“Hm? Oh, yeah, of course. Sorry, big day. Come in, Tony’s already here.”
To my eternal delight, Brendan rolled his eyes, confirming that he most definitely was the guy for me.
Kathy, on the other hand, had a very different reaction, “Is he really? It’s been forever since we’ve had a chance to get together!” she squeaked happily before bounding her way into my house, her big, gothy boots slamming against the ground as she did so.
“It was two days ago!” I shouted after her before looking over at Brendan for clarification, to which he nodded as he came in and closed the door behind him.
In case you hadn’t noticed, Kathy’s the one who brought Tony into our little group shortly after we lost a member.
He didn’t die or anything, he just got caught selling ecstasy to teenagers, so Hugo gave him up to the cops, which I honestly couldn’t fault him for.
“Anyway,” I sighed as I gave Brendan a quick peck on the cheek before walking over to the living room, “everyone bring their clips?”
“You know it.” Tony proclaimed proudly, waving his phone around like he was trying to cool himself off.
I wanted to deny him the opportunity of going first, what with the fact that he’d been a dick when he’d first come in, but then I figured getting it over and done with was the best way for me to keep my cool, “Alright, you can go first.”
The irritating member of our team of hackers puffed out his chest and straightened up before unlocking his phone and spending a good ten seconds trying to find the file, “Sorry this is taking so-got it!”
There was another few second’s delay as Tony struggled to figure out how to cast the file to my TV, earning him a few mocking smiles from the rest of us as we got comfortable on the couch.
“If you need some more time to prepare we can tot-” I stopped as the TV came to life, the unconscious body of Tony sleeping on the floor filling up the screen, “Who’d you get to film this?”
“No one, it was all me.” Tony said smugly, “I just chopped it up a bit on the way so we could skip all the boring crap.”
A giggle escaped Kathy and she bit her lip, “You mean like last month when you filmed yourself jerking off before diving?”
“For the last time, that is not what I was doing!”
He totally was, and it was hilarious.
Anyway, a second into the clip and Tony woke up, his head swiveling from side-to-side like some kind of coked-up meerkat before he finally sat up with unnerving speed.
“How’s your back?” I asked, knowing the pain of getting up too quickly all too well.
“Just watch.” Tony replied with a smile as he took a seat in from of the couch and pointed at the screen, “Trust me.”
I did as I was told and watched as the freshly awoken Tony sat unmoving, bolt upright with his neck at a slight angle.
“Wait for it…” Tony started whispering, “Wait for it…”
And then TV Tony fell over backward, smashing his head on the floor and apparently knocking himself out.
It was at that point that RL Tony lost his shit, laughing his ass off at the ‘spectacle’.
“Is that it?” Kathy asked with no small amount of disappointment, “You just sat up too fast?”
“Right!?”
I shook my head and smiled, “Well, my days of taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle.” I said before turning to Brendan, “You wanna go next?”
He seemed briefly taken aback before smiling and shrugging, “Sure, why not.”
After that we went through each of our tapes, Brendan’s involving a bit of a fire developing in his living room, and Kathy’s having her walk around in circles at an only slightly unnatural speed, to which I offhandedly mentioned she should’ve played Benny Hill over the top, before finally getting through mine and laughing at the weirdly large steps I took.
“Well, that was fun.” I said as I walked over to my counter and grabbed my wallet and keys, “Who wants to drive?”
“I’ll do it!” Tony shouted eagerly, “I just got my license ‘renewed’.”
“What’s this?” I asked, mimicking his air quotes.
“You know what it means.” he replied with a wink, “It got ‘renewed’.”
“What are yo-just stop it, alright? Just tell us what you’re trying to say.” I snapped, knowing that what he was trying to get at was he’d hacked the DMV and gotten his license renewed illegally, like an idiot who wanted to get caught by the feds.
Tony sighed and rolled his eyes, “I mean that it got ‘renew-”
“That’s it, Kathy, you’re driving.” I said as I tossed her the keys before turning my attention back to Tony, “And unless you wanna go by yourself, you can keep your damn mouth shut.”
Tony wasn’t really threatened by me, why would he be? But he knew that I held enough sway in the group that if I said that we collectively weren’t going to hang out with him anymore everyone would agree.
Christ, listen to me, ‘hang out’, it’s like we were in high school. To be fair though, we were outcasts in school for the most part, so getting to live through that in our later years probably did us well psychologically speaking, except for Tony who was probably taking a pretty big hit for the team.
Ah well, had to be someone, right?
No, you’re an awful person with awful friends.
Anyway, we got out to the car without saying another word, Kathy taking her sweet ass time to get in the driver’s seat as she checked that she’d locked my front door five times.
“I can’t believe you still drive this piece of crap.” Brendan playfully mocked from the backseat as Kathy finally started the car with her third try, “I mean, just get a car that is actually approved. You’ve got the money.”
“You know I’m saving.” I said as I got comfortable in the passenger seat, “Besides, wouldn’t wanna draw too much attention to myself.”
The crappy, poorly modified red hatchback gave an unearthly squeal as Kathy threw it into reverse and backed out of my driveway, the various belts and old fans crying out in pain as the oxygen converter that was attached to the muffler burped out the clean air it made from the carbon emissions that the car was trying to spew into the atmosphere.
“Draw attention to yourself?” Kathy laughed after wincing at the unattractive sound the transmission made when she shifted into drive, “You live in a three-bedroom house by yourself in one of the nicer neighborhoods in Silicon Valley. Trust me, if you were gonna draw attention to yourself you would’ve done it already.”
She wasn’t wrong, Hugo had done well by us in terms of making sure we didn’t get picked up by any of the various agencies that would love nothing more than to expunge every single Code Jumper from the planet, but that didn’t mean I had to sell my car.
“Did you guys hear that O² levels are getting dangerously high here?” Tony asked, shattering the tranquil silence the rest of us had been enjoying.
“Bull. Shit.” Brendan laughed, “It’s just sensationalist crap the tabloids are tryin’ to use to get gullible idiots to click through.”
“No, seriously.” Tony said like a gullible idiot, “They reckon in ten years the whole Bay Area’s gonna be under the Monaco Protocol.”
“Really?” I asked in mocking disbelief, “You think that of all the places that could go phwoom, Silicon Valley’s gonna be the next one?”
“If we keep havin’ people like you driving these shit-boxes with poorly filtered converters, then yeah, I think so.”
I wanted to kick him out of my ‘shit-box’, but I stopped myself just short of actually getting the words out and instead sighed, “Alright, you can keep thinkin’ that then. You guys mind if I take a nap? I feel like I haven’t slept in a week.”
My eyelids had already slid shut before Brendan could give me permission to sleep, and by the time Tony had let out an indifferent grunt, I’d drifted off to my first memory of Hugo.
That was a fun day…
Kinda.
FLASHBACK ONE: HARP MELODY
I can’t remember the exact date, I just know that it was a Tuesday, because that’s the day I used to go shopping.
Or maybe it was a Wednesday… Who knows?
Anywho.
I’d just come back from the deli, barely keeping the large brown paper bag of groceries balanced in my arm as my piece of shit plastic leg locked up again.
“Motherfucker…” I muttered as I fumbled with my various Star Wars and Supernatural keychains trying to find my house key with my free hand.
Eventually I managed to unlock the door, but not before head-butting the door a couple of times and dropping my groceries, which made a series of sounds including smashing glass and cracking eggs.
“Seems about right…” I breathed with a dejected sigh, my eyes sliding closed so that I could take a minute to compose myself before contaminating my shitty apartment with my depression.
“You going to come in or what?” a gravelly voice asked from within my home.
My first instinct was to run, assuming whoever it was had to be with some kind of federal agency, or worse, someone I owed money to.
Then I looked at my leg.
“Who is it?” I called through the door like the kind of person who says ‘bless you’ after they sneeze.
“Come in and find out.”
It was ominous, yes, but I was confident that I’d be able to fight the guy, or at the very least use my prosthetic’s weak ankle joint to literally break my foot off in his ass.
I stepped into the apartment ready to see any one of a million things, ranging from a gun in my face to a group of detectives with handcuffs, but I definitely wasn’t prepared for who was standing over my sink.
He was tall and thin, but also proportionate, he didn’t have that lankiness that I’d come to expect from guys who were over a certain height, and he had this big blonde mane, like some kind of lion-man.
My concern about whether or not he was a cop started to wane when I spotted he was wearing sandals, a pair of khaki cargo shorts, and a baggy white t-shirt that’d been worn down to nearly transparent after hundreds of washes.
“Good of you to finally show up,” he said, turning around to face me with a sandwich in one hand and his other resting on his waistband near where he had a small revolver tucked, “been waitin’ here a while.”
“That’s a really good way to blow your dick off.” I replied before shuffling over to my ratty couch, “And there’s a good chance it’ll get stuck if you try to pull it on me.”
No, I wasn’t being a hard-ass, I was just defaulting to my state of pointing out obvious crap to distract myself from the fact that I was absolutely shitting my pants, I hadn’t quite reached the level of keeping my cool when there was a gun in the room at that point.
Handsome hobo seemed amused by my apparent nonchalance though, and proceeded to pull the pistol out, making me wince, before putting it on the sink as gently as he could, “I expected a lot of things, but you being a smart ass? That’s a surprise.” he said with a smile as he started walking over to the couch, where I sat in masked stunned silence, and extended his hand out in front of him, “Name’s Hugo.”
HUGO, MY BOSS
“Hey, wake up!” Tony shouted in my face, shaking me violently by my shoulder, “We’re here!”
Instinctively, I reached for my pistol and got ready to shove its mighty barrel in Tony’s face, and then I remembered I was in RL.
“Did you try anything else before wakin’ me up like an asshole?” I asked with yawn as I stepped out of the car into the brisk night air, my cybernetic leg taking a few seconds to register my brain’s command after being left to go idle.
“Nah, what’d be the fun in that?”
I did my best to ignore Tony while I did my post-nap stretches and looked at Hugo’s humble house where Brendan and Kathy stood patiently waiting at the door which was a good fifteen feet from the car.
We’d often talked about how weird it was that he lived in the smallest house out of all of us, but we usually came to the conclusion that he was far smarter than any of the rest of us and he probably just figured a small, single-person dwelling out in the middle of some field was less likely to get him unwanted attention.
“You coming?” Brendan asked.
“Yeah, I’m comin’, I’m comin’…” I replied as I did a few extra stretches to deliberately buff out my time, “I don’t understand why you let Tony wake me up, this’d be goin’ a whole lot faster if I’d had a less aggressive wake-up call.”
“Quit your bitching and get over here,” Kathy scolded, “Hugo won’t open the door until we’re all here.”
Hugo had become more and more anal about his security protocols over the months, but he never seemed to be more paranoid or anxious, leading me to believe that he just liked screwing with us.
“So, what’d you guys end up hauling?” I asked, ready to blow them all out of the water, before starting my slow walk over to the rest of them with Tony in close tow.
“Just under thirty grand.” Tony pronounced proudly, “Managed to talk some idiot into getting five doses of Freedom at six grand apiece.”
“Ten grand.” Brendan said with a shrug, ignoring Tony altogether, “Mostly weed.”
The guys and I stood around for a few seconds looking at Kathy, waiting for her to throw her numbers out, but she remained suspiciously silent.
“What? I don’t have to share.” she finally let out defensively, “The only person that has to know is Hugo, and he already does.”
‘Yes!’ I cheered to myself, thinking that it was obviously a super low amount, ‘I’m the very best, yeah! I’m the very best, yeah!’
“Come on,” I coaxed, trying not to sound too eager, “we ain’t goin’ in until you tell us yours. Want me to go first?”
She didn’t say anything, but I took her indifferent expression as an assertive yes.
“Alright then,” I said, again doing my best not to explode out of my skin, “a little over fifty million.”
I was met with some very impressed looks from Brendan, confirming that I was most definitely going to get my first class ticket to Bangtown.
Kathy, on the other hand, was less impressed, “See? See that? That just makes me feel worse.” she said with what sounded like genuine disappointment before a sly grin spread across her face, “Now I have to emasculate all of you.”
My smile vanished, replaced instead with a look of horror as I realized that I had been horribly deceived, “You didn’t…”
“I did. Three. Hundred. Million dollars bitches!”
“B-bu-but… how?” I stuttered as I tried to do the math in my head trying to figure out what she’s sold.
“Massive car deal for the Yakuza.” Kathy practically squeaked, “Gave them the means to start cutting their own keys as well as a little something that scans door locks and develops a 3D model of whatever key you need to unlock it.”
“You guys done pattin’ yourselves on the back yet?” Hugo asked from where he stood in the open doorway, “I’ve been standin’ here for at least twenty seconds and not a one of you even noticed I’d opened the door.”
The boss was wearing an expensive looking navy blue pea coat over what I assumed was a blue flannelette shirt to go with his pants and slippers, his flawlessly trimmed beard peppered with what I guessed was some kind of cookie to go with the hot cup of cocoa he was holding.
“Sorry,” I finally said after everyone had apparently decided to stay silent, “we’ll try and be more observant next time.”
“Sure you will.” Hugo replied lightheartedly with a roll of his eyes, “Get in here before you get a cold, last thing I need is for you guys to get sick.”
We didn’t need telling twice, all of us shuffling in passed Hugo into his fireplace-warmed living room where a coffee table sat bearing four cups filled to the brim with steamy, sweet-smelling cocoa.
I may be an adult, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy cocoa,
and anyone who tells you different should just go away, you don’t need that kind of negativity in your life.
PAY AND ILLUSION
“So,” Hugo sighed as he did most other nights, looking at us on his couch from his expensive chair on the opposite side of the coffee table as he always did, “no complaints?”
We stayed silent, sipping our cocoa and letting the warm liquid heat our bodies as we waited for any one of us to say that someone had given us negative feedback.
“I’ll take that as a no then?”
There was a few seconds delay, but we all eventually nodded, accepting that we wouldn’t be answering incorrectly for our little gang.
“Good, good.” Hugo muttered with a smile before looking directly at me, “Noticed you had a bit of a snafu on that final non-job of yours. I trust you weren’t followed?”
“Not to my knowledge, no.” I replied with a shake of my head, “Did the Don’s transfer come through?”
Hugo nodded, “It did, nice job on getting that markup, didn’t think you had it in you.”
I went to say something snippy, stopping myself right before the words could get out and effectively ruin my life as I knew it.
“Anyway,” he finally said after a few seconds of awkward silence, “I suppose you’re all waiting to be paid then?”
It was a tense moment that, waiting for someone to be the first to ask for our money, none of us quite wanting to admit that we just wanted to get our envelopes of cash and leave, but things had gotten weird after Hugo had started getting a bit more upper class.
Little things at first, as most issues start out, like how he stopped wearing sandals and cargo shorts, which was fine, but then he started changing the way he spoke. He stopped dropping letters off his words as often, and he hardly ever skipped a shower.
The guy was just as fun as ever, sure, but we still felt like blue collar workers hanging out with a billionaire CEO.
“That’d be great, thanks.” Tony finally said, shattering the tense silence that had come over Hugo’s place and proving that he was far more money-grubbing than the rest of us.
Code Jumper Page 6
