Idempotency (42 page)

BEGIN 256 PETABYTE OpenPGP PUBLIC, PRIVATE, & AUTHORIZED ENCRYPTED CHAT SESSION . . . AFFIRM THREE TIMES TO ACCEPT PUBLIC KEY AND SIGNED CHAT FROM:

SIMEON:SIM_a8f3de13320b. . .<256PB>. . .34cf6

KRSDNA:KRS_e99235f8f3cb. . .<256PB>. . .cc8f2

[SIMEON 03:03:24] Wait, Sindhu, stop! Turn around! You’ve got to head back!!

“What? You’ve got to be kidding me, Simeon? And how am I able to see your text chat in my ocImps now?”

This text chat would have surprised Sindhu had she not been continually shocked since leaving the classroom. She’d half expected to see an army of androids and holoPods awaiting her exit, and yet the hallways had sat still. Even now, she was entirely alone. She had been running north, heading toward the Saint Titus wing where Dylan was being kept. At her current pace, which she knew was too slow, she guessed it would take her a few hours of running to reach Dylan. It was a hopeless attempt, but it seemed about as good a choice as returning to her room, where she certainly would have been caught and questioned. She had been planning on ducking into a closet at some point to contact Simeon and the team, but she didn’t want to face their admonishment just yet.

So when Simeon’s text chat popped up in her BOI as she was jogging down the empty hallway, it nearly made her stumble. She slowed to a walk, but continued north.

[SIMEON 03:03:59] We’ve gained root access to the facility’s, uh, well, facilities. Point: we can now track and talk to you from anywhere. We’re working on getting the ability to ghostTrip, we’re going send GrepMan to act as a guide. But you have to turn around, now. We have gained full access to the Titus layout, we now know the location of an underground transport. We figured there had to be one, since the place is so huge. It’s accessible from the promenade in the Silas Wright Titus courtyard.

“Can they still track me?” she asked quickly. Her ocImps were converting her breathy voice into text, and transmitting it back to SOP’s yurt of operations.

[SIMEON 03:04:11] Yes, but we’ve got a bead on that too. We just need a bit more time.

“And you know exactly where the entrance to this transport is?”

“Yep, we do,” Grepman stated as his projected body simultaneously appeared in Sindhu’s ocImps, directly in front of her.

She stopped walking. Her hardened face softened. He was a welcome sight, and this surprised her. He wore cargo pants and a simple brown T-shirt, one that she had once commented on. She was fairly certain this was not coincidence. His perfectly kept hair was still perfectly kept.

“Hi, Grep, it’s good to see you. What about transmitting all this data?”

“It’s good to see you too, Sindhu. We’re able to remove all trace of the data we’re sending, but either way, at this point we just need to get you and Dylan out of there. We gotta hurry, Sin, there are two androids and a dozen holoPods heading straight for you right now. I know you hate taking direction, but you gotta trust me. Okay?”

Any hints of a smile were washed away when Sindhu responded, “Fine. But don’t mess this up, guys. I was doing fine without you.”

Grepman’s body floated through Sindhu, then turned around to face her again, while still floating south. “Great, this way.” He stayed about three meters in front of Sindhu, facing her while floating backward.

“Grep, first off, never do that thing again where you float through me. I feel violated. Second, turn around: It’s weird looking at your face as I run. Third, go faster.”

“Sorry, Sin!” he replied with a wide grin on his face, then turned around and floated forward.

Sindhu ran silently for just over three minutes when Grepman twisted around suddenly and shouted, “Turn around! Go back, take the first left!” He again floated through her, and after he did Sindhu saw a pair of tall men in pinstriped suits running full speed toward her. They were near the end of the hall, not far from the entrance to the classroom. They ran in unison, and she could see their eyes bobbing reflectively like cats.

She stopped immediately and spun on her toes. Grepman was waiting next to a simple-looking door, as she got close he disappeared through the closed door. She punched the handle but it didn’t budge.

“Guys, it’s locked. What the hell?”

[SIMEON 03:09:12] On it.

Grepman’s head poked from out of the middle of the door and Sindhu jumped. “Good God, Grep, don’t freak me out like that.”

“Sorry, Sin!”

“And if you really want to date me, stop apologizing all the time. It’s emasculating.”

“Yes! Sorr—er, yeah, will do!”

Sindhu rolled her eyes, then glanced over her shoulder: The androids were less than a hundred meters away now, galloping tirelessly in her direction. She wondered what they might do should they catch her. Would she even be afforded the luxury of finding out? The door clicked and she flung it open, entered a small dark area, and promptly closed it behind her. The large expanse of the luxurious hallway was replaced by a cramped industrial staircase.

Grepman was already floating near the bottom, and Sindhu dashed downward. Though she did so carefully—LED lights lined the top of the stairwell, but only a fraction of them were lit due to the facility running at low power during the nights.

As soon as she hit the last stair, a clank rang out from above.

“We’ve managed to lock the door, but they’ll figure that out soon. Let’s move.”

Sindhu ran as fast as she could, twisting through a circuitous maze of concrete hallways, each serving as an access conduit for electrical wiring, networking, or plumbing. Grepman led the way.

“Good news, guys.” Simeon’s voice rang in Sindhu’s ear. “You’re off the grid, Sin. We cracked your employee ID. They can’t track you now. And we can send audio now.”

“Sindhu, coming up on your left there will be another staircase. This is an access staircase just like the one we came down, but this one will lead back up to the courtyard—” Grepman paused abruptly. “Uh-oh. Wait . . .”

“What do you mean, ‘Wait’? What’s going on?”

Sindhu turned a corner, and coming down the staircase to her left was a holoPod. She jumped just as the holoPod—adorned with a friendly, smiling face projected atop its tripod base—emitted a popping sound from its neck area, where it was concealing a pneumatic gun. It fired out a small metallic item that clanged off the concrete wall behind Sindhu. As she jumped, she reached up and grabbed a hanging metal shelf that served as a conduit for networking wire. She had expected it to hold her weight and to then be able swing over the holoPod. However, the shelf disagreed with this plan, and all its contents came crashing down upon Sindhu.

She stumbled to the ground as she heard more popping sounds, but a layer of metal shelving and wire were now between her and the holoPod. Not wasting time, she grabbed a section of the fallen shelf and held it up as a shield. The shelf had hung from the ceiling by means of a single bar that ran down the center of the shelving. This bar acted as a perfect handle. The shelf was only a foot wide, but it was two meters tall, and as Sindhu quickly turned to the side, she found that it covered her lithe body almost entirely. And it was good that it did: she heard more more popping, and several clangs rang off her new networked shelf-shield.

The holoPod’s smiling face began to speak. “Halt. If you stop moving, you will be apprehended peacefully by a nano-control unit. Should you resist, we will be forced to utilize a stasis-inducer nano-tranquilizer that will render you temporarily paralyzed.” The holoPod repeated this phrase incessantly.

Unsure of what to do next, she recalled Simeon recently telling her that caution was the better part of valor, and so she decided to spite him by charging straight toward the holoPod, shield out. They collided seconds later. The holoPod was surprisingly light, and Sindhu’s momentum carried both of them in her direction. Sindhu fell and slid belly first on her shield as if it was a sled, and the holoPod fell on its back, cracking a tripod leg in the process and still popping off metallic objects that began to clang innocuously off of the ceiling. For all of its wonderful toys and stair-climbing prowess, the holoPod now writhed on the floor like a tossed beetle, unable to stand due to a broken back leg.

Sindhu stood and realized that sliding upon her makeshift shield may have been a haphazard idea. She had a large cut down her right thigh, just above her kneecap. She turned her anger toward the holoPod, shouting, “Halt this, you bastard,” as she slammed her shield down forcefully upon the holoPod’s stump of a neck. She guessed right, as the shallow area proved fragile. The holoPod screeched to a halt.

“Damn.” Sindhu was staring at her cut leg. Her black spandex had stained red.

“How bad is it, Sin?” asked Grepman.

“It’s an annoyance.”

“There should be a first-aid unit at the transport. Can you still run?”

“Of course I can still run. Let’s go.”

She began to head upstairs when Grepman shouted at her, “No! Sindhu, this way.” He motioned down the hallway. “There are at least twenty units heading here, they’ll be here any—”

The door in the staircase above Sindhu flung open, and an android peered down at her with reflective eyes. It immediately raised its hand and five pneumatic pops fired off from its fingertips, which were aimed at Sindhu. She still held her shield in her hands, and a flick of her wrist upward fortuitously caught all five shots. They each left small indentations in the metal.

Sindhu spun away from the stairs and ran as fast as she could, following Grepman’s hovering virtGhost. They turned hard to the left, and she grimaced in pain, realizing that her cut was deeper than she’d assumed.
No matter
, she thought.
It’s only pain.
Turns came quickly. Grepman was doing all he could to lead her through intersections and forks as they attempted to lose their computerized followers. Sindhu was hobbling worse after each turn, and she began to fear that her cut might leave a trail. She wondered if the androids could even track that sort of thing—though she was certain the holoPods could not. Either way, she decided to rip and pull her leggings up over her cut in an attempt to better cover her wound. The pain was excruciating, and she felt her fingers warm against the blood-soaked cloth.

Pain is merely a thought. I control my thoughts.

The hallway ended at a perpendicular intersection. Grepman finally slowed and Sindhu felt relief welling up within her, but she squashed it like a worthless bug. “We must keep moving, Grep. I am fine! Go!”

“No, Sindhu, I’m not stopping because of you. We need to wait a second.”

“Go left or go right, just go!” Sindhu pleaded.

“Sin! Shut up for a second. Jeez.” Sindhu was startled at Grepman’s pushback. Grepman was looking away, likely toward the unseen SOP team. She sat her shield down and leaned against the wall. Noticing a metal rung sticking out of the concrete wall, Sindhu quickly realized this was but one rung on a larger ladder. She glanced upwards and saw a shaft leading toward a dim light above her. She began to climb, laboring as she did so.

“Sin—Sin?” Grepman lost sight of her for a second, then floated under the shaft and glanced upward. He sighed when he saw her struggling to climb. He followed and quickly caught up with her. She stopped climbing and they stood a breath apart from each other, face-to-face.

“Sin, please, please slow down. No one doubts your strength; you’ve proven it time and again.”

“Grep. I think I really mucked this up.” Her voice was a shallow quiver. “I should have gone back to my room. I got cocky.”

“No, Sin, you did the right thing. We need to get to Dylan, and we need to get you out of here. Simeon has an exit strategy for you—we just need to get you out of Titus.”

She snapped back, “I know I did the right thing, stupid. Stop second-guessing me.”

Grepman was confused. “I didn’t second-guess you, I just agreed with you—didn’t I?”

“Damn it, Grep. We need to go. We must go now.”

Grepman shook his head, dumbfounded. “You’re lucky—we needed to head upward anyway. Come on.”

They reached the top of the runged ladder a few painstaking moments later. A ubiquitous hissing sound enveloped them, but it was drowned out by Sindhu’s heavy breathing. She wrapped one arm around a rung, and reached down with the other to massage her good leg ,which had bore the majority of her weight.

After catching her breath, Sindhu glanced around. The shaft had risen to the base of the grand fountain, near the main promenade of the Silas Wright Titus courtyard. A small glass door was in front of her. Beyond the door she saw the source of the hissing: the back side of water—they were standing behind a waterfall. The water crashed in front of them, cascading off a series of aqueducts above them. The door popped open and a roar erupted around them.

“Sindhu.” It was Simeon’s voice. “All we have to do is get across the promenade, then run up the grand staircase. At the top of the staircase are a series of elevators, one of which serves as a service elevator. It’ll take us down to the underground transport. Simple as that. We’re monitoring all of their movements; we should be able to navigate you through this without trouble—they can’t see you, but we can see them.”

Without prompting, Sindhu hopped off the ladder and stepped across the glass door and onto a platform, careful not to fall. She considered kicking off her running shoes, but figured they were thin and light enough to get wet.

“Can you swim and hold your breath?” Grepman asked.

“Of course I can swim,” she fired back.

“Of course you can,” Grepman added with obvious annoyance.

Lights shined against the front side of the waterfall, highlighting the cascading water. Sindhu glanced down at herself: She looked ragged, tired—
And I still have a long ways to
go
, she thought.
Why’d I have to cut myself? I’m so clumsy—always running into things
. She pondered her doubts as she followed Grepman down a series of one-meter-high cascades to where the pouring water was hitting the pool. She hopped into the pool, and the cold of the water shot through her wound. It hurt at first, then provided some relief. She poked her head through the waterfall to the other side and saw nothing obvious, but the water was obscuring her view. Grepman was on the other side. She nodded at him and sunk slowly into the pool, all the while taking note of how her short hair soaked the water up quickly.