Point B (a teleportation love story)

by Drew Magary

  “Nor do I. It was just the first liquid that came to mind. I didn’t wanna suggest Coke, lest I drudge up memories of my gauche outburst. Tea? Juice?”

  “I could maybe get some tea. Let me just grab my phone.”

  Shit. Anna bit down hard on the flashlight.

  “You know what?” Bamert told Vick. “Forget it. It was a silly idea anyway. I’ve wasted enough of your time, sir.”

  What the hell is he doing?!

  The ensuing silence made Anna want to die. She finally got the cover off the phone and carefully unclipped the precious antihydrogen battery. Then, she swapped in the lithium tablet battery from her tablet and clipped it. According to Burton, she had to break one other component of the phone so that it would power on, but then get bricked shortly thereafter if it stayed on. The goal was to convince Vick his phone was broken, not that it had been tampered with.

  “Actually,” Vick told Bamert. “I don’t need the phone. Let’s go get your tea now.”

  Holy smokes, he did it.

  Anna heard both of them clomp down the stairs to the Grill, the sounds of their footsteps blessedly fading away and leaving her with all the time she needed to finish the job. She screwed the battery cover back on, clipped off a single terminal off the memory card, and slowly lowered the touch screen down into the casing. She felt around her right-hand pocket for the tiny screws, but only found a hole instead.

  Crap.

  Suddenly, there were new footsteps growing louder and coming toward the office. A rhythm of mounting dread. Anna crouched down with the flashlight and searched frantically for the little bastard screws. The floorboards of the closet were so aged and warped that the screws could have easily fallen between the cracks and been lost forever, as surely as a climber disappearing down a crevasse.

  The steps grew louder. Whoever was coming was coming nearer, and quickly.

  Please God, let me find these screws.

  “HEY!” she heard a voice cry out. That was it. She was dead.

  But then, another voice. “What?”

  “Hurry up, man! We gotta be there twenty minutes before practice!”

  “Quit busting my balls. Bad enough when Willamy does it. Christ.”

  The footsteps faded away. Anna had little time to process her relief, because the screws were still nowhere to be found. Then she reached into her left-hand pocket, and there they were. She had forgotten which pocket she had put them in the entire time.

  You. Moron.

  Once the pentalobe screws were in place, she pressed down hard on the POWER button and said a little prayer. The screen glowed a bright enough to make her flinch. The phone worked, at least as much as it needed to. She turned it off before it could brick, and then the closet went dark again. She cleaned the phone down for prints with a soft eyeglass wipe. Now to just quietly slip out of the closet, put the phone back onto the table, and get the hell out of—

  CLOMP CLOMP CLOMP

  Anna couldn’t leave the office, but she also couldn’t stay. Back in the closet she went, leaving the door cracked the exact way it was when she broke in. Her breathing was heavy and labored. She tried desperately to corral it so that it wouldn’t give her away. Stuck in that closet, she became all too aware of the wide variety of ambient sounds she could make: floppy shoes, heavy breathing, swallowing, sniffles, coughs, farts, sneezes. Her entire body was one big stupid booby trap.

  She moved to the back of the closet and slid down into the corner behind a row of stiff blazers, then covered her mouth even though she had no intention of speaking. Vick walked into the office and grabbed his phone off the table. Minutes after he unlocked it, he was met with an endlessly spinning wheel.

  “Ugh. Again?”

  He cursed the phone, the lousy hypocrite, then sat down at his desk and picked up a landline.

  “Mrs. Kursten? I’m aware it’s a Saturday, yes. My phone has frozen up again and I need a new one delivered to Druskin Gate tonight. No, not Monday. Tonight. It’s a ten-minute call and then you can have the rest of your day in Paris. Goodbye.” He slammed the phone down and began running through a pile of manila folders on his desk.

  Come on, you son of a bitch. Leave!

  But Vick wouldn’t. Maybe he knew Anna was in that closet. Maybe he knew she was there and was content to sit at his desk and leave her there with her fear for hours on end. That would’ve been a classic Vick move.

  Instead, what happened next was even more torturous. Vick caught a whiff of something and took to it like a hound. Anna quickly took an inventory of her own musk: menthol dandruff shampoo, stinky old shoes, honeydew body wash, enough sweat to fill a fish tank, and more. But there was one more thing.

  The gel packet.

  Oh no, that gel packet smelled like a dorm room made from concentrate. That’s what Vick had latched onto. Vick rose from of his chair to hunt the scent down. Anna was only feet away from expulsion, and that was the nicest possible outcome.

  Then a hard port wind blew in, and there was Emilia Kirsch, dead in the center of the office. She looked irritated.

  “Have you gone through those profiles yet?” she asked Vick.

  “Most. Not all,” he told her.

  “I want them done tomorrow, no later.”

  “I understand.”

  “Any of the new ones stand out?”

  “A couple.”

  “Such as?”

  Vick walked back over to his desk and pulled an envelope from the stack.

  “The boy, Jamie Burton,” Vick said. “Polymath. Very talented. Also, he’s a strangely mature kid for his age.” Anna rolled her eyes at that.

  “Any hang-ups about him?” Kirsch asked Vick.

  “He spends too much time with Annie Huff and Paul Bamert.”

  The name is ANNA, you bastard.

  “Ugh, Paul Bamert,” Kirsch said. “Charles, why can’t any of my friends have normal children?”

  “The boy is a mess, and everyone knows his track record is abysmal. I doubt he graduates.”

  “And what about the Huff girl? Is she worth anything?”

  “She’s clever but otherwise unremarkable.”

  “She didn’t rat out my daughter to you though, I’ll give her that. How is she as an R&D subject?”

  Vick’s mouth drew up a single corner into that grotesque half-smirk. Anna looked away, clutching her knees and trying not to scream out in rage.

  “She fails,” Vick said. “And then she screams.”

  “I keep telling you to go to Southeast Asia for lab rats, for crying out loud.”

  “They’re too easy to break.”

  “I’m a wealthy woman, Charles, but I am tired of doling out lunch money settlements on behalf of this school. That one Marshall girl, I had to shell out $500,000 after she walked out of your house lobotomized.”

  “The Huff girl won’t give you any trouble.”

  “She better not. I bet she only got in here as a pity case anyway. What’d her sister do, kill herself a month before applications were due?”

  “Actually her tests scores were remarkable. Shockingly so. And Coach Willamy says she’s already one of the best—”

  One of the best what? Divers? Why couldn’t he compliment you to your face and not to that pile of shit?

  “Oh, who cares what that lump of chewed gristle says about her?” Kirsch sneered. “Our admissions office needs to stop taking in every stray dog with a sob story hanging from its collar.”

  Anna turned lycanthropian, ready to break through her skin and burst out of the office closet door to devour everything in sight. Stealing Vick’s phone battery was a sordid little thrill, but it wasn’t enough. She could dash out into the center of that office, hold a samurai sword high in the air and let it catch a blinding glint of light before she brought the steel down on both of those fuckers.

  “How’s Lara?” Vick asked Kirsch. Anna leaned forward.

  “You don’t ever need to ask me about my daughter, thank you.”

  “How�
�s business?”

  “Charles, this company is solving far too many problems. Business cannot thrive if no one out there has any problems that require solving. Expanding access to Network Z and widening the porthole will disrupt things just enough to make consumers place even greater value in our security products.” Network Z! “Sold effectively, they could soon be as profitable as our porting products. Do you see how that works?”

  “I do.”

  “No, you don’t. You’re a common administrator with a head made of wet cement. That is why you help manage the players and why you are not a player yourself. Get through those reports and send me five names, including the Burton boy.”

  She exited with a portclap that shook the closet door. Vick stood there with his head bowed and for a moment, Anna pitied him. He was never going to grow into anything beyond what he was now. This was his permanent station in life. He was a pawn and a coward and a loser: a man surrounded by genius but possessing none of his own, and she knew with ironclad certainty that he would always be that way.

  That sympathy had a quick half-life, though. Anna had granted Vick the courtesy of seeing him as a human being, while Vick had never granted her any such favor. He belonged in hell and she was ready to kick him down there. She wasn’t afraid of him anymore. She didn’t dread his sour mug the way she had for the past month, because now she knew the truth: You’re better than him. You got his porting battery to prove it.

  She could stay quiet in that closet for as long as she needed. She could have stopped breathing for hours and still outlasted him. It was actually quite cozy in there. Maybe she’d hide in there again sometime. Make it her home. Maybe she’d get that jackass to spill everything he knew about this poisonous school. The anger was cooling now, hardening into determination. You could have seen wisps of steam come off her body.

  To pass the time as Vick continued poring over files, she practiced piano in her mind: Sonatina No. 1 in G Major, moving her fingers along an invisible piano in the dark, breaking into a private smile whenever the notes turned on the charm. She loved that piece right up to the day she sorted out how to play it. That’s when the magic disappeared from the music and it just became a rote series of keys to press. She didn’t want to become the kind of muso snob who was more impressed by a difficult piece of music than by a good one, and yet here she was, writing off Beethoven as kiddie stuff once she had mastered it.

  Anna won second place in the junior division of Nationals playing that little scrap of his brilliance. The competition took place at Bingham High School, south of Salt Lake City. She sat on the floor of an angled hallway outside the school’s assembly hall all that afternoon, waiting for two hours to take the stage. The hallway didn’t even have a vending machine. While the other insufferable prodigies were getting in their respective turns, Anna went over the sheet music in her head so many times that when she was finally called up to perform, she didn’t hear the notes. It was an easy piece compared to what the other kids were playing, but that simplicity was what gave her the freedom to arrange it herself and to strike the keys with such careful timing and pressure that no one else could have played it similarly. Anyone else trying to replicate her performance of it would fail, and be left at a loss as to why they had. That was Anna’s musical gift: the ability to play music precisely as she heard it in her own mind.

  Sarah was so, so proud of Anna that day. It was the soon-to-prove bittersweet accolade that would start Anna on her path to Druskin. Now, once more, she could hear the notes from the piece—each one sharp as a diamond—in her mind, providing an appropriate soundtrack to the sight of Vick laboring away at his pathetic little existence.

  Two hours later, Vick had finally plowed through all the reports. He turned the lights off and left the office door open behind him. Anna waited ten more minutes, poked her head out of the closet, and then ran back to Sewell. She ran so fast she could barely feel her feet.

  SEWELL HALL

  Bamert secured visitations for Anna’s room the night of the theft. All the girls hanging in the common room stared as he politely greeted Mrs. Ludwig at her apartment door and then bounded up the west stairwell in a flowered suit featuring tailored shorts instead of pants. Halfway to Anna’s room, he craned over the railing, stared up at the filthy plexiglass skylight at the top of Sewell, and sang out as loud as he could:

  ♫ Here comes your man

  Here comes your man

  HERE COMES YOUR MAAAAANNNNNN ♫

  Anna burst out of Room 24 and loomed over him.

  “Will you get up here, you jackass?”

  “Coming!”

  He walked straight through to the inner bedroom, kicked off his brown oxfords, and splayed out on her bed.

  “When do we start rasslin’?” he asked her.

  “Three feet on the floor,” Anna reminded him.

  Bamert dangled a hairy leg off her bed and let a single toe graze the hardwood.

  “Did you get it?” he asked.

  She pulled the slim battery out of her jeans pocket and brandished it in front of him.

  “I got it.”

  “Anna Huff, you are incredible.”

  “How was your teatime with Vick?”

  Bamert ran his hand over his greasy mop of hair and let out an exhausted groan. “That man is some bad weather.”

  “Yeah well, you weren’t trapped in his office for three hours.”

  “And how was your quality time in the ninth circle of hell?”

  “Awful and then quite soothing.”

  “Yeah, I bet you can’t wait to darken that particular door again.”

  “Kirsch ported in,” Anna told Bamert.

  He sat up. “What?”

  “This school isn’t just a school, Bamert.”

  “I know that. The brochure wouldn’t shut up about it.”

  “No. You don’t understand. This place is a recruiting facility for PortSys, and more than that. They want Burton.”

  “For what?” he started laughing. “Are they putting together a folk band?”

  “For I dunno, PortSys stuff! They think he’s a genius.”

  “Well, he is. He’s also an idiot. They say anything about me?”

  “Uh, no.”

  Bamert grinned until the corners of his mouth were nearly hitting his earlobes. “You’re lying.”

  “Dammit! They said you were a mess, and that I was a pity case.”

  “One of those two claims is accurate, at a minimum. Anything else you found out?”

  There was also the matter of the hush money Kirsch doled out on behalf of Vick and his ghastly porting experiments, but Anna wasn’t ready to talk about that just yet. Sitting in that closet, she agreed to place a gag order on herself for the time being. It was silence begetting more silence, and she hated that it was so necessary for her at the moment. Silence was an awful thing: the foremost tool of the corrupt. Every secret was an untreated wound. One day, Anna would see to it that everyone knew everything about everyone, and then the world would finally have to deal with itself. But for now, it was the most evil of necessities.

  “You never told me your father knew Kirsch,” Anna said to Bamert.

  Bamert laid back down on the bed and rolled onto his side. He propped his head on his hand, like he was posing for an underwear ad. “How do you think I got in here? All the old weird rich people know each other. They really said I was a mess, huh?”

  “I shouldn’t have even told you. Ignore it.”

  “What else did they say? I won’t tolerate odious slander.”

  “Nothing else, I swear. All they said was you’re a mess.”

  “There’s nothing worse than when people I hate are right, and they’re right about me an awful lot.” He stood up and gazed out the window. “Whatever. Soon enough we’ll break out of here and I can be back with all the other messy people again.”

  “The Wall is still an issue.”

  “Heh. You mean Emilia didn’t stand there and say, ‘Now Charles, don�
�t tell anyone my password is BananaButt69.’”

  Anna started laughing. Whenever Bamert made her laugh—and it was often—she felt a little less lost. High school is when you laugh the hardest.

  “Yeah no, she didn’t do that,” she said. “But she did mention something about a Network Z, which was something Lara also knew about.”

  “Aha! Maybe Z is how Emilia gets past the wall and all the nasty digital barracudas guarding it.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe they’re selling the ability to track other people and…” Sarah. You could get Sarah’s porting history, even without Lara’s help. Now that was something the police couldn’t do, even if they had bothered to try.

  “And?” Bamert had been left hanging.

  Anna snapped out of it. “I forgot what I was gonna say.”

  “You could track Lara with it.”

  “Yeah but that’s not my priority. I mean, I know that’s why you think I’m doing all this, but there’s something else.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  “Bamert, I can’t.” More of that poisonous silence.

  “Well, here’s an idea I’ve been kicking around: you told us about that one guy’s feed, right? Erick Martin? The guy who said PortSys was selling porting data to any asshole with a checkbook?”

  “Yeah, but Burton had a point about that guy. Who knows if his feed is worth anything. He’s just some bored lawyer. He got his account banned.”

  “The point is, I know an asshole with a checkbook.”

  Just then, Asmi came flying into the room, her flowered dress matching the pattern of Bamert’s suit. She had her hands held out in front of her in a full I-can’t-even pose, ready to dump out the day’s travails for Anna to take in.

  “Anna, you would not believe—” She noticed Bamert, who put a touch of extra effort into his underwear pose the moment he spotted her. “Oh shit. I’ve come barging in like some complete ponce, haven’t I? Are you two—”

  “Hell no,” Anna told her.

  “Right. You’re not even into lads.”

  “Nope.”

  “Is this the fabled Asmi?” Bamert stood up and did a little curtsy before extending a hand. “It can only be.”