How could she bridge the gap now? When years of trying had failed? And without revealing her illness?
Again she asked herself when the time would be right to tell Mandy, but she still could not imagine herself saying those words. Prion disease. Invariably fatal. The black pill.
Helen had to try to make things better before it was all over.
The next day, Helen hung out at a pizza joint across the street from her condo and watched the building until she saw her daughter go out. Then she went upstairs and pulled back the curtain that separated their sleeping spaces and took a look at the walls. She surveyed the posters of bands and musicians and guessed at Mandy’s favorite, judging by the number of posters for that particular band.
Then she went out and fought the road construction and traffic and crowds to splurge on a VR Earworm with the top ten live performances by that band preloaded onto it. It was an expensive gift, not something she would normally buy.
She requested gift wrap and waited anxiously as they put the bow on. If the past was any indication, Mandy would refuse to show appreciation even if it was there. Appreciation had gone the way of affection three years ago. But Helen had to try.
When she finally got home after fighting the road construction and heavy traffic a second time, Mandy was there again, in her usual spot on the loveseat, her clamshell perched on her knees and her Earworm active. She didn’t look up. The furrow between her dark eyebrows said she was concentrating.
Helen dropped her purse on the dining table and came over and sat down next to her daughter with the gift in her hands.
Mandy gave her the usual What do you want? glower. It made Helen’s heart sink, but she gamely extended the gift to her daughter.
“What’s that?” Mandy asked, not taking it.
“It’s a present. For you.” Helen studied her daughter’s face.
It was inscrutable. “Present? For what?”
Helen’s extended hand wavered. She let out a pained breath. “Just to say I’m sorry. I’ve been a jerk lately. I don’t mean it. I never mean to be a jerk to you. Whether you believe that or not.”
Mandy looked at her without expression.
“Here. Just… take it.” Helen waved it at her.
Mandy took it and opened it expressionlessly. As she took in the packaging, her stony expression cracked into a slight smile. “Okay, that’s pretty cool. Thanks.” She put the package down on the other side of her and returned to her clamshell.
It was something. Helen’s heart warmed a smidge. “You want to look at it and tell me how it is?”
“Now?” Mandy looked impatient.
“Well… yeah.”
“I can’t now. I have stuff I’m doing. For… job training. Accounting stuff. It’s important.”
The warmth crumbled away. “I just want to know if I picked something good.”
“I’ll look at it later, Mom. I’ll tell you how it is.”
“Can’t you look at it now?”
“Mom, I told you. What I’m doing is important!” Mandy glared.
Helen stood up and turned away. She almost got out of the room without lashing out, but in the final moment, she failed. Years of hurt compelled her to turn around and say, “How important can anything in your life be, anyway?”
9 Days, 15 Hours
The next evening, Helen limped down the carpeted hallways of the high-rise Hyperius bank building alongside a surly new accomplice: an older, wiry fellow named Jack who had grunted a hello and then ignored everything she said.
If Helen had entertained any illusions that everyone in Cobalt’s world was a fan of hers, Jack was destroying them. Then again, she was a tag-along who didn’t know anything about the task ahead of them, so of course her presence annoyed the expert.
They were dressed in janitor’s clothes bought from a worker supply shop. Before them purred a small parade of cleaning bots.
The sturdy, waist-high bots gleamed. Multiple arms sprouted from each, wielding dust mops and spray nozzles and vacuum hoses like cleaning robot Shivas. Helen found the bots unnerving. They looked like they could pull a human apart with little effort and less empathy.
They were autonomous to some degree, but they also required guidance from human operators, and Jack knew what to do. He wore the janitor’s Earworm, swiped from a utility locker, and he muttered commands to the cleaning bots as they moved quickly down the hallway.
Every time Helen gave serious thought to what they were doing, shivers of nerves ran down into her belly and anxiety raised gooseflesh on her arms.
They just needed to get to the server room, drop off the briefcase bomb, get to a safe distance, and set it off via Jack’s e-paper. She didn’t think it would be too difficult… if everything went according to plan.
She fingered the new burner e-paper in her pocket. It was Cobalt’s idea, like the burner clamshells, and it meant she could reach Cobalt in an emergency without revealing either of their identities or compromising Cobalt’s security.
As they passed by a series of original abstract paintings and then an office door, she glimpsed a man working at his desk, and the sight sent a thrill of horror through her. She bit back an exclamation. Of course not everyone would leave the building promptly at the end of the work day. Helen hadn’t thought of that because she was a rookie—and Jack and Cobalt hadn’t thought of it because they didn’t care.
But people were not going to get crushed in a falling building today. Not on her watch.
The bright LED lights passed in a blur above her while she walked, waiting until they were out of the man’s earshot, and then she stopped and grabbed Jack’s arm. She wasn’t going to let him ignore her this time.
“People are working late. That means we have to pull the fire alarm. To get everyone out. And make sure Cobalt tells everyone else in every other building.”
He glared at her hand on his arm until she let go of him.
“We have to do it,” she insisted.
“No,” he said flatly. He started walking again. “We’re not giving the cops and fire engines a head start.”
She got in his way, forcing him to stop. “So we’ll have to get out fast,” she answered. “But we’re not blowing people up. Absolutely not.”
He looked away. She saw the slow, silent calculations going on inside his head, and she grabbed his arm again, more forcefully this time.
“This is my job,” she whispered harshly. “And we are not. Blowing people. Up.”
She would do whatever it took to stop this. Jack was thin and at least a decade older than Helen. She could take him out.
Perhaps he noted the wild glint in her eye. He exhaled forcefully, either annoyed or frustrated. “Fine. You pull the fire alarm when I tell you.”
They resumed walking and Jack muttered into his Earworm. Helen struggled to keep up with his relentless pace. The dozen or so cleaning bots stuttered as if confused as they passed through an intersection of hallways, and Jack gave them quiet orders. Then he fell silent.
“So can I pull the fire alarm?” Helen demanded.
“In a minute,” he said, casting her an ugly look without slowing his pace.
Just then, the cleaning bot directly in front of him stopped abruptly and threw out a spray nozzle as if following a command.
Jack was still glaring at Helen.
He tripped over the bot’s arm.
On the way down, he instinctively threw out his arms, but they went wild, and his head cracked against the rock-hard metal shoulder of a bot and snapped back. His body was limp before it hit the carpet.
The little robot parade came to a jostling stop.
Helen rushed around the cleaning bot to see Jack’s face, and as soon as she saw his open, blank eyes, she knew he was dead.
9 Days, 14 Hours, 48 Minutes
Helen collapsed to her knees, her eyes shut tight against reality, gasping for breath. Her belly felt hollow and empty, and she drew her arms reflexively against her stomach as if to prote
ct herself.
Had that really just happened?
She looked at Jack again just to make sure.
Yes, definitely dead.
She had just considered taking him out herself a moment ago. That wasn’t right. She held her hands to her head.
This wasn’t possible. He had been alive a moment ago.
Was her disintegrating brain lying to her? Was it a hallucination?
She stared around her in dismay.
Everything felt too real, in that way that horrible things always did. There was a small coffee stain on the beige carpet next to Jack’s corpse. The LED light immediately overhead was bluish tinted compared to the rest. Probably a hallucination wouldn’t have this kind of detail. So maybe it was real. And if it was, then what did it mean?
The sudden tragedy left no room in her mind for the original plan. She tried hard to conjure it back up.
Servers. Blowing up servers with briefcase bombs.
How many buildings had to be blown up for the plan to work? If one set of servers remained, would the whole plan fail?
If the whole plan failed… then Jack would have died for nothing.
If he was actually dead, and she wasn’t just losing her mind.
“God, I’m sorry,” she whispered to his body.
She had to go on. Somehow. Until reality made itself known, she had to carry on with the plan.
The cleaning bots were standing around waiting patiently for further instructions. Helen couldn’t control them—she didn’t know how to use the control Earworm Jack was wearing. But Jack was dead—she couldn’t pretend to go on cleaning the building anyway.
She heard a door open behind her.
She looked around and saw an older man in a suit coming down the hallway with an alarmed expression on his face.
“This is not happening,” Helen muttered helplessly.
The fire alarm.
She hurried down the hall and pulled the fire alarm.
A high-pitched, ear-piercing noise emitted, then a buzzing, grinding sound began to cycle as lights flashed.
She hobbled back. The older man was now bending over Jack’s body. Maybe this was real after all.
“Excuse me,” she shouted fiercely over the grinding noise of the fire alarm. “I need to get to him.” She pointed to Jack.
“I think he’s dead,” the old man yelled back, his pale blue eyes stricken.
“I know,” she shouted. “Get out of here. There’s a fire. See?” She pointed to the flashing lights.
“Let’s go, then,” he yelled. He pulled himself to his feet with some effort and moved to take her arm.
She pulled away. “I can’t go. You get out.”
“I’m not going to leave you here!”
She shook her head. As much as she hated to be rude, she had zero time for Mr. Nice Guy. “Thanks anyway,” she yelled.
While the older guy looked on and protested, she swept Jack’s Earworm off his ear, rummaged through his pockets for the e-paper that was the trigger for the bomb, then grabbed the briefcase. She hobbled as fast as she could toward the elevators.
She put on Jack’s Earworm with shaking hands, wondering whether the device would recognize her. Would it have some kind of security? But as soon as she slipped it on, she saw with immense gratitude the note “Server room 912” floating in his heads-up display.
She wanted to message Cobalt somehow, but she didn’t know how to use the Earworm and she couldn’t type on her e-paper and walk while carrying the briefcase. She just hurried as fast as she could.
A few minutes later, as she hobbled down the hallways on the ninth floor, a message popped up on the Earworm: [ Status report Orlando Blue ]
She called out into the Earworm, “Am I Orlando Blue?”
She had no idea if speaking into the air did anything or if she had to somehow tell the Earworm to listen.
She stopped, put down the briefcase, pulled out her e-paper again, and typed a message to Cobalt. [ How do you use Earworm to talk? Jack is DEAD. ]
Crucially important seconds were slipping by and she would be damned if this mission failed because of her.
She tried tapping on the Earworm’s top button as she’d seen others do. The heads-up display blinked out.
Damn.
She tapped it again. When it lit up, there was another message: [ Status report NOW Orlando Blue ]
“Not good. Jack is dead!” she yelled.
Next message: [ WTF IS GOING ON JACK??? Answer me! ]
Damn damn DAMN. She swept the Earworm off her ear and shoved it into a pocket along with her worthless e-paper.
When she got to the door to the server room, it was locked. She swore violently, then found a fire ax in a glass cabinet just down the hallway and brought it back to use on the door. Her hands shook so hard, the ax glanced off the door twice and nearly took off her own leg. Her adrenaline ran so high, she could hardly breathe.
“Died on me,” she muttered to herself as she looked inside the server room for a good place to hide the IED briefcase. “Died on me. Dammit, Jack!”
She found an empty, low shelf that looked good, shoved the briefcase onto it, then headed for the nearest stairwell as fast as she could.
Her legs gave out unexpectedly and she came crashing down onto her hands and knees. A young man heading toward the same stairwell saw her picking herself up and came back to take her arm. “You okay, ma’am?”
Helen was taken aback until she remembered that she still looked like a middle-aged janitor. “Fine,” she shouted over the alarm sound. “Just freaked out by the alarm. Just want to get out in case it’s a real fire, you know?”
“Oh, it’s never a real fire,” he answered with a wry grin. “I figure this is just what I get for working late.”
As they went down the stairs, she struggled to think of something to say, but her mind was jammed full of things to panic about. Like whether she was supposed to have activated something on the IED before dropping it off. It was too late now. Maybe she had ruined the whole plan.
She let the young man help her all the way down and out to the evacuation area on the bottom level of the parking garage. “Thank you,” she said, and he responded with a slight bow.
She turned away and put a bit of distance between herself and the remaining handful of people who’d come down. She unfolded Jack’s e-paper, the trigger for the bomb. She had no idea what she was supposed to do next. What if, after all this, she couldn’t make the thing blow up?
She started tapping every button.
A massive explosion sounded from above just as the day’s first raindrops began to fall.
Helen’s gut churned with misery and anxiety. Her disguise removed, the uniform discarded in a random dumpster behind an abandoned building and her regular clothes back on, she walked toward a nearby bar, waving away mosquitoes. For once, there was no rain.
As she went, she sent frantic messages to Cobalt on her own e-paper. [ Did it work? ] [ Are enough servers destroyed? ] [ WHAT IS GOING ON? ] [ Why aren’t you answering me? ] [ Jack is DEAD. ]
She gave up and pulled up breaking news. What she saw sent a fresh wave of adrenaline through her. There was nonstop coverage of the bombings across central Florida.
As she stepped in to the dive bar, she saw that its patrons were also watching the bombings on the bar’s several TVs. She slunk in like the criminal she was, but no one took any notice of her. She ordered a beer, which came in a plastic cup, and sat in a worn wooden booth, alternately watching the news and checking the e-paper over and over for messages. Why won’t he answer me?
With so many explosions, a state of emergency was declared in Florida. The governor issued a shelter-in-place. Fire alarms had been pulled in all the buildings, and the Boom Boys had been careful to keep the collapses inside the buildings’ footprints. So far they said there were no fatalities. That was a welcome relief… but apparently they hadn’t found Jack’s body yet.
Without warning, Helen’s vision b
lurred as if smoke had risen in front of her eyes. She rubbed them hard, but it didn’t help. Not now, dammit. Not again.
Footage of the burning buildings was joined, split-screen, by text scrolling across prominent marquees and electronic billboards across the city. Helen squinted hard, but she couldn’t make it out.
A shout rose up from the bar’s patrons. Cheers. Applause.
What is it?
Fuming, she waited until the newscaster read it out loud:
Thousands of mortgage records gone. Claim any empty house in Orlando u want. It has to be empty. Then tell em to prove it aint yours. Ur welcome. Cobalt, the Robin Hood Thief, and the Boom Boys.
Helen clutched her stomach, feeling sick. Cobalt had let the cat out of the bag already. Was it definite? Or was her name attached to a lie?
Egged on by the others, a handful of the bar’s patrons left to take their chances on a new home.
Someone at the front of the bar turned, raised his plastic cup, and shouted, “A toast to the Robin Hood Thief!”
More cheers answered him. Cups were raised around the bar.
Meanwhile, more public figures were denouncing the Robin Hood Thief as a terrorist. Stood to reason. Helen couldn’t argue—not this time.
The governor updated his shelter-in-place order to state that any person seen on the streets with “apparent criminal intent” would be arrested.
The news supplied a map with pins for each explosion. Helen couldn’t see the details. She tried to bring it up on her e-paper, but being closer didn’t seem to help this time—she just couldn’t see through the fog. She wanted to ask the patrons at neighboring tables, but she didn’t want to draw attention to herself.
Finally, the newscaster gave a tally of buildings hit: twenty-three. Significantly less than the original target of thirty. Helen wasn’t sure if it was enough. Perhaps enough computer backups survived to ruin the plan entirely.
Live news footage showed people breaking windows and kicking in doors to claim empty homes. Helen’s stomach churned. Would it matter? Or would they just lose the houses in the end because the property deeds still existed?
The Robin Hood Thief Page 17
