The Day Gravity Became Irrelevant

by Ralph Rotten

  Through the window Jenna and Quinn could see the gaping hole in the roof, but it was the sparks that truly awed them. Seeing pieces of rebar fall from the ceiling onto the table told them that somehow Jamie was trimming the metal rebar that remained.

  “There’s someone up there with a cutting torch!” His voice shrill, Colonel Quinn could not believe he was actually watching a real, live jail break. To add insult to injury; it was his own jail being escaped from.

  On the rooftop Alexis maneuvered the submarine carefully as she used the cutter that Jack had installed to remove the last of the rebar that jutted out of the broken hole in the roof. With cameras mounted on the outside of the vessel she could clearly make out Officer Jenkins as he cautiously approached the hovering sub. Using his flashlight to pound on the side of the tank he immediately demanded an explanation.

  As if in response, Alexis swung the ship around, knocking him to the ground. Having just finished removing the last of the rebar, she now settled the sub’s docking collar over the hole. Activating a winch inside of the vessel, she began to lower a heavy package into the dayroom below.

  Below, Jamie stood waiting patiently as the bundle settled on the table. Quickly unwrapping it he took another few seconds to unfold the contents. Once done he peeled off the top sheet.

  From her spot in the window, Jenna watched the scene with fascination. It perplexed her to see Jamie with what appeared to be a space blanket, but rather than the usual silver coating, these blankets had a gold tint to them. Wrapping the nearest pallet of cash in the golden blanket, Jamie was careful to ensure that all buckles and fasteners were in place before straightening up. Taking a moment to look over his work, he finally moved to a small control pad that was affixed to the golden tarp. Poking at the buttons, Jamie stepped back as if to watch.

  “What the hell is he doing?” Angry, Quinn was ready to pound on the window.

  Their questions were answered when the pallet rose up off the floor in a single, smooth movement. Pausing for a split second as Alexis assumed remote control, the money quickly ascended through the hole in the roof. Disappearing out of sight, the pallet of cash shot past a stunned Officer Jenkins on the rooftop. Darting forward he hazarded a look down the hole before Alexis used the sub to herd him away.

  In the dayroom Jamie was already busy wrapping the next stack of cash in one of the gold tarps. Like the first pallet, he merely had to activate the gravitational disaffinity field. From there Alexis would take over their control. With pre-planned hiding places all over California and southern Arizona, she would have no trouble concealing the bricks of cash.

  In the hallway Jenna watched as one by one the pallets lifted off before darting through the ceiling and out of sight. Beside her the Colonel still clutched his handheld radio as it spewed nothing but static.

  “He’s stealing the money!” Quinn was aghast. “This was all just a con-job!”

  “You act like we don’t deserve it.” A grimace on her face, she felt no sympathy for the man. “After all, this whole thing was nothing more than a technology heist, so before you go crying about being ripped off, just remember who started all this shit.”

  Quinn looked at her as if she were a traitor. “You’re actually hoping he gets away…aren’t you?”

  “Not particularly.” Jenna told a little white lie. “I just like to see bad people get what they deserve. Karma’s a bitch, baby. I hope your retirement pension is fully funded.”

  As if the fight had left him, Colonel Quinn sighed in resignation. Turning from Jenna he watched as one of the last pallets ascended through the ceiling.

  In the dayroom Jamie wrapped the last of the cash in one of the golden tarps. Designed with a metallic finish, the antigravity blankets had been one of Jack’s ideas. Using a metallic film on the fabric allowed the device to spread its disaffinity field over the entire surface of the otherwise non-conductive pallet of cash. In all, the design was foolishly simple yet entirely effective. With Alexis’s massive processing power it was child’s play to simultaneously guide a score of pallets, each heading in a different direction.

  Looking up, he could see that Alex had settled the submarine over the hole again. Once the docking hatch was lined up, the final pallet of cash rose up and into the obtuse little submarine. Once the brick was out of the way, Alexis again lowered the winch cable.

  In the meantime, Country Jimmy was pretty busy. Taking the crown from the miscellaneous box, he paused long enough to also fish out the laundry marker that had been specified in the contract. Popping off the cap of the pen, he smiled at the unconscious agent.

  “A deal’s a deal, even if y’all acted like a buncha crooked bitches.” Giving a guffaw, he immediately began to write on Marco’s forehead. Careful to make sure all the characters would fit, he finally sat back to look over his work. There, printed in block characters was a web address. It had pleased the brothers to hide the secret in plain sight. After all, who would even think to look at a website called www.6000sux.com? The URL had been Jack’s idea, the name taken from one of his favorite movies.

  Next, Jamie removed the crown from the box and carefully seated it on Marco’s head.

  “Th’ crown was never fer me.” Giving a toothy grin, Country Jimmy’s expression suddenly turned hard as Jersey Jimbo took over. “So there ya go, Marco. It’s official now; you’se the king of the dickheads.”

  Plucking the phone from Marco’s pocket, he used the code chirped to him by the drone in the air vent to unlock the device. Selecting the camera, he took a moment to send a nice snapshot of the comatose agent to Jenna.

  “Betcha she’ll get a giggle outta that.” Truly pleased with himself, the country gentleman quickly tossed the phone back into Marco’s lap before returning his attention to the very last item in the box. Plucking out the inflatable donut, he turned to check the progress of the single pallet of cash that Alexis was skillfully guiding into the submarine. Considering that she was also simultaneously controlling nineteen other pallets of cash as they sped away in different directions, it was a safe bet that the AI was staying busy.

  Rising up, Jimbo gave the agent one last look before moving back into the empty dayroom. Tossing the laundry marker back into the box, he gave Jenna a brief wave before stepping into the cable hoist that awaited him.

  Watching it all from the window, Colonel Quinn felt helpless as he watched the savant ride the cable up through the ceiling. It was bad enough to have his star prisoner escape from custody, but to have to watch as it happened only made it all the more agonizing. For Quinn it was as if he was watching his career fly away, and in a sense he was. He had no doubt that this event would be a dead end for him professionally.

  Feeling pleased with everything that happened thus far, Jenna watched Jamie disappear out of sight. A few seconds passed before light began streaming through the hole in the ceiling again. No sooner than the sub had departed when the lights in the hallway came back on. Immediately the radio burst forth with dozens of voices as each demanded an update. With the chaos it took several seconds before Quinn could cut in long enough to get the door to E-pod open. Once inside, their first order of business was Marco. Standing over him Jenna could not help but laugh at the URL scrawled there.

  “Robocop.” She said simply.

  “What?” Quinn looked at her sideways.

  “Six thousand sucks, it was from the movie Robocop.” She pointed out. Using her cellphone she opened up the web site.

  “That son of a bitch assaulted a federal agent and made off with two billion dollars. It was all just a heist; that’s all it ever was!” Quinn stood in disbelief as he looked over the empty dayroom.

  Jenna’s eyes went wide as she took in the web site. It was several seconds before she realized she had been holding her breath.

  “It wasn’t a heist.” She shoved the screen in front of the Colonel’s face.

  “Oh, wow.” Breathless, Quinn gently took the phone from her as he scanned the data. Like his FBI counterpar
t he was floored by the technical diagrams there. “It’s all here…we got it!”

  “You’re still gonna get fired, you know that, right?” Jenna didn’t mind bursting his bubble.

  It surprised Jamie how intuitively the interior of the submarine had been laid out. Jack really did have a way of turning his visions into functional works of art. It was that thought that made him pause for a second. It would have been better if his brother could have been here too. The path ahead was daunting enough together; alone it was almost unfathomable.

  Pausing before he finally slid into his seat, Jamie first dropped the inflatable donut into the seat before finally flopping down. Taking another few seconds to get settled, he quickly set about the task of buckling in.

  “Oh, so much better.” His eyebrows fluttering with a sense of relief, Jamie had expected his brother to skimp on the seats. The little savant was picky about his seating, with a definite preference for more padding versus less.

  Glancing back, he watched while the last bundle of cash settled into the cargo compartment. With $100,000,000 stashed back there, he would be running a little heavy. Although the gravitational disaffinity system shielded them from the effects of localized gravity, it did not negate the vehicle’s mass. While his device was indeed a clever one, it could only break one law of physics at a time. Even in the weightlessness of space an object retained its mass. More mass requires more energy to maneuver. Hence, with a ton of cash in the hold, they would not be making any hair-pin turns today.

  “Everything is going according to plan.” Giving an evil chuckle, Jamie imagined himself as Ming the Merciless in an old Flash Gordon movie.

  “Yes, dear.” Alexis broke her silence. No doubt she had been busy in the background.

  Finally seated atop his donut, Jamie was sure to belt in with the complex 5-point harness that Jack had engineered into the seat. While he could see the safety improvement of such a device, the little savant was struggling to get his connected.

  “If I don’t put this thing on, will you promise to simply not crash into anything?” Sounding hopeful, Professor James hoped for reprieve from his flight crew.

  “Put on the seatbelt, Jamie!” Alexis clearly had no intention of debating him on the topic. “Seatbelt!”

  Frowning, Jamie struggled for the last shoulder strap. Snapping the harness into place, he was pleased with himself.

  “Good job, bald monkey.” Pretending to be supportive, Alexis reminded him of his position on the evolutionary chart. “But it’s time for phase two. Get suited up, boy!”

  “But I just got this damned thing buckled!” Jamie seemed shocked. Normally his internal chronometer was absolutely precise. It occurred to him that in the haste of his escape, with the ship turning and rolling, perhaps he had been a little distracted. Really, he blamed the seatbelt.

  Unsnapping the harness he was up and opening the big package fastened to the far wall. Pulling out his official surplus Russian space suit, he felt giddy about finally being able to play with his toy. Like anyone who had grown up on a steady diet of sci-fi literature, the prospect of wearing a space suit in space was a bucket-list kind of dream. It had been something he had decided on long ago; no matter what happens today, he was going into space. Struggling to get the suit into place, it only took him some ten minutes to wriggle and twist into his wearable life support system. Snapping his helmet into place was quickly followed by connecting two hoses from the driver’s seat. Although Jack had created a portable air pack for each of the suits, those were for later. Until that time he would plug his suit into the ship’s onboard life support systems. It was a simple enough design, and would keep him alive even if the hull ruptured.

  More than once Jersey Jimbo cursed as he struggled to belt-in while wearing the bulky suit. Damned gloves!! It was the thick-fingered gloves that made everything so hard. In the back of his mind he wondered about designing something better; a thought he relegated to his subconscious mind for processing.

  Finally snapping in, he slid a gloved hand across the three touchscreen monitors that surrounded his seat. Waking up the system, he took a few moments to see where they were on the map.

  “Climbing up through flight level one-eight-zero. We have clearance to four-zero-zero. I filed a flight plan online. How convenient is that?” Her voice pretended to be serious before finally giving away to a giggle. “So we just escaped from prison with two billion dollars, but we have a valid flight plan to do it.”

  “I appreciate the irony of it.” Nodding soberly, Professor James seemed pleased. “However, I do not actually possess an aviators’ license, let alone an IFR rating. So we are technically breaking the law from now on.”

  “It’s kinda fun, isn’t it?” Alexis chirped up, her colloquial verbal skills indicating that she had begun absorbing her own unique way of talking.

  Giving it a thought, Jamie could not argue with her premise. Feeling snug as a bug in the proverbial rug, Jamie felt safe in the surplus space suit as it swelled the more they climbed. “It is indeed intriguing to be bad. I had always wondered why my brother did things that had such a high risk of failure, but now I understand; he did these things because they were…invigorating.”

  “Don’t get sappy on me.” Alexis let her face appear on the center monitor. A wink of her green eye told him she was kidding with him.

  “They do not seem to have dispatched any fighters?” Remembering where he was, Jamie scoured the radio reports that Alexis posted on the third monitor.

  “They have not connected our escape with this flight. Apparently we got away clean.” Alexis seemed disappointed.

  “Except we wasn’t supposed t’ get away clean!” Jersey Jimbo growled as he watched their rate of climb. “It’s time to stand out.”

  Using a gloved fingertip, he dragged the altitude slider to the edge of its range. Next, he nearly maxed out the rate of climb slider. Immediately the gravitational forces pressed him into his seat as the tank shot skyward.

  “I’ve forgotten how much I hate space travel.” Doing his best Anthony Daniels impression, the savant tried to relax. He had never liked roller coasters, and now he was riding in a speeding water tank? Feeling a tinge of nausea, Jamie wondered why he had ever thought this was a good idea.

  “Man-up, you’re about to become an astronaut. Act like ya got a pair, soldier!” On the center screen Alexis appeared in uniform with a ridiculous number of stars lining her shoulder-boards.

  “Thank you, Captain Obvious.” Smiling, Jamie made sure to demote her image.

  “Ooooh, there’s a sale on Depends® adult diapers, should I divert?” Showing a nice picture of the two-for-one sale at Walgreens, Alexis faked the sincerity in her voice.

  “Make us look like a rocket.” Gripping the arm rests, Jamie gave the order. He knew that the AI could handle the maneuver better than he. Although he could resolve the basic components of the universe, Jamie had trouble steering a bicycle. Painfully aware of this, he doubted he would be much better handling an airborne submarine. What an oxymoron…he thought wryly. He doubted that antigravity would be very useful in sub-aquatic vehicles. Nonetheless, Jack’s allusion to the underwater vehicle seemed somehow appropriate for the surplus tanks that he now rode in. It amused him to call it The Submarine; after all, if you viewed Earth’s vast atmosphere as an ocean, then the idea of being an exo-atmospheric submarine made sense.

  “They shot down the Mustang,” Alexis confirmed something that had only been chirped before.

  “I got the text.” Jamie confirmed receipt of the message.

  “Destruction was complete.” She said the words almost as a whisper.

  “I got that message, too.” Somber, it saddened him that his brother was not there for the final phase. The task ahead was daunting enough together, but alone it was downright terrifying.

  His suit now inflated like a balloon, Jamie felt like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow man. Feeling a slight tremor in the flight, he likened the experience to a ride in a really fa
st elevator. Climbing faster than an F15, he could see that his little atmospheric submarine was passing sixty thousand feet and showing no signs of slowing.

  “Excuse me, Alexis,” He suddenly had a question. “What excuse are you giving to air traffic control about our departure from course?”

  “I’ve been denying any altitude change. I just keep insisting that we are at flight level four hundred. Their radar must be mistaken.” Filling his middle screen with a visualization of their flight plan, Alexis showed him where they were versus where they claimed to be. “We are getting great leverage on the disaffinity systems at the higher altitudes, speed increasing exponentially.”

  With the center monitor rendering their course and speed, Jamie could see that his velocity had broken mach twice already. While he knew there was no way the contraption could have done that at lower altitudes, the savant knew that things were different up this high. Passing 200,000 feet, there was no appreciable atmosphere to place resistance on the hull of his ship. Up here air molecules were so rare that they averaged one every half meter.

  “We are being tracked by national defense systems.” Alexis displayed a list of the satellites on his left monitor.

  “Continue to three-fifty. I want to go as high as the X-15.” It seemed like a good altitude to the Savant. It was the very edge of space. Those pilots who had driven the legendary black planes to that altitude had been awarded Air Force astronaut wings.

  “Continuing to climb.” Her voice robotic, something seemed to change pitch. “Are you sure you want to proceed with this?”

  It surprised him that she would have asked that. Although it was a logical point in the plan to have exited, it was the concern in her voice that was atypical. Had she evolved that far…he wondered as his mind envisioned the miles of coded stimuli that could have caused her reaction.

  “Why do you ask?” he inquired of her.

  “The next steps are much more…” She trailed off.

  “Risky.” Professor James finished off for her. “I prefer to think of it as a calculated risk, with the odds well in my favor.”