—from a 34 year-old missing child flyer
_____________________________
TONIGHT—ONE SHOW ONLY
______________________________
LIVE ON CENTER STAGE
***ALICE SEELEY***
_______________________________
PERFORMING ALL OF THEIR HITS FROM THEIR NEW ALBUM
“ENDANGERED RUNAWAY”
THE CLOUD 9 CLUB
ARCH & LEWIS STREETS
TICKETS: $27.00
_____________________________
The hovercar was a convertible. Not so surprisingly, Carmen was piloting it.
“That is what they call a four-point landing, Mr. Coe,” she said as they sped away.
Coe righted himself in the passenger seat and looked back.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I doubt we’ll be followed now.”
“How do you keep doing it?” he asked.
“Doing what?”
He cleared his throat. “Showing back up.”
She patted his knee. “All of your questions will be answered very soon.” She smiled. “Have I told you how proud we are of you, Mr. Coe?”
“Yes,” he said. “Er, no...well, a version of you has.”
“You’re silly,” she said. “Now make sure your seat belt is buckled. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you now.”
He looked out at the rooftops speeding by. “Where are we going?”
“Why back to Quantum,” she said.
“Quantum? Wait. Why Quantum?”
“You know the answer to that one, Mr. Coe.”
He watched her adjust the controls with her slender, perfectly manicured hands.
“I’m too tired to think,” he said. “Too tired for riddles.”
She smiled. “There’s only one,” she said.
And that seemed the unlikely, but obvious, answer all along.
Feeling tired lately? Need a little boost? Luckily for you, there’s In-VIG-or-8, from the makers of Hard Candy, the original erection-inducing lozenge—
Coe switched off the radio.
“Sorry,” she said. “I had the radio set to mood-sensor.”
She lowered the hovercar down onto the hoverpad of the Quantum Building, where a number of other crafts in Quantum’s hovercar pool were moored.
“Now what?” he asked.
“Well,” she said. “I’m not quite sure what kind of reception were going to receive.”
They stepped out of the craft. Carmen popped the trunk and removed what appeared to be an AK-47.
“Jesus Christ,” Coe said. “What are you planning to do with that?”
“Take down an army if I have to.” She slipped the strap over her shoulder and grabbed his hand. “C’mon.”
They entered the building.
They bypassed the elevator and used the stairwell. Their lonely footfalls echoed as they descended to the lower levels.
“Whose side are we on, anyway?” he asked.
“That question no longer has any relevance,” she said.
Coe took note of the numbers on the doors as they climbed down the steps. “There’s no forty-five.”
“What?” she said.
“You kept telling me to go to forty-five. But there is no forty-five. The first door was marked forty-four when we came in from the roof.”
“There’s a forty-five,” she insisted.
“There isn’t,” he said. “I’ve been watching.”
“Think of it as more of an attitude.”
“That sounds like a catchphrase from a commercial.”
“Oh, Mr. Coe,” she said.
They continued descending steps for some time until they finally reached the floor that Coe somehow knew they were destined to arrive at: twenty-seven.
The Auditing Division.
She went to pull open the door when Coe stopped her.
“Is this where I will get all of my answers?”
“We’ve got to tie up some loose ends, first,” she said. “I’m afraid it’s all about to get worse before it gets better.”
She opened the door and they entered the floor.
This advertisement has been pulled due to low rating.
Carmen walked to a desk and picked up a phone. She dialed an extension. “We’re here,” she said into the phone. “I figured you knew. See you soon.” She hung up.
“Who was that?”
“Locksley,” she said.
“Didn’t they just try to kill us back there?”
“And that directive has not changed.” She readied the AK-47. “You might want to get your gun out of your ankle holster.”
They moved cautiously down the aisles of empty cubicles. He recognized his own. A new SCOTT COE: AUDITOR nameplate was placed in the spot where Revis’s name had been. Just then, he heard Ms. Hunter talking on the phone. They turned a corner and found her at her desk. When she saw Coe, she hung up the phone, stood, and fell into his arms.
“Oh, Mr. Coe. I was so worried. I was afraid something terrible had happened to you.”
Coe looked to Carmen, who nodded.
Ms. Hunter kissed him. “I love you,” she said. “I want to leave here. I want to go with you. I want to leave this company, this city—go far away from this place. With you—”
She noticed the guns.
“What’s going on?” she asked, nervously. “Why do you have—”
Carmen said to her, “You might want to get under your desk now.”
Ms. Hunter hesitated. “Mr. Coe—Scotty, I don’t understand—”
“You better do it,” he said.
Up ahead, Mr. Orton and his colleagues appeared dressed in their white coats. Orton, upon seeing Carmen and Coe, cried out, “The Agents of Chaos are here!”
They threw off their coats to reveal studded bullet-belts crisscrossing their chests.
“Oh, Christ,” Carmen said.
Locksley and Shackleton emerged from an adjoining aisle, leading a pack of dangerous looking and heavily-armed, men.
“The Cabal,” Carmen said. “I knew it. I knew those two weren’t lawyers.”
“Cabal? What—what’s The Cabal?”
“The Quantum within Quantum,” she said.
“Huh?”
In the aisle across from Locksley, Shackleton, and The Cabal, Ms. Davenport appeared, leading a unit of Quantum security stormtroopers. Both Lyme and Mitchell were there, too; they were bound in handcuffs.
“I’ve assumed control of the Auditing Division,” Ms. Davenport proclaimed.
“Bitch,” Coe heard Ms. Hunter remark from beneath her desk.
“It seems we have a situation on her hands,” Locksley said. “With Arturio Golden out of the way—no thanks to Mr. Coe—we are free to go ahead with our takeover of Quantum.”
“Quantum?” Coe said.
Carmen said, “The Firm of Locksley & Shackleton—along with a group of investors, collectively known as The Cabal—had been the minority shareholders of Steele.”
“Quantum’s house counsel was invested in their chief rival?” Coe asked.
“They’ve been attempting to orchestrate a hostile takeover of Quantum,” Carmen said. “But Golden, the majority shareholder, was the loan holdout.”
Ms. Davenport cried out, “Bastards.”
“But,” Carmen said, “They’ve overlooked one simple, but key, complication. Ms. Hunter?”
From under her desk, Ms. Hunter said, softly—nervously, “Quantum already owns Steele.”
“What?” Locksley said.
“That’s absurd,” Shackleton said.
“It can’t be,” Ms. Davenport said. “When?”
“Seventeen years ago,” Ms. Hunter said. “It’s all quite complicated, and i
t involves a lot of transactions and subsidiaries and cross-pollination—too many to recount here from under my desk—but I assure you all, Quantum owns Steele.”
“Tell me,” Carmen said, addressing everyone present as well as any auditors who might be cowering beneath their own desks. “What is it exactly that Quantum does?”
“I’m not going to stand here and take this from an—an elevator operator,” Ms. Davenport said.
Carmen said, “You don’t know—none of you. You don’t know. You come to work everyday and you sit at your desks and complete forms and you run reports and you go over numbers and graphs and pie charts, and you measure your gains and losses, your successes and failures by these—bottom lines. But ultimately, you don’t know what any of it means. You don’t know what your seemingly mundane, innocuous little tasks—tasks you accomplish while not even thinking about them—do to your fellow man.”
“Bravo, Carmen,” Orton said. “Bravo. She does put a pretty face on our movement, doesn’t she?”
“Oh, shut up, Orton,” she said. “I’m no more a part of your rebellion than I am an elevator operator,” a statement that prompted Coe to say:
“What exactly are you, anyway?”
“I’m your savior,” she said without so much as a hint of a smile.
“What’s with Lyme and Mitchell?” Coe said to Ms. Davenport. “Why do you have them in handcuffs?”
“Political prisoners,” she said. “Part of the old regime.”
“She’s lost her mind,” Coe said to Carmen.
“She’s done half of our job for us,” Carmen said.
“Huh?”
Carmen raised her gun and pointed it at Ms. Davenport. “Tell your men to stand down. I’m here to advise you, that effective immediately, you’ve all just been terminated.”
Ms. Davenport sneered. “And by whose authority?”
“Alice Seeley.”
“Alice Seeley?” Orton said. “Alice Seeley is a folk rock band named for a missing child flyer.”
“Not that Alice Seeley, you idiot,” she said. “Alice Seeley. CEO of Quantum.”
Locksley said, “Bullshit. CEO of Quantum is...”
“It’s not someone named for a folk rock group, that’s for sure,” Shackleton said.
“You’re a fucking mole,” Orton said and drew his side arm. “I don’t believe it. We had a fucking snitch in our midst.”
He fired at Carmen, striking her in the left shoulder. She returned fire, shooting Orton in the face. “That’s for all the times you squeezed my ass,” said.
The Quantum security unit opened fire; so did Locksley and Shackleton and The Cabal. It was a dizzying scene. Bullets whizzed by, a cloud of smoke developed—the smell of cordite choked the manufactured, recycled air.
Lyme and Mitchell had no chance. They were the first to die. Ms. Davenport charged forward shooting Locksley in the heart; Shackleton took a bullet in the throat.
Carmen pushed Coe behind a desk and opened fire with the assault rifle. She made short work of the remaining factions. From Coe’s position, he could see Ms. Hunter beneath her desk, plugging her ears with her fingers. After a moment, it was all over.
“All clear, Mr. Coe,” Carmen said.
He stood. He realized he was still holding his handgun. He dropped it to the floor, as if it were responsible for the carnage—though he never even fired a shot.
He scanned over the dead. Locksley, Shackleton, Orton, Ms. Davenport, Lyme—Mitchell, his eyes still open, staring like a prawn. He longed for his old filing job in the Research Department back at the Philadelphia office—far from all of this destruction.
It was then that he noticed Carmen was bleeding in multiple places on her chest, abdomen, and legs.
“You’re hurt,” he said.
She lay the rifle down. “I’ve had just about enough of this business,” she said.
Ms. Hunter crawled from beneath the desk. She was weeping. Coe held her in his arms.
Carmen moved toward Ms. Hunter’s desk and picked up her phone. She dialed a number she seemed to know well. “We’ll need a clean up squad,” she said. “That’s right. Twenty-seven.”
Just then, something stirred within the mass of bodies. Smoke emerged from around the collars of both Locksley and Shackleton. Suddenly, mechanical wings sprung from the sides of their heads which detached from the bodies. Their heads flew upward.
Carmen noticed too late. She stretched for her gun, but a spray of bullets from Locksley’s head caught her in the chest and neck. She picked up the rifle, and in her dying breath, shot the Locksley cell-bot out of the air.
Coe dove to the floor to retrieve his gun as the Shackleton cell-bot swooped toward him. He picked up the gun when he heard Ms. Hunter cry, “No!”
She dove in front of him as the cell-bot fired a round of bullets at Coe. Ms. Hunter fell over him. He held her up and fired at the cell-bot. It took three shots, but he finally blasted it from the air.
“Ms. Hunter,” he said, and then more softly, “Delly...”
She looked up at him at this mentioning of his name. Coe felt blood on his hands where he held her. She’d been shot multiple times in the back. “Tell me,” she said. “Tell...me...”
She was gone.
He sat on the floor with her for some time, holding her—until a crew in white jumpsuits arrived to dispose of the bodies.
Fourteen.
A new reality awaits you in New Eden...where all of your dreams and realities come true. New Eden is currently accepting new applications. Join us in paradise, join us in praise—join us in oneness with the Creator, the all-benevolent being, the...
“Nice work,” Tate said as Coe passed him in the hall. “Did you take out Davvy? Please tell me you landed the kill-shot on that miserable bitch—”
“I didn’t kill anyone,” Coe said, stumbling toward the elevators.
“Well, anyway. It’s a much-needed shake-up in Auditing,” Tate remarked. “You’ll probably get Lyme’s old position for blowing the lid off of—hey? Where you going?”
Coe ignored him. A mobile unit drove past with the last of the bodies. He pressed the down button for the elevator.
“Remember us little guys,” Tate said. “Remember: I took you out and showed you a good time with you being a new guy and all...”
The elevator bell sounded—or a tone rather than a bell. The doors slid open. Carmen sat perched on her stool. “Good day, Mr. Coe,” she said.
It no longer surprised him. He stepped in and she closed the door.
“Going down?” she said.
Coe hesitated. “Forty-five,” he said.
“Excellent choice.”
The elevator started with a lurch.
Your advertisement here! Increase traffic to your site!
Increased traffic = increased revenue.
Who reads advertisements? YOU just did!
Call 555-1212 to reserve your space...slots going fast. Don’t wait!
“How do you fit in all of this?” Coe asked her.
Carmen, sitting on her stool, legs crossed—foot swinging—simply smiled.
“You’re not going to become coy now, are you?”
She held out her hands, palms up, and gestured to him. Cautiously, he lay his hands, palms down, over hers.
“I like you,” she said. “You were everything we could have hoped for...you really are. You played the game very well.”
“What does that even mean?”
“I’ve said too much.”
“Too much?” He pulled his hands away from hers. “I want to know what the hell is going on. What is all of this about? I think I’m owed that much—”
The elevator came to an abrupt halt. Coe fell back against the elevator wall. He realized he could not determine if they had been going up or down.
“Forty-five?”
“That’s right.” She stood, embraced him. “This has really been thrilling. It really has. You just can’t understand what a unique and wonderful experience I’ve had.”
“You’re not coming?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I’ve got to get back.”
“Back?”
She kissed him on the mouth. “Good bye, Mr. Coe. I’ve loved every moment getting to know you. I look forward to following your progress.”
“My progress?”
She opened the doors. “Good bye,” she said.
The elevator flooded with bright light.
“Go on now,” she said. “Don’t be afraid. You really couldn’t be any safer.”
Her voice faded.
“Carmen?”
She was gone; the elevator, too. He seemed to have no option but to step toward the light. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. When they did, he found himself inside a spacious room, surrounded on all sides by windows. Immense sunlight was pouring through. He’d forgotten just how bright the sun could be. He became aware the entire room was white: white carpeting; white walls; and white drapes.
On the far end of the nearly empty room was a white desk. At the desk was seated a woman in a white pants suit. She had long, flowing blonde hair. She was busy working on something.
“Mr. Coe?” she said, without looking up.
Her voice was oddly familiar to him, but he was unable to place it.
“I’ll be with you in a moment.”
He looked toward the windows. All he could see was sky—endless, blue sky. He guessed the forty-fifth floor was somehow above the rain clouds and surmised the Quantum Building afforded some sort of additional space not accessible from the other floors.
Finally, she stood and turned. Her face, like her voice, was both familiar and unfamiliar to him. As she started to walk toward him, she said, “Sorry about that, Mr. Coe. Business seems to follow me everywhere.”
There's Only One Quantum Page 13