

  “You can just use these bags. They’re… really good,” said Willa. “You don’t need a phlebotomist on the inside to help you.”

  “That bag took me weeks to get just right. Mass production will mean errors and I need someone on the inside to help with the fudge factor,” Lock said. “I don’t have time to wait. I’m trying to feed my kids.” Lock’s face lost its exuberance and she seemed to shrink from the larger-than-life persona she’d inhabited back into the five-feet of space she actually occupied. She opened the door and gestured for them to exit. “Go on,” she said. “Lindon will take you back. Not a word, of course. Or… you know… bad stuff.”

  Willa took a step toward the hatch but stopped. They were trying to do the same thing, after all, just on different scales. Lock was trying to hack the Harvest while Willa had tried to break it. “I know how they really move the blood,” she said. “Where you could get enough highblood for every family in AB Plus to sell before they’d discovered it was gone.”

  Lock sighed. “I know where it is too. But I haven’t been able to commandeer a blood drone. I can get a signal up, but I don’t have the encryption to assume their navigation.”

  “The drones are empty.”

  Lock let the door slam shut.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ANALYTE

  A substance or sample being analyzed, identified, measured, or otherwise tested.

  “Empty.” A question in statement form.

  “Empty.”

  “Where’s the blood, then?”

  “SCS distribution has a speedloop tube.”

  “How do you know that?” asked Lock.

  “I’ve seen it.”

  “No, how do you know they put the blood in it?”

  “I figured it out.”

  “You figured it out? Why didn’t I figure it out?”

  “I saw a drone crash,” Willa continued. “That and they basically admitted it right before they…” She covered Isaiah’s ears and mouthed, tried to kill me.

  “What?”

  “I violated my NDA.”

  “You aren’t killed though.”

  “We ran. This was the only place we could come. I’d met Everard before. He seemed like a mostly good person.”

  Lock sat heavily onto a stack of ancient computer monitors. “All of those drones, all these years… they’ve been empty?”

  “I don’t know for how long, but I’m guessing it’s been that way for a while.”

  “Why? Why would they send up empty drones?”

  “Extra security is what they said. Makes sense.”

  “Nah. Nah, it doesn’t make any sense,” said Lock, rubbing her brow. “If someone wanted to get their hands on an entire day’s shipment, they’d need to take down all eight drones intact. It’d never happen. If what you’re saying is true, then Patriot is vulnerable if someone gets hold of a single speedloop pod. And that doesn’t make sense to me.”

  Willa shrugged. “How could anyone hijack a speedloop pod at anything but the debarkation point? Nobody knows the routes.”

  “That’s true… Do you have proof about the drones?”

  “Just my own eyes.”

  “Well, Willa,” said Lock, “I can’t make a move based on what you think you saw one time with your eyes or anyone else’s.”

  “The blood is not in the drones, Lock. And when I guessed that it went out by speedloop, Patriot didn’t dispute it.”

  “Oh, wow, Patriot didn’t dispute it,” Lock rolled her eyes. “Well, I’ve hit a dead end. I have no phlebotomist on the inside, and without that, no way to care for these kids aside from sending folks through on piecemeal hacks. One of these days, they’ll catch us.”

  “I am telling the truth. If you can get into the speedloop pod, you can get to the blood.”

  “I want to believe you,” Lock said, standing and shaking out her arms like a ragdoll. “But I don’t make a move based on word of mouth. I gotta see it with my own eyes.”

  “Before three nights ago,” said Willa, “I’d never seen one crash. You might wait around for eternity before another goes down.”

  “Hmm… before another goes down eh?” Lock palmed a board between the rafters a few feet up from where the roofline met the plywood floor. Dust and tufts of insulation puffed from the joints and she coughed it away. One edge of the board slipped down and a large rifle rolled from the void into her hands. She caught it heavily and shuffled to a dusty couch underneath the attic vent where she dumped it onto the cushions. “I guess we’ll just shoot one down.”

  “Can I come?” asked Isaiah jumping up.

  “I like him,” said Lock.

  “No,” said Willa, then turning to the woman, “Shoot one down?”

  “Probably lots of other ways to ground one of those bad boys, but this way is quick and we can do it remotely. A clear line of sight to the impact zone, the rifle does the rest.” She pointed to the gun. “MK13-Mod9. That’s mark-thirteen-block-nine in civilian. Only two-hundred forty-two inches of vertical correction at a thousand yards, so.”

  Willa’s expression went flat. Who was this person?

  “Bottom line, if the drone’s empty, we’ll talk. If it’s full, you and Isaiah there will have to go.”

  “Where are we supposed to go?”

  “Not my problem. You saw all those kids in the boarding house?”

  “I did.”

  “They’re mine. I’m responsible for them. You’re responsible for you.”

  Willa and Isaiah stayed in the Locksmith’s attic that night. Willa took off the aubergine boots but left the rest of her clothing on. Exhaustion meant sleep came fast. Before dawn, Lock nudged t
hem awake. They got themselves together over tea and bulk protein chew. Near the end of the meal, Lock dropped a bowl of strawberries and blackberries in front of them. Fresh berries? Willa went to inquire about the source of the delicacies, but Lock said don’t ask, so she didn’t. They waited the rest of the day out, during which Willa explained everything that had happened to her, including Scallien’s attack. She left out a few of the possibly hallucinated details.

  About one hour before the blood drones would be leaving SCS Distribution for their trip to the Central City Collection, the Heart, downtown, Willa, Isaiah, Lindon, and Lock took the rogue taxi drone back across AB Plus to Everard’s boarding house.

  Isaiah ran inside to greet the other children and Willa followed after. “I’ll be back in a little while, baby. Be careful and listen to Mr Everard while I’m gone.”

  “I got those crumbsnatchers covered, don’t you worry,” Everard chimed from the adjacent room.

  “Be good, ’Saiah,” Willa reiterated to her grandson, hugging him, “and always keep your eyes open.”

  Lock waited at the door, where Willa joined.

  They entered the drone and Lindon secured the shed door behind them. “Lindon isn’t coming?” Willa asked.

  “We don’t need him,” laughed Lock.

  “Doesn’t he need to shoot the drone?”

  “Girl! Lindon can’t shoot! My-oh-my,” she said. “I figure I’ll give it a go.”

  “Give it a go?”

  “Can’t be too difficult, right?”

  Willa wondered. The woman could hardly wield the massive gun. And standing on end it was almost taller than her.

  Lock settled in front of the nav screen. “I like that pink hair of yours,” she said, steering the drone out of the shed and over the homes.

  “How do you know about my hair?”

  “I know all sorts of stuff. You still have it, I hope.” She messed with the screen. “I assume we’re going somewhere just northwest of SCS distrib?”

  The woman did have a knack for subject changes. “Uh, yes,” said Willa. “They’ll be flying right at you if we land to the northwest.”

  “Alright, then, it’s a plan,” she declared, setting the drone on cruise and hefting the rifle. “This guy has a pretty legit scope so it shouldn’t be too hard to hit one. We’ll park in line with their vector and wait until they’re over those empty lots in AB Minus. Then I’ll just shoot one head on.” She mimed firing the gun. “Boop.”