by Drew Magary
“That can’t be right.”
But it was. There was no record of anyone else being in the house the night Sarah died. No pin. No profile. Not even a default avatar. Whoever was in the house that night, whoever killed Sarah Huff, was nothing more than a ghost.
THE CRATER
Anna and Bamert trekked out to The Crater at 5am, the earliest time that students were technically allowed to leave their dorms. She draped the weighted blanket over a branch and ducked under it once more, like a fifth grader reading in the dark. She opened up Network Z and chose a pin on the opposite side of the Harkness Wall, then took a deep breath and steeled herself for the cold as she hit PORT.
But nothing happened. Instead, she was greeted with an error prompt: “Portwall ACTIVE. Please enter user ID and password.”
“Shit.”
“Anna? You’ve still got my blanket on you.”
She pulled it off. “It doesn’t work. Network Z doesn’t get us past the wall.”
“Ah,” said Bamert. He thought about it for a moment and then slapped his hip. “Well then, that’s it. We’re just gonna have to climb it.”
“What? Are you out of your mind? Do you remember what happened to that stupid boy who crashed assembly after climbing the wall?”
“Hell yes, I do. That owned.”
“It doesn’t own as much when it happens to you,” Anna told him.
“Well, yeah.”
“You’re a physicist. You should physicist yourself past the wall some other way.”
“Don’t you think I’ve considered that? Physics grants you a miracle once a century, if that. And our century already got its miracle. Every time I try to engineer a way past that thing, I hit a,” he looked up, “well, you know. Listen, I’d only have to climb it once.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Don’t you recall the wonderful visit Edgar paid us? He ported right out of that room.”
Her eyes widened. “He’s a trustee. He’s got a password to get past the wall.”
“And I have a password to get past his wall back home. Now tell me that isn’t lovely. All I have to do is scale the Harkness Wall, port to the old man’s house in Richmond, make sure he’s asleep, swipe his phone, unmask his user ID and password, port back, leave his phone exactly as I found it, and port back here again.”
“That plan seems completely workable and seamless,” Anna told him.
“Stay right here.”
“I was being sarcastic.”
“Sarcasm is for the unwilling. Stay here.”
He sprinted back to Kirkland while Anna stood out in the dark. The first traces of blue morning were creeping in from the East, and she was getting nervous. Overachieving losers would soon be streaming out of the dorms and heading to Main Street for breakfast and early cramming. She heard a rustle nearby and then saw a beam from a flashlight probing around.
The dreaded Wade. His bulky shadow preceded him.
Technically, Anna was allowed to be out here right now, but it didn’t feel legal. Wade would have questions. Frantic, she flopped to the ground, covered herself with the blanket, then frantically hand-raked a pile of leaves and pinecone grubs on top of the blanket to camouflage herself.
Wade drew closer. She had no idea if she had hidden herself well. The small pocket of air under the weighted blanket took on her body heat, and now Anna Huff had the privilege of living inside her own little sweat lodge.
This is probably what being in a coffin is like. Oh god.
The footsteps came closer, gradually faded, and then gradually came closer once more, stopping right by Anna. Footsteps were the worst. It was nicer to live in a world where they remained an anachronism. Someone grabbed the blanket and whipped it off. Her chest cramped up as she stifled a scream.
It was Bamert. He was holding two Army blankets and a pair of box cutters.
“Let’s get cutting.”
“I’m not staying out here another minute.”
“You mean I gotta bring all this back?”
She did. They punted on the morning’s effort and schlepped to class. That night, Anna sat in her room with one of the army blankets and a box cutter, hacking away at the thick green canvas. Lots of sweating. Lots of hand cramps. Asmi caught her slaving away.
“Ooh, a box cutter! Can I play with it?”
“No.”
“Do you need to glue any of those strips together? I have extra.”
“No.”
The next day was a Saturday. Bamert and Anna were back at the wall at 9pm that night, both of them carrying a knotted ribbon of shredded canvas. They joined the ribbons together and the makeshift rope stretched out to twenty-five feet. Bamert walked over to a sturdy pine tree that towered above the wall. He gave it a hearty shake got showered in old brown needles. He wasn’t in a suit this morning, opting instead to climb in school-issued grays from the gym equipment room. He was barely recognizable, right up to the moment he took out a tin of Kodiak and stuffed his beard with a fat dip. The smell of menthol and tree rot permeated the whole forest.
“And you ready for this?” Bamert asked Anna.
“I’m not the one who’s gonna die.”
“Remember me if I do.”
“Are you in shape to do this?”
“How dare you. Never ask a Southern boy if he can climb a tree.”
Bamert tied the rope around his waist, pocketed their phone, and started up the pine. For such a large boy, he was shockingly nimble, slithering his way through the gauntlet of sticky branches and live needles. When he reached the top, he grabbed onto the wall with both hands.
Now Bamert was hanging off the side of the wall. Anna backed away to make sure he didn’t fall directly on her. No sense in both of them dying. He swung a gamey leg over the masonry and tied a highwayman’s hitch around the posting. Anna watched as he performed a series of elaborate moves to safety re-wrap the rope around his own body.
With the rope secure, Bamert tucked his hand firmly against his butt and gave Anna a thumbs up before rappelling down the other side. She watched as the knotted canvas struggled against the posting, dying to be free of it. After a moment passed, the rope went slack and slipped off its mooring. Bamert was either past the wall or dead. The BANG she heard from the other side didn’t do much to relieve her apprehension.
For five agonizing minutes, Bamert was MIA. Anna held her right hand up to the moon and cupped it in her palm. Suddenly, there was a fresh gust and there he was, bursting into laughter. There were still pine needles stuck in his beard.
“WOOO! That was cold! The user name is BigBam2020 and the password is parfive, with the number spelled out.” He handed Anna their PortPhone. “Your turn.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
“But how’d you get the password?”
“Edgar was in the shower. A ghastly sight. Anyway, the nice thing about old people is they never remember their passwords, so they never use them. Where are you gonna go?”
“I dunno,” Anna said. “I need a test pin. Somewhere quiet and deserted. Someplace where no one would ever bother to port, so that I can go in and out without anyone laying eyes on me.”
“Aha!” Bamert cried. “I have just the place for that.”
CLEVELAND
Anna reappeared in the middle of what remained of downtown Cleveland. Cars, a few of them occupied by the destitute, sat forever idle in the middle of Sixth Street. Skyscrapers lay empty and rotting in the dark. Half the streetlamps were toppled and not one of them was illuminated. The nearby Browns stadium was packed with bad memories and little else. This was a squatter’s paradise now, with orphaned office buildings home to small hordes of porters from South Asia and Africa who were searching for temporary shelter from both the elements and from any PINE agents that might roll by.
She was out of Druskin. Free. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small, lacquered bulldog made from crushed pecan shells. She had stolen it just the d
ay before, sneaking into Vick’s office and hiding in his closet just because she could, watching him come in and tend to his evildoing. In the dark, she practiced her piano tutorials for the week, tapping out each key in midair and hearing the notes peal out in her mind as clearly as if she heard a hammer striking a string. She made shadow puppets despite having scant light to cast them. She weaved her hands into a dragon and turned the dragon on herself, watching as it let out breaths of invisible flame. After Vick left for his house, she slipped out of the closet, swiped the little bulldog off his desk, and went on her merry way.
Anna’s grandma Eileen always said she had “ten busy little fingers,” because Anna would touch everything, examine everything, break everything with comical regularity. She could think with those fingers, see with them, remember with them. When Anna was much younger, Sarah taught her how to play blackjack, and what Anna loved far more than memorizing the basic strategy chart (which took her all of a minute) was shuffling the cards, growing addicted to the feel of the glossy card stock. No games. No magic tricks. The physical satisfaction of riffling those cards was all Anna needed. How could something so cheap be so perfect? Sandy had to confiscate her deck, she was so tired of hearing cards flapping at all hours.
Now Anna was in Cleveland for no good reason, but she took a moment to open the camera on Chester Bumlee’s PortPhone. She ported over to the waterfront and put the bulldog on top of the script CLEVELAND sign overlooking Lake Erie. Against all reason, she liked it here. It was a peaceful little ghost city. Nothing but dark parts.
She opened up Network Z and typed LARA KIRSCH into the search bar, without any nosy boys looking over her shoulder.
You could port to her right now. She’d be fucking blown away by that.
The search results came up empty. As far as Network Z knew, Lara Kirsch didn’t exist. Huh. But it only took Anna Huff a moment to shrug it off. Lara Kirsch was the daughter of a trillionaire. It stood to reason that PortSys protected her privacy in ways it would never do for common folk.
No matter. Anna would still find her. She needed a plan to find Lara as breathtakingly reckless and stupid as the plan she and Bamert devised to get out of Druskin. Oh, and she had to avenge her sister’s death. It was a lot, as far as intramural activities went.
She ported to Vancouver and bought Bamert a PortPhone.
KEWARRA BEACH
Anna ported back to Druskin with an extra phone and Bamert set up a dummy Boola account for Chester Bumlee’s daughter, Sarah. The company allowed for up to five of the elder Bumlee’s contacts and/or employees to have access to their benefits. Thus, Sarah Bumlee was granted special privileges to Network Z.
They got under the weighted blanket together.
“Where to now?” Anna asked Bamert.
“You’re letting me pick?”
“You climbed over the wall. It’s only fair.”
Bamert took out his phone and zeroed in on Cairns, Australia. Kewarra Beach was, for the moment, miraculously unmolested by the swarms of blue dots roaming across hemispheres. Here was the nefarious gift of Network Z to Anna, who hated crowds but always managed to port directly into places crammed with them marring the view, milling about, putting down lightweight sleeping bags anywhere they pleased, challenging strangers to pickup soccer games, and taking up precious space without cause. She could dodge all that now, even if empty spaces in 2030 never felt truly empty. Invisible hordes were always waiting on the periphery.
Bamert toggled to the CONFLICT layer of the map and it showed zero combat alerts. Another small miracle. The weather layer was clear, as was the ground hazards layer. He sent the pin to Anna. They locked eyes as they hit PORT, feeling the shiver as they stepped forward in unison.
The sunlight gave them a hard slap the second they appeared on the Aussie coast, but Bamert was unfazed. He shed his gray shirt to reveal a torso mossed in curly black hair, then took off his shoes and closed his eyes as he dug his toes into the sand. He groaned with pleasure, like someone had just fed him a hunk of steamed lobster.
“Oh, Anna Huff, this is what life should always feel like.”
“We should go back to school soon. It’s gonna be lights out.”
“We just got here! Give me a moment, please. Let me have this.”
A man walked by with an ice-cold rack of beer strapped to his shoulders and Bamert ran at the poor vendor like he was about to tackle him.
“YOU!”
He threw cash at the beer man and plunged a mighty hand down into the crushed ice for two cans of Tropics Lager, then he ran back and offered Anna one.
“I don’t drink,” she told him.
“More for me, then.” He sat down on the beach and worked his toes down into the cooler layers of sand, kneading the grains and shaping them into tiny dunes. “Come on. Sit for a moment.”
Anna slipped off her mary janes and plunked down next to Bamert. Small gusts of sand kicked up whenever other port tourists came popping in and out, but that did little to spoil the vista before them: the beach curling along Palm Cove, palm trees shooting clean out of the sand like tiki torches. The Aussie government enforced a No Posting law at this beach, which left it pristine compared to other global destinations that had become littered with obnoxious flyers and billboards. A nearby Malaysian tourist stood by the water, taking dozens of selfie-stick pictures and making a different facial expression in each one. A fat little 11-year-old waded out into the surf with a rented kayak, and then fell into the water every time he tried to get into it. It was hard to tell whether the boy was more unsteady than the kayak or vice versa. In the distance, they spotted a twentysomething parasailing high above the Coral Sea. Bamert stared at the woman in midair and shook his head.
“Now that I don’t care for.”
“Why?” asked Anna. “She’s just parasailing.”
“I don’t care for it. Too high over water.”
“What is it with you and heights over water?”
“Oh it’s a long story. And I hate long stories.”
“You must hate Nolan’s assignments then.”
“That I do.” He chugged the first beer and let out a mighty AHHHH, like he was in a commercial. “This beer I hate far less.”
The palms bent toward the sunlight radiating off the pink sea and Anna did as the treetops did, pulling her knees to her chest and leaning into the warm, happy light.
“We shouldn’t abuse these phones,” she told Bamert. “We need some kind of rule to make sure we don’t do this too often.”
“I agree. We’ll only do it every day, all the time.”
“I’m serious. I honestly don’t wanna get kicked out.”
“I suppose I don’t either,” Bamert said. “What are your parameters?”
“Well, we don’t tell anyone except Burton.”
“Duh.”
“And we only port at night on weekends, or at 5am on weekdays.”
“You’re wounding me with these 5am wakeup times, Anna Huff. The other night I had to stay up late to study after our little sojourn and I hallucinated. A pig appeared in my room and asked me if I had a cigarette.”
“I’ve been in your dorm. That probably actually happened. But look, the only way we can do this is by setting some limits on how much we do it.”
Bamert let out a sigh and extended a giant hand. His palm was cold from fresh beer can sweat. “Deal.”
Anna took out Vick’s bulldog and snapped a candid of it resting on the beach. Their small moment of peace was interrupted when a man ported in directly in front of them, his arrival blowing sand into their faces. He wasted no time going into an elevator pitch.
“ARE YOU MR. CHESTER BUMLEE?” the man shouted. “IF SO I HAVE AN INCREDIBLE OFFER FOR YOU.”
“Go away,” Anna told him. “You see the No Posting sign, fucko?”
“I think you’ll find that this offer is worth your time!”
“If you don’t go away right now, I’ll kick your ass.”
The man didn�
�t like that very much. He opened up his sport coat to reveal a loaded Glock tucked into his waistband. Anna’s feelings about Druskin were conflicted at best, but at least there weren’t any guns there. She did not miss all the big stupid guns, or all the pushy assholes porting from place to place and brandishing weaponry to make sure they got an audience.
“That was very rude, Ms. Bumlee.”
For another five minutes this aggro port spammer held them hostage with vague offers of “market-based solutions” until someone nearby screamed out “CROC!” and the beach cleared to accommodate a 20-foot long saltwater beast that had arrived at Kewarra Beach the old-fashioned way. It moseyed along the sands with dead eyes and an open, neolithic jaw.
The port salesman had no choice but to cut his pitch short and bang out as crassly as he had arrived. Bamert and Anna ported back to Druskin. When Anna went to clean up in the Sewell bathroom, she still had grains of gleaming white sand pooled in her socks. She shook them out in the shower with a knowing smile before looking in the mirror and having her mood turn sour. Twenty minutes in Australia had been long enough to turn her face as red as a rum punch. As soon as she had discovered a way to port out of Druskin, she had managed to ruin it.
Anna Huff had herself a sunburn.
SHIT MEMOIRS ENTRY
Date unknown
SEWELL HALL
“Anna!”
It was Asmi running in from the larger bedroom. Anna was all the way under her comforter, but Asmi wasn’t having it. She sat down next to the big lump on the mattress and began shaking it.
“UP UP UP. Anna, you have to wake up!”
“Says who?” she asked, still buried beneath her covers.
“Says me. When you guys told my dad to move his trucks from his usual corners, his sales doubled in ONE night! How in the great fuck did you know where he should put them?”