by Rayya Deeb
"This place is insane."
"Chica, you ain't seen nothin' yet."
"Well then, show me more, Rrreba." I rolled my "R" just like he did.
"Easy, tiger– all in due time. Your last stop of the day is at a location in the Aboves. Ellen Malone is taking you."
"Okay." The way he said it sounded so mysterious. Like it wasn't a part of my day that he was excited to share. But I wasn't worried, because so far everything Ellen Malone had shown me was ridiculously slick. And most of all, I was ready to get past today to start tomorrow and see Blue Combat Boots.
6
BACK IN A blacked-out flighter with Ellen Malone, I was riding high at twilight in Great Falls. The cabin was soundproofed against the dwindling traffic outside. Taillights and headlights flowed towards infinity in both directions. I knew those lights were like the ones that passed by my mom, and we were somehow connected this way.
"You seem happy here. Different than when I first met you just a couple days ago."
She was right. When I’d first met Ellen, I’d been ready to go down swinging.
I’d just had that unfortunate hallway conversation with Mr. Malin and had headed home to the small two-bedroom apartment I share with my mom in Culver City. I figured she’d already heard from Mr. Malin about that pointless calculus test and I was ready for round two of, "What are we going to do with you?" I pulled my flexer from my ear and held it to the sensor to unlock the front door.
My dog, Killer, a sweet black Pomeranian, greeted me every day with hops and licks. That day was no different. Despite everyone else's disapproval of my academic fall, Killer showered me with unconditional praise. Apartment 14W was Killer's kingdom, and I was his queen. This pup of mine was an expert in extracting the warm fuzzy side of me that, believe it or not, does exist. I scooped him up to my face where he unleashed a barrage of ticklish licks.
"Killer, I missed you so much, my sweet, sweet baby boy." I remember suddenly feeling that something was off. Drenched in dog breath, I looked down the hallway and noticed that my bedroom door was wide-fricken-open.
"What in the...?"
I always left it locked. Always.
I quickly, but gently, put Killer down and tiptoed down the hall while he jumped at my heels, squealing for attention. As I inched along, I heard the murmur of voices. My heartbeat flat-lined and jump-started into a race.
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, then turned and looked through the doorway– there was my mom, sitting with her head in her hands. I was floored.
"Mom?"
"Dorothy!"
"What are you doing in my room!?"
"Doro–"
"This is so messed up–"
My eyes darted to the ground where I saw the three heavy-duty flexer entry locks from my bedroom door that had been removed and scattered. My mom had let me secure my room after my dad went missing. She knew I needed a sense of security as well as the privacy to deal with grief in my own way, on my own time. And she much preferred that I was in our home behind locked doors than out getting into trouble.
"You broke my locks?!"
Storming in, with Killer yapping away at my side, I instantly realized that my mom and I were not alone–
"What the–"
"Hello, Dorothy."
There were four men all in black, and a striking woman in a power suit. Ellen Malone. She wore a double-breasted metallic blazer and pants perfectly contoured to her body, an electric-blue blouse and three-inch shiny black heels with a silver stone at the base of each heel. Culver City fed Los Angeles with its blue-collared heartbeat. White tees and jeans were more common here than floral dresses at a Southern Baptist church service. Women in high-end power suits were never local.
So the people in my room clearly were not from around our neighborhood. One of the men took a step towards me. Just as fast, I took a step back, scooping Killer up from the ground in the same move.
The approaching man in black pulled out a badge. "Federal Bureau of Investigation."
Damn. I felt my mom's eyes burn a hole in me. Not just a little hole. This was a full-on fire blown in by the Santa Ana winds.
"Take a seat."
I sat on the edge of my bed, literally and figuratively. With all these people in my room there was barely room to breathe.
“Expensive equipment for a teenage girl.”
“It was my dad’s.”
“That’s nice,” the agent sneered.
I’d claimed my dad’s gear after it sat dormant in his office for almost a year. Floor to ceiling flat flex glass monitors leaving not an inch of wall visible to the naked eye. Thick, midnight purple velvet drapes pulled closed, their fibers shimmering in a blue hue that emanated from the monitors. The blue hue I lived for. The purr of electronics being cranked full of energy from a stand-alone generator drowned out the sounds of traffic from one of the country's most congested freeway systems, below us. The 405 delivered a polluted yet calming sound that could be heard in every other nook and cranny of our apartment.
"Your mother is going to prison."
"What?!" No way. They had to have been there for me, not her. I looked away from the FBI agents to my mom, who sat distraught and broken down. Mascara streaked down her cheeks like charcoal art. Killer panted maniacally, feeding off my anxious energy. I could smell his hot beefy breath. Gross. The whole scene was stamping itself into the impression center of my brain for many a replay at later dates.
"Fifty thousand dollars shows up in her bank account, and she knows it doesn't belong to her, but she doesn't tell anyone about it."
"I told you, I don't even have a bank account at InfiniCal Bank!" My mom snapped.
Oh my god. The whole situation was absolutely my fault. When all the money had started coming in I had set up a false identity at a bank in the Caribbean, created an account in my mom's name and transferred that money in to it. Obviously that false identity wasn't as foolproof as I had hoped it would be.
"You don't know anything about that do you?"
I remember searching my mom's face. And she searched mine. I could tell she instantly knew that I must have had something to do with this mystery account the FBI found that was in her name. She always had the answers, but at that moment she was completely incapable of counseling her misfit teenage daughter. I could tell by the way she looked at me that she was thinking of my dad, and that I was indeed my father's daughter. She always said that. I know I reminded her of him, and it both broke her heart and kept it beating all at once.
"Let me try that again..." The presence of the men in black in my bedroom shook me to my core and they knew it. It wasn't their first dance, that was clear from the mix of nonchalance and confidence in the agent's voice. "We're investigating your mom for wire fraud. If you know something about this and you don't tell the truth about it, you don’t want to know how both your lives will change. And not in a good way." I figured that they must have had legit evidence, but all I knew to do was deny, deny, deny. I had to get my mom out of that situation. It wasn't her fault. My mind raced to find solutions. What should I do? What should I say?
An 8x10 black and white photo of my family tacked up above my motherboard caught my eye. It was the last photo of us all together. I looked at it every morning and every night and wished every single time that our life was still like that. My mom was a geriatric nurse at the hospital and my dad had a "job with security," as he always liked to say. For an instant, as her happiness in the photo conjured a barrage of memories of our happy past I nearly forgot her current despair. Normally I could get lost in that photo, but not then, in that salty, lingering moment that was all my fault.
"Doro, don't say anything. We're getting a lawyer. We'll fix this." My mom's body language didn't exactly match her words. I kept quiet, but on the inside I was bursting with worry.
Up to that time, Ellen Malone had simply been the woman in the metallic power suit who sat calmly in my peripheral vision. But when we locked eyes, she interjected, "
If you all would give us a moment, I'd like to have a word with Dorothy alone."
The men in black obliged and they took my mom with them. "Thank god," I thought. That menacing pack of human wolves had my mom in tears and something had to give. Before she left she stared at me with a firm, 'Don't say a thing,' look. I wasn't going to.
Ellen offered a kind smile, obviously making an effort to quell my panic. "I've been looking forward to meeting you for a long time."
That was weird. I tried to calculate her motive. I wouldn’t let her smooth talk me, no matter what. I’d thought I was invisible but what an idiot I’d turned out to be. I’d made one bad move because I’d wanted to help my mom out. We were drowning in debt. She did the best she could for us both, but now that my dad was gone our cost of living far surpassed her income, and we were in a deep, deep hole that was only becoming blacker by the second. I knew she was having panic attacks and trying to hide them from me. She’d say she had allergies and would go to the bathroom and cry. We couldn’t even afford two flexers anymore. She gave hers up so I could keep mine. I’d felt guilty and helpless for so long. I had always wanted to help and finally I could. I knew creating that account for her was the only way to get her the cash. I believed that would allow the transfer to fly under the radar, but it didn't.
Ellen stood up. "I know what you're thinking–"
"You people always do."
"And I understand why you'd be guarded with me. But I'm not part of the FBI. I'm here to offer you help."
I don't know what it was with adults always thinking I needed help... but this wasn't about me anymore. I had reeled my mom in to this mess as a result of my criminal activity. I had no choice but to listen.
"Let's be honest. You and I both know where that money came from..."
I put on my best poker face. Wasn't talking, no matter what.
"But I don't care about that, Dorothy. What's done is done. Let me tell you what I do care about. Your mom is going to prison, unless we do something about it."
I crossed my arms and tilted my chin up to offer her my skeptical ears.
"The mandatory sentence for wire fraud is six years. I know you don't want your mom to rot away in prison. I don't want that either. Wouldn't wish that on anyone. I can make all of this go away, Dorothy. Are you interested in hearing me out?"
Although everything inside me said, "trust no one," I slowly started to feel in my gut that maybe she had come for good reasons. Maybe. I might listen, but by no means was I ready to offer compliance. "Not really."
"Alright then."
Ellen turned in towards my system of monitors, looking intently at it. There was no way she knew what it all meant. I noticed that the view through her glasses was blurry until she turned a tiny knob on the side of the frame and her lenses adjusted to the focal point: A numerical reading that was multiplying at what might as well have been the speed of light.
"Impressive."
She took her glasses off. Puffy, dark skin framed her kind blue eyes. A loose bun held up with no kinks in her hair. I could not get my hair up like that to save my life. My ponytail always had kinks. "She must be pushing forty," I thought, and wondered why in the world she thought my monitors were, as she put it, "impressive." She couldn't possibly have known what she was looking at. Not a chance.
"Did you know that you're the only person to have broken the algorithm for every major gambling site in the world?"
I was stunned. Who was Ellen Malone? Until I knew that, and what she was doing in my room, I was going to play dumb. "I don't know what you mean."
She gave me a smile as if to say, "How cute." No matter which way I played it, Ellen Malone was reading me like a book.
"Dorothy, I appreciate your sense of humor. We're both smart women here. Well, you might be smarter, and that's fine."
"It's Doro."
It was weird. I didn't know her. She was enigmatic. Yet against my better judgment, she was someone I wanted to trust. Wanted to, but wouldn't. She’d called me a woman, when everyone else considered me a kid. She already knew so much about me, and now I wanted to know about her.
"My name's Ellen. Ellen Malone. When I heard about what was going on here, I knew I had to step in. It would be a shame to let your genius go to waste. Those guys out there, they don't understand that. All they care about is the law, and that you've broken it. I can look past that because I see your potential."
"Thanks." It was a compliment after all, and so far I liked the direction of this conversation, considering where it was headed just a few minutes back.
"I took a BoomJet in from Virginia this afternoon to personally invite you to be a part of something. Something very special."
"Great. A cult. I should have known."
"Not even close."
"Sure."
She took a controlled breath and stared me down. As a matter of fact, she gave me the stare-off of all stare-offs. "Do I really look like I'm in a cult?"
I looked away.
"Cults don't recruit geniuses, they recruit the weak-minded."
She was right. Being facetious wasn't working for me. I needed to get my mom out of trouble, find out who Ellen Malone really was, and what she really wanted from me.
"I can go. I'll just let the men waiting in your living room know that I'm done here."
Ellen stood to go and didn't hesitate. She walked towards my door and didn't look back. My immediate future flashed before me. My mom being torn out of our apartment, hauled off to prison. Me on my own. I'd probably end up in juvie or even worse, some orphanage.
"Wait!"
Ellen stopped in my doorway when she heard my voice, but she didn't turn to look at me.
"I want to know what you came here for. What do you want from me?"
"Honestly, Doro, what I have to offer you is a privilege. It's something I wanted to do, not something I needed to do."
"Alright. I'm sorry. Please understand, coming home to... this... completely shocked me."
"Listen, I can't say I sympathize with you on this current situation. The law was broken and this is the consequence. I'm here with a solution, because I don't want you to flush your talents down the drain. I want you to bring them to a place where they can be refined and used for good."
First Mr. Malin and then Ellen Malone with the flush metaphor. Was something out there in the universe trying to tell me to get my head out of the toilet or what? As weird as it felt, the probability was super slim that a higher power was speaking to me through toilet metaphors. But still...
"Like how?"
"Oh, you’ll see for yourself. I'm not asking you to simply accept anything as the ultimate truth. Just open your eyes, Doro."
"Okay. Eyes open. Mind open, too."
I felt our dueling presences arrive at some sort of odd alignment. Despite the friction, something clicked.
"Most of the people in this world don't get second chances, Doro. This is yours. It has everything to do with the future. With your future."
Over the next several hours, Ellen gave me one seriously strong sales pitch. Probably the most convincing part of it was that she made it perfectly clear that she knew everything. She knew I had my hand in every major online gambling site in the world. Everything from poker and beyond, if there was algorithm-based security on their sites, I had pretty much had their number. Processes that entire departments in the government had been researching for decades had taken me just a couple of weeks to crack. If quantum cryptography couldn’t stop the Chinese, it couldn’t stop me. I’d written the algorithms to break the quantum repeaters that the sites had in place. This wasn't a learned skill. According to my dad, it was a gift. Ellen Malone saw it as that, too. Most people that were on the same wavelength as one another finished each other's sentences. But my dad and I, we finished each other's equations.
The systems in my room were set to work around the clock. My method was to create new identities, setting them to win and lose at a 75/25 ratio, and then shutting them d
own once they’d won more than about $500,000. I had been funneling millions of dollars from all of these wins into an offshore bank account in the Cayman Islands, where they don’t ask a lot of questions when they see big sums of money come and go. In less than one month I’d racked up nearly a billion dollars. Getting to that point had been a walk in the park for me. I felt confident in the invisibility my secret identities provided, and thought I’d been careful not to raise any red flags. Unfortunately one red flag had been flapping in the wind. Some secret division of the United States Government had its all-knowing eye on me.
During that conversation with Ellen I’d responded with equal parts resistance and curiosity, but no matter what I conjured up as Ellen's possible motives, I knew that going with Ellen to some reform school in Virginia was the only way for me to protect my mom. So the next thing I knew, I was here. Seneca City. Totally not reform school and nothing like LA. Ellen was right, I did feel completely different here.
"I can't believe this is all happening, I mean, I've dreamt that places like this existed ever since I was a little kid. My dad talked about this sort of existence all the time. Instead of bedtime stories, he would light up my room with flexer moonlight and tell me all about Earth's great potentials and how I would be a part of it all one day. Now it's starting to come true. I just wish he could see it."
"I bet he can." She was so optimistic. Definitely not the typical authority figure I’d dealt with in my life so far, always trying to suppress my spirit. She was trying to align with me and that was pretty darn cool. I wanted to feel her optimism, but I was still worried that all this goodness just couldn't be real. I wanted to be careful not to be blinded by the allure of a secret city which fulfilled all of my technological fantasies.
