Just as suddenly as it had come, the fog vanished from Helen’s eyes. She sighed. She couldn’t decide if she was grateful that it was gone, or angry that it had happened at all.
Now that she could see again, she logged into her latest profile on Whatsit and made a post: [ You guys stay away from the cops. Don’t riot. Make it peaceable, okay? I don’t want anyone to get hurt. And don’t try to take occupied buildings—it won’t work. ]
Christian Smith from LSTV sent her a message: [ Kudos, Robin. Well done. Especially for no one getting hurt. That was nice work. ]
Nobody except Jack.
Like Christian, most of her fans were pleased, even delighted, while others seemed lukewarm, and some were turning against her, saying she’d crossed a line. Apparently, blowing up buildings wasn’t universally appreciated.
Helen sighed. Only a few weeks ago, she would have been among those condemning this kind of behavior, and she wasn’t sure anymore what that meant. She had a vague, lurking fear that perhaps Helen-in-her-right-mind would never have done this. That perhaps it wasn’t Helen calling the shots anymore, but her diseased brain.
But what else could she do, besides wait to die?
She had to trust that the daydreams she’d harbored all her life had been true enough—noble enough—to deserve to be brought to life.
An hour or so after it was all over, Helen was getting out of the rusty old Ford next to a dumpster where she planned to throw away the burner e-paper when it buzzed in her hand, startling her. It was Cobalt—finally.
After taking a look around to make sure it was safe to linger here, Helen read the message: [ So we defiantly got enuf for Hyperius. The other two… i dont know yet for sure. Plus four of the county courthouses didnt go off. But we defiantly cleared out like about 150,000 mortgage records i think. And their saying we did $147 billion dollars damage to the banking and real estate industries. And pple rly like us even more now that we did that with teh mortages. Even if it wasnt complete. I mean people dont know what we were aiming for right? They only know what we did. ]
Helen leaned back against the door of the stubborn old Ford, exhausted, contemplating the rusting dumpster before her. She was grateful the kid couldn’t see her disappointment. It wasn’t his fault that she’d aimed at a hundred million homes and hit a hundred fifty thousand. She’d aimed too high, that was all.
[ I’m grateful for what we accomplished. ]
[ Its rly sideways about Jack. Thats so wierd. He rly tripped over a cleaning bot? ]
[ Yeah. He really did. ]
[ Woww,. Thats effed up.... Um so not to be totally like cold but theres like not much to say about that so whats next Robin? The cool thing is like i said people dont know what we were aiming for just what we did so we impressed alot of people. I can get some people to help i havent worked with before. Like internationsl super star hackers have been messaging me for hours. Theyre waiting for the next job so they can help. Which rocks. Im gonna have like 40 people in my posse. They have some new ideas too. ]
[ That’s good. New ideas is what we need, I think. ]
She waited for a reply, but after a few minutes, she figured out that Cobalt was done for the moment. Meanwhile, her thoughts wandered to Jack. She vividly recalled the horrific way his head snapped back as he collided with the bot.
Never had she dreamed of such a pathetic death.
She still couldn’t believe it. Of all the petty, dirty, small moments of a life, to die by tripping over a cleaning bot had to rate as one of the lowest.
How could anyone ever have believed in a God or a life after death? How could a God who supposedly marked the sparrow’s fall let a man die this way? Even a man who’d been—as much as she hated to think ill of the dead—more or less unlikeable, at least in the few minutes she’d known him?
No. Life didn’t stand up to scrutiny. That was plain and simple and obvious as hell. Life just didn’t bear looking at too closely. It was too small, too ridiculous, too ugly, too barren.
Maybe only the rich could pretend it was anything else.
But if anyone’s life mattered, if she could claim that her own life mattered, she had to honor Jack’s life. Had to honor his passing. So what if he was kind of a jerk. So what if he was one of the least pleasant people she’d met in recent years. No one deserved a meaningless life or a meaningless death.
Maybe that was why people used to make such a big deal out of death, back before there were so damn many people on the planet. Maybe it was because they were trying to pretend that death mattered. To pretend that they mattered.
Did she matter?
She thought about her own struggle to make an impact here in the final days of her own life. Why was she trying so hard? If she stepped back far enough… on any scale that was sufficiently large, the impact of any given life flattened to zero. Eventually, all ripples died out.
Was she naively hoping that somehow she would last forever in the history books? There wasn’t enough time to talk about or learn about every significant person in history. When so many billions of people lived and died… not even a thousandth of a percent could be remembered. Not even a ten-thousandth of a percent. The very best she could hope for was that a record of her actions would be stored forever on some web page that no one ever read.
No, this wasn’t about fame or being immortalized.
Helen cared. That was all. She cared about the world. About the nameless and small, the unremarked and everyday people who died small and ugly deaths. She cared about Jack just because Jack was a human being who struggled and did the best he could and, by God, did not deserve less than anyone else did. Did not less deserve love or kindness or meaning or fulfillment or beauty.
No matter how much of a jerk he was.
She stomped on her e-paper until it shattered, then threw it in the stinking dumpster. She kicked Old Blue’s door to make the handle work, slammed the creaky rusted door behind her, and drove home.
That evening, Helen ate some ramen noodles—they were just about all her stomach would take these days—and then typed up two messages to Cobalt on another burner e-paper. She drove out to a different neighborhood before she sent the messages, because she was afraid to communicate with Cobalt from her own home, fearful that law enforcement could somehow track where the messages came from. Above all else, she still had to protect Mandy.
The first message asked Cobalt to find next-of-kin information on Jack. Tomorrow, she would send the cash cards—the ones she’d lost and then found again—to his family as an anonymous gift. She regretted the media attention that was going to come to them. The janitorial company would fail to recognize Jack as an employee, and red flags would go up, and the cops would figure it out.
The second message was about her next plan.
[ What I would love to do next is to set all nonviolent offenders free and wipe out their prison records. Especially children and debtors and anyone in solitary confinement. I know it’s a big deal to do that. It’s going to piss a lot of people off. What do you think? ]
[ FUCK YEAH. Fucking assholes putting kids in fucking prison and in solitary. YES lets do it. ]
[ Okay. But it would have the same issues we just had, right? We would have to blow up a ton of buildings again? I don’t think we’ll be able to do that a second time. And I’m not sure I want to. ]
[ Let me check with my posse, especially the new guys. I bet theres a way we can do it but I cant promise for sure because u really dont know til u try to do stuff. ]
Now he tells me, Helen thought. [ Okay. Let’s get on it. We have very little time left, okay? Maybe as little as a week, plus this might be the last robbery I can do. I’ve been thinking about this, and in addition to destroying the criminal records, we have to open the prison doors, which means hacking the security systems of the prisons themselves, and we have to get into the PA systems to tell the prisoners that it’s safe to leave and to tell the guards not to stop them. I don’t want a lot of prisoners getting shot.
]
[ KK yeah ]
Helen sat back in her car seat. She suddenly thought of another problem with the plan, making her stomach tighten unpleasantly. If thousands of convicts walked along the highways in brightly colored prison jumpsuits, the cops could easily round them back up.
She gazed out of her car window at the passing vehicles until inspiration struck in the form of a Flyte self-driving taxi stopping at a bus stop to pick up a passenger.
Of course.
[ Can you guys hack into the Flyte dispatch system? Send cars in every city to the prisons to pick up the prisoners? And drop new clothes in the cars for the prisoners to wear? ]
[ Hahaha we can try peace/up ]
8 Days
Yeah so Theres this idea one of my new posse has called poisnoing backups. Basicalhy instaling software on the backups that garbles the backed up data. If were overwriting data then thats not the same as deleting so they can’t just get it back. It woud have to run like a few days to get all the backups.
And the active servers we can encrypt during operation and then change the passwords and dlete the passwords from the system. Boom locked out baby. No need too permanently destroy thes ervers when they cant even get in.
One of my new guys knows somebody with the DOJ who can get us some of the nfo we need to get in. So we can do all of this from our machines remotely. No explosions. Not messy.
There are like almost 5 000 prisons. But honestly the number doesnt matter cuz we just build the list of servers and then throw the software at all of them. This is a whole lot easier than what we did b4. The other plan was actaly kinda fucking stupid actually. Sorry.
But heres the thing. U wanted us to only do the nonviolent offendors. Well its actually pretty complicated. Their kept in teh same prisons. Except super max those are seperate. So u could just leave out the super max prisons.
But otherwise the prisons have like violent and nonviolent together. Also my buddy whos dad is a cop was telling me violent criminals plea bargain so theyre record shows theyre not convicted of the violent crime. So u reallyc ant be sure who is and who isnt violent.
So basically theres not any easy way to do what u want. Best thing is just let them all out. Or not do it at all. Its up to u. Whatever u want.
Helen leaned back from the library projcom and massaged her temples. The roller-coaster ride was giving her a headache.
So, all the violent felons going free. Rapists, pedophiles, murderers, domestic abusers… set free with no records, free to commit more crimes at their whim. Could she live with that?
She had often heard phrases like “you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.” As a young hothead, she’d loved it, but as an adult, she’d gotten clear that the ends never justified the means. Never. That was why she had chosen to live the life she had. Always taking the high road. Always taking care to cause no harm, as if she were a doctor subject to the Hippocratic Oath.
And now she was considering breaking a few eggs for the greater good.
Other people still had everything left to lose. Did she have any right to make this choice for them?
She sagged against the table. The email on the computer screen blurred as her vision came and went.
She couldn’t decide right now. Not here, on the spot. It was too big a decision to make at a moment’s notice.
Suddenly, a thought flashed into her mind. Her retirement fund payout. It should have come in a week ago.
She checked her bank account. The payment was there, dated only yesterday, and marked “pending.” She called her bank and was told that the payment was on hold for a ten-day verification period that was mandatory for unusual deposits over a thousand dollars.
She slumped back in her chair. The payment might not clear before she died. She didn’t truly need the money now, but it was an insult on top of a host of injuries.
What if she had really needed the money? This was evidence of how the system was stacked to work against the very poor. This delay could put someone in jail, if they had an outstanding debt they couldn’t pay.
Distracted and tired, she went out to the old Ford.
Cops, private investigators, the FBI, the CIA, hit men sent by the Entitled she’d pissed off—she’d expected any or all of them. But not this—she hadn’t expected this.
The unkempt man reeking of alcohol knocked her down next to her old Ford just as she opened the door, just outside the flickering light cast by the dying street light, here between cars, where no one could see.
He planted one knee right on her wounded thigh, and agony took her breath.
He pulled her face to his by her hair and pressed his mouth toward hers, his gaze smeared by drunkenness. She felt his stubble scrape her skin as she tried to turn her face away. She struggled against him.
Wordless, his face twisted with annoyance at her resistance, he elbowed her in the face. She felt something pop—felt agonizing pain and warm blood coming down. Tears filled her vision.
As she lay stunned, he knelt astride her. He ripped at the front of her shirt and tore at her bra, grunting with exertion.
By the time she could think again, he was pulling up her skirt.
She’d had some self-defense training. Three classes twenty years ago. But she remembered something. She twisted her torso and threw one hip hard into his crotch, then tore a hand loose and went straight at his nose with a flat palm. He turned his head at the last second and her hand went off to the side. All the same, blood trickled from his nose.
He cursed her, his voice guttural. “Baby, you don’t wanna do that.” It was a threat. He swiped at his face and looked at his hands for blood.
The Bowie knife was visible, knocked out of her purse, there on the ground, just out of reach.
He went to hit her in the face again, to stun her again, to keep her from fighting. She threw up her hands and knocked the blow aside.
She tried to slide out from under him, but he dropped his full weight on her and knocked her breath out of her. She struggled, gasping. She tried and failed to do the hip trick a second time. He threw one elbow across her throat and drove his weight down onto her. She couldn’t breathe.
Thunder and lightning at once.
Rain. Sudden and ferocious. Halos around the few street lamps.
She tried to scream, but with his forearm on her throat, she could only make a ragged croak. She flailed and struggled, but she’d gone weak.
Her vision flashed black in the corners as she struggled for breath.
The man stared at her with a twisted leer and victory in his dark brown eyes. He waited for her to go unconscious.
She couldn’t stop him. She knew that now. Panic ran through her like a chill. She truly couldn’t stop him. Hot tears came to her eyes.
Rain wet her hands, her lower legs, her face.
He couldn’t wait. He yanked upward at her skirt.
In his eagerness, his elbow on her throat slipped to the side.
She got a full breath.
She threw herself hard to the side. The Bowie knife.
She didn’t hesitate. She would not let this man do what he sought to do. Never, never, never.
She shoved the knife into the side of his neck and pulled it back out.
Blood sprayed down on her, hot and wet. She tried to swipe it away from her face.
The man fell on top of her and convulsed, and she pushed with all her strength. She pulled away, onto wet cement. Torrents of cold rain wet her clothes. It was so cold. It wasn’t supposed to be this cold.
He reached for her, but he couldn’t get to her.
She got up and into the half-wet seat of her car.
She pulled the door closed and locked it. It felt like sanctuary. The engine started.
She drove forward, over the parking curb, the car rocking violently and groaning in protest.
She left him crawling through his blood toward a salvation that he would never reach.
Helen wanted to go to Egemon, but he would as
k what had happened to her, and she couldn’t bring herself to tell him. She felt sick and ashamed about how she’d been attacked, and sickened again by what she had been forced to do to him.
On the drive back, she tried not to think about it, about the man’s moist breath and scratchy chin. She tried not to think about the cascade of hot, heavy blood on her face. The twisted, sinking feeling that always came with sexual assault.
She tried to think about curling up in her own bed with Jessie and watching TV with some hot tea. She tried to think of comfort and safety and peace.
Then she realized that she couldn’t go home. She was covered in blood and soaked in rain. She flipped down the mirror and saw that her face was bruised. Her wet clothes were torn half off. She changed direction, toward her sleep locker.
She passed one younger woman in the hallways of the sleep-locker facility. The girl took one look at her and walked faster, carefully averting her eyes.
Helen locked the door to her sleep locker. As she sat on the edge of the rubber mattress and struggled to peel off her wet clothes, she shook violently with cold and old fear. Blood ran down her face and swirled along with the water toward the drain on the floor.
Trying to get her clothes off exhausted her too much. Dizziness overtook her. She crawled, shivering, onto the bare rubber mattress smelling of mildew. She had no bedding here, not having imagined that she would need to spend the night.
Her pain pills were back at home.
The dizziness intensified, sending the room spinning around her faster and faster. The pain in her thigh stabbed into her, and her nose throbbed. Her muscles shook so violently, it couldn’t be just from cold.
Helen knew that if she had been a superstitious or religious woman, she would have seen the attack as a sign. A message from the universe about her quandary on the prison break: Don’t let those bastards out.
The Robin Hood Thief Page 18
