Then she was standing in a small grey room with no windows and a light that seemed to emanate from no source in particular. There was a conventional computer terminal in front of her sitting on a cheap plastic table with no chair. The nausea in her stomach almost made her forget what she was here for—that killing her father was really just one last, thin and desperate security feature that the Citadel had tried to use to hold her off.
Now she was here. The bloodied arrowhead in her hand, she reached forward and touched the terminal screen. The monitor fluttered to life and began whirring like the old computer Charlotte’s family had in the late nineties.
“Thank you, Charlotte,” Diana’s reassuring words came to her. The true Diana. And her voice felt a little like being wrapped in a warm blanket.
“Is it really you?”
“It’s really me. And I have already found our two prisoners.”
“Is Darnell still okay?”
“He will be if we give him a little extra help.”
Gabriel Boucher was smoking a clove cigarette in a white van parked one block from the Citadel. It was his fifth one. Alexi was in the driver’s seat. She had dyed her shiny, pixie-length hair black the night before.
She was the only resistance member Gabriel had met in person before recruiting her. It was a snowy morning over a year ago up in the hills of Mendocino County at some small town gas station. There were sharp lines in those places—an almost Appalachian sensibility to the locals’ manners that contrasted starkly with the burgeoning influence of the biodynamic wineries in the valleys. It was like two different Californias. Both rural, but at inextricable odds in their worldviews. Alexi was hitching rides to get to San Francisco, but a trucker had gotten handsy with her, and she had stuck a Swiss Army knife into his palm.
It was Gabriel that prevented things from getting worse. He was there filling up his Mercedes—a gay Frenchman lost on a backcountry road to an elite wine tasting.
“Come with me, child,” Gabriel said over the trucker’s threats to call the local sheriff. A scene was starting to build, and this wasn’t the kind of place that admired girls from out of town for defending themselves. “Let’s get you out of here.”
He brought her back to San Francisco and gave her a home when she didn’t have one. And she took to his causes and made them her own eventually, and she carved out her own living fixing up cars and selling weed to white kids.
They sat there and listened to frequent updates from Diana about the progress of both Blue Bird’s raiding party and Darnell’s movements inside the building. Alexi’s face betrayed little emotion as they listened to the virtual team get slowly picked apart, but she twitched and flexed her pale fingers on the wheel and cracked her knuckles more than a half dozen times. Gabriel simply left behind a collection of cigarette butts on the sidewalk, but his fingers were starting to shake as he lit them and he was sure Alexi had noticed.
The sirens had started wailing only a few minutes prior. The police had arrived and were starting to establish a cordon on the streets around the building.
This surprised Gabriel. Slightly.
Sure, the Citadel no doubt had protocols for informing local law enforcement in the middle of a security breach. But certainly, there was no reason for the warden to yet believe he was in danger of losing a prisoner. Audacious though the attack was, it seemed more reasonable the intent was about stealing data. A physical breakout was ambitious to the point of being inconceivable.
Then Alexi and Gabriel’s faces were drawn in unison to the sides of the enormous tower where countless prisoners were visible moving their limbs about within their virtual cages. On every cell, in front of every prisoner on every floor, the large, bulletproof glass facades suddenly began sliding away. The inmates were still trapped in their Sharebox headsets, so they were slow to perceive the change. Then the cold air of the chilly afternoon flooded their cells from the exposed wall, and one by one, the prisoners all began tugging at their headsets.
Sirens from inside the tower were blaring now. Gabriel could hear them from his open window. It wasn’t a prison breakout alarm, however. It sounded like an evacuation alert.
“Diana, what have you done?” Gabriel breathed the words out in astonishment.
“It was the only way,” came her bright and emotionless response.
Evacuating a prison in the event of an emergency or natural disaster always poses a sophisticated design challenge. The prison architects need to ensure inmates do not find themselves, say, trapped in a blazing inferno caused by a building fire, but not at the expense of providing anyone with a clear route to escape. Because the Citadel was designed with the primary purpose of striking terror and awe in the hearts of those who looked at it with its fifty-five stories of glass, complying with federal code for inmate evacuation required a custom solution. It was impossible to evacuate every floor using conventional procedures in a mandated timeframe of less than two hours.
So the architects created a plan that was wild and even a little whimsical. Every prison cell in the Citadel had a view to the outside. Some faced the Bay, others faced the financial district, still others could see the scoreboard of the Giants baseball stadium. The quickest way out of the building in the event of an emergency for all those inmates was straight down.
Initially, the architects considered using ropes or parachutes that prisoners would be suspended on and lowered to the ground. But unleashing two thousand inmates onto the streets of downtown San Francisco, without a proper means to contain them, would be pure chaos.
So the Looncells were invented.
Every inmate who was processed into the Citadel was shown a brief safety video highlighting the evacuation procedure using a Looncell. It was a bright orange inflatable airbag—not dissimilar to the plastic bubble wrap used in shipping boxes—and would grow and stretch and cover a human body anywhere from four feet to seven feet tall. Then a strap would whip the Looncell straight out of the open cell’s window, possibly into high winds at the tower’s apex. But no prisoners could escape once they hit the ground, that was the important thing. The vessel that cushioned its passenger’s dizzying fall also ensured the prisoner would stay suspended and helpless until officials from the prison came to free them by cutting them out.
The design was never meant to be used. Not really. The warden had an understanding with local law enforcement that, in the event of a real emergency, he would try to get prisoners out the old-fashioned way going down the stairs and using buses. The Looncells were just a way to skirt federal evacuation compliance procedures, and the architects had chosen to do so in a manner so ludicrous that the whole design was perceived as something of an inside joke, one more contemptuous laugh in their wanton disregard for the humanity of the inmates of the Citadel.
Alarm sirens were whooping over Darnell’s head as he stepped out onto the thirty-fourth floor, his nerves shaking, unsure of where to go next. Then he watched as the outside-facing cell walls for every prisoner slid upwards and open, and every inmate in the building was now standing over a terrible precipice with the city below them.
“Diana, was this you?” Darnell asked, his voice almost trembling.
“Yes, I’ve concluded your best chance at exiting this building successfully today is by creating a mass distraction.”
“What do I do now?”
“Kyle Liu is in a cell on the thirty-sixth floor. Run there quickly now, and we will finish this.”
So Darnell sprinted the best he could with his left leg pulsing its dull but steady resistance as he ascended the two flights of stairs necessary to reach Kyle. The glass door barring entry to his cell gracefully glided open as Darnell approached, and he saw the thin shape of a man he knew as Kyle from pictures in Gabriel’s house standing there, slowly trying to detach a Sharebox headset from his face.
They didn’t make it easy. The sets were not designed to be freely r
emoveable by their creators. Darnell found a release after a few tense seconds and lifted the headset free. Kyle blinked, the sunlight and brisk winds whipping his window were an assault on his senses, and, like all virtual junkies, Kyle had a net hangover from overuse that caused his head to ring.
“Grab this handle,” Darnell shouted over the alarms to Kyle. He took Kyle’s hands and placed them on the handle of the Looncell mechanism, and then Darnell took a couple steps back.
Kyle looked up at his hands on the mechanism, and then he turned to Darnell looking exasperated and scared.
“Just pull it!” Darnell yelled. “Or you’ll die here.”
Kyle had features that may have been handsome once and maybe would be handsome again. But Darnell saw the lines of stress that had prematurely aged him, a look of malnutrition, and a glassy fear to his eyes, like an abused dog. He looked at Darnell confused and sad, and his face was almost apologetic.
“Gabriel is down there! He’s waiting for you.” Darnell took a step close to the edge and nearly regretted it, for a wave of dizzying vertigo threatened to send him stumbling backwards. But at the mention of Gabriel, some look of defeat seemed to drain from Kyle’s face, and he turned to look at the mechanism and gave the handle a strong jerking pull.
The Looncell ignited, like a gaseous orange monster it flowed out of the open ceiling compartment onto Kyle and enveloped him from his toes to his fingers. Already Darnell could hardly make out his features from inside the expanding air bag. It took less than thirty seconds, and then a strap snapped with the sound of a whip and the balloon was flung with a sudden violence out into the chilled winds, and Kyle was gone. Darnell dared to lean over the edge to watch the Looncell fall, and he noticed a handful of other inmates had activated their mechanisms too. The street was already growing cluttered with the bouncing and jostling of orange shapes far below.
“Don’t worry,” Diana said, seeming to read his thoughts. “I’ll guide Gabriel and Alexi to find him. Our last prisoner is on the fifty-first floor, run now!”
Darnell did not dare to use the elevator. He was too afraid to wait for the doors to open and find Arlo or a host of guards behind them. Instead he ran up the remaining fifteen floors to find Orion, taking one short halt to dig his fingers into a stitch at his side and another to breathe. Somewhere around floor forty-seven, the elevators opened on the floor below him and a host of frantic footsteps on glass floors marked a team of guards in hot pursuit. He dared a glance over the railing and saw the black coat and pants that marked Arlo running at the lead of the party.
At the fifty-first floor, Diana had preemptively opened Orion’s cell for him, cell 51G. When Darnell reached it, gasping for air and blood pulsing in his head, Arlo and the guards were mere yards behind him. In the other cells, some inmates were still struggling to remove their headsets, another prisoner had his hands on the Looncell release mechanism looking unsure of himself, still other cells were already deserted. In cellblock 51G, the prisoner was standing there in the center of the room, looking out over the edge when Darnell realized there had been a terrible mistake.
It wasn’t Orion. It wasn’t even a man.
There was a slender young woman there of Latin descent. Her long, straight black hair flowed wildly in the cold winds that swarmed and howled in her cell. She looked out at the city far below her, and there was something in her eyes that Darnell could not quite place. Hatred? Resignation? There was an icy animal quality there that frightened him.
Darnell dashed into the open cell, and then Diana, always so impossibly and mechanically quick, locked the glass door tight behind him, blocking his pursuers. Arlo reached the glass a moment later, and he pounded on it in frustration. His wild eyes bored into Darnell as the guards accompanying him began to tap animatedly on the external console.
Over the gusts of the heavy winds, Darnell had no choice but to shout at the stranger.
“My name is Darnell, and it’s time for us to leave,” he said, pointing to the Looncell mechanism mounted over the woman’s head. “It’s not the safest thing, but it should support both our weight if we try it together.”
The woman appraised him slowly, and then her unfeeling eyes shifted back down to stare at the city below. She put a foot forward towards the edge.
“Hey, stop!” he yelled. “Jesus. You don’t want to do that. You’ve just been in Sharebox too long. I’m taking you out of here.”
Behind Darnell, he could hear the muffled shouts of Arlo barking threats at the guards to get the door open faster. Any second now, they would be through. Darnell extended his hand towards the woman. He felt a spark of familiarity in her face, but then the sensation was lost in her haunted gaze, her feral posture.
“I don’t know who you are, but a lot of people have risked everything to get the prisoner in this cell out. That’s you. Come with me, and we’ll go together.”
The woman exchanged one last glance at Darnell. Behind them, the glass door into the cell glided open with a small metallic chime sound, and Arlo spilled into the room. Then the girl took another step forward, her toes hovering over the open air fifty-one stories high over the city of San Francisco, and Darnell rushed her. With his left hand he reached out and swept her thin waist against his, pulling her back from the window, and with his right, he reached up and yanked on the Looncell mechanism in the ceiling.
The orange, plasticky airbag submerged him. It reminded him of playing in the ballpit at the local McDonald’s when he was six years old. The cushioning inflated rapidly, squeezing his limbs in place, restricting the movement of his head and shoulders while also binding the frail, young woman tightly to his body. He felt her heart beating so fast it was like the wings of a hummingbird. She let out a small gasp of surprise or disappointment, and then she was quiet.
Darnell could hear Arlo just outside the bubbly foam and saw his hazy silhouette trying in vain to grab a hold of the orange material to slow its expansion.
“Stop them!” he screamed at the guards. “Shoot them if you have to!”
Indeed, another guard did reach out and put his hands on the Looncell in an effort to hold it in place. But in a moment there was a whip sound—the strap jettisoning their bubbly vessel out through the open window. For Darnell, the experience conjured the experience of jumping out the door of an Army aircraft with a parachute and was quite certain his neck would have been broken had it not been so carefully cradled in place by the Looncell. The winds screamed all around, and the sense of freefall was so absolute that his intestines clenched tightly in his stomach. The unfortunate guard who gripped at the balloon was there too; he had not the sense, under the duress of Arlo’s shouting, to let go of the Looncell before it was launched. The guard’s weight bore down on their falling airbag, but he lost his grip momentarily and slipped from Darnell’s view, his screams disappearing into the cityscape.
Now the ground rushed to meet them. Darnell could just make out the outline of the street—a scene of chaos of cars and orange shapes and red and blue police lights—and then he closed his eyes.
“You have completed your part, Charlotte. You may now log out.”
“So you found Kyle and Orion?”
“I’m afraid not, but we will have to talk more later.”
“What do you mean, Diana?”
“Please log out now, Charlotte. It’s not safe.”
“I’m not leaving until you tell me what’s going on.”
“Orion isn’t here.”
“They took him away?”
“He was never here.”
Charlotte’s fingers were still covered in digital blood. She stared at them for a moment, dread filling her stomach.
“Then why did you bring us here, Diana?”
“Because it’s what Orion would have wanted.”
Then Charlotte was forcibly logged out. The world went black. The words Thank You For Playing In Shar
ebox Today hung in the air in front of her and then dispelled, leaving nothing.
She took off her headset and found herself back in the ornately adorned bedroom of Gabriel Boucher on the edge of Pacific Heights. Walking off the haptic treadmill, she stumbled, finding her muscles sore with exhaustion and her head swimming.
One step at a time, she reminded herself.
For now, she needed to get out of the city and to the linkup point.
She peeled off the haptic suit and put on her regular clothes, along with a scarf to conceal her hair and a pair of oversized sunglasses to mask her face. Then she walked to the front entrance of the Tudor mansion and slipped out onto the street.
Alexi accelerated the car as soon as Diana gave the word. They tore for the west side of the building, swerving around parked cars, the Looncells of other prisoners who had evacuated themselves, and open-mouthed bystanders. Police were on the streets everywhere, shouting at civilians posing for photographs, directing traffic, and trying to organize a hopeless cordon two blocks in every direction of the Citadel. The sight of orange bubbles launching themselves from the world’s tallest and most notorious prison proved quite a spectacle—a far too tempting sight for passing drivers and pedestrians who mostly ignored the officers’ pleaded insistence to move along because “there is nothing to see here.”
Finding Kyle amidst the half dozen Looncells flooding the street required some guesswork on Diana’s part and a couple cases of mistaken identity before getting it right. Alexi pulled the white van alongside Kyle’s airbag; the man’s body appeared frozen and silhouetted in the hazy orange plastic, no sign of life visible. Gabriel produced a thick knife and began slashing at the bulbous vessel. First he freed a hand, which wriggled in response, and then a foot, and then he set to work liberating the chest and face.
The Echo Chamber Page 24