Scarcity

by Robert Calbeck

  “Only it wasn’t a terrorist. It actually was a civilian. A woman holding her baby. The bullets penetrated enough to kill the kid too. I shot an innocent mother and murdered an infant. That ain’t so good for your sanity. Every time I saw my wife or my son, I saw that poor woman and her baby… Every time.”

  Luthor felt another pang of guilt for Bill. He might not have endured the horrors of Antarctica, but he had nightmares of his own. Bad ones. Luthor had never killed a kid, just lots of oil-hungry Chinese. He wasn’t sure if he would have been able to be functional after a mistake like that either.

  “From what Quency has said, and from what I’ve seen of you in person, I know you aren’t that man I saw in there. The man in there was born in Anti; he don’t have to be you.”

  “But he is me. We are the same. I am the one who lived that life.”

  “Son,” Bill said seriously, “you aren’t. The problem you have right now is that you are just sharing the same body.”

  Bill’s gruff metaphor made a kind of simple sense to Luthor. He really had been there too; he understood. And he had successfully moved beyond it. “So how do I get rid of him? How did you do it? Or is that even possible?”

  “The problem is you’re both in the same place. If you want to be free of him, you have to let him out.”

  “No, I can’t do that! I’ve spent the last ten years working to lock that part of me away. It’s dangerous when he gets loose—you saw what I’m like. I try not to let him take over. Tanya deserves better than a broken, bitter, abusive man.”

  “Listen to me; you have to let him go.”

  “You just witnessed what happens when I lose control! I have to be stronger, so I don’t call honorable men cowards and curse at the people who saved my life.” Luthor hung his head, the full weight of his shame palpable on his shoulders.

  “Then why, after the son of a bitch is out, would you let him back in? He’s out right now Tenrel! Don’t welcome his ass back into his cage. I don’t care if you have a maximum-security prison in there, he will get out again. Trust me. I tried that. I lost my wife and my son trying to control it. But you can’t control it. You have to get rid of it.”

  “I would do anything not to lose Tanya. I love her.”

  “Luthor, the only way to keep her is to stay sane. Shove all those memories out every time they come in. Tell her your story Luthor—the whole damn thing—and anyone else who will listen. Be honest about having shit for temper control and goddamn PTSD. Just keep pushing that guy out so he can never make a mess again.”

  “Why are you trying to help me?” Luthor asked quietly. “I insulted you— and your honor—after you helped me. Nobody in their right mind would do that after what happened to William.”

  “I think you just answered your own question. I ain’t in my right mind. If I hadn’t been like you 30 years ago, I wouldn’t have to regret never knowing my own son, and not being there told hold my wife as she died. Maybe if I help you, this won’t hurt so damn much.”

  Luthor closed his eyes and hung his head again. He couldn’t have been more wrong about the kindhearted, veteran before him. The guy deserved the Medal of Valor, not a bastard who tore him down. “I’m sorry Stone. You are anything but a coward.”

  Bill nodded, accepting the apology. “So, what are you going to do now, Tenrel?” he said, reminding Luthor of a football coach. “You just spilled your guts all over the room. Your secret’s out. That asshole from Anti is out. Are you going to let him back in just to take over your life again, or do you have the courage to tell your story and keep that fucker out for good?”

  Luthor felt his heart surge. He wanted to try again. He wanted a fresh start at life. Maybe Bill’s idea would work. Maybe Luthor had tried the wrong strategy all along. Only… there wasn’t any time left.

  “What difference does it make at this point? I am going to be dead soon, along with the love of my life. Why bother starting over?”

  Tanya suddenly appeared around the corner, she had a tear in her eye. “Because I want you to. I don’t care if we only have one day left. I want you to try.”

  “How long have you been listening?”

  “The whole time. Bill told me to come along. He said I would hear what sort of man you are.”

  Emotions bubbled up Luthor hadn’t experienced properly in years. His atrophied tear ducts struggled to express his feelings with mere saline. Tanya stepped forward, cupped his face in her hands, and kissed him gently on the forehead.

  “Why would you want to be with me? You’re going to die because of me, and now you know what I really am. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “You’re the one who likes to say that women don’t make sense,” she said with a twinkle in her eye that was deeper than the tears. “I still love you Luthor, Antarctica and all. I don’t care how horrible you think you are. I want to be with you. For however long we have left.”

  The tears broke and Luthor began sobbing. He heaved and cried, and Tanya knelt next to and held him. It was as if the giant dam of locks and cages that stored all the times he had been unable to cry had suddenly collapsed. Years of pain and regret, joy and sadness, all roared forth at once in a deluge of emotion.

  Long minutes passed where no one said anything, no one dared. Finally, as the reservoir slowly drained, Luthor managed to collect himself. Everyone else stood around, no one looking with judgment, some even smiled at him. None of it made much sense.

  Answering his unasked question, Tanya spoke, “Bill and Vika explained it to us. We know that wasn’t really you back there.”

  Luthor shook his head. “Thank you so much, but please, go. They are going to come kill us. Dimarin is going to hunt us down and kill everyone who even knows my name.”

  Bill raised a very Vika-like eyebrow. “You giving up now, Tenrel?”

  “Doesn’t seem like I have much choice, we’ve already lost. Dimarin controls the media, he has worldwide carbon enforcement resources, and has access to the CPI databases. We can’t get our message out. And anyone we tell about 126 we will just be sentencing to death.”

  “I am not sure you heard me earlier,” Qwiz said without a hint of resentment. “We still have the research. And we still have a bit of your element left too.”

  “I still don’t see how that can help us. You of all people should know that. You saw what they did to my entire apartment just to cover their tracks. Dimarin will bomb whatever he has to, to ensure he’s destroyed us and the research. We will be dead tomorrow.”

  “Then we act tonight,” Vika said.

  Michael grinned again. “If we are going to share this with the world, we’ve got about twelve hours.”

  “It’s impossible,” Luthor said bitterly.

  “My old brain’s got a few more cobwebs than it used to,” Bill began, “but I seem to recall Quency over here already having an impossible plan.”

  “You mean we are going to steal the nuclear missile?” Vika asked hopefully.

  “I was thinking more along the lines of hacking the USNN broadcast,” Bill said. “But maybe next time we can steal a nuke.” Vika looked like she just found out that she wasn’t really going to receive a rifle for her birthday.

  “You’re insane,” Luthor said.

  “I believe we have already established that.” said Bill, “but then we’ve had a chance to see that you’re a few farts short of a turd yourself.”

  Luthor shook his head vigorously. They didn’t understand the danger. “You should be running. Not signing up for a suicide mission.”

  “What else have I got to live for?’ Bill said simply. “Might as well bust some commie skulls as I go.”

  Qwiz gave a sidelong glance to the old man, tactfully ignoring that they were, in fact, in the USW and not, in fact, communist. “And you won’t be able crack into the USNN uplink on the roof without me.

  Luthor couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Qwiz, don’t be a fool. Dimarin doesn’t know your name yet. You can still escape. Why would you r
isk your life for a bunch of condemned fugitives? You have so much to lose.”

  “My father always told me ‘courage isn’t defined by what you do, but by what you are willing to lose.’ If I were going to die anyway, helping you would be logical, but now I have the opportunity to do something truly honorable.”

  Qwiz and his honor; it would be the death of him.

  Luthor turned to Vika and Michael. Michael was several standard deviations closer to her than she would have allowed an average person—Vika had an exceptionally large personal space bubble. He nodded to Luthor, “what the hell. Like Qwiz said, what have I got to lose? We’re going to be dead tomorrow either way, right? He can’t let the ones who actually worked with the research live.”

  Luthor turned to Vika, “I’m sorry for what I said to you too. We would all be dead many times over if it weren’t for you.”

  “I am bad with words too, Tenrel,” Vika actually smiled, at least what passed for a smile from her “so forget the apologies. Let us kick Dimarin’s ass.” Michael nodded approvingly.

  Bill rubbed his hands together cheerfully. “Looks like everyone’s in. Let’s get cracking.”

  Luthor blinked. He must be dreaming. No. He couldn’t be dreaming: no one had died, there was no blood, no cold, explosions, or cannibalism. This was real. He smiled, shaking his head.

  “Thank you. All of you. I… I don’t deserve this kind of friendship.”

  “Knock it off, Tenrel,” Bill said. “We’re with you.”

  “We all hate how messed up this world is,” said Qwiz. “This plan is our best chance to fix it.”

  Luthor smiled. It felt strange.

  “Getting to the rooftop is easy, we have enough 126 to send someone up there,” Luthor said, “but how are we going to get a team inside to steal the transmission codes?”

  “That’s even easier,” stated Stone. “My job as janitor. I have a keycard and my Mark is on file. After what Stalker’s put him through, William might be willing to lend us his knowledge of the building too.”

  Luthor couldn’t help himself; he actually believed that their crazy plan might just work.

  Chapter 25:

  Outside the USNN Tower, Chicago, United States of the West

  “If I have to sneak into another secured area with a Mark scanner, I am going to cut somebody’s balls off,” said Vika tugging at her janitorial overalls.

  “Unfortunately, mine are already spoken for,” said Luthor, nodding at Bill. “But I believe Michael’s are ripe.”

  “So they are,” Vika said turning to a green dumpster and giving it a kick. Muffled cursing came from the receptacle.

  Tanya climbed into another green garbage can. “At least you don’t have to be stuffed in this damn thing.”

  “At least you have an identity.”

  “Touché.”

  “All of you, shut your pie-holes, “said Bill. “This ain’t gonna work at all if somebody hears you. Don’t forget your Seebees either.”

  Luthor shut the lid of his own dumpster and said nothing more. The absence of light highlighted the stench accumulated from years of waste removal. Luthor covered his nose with the scanner-jamming glove. It effectively protected him from the inevitable scanners at every entrance to the government building, but was somewhat less effective at protecting him from the smell.

  Two swift knocks on the lid were the only prelude to Bill rolling the dumpster forward. Vika rolled Tanya in; Michael had to wait. Thanks to Ostafal, Vika was now impervious to the CPI security protocols; she also had no identity nor could legally own anything. Ever. A rough tradeoff. A mechanical beep followed by a series of clicks indicated that Bill had unlocked the steel security door using his keycard and CPI chip. A slight bump on the threshold indicated he had passed through the overhead scanners and made it inside.

  The plan was relatively simple. Disguised as janitors they had to infiltrate the building, find the security codes, and send them to Qwiz. Qwiz, who had left earlier and hopefully was already close to the roof, had to tap into the hard line feeding the primary USNN satellite dish. Once they sent him the codes, he could transmit an interview they had recorded earlier with William’s help, thereby transmitting a special report to the world. Right, simple. Simple as quantum mechanics.

  The only flaw in their hastily devised scheme lay in actually finding the codes. William told them they would be somewhere between the 60th and 65th floors. These floors were where the executives and producers worked.

  After about fifteen minutes, Bill and Vika had rolled each of them into Bill’s janitor closet. Luthor gratefully climbed out of the olfactory torture device. He too wore janitorial overalls.

  “I bet William my truck that the codes are going to be somewhere on the 63rd floor,” Bill put a few spray bottles of disinfectant on a cart and started to wheel it out the door. Luthor stopped him, “so you’re certain they’ll be there?”

  “Nope,” Bill said brightly, “I just wouldn’t mind losing that smogging pile-of-crap truck. But it’ll be somewhere close. I mostly clean on the lower levels, but I know you need a special access card on a different elevator to even get to the 60th through the 65th floor. If they have anything worth hiding, they’d put it where I couldn’t find it.”

  “Smart of them,” said Vika.

  “All I know is they don’t take much liking to anyone poking around on the 59th, if you know what I’m saying.”

  “But that’s where the maintenance hatch is?” Tanya asked.

  A building bristling with that much communication equipment needed a way to repair it. Bill had informed them of hatches throughout the building leading to the outside for just such a purpose. If they could find the hatch on the 59th, they could use it to exit the building and then climb the exterior to the 60th through 65th floors using 126.

  “Like I said, I ain’t seen it. But if my boy says it’s there, then I’d believe him.”

  Luthor put an arm around the old man and patted his shoulder. “Thank you for coming. We couldn’t do this without you.”

  #

  What have I gotten myself into? Qwiz thought as he looked down, or rather sideways. He knew it was down, but it felt very different. To him the vertical face of the skyscraper was down. He was about 40 stories up, and the contrast had become highly disconcerting. It scared him that he didn’t feel afraid. Heights were supposed to give butterflies to all but the most fearless of men. He knew for a fact that he wasn’t fearless. But for all the world it felt like he was crawling unbearably slowly on flat ground.

  He placed another wad of their element above his head and felt gravity subtly shift in that direction. This is going to take some getting used to. Oh well, I have another 50 floors of crawling to figure it out. He crawled forward half a meter and the repeated the painstaking process.

  He felt naked up on the side of the building. Who knew who would randomly look up from the street and see a small Asian man scaling the massive edifice? He pushed it out of his mind; now was not the time for second-guessing, it was the time for courage. Cognitively, he knew he was all but invisible on the side of the structure, it was just hard to remember that this high up. He wore all black and was fully obscured by the jungle-like lattice of communication equipment girding the outside of the building.

  The building was the main hub for all the communications in the entire Chicago area, and therefore needed an absurd quantity of cell towers, satellite dishes, and communication arrays. It looked like a man-made millipede with all its protrusions. Qwiz desperately wanted to see the cabling connecting into the subbasement. It boggled his mind the amount of bandwidth the building would require. Millions of people’s internet usage, all eventually funneled through this place. Qwiz could almost feel the electromagnetic buzz in his skull with all that information shooting around. He couldn’t wait to get his claws on that rooftop satellite array.

  This is so boring, Qwiz thought, I’m never going to get there. He sidestepped, or rather side-crawled, a cell array mounte
d directly in his path. He passed quietly over a dark window and heard a thump from the inside of the glass.

  Qwiz froze. He hardly dared breathe, someone had caught him. It had only been a matter of time, he just hadn’t expected it this soon. Curse my ineptitude, I have ruined everything. I am sorry Luthor, I hope you can forgive me from whatever dark dungeon they’ll send you to.

  Then he saw what had made the noise. A lowly stapler, firmly stuck against the inside pane of the window. By placing the 126, he had changed the gravity inside the office as well. The stapler obediently fell toward the new orientation of gravity defined for it by Qwiz.

  He rolled over on his back and took a deep breath. Crisis averted. A poke jabbing him in the back reminded him of the gun Vika had made him stuff back there. Hopefully, he would never be put in a situation to use it. Realizing he couldn’t sit on the outside of the building forever, he shuffled forward, up and away from the window. He had to find a way to go faster, or he wouldn’t be ready when the others recovered the transmission codes.

  #

  Tanya sighed. The 59th floor had quickly become a depressing place. It contained nothing more than a bunch of cubicles with computer terminals. Even at this time of night, hundreds of men and women sat and mechanically clicked through other people’s emails and listened to recorded conversations all in the name of national security. Tanya had known that the government still monitored and censored communications, but she honestly had not ever imagined it would be on this scale. It had been ten years since the war had ended, when would they terminate this stupid practice? There hadn’t been much national tension with China in years—not that there had exactly been much communication either. Still, seeing the entire floor dedicated to nothing but censorship helped her understand the scale of their monitoring. And each floor of the 90-story building had equally large numbers of people doing the same thing. Their sole purpose was to double-check anything flagged by their AI algorithms. And there were dozens of other buildings in the area filled with the sensors who screened less-critical data. Excessive would be putting it mildly.