Dead Man's Resolution

by Thomas K. Carpenter

  “I got projected to Shanghai.”

  “Isn’t that illegal?”

  “Yeah, but no one noticed.”

  William looked back to the door. “Can we leave yet?”

  “Just one more mod, then we’ll leave. This Mr. Plow is so big it's got to be something totally blade.”

  William’s face sunk into his hands and a sigh trailed from his lips like a dying balloon.

  Tibor switched Mr. Plow to standby mode and the projection of a man appeared in the middle of the lab table.

  The man had a thick round head like a bowling ball on top of powerful shoulders. He wore a white shirt with no sleeves, displaying muscular arms with dozens of cut scars along the forearms.

  “Bloody hell. Who you nub? As sure as pajamas, you’d better tell me? The Unseen don’t play games,” the man said.

  William fell off his stool, scrambling to get away. Tibor reactivated Mr. Plow and the man disappeared.

  “Did you see those scars on his arms?” William got to his feet with a look of horror on his face.

  William rubbed his forearms.

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  They cleaned the table and slipped out of the room after Tibor checked for a clear exit. He kept the new computer connected in case it revealed anything else.

  They made it to their electrobikes and as they prepared to leave, William grabbed Tibor’s bike handle.

  “Get rid of that thing. I didn’t like the look of that man…the Cutter.”

  Tibor was about to give him a big smile and tell him not to worry, but William’s heavy stare made him hesitate.

  “I’m serious, Ti. I know you. Don’t be a vag and mess with that thing anymore. Go throw it in a lake or something.”

  Tibor hesitated, then sighed. “Okay. I’ll throw it in a lake.”

  William tilted his head as if he could detect whether or not Tibor was serious. Eventually William nodded and let go of his friend.

  “Ping me tomorrow. If my mom doesn’t have me busy in her garden, we can design a new skin to sabotage the Plastics,” William said.

  “Sounds good.”

  Tibor smiled and waved as William left. For a moment he’d almost believed himself that he would throw it into a lake, but the visit to Shanghai and the man’s curious speech had sparked something in him. If he threw it away, he might as well resign himself to living in back-ass Michigan for the rest of his life.

  #

  On Saturday, Tibor pinged his friend, but the status returned busy. He figured his mom had him working in the garden and she could spot him mindtexting from a mile away. So he spent his weekend lying on the bed, scrolling through the mods in the dead man’s ARNet. A sniffer revealed tantalizing clues to their purpose, but he dared not activate them. The only mod he couldn’t penetrate was Carbonite, which required a pass-symbol to enter. Accessing it would require Tibor to generate a unique symbol in his mind.

  Tibor pinged his friend a few more times, but the busy message remained. It was strange not to pass a single message all weekend. They’d grown up together and spent their childhoods tunneling messages through their parents’ firewalls so they could talk late into the night when they were supposed to be asleep.

  Tibor didn’t have class with William until the third period, but he could see his bubble across the school.

  He sent him a mindtext,

  The response was slow coming, but eventually the digitized voice returned.

  Tibor was so excited to hear his friend’s response that he almost told him about his investigation into the dead man’s computer.

 

  What the hell is he talking about?

 

  Maybe the experience with the dead man had made William more adventurous.

 

 

  A map marker appeared in Tibor’s vision showing a meeting location in Old Detroit. As he transferred the location into his memory, William’s bubble floated out of school. Then he realized why William had been quiet all weekend. Probably planning a new hack to escape.

  Tibor’s own escape would take longer and the extra time would give William an advantage in the game. Rushed, he used an old hack, which he knew was foolish in case they’d fixed the loophole, but he hated that William had out-maneuvered him.

  Attendance-bots tracked their location in school verifying attendance and punctuality. To keep the alarms from going off every time a student loitered in a doorway before class, the bots didn’t notify the teacher of a missing student for thirty seconds. The worm he dropped into the system would cycle his location through all the doorways in the school. And as long as his “presence” cycled between the classes, he would officially be in school and not subject to calls to his father.

  Having escaped before the next period, Tibor left for Old Detroit. When he neared their meeting location, he switched on Project Gandaymede.

  The three moons in the sky comforted him. He hadn’t wanted to stare at the broken buildings any longer than he had to. The program turned them to adobe huts with clay roof tiles in shades of ochre. Simulacrums of townsfolk in layered wrap-arounds lingered in their doorways beating dust from rugs or throwing dirty water from second story windows.

  He left his electrobike behind a crumbled wall and headed in on foot. His bastard sword appeared in his hand. If it were real, he’d stagger under its weight, but thankfully he didn’t have to actually carry it.

  He neared the collection of old warehouses that would serve as their combat zone. They’d fought here before. Project Gandaymede drew in a deserted blacksmith shop and other artisan crafts in the spaces of the warehouse. Only the faint smells of long discarded oils intruded into the illusion.

  Creeping along the wall, he kept checking for signs of movement. As he turned the corner, a wash of vertigo hit him. He steadied himself against the wall.

  What was that?

  Was William messing with him? An odd sense of dread sunk into his shoulders. The urge to turn on the bubble locator and find William nearly overwhelmed his sense of fairness to the game, but he didn’t.

  Tibor entered the blacksmith’s shop. A roaring fire stoked by invisible bellows crackled. He sidestepped the forge in the middle of the room, avoiding the fake flames.

  The overcast pallor had faded the shadows to an imperceptible haze. The crackling fire and slow wheezing of the bellows hid his slow shuffle to the far doorway. The orange glow of flames reflected in his bastard sword, highlighting the runes etched down the middle of the blade. Using the dead man’s computer with the zetta-chip, his sword glimmered artificially real. The other details of the blacksmith shop glazed away as he studied the sword.

  The soft crunch of a footfall in the gritty soil somewhere outside the building stopped him. Two doorways and a rusted stairway were the only exits from the building. Sneaking around was unlike William. That was Tibor’s style. William preferred to stand in the middle of the street, keeping a good line of sight on all sides.

  They’d occasionally encountered vagrants in the maze of warehouses, but they were usually emaciated and posed little threat. An animal like an old guard dog would be more worrisome. William had once claimed to have seen a panther creeping along a roof-line, but Tibor told him it was his imagination.

  A vagrant or an animal would have made more noise so he decided it was either William or someone else. Tibor touched the dead man’s ARNet in his pocket.

  “Nerds rule the world…” He called out, hoping to hear his friend answer. "but not until after high school."

  Tibor counted the heartbeats that thundered in his ears. As the third one faded, he burst toward the rusted stairway. His caution saved him when, from the far doorway, a man cut around the corner, his form blocking all the light from the outside, firing a weapo
n.

  A projectile burst on the wall next to him and his elbow and upper arm went completely numb. He raced up the stairs, the iron structure rattling and swaying under his feet.

  When the man hit the stairs, he heard a support snap somewhere below him, but the heavy echo of his steps continued. Puffs of iron dust broke free showering filings onto the stairs. Tibor didn’t want to get trapped on the roof so he entered a door halfway up.

  The floor had once been an office with old cubicle walls tipped over dust covered desks like scattered dominos. He ran down the main pathway as far as he dared before ducking into a side office.

  Tibor tried to control his breathing, but his chest labored loudly. He probed the numbness around his upper arm and found the area coated with an oily liquid. His fingertips numbed immediately from their tentative exploration, but it didn’t spread beyond the first knuckle. The numbness had an ethereal quality, as if his arm didn’t even exist. Thankfully, he hadn’t been hit in the legs.

  Peeking through a hole in the wall, he surveyed the office. The man waiting in the doorway was the Cutter, the same man who’d appeared in the middle of his school lab table.

  “No need for all this running, nub. We just want what ya got in your pocket,” Cutter called out as he twirled the numb-gun in his hand.

  Tibor closed his eyes hoping the man would leave. Then he heard an amused grunt. Cutter had turned down his corridor with his head down. He seemed to be examining something on the floor.

  Looking down, he realized what the man had seen. His footprints in the dust led a trail to him. Cutter was nearly upon him.

  With the bald man steps away, Tibor put his shoulder into the cubicle wall. Cutter mumbled surprise and the numb-gun came level with Tibor. Before Cutter could use it, the momentum from the cubicle took hold and three sections folded over on him, redirecting the projectile into a far wall.

  Tibor left puffs of dust at each footstep as he sprinted to the exit. The man burst from the pile of walls, knocking another section over. Half the room collapsed in reaction, sending a massive cloud into the air.

  The rust-streaked door resisted his initial attempts get through. So Tibor put his shoulder into it as he jammed the handle. Once through, he vaulted the steps three at a time.

  Sunlight peeked through a partially open door at the top of the stairs. With heavy footfalls ringing below, Tibor barreled toward the door ready to burst through. As his shoulder hit, vertigo overtook him and he collapsed on the pebbly, tarry rooftop.

  Dented, tarnished vent ducts stuck out at intervals on the wide roof. They hadn’t ever bothered to program the tops of the buildings since they were dangerous. William had nearly fallen through one early in their explorations of the warehouse district, so they stayed on the ground.

  The warehouse stood above the others around it by a meter. No other doors could be seen. Tibor loped along the side hoping an emergency ladder would grant escape, but the two he found had rusted away to piles of reddish brown dust.

  Another projectile impacted near his feet. Cutter chased him across the rooftop firing his weapon. Tiny silvery spheres sailed through the air. Tibor dodged around an air duct as a projectile flew past.

  With only one exit, he was trapped. Tibor still couldn’t feel his upper arm. The only way off was to another roof. Even if he could make the jump, he might fall through a rotted ceiling.

  Before he could reason himself out of his escape plan, Tibor started sprinting to the back edge. A silvery capsule burst near his foot, but the spray missed him. He stutter-stepped to avoid the numb puddle and leapt early.

  Tibor’s premature leap saved his life. He planted his foot a good three feet behind the edge and a strange sensation hit his toes as he pushed off toward the other roof. Flying through the air, arms flailing, he realized he’d be a few feet short. He hoped he could grab onto the edge before he plummeted to his death.

  Instead of falling past the edge of the building, his feet slammed into an invisible floor. The rapid change in momentum folded him over and he tumbled onto his back. He might have dislocated his shoulder upon impact, but the adrenaline from the jump made the pain a distant sensation.

  He unsuctioned his goggles from his face. The world shifted three feet back into its original position. The man had hacked his reality, changing his geospatial alignment. Tibor knew then how the man in the dumpster had died.

  The man appeared on the edge of the warehouse roof. A raised eyebrow on his bowling ball shaped head transmuted surprise at Tibor’s survival. The hesitation was enough to let Tibor get out of range of the man’s projectiles.

  After finding the exit, Tibor sprinted through the alleyways with his goggles stuck to his forehead. Cutting through the maze-like gaps between the broken warehouses and crumbling buildings, he let the fear carry him.

  Eventually, the effort stole the breath from his lungs, and he hunched over heaving great gulps. The feeling returned in his paralyzed arm and both arms shook violently as the weight of the events collapsed around him. After a few minutes of uncontrollable shaking, Tibor straightened.

  A deep mechanical voice spoke into his ear,

  Tibor was not surprised by the voice and guessed what would come next.

 

  His frantic flight had only gained him room to think. Would Cutter trade fairly, or would he be walking into a trap? He wanted to ask for proof that William was still alive, but after the events on the rooftop, he couldn’t trust any reality Cutter presented to him.

 

  Tibor caught the plurality of his demands and assumed there was more than one. They had all the advantages and he was just a kid in high school. If he thought the trade would be fair, he’d gladly give up the ARNet. The man had ambushed him using William’s system and had found him in the blacksmith’s shop. Shit. They can probably find me right now.

 

  The two possible answers oscillated in his head as his face scrunched tight, hoping to squeeze the right one out.

  Two can play games with the truth.

 

  Tibor put his goggles on to see that a map with a blinking red dot had been pushed into his HUI. He accessed the dead man’s programs and scrolled until he found a trio of mods he’d sniffed before: BlackTome, Somania, and Bang.

  He mapped his system to the dead man’s ARNet and activated the three programs. Immediately, new interface tools floated in his HUI, including a red blinking box in the center with the word “Bang!” circling the edges and “Nuke Remote Hack,” in the middle. Triggering the box sent him to his knees as the world shifted toward him. His augmented vision and the real world had snapped back to its normal alignment.

  Tibor jogged back the way he came. With a half a kilometer to go, he stopped and activated the ‘Remove Fog of War’ button that now hung on his mini-map and smiled when three dots appeared. Two dots huddled together on the upper side of the map, another kilometer from his location while the third lurked near the rendezvous point. He hoped one of the dots was William.

  To get to William he’d have to pass near the first dot which he assumed was Cutter. He knew they could spy his location, so as soon as he bypassed the meeting site, they’d know he wasn’t trading.

  Tibor checked through BlackTome to find a option that would help him. The structure had been organized in a way he couldn’t fathom. They weren’t alphabetical, by size, usage, or any other method he could fathom. Sifting through the files, information bloomed in radial designs until a garden of named blobs floated in front of him. He slowed to a walk to give himself more time.

  Cycling through the blooms, he misclicked on a blob called ‘Spell.’ Three spheres floated out of the blob: Illusions, Transmutations and Evocations. William would have found this right away.

  Under the illusions sphere an option called Create Doppe
lganger grabbed his interest. He activated it, and suddenly he was staring at the backside of himself. Another dot had formed on the map, nearly overlaying his original. Using controls similar to the Portal mod, he moved the doppelganger forward. A small view screen showed what his double could see.

  Tibor moved it to a location a few hundred meters from the bald man.

 

  Then Tibor circled the long way around. When Cutter’s dot moved toward the doppelganger, he exhaled the breath he’d been holding.

  He wouldn’t have long before his ruse was uncovered, so he broke into a run. Once they knew he wasn’t trading, it’d be more difficult to get William back.

  In the courtyard where William was being held, ki-yops and grunts echoed. A samurai in full battle-regalia stepped through a precise kata with a traditional curved sword. Tibor admired the man’s style. He felt guilty for peeking under his goggles to see a young Japanese man in a dark blue suit practicing his moves. A numb-gun sat on the hood of a sleek Kia luxury sedan. He’d never be able to reach the gun before the samurai did.

  Cutter neared his double’s location, so he moved the simulacrum away to stall for time.

  said Cutter.

 

 

  He needed more time to get William out of the car, even though he didn’t know how he’d do it.

 

  The bald man’s dot stopped.

 

  Tibor composed his mindtext, hesitating before hitting the send button. He couldn’t know if it’d stop the man or make him mad.

 

  The silence was damning until he heard the modified voice.