The Pedestal

by Daniel Wimberley

  Cutterly grunts, then picks up his fork again. For now, I’m forgiven—or on probation—but my suspicion that this is a joke is fading fast. “Emmers didn’t like Grogan at all,” explains Cutterly. “He thought there was a conflict of interests with Grogan working here—you know, because of Fiona—so he filed a complaint with headquarters.” He puts away half an entrée in a single bite and begins chewing fiercely.

  I can’t help but smile; Cutterly’s just confirmed my longtime suspicion that Grogan and Fiona were once an item. On the other hand, this whole Grogan thing isn’t quite adding up, which waters down my sense of satisfaction. “Seems like kind of a weak motive, don’t you think?”

  Cutterly swallows his cud and snatches up a napkin, wiping his mouth with a muffled chuckle. “You kidding? Think about it: this place is his whole life, man—it’s all our lives; we don’t just work here—this is it for us. I can’t speak for you, but the rest of us don’t have much choice about being here. Grogan does. For whatever reason, he’s sacrificed a lot to be here. And there’s no way he’d let anything jeopardize his position.”

  “Are you saying that by getting rid of Emmers, Grogan’s problems with headquarters went away?”

  Rogers chuckles. “He’s still here, isn’t he?”

  I shrug noncommittally. “I guess so.”

  Cutterly sighs. “You think anyone on Earth gave Emmers’s complaint a second thought after he killed himself?”

  “Killed himself? I thought you said—”

  My objection is cut off by a dismissive wave of Cutterly’s huge hands. “I’m just telling you how Grogan spun it—convinced pretty much everyone, too. Just not us.”

  “Wow.” I honestly don’t know what else to say.

  Rogers clears his throat and leans forward. “Listen, Wilson, just don’t let your guard down around the guy if you can help it. That’s all we’re saying. We don’t need another grave out there.”

  A thought occurs to me. “Wait a second—you don’t think he had anything to do with Winkley, do you?”

  Cutterly glances at Rogers and they both shrug. “No telling,” Rogers replies. “Personally, I figure I’m better off assuming the worst with him.”

  Man, these cranks are wound tight; can anyone say paranoid?

  We stay up much later than usual, sipping hot tea—warm whiskey, in the case of Rogers—until I’m half-convinced these guys are on to my plan and have decided to keep me well within their line of sight. But then, at nearly one in the morning, Rogers passes out on the table. Cutterly is annoyed by this, because the head of his buddy plopped to the table precisely as he was delivering the punch line of a ridiculously long and circuitous joke. I suppose I may never know what happened to that robotic fish and his left-handed pharmacist.

  Declining my help, Cutterly drags the limp, snoring bag of drunken flesh that is Rogers from the commons to the dorms. Heart racing, I retire to my own room, leaving the door slightly ajar. My breaths ebb and flow in ragged succession. I hear Cutterly shut Rogers’s door and then relocate to his own room. Through the crack of my own door, I can just discern a slice of lamplight against the hallway wall—Cutterly’s light. Ten minutes later, when his light finally extinguishes, my breathing finally returns to normal.

  I’m as ready as I’m gonna get.

  Creeping from my room, I stand in the empty corridor for a long moment, listening for any excuse to abort my mission. Nothing but the tranquil hum of forced air and a faint whisper of night wind outside. On tiptoes, I pad down the hall toward Grogan’s room. The darkness is like pitch, so thick and impenetrable that I’m forced to navigate by touch; fortunately, I have a pretty good memory for the lay of the land in here. There’s not much at this end of the hall: a few dorms—one Grogan’s, one formerly Fiona’s, the last used for storage—and a common restroom that, until now, was our unofficial women’s room. My NanoPrint begins to hum, and I know I’m close. Seconds later, as my fingers graze the latch to Grogan’s door, I suddenly wonder if I’ve gone crazy.

  What am I doing here? I’m no prowler, yet here I am sneaking around like one, preparing to break into my boss’s dorm. And for what—idle curiosity? What would Stew think of me now?

  I’m almost hoping the door will be locked—that’s perhaps the only scenario in which I’ll walk away with both my dignity and a clean criminal history—but alas, it opens on well-oiled hinges, beckoning me inside. I hurriedly oblige before I can change my mind, shutting the door behind me as noiselessly as I can manage. I flick on the light and look around. The space is much larger than I imagined—easily twice the size of my own dorm. The room is halved by a muted seam along all four planes, perhaps the ghostly footprint of a removed wall. On one side of the line is a tidy bed, a desk with a blank surface, and a dresser; it’s a depressing, militaryish space, devoid of any personal identity whatsoever. In its own way, the opposing side of the room is just as bizarre: it has been modified to resemble a control station of sorts, sporting monitors, gauges, meters, toggle switches, buttons—you name it. I’m betting Grogan can control every inch of the b-hive in some capacity from here.

  I’m not sure what to do now; my implant is busily humming away—kind of annoying really, now that I’ve grown unaccustomed to the thing—yet I’m not at all sure how to identify what’s causing the activity. I wander toward the wall of electronics, hesitating with it just out of reach; I’m not sure why, but something inhibits me from approaching any closer, as if even the slightest movement of air against the circuitry will set off an alarm. This is probably an irrational fear, but it might also be the sound warning of my trusty gut—under the circumstances, it’s difficult to distinguish between the two.

  Better to err on the side of caution.

  Stepping away from Grogan’s altar of gadgetry, I steer toward his dresser. Nearing the plain chest of drawers, my implant seems to go crazy, and the feel of it—a frenzied wiggle, so tantrum-like that it could almost be a living thing—sends my blood into an excited boil.

  There’s something here, no doubt about that.

  I find it in his sock drawer—a little plastic container that hinges open like a miniature suitcase. Inside are two identical, rice-sized bits of loose metal. I’ve never actually seen one before, yet I innately know what I’m looking at. These are NanoPrints—though I have no idea who they belong to, much less what they’re doing here. I pick one up delicately, bringing it closer to my eye, like a jeweler examining a gemstone through a loupe. It’s too small to discern much detail, but I can just make out the tiny trademark fingerprint stenciled on one side. Between my fingers, the implant suddenly begins to vibrate in short pulses, and my own responds in similar pulses as they shake hands.

  The pulses graduate until my NanoPrint is virtually dancing under my skin, hiccupping like an old combustion engine with a maladjusted carburetor. I can feel it accepting an xchange profile just as it sends out update requests to the nexus, choking on a bottleneck of unheeded threads. My daily schedule loads and attempts to fetch the availability of my favorite restaurants and retailers, and that chokes, too. Even as I’m overwhelmed by the piling of failed functionality, I sense something flicker in the background: a file has just downloaded to my MentalNotes. It’s not large, and it’s definitely not one of mine. Something has copied to my implant almost faster than I could detect.

  Unrelated to the NanoPrints, a feeling of unrest begins to settle upon me, bristling the hairs in my pores as if I’m being watched. Nervously, I check the door. I quietly rejoice that it’s safely closed, yet I feel no less probed by invisible eyes.

  Gaze darting about the room, it suddenly occurs to me that I’ve been terribly naive to believe I could invade Grogan’s privacy without his knowledge; not only is he an engineer, he’s an adamantly secretive person. On Earth, people like him monitor every inch of their living and working spaces, especially in their absence. Why should Grogan behave any differently here? I can easily imagine that my digital likeness has been recorded to a hard drive
somewhere, waiting patiently to betray my crooked ways.

  Man, I’m a crank idiot.

  Afraid now, I drop the NanoPrints back into their box and return it to the drawer where I found it. I can’t wait to investigate the file in my MentalNotes, but I don’t dare linger here any longer. It’s all I can do to keep from sprinting for my room. But I’ve got to leave this place with the same cunning—or better—with which I entered it. There’s still a chance I might get away with this—not that I’ve ever been lucky—and the last thing I want is to squander that chance out of carelessness.

  As I tiptoe down the hall—my fizzing stomach lurching at my esophagus—something I should have predicted happens: my NanoPrint abruptly goes still again. Repeated efforts to access it fail until the scope of my predicament gradually sinks in: if I’m going to access that file, I’ll have to do it from Grogan’s room—for reasons that I can’t fathom in the heat of the moment, my implant doesn’t seem to function away from it.

  Though my flesh cries out for permission, I’m given no chance to panic because just then, a voice accosts me from the inky corridor, very nearly squeezing the pee from my bladder like a rolling pin against a jelly doughnut.

  “What in deep space are you doing, Wilson?”

  I stiffen with such a start that blurry spots glide into view. Pardon me while I have a heart attack.

  “I asked you a question,” the voice hisses. It’s Cutterly, I realize.

  “Give me a second,” I gasp, doubling over to catch my breath. True, I’m stalling for time, but I’m also genuinely struggling to keep from fainting. “Holy pile of circuit scrap, you nearly scared me to death,” I confide in a wheezy slur. “I was just looking for something to read.”

  “In Grogan’s room?” I can’t see much of Cutterly—just an ambiguous outline against the darkness—yet I can physically feel his presence nearby. I’m not sure why, but it comforts me as much as it frightens me. With that said, my heart is racing.

  “Well, yeah,” I say, noting that apprehension has boosted my voice half an octave. “Where else am I gonna find a book?”

  Cutterly is quiet; the darkness veils his expression, but I sense that he’s mulling over my explanation. And that he’s found a hole in it. “So what’d you get?”

  “What do you mean?” I quip innocently.

  “You said you were looking for a book in there; so what book did you get?”

  “Oh, yeah—that. No luck. Grogan must’ve taken them along for him and Fiona to read.” That much is true, anyway; I didn’t see any books out in the open. Of course, now that I’m on the defensive, even the truth sounds shady.

  Cutterly sighs, and though a sigh can’t always be translated into words, this one manages to say a lot. Have I mentioned that I’m a terrible liar? It’s been so long since I tried, I suppose I forgot until I opened my mouth to try. “Listen, Wil,” Cutterly whispers. “I don’t know what you’re up to, but I get the feeling you’re playing with fire.”

  “I’m not up to anything, Cutt.”

  “C’mon, crank. It’s almost two in the morning—in my experience, only prostitutes and cat burglars are running around this late.”

  I realize the opportunity is untimely, but I find it impossible to pass up this invitation to poke a jab—I mean, silver platter, and everything. “Got a lot of experience with prostitutes in the wee hours, do you?” An amused snort escapes me, but that’s about it. Would’ve been more satisfying with a better audience, I guess.

  Cutterly doesn’t laugh—shocking, I know. His breathing deepens, though, a powerful, cavernous sound when juxtaposed against my own choppy respiration. For a long moment, neither of us speaks and I begin to wonder if he’s fallen asleep.

  “He’ll know you were in there,” he finally says. “You realize that, don’t you?”

  My skin prickles. I had nearly convinced myself that I was being paranoid. The back of my tongue turns into cotton, and the compulsion to run becomes almost unbearable. But where would I go?

  Afraid my voice will betray me, I don’t reply; instead, I nod my acknowledgement, realizing too late that he can’t see me.

  Cutterly chuckles—maybe he can see me after all; that, or he’s simply interpreted the truth from my silence. “When I said to watch out for Grogan, I didn’t mean to do it from his room.”

  This bit of dry witticism strikes me as mildly funny—and that’s being generous—yet before I even realize what’s happening, a raging flood of nervous laughter explodes from me, resounding through the hallway in a single, crashing tidal wave. I can’t help it; since this afternoon, the tension has slowly built up in me until it simply had to break free. Better laughter than tears, I suppose—or worse: vomiting, or even explosive diarrhea. Anyway, drunk or not, Rogers couldn’t sleep through that.

  When my fit has subsided, Cutterly clears his throat uncomfortably; fumbling in the darkness, he lays a calloused hand on my shoulder. “Go to bed, Wilson,” he says. “Too late to do anything else.” Inexplicably, the man’s voice is more gentle and fatherly than any I’ve heard in a long time. Unexpectedly, tears gather in my eyes, mercifully cloaked in deep shadow.

  For no reason, I’m reminded of the one fight I ever picked in my entire life. I was twelve. In the throes of some preadolescent identity crisis, I guess I thought I’d give bullying a try. Uncle Stewart came to my rescue just as our inhumanly scrappy, eleven-year-old next-door neighbor was cocking back an oversized golf club to literally bash my head in.

  I vaguely remember Stew carrying me home, then, cradling me in his arms like a baby. I was beaten to a bloody pulp; Uncle Stew cleaned me up and then spanked me with his belt until I swore to never provoke violence again. I’m not sure which of us cried harder that day.

  A year later, incidentally, that same kid lit a neighborhood dog on fire before disappearing into some psychiatric care facility—I’m pretty sure his helix was missing a few hundred spokes. Even now, I shudder to think what that freak would have done to me, if not for Stewart.

  Jeez, I’m a wreck tonight.

  I hear Cutterly shuffle toward his room, and as I follow through the darkness, exhaustion abruptly hits me like a brick wall—and I mean with a vengeance. My NanoPrint’ll have to wait until tomorrow.

  I’ll be lucky if I make it to bed before I crash.

  It’s after four. I don’t even remember my head hitting the pillow earlier, only awakening later in a confused panic—and since then, I’m not sure that I’ve actually slept for more than a few minutes at a time. Despite the dope of fatigue, my consciousness porpoises in and out of slumber, broken up by short spells of lights-on disorientation. I can feel my brain cranking away at the gears even as I try to shut the machine down.

  I suspect I won’t get another wink of sleep until I get a look at that file—and frankly, trying to rest is wearing me out even more than staying awake—so I sit up in bed. I’ve had a minor epiphany, by the way: I don’t need Grogan’s room—there’s nothing special about it, except that it’s much more spacious than mine—what I need are those loose NanoPrints.

  Wearing only my boxers, I once again traverse the darkened hall to Grogan’s room. As before, my NanoPrint hums to life, which reaffirms that I’m not endangering myself for no good reason, and thereby emboldens me. Leaving the door wide open and the light off, I creep to the dresser and slide the sock drawer open.

  Snatching the plastic container within, I shut the drawer and return to the hall. Seconds later, I’m back in my room, simultaneously elated and achingly tired. Just as I hoped, my implant remains active. Grinning at my success, I deposit my plunder on a nearby desk and settle back into the warmth of my bed.

  It takes some effort to interact with my implant—it’s fighting like crazy to run routines that require a connection to the nexus, and as a result, very little RAM is available for my discretionary use. Still, a little perseverance eventually pays off.

  I can’t help but laugh at my last MentalNote, logged forever ago. “Whatever you
do,” it warns, “don’t eat the sushi at Jin-Jing’s. Ever again.”

  Fuzzy with sleepiness, or perhaps the hypnotic allure of nostalgia, I scroll past my remaining notes and browse my implant’s file directory, where the file in question is likely hidden among thousands of audio, video, and document shortcuts. I sort them by modified date, sending the newer files to the top. First in line is a file whose date stamp completely baffles me.

  My God, have I really been here that long?

  I don’t recognize the file extension, but thankfully, my NanoPrint does; almost instantly, my internal audio/video routines mount the file and begin transcoding. Closing my eyes, I hiccup with surprise—Arthur’s face appears on my retinas, his voice in my ears as though he’s sitting beside me. For a moment, I’m confused—outside of text mode, MentalNotes records the comprehensive experiences of one’s sensory organs, so I expect to see what Arthur saw when he made this note, rather than the man himself—but then I understand.

  Art’s looking in a mirror.

  “If you’re watching this, Wilson, things have probably gone badly for me. I’ve put a program on my NanoPrint—yes, I may be a dinosaur, but I can still throw a program together with proper motivation.” He smiles, knowing I’d poke fun at this paltry attempt at humor if I was there. My eyes are welling with tears, but through the magic of my NanoPrint, the video feed maintains crystal clarity.

  “Anyway, should anything happen to me, my implant is programmed to automatically seek out yours and launch a file transfer; I can’t risk it within the nexus because it isn’t safe, so the only way it’s gonna work is if you get near enough for a handshake. I installed an old http server on it, so it should stream the files without interference from the nexus. The files should self-decrypt on your implant.”

  Files? Huh, I only saw one. Consulting my NanoPrint’s file directory, I discover that there are, in fact, hundreds more files with today’s time stamp; I guess I grabbed the first one that caught my interest and never looked back.