Dead Snupe

by Spikes Donovan

  Where those two were headed, they wouldn’t say. That hurt a bit, as you can imagine, and I told Bobby so. But deep inside I knew I’d see them again. When and where? I couldn’t tell you. But one thing Bobby did say was that he and April were meeting up and that, after tonight’s election was over, they’d be disappearing from the grid. Elton would be going with Bobby and April as far as the border – north or south, they never said – and Elton would decide where he’d go when they got there.

  At midnight on November 3, 2048, just as the presidential race was called for Senator Kevin Tyler, Bobby Griffin and Elton Peacock walked out through the front gate of Long Wait Prison. Yep, you heard me. Those two boys walked right out through the front door and through the gates and onto Second Avenue in Nashville, Tennessee, and disappeared. And nobody saw them leave. They’d vanished just like that Clog Droid had disappeared a few years earlier. I never knew how they did it and how nobody saw them.

  And all I could think about was Override.

  At eight o’clock the next morning, officials from the National Security Agency, or the “None Such Agency” as some like to call it, arrived at Long Wait Prison. Warden Neal, the new Boney Chief Bart Fitzhugh, and some of the administration staff greeted them when they arrived. Everyone must’ve taken their time exchanging pleasantries – and savoring the chocolate donuts I’d been told to send down a half hour earlier – because they didn’t head for Bobby’s ECPAP lab until somewhere around eight-thirty.

  And when they got there, Bobby and Elton were nowhere to be seen. In fact, the computers and servers in the lab were smoking, and the whole place smelled like someone had baked a pair of plastic gloves in with the dinner rolls and farted. But that’s not all. There was also an obscene gesture spray painted on the wall telling a particular person what they could do to themselves and where they could go.

  Warden Neal blew a gasket. It’s a shame she didn’t blow an artery in her brain, or split her colon wide open and die of septic poisoning. But she certainly went dead-bang out her mind – which I’ll tell you about in a second or two.

  Chief Bart Fitzhugh later told me that Warden Neal howled like an animal when she discovered the smoking hardware in the ECPAP project room. After that, the warden started throwing everything she could get her hands on. Computer monitors, hard drives, chairs – you name, she pitched it. The three guys from the NSA fled from the room and into the hall and down just a bit before they stopped. Chief Fitzhugh – always the calm type – just stayed behind Warden Neal until she ran out of steam. When she finished, she turned and grabbed him by the shirt and threw him against the wall so hard his teeth rattled.

  Seemed like she hadn’t run out of steam.

  “Why are you just standing here, you imbecile?” Warden Neal screamed. “Go check their rooms! If they’re not there, check the entire building from top to bottom!” And she shook him like a seven-point-oh earthquake shaking the Santa Monica Freeway at rush hour. “And has it ever occurred to you to sound the alarm?”

  Another Boney entered the room and spoke to Warden Neal.

  “Oh! We can’t track them, huh? That’s because you have no idea of what you’re doing! I want you on surveillance in five seconds, do you hear me? And I want an instant report of what you see. You got that?” And she reared back and knuckled-sandwiched the guy right in the jaw.

  Chief Fitzhugh called for a couple of Boneys to meet him in Administration. He hit the alarm and began the search. Good thing for everyone in Long Wait that the alarm had failed, or maybe someone had sabotaged it. All that thing would’ve done anyway was make a lot of noise and confuse people. Or maybe Chief Fitzhugh didn’t hit it at all.

  Five hours later, after turning over every bed in the entire prison, and after a lengthy and brutal search of every single room in the building, prison officials came up empty. Bobby and Elton were still missing. By three that afternoon, calmer heads met back in the ECPAP project room. A few minutes after that, DEAD SNUPE was called in. One minute later, Mary Kaepernick found a wire.

  It was the same length of wire Bobby had stolen from under my serving island in the cafeteria however many years ago.

  It didn’t take long for the Boneys to trace that strand of wire to a hinged piece of sheetrock. I wasn’t there to see it; that’s just what Chief Fitzhugh told me. He said that, when they pulled the sheetrock back, they found a jack – a direct connection to the outside world via the old fiber optic cable that served the entire administration wing. Bobby’s project room, at one time or the other, had been an office for someone in Administration. Seems like, during a remodel, some construction worker had just been too lazy to rip out the connector. How Bobby found that connector remains a mystery to this day.

  And they also found other things behind that sheetrock. I can’t tell you about everything Bobby and Elton had stashed behind that wall – whether the stuff was mostly old books, DVDs, CDs, or what. But what I heard from Mary Kaepernick was this: when April had left Bobby to take up with Mario Kaepernick on the seventh floor, she’d done it for no other reason than that she’d been sent by Bobby to steal DEAD research data. April did her job well, and Bobby got what he needed. Mario, however, eventually figured out what was going down. But, because Mario hated the government just as much as April and Bobby did, he played along. Given the data found behind that wall, it seemed like Bobby and Elton had been spending most of their time learning about droids – how they worked, how they were programmed, how to build and maintain them, and a bunch of other things I can’t understand.

  Then I remembered Congressman Burt Holman and his visit to Long Wait Prison to spend the night. How that, after his little party with three of the girls from the Bitch Clique, he and the Clog Droid had disappeared from the prison just as fine and pretty as a wisp of cloud on a breezy day. And how that, the next morning, I discovered that most of my tools had gone, including my power drills and cutters, spare batteries, chargers, wrenches – I still can’t remember how many tools I lost that day, and every now and then I find myself short of something or the other.

  “Bobby stole the Clog Droid,” Mary said, and when she said it, I could tell there was a lot more going on behind her big, beautiful brown eyes than she was letting on about.

  “It wasn’t Congressman Holman, then,” I said.

  Mary smiled. “Hold on for a sec. That Clog Droid took every drill bit we had up in DEAD – diamond, titanium, carbide-tipped, you name it. And we knew it was Bobby’s work, thanks to April alerting us. But we kept it to ourselves.”

  I nodded. Good information – okay. But I couldn’t put any of this together in any coherent way. Why the Clog Droid and all those tools? And what did the droid have to do with Bobby and Elton’s escape? And why the heck didn’t they take me with them? It was still hitting me kinda hard at the time that I’d missed my racehorse out of here and, as far as I knew, that horse wasn’t coming back. Add to that the fact that my magic number would be up shortly and that – well, you know how the danged bait-processing machine works.

  “As for Congressman Holman,” Mary said. “SNUPE saw the whole thing – and it was on one of those rare occasions when we could actually see ECPAP and HIRAD at work. Seems like ECPAP wanted us to see it. To make a long story short, Bobby emailed the congressman minutes after his little party here, showed the guy all the dirt ECPAP had on him, and Congressman Holman was only too happy to comply with Bobby’s demand.”

  “That the congressman take the Clog Droid with him?”

  “And drop the droid off in the alley behind the ruins of Cyber International.” Mary stopped right there for a moment. And she was wearing a big, satisfied smile, just like she was waiting for me to discover whatever was coming next. She was just like a school teacher. I should’ve slapped her.

  “Bobby was after something inside Cyber International?” I said.

  Mary tapped her nose. Then she said, “Think. You’re brilliant – we all know that here.”

  The whole Cyber International
building had been cooked in the fire. Research, equipment, data, human lives – everything needed to piece together Cyber’s research into artificial intelligence. But what could Bobby have been after? If he’d sent the Clog Droid to Cyber, something must have survived the flames. That much I could figure out.

  “Drills and bits,” I said. “That Clog Droid was going after a vault – or something like that. Something that wasn’t touched by the fire.”

  “Bingo,” Mary said.

  “A synthetic person to go with the AI that supposedly vanished when Cyber International went up in smoke,” I said, not aware I was thinking out loud. And then I looked at Mary. “We sent batteries out through the trash. Remember? Parts and stuff from time to time.”

  “Just after Senator Tyler got shot,” Mary said.

  I laughed. “The senator – Senator Tyler – he looked tired sometimes on the campaign trail. Got all wobbly a time or two. And a few times, he couldn’t seem to talk smoothly or he looked bored or looked like he didn’t care. But then he got shot and —”

  “Right in the battery,” Mary said.

  “Well, I’ll be,” I said, and I thought for a second. Senator Tyler. We thought he was dead that night we saw him get shot, but he was back on his feet pretty quickly. And if you looked at him, you could just tell it was like he’d never been shot. But he’d still get tired at times – but not as often as before.

  “Remember the last shipment? The last couple of kids we sent out through the trash?” Mary said. “We sent more parts.”

  “Magnets, some flat-printed circuit board coils, and what else?”

  “Let’s just say that the Clog Droid had a heck of a time rigging Senator Tyler up with a motion-activated battery charging system. Almost lost the senator with that one. Once we got Senator Tyler upgraded, all he had to do was dance, do push-ups, jog, or do jumping jacks. Instant charge. Kinda like us humans. Exercise gives you energy. Ever notice that the guy was always doing a little jig on the way up to the mic? Or that his fundraisers were always dances?”

  And then I knew. I didn’t know exactly how Bobby and Elton pulled it off, how they created or retooled a synthetic person, but they did it. Bobby sent Long Wait Prison’s Clog Droid to Cyber International, found his father’s biggest, most secret project, and he and Elton went to work getting him ready for the real world. Once their man was up on his own two feet, as you might say, Bobby had only to raid a few bank accounts – and I like to think he went after the ones owned by our wealthy congressmen – and fund the soon-to-be Senator Tyler’s own bank account. With that money, Kevin Tyler supported the Christian Homes for Children and, at the same time, bought Dr. Tenpenny’s loyalty. He also would have probably become a heavy contributor to Vanderbilt University and bribed the president of the university into giving him a law degree. Those two little moves on Bobby’s part were slick ones. With the kind of money Kevin Tyler was throwing at Dr. Tenpenny and the president of Vanderbilt, they would have been fools to not claim him as one of their own.

  After that, Kevin Tyler – with the help of ECPAP and HIRAD – ran the numbers on Tennessee Governor Otis Youngblood. He discovered the governor had a few skeletons in the closet, and he told him those problems would all go away as long as he named Kevin Tyler to Tennessee’s vacant seat in the Senate.

  And the rest is history.

  Now that I think about it, I find myself wondering. And it gives me chills. Override. The person who started this whole thing nearly a decade ago. If you ask me now, I suspect that Override and Senator Tyler are one and the same person. Am I a hundred percent? Like I always say, there’s no such thing as a hundred percent. But I think Curtis Lane Griffin and Cyber International, through Bobby Griffin, had finally achieved what they’d set out to do. Namely, to unite artificial intelligence with an artificial person. And that person, with ECPAP and HIRAD at his disposal, would, in strange kind of way, become godlike: he’d know everyone and everything.

  Warden Neal just stood there in the ECPAP project room with her mouth open. And everyone from the National Security Agency did, too.

  “The last time I saw a mouth like Warden Neal’s,” Chief Fitzhugh whispered to me, “it had a fishing lure in it.” When he said that, and when I considered that Bobby’s Enhanced Criminal Proclivity Assessment Program had seemingly gone up in smoke, I thought it entirely possible that Warden Neal would be leaving Long Wait Prison through the bait-processing machine.

  But that never happened.

  Warden Neal pulled a small pistol from her pocket, put it to the side of her head, and pulled the trigger.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I can’t tell you about everything that went down with those NSA people, those “None Such” guys who’d come to Long Wait to get a look-see at Bobby’s project. But I do know this. Bright and early the next day, there were no less than a hundred of those NSA goons all over the place. They just tore through Long Wait Prison like they owned it, searching rooms, taking tablets and hard drives, and questioning everyone, especially the guys and gals in DEAD and SNUPE. That went on all day and straight through ‘til sunup the next morning. And those suckers vanished almost as quickly as they’d come.

  And not a single kid got hurt.

  A day later, Boney Chief Fitzhugh became the warden. He was one heck of a decent man, it makes me happy to say. The guy wore a smile. He gave the Boney guards the business in the cafeteria, right in front of every kid in the joint. He told them they couldn’t so much as look at a single person at Long Wait Prison, let alone haul them up to the eighth floor without his knowing about it. And that was all fine by us.

  By December fifth, the Boneys all but disappeared from the halls of Long Wait. I suspected they were still here, probably watching the perimeter or sitting behind their desks on the eighth floor with their eyes on the surveillance monitors. I didn’t know that for a fact, and even Mary Kaepernick couldn’t tell me for sure. But life at Long Wait seemed to go on just as it had for the last however-many years. The younger kids still had class in the mornings, and everyone still showed up for their jobs on time, even if those jobs still benefitted a government they’d come to rightfully despise.

  On December 25th, 2048, the teachers and staff at Long Wait Prison vanished and never returned. Some believed they’d all gone home on Christmas break and just quit. The Boneys and Chief Fitzhugh? Nobody had seen any of them since early December. Seemed like they too just up and left. You might think that all of this was a good thing. But I’ll tell you it wasn’t.

  When the kids showed up for classes bright and early on Monday morning, December 27th, and when the teachers failed to appear, things started getting dicey. I never would have thought it possible that the kids at Long Wait would lose it the way they did. Some started crying, others pulled their arms in close to their bodies and walked around like they were seeing ghosts, some kids ran to their dorm rooms with a friend and went into lockdown. My small-group kids, about fifteen in all, knew to look for me. And that’s just what they did. We met in the cafeteria, had a Bible reading, sang a few songs, and prayed.

  On Tuesday, December 28th, Long Wait Prison didn’t get its weekly food deliveries. And that wasn’t good.

  Mary and I – and a few of the older kids from my small group – scoured the pantry for everything we could find. We had a day’s worth of canned goods left, mostly a mixed bag of things nobody really liked. Things like canned carrots and peas, a vegetable medley that didn’t taste like any vegetables I’d ever eaten, canned salmon, Aunt Jemima buttermilk pancake mix but no syrup, and a few other odds and ends too mealy to be included in a meal.

  We tried breaking into Administration to get a call out. But, no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t get through those steel doors. We must have used every tool owned by DEAD to break in, but we did little more than make a few dents that a dab of paint would fix. Every door in Long Wait Prison was locked down – the Administrative offices, the Boney stronghold on the eighth floor, and every exit leading to
the outside.

  That night, we all gathered in the cafeteria for our final meal together. Vegetables and salmon. Each kid got one medium-sized pancake sprinkled with sugar for dessert. After dinner, most of the kids, despondent and about as torn up as a puppy’s first toy, headed to their rooms. The older ones met in the common room on the second floor. The TV was already on when we got there.

  And I’ll be you-know-what.

  Every station in the country was reporting on President-Elect Tyler. He was standing behind a thousand microphones, flanked on either side with more Secret Service agents than I could count. He was already speaking by the time I grabbed my seat.

  “Congressman Floyd Carnegie, of California – wire and tax fraud, conspiracy, lying to Federal investigators, seven counts of rape involving incarcerated minors, ” President-Elect Tyler said, and he handed a folder to a man standing beside him. He picked up another folder and said, “Congressman Justin Fleebes of Rhode Island, twenty-three counts of racketeering, fraud, and two counts of rape involving incarcerated minors.”

  And on and on it went until President-Elect Tyler had named almost one-third of the House of Representatives and nearly half of the United States Senate. And he’d accused most of them of raping minors and claimed he had data that proved it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

  Then President-Elect Tyler named President Forti, Vice President Mulvaney, and the Speaker of the House Fred Delay of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and the misuse of campaign funds.