Time Heist

by Anthony Vicino

  The problem with micro-expressions is they tell you what a person is feeling, but not why. It takes creative guesswork and some empathy to root out the underlying motivations.

  Contempt is simple. He disliked me. That was not surprising; I have that effect on people.

  The shame was trickier. It was the one he'd concealed, so that made it important.

  I wanted to believe he felt shame for releasing Malcolm, but reading emotions is like looking into a crystal ball. Sometimes you simply create a narrative convincing enough to sell the client.

  In this case, I sold myself on a story of my own making. A questionable business plan at best.

  "I am perfectly content with my work here," Emilio said, his words a series of stutters and stops. "And furthermore, you are mistaken if you believe I will sit idly by while you impugn my honor with any such accusation to the contrary."

  His anger was genuine, but not the source. Something else rode beneath the surface of his indignant outburst. Emilio wasn't a hardened criminal, which suggested he'd been pulled into this against his will; that would explain the shame.

  "Our window of opportunity to apprehend Malcolm Wolfe is closing, and you waste my time with these tangential accusations?" Emilio stood, a praying mantis unfolding his limbs.

  No arguing there. But truth was, Malcolm's gone. To catch him, we'd need a boatload of luck and stupidity. Luck on our part, stupidity on his.

  Each as unlikely as the other.

  "Then help us open that window. Tell us why you helped him escape," I said, ignoring Raines trying to murder me with her stare. So much for being subtle, but like I said, my toolbox was sparse, and a hammer can only do so much.

  Emilio perked his eyebrows to force an emotion he clearly didn't feel. Shock.

  Definitely lying.

  Twenty years on the force had honed my skill as a personal lie detector to a razor's edge. True, I'd allowed that edge to rust in the intervening years, but rusty or not, there's no mistaking the look of fake surprise.

  Emotions follow a distinct time line and they're quick. Surprise doesn't linger awkwardly like a failed first kiss. Anything more than a second, and it's fake. That simple.

  "You need to leave," Emilio said.

  On cue, the door opened and a large man with a neatly trimmed beard and the uniform of a prison guard stepped into the office. The guard turned, his hand resting on the butt of the rifle slung around his neck. An alarm went off in the lizard part of my brain. Instinct set my body in motion before consulting with the rational part of my brain and I lunged sideways, driving my shoulder into the door.

  The guard pivoted too slowly to clear the path of the closing door. It slammed him into the wall, but the guy bounced back, unfazed, with his rifle raised. He had me outgunned, but I was a blur of movement thanks to the nanite upgrade I'd received in Raines’ Fly.

  I leaped at him and snatched the barrel of the weapon before he took aim at my face.

  Realizing he'd lost the range advantage, he changed tactics on the fly. He swung the butt of the rifle towards my head with enough force that I stood to lose a couple teeth and consciousness if it connected.

  I dropped, letting gravity do the work of pulling me to the ground. Air from the man's strike swished through my hair. I hit the floor and rolled, sliding the pistol from the guard's holster as I moved past.

  I popped up like a nanotized prairie dog with the vortex pistol aimed at the back of the man's head. "The world doesn't need more heroes,” I said, flicking the safety off with an audible click.

  The guard tensed, shoulders rising to his ears, and dropped his weapon.

  Minutes later I had the guard wrapped up on the floor, wrists tethered to ankles, thanks to the restraints he'd been considerate enough to bring on his utility belt.

  "What do you hope to accomplish?" Emilio asked, puffing his chest despite the tremble in his hands. "Certainly you realize you're a dead man? This is my island. Nobody gets on or off without my permission."

  "Is that an admission of guilt?" I asked, closing the door and engaging the lock.

  Emilio's face went through an interesting color change. "There's nothing to admit."

  Things were moving fast, and if I had any hope of getting Raines off that floating island with blood still in her veins, we couldn't afford to be standing around when reinforcements came. But, Castille hadn't given us what we'd come for and I wouldn't leave until he did.

  I had a final card to play. One I hated. Thinking about it made my stomach sink into my leg and take cover behind my knee.

  Lou tried giving me a job like this last night. Turning him down hadn't been hard when it was only my life on the line. That had stopped being the case about an hour ago.

  Something had to be done, a decision made. A better man might have classified the options in categories of good and bad, but I wasn't that man.

  In the end right or wrong didn't matter anymore. I'd do anything to protect Raines. Anything to stop Malcolm.

  "Do you know how I caught Malcolm the first time, Emilio?" I asked.

  For what came next I needed to access the Time Bank archives, but for security purposes Pause ran off its own subsystem. A derivative, weaker, version of the Stream. Making the jump to the Stream would require a boost in my signal strength.

  I blinked into Pause's network and located the untapped capacity of half a dozen guards and secretary types. Rerouting their nodes to mine was all the push I needed to link with the Stream.

  "You're an Intuit." He said the word as if trying to purge a bad taste from his mouth.

  I could sympathize. He did, after all, spend the majority of his time surrounded by the most dangerous Intuits the world could imagine. Being the only ones capable of walking the tight line of the neural network, sliding between firewalls and encryptions to manipulate the source code itself, made it so the only white-collar time criminals were Intuits. This was a fact that did nothing to ingratiate us law-abiding Intuits with the general population.

  We were feared at best. Hated at worst. Not a great platform to breed acceptance.

  We aren't good at accepting what we don't understand. And nobody understood the Intuit phenomenon, or what caused it. No genetic component had been found. Best theory attributed it to the formation of neural pathways at birth.

  Genetic or not, our numbers grew each year. But while estimates of the Intuit population varied, one thing was certain: fewer lived today than nine years ago when Malcolm went and murdered one million Intuits.

  How he'd managed to hack the Life Tracker system so thoroughly remained a mystery that haunted me every night in the faces of the dead that visited my dreams. Those lives were on my shoulders, an anchor tied to my soul. A minute faster and I could have stopped him. Could have saved them.

  Saved Diana.

  The public-relations fallout thanks to Malcolm's psychotic break was immeasurable. Citizens saw firsthand just how vulnerable Life Trackers were in the hands of an Intuit, and it was terrifying. People called for tighter oversight of the Intuit population. The Unity leadership tried forcing Intuits to register themselves in a worldwide database. That might have worked if they hadn't also tried suppressing Stream access for all Intuits.

  You can't keep someone in a cage if they have the key to the door. Though in the case of the Intuits, they didn't just have the key to the door, they had the key to the entire system. A small team of thirteen anonymous Inuits proved this to the rest of Unity one spring morning nine years ago when they shut down the Stream for ten minutes.

  Ten minutes was all it took to make their point.

  President Jennings vetoed the motion to tag Intuits later that day. He went so far as to squelch all anti-Intuit rhetoric coming out of the media, and built his platform on the idea that the Intuit population could be Unity's greatest resource if used properly.

  This didn't sit well with the general population, but what could they do short of war? Nothing. There was nothing they could do but bottle the frus
tration and rage that comes with knowing they were obsolete and vulnerable. The years between had passed in relative peace, but the tension lingered, a festering wound.

  One spark was all it would take. One flame to ignite the whole damn thing.

  Malcolm wanted to be that spark. Whatever he had planned this time, I couldn't afford to pull punches. Bad news for guys like Emilio who'd be caught in the crossfire. Collateral damage was the unavoidable consequence of stopping Malcolm.

  I rummaged through the Time Bank archives, ignoring the dizzying array of data zipping past, before coming to Emilio Castille's account.

  I removed everything I could.

  The shrill cry of the Safeguard shattered the silence like smashed porcelain. Raines and Castille showed equal amounts of surprise, but the Warden was first to realize what had just happened. He scrabbled at his coat sleeve, desperate to get to the numbers beneath. His face, a hollowed white husk, stared in disbelief at the ten minutes remaining on his Life Tracker, thanks to the Safeguard.

  I had cocked the proverbial gun held to his head.

  Centuries worth of Intuits had tried cracking the Safeguard, implemented by the creator of the Life Tracker system, Leopold Hallond, but where everyone else had failed, only one had succeeded: Malcolm Wolfe. The rest of us were limited by the Safeguard. A safety measure making it so nobody could take a man's time and kill him outright. Nobody except Malcolm.

  Ten minutes, however, gave me plenty of time.

  Emilio's white saucer eyes searched for understanding. He rubbed the bars on his arm as if the true ones hid beneath. But that was it. I'd relocated the rest to a holding account until I got the answers I needed.

  I wasn't gonna kill the guy, but he didn't need to know that.

  "Agents from Time Vice monitor my biofeedback. They'll restore the time you've stolen," Emilio said once the initial shock of his circumstances wore off. He turned to Raines. "Your friend will be dead by the end of the day, but you will spend the rest of your life behind bars paying for this indiscretion as an accomplice to his crimes. Stop this now and I will vouch for you. We may yet mitigate the damages to your career."

  Raines plopped into the chair across from the Warden's desk. She'd never been shy about making the hard decisions that sometimes lead an investigation down the rabbit hole. Our job required us to follow the breadcrumbs wherever they might go, a task harder than it sounds. Those clues have a way of taking you to places you can't come back from.

  Places that change you.

  Places like this.

  She stood at the crossroads of a decision that would affect the rest of her life. It wasn't too late to stop. She could take me in and hope to land in the good graces of Time Vice on account of poor personal judgment, or she could blunder through on the sliver of a chance that we could stop Malcolm.

  She weighed the options. The scales swayed in her mind. Her children, her career, her life sat on one side. On the other sat the shell of a man she once knew—once loved—and an obligation, heavy as the one I carried, to stop Malcolm Wolfe from breaking the world.

  A decision in either direction could be considered selfish.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Men Without A Past

  "Why did you help Malcolm escape?" Raines cast her lot and reiterated my question.

  "You won't kill me."

  "I don't recommend gambling on his good will," Raines said.

  The underlying message, if you were listening for it, implied she'd been burned by that same gamble.

  "Raines, what do you suppose the odds are that Time Vice is monitoring the Warden's biofeedback?" I said.

  "Pretty damn good, I'd say."

  "How about his daughter, Chloe?"

  "Oh." Raines shook her head in mock sympathy. She played her role of callous interrogator well. "Less good."

  "That's what I thought."

  "Bring her into this and you're no better than Malcolm Wolfe," Castille said.

  "I never said I was."

  I blinked into the Stream, skipped back up to the Time Bank's archives, and quickly located Chloe Castille's file. A small picture of the girl appeared in the upper-right corner of my screen.

  Talk about aging the hard way. She looked to be twenty-two going on seventy.

  Bags beneath her eyelids drooped until they touched the bridge of a crooked nose. Her skin was yellow tissue paper left to rot in the sun, a warped maze of wrinkles and cracks. It didn't take a junkie to know a junkie, but it didn't hurt. Her Life Tracker confirmed the truth: she wouldn't live to see thirty.

  Poor Chloe was deep into an addiction that meant more to her than living. From her withered frame I'd guess Star Dust, a nasty little pill that eats the body from inside in exchange for twelve hours of chemically induced bliss.

  After that first hit life becomes a series of peaks and valleys. Soul-crushing depression interspersed with the ever-decreasing euphoric high. Most Dusters take their own lives rather than waiting for Mother Nature, or the Tracker. But in the Lowers that doesn't matter. It's easy to make and easier to get.

  The tragedy of youth. We'd conquered death, but chained ourselves to its yoke anyhow.

  I was in no place to judge.

  I understood Emilio Castille's position. I imagined myself toeing that same line if the positions were reversed. The one even good men swear they'll never cross.

  But every man who's eyed that line long enough starts thinking maybe one step over wouldn't be so bad, if it's for the right reason.

  It's always for the right reason.

  That's how we justify it, anyhow.

  "What kind of deal did you make to save your daughter?" I asked, exiting the Stream and turning to the Warden. "More time?"

  Emilio deflated, collapsing into himself and his chair. The bravado evaporated. The Warden, no longer keeper of the thousands of criminals calling Pause home, was now simply a father afraid of losing his daughter.

  His face sagged and cratered. It showed the pain gnawing at every well-intentioned decision he'd ever made on behalf of Chloe. I pitied Emilio. He still clung to hope. To the belief he could save his daughter. I saw it etched in the lilt of his eyes. But he could do nothing to save Chloe in the same way Raines could do nothing to save me.

  We'd made our deals and the devil doesn't take substitutes. He's tasted our weakness; he knows we're worth the wait.

  "Time Vice won't let her keep those years," Raines said. "Not when they figure out what you've done."

  "There are no years. They're going to fix her." Castille looked up with wet fishbowl eyes. "I did what they asked. They'll fix her. It'll be worth it."

  Raines cast me a sideways glance. She hadn't seen Chloe's file so she didn't fully grasp the situation, but I had. That girl was beyond reconstruction.

  Emilio knew that—part of him, at least. Denial straight to death's door.

  It wasn't my place to tell him his sacrifice was in vain. That she'd continue her decline until she swallowed a bullet or chewed through her Tracker's remaining time. I couldn't make that judgment of any man or woman.

  "Emilio, I can tell you love your daughter. I don't blame you for wanting to save her. You're her father." Raines leaned across the desk and placed a tanned hand atop the Warden's. "There's nothing you wouldn't do to protect her. I understand that, but you know what Malcolm is capable of. You've seen firsthand what he's done. He'll do it again unless you help stop him." Raines paused, letting her words sink into the Warden. "Don't give him the chance to kill again. Help us. Tell us who you're working for."

  "She's my daughter," Emilio said, with a half-sputtered whimper. He teetered on the brink. Swaying with the weight of each word.

  "Give her a world worth living in," Raines said, her voice smooth, comforting, and controlled. It commanded the Warden's attention. Raines became the entirety of his world, his focus. He stared into her eyes, a snake dazzled by its charmer. "One where the nameless few sacrifice on behalf of the many. To protect those unable to do so themselves.
You can be part of that world."

  Raines navigated the Stream like a blind woman, but she had a gift that made her as unique as any Intuit.

  If I was a digital wizard then Raines was an emotional sorceress. The counterpoint to my unique skill set, which included little in the department of empathy.

  She manipulated people like I manipulated the Stream. Humans must have buttons and levers 'cause she knew where they were and how to push them. It's unnatural, spooky, and borderline unethical. I'd complain if her gift wasn't so damned helpful.

  Her ability to connect with strangers went beyond reading facial twitches and inferring motives. She could read minds and direct thoughts. At least that's how it looked from my perspective.

  Emilio's tear-soiled eyes confirmed my suspicion; he was putty in her hands.

  "I don't know where he is," Emilio said, breaking the long silence. "Malcolm, that is. Somebody else came. Somebody with power." He paused, searching for a word perched on the edge of his tongue. "A lot of power."

  "How did they contact you?" Raines asked.

  "Here. One man. That's all."

  "Did you get a name?"

  "Daniel Brandt. He came...uh, from a branch of Division I'd never heard of, but everything checked out in the Stream. I mean, what could I have done? His clearance level outranked mine."

  The government conspiracy angle is a crowd favorite, but it's a tough sell. Despite the small army of nanites working overtime in my brain, however, I could detect no deception leaking from the Warden.

  Castille couldn't tell a convincing lie to a wall, so while what he said might be fiction, the man himself believed every word.

  "Show me," I said.

  "There's nothing to show." Emilio frowned as if he'd been punched. "It's gone. All of it."

  I cocked my head and said, "Define gone."

  "A virus crashed the Pause independent network. We switched to the Stream for a few days while we reconstructed the Pause feed. But it didn't matter, everything had been erased. Our entire network...deleted. Gone."