The Echo Chamber

by Rhett J Evans

  Alexi groaned impatiently as the minutes dragged on. No doubt this whole scene was being caught on surveillance cameras mounted to the Citadel walls somewhere, and it was unlikely their dark sunglasses would shield their faces from digital scrutiny.

  Just as Gabriel was pulling a gasping man out of the orange plastic, tears running down both their faces, a shot was fired. Alexi spun around in the driver’s seat to see a police officer pointing a handgun in the air and then watched him as he trained it on the direction of the van, right at Gabriel’s heart.

  “Freeze!” the officer shouted.

  The street was filled with turmoil, but their white van was quickly becoming the center of attention. No one else, after all, was trying to unwrap any of the helpless bubble people falling from the sky.

  That should have been it. The officer was only a dozen yards away and closing on them fast. Alexi had a shotgun in the passenger seat. No one in the crew asked her where she got it; she had pillaged it from her father’s collection years ago. Her father probably never even noticed given the size of his armory. She went to reach for it now. They were too close to victory just to fail here on the finish line.

  Then a Looncell carrying an unknown but fortuitously timed inmate crashed down from the heavens into the street. The bag bounced twice and then rolled into the white van with a soft crunching sound before skittering towards the police officer, who was forced to hurl his body out of its rolling path. Gabriel heaved the weakened Kyle into the back of the van, and before he had a chance to close the doors, Alexi stomped her foot on the gas.

  The vehicle sprung forward, weaving through the growing chaos of the breakout, and turned down a side street. She drove onwards several blocks, just buying time, before pulling over into an empty alley. But no sooner had she put the van in park had Diana’s voice informed them that Darnell and their next rescue target were about to release their Looncell from the north side of the building. Alexi sped the van back towards Market Street and approached the melee on the Citadel’s north side, which was at a traffic standstill caused by spectators craning their necks to watch more Looncells fall out of the tower.

  Police on the adjacent street were just beginning to assemble some order. One Looncell had crashed into a mobile taco stand and a group of schoolchildren were on the corner trying to take selfies with another, but otherwise several officers had succeeded in preventing new pedestrians and cars from entering the block. There was no way to rescue Orion and Darnell without driving straight into the cordon. So when Diana informed Alexi that the next orange airbag falling from the sky contained their compatriots, Alexi jumped the curb and drove the van over the sidewalk against the protests of several officers. There was no mistaking this balloon for any other; there were the outlines of two bodies visible inside it.

  Gabriel jumped out the back of the van and began hacking at the Looncell with his knife in far greater haste and disregard than before. Multiple police officers were now converging on them, and he didn’t have the luxury of worrying about inadvertently jabbing his friends.

  Alexi grabbed a hold of her shotgun and fired into a parked car a couple meters in front of the lead officer. She had practiced shooting the shotgun twice before, but the roar of the blast and the kick to her shoulder was still almost enough to make her drop it in surprise. Even Gabriel felt compelled to throw his hands over his ears. The buckshot gave the officers pause; two of them dove behind cover and another dropped to a knee to call for backup on his radio.

  Gabriel pulled a thin Latina woman out of the Looncell first. His face sank. What had gone wrong? This was not the hero of the revolution that Charlotte pined after and Diana had promised.

  Darnell meanwhile had managed to squeeze his arms free from the Looncell, and Gabriel was working to cut his legs out of the plastic when a volley of fire was unleashed from up the street. One round entered and exited through Darnell’s shoulder. Gabriel was struck in his ear. The pair pulled themselves free of the balloon, bleeding, into the safety of the van while Kyle shut the door. Alexi leaned out the window to aim a returning shot, but a group of schoolchildren was still visible on the edge of the street trying to duck into a hair salon and she didn’t want to risk it.

  It wasn’t a precaution shared by the police.

  Several more shots struck the side of the van, and two rounds punctured windows while Alexi dropped the shotgun and began speeding off back towards the logjam on Market Street. The white van smashed against other fenders, scraped a light post, and nearly toppled a flower stand as it crossed four lanes of traffic to skid conspicuously into an underground parking garage.

  Alexi had hated this part of the plan. If there were any rules about how not to flee police in an active pursuit, hiding underground seemed like it would top the list. But Gabriel knew this building, he insisted. There was a connection point to an adjacent garage, which in turn, connected with the Bay Area subway, the BART. By eschewing roads and bridges and using the BART to get out of the city, Gabriel was risking everything on a strategy that Alexi could only summarize as the “we’ll-do-what-they-least-suspect” escape route.

  Gabriel was now clutching as his wounded ear; Darnell was staunching the flow of blood from his shoulder. And this mystery woman with the straight black hair watched all of them passively and uncaring, and she had still said nothing by the time they rolled into a spot near the exit. No one knew what to make of her.

  Gabriel led the way. He hustled the party of five through a blue door into another parking garage, and from there, he entered a stairwell shared with the BART terminal. They swiped their five pre-purchased cards at the turnstile just as the planners among them had rehearsed. (No need to draw attention to themselves by getting caught trying to dodge the fare.)

  Gabriel now slowed to a saunter in his graceful gait; his legs moving briskly but doing his best to look unhurried. He touched a white handkerchief to his ear as infrequently as he dared and brushed his grey hair over the tip that had been removed by the bullet.

  Their pictures would be everywhere soon, he knew. But not yet. It would take a few minutes more, at least. And by then their train would be underwater, where no one’s cell phones would get service, and on its way to Oakland.

  Darnell had it harder; the stinging pain from the wound in his arm was causing sweat to break out over his face. He was a wearing a dark jacket, so the blood there wouldn’t draw attention so long as no one glanced directly at him for longer than a moment. He did his best to keep pace with Gabriel. And as they crowded into a train car, he stood facing the closing doors and away from the other passengers, and generally this seemed to work to hide his injury since subways are a place for polite people to avoid eye contact.

  They got off at the first stop in Oakland and piled into a red SUV that Gabriel had arranged, and all five of them drove north and took the long way around the Bay Bridge, up to Napa and then to Sonoma County where they had booked the rental of a small house under a fake name a couple nights prior. And through that long drive, all their minds brimmed with questions, especially for Diana.

  But everyone still seemed too exhausted, too superstitious to open their mouths—even as they drove miles away from the chaos of the Citadel—as if they might somehow attract attention and invite some new calamity upon themselves. Gabriel patted Kyle’s hand affectionately, Darnell tended to his shoulder, Alexi focused on ensuring her driving was beyond the reproach of any traffic cop, and the quiet stranger stood stiff and cold in the backseat.

  And the drive was silent.

  Now

  Charlotte had gotten there first, about an hour prior. She had ordered several pizzas by placing a call on the house phone and leaving the money on the front doorstep. Then she got a fire going in the fireplace of the small Victorian home in Bodega, nestled in the town’s solitary hillside. From the porch, she could see the striking white church that Alfred Hitchcock had used in his movie The Birds. A life-siz
ed statue of the director stood outside the general store in town, and a small gift shop sold t-shirts with his face on them. She found the location ominous and suspected the Frenchman was trying to be clever by housing them all here.

  Down the hill there was a dive bar, but Charlotte knew none of them should risk being seen outside yet. Least of all her. The previous renters had left half a bottle of cheap vodka in the freezer, and it was cold and bland but more than she had any right to hope for. She helped herself to a generous portion and sat in the living room with a window open next to her that invited salty breezes from the coast less than a few miles away.

  A shiny red SUV rolled into the gravel path just before dusk. She restrained an urge to run out and greet it and confirm Orion really wasn’t among the rescued, but as the party staggered in, their bodies looking wooden and their eyes sunken and distant, her fears were soon confirmed. There was a thin man with a worn smile that Charlotte took for Kyle. Then there was the girl with the straight black hair, who was as much a mystery to Charlotte as she was to anyone else.

  The mission was a failure. They hadn’t saved the one person who really mattered.

  Everybody mumbled greetings, and then they reached for a slice of pizza, and the crowd of six people sat in vintage, springy chairs and ottomans huddled around the fireplace, chewing their food and watching the flames. Only the stranger was left standing in a corner of the room, and she sulked there, eyeing the scene warily.

  It was some time before Charlotte broke the silence.

  “Has anyone heard from Diana recently?”

  “She stopped communicating from that drone we sent over the Pacific shortly after we left San Francisco,” Gabriel grunted out of his reverie. “I suspect she fell into the sea, but she left instructions on how to access one of her copies in the cloud.”

  Gabriel reached for a laptop from a bag he lugged over his shoulder, and then he opened it and began slowly typing.

  “How did the virtual attack on the Citadel go?” Darnell asked Charlotte.

  The movie star took a deep breath before she began her tale, and all eyes turned to her as she walked them through the raid that had exposed Koti and Gor’s locations and presumably compromised Kota as well. Charlotte told them about the tower on the rocky island over the black water, how they lost Blue Bird to one of the Citadel’s enchanted rifles, and how Gor and Koti sacrificed themselves to ensure she reached the security console. She shuddered when she reached the point in the story where she passed through the vault, into the dead zone, and from there, she told no more.

  Darnell then shared his portion of the story—his near apprehension on multiple occasions, the pursuit of Devon Zimmer’s head of special security projects and nephew, Arlo Zimmer, and the shock of entering what Diana had led him to believe was Orion’s cell. Everyone turned to the stranger at this portion of Darnell’s account, and an expectant silence permeated the room.

  She gave an annoyed sigh and then spoke for the first time.

  “My name is Catalina Fernandez.” She crossed her arms. “And I have no idea why you freed me either.”

  The name was familiar to everyone in the room. Gabriel’s eyebrows knitted in recognition from above his laptop, Kyle nodded his head solemnly, and Charlotte put a finger to her lips in sudden concentration. She was so gaunt now, wild eyed, so different from the girl who had stood trial three years ago.

  “You worked with Orion—er, Michael—at Sharesquare Industries,” Charlotte said, standing up. “He believed you were innocent. He believed you had been set up in the whole Nutrino disaster.”

  Catalina said nothing in response. She merely shrugged.

  “Diana,” said Gabriel, looking at the blue screen in front of him. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

  Diana’s voice resonated from the laptop, clear and bright as always.

  “I am sorry, everyone, for deceiving you. I don’t know where Michael is. I never did. I have only the vaguest of suspicions. But he left me with clear instructions that should something happen to him, I was to devote my resources to freeing Catalina.”

  “Why?” Catalina asked.

  “When Charlotte came to Gabriel asking for help to rescue Michael, she did not tell the full truth,” Diana answered. “The full truth is that Michael has an implant in his brain that he believes allows him to relive memories—memories from the future. If true, it puts him in a unique role to halt the slow collapse of the social order that he said is coming. I can tell you that I, as a machine, believe him. The story sounds ludicrous, we know. This is why we didn’t tell you when we were trying to enlist your help. But given everything that has happened, I hope you will all try to keep an open mind and trust one another. You all have a right to know.”

  At these comments, Darnell buried his head in his hands, and Gabriel set the laptop on a coffee table so he could pace around the room and smoke a cigarette again. Alexi’s mouth hung open with her left eyebrow askew. Charlotte found the color in her face draining.

  “Trust one another?” Darnell interjected, staring at the floor, and his voice quivered with rage. “You sent us all on a wild goose chase and nearly got us all killed. And for what?”

  “Miss Fernandez was my friend,” answered Diana. “And we would all do anything for our friends, would we not? That is humanity. It’s good to hear to your voice, Cat.”

  Catalina leaned against a doorway and sank to the floor. There were tears in her eyes.

  “That’s it?” Charlotte snapped. “That’s why you sent us after her? Because she was your friend?”

  “No, not the only reason,” came Diana’s polite inflection, impervious to their injury and outrage. “Michael was unique. But he believed it was possible Cat might also hold a path forward for taking down Sharebox. Michael’s instructions were to free Cat and work with her to retrieve my original logs to see if I was tampered with.”

  Catalina groaned. “There may not even be any evidence in those logs at all. There may never have been any foul play in the code. It’s possible I just overlooked something.”

  “We won’t know until we look,” Diana responded.

  Gabriel was chomping on his cigarette. “Diana, you said you can’t keep hacking Sharebox security protocols because they know now how to find you. How are you going to look for these hidden log files?”

  “There is almost nothing hidden to me now. Thanks to Charlotte, I have indexed several petabytes of information from the Citadel’s master security vault. I have all the access token configurations, encryption keys, and records we could possibly need.”

  “So where’s this Orion, Michael time-traveling dude then?” Alexi growled. “As if I believed that shit, that is. He’s the only person who can really fix all this. So theoretically we need him.”

  “I’m afraid Sharesquare Industries was careful to leave no digital trace of his whereabouts so far.”

  Gabriel shook his head. “Time traveling memories. Lies. Mythically secret log files which may or may not be useful. And more lies,” he said, with an eye to Charlotte on the last word. “I am grateful my Kyle is returned to me. I am grateful to you all.” He put his hand on Kyle’s shoulder. “But I am sorry for dragging more of you into this conspiracy under such…” he paused, searching for the right word. “Incredible circumstances. We must be getting to bed now.”

  Gabriel and Kyle drifted off to an upstairs bed. Shortly after, Alexi disappeared too. She was the one person in the party whose picture hadn’t shown up on any news reports that evening, so she felt at liberty to get a drink at the dive bar in town. Then it was just Charlotte, Darnell, and Catalina sitting around a fire that was rapidly dimming.

  “I think Michael just had a lot of respect for you,” Charlotte broke the silence, looking at Cat. “He felt guilty too. He wished he could have done more for you during the trial.”

  “I don’t think I’m worth all th
is effort,” Cat groaned, avoiding eye contact. “I’m not sure if I can even help.”

  “Well,” sighed Darnell, as he rose from his seat. “You damn well better try.” Then he too disappeared down the hallway in search of a bedroom for the night.

  Now

  Three weeks later, the Sharesquare Industries CEO, Devon Zimmer, was sitting with his socked feet propped on a mahogany table as his assistant read off his daily schedule with faux cheer.

  “At nine thirty, we have the security team coming to present… At eleven, the legal leads will go over your statement for… For lunch, you will be dining with…”

  Devon skimmed through the news headlines on his phone with a bored glaze and a kink in his ever-stiffening neck.

  When are they going to find those fools? he thought to himself. Every morning he awoke in his New York City penthouse, he would reach out to his bedside table for his Sharebox headset. Then his avatar zipped to the Patriot Palace where he expected to find an immersive video report about Charlotte Boone or that gay Frenchman or that ungrateful thug, Darnell Holmes, being escorted into a police car in handcuffs or, better yet, lying dead at the close of some shootout with authorities. And each morning for almost a month he was disappointed.

  Then there was Catalina. She was too broken to be a threat to him now, he comforted himself. But he would feel better when they caught her again, and perhaps this time he could push the judge to have her executed. He pictured that and leaned back further in his chair, and the thought of cutting that loose end off forever put a smile on his face.

  “You look pleased with yourself, Uncle,” came the slippery voice of Arlo letting himself into the office. The assistant tried to protest, but Arlo brushed her aside with a wave of his hand. Devon groaned.