by Barry Lyga
The door cracked open. Randall Worther, dean of the Classics Department, poked his head in. “Rachel. Do you have a moment?”
“Sure.” She had endless moments stacked atop one another, teetering and threatening to collapse and bury her with a lifetime of time itself. There was nothing in her life but each moment in which she lived and then the next, and she just had to get through them. Like pushing through tall grass, unable to see your destination, hoping it was still there.
Randall stepped inside and closed the door behind him. It was long after hours, as proven by his sartorial concession of loosening his tie and unbuttoning the top button of his shirt. He was the sort of guy Rachel once would have accused of having a stick planted far up his posterior, but she knew that wasn’t fair. He had to project a certain image; it was part of the job.
“I’m sorry to bother you when you’re working late …” He gestured to a chair and she nodded.
“I’m not really working,” she confessed as he sank into the chair. “It’s just … not comfortable at home right now.”
“Right.” He cleared his throat. “Right.”
He looked around the office for a moment, as though desperate to find something odd or interesting that he could hang a few minutes of small talk on. But Rachel’s office was still in the unpacking phase. She hadn’t shelved her books yet, nor hung anything personal on the walls. The office was an off-white cube with rather nice built-in bookshelves and a stack of boxes.
“I hate to have to talk about this …” he began, pointedly not looking in her direction. “But it’s my job. I hope you understand.”
Rachel leaned back in her chair. “What’s on your mind?”
“This … activism of yours …”
A knot formed in Rachel’s gut. “What about it?”
Haltingly, he continued. “We support free speech, obviously. It’s core to our mission as a university. But we also rely on a number of government contracts and research grants. This is a …” He fumbled, then finally resigned himself to looking up at her. “This is a tough thing to talk about. I know you’re under a lot of stress. But there are some important people — people above my pay grade — who are upset with the attention you’re bringing to the university.”
She knew her part in this discussion. She was to meekly accept the admonition, keep her head down, keep her voice lowered. Go along to get along.
Well, fuck that, she decided.
“Are you really sitting here and asking me to choose between my job and my child?” Her voice was tight and throaty.
“Of course not!” he exclaimed. “No one is saying that!”
“Because there aren’t a lot of ways to interpret what you’re saying. It sounds vaguely like a threat to my job.”
She’d hoped that her offensive posture would force him to stand down. Instead, he stood up, straightening his jacket.
“You’re new here, Rachel. Still on probation. Not tenured. I’m not making threats. I’m just giving you some advice — don’t make things difficult for the university, or the university will have no choice but to make things difficult for you.”
He left before she could reply. Which was too bad because she’d worked up a head of steam and was ready to put him on blast.
She could follow, but running after someone to yell at him didn’t really show a position of strength.
So she swallowed the retort, along with a toxic brew of rage, helplessness and regret, and returned to typing. There were hashtags to amplify, people to rally and a world to change.
If she lost her job, fine. If she lost her home, fine. If that’s what it took to have Cassie back, she would gladly give it all away.
100102400101
They agreed to meet at 168 Vance Street, which was right around the block from the bus stop. When the time came, Cassie huddled behind a cluster of bushes and a fence near a broken streetlight, across the street from the building’s front door. That’s why she’d chosen this place.
She had only ever exchanged a couple of dozen words with Carson, and now she was trusting him with her life. She knew enough now not to let trust go untested. If he showed up across the street alone, great. If a mob came instead, she’d already identified her exit strategy.
Just then, someone touched her on her shoulder. Cassie nearly yelped but managed to keep it together.
Carson had slipped up beside her while she was focused on the building across the street.
“Smart,” he said, with a jerk of his head at their putative meeting place. “I would have done the same.”
She stared at him, almost unable to believe he was actually here. Her mom had thrown together her backpack that night, a million years ago, when she’d merely been Level 5. The jeans she’d tossed in were the ones Cassie wore to debate club.
The ones she’d worn when Carson went old-school, writing down his number on a piece of paper. The same piece of paper she’d found at the lint-thick bottom of her pocket.
Then she’d conjured him like a magic spell.
“Sweet mask,” he said, breaking the silence. “Do you really want to stand in the rain or should we go somewhere dry?”
Cassie licked her lips, a motion that was lost on him with the mask between them. “Are you inviting me to your place?”
“You got a better idea?”
She exhaled. She hadn’t realized how badly she’d wanted what he was offering until it was within her reach: A safe room. A bed. Maybe a soda.
She barely knew Carson. Didn’t know him at all, actually.
And yet he felt like some kind of home.
In the end, there was no alternative. He knew as well as she did: she really had no other choice.
She appreciated that he didn’t say it.
*
They took a ride share back to his apartment, with Cassie sitting in strategic shadows, her mask doing most of the work. They crept up a flight of stairs, then around a bend, entering the apartment through a back door. Cassie hadn’t even known that there were apartments with back doors.
This was no ordinary apartment, though. The back door spilled them into a kitchen bigger than the living room in Cassie’s old house. Carson was loaded, it appeared. She thought momentarily, with a chill, of Bryce. Everyone had more money than she did.
“This way,” Carson said in a not-quite whisper and led her down a dark hallway. Soon they were in a bedroom that tried desperately to look dark and cramped but was too big to pull it off. The walls were a slate gray, and blackout curtains added to the gloomy effect.
“We’re good now,” he said, gesturing. With hesitant hands, Cassie peeled off the mask. Carson blinked, noticing Cassie’s roughly shorn hair, but said nothing.
She couldn’t find the words to say thank-you yet, but the silence was too much for her. “So your parents are OK with you sneaking girls into the house?” she whispered.
He shrugged. “You don’t have to whisper. I leave them alone, they leave me alone.” He dropped into a comfortable gaming chair and swiveled to his desk. There were three monitors set up in a classic triangle arrangement, with a monster laptop open between them and a tablet tethered by a cable. He tapped some keys and the screens lit up. It was familiar — Cassie’s BLINQ account, along with charts, graphs, trend lines and streaming hashtag feeds. #HasCassieSurfacedYet? wasn’t dipping anytime soon.
“Welcome home,” Cassie muttered mordantly.
“Have a seat.” He jerked his head toward another chair, which she rolled over and flopped into. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he told her without even glancing in her direction. “It’s like the whole country is CassieTV, 24-7.”
Cassie nodded, barely hearing him. Not wanting to hear him. She was suddenly bone-tired. Made sense, really. She’d been on the run for more than twelve hours, racing across rooftops, BASE jumping, running, shooting thr
ough doors, evading the law, channeling her inner action hero. And now, finally, she seemed to be somewhere safe. Carson was saying something important but her eyelids drooped, commanding her to sleep.
“Why are you helping me?” she heard herself ask him, her voice thick with fatigue. “You hardly know me.”
“I know you code with Inconsolata. That’s pretty much all I need to know.”
She smiled, eyes half closed, head resting back against the chair. “No. Seriously.”
He looked away from his screens, his expression one of mingled anger and concern, his eyebrows crunched together. “Seriously? Because you made a joke and they’re trying to kill you for it. The bed’s a wreck, but there’s a trundle and it’s already made. Get some sleep.”
She didn’t want to listen to him, but all she wanted to do was listen to him. She wasn’t sure how she transported herself from the chair to the bed, but before she knew it she had collapsed and fallen into a darkness, deep and all-encompassing, before he could finish his offer.
*
She awoke with a jolt to the sound of his fingers slamming the keys. Her dad had typed like that, banging away at the keyboard as though it had insulted his mother. Mom used to yell at him from the other room, Harlon! I can tell what you’re typing from the aftershocks!
Dad went through keyboards the way some people went through socks.
Her body still heavy, she pried herself up from the bed. To her surprise, she’d only been out for about an hour. Carson was at his keyboard, casually sipping an energy drink, as if he weren’t harboring a fugitive at all.
“What’s happening? Anything new?” she asked, rushing up behind him. As she approached, she noticed the way his hair was slightly sticking up in the back, as though he’d rubbed some pomade on it and then tousled it to achieve a “look.” Or maybe, she had to admit, he’d just slept on it in some weird way. She touched a choppy lock of her own hair. She wasn’t one to talk, really.
On one of the screens, she spied the frameworks for a bot, one designed to crawl sites in search of data, sort of a custom-built Google. His style was spare and lean, unlike her own, which was wild and untethered.
“Code is poetry,” she murmured. The memory of his shirt, of her life pre-Level 6, slammed into her. Her shoulders sagged.
But at Carson’s grin, she straightened up. “Yeah, you know why? Because poetry is messy and human and imperfect. So is code. We make it. It can’t be perfect.”
Speaking of not perfect … She readily saw some flaws in his bot. “We’ve gotta move fast. Do you mind?” she asked, reaching for the keyboard.
“Please,” he said, rolling back in his chair. “Save me from myself.”
She started typing and pretty soon time ceased to have meaning. This was the best. It was everything. When you sank into what Harlon reverentially called “the Flow,” where it was just your fingers and the keyboard and the code, where nothing else happened or mattered.
“Jesus,” Carson said admiringly. “Are you a cyborg or something?”
She blushed with mingled pride and embarrassment. “It’s just what I’m good at.”
“If I could code half as well as you do …”
“I’m guessing from the setup you’ve got here, you’re doing OK.” She considered things. “And, I mean, you took a chance, agreeing to meet with me. So, like, overall, you’re more than OK.”
Behind her, Carson didn’t say anything. Cassie was glad. She kept her eyes and hands trained on his computer, her lips pressed together. Part of her wanted to word-vomit every thought she’d had over the past few days — about OHM and her parents; about the Hive, and friendship and justice — just to clear it from her system. For reasons she couldn’t quite articulate yet, Carson seemed like a receptive audience.
She was close to opening her mouth and unloading everything when he interrupted her thoughts and her flow by cracking his knuckles. “Can I show you something?”
She stepped away, exhaling, grateful the moment had passed. Whatever it was — if anything at all — she didn’t know if she was ready for it. “Yeah, sure.”
He took up his position at the keyboard again. “I’m a decent coder, but what I’m really good at is patterns. Finding signal in the noise, you know? And I’ve been staring at your account and … it’s just all off,” he complained. “I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something wrong here. Your trend. And how does …”
His fingers, long and strong, played on the keyboard. Cassie watched them as he spoke. It was hard to believe she was here, in Carson’s bedroom. That he’d let her in. She thought, if she had more energy, or maybe if she weren’t being chased, she’d enjoy wondering what it all meant. Maybe someday …
Carson rolled up his sleeves. Cassie spied something up near the crook of his right arm. Without asking permission, she grabbed his wrist and turned his arm out so that inside faced up.
There, nestled up near the inner fold of the elbow, was a small blue Ω.
“OHM,” she whispered. She stared at him. “Are you …”
He pulled his arm back. “It’s an omega. I like it. So what?”
“You’re one of them,” she said. Or was it one of us?
He demurred, palms raised in deflection. “No. I’m not. You can only be OHM if you’ve been Hived. I haven’t been. Besides, my coding skills aren’t quite l33t enough for OHM.”
She considered him in the pale light of his screens. “Then what are you?”
He shrugged. “A sympathizer? An ally? I don’t know the word. I’m just trying to help. And it’s good for them to have someone on the outside.” And then: “You were there?” he asked quietly. “During the raid?”
She nodded, silent. When she realized her hand was still gripping his arm, she dropped it and stepped back.
Carson looked at the floor. “Damn.”
“That’s about it.”
“You made it out,” he said. “From the livestream, it looked like some other people did, too. Did you know a guy who calls himself TonyStark?”
The force of her reaction caught her off guard. In an instant, she was in the air again, falling, her static line not yet taut, watching TonyStark’s head crack open on that ledge.
“He’s dead.” The tonelessness of her own voice surprised her, though her breath hitched in her chest, caught on grief lodged in her heart. She fell back onto the bed. “He died saving me from the Hive Mob and the cops.”
For a moment, she worried that Carson might do something really stupid and annoying and wonderful, like stand up and take her hand, or even give her a hug. She would hate and love it at the same time.
But he didn’t. And she felt greedy and self-absorbed for thinking it, much less wanting it. She’d known TonyStark for a few days. Who knew how long Carson had been communicating with him and working with him? She should be the one offering comfort.
She’d never been good at that.
“I need you to know something about him, OK?” Carson said. “He was on your side.”
Cassie nodded, trying to sit in the stillness her memories of TonyStark brought her. “I know.”
“He fed me some data. They’d gotten further than you think. But they were arguing internally about what to do with it.”
She sat up straight. Yes, Pastor had ’fessed up to the irregularities in the Hive, but that was just hearsay. She needed solid evidence. “They had proof? There was something wrong with the system?”
“Of course there’s something wrong with the system! There’s something wrong with every system. Bugs and glitches are part of software engineering. GIGO.”
Cassie rolled her eyes. “You know what? I’m tired of hearing that the system’s fucked. I want to know how and what I can do about it!”
Carson leaned back in his chair, studying her. A faint smile began to light up his face, like someone had t
urned on a dimmer switch inside him.
“I swear to God, Carson, if you laugh at me right now, I’ll rip out your heart.”
“I’m not laughing at you.” Carson held up a hand, pledging. “It’s just …” He trailed off.
“What?” she demanded. “Tell me!”
He spoke in a rush. “It’s just that when you get angry, your eyes kind of disappear and you kinda look like a Super Chibi character.”
She couldn’t help herself — she laughed, probably more heartily than the little jab deserved. It felt good to laugh, a real, honest laugh, for the first time since … well, since even before sending the BLINQ that changed everything. She felt the ball of anger that had been coruscating in her gut begin to spin down and dissipate, replaced by thought. Anger was useful, she knew, but not right now. Right now, her head had to be clear.
“I needed that,” she admitted. “Thanks.”
He essayed a bow. “I live to serve.” Turning back to his computer, he moused around a bit. “Let’s walk through how we got here in the first place. I’ve been putting together a timeline, just to keep things straight in my head. Like I said, I’m good at patterns. Some of this is public stuff. Some of it’s stuff that OHM dug out of government archives.”
A picture appeared on-screen: the heads of the country’s biggest tech firms, at a table with the president of the United States.
“This was a little way back,” Carson said. “Before our time. The guy wasn’t even sworn in yet, and he met with all the tech bigwigs, the heads of the biggest and the most innovative and most powerful companies in the field. This is where it all started, even though we didn’t know it yet. BLINQ was born here.”
She leaned in and stared at the photo. The president and a bunch of mostly white people, mostly men. No one looked happy to be there, except maybe the president.
“Every now and then, there’d be another meeting,” he said, clicking. The photo changed. Most of the faces were the same, though there were some substitutions. The head of BLINQ popped up. And Alexandra Pastor showed in the background, her head down, studying her phone.