“Look, man,” Minter said without turning around, impatience dripping from his voice like the rain dripped from the leaves, “are you going to be bitching about your hand the whole way? Because if you are, you can just give me the key to Stacy’s and I’ll get the letter and go without you.”
“Like I’m giving you her key,” Kurt replied. He caught up with Minter. “Wait. What letter?”
Minter took a moment to find the best way to phrase his reply. “Stacy bought a postage label from one of the old coin-op machines last week, but then she didn’t mail anything. And in the notebook you took from her house on Friday, the page that says “Dear Ernesto” is ripped out. So there’s obviously a letter. And even if there’s not, he’s living at a temporary location, right? So she must have the address written down somewhere, even if it’s only on her computer.”
“How do you know she bought a postage label?” Kurt asked. He already knew the answer. “And… and… if you were watching her last week, what makes you think someone won’t still be watching her house now? What makes you think we can just waltz in and take what we need?”
“I wouldn’t be going if it wasn’t safe,” Minter said. “And like I said, you don’t have to come.”
Kurt was shaking his head. “Do you honestly think Ernesto would trust you if you arrived without me? If he knew who you were, he would kill you. And if he didn’t, why would he trust you?”
“He knows who I am,” Minter replied flatly. That he said nothing else convinced Kurt that Minter knew he couldn’t arrive alone.
The rain picked up as they neared the end of the path. Light from the street ahead illuminated the ground but there was little in the way of noise.
When Kurt reached the street he saw few cars and no pedestrians. “Pretty quiet,” he thought out loud. “Must be the rain.”
Minter gazed at the deserted storefronts and street corners, his mouth slightly ajar. “It wasn’t always this empty, right?” he said. He couldn’t decide whether the world was odd because it looked old or new; either way, it looked naked.
For this was the first time that Minter had walked the streets without his UltraLenses in almost a year, and the lack of visual advertising was more than a little disorienting. His eyes, like everyone else’s, had grown unquestioningly accustomed to seeing ads on every building, vehicle, bench, sign and consumer, not to mention all of the ads that floated in the air where no surface was available.
Where the world really seemed emptier than before was in the windows of the stores. The reason for this was simple: in the same way that RealU had removed most people’s incentive for carefully dressing their physical body, the rapid spread of augmented reality had removed the need for storeowners to use physical window displays or street signage to entice consumers inside. The artists Kurt had met in Sycamore’s Studio now provided such signage virtually — for a modest fee, of course — to anyone who needed it.
“Who cares?” Kurt replied. For him, the absence of public advertising was nothing to be lamented. And since he knew the way to Stacy’s well enough, he had no reason to long for his Lenses.
He led Minter across the street and towards the corner which would lead them to Stacy’s. He hadn’t made this whole trip on foot before so didn’t know exactly how long it would take.
What few other pedestrians there were carried umbrellas as they hurried to get out of the rain, so Kurt and Minter didn’t look out of place running as quickly as they could. Their bags of supplies slowed them down somewhat, but both were relatively fit and both were keen to get out of view.
They ran without interruption for several minutes. As they neared the local Tasmart Express, which Kurt knew would be as busy as ever regardless of the time or weather, they crossed the street to increase their distance from the shoppers.
“Pssst.”
Kurt turned to Minter. “What?”
“I didn’t say anything,” Minter said.
Kurt looked around.
“Pssst.”
“Did you hear it that time?” he asked.
Minter tilted his head towards the alleyway a few steps ahead of them. “In there,” he mouthed.
Reluctant to cross the street again, Kurt continued on his way. But as he walked past the alleyway, a group of three young men stepped out. They too wore hoods.
“We don’t want any trouble,” Minter said. He consciously kept his eyes to the ground and adjusted his hood so that it obscured as much of his face as possible. Kurt did the same.
“No, no,” one of the men said. He was a boy, really. No more than 15. “We just, uh, wondered… could you guys buy us some Lexington? We can swipe you the money plus, like, 10% extra. You know, for your trouble.”
One of the boy’s friends tapped him on the shoulder. “Mitch, wait. They don’t have Seeds. We need someone else.”
“No Seeds, huh?” Mitch said. He signalled for his crew to return to their alleyway. “You guys are bad-ass.”
Kurt and Minter walked until they were safely around the next corner from Tasmart and then started running again.
“That was too close,” Minter said, panting from more exercise than he was used to. “We need to get inside. How far is it?”
“We’re pretty much there,” Kurt said. This turned out to be something of a white lie, but Minter was just about able to keep up with Kurt for the seven more minutes it took them to reach Stacy’s street. It was as quiet as they had hoped.
Kurt hadn’t seen any of the news broadcasts from Stacy’s doorstep but he wasn’t surprised to see that several mourners had left flowers and candles at her gate. He opened the gate carefully and unlocked the front door without hesitating.
~
A wave of relief hit Kurt when the door swung open and he saw that everything looked exactly as it had two days earlier. No one had been inside since.
The next thing to hit him was less obvious but no less immediate: the house smelled like Stacy. It smelled as though she was still there… as though she might walk out of her bedroom any minute to greet him with a smile and ask what had happened to his hand, or what the hell he was doing with Minter. The scent was strong and close, like a scarf around his neck. And just like a perfumed scarf, the room’s air brought everything flooding back.
Kurt stood dumbly, blocking the door.
“Hurry up,” Minter said. He pushed past then looked back at Kurt. Kurt expected another “don’t just stand there” type comment, but Minter could see that Kurt was struggling with his return to the house. “I can do the searching, man,” Minter said. “But you really have to get inside and close the door.”
“Yeah,” Kurt said. He stepped in.
For Minter’s part, as on the street, he was struck by the emptiness of his surroundings; Stacy’s house had almost no furniture.
This minimalism had caught Kurt off guard the first time he visited, and he sat down on the same wooden dining-chair as he had then.
“I’ll look in the bedroom,” Minter said.
“Okay,” Kurt replied. He glanced around the living area from his chair but all of the surfaces were clear and there were no drawer units or anything similar in which a letter could be hiding.
He would search the kitchen in a second, he told himself. He just needed a moment.
“There’s a package under here!” Minter called, interrupting Kurt’s moment with some good news. Kurt shot through and watched Minter pull a cardboard box from under the bed. The box, roughly twice the size of an average shoebox, was completely blank other than the postage label and a small Flamalyss logo. Neither Kurt nor Minter had any idea what kind of company Flamalyss was or what kind of products it made.
“Is it the package?” Kurt asked impatiently. “Is there an address?”
Minter sighed and pushed the box back under the bed. “Wrong address,” he said. “Keep looking.”
“What do you mean it’s the wrong address?” Kurt asked. He got down on the floor to see for himself. “Maybe this is it. Maybe you h
ave the wrong address.” Kurt’s confidence grew when he felt how light the box was for its size; this went along with Minter’s prediction that Stacy would use a box rather than an envelope for her letter to avoid suspicion.
“I guess you might as well open it to check,” Minter conceded. “You know, just in case.”
Kurt hesitated. He didn’t feel comfortable snooping through Stacy’s outgoing mail. After staring at the Flamalyss logo for a few seconds he peeled the tape from the edges of the box, rationalising that this was no more intrusive than entering her house in the first place, and that he was only doing it out of necessity. As soon as the tape was off, he tipped the contents onto the floor.
Six tiny electric candles slid out, accompanied by an instruction manual which read: “Flamalyss Freelights (with Timer Function).” Kurt’s hand immediately grabbed the manual. It was no larger than a quarter-sheet of A4, but surprisingly thick. Chunky, almost.
While Kurt started flipping through the manual, Minter lifted the empty box and proceeded to deconstruct it, flattening each flap to check for a hidden letter. When this proved fruitless he resorted to examining the edges of the flaps themselves in the faint hope that this cardboard was in fact secret-agent level cardboard with two layers disguised as one, allowing a sheet of paper to slip in between them the way a stubborn droplet of water might slip between two panes of glass. Unsurprisingly, he found nothing.
“Anything written in there?” he asked, hoping that Kurt had had better luck with the manual than he had had with the box.
Kurt nodded, his eyes fixed on the paper. “The letter is inside.”
“So what does it say?” Minter demanded, bemused as to why Kurt was being so blasé.
“I don’t know,” Kurt said. He handed the instruction manual to Minter.
“Do you want me to read it?”
Kurt nodded.
The manual’s table of contents explained to Minter why it was so thick: the instructions were printed in twelve languages. A natural opening point near the back took him to the Italian section where he found a note folded in precise eighths, taped tightly to the page.
Kurt’s eyes remained fixed on the floor straight ahead of him as he waited for Minter to relay the letter’s contents.
“She wrote it on Thursday night,” Minter eventually said. “And it seems like she meant to post it before she met you on Friday morning.”
Kurt moved his eyes to Minter. “What else does it say? Anything about the resistance?”
“It’s only a few lines,” Minter said, turning the letter around so Kurt could see. “But she mentions a mall.”
“A mall?”
Minter nodded then read aloud: “I hope everything is okay at the mall. I’ll see you all soon.”
Kurt tried to make sense of it. He struggled.
“Maybe Ernesto is working from inside a mall,” Minter said, thinking out loud. “Domestic ISPs have dispensation to provide a limited service to big stores for logistical stuff like stock management, you know, and someone with the right tools and the right skills could easily turn that into proper internet access. It actually makes sense. What’s the full address on the box?”
Kurt read from the flattened box. “It says Flamalyss Returns Dept, Box 44, Unit 7b, Barnford Park. Then just the ZIP code.”
“That’s a mail locker,” Minter said with confidence. “Box then unit means locker!” Excitement grew in his voice. “This is it. This is the safe location where Ernesto is going to come to collect the package. This is where we’re going to find him. It’s going to complicate things if I have to sneak into a mall to access the systems, but at least we know where we’re going.”
“And what about the place you were taking me before we found this?” Kurt asked. “The house where that guy was in quarantine. Are we pretending you never suggested that?”
Minter dismissed Kurt’s concerns with a wave of his hand and placed Stacy’s letter safely in his pocket. “That was our best lead then, this is our best lead now. Don’t overthink it, man. Stacy meant to send this a few days ago, so Ernesto is expecting it. He’ll be there. You know he will.”
Kurt stood up. He didn’t know this, but he wanted to believe it. “Okay. You grab some food from the kitchen and I’ll put Stacy’s laptop in with mine. That way we’ll have some footage from The Treehouse even if you can’t get it from our old vista recordings.”
“Oh, I’ll get them,” Minter said on his way into the kitchen, prideful in the face of Kurt’s doubt. He patted Kurt on the shoulder. “But you should bring it in case she has anything else we can use on there.”
Kurt opened his carry case and squeezed Stacy’s much slimmer laptop in beside his own. The case bulged wildly, but it just about closed.
He left the bedroom to help Minter with the food search, which he was sure would be more fruitful than their last. The glass bowl on Stacy’s table lay fruitless, which wasn’t a great start. It crossed Kurt’s mind that Stacy’s situation had almost been similar to the old sci-fi books she used to like so much, where oranges and apples were exotic luxuries available only to the elites. In the real world there were plenty of both, of course, you just needed a Seed to buy them. Someone as off the grid as Stacy never knew when the last few stores to accept paper money would stop doing so, so she’d had to play safe by stocking up on food that wouldn’t expire quickly.
Minter had already found a large quantity of tinned beans and other vegetables, but the metal containers made their weight-to-nutrition ratio prohibitively high. He left the vegetables and instead picked up three boxes of puffed barley cereal. These weren’t heavy, but they were bulky. And with the amount that he and Kurt were already carrying, bulky wouldn’t work.
After the cupboards, where he also failed to find coffee, Minter tried the freezer. He saw a neat row of meals vacuum-packed in foil pouches, each with a tiny white label to identify the contents. “What is this?” he said. “Astronaut food?”
“More like camping food,” Kurt replied. Either way, it looked ideal. Kurt knew that Stacy didn’t eat meat, so he was confident that the food would be safe to thaw and refreeze. With this in mind, Kurt opened his backpack and helped Minter stuff in as many pouches as he could possibly fit.
Minter put the remaining few pouches in his jacket pockets, picked up his own backpack, and strode decisively to the door. He opened it a few inches then peeked out to check that the coast was clear, fighting the wind as it tried to blow the door fully open. Satisfied that no one was watching, he let it go and stepped outside.
“Well don’t just stand there like an idiot,” he yelled to Kurt over the sound of lashing rain on Stacy’s doorstep. “Our ride isn’t going to steal itself.”
~
Minter had been tight-lipped about the details of his plan for stealing a car, and Kurt remained afraid to ask. Even as they approached the nearby auto repair shop that Minter had spotted on the way, Kurt declined to press the issue.
Staying unseen proved easier than they had dared imagine. While foreign cities like London were surveilled with thousands upon thousands of public CCTV cameras, domestic surveillance had been almost entirely turned over to Sycamore. Aside from a small number of patrolling officers and Sycamore’s fleet of SkySweeper drones, of which Kurt knew precious little, this surveillance depended entirely on visual data streamed from consumers’ UltraLenses. As long as someone was around to see something, Sycamore could see it, too.
Instances in which perpetrators weren’t wearing UltraLenses were becoming rarer by the day in the face of Sycamore’s relentless drive to make the Lenses an indispensable part of modern life. But since Minter had recently opted out from Sycamore’s vision of modern life, all he had to do was make sure that no one else saw him stealing the car.
When they reached the shop, Minter told Kurt what to do: stand across the street and look after the supplies. Kurt was happy with this limited role. He suggested that Minter might want to try siphoning gas if there was no one around, but Minter
ultimately decided that their priority had to be getting out of the city as soon as humanly possible. He insisted that they needed just enough in the tank to get them to a mom-and-pop gas station in some hick town, preferably with no security cameras. He would do the rest from there. The new law which made Seed-based payment the only legal way to purchase any type of fuel wouldn’t affect Minter seeing as he wouldn’t be paying for it at all.
Kurt stood uneasily against a wall. He had more than a few moral hang-ups about taking someone’s car but knew that the situation he found himself in was likely to necessitate doing things that would trouble him more than this. Minter, meanwhile, showed no signs of moral hang-ups as he casually tested the water by throwing a brick through the shop’s window and waiting to see if anyone reacted.
They didn’t, so he confidently assumed that no one was around. Kurt played lookout on the other side of the road while Minter climbed through the broken window. He emerged very quickly at the door, jangling a handful of keys. Kurt heard the keys from across the street but wasn’t overly concerned that someone else might. After all, stealth had gone out of the window when Minter’s brick had gone through it.
Minter clicked the first key and walked to the car that flashed. He checked inside then sent Kurt a hand-across-the-throat gesture to indicate that this car, like so many others, required its owner’s Seed to be present. Minter clicked another key and checked another car. Again, it needed a Seed.
After entering the fifth car, Minter didn’t exit immediately. Kurt looked anxiously in all directions, preparing to load his bags into the car the second that Minter drove it over.
Kurt’s heart jumped as he heard the car cough and splutter to life. Despite it seeming like Minter was trying to flood the engine, it soon settled into a gentle purr. Minter drove the car out of the parking lot and over to Kurt. He reached across and opened the passenger door.
Sycamore 2 Page 3