Tanya pushed her cleaning cart around awkwardly, trying not to look too suspicious as she searched for the maintenance hatch. Bill’s old grey Carhartts didn’t fit her well. A balding, heavily bespectacled man turned from his typing to stare awkwardly at her. The lenses were so thick his eyes appeared many times their normal size. She smiled politely back. He quickly turned away upon being noticed. She just hoped that he had been admiring her and not the fact that she obviously wasn’t supposed to be there.
She turned her cart around the corner and noticed a slightly different-looking cubicle near the corner. Instead of a walk-in opening, a locked door completely sealed the contents of the inside. The door read Caution, Maintenance Only.
I wonder if lock-picking is in Vika’s repertoire? Tanya wondered
#
Qwiz’s muscles ached. He hadn’t thought about the consequences of climbing using gravity before. You couldn’t just stick to the wall with a small manipulation of gravity; you needed a significant change in gravity. Qwiz felt like he weighed twice as much as he normally did and even crawling had become exhausting. He estimated he was near the 70th floor. He rolled over and rested again. No wonder Tanya told me to leave early. This is hard work. He wished he could have used the elevators with the others, but it was just too risky to get through the detectors with all his equipment, they might have metal detectors embedded in the security.
But heroes didn’t give up when they got tired. They didn’t give up when they got scared. Heroes acted in the moment, doing the right thing no matter the cost or difficulty. Qwiz knew he was no hero, but it was what he had always striven to be. Live a life of courage and honor, his father had told him. But there wasn’t a lot of honor to be gained in fixing computers. And as exciting and fun as gaming was, it didn’t take a lot of courage to complete a digital quest or stand firm in the face of insurmountable 0’s and 1’s. But climbing the USNN Tower, striving to give the world a source of energy that could eliminate scarcity… that was different. For the first time in his life, Qwiz felt like what he was doing something that might make a real difference, might be worthy of honor. Qwiz had finally found the task that was worth risking his life over.
If only I could go faster. Maybe he could walk. It was worth a try at least. He felt as securely planted on the wall as he could be, walking could rest his arms and chunk the distance. Carefully, he rose to his feet. He could feel the regular Earth gravity pulling him toward the street, but the 126 overwhelmed it. The combination of the two gave him the sensation of walking steeply uphill, nothing he couldn’t handle. He rose to his full height, standing perpendicular to the wall.
His head became dizzy. Standing up straight, he couldn’t tell which direction was down. He took an experimental step, placing another BOG in front of him. Gravity shifted as the BOG moved. So did his insides. Qwiz realized the problem immediately. The well of altered gravity was too small for standing, his feet were pulled toward the wall but his skull wanted to fall to the street. The distortion curdled his stomach.
He quickly threw himself back down to the safety of his hands and knees. Instantly his queasiness subsided. But the jolt of crashing back against the wall combined with the shifting gravity field jostled his pack. In the scrum, the pistol popped loose from his pants. Artificial gravity pulled it down against the wall. Qwiz frantically reached for it, but it skittered away from his hand, just out of reach. As it slid away from the gravity dimple, the pull of the earth began to compete with Qwiz’s 126 for dominance.
Qwiz watched in horror, as the gun floated slowly away from the wall, almost perfectly suspended between the two gravity wells. It hung in the air twisting slowly, appearing frozen. He grabbed for it again, but a sudden gust of wind pushed it the rest of the way into the influence of Earth’s gravity. It slowly accelerated out of Qwiz’s reach until it began hurtling toward the ground according to Newton’s laws.
It smashed the pavement several seconds later. Qwiz winced as people around it scanned the skyline, looking for storm clouds that rained Glocks. They probably wouldn’t have seen anything, but even the stupidest suburban refugee would know that illegal guns just didn’t drop from the sky. Hopefully, none of them would call the carbon police… now he really had to hurry.
#
Luthor closed his eyes against a blast of wind that blew through the maintenance hatch opening. I am actually going to climb out of this hole, Luthor thought—sane and in my right mind? He steeled his reserve. He had been here before; he had beaten this before. He would do it again. At least there’s no jumping required this time, he reminded himself. He still felt the fear that haunted him for a decade trying to shut down his muscles and paralyze his mind, but now he felt the power within himself to choose to ignore it. The stomach churning remained, the dizziness remained, yet Luthor simply chose to not to be bound by the whims of his fear any longer.
Straining against his every instinct, Luthor reached outside and stuck a BOG firmly against the wall above the hole. Gravity shifted, adding to the terror-inducing sensation that he was about to fall. He added another below the hole, making sure if anyone slipped, they would be firmly anchored. Luthor reached out with a tentative leg; a shiver shot up it like a bolt of electricity. Luthor set his face firmly. No. Not this time. He stepped outside.
The sensation was extremely odd, it was more like climbing out through a hole in the ceiling than anything else. His hands naturally stuck against the wall. Bracing either side of the opening he pushed the rest of his body up and out. He breathed deep, pressing his face against the reinforced concrete. Luthor didn’t dare look around and stayed strictly prone. No need to mess with a good thing, right?
“Remember you are not sideways on the wall,” Vika said, turning to Bill as she joined Luthor outside, “we just changed gravity. The wall is now down.” She leapt out and clung to the wall like a panther. Tanya followed, looking more housecat than predator, but no less graceful.
Bill’s furry face popped out of the opening like a whack-a-mole. “Starting to wish I was old enough to need diapers because I’m about to piss myself. You people are crazy. Are you sure I’m going to stick?”
“The gravity seems to be a property of the element itself,” Michael said, from the shaft. “So quantum-ly speaking, there is a nonzero chance that the 126 will fail.”
“You’re saying I could fall?”
“Yes.”
“He’s also saying you could randomly burst into flames or teleport across the room,” Luthor added.
“Technically, yes. There are also nonzero chances of those things occurring.”
“Michael?” Luthor said.
“Yes?”
“Shut up.”
“Okay.”
Tanya offered him a hand. “Stone, I promise, you aren’t going to fall.”
Bill took it with minimal hesitation and joined them. He looked around wonderingly. “This is amazing, it really is down!”
“Your inner ear can’t distinguish between regular and artificial gravity,” Luthor said. “Whichever pulls harder is what you think of as the ground.”
When Michael had joined them, they started the arduous climb up to the next floor. It didn’t take long before Luthor began to feel sorry for Qwiz; he had to climb the whole thing.
“Wait,” Michael said, “what if the other maintenance hatch is locked? What are we going to do then?”
“Blast a hole in a window and break in the hard way,” Vika produced her handgun, almost caressing it, like she needed to shoot it.
“Why don’t we hold off shooting until we get there?” Tanya suggested. “Alarms won’t give us or Qwiz much time.”
The hatch itself was a steel door about half the size of a standard door. The passage had been designed to fit seamlessly in the space between the acoustical ceiling grid of floor below and the carpet of the floor above. The handle reminded Luthor of the latch that had secured the doors to the airplanes. He shivered, thankful he was only 60 stories up, and not 16,000
meters.
Standing perpendicular to the wall, Vika grasped it with both hands. Luthor held his breath. The handle turned 90 degrees and the door swung open. In moments they were inside.
Bill’s phone beeped. It was Qwiz.
#
Qwiz peered over the top ledge. Three men stood on the roof. One hung from straps on a giant antenna while the other two stood around not doing much of anything. Qwiz figured that the minimum number of supervisors per worker on any government project was two, leading to their current ratio. With only one guy working, odds were bad that they would complete the repair any time soon. Making matters worse, the two that weren’t climbing both had side arms.
Why two guards were on the roof assisting a mechanic, Qwiz could not ascertain. Regardless, Qwiz had the unfortunate predicament of trying to hack into the very equipment that the guards leaned on. And now he had no gun—not that he had proven particularly proficient at its use in the past. He had no reason to suspect his aim from altered gravity would be superior to his aim from a moving truck. Nor did any of the three men seem like they had done anything worthy of a death sentence, therefore a gun was the wrong tool anyway.
Qwiz rummaged through his bag of equipment to find his phone. He found it, but realized he didn’t have his voice modulator, there would be no way to disguise his identity from the sensors. He couldn’t exactly say, “please help me, I’m planning to hack past the USNN firewall, but there are guards in the way”. Stalker would be using all his resources to track them down and eliminate them, which meant he would have access to phone conversations.
After crawling down two levels so his voice wouldn’t carry, he called Bill. He took a deep breath and hit speed dial 1.
Bill picked up on the first ring. “You all set?”
“No. I am having trouble on the last level, right before the boss.” Bill would understand, but the censors would think he was talking about a video game.
“Oh right,” he said, “So ah, what seems to be the problem?”
“I don’t know how to sneak into the base. I am out of mana and the orcs took my sword. And there are guards at the top.”
“Shit,” Bill said. Qwiz heard intense, muffled conversation behind the earpiece.
“No … ah Sword? How in the name of Jesus H. Christ did you lose that?”
“I was climbing those cliffs. An orc used a spell, it made me drop it.”
More muffled conversation, all Qwiz could make out was an occasional curse word that slipped through the receiver.
“I will log in and come to help you.”
“What about the others?”
“Don’t worry about them, none of this will work if you can’t beat the level.”
The call terminated from Bill’s end. Qwiz laid on his back, waiting. Hopefully Bill would have a better clue to get rid of them than he did.
#
“We should send someone else. You know this building better than us,” Luthor said.
“I’ve never been on this floor either. Not sure why my eyes can search better than yours,” Bill replied.
Michael nodded, now that the old man had gotten them in the front door, he’d become much more decorative.
“I can’t just leave the boy,” Bill continued, furrowing his brows with worry, “with William thinking… what he thinks of me, Qwency has been as true of a son as I ever had. I can’t leave him up there alone. This has to be me.”
Michael gave him his best manly clap on the back. “Good luck, Stone.”
“I know how to climb with this stuff now, I don’t need no luck.” In a moment he was back outside, using half of their remaining eight BOGs to meet Qwiz.
Unfortunately, that left them to finish the far more tenuous task of finding the mythical transmission codes. William said they would be in an office of someone called the Transmission Security Director, but didn’t have a damn clue where that office could be found.
“Should we go door to door threatening important looking people?” Michael offered. “If somebody waved a gun at me, I’d point them in the right direction.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” Vika said, “you’d just soil yourself.”
“Trust me, I would.” Michael replied, not backing down. Usually, she could intimidate him, but she didn’t understand what it had been like to watch them shoot Eli. Not because he hadn’t told the truth, but just because he hadn’t told it fast enough. “I really don’t like it when my friends die on my account.”
“Let’s hope no one dies,” Tanya said.
“Spread out and look for that office, and meet back here in 15 minutes,” said Luthor.
Michael found nothing. In fact, the 60th, 61st, and 62nd floors hadn’t looked an atom different than any of the other floors in the polluted building—though the average beauty of his company had increased markedly once Vika had replaced Bill. Bored looking censors stuffed into matte grey cubicles filled every crevice of the open area. Their night was filled with the same monotony as the décor, reading other people’s emails, texts, and transcripts of phone calls. The edges of each floor were pock-marked with real offices made with actual walls and stuffed with slightly more well-paid censors.
The whole damn thing felt like a waste of time.
A text message popped up on the cell phone he’d “borrowed” from Ostafal. It was from Luthor, “better look like you’re working. Guard incoming.”
“Should we clean or something?” Michael asked Vika.
“The bathroom would be the safest location.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
Minutes later Michael wiped a rag across the bathroom mirror. It took a few extra to get all the streaks off. “This is the single most boring heist ever,” he said.
“Are you actually trying to give us away?” Vika responded, looking up from a urinal.
“It’s just that this should be more… exciting.”
“Do you really want someone to shoot at you?”
“No. But I am not cleaning the toilets. I refuse to clean up a rich man’s shit.”
“Why not?”
“I spent too many years on the street looking up at those high-rise smoggers with their suits and thousand credit shoes. During the Culling things got so bad I had to roam the sewers, wading through their excrement to hunt rats. Their crap literally covered me for years of my life. You see, only the rich had enough money to afford a sewer bill. I didn’t get all the shit cleaned off until I got drafted. I’m not voluntarily going to get back in it.
Michael paused and then added, “I wouldn’t ask you to flirt with a Saber. Don’t make me do this.”
Vika nodded. She finished her urinal and went into the first stall. She closed the door to have enough room to work. Michael squirted a blue cleaner onto another gold embossed mirror. Damn these smoggers and their expensive bathrooms. The bathroom was beautiful by anyone’s standard. Pristine, black marble countertops flowed seamlessly into sinks, girded with polished gold faucets. They even had automatic soap and paper towel dispensers. Is anyone so lazy that they can’t be bothered to press a button to get soap? What a waste of electricity. It was lavish, and it made him sick.
Vika flushed the toilet and moved to the next stall. “They are not even dirty.” “I
"I don’t care,” Michael said stubbornly. “Their shit stinks.” She didn’t understand. The Culling had permanently etched things into his brain. One of those things was the smell of rich poo.
Just then the bathroom door opened. A gigantic man in dark blue security fatigues strode in. He was nearly a head taller than Michael and easily twice as wide. The man bent the laws of physics to fit his massive arms into his rolled-up sleeves. A pistol hung in a holster on one side of his waist, a walkie-talkie and a mag-light on the other. Michael dropped his rag in spite of himself.
“I don’t remember seeing you before,” said the man in a voice befitting his size.
“Oh, that would make sense,” Michael said, trying to sound both genuine and s
mooth, but unsure if he’d managed either. “I just started.”
The man narrowed his eyes. “Is that a fact? When did you start? I am here every night, and I haven’t seen you cleaning.”
Michael felt like the guard was staring into his soul. He wanted to run. Unfortunately, the imposing man filled almost the entire doorway. He would have to ask the man to move just to squeeze around him.
Michael forced himself to smile. “I started on Tuesday, but they have been training me during the day. This is my first night shift.”
It had felt like a believable lie, but the man continued to press. “Who trained you?”
Michael could feel sweat beading on his forehead. “Oh, different people, I honestly don’t remember, I’m not very good with names.”
“Is that a fact?”
“Yes sir.” Michael gulped, but stuck out his hand. “Uh, what’s your name? I’m Michael.”
The man took his hand and shook it. “Well Michael, it just so happens that I am good with names.” He didn’t release Michael’s hand. “I also happen to be the head of security of these floors. I interview every new custodian who works here and am responsible for conducting their background check. I know a lot about anyone before they scrub their first toilet.”
He backed Michael against the countertop and squeezed his hand painfully. “And I have never seen you before.”
Michael was bent so far backward his head bumped against the mirror. “I am going to need to get a CPI scan from you, Michael; and then,” he smiled, “then you are under arrest.”
Michael began to panic, stammering his protest. “Honestly, it isn’t what you think, I swear I—”
“Move a muscle and you die.”
The man’s eyes widened as Vika jammed her suppressed pistol to his occipital lobe. Unfortunately, he quickly regained control of his emotions. He didn’t even look afraid. Vika used the mirror to gesture for him to slowly back away.
He did just as she asked. Then a step away from the mirror he jerked violently, whipping his hand around to bat the gun away. He fell in a bloodied heap before he came close to disarming her.
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