“There’s no drones,” Ty said, rising to join Lisa. “He just likes being the boss. Give it a few days and you’ll know what I mean.”
“See yous both later,” Lisa said in her ever-chirpy accent.
Kurt sat in silence for a few seconds while Minter stirred his coffee.
“You don’t have to wait,” Minter said. “I’ll come over as soon as I’ve finished this and had one more. We’ll be in separate rooms, anyway.”
“I know,” Kurt said. “But I don’t feel tired. I just can’t believe we’re actually going to do it in the morning.” He thought back to all of the ups and downs in the journey that had brought them to this point, just hours away from the internet access Minter needed to do the job.
“Yeah,” Minter said.
He didn’t seem very excited. “You can definitely do it,” Kurt said, trying to rev him up. “It’ll be easy. Just like you said, right?”
“As long as I remember my password.”
Kurt laughed. “Imagine if you didn’t!”
Minter took a sip of his coffee.
“You are joking though, yeah?”
“Yeah, man,” Minter said. He took another sip of coffee. “Just joking.”
11
Kurt woke before Minter and, by the sound of it, everyone else. His king-size bed in the rear corner of Tasmart Home was by far the most comfortable he had ever slept in. This comfort may have been amplified slightly by the contrast between the floor of Harry’s truck and any kind of bed, but the prices on the placard beside the display — well over a thousand dollars for the mattress alone — suggested that this was indeed a special bad.
Even Kurt’s hand — which was much better, despite his fingers feeling fatigued from being constantly outstretched — hadn’t stopped him from sleeping soundly. Kurt took the string and the spacers from his hand and stretched his fingers. It felt much better. His cheek didn’t sting anywhere near as much it had, either, but it would take a while for the bruising to fade.
The regular ceiling in Tasmart Home, as inside every other store, provided no natural light. Only the dollar-shaped walkways had glass ceilings, presumably to make La Plethora look good from above. Kurt still couldn’t quite square the tackiness of the mall’s shape with the elegance of its internal design. In any case, he took a weird kind of pleasure from the irony that the project ran out of dollars before a single customer set foot inside.
Kurt could see easily thanks to the various lamps left on throughout Home overnight, but it was nowhere near as bright as it had been the previous day when the ceiling lights were turned on. He didn’t know what time it was or whether it would yet be light outside.
He changed his clothes for the second time since arriving and tiptoed towards the doors which led out to the rest of the mall, loathe to wake anyone else. This was hardly necessary, though, since no one slept anywhere near the middle of the store and every person or couple had their own semi-enclosed display bedroom. That was one benefit of there being so few people, Kurt reflected.
As he neared the door, Kurt saw that it was indeed getting light. The sun hadn’t quite hit the walkway yet, but it was certainly rising. Kurt felt sure there was no way that this could count as night and fall under the forbidden timeframe for crossing the walkway. Once through the door, he saw Ty sitting alone in the food court and knew for sure that it was okay to cross.
“Kurt!” Ty yelled when he saw him, evidently feeling no need to keep his voice down. “Over here.”
“What time is it?” Kurt asked when he got there.
Ty shrugged. “Going by the position of the sun I would say… early morning.”
Kurt didn’t reply.
“Not a morning person, huh?”
“Something like that,” Kurt said, starting to think that maybe he wasn’t a Ty person. “Is there anything to eat?”
“Loads,” Ty said, turning towards the row of fast-food outlets behind his table. “Most of the places don’t open until nine, though.”
Kurt smiled this time. “Is there a working kitchen?”
“Yeah, man. But I don’t think you’ll be allowed in it. I’m not.”
“Why?”
“Ernesto’s super strict with the food,” Ty said. “Everyone gets two hot meals a day, apart from yesterday, plus breakfast. Mary cooks it all so she’s the only person with a key. Well, obviously he has a key for himself, but Mary’s the only one of us.”
Kurt saw the logic of these restrictions, knowing that access to food and other resources had to be carefully managed in any kind of closed environment if there was to be any hope of avoiding conflict.
“But I dunno, actually,” Ty went on, “because that was before you arrived. You brought more food, right? And now we know that we’re only going to be here for another week or something, so it’s not like we have to keep rationing.”
“As long as everyone gets enough,” Kurt said.
Ty shrugged. “I guess. Anyway, we can’t eat until Mary gets here. Do you want me to show you the computers?”
“Definitely,” Kurt said, standing up to go right away.
Ty led him into the very far corner of the huge food court, underneath the large monorail platform. There was a door, unmarked, which looked like it might have been an exit to the outside world but led in fact to a room which Ty said had been designed to function as the mall’s security centre.
No security equipment had been installed for the simple reason that this room offered no exciting photo opportunities for showcasing the mall and had thus been left until last.
Kurt didn’t care about security equipment. All he cared about were the two desks against the side wall. Two desks, two chairs, and three computers.
The computers were all laptops, as Ernesto had said. Two of them were closed and the other open. Permanently open, Kurt noticed, seeing now that it was surrounded by a metal frame bolted to the desk.
“That’s the internet computer,” Ty said. It had a smooth, silver finish.
Kurt couldn’t hide his confusion. Ever since he was a child in the late 1990s, experience had taught Kurt that every computer was an internet computer. It didn’t make any kind of sense that only one of Ernesto’s would be online. He didn’t even know how to phrase his confusion into a question. “What’s the difference?” he eventually asked.
“The other two don’t have 4G or anything,” Ty said. “Just regular wifi. We have a router so they can link up with the cameras and the printer and stuff, but obviously the router doesn’t have any internet going into it.”
“Hmm,” Kurt said. The answer was obvious in hindsight and had only evaded him because he was so used to computers and other devices easily finding an internet-connected wifi signal wherever they were, from parks to buses and hotels to planes. Kurt’s trusty laptop didn’t have 4G capabilities either, but he knew there were simple ways to access the connection by using this bolted-down computer as an intermediary. He pressed the power button.
“I don’t know the password,” Ty told him.
“For the internet?”
“For the computer.”
“What do you mean?” Kurt asked.
Ty nodded towards the screen. The computer’s SSD had booted everything up in the few seconds it took Kurt to ask his questions, and a password prompt now popped up to answer them.
“I don’t know the password,” Ty repeated. “But you’re good at getting past stuff like this, right?”
“That’s not how it works. And it’s hardly going to be something we could guess. He’s not an idiot.”
“It can’t be very long,” Ty said. “Because the four of them remember it without writing it down.”
“Which four?”
Ty looked as though this should have been as obvious to Kurt as it was to him. “Ernesto, Val, and Michael. Plus Anthony. He isn’t really “one of them”, but he’s Michael’s son, so…”
“So no one else can use the internet?” Kurt asked.
“Anthony lets th
e rest of us on whenever he can, usually really early in the morning when no one is around. I dunno why Ernesto even cares, though. Like, I almost get why he says Mary isn’t allowed to leave and why we’re not allowed to log-in to any of our old accounts, but I don’t get why we can’t even read the news or watch TV. There’s literally nothing to do in here and he won’t even let us have that.”
“What do you mean Mary isn’t allowed to leave?” Kurt asked, ignoring the rest of Ty’s complaints, all of which seemed trivial compared to this point. “Does she really want to?”
Ty nodded. “She hates it here. I mean, I hate it here, you know, but she actually wants to go home.”
Kurt sympathised with Mary’s plight but knew that Ernesto was absolutely correct in insisting that no one could leave. Just as Kurt had to bring Harry to the mall when he found out Kurt was alive, there was no way that someone who knew the location could leave until the job was complete. And while Ernesto may have had no reason to believe Mary would reveal the location — just like Harry had sworn to tell no one about Kurt — the life-or-death stakes made even the slightest risk completely unacceptable.
“I hope everyone is being nice to her about it,” Kurt said. The words sounded trite as he said them but they accurately reflected his thoughts.
“She gets on pretty well with me and Lisa,” Ty said. “And Anthony tries pretty hard.” The names that Ty did and didn’t say were more or less the ones Kurt would have expected.
“What’s Mary’s story, anyway?” Kurt asked.
“She’s a teacher, I think. Or maybe she worked at a summer camp. It’s definitely something with kids.”
“Was she here before you?”
“She was the last to arrive,” Ty said. “Before you guys. It was only like a week and a half ago. She just turned up with Val out of the blue, but one look at her and you could tell it wasn’t going to work.”
Kurt didn’t feel so bad for Mary now. A week and a half wasn’t too long, especially when everything would be over within another week. “But how did she know Val?” he asked.
“She didn’t, that’s the thing. It’s a long story. There used to be a dog in here — Val’s dog — but it was really old and it died. Val was in pieces over the whole thing but she’s the only one who ever goes out, so she had to take the dog and bury it on her way to the mail run.”
“That’s rough,” Kurt said.
“Yeah,” Ty continued. “So anyway, when she got to Barnford Park, she literally bumped into a girl who was there collecting her own mail, and this girl happened to be the kind who can’t see someone crying without asking what’s wrong. And Val was standing there covered in dirt, all upset about this dog that she’d had for twelve years, and she told the girl all about it. Plus everything else. Next thing you know, she’s driving back with an extra person. I think they both woke up the next morning like “what the hell have I done?”. It’s not Mary’s fault, though. Val’s the one who messed up.”
“The whole thing is messed up,” Kurt said.
“Yeah. But as for this password,” Ty said, bringing Kurt back into the moment. “There’s only so many possibilities, right? You must know how to get it to run through all of the combinations or something.”
Kurt was surprised that anyone would think that, even Ty. “A password made up of six lower-case letters has something like three hundred million possible combinations,” he said. “If you make it eight digits and throw in just numbers and upper case letters — still no symbols or punctuation — it’s more like two hundred trillion.”
Ty was counting on his fingers. “Sycamore has eight digits,” he said, excited by this apparent revelation.
“Feel free,” Kurt said. He held his hand out towards the computer.
Ty typed it in.
INCORRECT PASSWORD ENTERED. 2 ATTEMPTS REMAINING.
“Sycamore backwards,” Ty said. “In capitals.”
Kurt watched, bewildered, as Ty typed in his second guess, saying the letters out loud as he went: “E-R-O-M-A… uh… C?… yeah… C-Y-S.”
INCORRECT PASSWORD ENTERED. 1 ATTEMPT REMAINING.
“Hmmm,” Ty said, turning to Kurt. “Last guess. What do you think?”
Kurt forced himself between Ty and the computer. “Something happens if you get it wrong again! That’s why it warns you,” he said. “Are you messing with me here or are you actually this stupid?”
“You don’t have to be an asshole about it.”
“I’m not trying to, but if you had typed another wrong password it would have locked everyone out for a while. And obviously we’re hoping to use this computer as soon as we can to get into Sycamore’s systems and start doing what we have to do.”
Ty stepped away from Kurt and the computer. “Good luck with that. I’m going to see if Lisa’s up yet. If you want to watch the La Plethora documentary she told you about, it’s on the black computer. You can take that one anywhere.”
Now alone in the computer room, Kurt turned the black laptop on. It had a regular old-fashioned hard drive, like his own, so took almost a minute to fully boot up. When it did he saw a crowded desktop with folders titled things like “T-Y-T-V” and “1080p Uploads”. Kurt navigated to the System Information screen and looked under registration details. Confirming his assumption, he saw that the computer belonged to Ty Kennedy.
Kurt wanted to watch the documentary but didn’t want to snoop through Ty’s files. There were a stupid number of folders on the desktop — at least fifty — so Kurt opened an explorer window and sorted them by creation date. Some were very recent, one as recent as a few days old. Kurt clicked into this folder, titled “Transferred IC 3”, and saw several thumbnails of short SycaNews clips. One thumbnail caught his eye immediately: a picture of Amos in front of the bank he had been about to blow up.
There’s a face I haven’t missed, Kurt thought.
He double-clicked the video to play it, satisfied in himself that this didn’t constitute snooping. The video began with a logo Kurt hadn’t seen before for a service called SycaNews Worldwide. Presumably this was just the regular SycaNews made available on the real internet for the rest of the world to see. The footage was augmented, of course, exactly as it had appeared to UltraLens-wearers like Kurt who were there to see the event in real life. Only it wasn’t quite the same, because even the highest resolution screen couldn’t dream of competing with the fully immersive AR experience provided by the UltraLenses.
Kurt went back to the explorer window and looked at the recent folders. He saw one called “Transferred IC 2” so tried that. He guessed that IC might have meant internet computer, since that was the name Ty always used to refer to Ernesto’s laptop. Whether these videos had been transferred with or without Ernesto’s permission was unclear.
One of the first thumbnails Kurt saw was a shot of La Plethora from above. It did look like a dollar sign. Worse than that, in fact, it looked like a giant diamond-encrusted earring shaped like a dollar sign. People who wore shiny dollar signs in their ears annoyed Kurt, but people who built malls out of them injured his will to live.
Kurt played the video. It was fifty minutes long.
After a few minutes the narrator mentioned the building’s head architects by name, and Kurt recognised one as the woman who had designed Sycamore’s leaf-shaped HQ. Small world, he thought. He would have paid good money to see what her house looked like.
The narrator, speaking four years ago, said that La Plethora would likely never be completed given its total isolation and the projected cost of completing the necessary transport links. Tasmart, which was to be the mall’s double anchor with a flagship store at each end, had apparently shown recent interest in taking over the whole project. But even for them, the largest retail chain in history, the cost of salvaging anything from the disaster that was La Plethora was a bridge too far.
At the end of part two, before cutting to commercials, the narrator really played up the symbolism of a dollar-shaped mega-mall failing “at the heigh
t of capitalism’s hubris,” and reflected on how it had been a sign of things to come:
“All that and more coming up in part three of La Plethora; the story of one mall, built and abandoned by men too rich to care, which proved once and for all that nothing was too big to fail.”
Kurt closed Ty’s laptop and took it with him into the food court. The documentary was pretty good, but he couldn’t concentrate on it for another half hour while the internet computer sat taunting him with its password prompt. He switched it off on his way.
~
By now, several of the others were up and about. Ty had found Lisa at what seemed to be their usual table, and Harry and Joyce were at another table nearby. Kurt walked over to check on them.
“Good morning,” Joyce said. “You look smart.”
Kurt looked down at his clothes. They were far from smart, but they were clean, which in itself was more than Joyce was used to from him. “Thanks,” he said. “Did you both have an okay night?”
“Best night’s sleep I ever had, son,” Harry replied. “Remind me to put one of those mattresses in the truck before we leave.”
“And me,” Kurt said
“So, have you been online?”
Harry’s question was reasonable given that Kurt was holding a laptop and had just appeared from a mysterious door. But Kurt didn’t want to say anything about Ernesto blocking access to the only online computer, so he chose his words carefully. “I’m waiting for Ernesto,” was what he settled on in the end.
Kurt then sat at a table on his own and resumed the documentary. The narrator’s criticism of the project and its backers was soon joined by analysis from several talking heads, some of whom were fairly successful and well known social commentators.
“Boss man,” Ty suddenly said, capturing Kurt’s attention.
Kurt paused his video and looked up to see Ernesto approaching. He wasn’t coming across from Home, though, but rather up the main walkway from somewhere else.
He went straight to Kurt but didn’t sit down. “How are you feeling?” he asked.
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