by Drew Magary
“Ah, PINE agents! You’re just in time, and looking appropriately formidable.”
The PINE agents slowly advanced.
“I thought you might do that. Before you get un-gentlemanly with me, let me show you fine officers one thing.”
He tapped his phone again, but nothing happened.
Oh shit.
Now Bamert was breaking in that suit. Here came the sweat, mixing with his natural musk and infecting the Egyptian cotton with a Bamertness that would never wash out. Sweat gladdened Bamert. It was his closest ally. He never felt himself when he was fully dry.
He whispered into his lapel, “Burton.”
“One second,” Burton relayed back from Gould House.
“Seconds are at a premium, dear friend.”
“Almost got them all pinned.”
“There’s no time for almost.” Bamert addressed the crowd again. “Sorry for the momentary technical delay, everyone. Startups, am I right?”
He tapped his phone again. This time, every PINE agent surrounding the theater disappeared. The crowd gasped.
“Ah! There,” said Bamert. “You know, I’m glad PortSys solved our little global warming problem, but I will say that such a feat will make the North Pole far less hospitable to those fine agents than it might have been in prior years. Now, we have business to discuss, don’t we? You see, PortSys may have the recipe for teleportation, but only I have the spice. I have transformed the ingredients, and I’m ready to serve you, the entrepreneurial community. Who wants some spice?”
The venture capitalists in attendance shouted offers at Bamert: first $20 million, then $50 million, then $300 million. It was an auction without end.
“Oh, I see you were positively famished for my business. Well, that is sweeter than clover honey to me. But as you can see, PortSys doesn’t care to have their monopoly disturbed, so I must be going. You have the URL: pegasys.com. I’ll have all of you naked folks home just as swiftly as I can be troubled to do so. Now, before I bid you good day, I’d just like to say CLEMSON FOOTBALL RULES.”
And then Bamert was gone, along with all of the port runaways sitting in the second cordoned-off section of the theater. The surrounding hillside grew thick with black smoke as PortSys’s main testing lab turned to ash.
SINGAPORE/MANHATTAN
At 3am Singapore time, the reception desk of Tower One at the Marina Bay Sands Hotel received a frantic call from an elderly American woman staying in one of the Premier suites on the top floor.
“Someone was in my room!” she screamed at the clerk.
“Ma’am, I assure you that our system of smartwalls is the finest in the world,” the clerk assured her. “No one can get past it.”
“I heard the clap!”
“Let me send security up to sweep the room for you, and I apologize for the disturbance.”
As soon as the clerk hung up, he got another frantic call from upstairs. Then another. And another. Now complaints were coming down to the reception desks in Towers Two and Three as well. The late night revelers and port tourists staggering through the mammoth, trapezoidal lobbies were blissfully unaware of the crisis rippling through the hotel until guests ported down to the desks in their bathrobes, screaming at any staffers they could hunt down. The clerks, collectively desperate to keep the situation quiet, politely refused to issue a widespread alert. They insisted that everything was fine.
Anna Huff had ported into two dozen other rooms before arriving inside the Chairman Suite on the top floor. She felt terrible about breaking in on all those other guests. One guy was drunk and naked and coming out of the shower when Anna ported in. He let out a noise that she had never heard a grown man make. Like a rooster being choked. The rest of the guests she barged in on were asleep, but not for long after she rudely clapped out.
She stood in the center of this suite’s main living room, the sexy glow of the city skyline outside providing the room’s only light. The plate glass windows had snuffed out the noise coming from the fully pedestrianized, and always bustling, city streets below. In the flashing neon, Anna could make out a baby grand piano and hard-edged, modernist furniture. A vase of perfectly cut and arranged orchids changed colors with the shifting lights outside, from deep purple to rose to clementine. She moved toward the bedroom with a lightness, as if approaching the end of a diving board. She was fluid, moving in lockstep with the air circulating through the room.
There was a man in the bedroom, clad in khakis in a black t-shirt, staring at the PortSys lab burning on television and screaming into a wireless headset nestled in his greasy hair. He was sitting at the edge of the bed, facing away from Anna.
“WELL, WHERE IS HE? WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU CAN’T FIND HIM? He burned down my lab! Why do I even have you on contract if you can’t find him? This is all my bitch/slut/whore of a sister’s doing. I’ll fucking kill her right now.”
Jason Kirsch hung up and opened PortMaps. But then he felt a presence. Someone was lingering in the room like a faint scent. He turned around and saw nothing. Anna Huff pressed hard against the living room wall, hoping to melt into it. Oh, how awful it was to be in the same room as Jason Kirsch. She remembered the night he blew into Room 24, seeing him loom large over her bed, consuming the room and thickening its air like a noxious cloud. She could feel that cloud billowing again, choking everything in acid vapor.
Jason shook off the odd vibe and clapped out. Anna made a video call to Burton.
“He was in the Chairman’s Suite. You got him?”
“I got him,” said Burton. “Don’t port yourself. I can send you using thermal recognition.”
She hit MUTE on the phone, clipped the phone to her pants without hanging up, and then stepped forward and felt the shiver.
Now she was in the darkened pantry of a lavish apartment, surrounded by luxurious non-perishables: bags of dried pasta from Italy, jars of oil-slicked Marcona almonds, canned Portuguese sardines, German butter cookies, vacuum-sealed packages of mullet roe. Jason Kirsch was in the next room over. His voice was pure spittle.
“What did you do, Lara?” he said.
“Stay away from me.” It was the first time Anna had heard Lara’s voice in months and it charged through her like an espresso shot. She gripped her gun tightly.
“I’m asking you a question, you little sack of shit. No more delays out of you. Mother isn’t pleased with you and neither am I.”
“You’re both sick.”
“She was right about you, Lara. She was right about how substandard you are. You‘re nothing more than an average child.”
“Average children are gonna save this world,” she spat back at him.
“I already saved it. You’re only in the way of me saving it further. You should kill yourself.”
“Stop it. It’s never worked and it never will, you bastard.”
“You should kill yourself now because you’re not gonna like the way I kill you. Do you understand? I was born to hate you. Now tell me where the fuck those notes are.”
“Go to hell.”
Jason lunged at Lara. She let out a half-scream before he covered her mouth with an iron hand. Over a year ago, Jason Kirsch was one room over from Anna Huff, and Anna had done nothing about it. She had slept as soundly as any child that night, only stirring when it was far too late.
But not on this night. Tonight, Anna Huff was wide awake. She slipped out of the pantry and into the Kirsch family living room. They’d only see her shadow first.
Lara was handcuffed to the wrought iron frame of a daybed. Bruises and welts all over her arms and legs. No more bangle bracelets. She was dressed in a white camisole and red skirt, and looked like she hadn’t been allowed to change clothing in weeks. She looked thinner too, a mere phantom of the Lara that had exercised lasting dominion over Anna’s mind. She looked like she had been chained to that daybed for days on end, abused and malnourished. Her normally razor-sharp bob had been reduced to tangles, like it had been brushed with an egg beater. Jason had c
arved the Conquistadors logo into her upper arm—opposite her adorable Point B tattoo—with his butcher knife. The symbol bubbled up from her arm in the form of a crude scar, looking like a small animal had burrowed under her skin and made a tunnel in that shape.
Jason gripped Lara’s jet black hair with his free hand—apparently, he had been doing this a lot over the past few weeks—and pressed firmly against her mouth with the other.
Anna spotted an upright piano along the south wall of the room. Sitting on top of the piano were dozens of framed photographs, mostly of Emilia and Jason Kirsch posing with industry titans, celebrities, and heads of state. Anna spotted a lone photo of Lara cuddling with a tiny bulldog. There was no trace of that bulldog anywhere in this apartment. She snuck over to the piano and bashed out the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth as loudly as she could.
BUM-BUM-BUM BUMMMMMMMMM.
Lara’s eyes went wide at the sight of her Roomie. Jason Kirsch turned around and stared fiercely at Anna, an eyepatch adorning his face. Anna aimed her gun at the patch.
“Get your hands off of her,” she told Jason.
“You,” he said. “Still alive, huh?”
“I am. Hello, Jason. How’s the eye?”
“I have one good eye and that’s all I need to finish you off.”
“ARRGGHH ye sure?”
“Fucking bitch.”
Jason Kirsch took out his PortPhone and disappeared again. Anna stared at Lara. The noxious cloud receded from the room and Anna felt nothing but hot, spiky light. Lara’s lip gloss was smeared and her cheeks were blood red. She was too stunned to move. Too stunned at her brother’s vicious assault. Too stunned at the sight of Anna Huff alive and well (and armed!). Too stunned at everything. Finally, she spoke.
“You’re alive!”
“Fuck yeah, I am,” said Anna. “How do I uncuff you?”
“The key is over there on the buffet.”
Anna grabbed the key and freed Lara from the daybed. There were welts on Lara’s wrists where bracelets of a different sort had dug in, grinding her skin down nearly to the arteries.
“You got a haircut,” Lara told her.
“It was for an assignment,” Anna said. “I had to burn your mom’s lab to the ground.”
“So that was you.”
“They can try to tell us what to do, but that doesn’t mean we have to listen. You said so yourself.”
“Well, your hair looks great.”
“Thanks. Are you okay?”
“I’ve been better.”
“I wanna take you with me but I don’t think you’re in any shape to tag along right now. I need you to rest.”
“Okay. But where are you going?” Lara asked.
Burton chirped at Anna over speakerphone. “He’s back in Singapore.”
Anna looked at Lara. They were alone again: all her hyperactive imagination had ever wanted. The last thing she wanted to do was leave, and yet…
“I have to go get him.”
At that, Lara’s face turned dark and she flashed a wicked grin.
“Then go get him,” she told Anna. Her voice was lower when she said it, even more seductive. Like talking to a crush on the phone. That voice made it harder for Anna to leave.
“I’ll be back,” she told Lara.
“I know you will.”
Anna stepped forward and Burton ported her back to the suite in Singapore. Alarm bells were going off throughout the hotel: loud PINGS that would make a dog’s head explode. Epileptic emergency strobe lights inside battled with the flashing neon outside.
Anna wasn’t as sly about her entrance this time. Jason Kirsch saw her and made himself huge as a bear.
“How did you find me?” he asked.
“You should be a lot more careful about what you post on WorldGram,” she lied. “You give yourself away so easily when you post pictures of yourself at conferences and what not.”
“What do you want?”
“You’re gonna tell me why you killed my sister.”
“Maybe you should confess to murdering one of our PINE agents in cold blood first, sweetheart. He was so, so young.”
“I never killed anyone,” said Anna. “You made that up, just like you made up that story about me being a neo-Nazi.”
“Don’t you understand who we are, Miss Whatsyourface?” Jason asked.
“It’s Anna. I took your eye, hotshot. You know my name. Get it right.”
“Okay then, Anna. We make the truths here. Not you. If we say you’re a murderer, then you’re a murderer. And if we say you’re a neo-Nazi, then you’re a neo-Nazi.”
“When the world finds out you killed my sister, people won’t be so eager to buy all of your bullshit lies.”
“Sure they will,” Jason insisted.
“They won’t. I have proof that you were in our house that night.”
“Ooooh, Lara give you that, too? I can make proof that says otherwise. It would take nothing. I gave the world porting. I gave it elevated civilization. I made this world and I can break it. I can break you. What have you ever given the world? What good is there in believing the word of a preppy psycho over us? Your loser of a sister killed herself. That’s all there is. She did it because she was selfish and worthless, just like you. You weren’t even awake to save her. You’re a failure.” Jason didn’t have a knife on him, but it was clear that he believed his lethal silver tongue was all he needed to dispatch Anna.
“Why do you do this to people? Why do you troll them to death?”
“It’s my greatest experiment, but explaining it to a girl as common as you would be a waste of time,” Jason told her. Then he made sarcastic puppy eyes, put his hands up in mock innocence, and said in a singsong voice, “I wasn’t even in your sister’s room that night, little angel. I can proooove it.”
“You were there. And now I’m here.”
“So? Who the hell do you think you are?”
“I am war.”
Anna brought the butt of her gun down on the bridge of Jason’s nose, blood gushing out of his nose so quickly that it audibly babbled. This pleased her greatly. She grabbed Jason’s PortPhone and threw it to the ground, digging her heel into the gorilla glass until it cracked and the phone’s guts spilled out.
He rolled his eyes. “You know I can get another one of those, yes?”
“Why did you kill my sister?” she asked him.
“If anyone killed her, it was you. Glomming onto her like a needy child and making her life miserable.”
“You know nothing about Sarah.”
“I know she was a whore.”
“Fuck you.”
“Jesus, you girls and your weak feelings. Your good intentions lie to you. You wanna know why I made your sister die? Because I could. I am the strong and people like your sister are the weak. You’re weak, too. I can see it in your eyes, little piggy. It’s why your daddy left you.”
“You know nothing about my father.”
“Oh, but I do know about Arthur Huff. Like I know that he died. Did you know that? Shot to death by a hooker in Trieste just a couple months ago. Isn’t that fantastic? It’s fun to know things about you, Anna. Don’t you think? I know your father was glad to spend his final years without you or your pathetic loser of a sister dragging him down.”
He’s lying. If dad had died, you would have known. “Fuck you.”
“You didn’t know, did you? Does that news bother you? Did you know he was a member of the Conquistadors? I believe K15 was his handle.”
HE’S LYING.
Arthur Huff was an unremarkable man. Whatever money he made as a restaurant accountant he recklessly spent on anything except his own family: booze, hookers, hands of blackjack at the MGM Grand, everything. At home, he did nothing except fight with Sandy and then stare at either his phone or the wall. Her whole life, Anna got the impression that her dad would rather be anywhere else than with her. He constantly reminded all the Huff women that he was a “great man,” though they never saw
any evidence of it.
Every time Mr. Huff left the house in a snit, she and her sister prayed it was for good. They begged Sandy to leave him. But Sandy, ever the misguided saint, assured them both that their father had a good side. That he meant well. He was gone for good before Sarah or Anna ever saw proof of those claims. Once Arthur left the house permanently, Anna couldn’t allow herself to feel relieved because she remained terrified that he would pop back into their lives one day. Sometimes she felt guilty even though she knew she shouldn’t. Arthur Huff swore to his daughters that if he ever deserted them, it would be all their fault. Anna hated believing him. Also, he took the goddamn bulldog with him. It was the surest sign he wouldn’t be coming back, but also the worst one.
“You’re lying again,” she told Jason. “You’re K15.”
“I’m a trillionaire. The most powerful man in the world. Why would I spend any time hanging out online?”
“Because your mommy can’t boss you around there.”
“You’re really too stupid to believe that your father was one of us, huh? I’m shocked you can even make it through the day, you’re such a delicate little flower. How do you think I found your sister, hmm? Your father said she’d be perfect for me. Do you know he sent me a DM after I made her die? Know what it said? It said, ‘ell-oh-ell.’ Classic.”
Jason laughed out loud. It was such an awful thing to live in a world where laughter was a telltale sign of cruelty. Anna became fire.
“Jason,” she said, “I’m gonna kill you, and I’m gonna be rude about it.”
“Did Lara put you up to all this?” he asked her. “I bet you think Lara loooooooves you.”
“Shut up.”
“Everyone thinks Lara loves them. It’s her talent. I admire it. Did she promise you that you’d both run away together if you just got rid of her nasty mom and brother? She promise you Lily Beach? Was that what she sold you when she gave you trade secrets?”
“She didn’t sell me anything. I’m here on my own.”
“Then you’re an even bigger sucker than the puds she usually ropes in. Do you see her here now, coming to your aid? No. She sent you to do all her dirty work for her, so she could steal this company out from under my mother and me without ever lifting a finger. You think you’re so special because you discovered love. The only thing love is useful for is betrayal.”