The Lightcap

by Dan Marshall

  Aria sniffed and said, “I was immediately suspicious. On the first day of the project, Damen and I walked to the same subway station after work. You know I’m not a big talker, but Damen definitely was, and he gave me the short version of his life story. He was so excited to be working for Adaptech, especially because he mentioned dreading having to move out of the City or the Region to find work. His mother was ill, and his family had sold almost everything they owned to keep her in a facility where she could get the care she needed.”

  Adam thought about what Aria said. He didn’t know Damen well at all, having talked to him for the longest unbroken stretch during his hour-long interview when he was being considered for the project.

  “Well, it sounds like the offer he had was enough to get him to leave. I understand wanting to be close to family and your parents. If mine were still around I’d want to be able to see them too. Maybe he decided the money was worth moving to the Cascadia Region,” Adam offered.

  Aria shook her head slowly from side to side, looked down, and answered, “That’s what I thought at first, too. Maybe it was just about the money, but I also don’t know how much more he could have possibly been offered at another company. I don’t know what Adaptech is paying him.” Her eyes flicked to him as she said this, non-verbal recognition that they were prohibited from talking about compensation by their employment contract. “But I do know it’s expensive to migrate to another Region, especially a corporate one. Expensive enough Damen would have to be making about thirty percent more than what I’m making just to make it possible, let alone worth his while. I have over ten years of professional experience. Damen was fresh out of university. The math just doesn’t add up.” She clutched a glass of water and stared down into it, distressed.

  Adam worked to suppress a frown. As manager of the project, he was privy to compensation data. He struggled with whether to tell Aria that Damen was paid slightly more than she, thanks to the racist, misogynistic LaMont, who hadn’t even wanted to bring her on board in the first place. Adam had to negotiate with LaMont to pay her twenty-five percent more than LaMont wanted and considered it a minor miracle he had succeeded. As it was, Aria was the lowest-paid member of the team for no reason but LaMont’s prejudice.

  Aria didn’t give him the chance to divulge anything, however. “Also, I—” She looked to Dej, who tightened his arm around her shoulder and nodded, as if to let her know she could tell Adam. “I ran a trace on the message that supposedly came from Damen. Sorry, I know that’s not allowed, but I couldn’t help myself. I had to know. It definitely came from his dome, but I couldn’t find any kind of geotag on it at all, which makes it impossible to prove where the message originated. It seems odd that Damen would go to the trouble of hiding the origin of a simple farewell message.” Adam was surprised Dej and Aria would trust him enough to bring their concerns to his attention, but he chalked it up to his demeanor of integrity and as a byproduct of the courage he had shown by standing up to LaMont earlier that afternoon.

  They sat with the air suspended in silence between them like a crossbow pulled back, about to fire. Adam finally said, “I appreciate you letting me know. I’ll do my best to find some answers. You need to be careful about who you tell, even talking about it between the two of you, especially at work. There are ears everywhere.” This last line was punctuated by his raised finger, circled in midair.

  Being overly analytical had its downsides, and Adam was intimately familiar with the majority of them, particularly the downside of paranoia. He spent his entire trip home lost in thought, attacking different possibilities from all angles. Hana was gone on a business trip, not to return until the following week, which allowed him to continue his pondering uninterrupted from the comfort of his flat. Adam went through his evening routine from muscle memory, teeth brushed and flossed without any conscious thought, sheets pulled back, bed occupied, and finally fell into a restless slumber, the scent of sweet musk stuck in the back of his nose.

  Adam opened his eyes. His hands were clasped in his lap. He faced a screen filled with line after line of code. He did not recognize the bare cubicle, with nothing more than a desk, a chair, and the screen in front of him. The walls of the cubicle, beige and unremarkable, were tall and topped with a translucent white dome to let diffused light enter from above. Disoriented, Adam reached up and felt two smooth surfaces encompassing the back of his scalp. A third bisected the top of his head and ended in a round circle on his hairline. The arms met in a fourth circle under his skull’s occipital bump.

  This was his cube at the Lightcap project, Adam was sure of it. He turned to look at the code on the computer screen, but it was jumbled, washed out by a glow seeming to emanate from everything around him. This must be a dream, Adam thought. He noticed a squiggled line added to the ones already on the screen. That’s interesting, he thought, and another line appeared.

  Adam suddenly heard cries of desperation, sounding far off and muffled like the screams of a jet engine passed through several thick walls. He slid open the opaque door separating him from the larger room and stepped into a row of a cube farm, each cubicle like the last, their bubbled tops giving the appearance of a room full of eggs in a large, open carton. Adam walked down the walled row.

  “Hello?” Adam called out to the seemingly empty area. The word died shortly after it left his mouth, absorbed by the beige carpet lining the cubicle exterior walls. He pulled open the doors of several cubes to find each one empty, save for the same types of desk, screen, and chair that had been in his own.

  Adam heard another cry, clearer and filled with pain, rather than the desperate anger of the last one. The sound of shuffled feet truncated with a dull thud followed, coming from one of the cubes. Adam raced to throw open door after door, finding nothing behind them but the desks, chairs, and screens displaying the same blurred chunk of code he had seen in his office. Adam made it to the last row of cubicles, where the first door he opened revealed a man slumped against the floor, Lightcap lying next to him.

  Adam turned the man over and discovered with horror the face of Damen Theda. Dark red blood flowed from his nose and mixed with a milky fluid from his ears. Damen, still alive, shook slightly. More blood slid down the side of his face with each blink of his unfocused eyes. “HELP! I need help!” shouted Adam, the sound of his voice muted against the enclosed walls of corporate solitude. Adam heard rushed footsteps and the sound of heavy boots on thin carpet as two men rounded the corner. Blues, uniformed with batons dangling from their hips, hands readied on the holsters of their pistols. One rushed to Damen, the other to Adam.

  The man tending to Adam pulled him from the cubicle and spun him in a circle, and as his eyes flicked to the Lightcap a look of relief spread across his face. The other man, the one with Damen, said, “This one woke up. His device is off.” Adam turned at the sound of the voice and watched, unable to intervene, as the Blue drew his revolver and pointed it at Damen’s forehead, its barrel resting where the Lightcap’s front bubble usually lay.

  POP.

  Adam jolted awake, his bed sheet stuck to his chest with warm sweat. He clutched at his heart as tears formed in the corners of his eyes. He shook his head and tried to convince himself it was only a dream, even as he felt that what he had just experienced had the distinct footprint of a memory, similar to a long forgotten moment from childhood brought back into hazy recollection by a smell or sound. He jumped out of bed, making it to the bathroom just as his stomach expelled his dinner and scotch in fetid chunks against toilet water, sounding like gravel thrown repeatedly into a deep puddle.

  The cement floor of his bathroom was cold and rough under his hand. Adam pressed the back of his head flat against the textured grey wall. His chest heaved with breath caught in choked gasps as he wept. Aria and Dej were right. Adam sat this way until his senses returned and the throbbing at his temples subsided. At some point, he pushed off from the floor and got to his feet, livid and filled with thoughts of righteous retribution. H
e would find those responsible and bring them to justice. He would slay entire legions of men, with his bare hands if necessary, if it would avenge the young man who had died while under his charge. But first, he needed proof there had been a crime.

  Finding Damen’s address was easy enough. He was a registered voting shareholder, and voter registrations were public information available to anyone with a connection to the mesh. Though it was meant to assist in political fundraising, it allowed Adam to find his destination without accessing Adaptech’s employee database.

  Minutes later, his clothes hastily thrown on, Adam was out the door and gone. He had never been to Damen’s but was fairly confident he could find the apartment, as he now had the address and a passing familiarity with the neighborhood. Adam pushed open the front door to his own building and stepped out into the freezing knives of wind and snow that buffeted his exposed skin. He walked with purpose, his footsteps echoing into alleys and off cars surrounding him. He was still angry, but as he walked his reasoning mind caught up with him. It was just a dream, he thought. What else could it be? His mind went back to the dream from almost a year ago, with its empty subway car, mysterious old man, and above all a note slipped into his pocket that did not seem to exist in reality. Then there was the Ensyn memo, pages upon pages of paper found in Nate’s cubicle that may or may not exist. Why would this dream be any different from the others?

  Adam wandered through street after street of row houses for what felt like hours, his resolve waning, until he came to a familiar cross-street that gave him a bearing to his destination. After checking the address, he walked around both sides of the building looking for any signs of life, but there were no lights or noise to suggest anyone was awake. Adam wasn’t sure of the time, having rushed out of his apartment without grabbing any devices or checking a clock, but the silence surrounding him suggested the middle of the night. Damen’s apartment was on the right side of the first floor of a converted row house, now a fourplex, that looked as if it were a thousand years old. Adam quietly walked up to the window to the left of the front door. He tried to open the window but failed, its wood solidly lodged in its track, layers of paint added over decades bonding the boards together.

  He had similar luck with the side window, which opened an inch, stopped, and stubbornly refused to go back into place or up any further. He climbed the fence barricading the back yard and met the same resistance from the window adjacent the back door. Adam considered going back home, then felt emboldened by the privacy provided by the high fence and the lack of light in the back yard. At this point, I have to know, he thought as he picked up a smooth rock in the garden, cold and heavy against his palm. He turned it in his hand, feeling its weight and shape before throwing it in a tight, straight line at the window. It struck with a crash, broken shards flashing reflected moonlight as they fell. Adam heard glass sprinkling on metal, accompanied by the slide of rock over cheap linoleum. A dog barked in the distance, but there was no other indication his actions had alerted anyone. Adam walked up the steps to the back porch while wrapping his jacket around his arm, then cleared the remaining pieces of shattered window away and climbed through. As efficient as any professional burglar, he thought bitterly.

  Adam’s eyes struggled to adjust to the lack of light. He climbed over the sink and dropped down to the floor, boots crunching with each step, grinding slivers of glass into dust as he made his way farther into the flat. Pale moonlight and neon colors from far-off ad zeps came in through the window, providing enough light for him to see that the room was completely empty. A set of saloon doors separating the kitchen from the rest of the house emitted a long high-pitched shriek as he parted them. He stepped through into another empty room, his eyes playing tricks on him as ghosts danced in shimmers of light coming in through the window. Adam walked from one corner of the room to the other to satisfy himself that nothing was nothing there. The building heater kicked on, permeating the room with the scent of burnt bark.

  Damen’s apartment consisted of four rooms: kitchen, bedroom, living room, and bathroom. All were empty, with the exception of a toothbrush on the back of the top shelf in the bathroom medicine cabinet. The toothbrush was odd but did nothing to solve the mystery of Damen’s disappearance. Adam couldn’t find anything suggesting foul play or a rushed exit. And why would I? he wondered, and felt his face flush with embarrassment for breaking and entering an empty apartment in the middle of the night.

  The floorboards creaked as he made a second pass through each room, tracing his hands along walls and windowsills as he searched for any type of clue. Adam jerked his head toward the front of the house at what sounded like a jiggled doorknob, but it was just the venetian blinds swinging against the window frame, moved by air from the heating vent. I need to get out of here, he concluded.

  Adam made his way back to the kitchen, walked toward the window and began to climb over the sink, positioned to make his exit, when he noticed faint writing scratched on the frame under the lip of the windowsill. He moved closer and squinted to see the letters under the dim moonlight.

  It read “ms = no enemy”.

  Adam had no idea what this meant. He delved into the darkest corners of his memory to remember anyone he knew with the initials MS, or what the phrase “no enemy” might mean. The letters might have been written long before by someone other than Damen as a notation or inside joke. He did not want to misinterpret these letters as being related to Damen’s abrupt disappearance if they were not. Adam remembered his visit there was the result of a nightmare, and he grimaced at how foolish he was. He had left his home in the middle of the night, wandered around until he found what he thought was Damen’s apartment, broke a window to get in, and then walked around the empty rooms several times in an attempt to uncover . . . what? A conspiracy? A nefarious plot? Evidence of foul play? Yes, evidence of foul play, at least. Adam could not shake the suspicion there had been some.

  All Adam had found were empty rooms, a lone toothbrush, and nonsensical letters etched in a wood window frame. He thought back to the solemn conversation with Aria and Dej, their earnestness, their minds sincerely convinced that Damen had met some evil end at the hands of . . . someone. No one quite knew for sure. Maybe Damen just wanted to make a clean break, or to not suffer through awkward conversations with coworkers, forced laughter, and small talk with people he’d likely never see again.

  But the dream had seemed real: the color of the blood, the urgent anger in the first cry he heard, the desperate sorrow in the second. The sound of the gunshot still echoed in Adam’s mind, the copper smell of blood and gunsmoke. Adam thought back to the dream from almost a year ago of the empty subway car and the disheveled old man. It dawned on Adam that his dreams might not be the most reliable source of accurate information. He began to wonder the odd dreams might represent. Apprehension? Fear of death or being forgotten? Adam didn’t know, but as he emerged from the broken window in the full moonlight, visible to anyone who might have been looking, he felt the full embarrassment of having committed a crime based on a dream.

  He felt downright sheepish by the time he got home, the cold walk back to his flat filled with silent curses and self-criticisms. He hadn’t brought his dome or wallet, so he had no way to call or to pay for a ride. Adam walked with his collar tightened around his neck, his head down as if to gird against the strong wind, which seemed to change direction with his every turn, slowing his progress. His path from point A to point B took him through some parts of New Metra City he would not normally care to visit even in the daytime. On one block, Adam was sure he walked past a Cloud house, the distinctive cinnamon sweet scent of the drug mixed with the burnt chlorine smell of its ignition. Silent figures watched him from the front porch as he passed, their narrowed eyes following from right to left until he was gone from their sight.

  Adam’s heart nearly stopped when he pulled open his door and saw the back of a long-haired woman in his living room. He flinched as she abruptly spun around to face him
. It was Hana. She rushed him and jumped, her arms wrapped around his shoulders, her legs around his waist. He hadn’t expected that, and let out an involuntary “oof!” as she slammed against him. They both almost fell against his door, but Adam caught his balance for both of them in time.

  “Holy shit! There you are! I was so worried about you! Don’t you know it’s the middle of the night?” she sobbed, her words strung together without thoughts of spacing or breath. Her lips pressed against his neck, her face bent down to the side under his jawline. Adam thought he felt a warm tear as she pressed her cheek against his. Hana unlocked her legs and stepped back down to cold floor, releasing his neck to look at him, her eyes suspicious. “Where were you? I just got back in and I was going to come surprise you, but you were gone. It’s almost four in the morning.” She continued probing his face with her eyes.

  A refreshed mind could have probably created a better excuse, some kind of believable story. Adam’s mind was anything but refreshed. “I-I couldn’t s-s-sleep. Went for a w-walk,” he stuttered, his body’s way of protesting both his exhausted state and the chill he still felt down to his bones. Adam shivered and pulled his jacket pulled even tighter, its stitched seams near splitting. He willed warmth back into his numb fingers and toes. When he felt his chattering teeth wouldn’t provide percussion to his speech, he added, “It was colder than I expected, and I got lost.” He praised himself internally for appending something plausible to his excuse.

  Oddly, Hana didn’t seem to doubt him. She hugged Adam again, his chin resting on the top of her head, both their gazes directed to his left. His wallet and dome sat on the kitchen counter, within eyeshot. Adam saw them about a split second before Hana did. His stubble gripped her long, dark hair as she pulled away, her eyes raised to meet his.