Sunlight 24

by Merritt Graves

The Gruensteins lived in a neo-Gothic Romanesque Revival one neighborhood over—more tacky than ostentatious—a kind of mcmansion version of Neuschwanstein Castle. We’d thought about hitting it ourselves several times but had always scratched it off our list because the security system was too layered. There was a ton of exterior motion-triggered lighting, most of it harsh and unfrosted, laser alarms, cameras, contact sensors on the windows, as well as thermal scans and biometrics. To ice it all off, they had two big, trained Dobermans who scared the shit out of me.

  Before, I would’ve said Jaden was nuts for thinking he could get in there. He’d never been overly detail-oriented, preferring stuff to happen fast and then lying about it later if things went wrong. But there was a large dossier on these people, drilled down to a very granular level: their workplace, travel habits, friends, the fact that the husband was having an affair, family—the woman’s mom was sick with Parkinson’s and had recently been moved into a care facility, schedule—everything from dental appointments to yoga classes. And finally, thorough notes about the security system—complete with dimensions, power usage, model numbers, serial numbers, etc.

  I directed my focus on my film’s “dial out” icon. All I had to do was blink at ‘Ready,’ then ‘Call 911,’ then ‘Enter,’ and the police would be racing down the street. The thought was terrifying. After everything, it would be over in minutes.

  However, as it got later I became less certain Jaden would try it tonight. It was still only 10 p.m. but, like Ethan had said, it just seemed too surreal, too outside of what you’d expect was possible to even imagine what it looked like. Even now, lying in bed, it didn’t feel like it was me. It was like I’d diverged from reality some time back and this was just what was left over.

  I closed my eyes for a while and opened them again, looking out at my room. There was Telluride The Skiing Hamster and a reprint of this stunning oil painting by Cyril Beaulieu, but that was about it. I’d long since taken down all my sports trophies because having them up was too depressing. And posters of my favorite professional football, basketball, and baseball players because they could be schooled by a doped-up preteen. And my favorite indie bands because they were just wallowing in it. I didn’t want to wake up to that every day. I had to create an environment conducive to accomplishment, as Principal Frank had once ironically put it. The broken windows theory or whatever.

  Though mostly it was because I didn’t want to be part of the crowd that escaped into nostalgia, not just listening to the same music and wearing the same clothes from their childhood and the childhoods of VR game designers, but the childhoods of all the screenwriters and musicians who’d influenced them. It was a farce, recycling nostalgia three generations down. Half of it was suits cynically cashing in on old memories and built-in audiences, but the other half was people lapping it up because they wanted to go back. They wanted to be back in a world where they were at the center.

  A door opened and then the sink turned on. Jaden was in the bathroom getting ready for bed. I usually showered about now, too, but had done it earlier, after positioning Syd and Taurus to watch all the doors and windows from the side yard.

  Music sounded from inside. Jaden’s tastes ranged from post emo revival to prog indie rock, to oldies, and this was of the latter, “Jump, Jive an’ Wail” by Louis Prima, a big band jazz swing from the mid-1950s. Despite its bounciness, it was strangely calming along with the shower noise because it meant he wasn’t going to be leaving right then.

  I took deeper breaths and sank into the sheets. Even with Syd and Taurus camped outside, I tried to tell myself I was just a senior going to bed—following along the exact thread of time I should be following. I turned off the light and a glow in the dark constellation lit up the ceiling—another reminder of Michael’s abortive attempt at getting me into astronomy. I should probably take it down, too, though, since space was just another form of escape.

  An hour passed but I couldn’t fall asleep. I had motion detectors set up in every section of the yard, yet I still wasn’t able to stop checking Syd’s footage on my film. Normally, I’d take a sleeping pill, but I couldn’t be drowsy when I woke up. I just had to lie there, circling around the same thoughts with the knowledge that at any second the silent alert would go off in my mind and I’d be throwing off the covers and sending the drones off into the darkness.

  A ringing slammed into my consciousness. I looked one way, then the other, thinking I was having a nightmare, but when it settled into the familiar cadence I’d set for the internal alarm the confusion blended into disbelief. It hardly seemed real. I quickly moved the bedspread off and padded over to my workstation. I’d left it on, the avionics program running, and it was only a few clicks before I had Syd’s feed up, watching a figure Jaden’s height walk down the sidewalk.

  I hit a hotkey to select Taurus, perched on the underside of a leaf, and then the hotkey I’d assigned to Jaden, choosing a clandestine following pattern I’d picked up from a premium code warehouse. Blue morphos were diurnal, so normally they wouldn’t be active this time of night, but fortunately, like with the bees, blue jays, and birds of paradise, they were so critical that the USDA had waived the temporal biomimicry rules. And therefore, there were enough clusters of them that Taurus (designated T) was never out by himself for more than a block or two.

  “Don’t you think you’re pushing it a little at thirty meters?” said Ethan into my ear over our direct line. “We know where he’s going.”

  “Yeah, but I wanna see if he stops. If he’s gotta stash somewhere, this could help us leapfrog him.”

  “Well, you should bring up Syd then,” Ethan said.

  The problem was Jaden knew Syd, and I didn’t know how good Jaden’s vision was.

  Seeming to sense my thought, Ethan said, “Don’t worry. He’s looking for drones, but only ones that could get him on facial rec. See, watch his head on Scorpius’ (designated S) cam; there’s a forty-degree window on his right side that he hasn’t checked once yet. Fly Syd high and wide enough around and Jaden’ll never spot her.”

  That wasn’t a bad idea. “Okay. Highlight that window on my screen to make sure we’re seeing the same thing. I’ll have him maintain at one hundred meters, shaded north northwest of Jaden’s current trajectory.”

  “Done. I’d still use as much tree cover as you can, though.”

  “Copy that.”

  A few seconds later he said, “You were right about him not heading straight there. If anything, it’s Midland Park now,” said Ethan.

  “He could just be avoiding the CDN cams, but everything’s pretty green tonight. They’re all down on Baker Street. Must be some kind of drone fiesta going on.” I toggled my Pollinator Community heat map. “I wonder what that is.”

  “Do you think Jaden’s drawing them there? You know, so he has a clear path to these Gruensteins or whatever.”

  “How would he do that?” I asked.

  “Not sure. You’re the one who looked at his files.”

  I hadn’t had time to look at all of them, though—and some were secure. Like ‘The Road to Camelot’ had two hundred fifty-six bit encryption, which would be unbreakable unless I could get my hands on a password. “Just thinking out loud, but if most of the fauna are pollinators then, yeah, you could lure them with a lot of pollen. I saw Mr. Jefferson with these reusable bags earlier. I thought he was just going to the store, but maybe . . .”

  “Jesus, he’s smart,” said Ethan. “Maybe you are actually right.”

  “About what?”

  “Ending this before he gets even smarter.”

  There was silence for a few moments, and then I heard the faint sound of smacking lips.

  “Are you chewing something?” I asked.

  “Dude, I eat when I’m nervous. And I have these oatmeal cream pies that are about to expire. Could be like a last supper or something.”

  “Don’t freakin’ say that.”

  A vehicle came around a corner and headlights beamed down the
street. Jaden switched his trajectory so he’d be up against a tree away from the streetlights as the car neared. But instead of hiding behind it as the lights splashed onto the sidewalk and median, he seemed to merge into it. He was gone.

  “What the fuck,” I said.

  “It’s got to be a nanotube or graphene cloak—the same thing I wanted to build,” said Ethan. “Somehow, the subwavelength’s electromagnetic response is reshaping the phase of the base wave, bending the light in a way we can’t process him. Have you seen him do that before?”

  “No.”

  “I can try to have T compensate for the refraction by switching his optical unit’s wavelength . . . wait a second.” Jaden reappeared on the other side of the sidewalk and started cutting into Midland Park at a jog after the car had passed. “Never mind. That sneaky shit. Probably got a little hot in there using CNTs as conductors.”

  “Yeah. Or he was afraid he’d get flagged if someone spotted him in it. Either way, I’m ramping speed up to 7.5. The flapping rate looks a little unnatural, but we’ve got to stick with him,” I said, hitting the hotkey for T and typing the command.

  “Copy that. Following suit with S, although I’ll take a forty-five degree angle in case he veers left. He’s really picking up the pace here; do you think he suspects a tail?” asked Ethan.

  “He’s only checked behind once, but who knows?”

  “Actually, veer back right. He’s going into the woods.”

  “Why would he do that?” I squinted at the screen. “It looks suspicious. But I guess it doesn’t matter as much with the drones all cleared out.”

  “Moving speed up to 8.5 to maintain tracking distance. His rear line of sight’s blocked by the trees anyway, so it should be okay,” said Ethan.

  “I’m going all the way to 10 so I can swing around by the creek, but I kinda doubt I’ll have the angle in time. You were right; we should’ve made these things faster.”

  “Nah. You’ve got it.”

  I had lost a visual on Jaden, but when Taurus reached the tree line I saw a flash of him on the other side of a ravine, only now he had a small backpack with him.

  “What’s he got there?” Ethan asked.

  “Something that he doesn’t want to keep in our house. Something that . . . oh, what do you know, he’s back on a trajectory to the Gruensteins. Re-routing Scorpius on a wider flanking vector.” I toggled between the view from Taurus to Scorpius back to Taurus, keeping Scorpius minimized in the bottom right corner with Syd’s aerial just above him. “The little bastard’s actually doing it.”

  “Which is what you thought, right?”

  “Yeah . . . ,” I said, not knowing what I thought anymore. I could calculate more things than I thought possible, but they almost made the world more mysterious. Stranger than I ever imagined.

  “What’s that up there?”

  “What? Oh, it’s a . . . a person. Digitizer’s saying 5’7’, 5’8. Can’t get a face rec. Probably has a mask on. And there’s another one . . . no two, at your 9 o’clock at the intersection. Looks like he’s brought his Counter Insurgency friends.”

  “They’re converging on the house,” said Ethan. “It’s just up the next block.”

  A few moments later Jaden was out of the woods on the edge of a property. There was a fence marking the outer boundary of the yard and he moved around it, reached over the side, and unlocked a gate.

  “What’s his play? They’ve got cams and motion detectors everywhere. Are they just going to friggin’ walk up there?” asked Ethan.

  As if on cue, Jaden casually strolled up to the back patio and climbed the steps to the porch.

  “Shit, they’re not going off,” I said. “The system’s down.”

  When he got to the door Jaden pulled back the weather stripping on the lock to reveal its plunge and slid a BASIC card through, and like that he was in.

  “The owners didn’t even bother with the deadbolt since they thought they were good with all that other stuff,” said Ethan.

  There was silence as I stared at the open door, dreading what came next.

  “So, are you going to do it?” asked Ethan after a few seconds.

  I took a deep breath and focused on the 911 icon I had queued up on my film. The signal was routed through a number of proxies so the police wouldn’t be able trace the GPS back to me.

  Two other masked figures went in through the back door and closed it behind them. I made one last survey of the options before letting myself be carried over into a string of reflexive motions. I turned on the voice modulating filter on my bug, blinking on ‘Call 911’ and then ‘Enter.’

  “911. Please state the nature of your emergency,” asked a digital male operator voice.

  I felt like I was freefalling. “Hello, I’d like to report some suspicious figures entering 2323 Weatherford Court. I don’t think the occupants are home.”

  “Are they armed?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. It’s dark out.”

  The call’s content must’ve triggered a priority routing because the voice changed suddenly from digital male to human male. “And you think they’re robbing the house now?”

  “Yeah. I can see them a little through the window.” This was a lie, but I wanted it to feel urgent.

  “And what is your name?”

  “I’d rather not give it. I don’t want my wife to know I was out.”

  “Sir, you have to give me a name in order for me to—”

  “No, I don’t. Just come, please.”

  And then I hung up, exhaling a long, slow breath. It was over. They were going to arrest my brother, the same brother I’d grown up having AR cushion fort wars in the living room. Playing Final Avenger. Sharing everything—even our films up until last year when we’d gotten a second pair for Christmas, so we didn’t have to trade off days. I was starting to reflect on what that meant again when the door flew open and all three of them sprinted out, beelining for the backyard fence.

  “What the fuck? How are they out so fast?”

  “Did they take anything?” I asked, trying to zoom in on Taurus’ cam.

  “I don’t know. That backpack looks a little bigger, I guess. It couldn’t have been much, though, since they were just there twenty seconds.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Should we pull the twins out?” asked Ethan.

  “Yeah. No, wait. I want to take a look.”

  “What do you mean? The freaking police are coming.”

  “I know, I know, but this’ll just take a sec,” I said.

  Jaden and the two others disappeared behind the fence and I brought Taurus down from the tree, setting its speed to nine, then to three as it entered the back door. There were modern appliances everywhere in the kitchen: a touchless grill, an automated griddle, a giant range, coffee and milk bars with cold brews on tap. Below on the floor, a vase had crashed, sending chards of glass in a radial pattern around orchid petals and water. A cleaning drone was splayed awkwardly on the counter behind it, seeming to be in mid-swipe of a cloth. In the family room, two buddy bots were slumped over a table on either side of a multi-level chessboard.

  “What are you looking for?” asked Ethan in my ear.

  “I don’t know. Something doesn’t seem right, though,” I said, as T flew in a little farther.

  “Should I search upstairs?” asked Ethan.

  I glanced in the corner display and saw that Scorpius had entered, too, before toggling screenshots of the house’s blueprint I’d gotten off Jaden’s workstation. “I don’t think they made it that far. Check in the library, I’ll check down here. There’s this big room on the first story that’s not on the print.”

  I set T’s speed back to seven as it powered down the hall, arriving a few seconds later in a room that was empty except for a couple of sofas covered in transparent tarps, a ladder, and a few buckets of paint.

  “What could they’ve taken so fast?” I muttered.

  “Dude, these drones really shouldn’t be floatin
g around in here when the cops arrive.”

  “Just another second.”

  I stopped T in a doorway. “Oh, there’re their Dobermans lying in the den. Looking drugged,” I said, inching a little closer. “But why . . . why would they just drug the dogs and leave? That’s about all they had time for.”

  “Dunno,” said Ethan.

  I glanced over at S’s feed and saw something on the floor—a black blotch in the dimness. “Hey, do you see that?”

  “See what?”

  “Go back, go back. There’s something on the floor.”

  “So? We’ve got to get the fuck out of here,” Ethan said, the panic from this morning reappearing.

  “There’re cleaning bots everywhere. There shouldn’t be something on the floor.” Scorpius turned around and moved back a few meters. “No, it was behind the counter. There, there! Now get closer and zoom.”

  “Whoah, it’s a BASIC card. These cats don’t seem like the types who would . . .”

  Ethan trailed off. It was my BASIC card. Dorian Waters. Birthday 8/19/2014. Even though I knew instantly the overall conclusion, it took a few moments to parse.

  “Oh, God,” said Ethan in a monotone.

  I threw on a shirt and bolted outside, tearing down the street faster than I’d ever run before. Things were finally cooling off now in late November, but the air was still more fresh than cold and I felt like I was tunneling right through it, for the first time really internalizing the speed bump I’d gotten—aware of how fast my muscle fibers were twitching and how fast my heart was pumping oxygen and nanobots all over my body. At track practice I had to hold back, but this was almost like I was sliding off the edge of something, barely in control.

  When I reached a straightaway, I rewound the footage from T’s feed and placed it beside my film’s live view under the CDN overlay, which was beginning to turn from green to yellow as more and more of Jaden’s pollen was collected.

  “Jesus, Dorian. Can’t Syd get it?” asked Ethan. “She’s got toes, right?”

  “Yeah. But she only has surveillance algorithms.”

  Through the trees I saw that a police cruiser had already pulled up by the Gruensteins’ cul de sac, its lights spilling through a cluster of trees in the middle of the circle drive. For a few moments I ran faster, crashing through the bushes, thinking about hurdling the fence in hopes of getting in the rear door. A flashlight beam cutting through the foliage alongside the house made me pull up short, though, peering at a cop through the gap. When he opened the side gate and went in the backyard a few moments later, I crept around to where he’d been. Once he had his back to me, shining his light at the back door, I slipped past the opening.