by David Yoon
After that, Pilot would probably take Max and Akiko and Shane and Brayden somewhere else. God knew where. And they would have no choice but to go.
Unless.
Max took a breath and began formulating a to-do list.
Jump Pilot.
Restrain him somehow.
Get his laptop.
Stop whatever cyberattack he had planned. Somehow.
Max eyed the open floor panel and could see other items stored there: sponges, window cleaner, lassos of Ethernet network cables.
Ethernet cables, named after aether, or heaven. A divine name for what amounted to information plumbing. But if you wanted to fashion yourself as a god, Max guessed, giving your world godlike names was a way to start.
“Thank you,” said Pilot to Max. “No one needs to see this sort of thing.”
Now there were two black tarps hulking on the floor of the arena. Max rose and gave Shane as meaningful a glance as he could muster through the mesh in his mask: at the network cables, at him. Did he catch it?
Akiko did. She buried her face into Shane’s neck, and Max could see her jaw moving just slightly beneath her mask, whispering.
“Who wants to go next?” said Pilot with a bright sigh.
3.3
Silence.
What Max needed was a moment of opportunity.
What would be a good moment of opportunity? And if that moment came, what signal would he give to Shane? Would he wait for Pilot to cross his forearms and then, while the sparks flew and the screams rose, tackle Pilot to the ground?
Max could not wait for another person to die. He would have to somehow make his own moment of opportunity.
But how?
“Mister River,” said Pilot. “You are quiet as a mouse. What are you thinking?”
River Askew could only stare at Pilot, his white hands kneading his knees.
“What would you promise your loyal subjects, O great disruptor of the travel service sector?” said Pilot with a chuckle.
Oh my God, thought Max. Pilot was enjoying himself.
“I want to give you what you want,” said River Askew. “Just tell me what it is, Mister Pilot.”
Pilot’s face darkened like a cellar door falling shut. “It is not about what I want, River. It is about what is right for humanity. Do not ask me what I want. No one can give me what I want, not ever.”
“What,” said River Askew, swallowing once, “what is it, that you want?”
“I want Noelle back.”
“You want absolution. I understand that.”
“You obviously do not understand,” said Pilot with a sneer. “No one with your record could. Five murders in your cars. Dozens of rapes by drivers. Lodging lenders blocking minorities, using flats for prostitution. I could go on. You understand why I want you to clarify your wishes for your enterprise.”
Pilot raised his arms, and hope began to leave River Askew’s eyes.
“Now,” said Pilot. “What do you promise?”
River Askew was too tremblesome to answer.
Max glanced at Shane, who glanced back. He hoped he was ready.
Max cleared his throat. “Pilot, Noelle’s death was not your fault. You have to stop blaming yourself.”
It was a risky tack to take. But maybe he would get Pilot riled up and monologuing. Maybe he would open a window for Shane to pounce.
“Of course it was my fault,” said Pilot. “What do you think this is all about?”
“We need to let these guys go home, like we planned,” said Max. He searched for a provocative next thing to say. He found it: “These CEOs are innocent.”
“Five driver murders, five Noelles,” said Pilot. “Jonas Friend there watches our every move with Milc phones made by child slave labor in China. And there is Cal Peers; who knows how many suicides and murders have been livestreamed on Wren without consequence. How much bullying and trolling and deceiving. They are hardly innocent. No one leaves until I am satisfied with a promise, any kind of promise, to fix the broken world they have built.”
“How about I move my whole supply chain to the United States?” said Jonas Friend. “Would that make you happy?”
Pilot narrowed his eyes. “Jonas clearly does not get it.”
Shane let go of Akiko, but did not make a move. Neither did Max. What if Pilot slipped their grasp?
Dammit, thought Max. Pilot had given them a good long stretch and they waited too long. Max needed to keep Pilot talking and distracted.
“What’s it gonna take to satisfy you?” said Max. “Just kill everyone?”
“Do not give him ideas,” said Cal Peers.
“These people,” said Pilot, “are a cybernetic hive mind. They swoop in. They reduce the world to that which can be expressed only through their algorithms. They assimilate everyone and everything they touch.”
Pilot was revving up. Max looked at Shane: Get ready.
“When you begin to believe that Wren equals society and that Knowned equals discourse and that your phone equals freedom of speech, then you, too, have become part of the cyborg collective.”
Max nodded: One, two, three.
Suddenly the doors above the arena slid open. Max could hear a rhythmic sound, as in thwopthwopthwop, and knew at once it was a helicopter.
Fuck yeah, Brayden.
He saw Brayden’s mad yellow crown of hair appear, and an object come lobbing down into the arena to explode in a giant asterisk of sweet foam.
A champagne bottle.
Pilot fell dripping wet from his seat.
Brayden stepped into the arena kick-pushing a cardboard box. He wore a Black Halo mask. He reached in and sent another bottle flying. It hit Pilot squarely in the back.
“The chopper’s here,” shouted Brayden through his mask.
“Now,” said Max.
Shane lunged. He reached for Pilot, but Max, who was going for the Ethernet cables, slipped on a curve of glass made invisible by all the wet and knocked into him—a crucial, tragic misstep, one Max would never forget for the rest of his life, for Pilot was now able to stand and aim his forearms skyward to conjure a sickening scream from above.
Brayden.
“No,” cried Akiko. She rushed up the stairs toward him.
“Motherfucker,” said Shane. He fell upon Pilot like a bear gone wild with hunger; Shane, two-time district wrestling champion back in high school, pinning each of Pilot’s limbs into a helpless X with ease.
“Get the rope,” screamed Shane.
Max scrambled to grab two coils of networking cable.
Shane punched Pilot two times in the face—pop pop, hard as a nailgun—to render him limp.
“Chair, now,” shouted Shane.
Max knew what to do. He and Shane began dragging Pilot to the chair through the wet broken glass, hoisting him into seated position, and tying him down. He tied his legs to the chair legs, his arms to the chair arms, his back to the chair back. He had never been this close to Pilot. He was a dead-heavy man, with dense rubber limbs falling into stubborn angles.
Through the sweat and heat of his mask Max could see the three surviving CEOs making their way up toward the exit.
Thanks for hanging out, assholes.
“Go check on Brayden,” said Shane, and just as he said it they both knew it was loud enough for the cameras to hear, loud enough for the world to hear: Brayden. Max could see the queries flitting about online, searching for any connection to Pilot Markham.
Not that it would matter after the next few moments.
When Max reached Brayden he was in a bad way. The worst way. Akiko cradled the boy’s head in her arms.
“Get this mask off me,” whispered Brayden. “We should go.”
“Okay,” said Max. “Okay, man.”
Max removed the mask. Brayden looked up into Akiko’s hair.
“You smell good,” said Brayden, and died.
Akiko’s wail echoed through the arena.
Below, Shane slammed fist after fist into Pilot’s face with the steady rhythm of a clockwork escapement.
“He was good,” screamed Shane. “He was good.”
3.4
Max looked at Shane. Max looked at Akiko. Both stood frozen in a strange pose, staring with confounded wonder at their wristbands. Were they safe, with Pilot now restrained? Could they cut them off now, or would they explode if they tried?
River Askew was gone. Jonas Friend was gone. Cal Peers was gone.
Linda Belinda and Hunter Mole were still here, under black tarps.
Max looked at the ragged window raging with white wind and could picture all the other cameras concussing one after another to bring the whole arena ceiling crashing down.
The whole building.
Max found himself talking.
“What do we do with him?” said Max.
“We end this fucker,” said Shane.
“Baby, you can’t do that,” said Akiko.
“But he fucking deserves it,” said Shane.
“Unh,” said Pilot. He opened an eye and cast it about. Your CEOs are gone, thought Max. And soon we will be gone, too. Except.
Except.
Max blinked behind his mask. In his mind there was a decision node fast approaching, and he swallowed it like a ball of black-green phlegm.
“We need to fly the fuck out of here,” said Akiko. “We should just leave him.”
“What if he escapes?” said Shane.
“Where’s he gonna go?” said Akiko. “He’s the world’s public enemy number one.”
The three of them looked at Pilot: this person, this man, now so alien, hunched in his chair with his chin touching a bib of spittle and red.
“I trusted you,” said Max. “You took my trust and you used it.”
“But we are of the same mind,” said Pilot with a slow thick tongue. “Me. You. Same.”
Max’s gut twisted, because who the hell was he to talk about trust? He looked at Shane and Akiko and wanted to lash them together and catapult them to safety and apologize for everything: for all the wanting, for the betrayal.
Oh, he was a fine one to talk about trust, all right.
But was anyone, really?
No more talk. Max just had one thing left to do, and he would do it.
There were moments in life, so many of them, and it was only ever in hindsight that you could tell which were significant and which were not. There was no way, for instance, of telling whether you were seeing someone for the last time, forever and ever, infinity.
Max glanced down at something on Akiko’s waist. It was a small black object.
A magic eight ball.
Akiko saw him see, and she tucked the eight ball into the small watch pocket in the front of her jeans with a gentle push of her thumb. It was a practiced gesture. Max thought she could probably just as deftly remove the magic eight ball from the pocket to obtain a quick fortune whenever she wanted. It was a gesture he was dying to see. But he knew he never would.
And he was okay with that now.
“We need to go,” said Akiko.
“So we’re seriously just gonna leave him,” said Shane.
“Listen to your girlfriend,” said Max.
Up the stairs they ran.
“Max,” called Pilot.
* * *
* * *
Shane and Akiko sprinted into the cold sunlit vacuum outside and flung their masks aside. Max slid his own mask up onto his forehead and held it there against the whirling universe of crystal and snow. The massive transport helicopter was in full idle, ready to take off at a moment’s notice.
The chopper’s heavy steel sliding door sat open. Cody waved them in.
“Where’s the others?” said Cody. “Where’s Pilot?”
For a single insane moment Max wanted to quip, He’s a little tied up right now.
“They’re dead,” said Max. It was easier than explaining what happened.
How could anyone explain what happened?
Cody’s face fell. Frowning now, he helped them into the rumbling interior. He handed out headsets for them to put on before taking his seat up front and donning headphones of his own.
The other CEOs—River Askew, Jonas Friend, and Cal Peers—stared at their strange new compatriots-in-misery with faces gone slack with shock.
“So it was you,” said Cal Peers in a monotone. His voice had been reduced to the nasally thin whine of a vintage radio broadcast. “Maximilian Portillo. And Akiko Hosokawa. And you, you drive that eyesore of a van.”
Shane set his jaw and flexed.
Max drew the headset’s mic closer to his mouth. “No one knew Pilot was gonna do what Pilot did.”
“When we get out of this,” said Cal Peers, “I plan on prosecuting the three of you to the fullest extent.”
“Are you serious with that right now?” said Max.
“Can we fucking go already?” shouted Jonas Friend, so loud Max scrambled to dial down the volume on his headphones.
“When you get back to civilization,” said Max, “you will step into a world of shit. All three of you. Because people know what’s right and what’s wrong. So yes, Cal Peers, this was about revenge. You’ll see.”
“People only see what they are shown,” said Cal Peers. “People will see you and your friends, the terrorists perpetrating this heinous crime, and they will see nothing else.”
“Except you’re never gonna see us again,” said Max.
Max glanced at Shane and Akiko, who startled at this notion.
“But they will see your parents,” said Cal Peers. “They will see everything about them.”
Max froze as the rotors idled.
“Don’t you fucking dox them,” said Max. “They didn’t do shit.”
“They are illegals, are they not?” said Cal Peers.
“There’s no such thing as illegal people,” said Max.
“I will put everything I have on Knowned,” said Cal Peers. “For Linda Belinda. Thanks to you, her child no longer has a mother.”
“Don’t,” was all Max could say.
“Don’t fucking do it, man,” said Shane, rising.
Cal Peers merely laughed once and stared.
“Excuse me, helicopter pilot,” said River Askew. “May we take off now?”
The rotors whined in earnest now, and the whole transport labored to rise an inch off the ground.
All Max could do was hope any doxxing was vastly overshadowed by the storm of condemnation that would bury Cal Peers. He had no time to worry about this. Because he had something important to do.
He abruptly snapped his fingers at Shane and Akiko. “Look for pliers or something. Get these wristbands off.” Pilot had said something about a self-destruct mechanism that triggered when the bands fell outside a certain range.
“Oh,” said Akiko, her eyes still on Cal Peers. “Right.”
You will see, Pilot had said.
Max did not want to see.
“Shut the door, shut the door,” said Shane.
“I got it,” said Max.
But instead of sliding the door shut, Max gave Shane a big slapping hug—his last hug ever—and turned to Akiko for a gentler embrace. A shoulder hug. Nothing too long. Nothing too weird. How he wanted to hold her face in his hands. But he didn’t. He took a step back and hung from the open doorway. The helicopter rose another foot. The world tilted.
Akiko and Shane stood confused.
“What are you doing?” said Akiko.
“Be safe, duncies,” said Max. “I love you guys.”
“Max?”
said Shane.
“They will tear your mother and father apart,” said Cal Peers with a smile.
“Fucking try it,” shouted Shane.
“I love you guys,” said Max, and jumped out and away.
As Max stood on the whirling helipad, he watched as the chopper rose ten feet, then another.
Then the big machine paused. It wobbled.
When Max shielded his eyes against the brilliant sun, he could see a figure tumble from the doorway and hang perilously there.
Akiko.
Max clawed at his ears in horror.
Shane appeared. He reached for her with both strong arms. But someone within kicked at his head and neck. Shane retreated—just for a moment—and then there was just Akiko, kicking her legs in space.
Cal Peers came falling out.
He fell back-first, like an upended beetle. His legs struck the landing gear on the way down past Akiko, sending his limbs spinning. The helicopter bobbled. Cal Peers fell fifty, sixty feet to the helipad.
Above, Shane grabbed hold of Akiko and heaved her back in. Max could see him turn and cover his mouth in shock at the sight of Cal Peers’s body below. He shouted something. Is he dead? perhaps, or maybe Oh fuck. Max would never know.
Max waved Shane away with big swings of his arms.
“Get out of here,” he yelled.
But the helicopter ignored Max’s command, and began to descend.
“Get the fuck out of here,” yelled Max again.
The helicopter finally seemed to hear him, which was impossible, but Max liked the thought. The sliding door rammed shut. The helicopter drew a mighty arc away, away, away to disappear behind a ridge.
At Max’s feet lay Cal Peers. Max drew his Black Halo mask back onto his face.
The man twitched once. Then he was still.
3.5
Akiko sat in the helicopter, warmed by the sun blazing in through the shifting portholes. Around her swirled a glittering cloud of frozen scintillae; beyond, the perfect day blazed on and on into a parallaxical infinity. She had no idea what time it was—the days were so long in this part of the world—and if,