All Rights Reserved

by Gregory Scott Katsoulis

  The room swam away from me, the blue dawn at the windows dimming. I saw Sam, Saretha and my parents gathered around a spinning table, all talking at once, but I couldn’t hear them. Kel was there, but Henri wasn’t. I opened my eyes to a darkening blur and thought, for just a moment, that I saw Margot. Then everything went black.

  THE STAIN OF A SENTENCE: $51.95

  A bell kept sounding.

  “Where is Henri?”

  The bell sounded again.

  Something struck my face. My eyes opened to see Margot’s hand hovering in the air.

  “Where is Henri?” she demanded. She was sitting over me, her face tight and hard. She had Kel’s Pad in her non-slapping hand. The Pad was working again, lit up with the building’s map. She shoved the map in front of my face.

  I looked at her blankly. She slapped me again. The bell sounded. My head ached.

  “Wake up, Speth. Tell me where Henri is.”

  The bell sounded again. We were on the elevator, going down. Where was Henri? We were on the sixtieth floor. Was Henry still on seventeen? Margot took a small, bean-shaped device from a pocket near her biceps. It looked like it had a little stinger. She jabbed it into my arm, and I felt my heart start racing. She slapped me again, one more time than was necessary. I sat up angrily.

  “Type it!” she demanded. She held the Pad out to me. I hesitated, and her face grew red with anger. “You typed Silas Rog, goddamn it, you can type Henri’s location.”

  We weren’t in a Squelch, but I didn’t know if that mattered. The Pad wouldn’t register it, and I had no Cuff to report it. I was too groggy and panicked to have the debate in my head about what I could or could not do anymore. We had to get to Henri and the others. I raised myself up and swatted at the 17 on the elevator’s control panel.

  “This elevator is stupidly slow,” she complained. We were on the forty-fifth floor and dropping.

  I looked around in a foolish pantomime, as if Rog might be on the elevator someplace, hoping Margot would understand what I asked.

  “I hit Rog very hard on his head. Maybe he is dead. Maybe he is up and plotting. We should move quickly.”

  Damn it. Our next moves would have been simpler if I knew he couldn’t interfere. She should have made sure he was dead, but murder was rather a lot to ask.

  I tried to stand, but I felt weak. We were on the thirty-fifth floor. Margot looked determined.

  “I told myself not to come back,” Margot said, rummaging through her bag. “I said to myself, Henri is a big boy.”

  The thin bell rang again. Thirtieth floor. I looked at the elevator’s display, scanning down to the lowest level. I had a plan. What had it been? I needed to get beneath this building. I needed to find the place where the WiFi was housed. That’s what I needed to do. I stood and pressed the elevator’s glass display. I queued the garage, the lowest floor I could find. Margot noted what I did and shook her head.

  “Kel is an idiot,” she said, examining her green pony bottle of sleep gas. “We’re going to save her, too.”

  She attached some kind of nozzle. I didn’t have a nozzle. I wouldn’t have been able to use one anyway, since I couldn’t have let Rog see me take the canister out.

  “You are coming with me.” She canceled my garage call with a swipe. Maybe she was right. Maybe she could help me after we rescued Henri and Kel. Maybe they all could.

  The elevator slowed. I stood and looked for my bag.

  Margot hooked it on my arm for me. I put my palm to my temple. There was a small spot of blood when I pulled it away.

  “You’re fine,” Margot said, and she gave me a little shove halfway between playful and impatient as the elevator doors opened.

  LICIT AUTHORITY: $52.98

  The seventeenth floor was nothing but a hall of doors from the center out to the windows. Two Lawyers were walking toward us, dressed in their Butchers & Rog best. One was a blonde woman with legs so thin they looked insect-like. The other was a man with a narrow mustache. They seemed to greet the morning with determination, noting us without alarm. It scarcely seemed to register with them that anyone would dare intrude at Butchers & Rog. They kept walking. The woman typed diligently on her Cuff, like a reflex, coming off the last tap with a delicate flourish.

  An InstaSuit™ appeared on Margot’s Cuff. Twelve thousand dollars for associated pain and suffering from our trespass. The two Lawyers looked from her to me. Their satisfaction crumpled when they recognized I had no Cuff. My heart was beating fast, almost too fast. I was alert, but unsteady. Or maybe I was afraid. I couldn’t think of how we would escape from this. The tower seemed to be crushing in on me from all sides, and I was still far from where I needed to be.

  I took a deep breath. I didn’t need to escape. I needed to get down to the WiFi.

  The male Lawyer opened his mouth to speak, but Margot slammed him to the floor like a possessed warrior. Insect Legs tottered back in fear, tapping away wildly at her Cuff; it was her only defense. Another InstaSuit™ vibrated from Margot’s Cuff. Insect Legs turned to me, and her mouth fell open, horrified by my bare arm. I wanted to punch her in the face and break her slender, plastic, scalpeled nose, but instead, I swept her legs and she crumpled like a pile of twigs, weeping and tapping from the floor.

  Without missing a beat, Margot put a small mask over her face and then slapped one on my head, leaving me to adjust it while she sprayed the two Lawyers like they truly were insects and her pony bottle was a can of bug spray.

  When she was done, Margot pulled Kel’s Pad from my hands and panned it from side to side, looking for the heat signatures of our friends. Every room had a Finishing Bed® inside, outlined in a thin neon glow, but all appeared empty until we were halfway down the hall. Margot’s brow furrowed, unsure of what she was looking at.

  A few doors in, Henri and Kel were each guarded by a man, with an extra guard inside the door and an outline I presumed to be the Lawyer working the machine. Cold metal shapes holstered in blue told us the guards were armed. Kel was in the finishing bed now, the warm glow of her body stiff in the machine.

  Margot’s face was red; her mouth was quivering. There were tears in her eyes. She angrily wiped them away.

  “Don’t take Henri from me,” she said, low and throaty. “Please.” Her pony bottle was ready. She shook herself and raised it with one hand, and held out the Pad in the other, turning back into the warrior of a moment ago. She nodded for me to unbolt the lock.

  I opened the door without hesitation, swiping the mechanism like I had a hundred others. The door clicked open, and Margot pulled back on the bottle’s trigger.

  “Hold your breath, Henri!” Margot shouted, her arm extended blindly inside. I heard him gasp.

  Bodies dropped like flies. Henri and the guards didn’t heed Margot’s warning, but Kel and Butchers did.

  Butchers instantly understood what was happening and aimed his Cuff at Margot. I leapt at him. He had the same hole bored in his Cuff that Rog did, and before I could think, I jammed his arm up toward the ceiling. His Cuff detonated with four quick shots; bullets punctured the ceiling in a line of holes. Someone above us screamed. In one swift motion, Kel punched Butchers in the throat and he dropped to the ground, gagging, then silent.

  “We need to get out of here,” Kel said, looking at Margot with pride. Her Cuff buzzed harshly. Her account had gone so far into the negative from the Finishing Bed® that it registered a debt error. I didn’t know what that was—I’d never seen it before, but her eyes weren’t being shocked. She kicked the machine. Perhaps it had overloaded her Cuff’s system.

  “What is that thing?” Margot asked, smirking a little in the glow of Kel’s approval.

  “A parlor trick,” Kel answered, kneeling down to Henri and jabbing him with the little bean-like device Margot had used on me. “I suspect it assigns a
lgorithmically likely violations based on your personal history.”

  Of course, I thought to myself. Someone as deceitful as Silas Rog would find it easier to fake reading our minds than to do the real thing. He could automate the process of destroying lives. Somewhere in a million words of Terms of Service, you can bet he hid a paragraph or two about results being approximate or simulated based on reasonable presumption.

  “We need to get out of here,” Kel said.

  No, I thought. I took the Pad. I rifled through the layout of the building, scrolling down below the bottom floor. The map showed nothing but an empty circle. I showed it to them all.

  “I think she is brain damaged,” Margot said, rushing over to Henri as his eyes fluttered.

  A small thrill flashed in Kel’s eyes. “I don’t think so.” She’d understood me. My heart swelled. I showed the great empty outline to Margot again.

  “What does this mean?”

  “The WiFi is down below us, Margot.”

  Margot considered this, comprehension dawning on her face. I raced to the elevator.

  “There won’t be a giant off switch,” Margot muttered, helping Henri to his feet. Henri looked at her, a little dazed, a little impressed.

  I pressed the button for the lowest floor available—the garage—as Kel, Margot and Henri stepped on. I couldn’t wait to get there. I was eager to see what damage I might do. The display ticked away each floor—12, 11, 10, 9—and then stopped. The elevator shook and seized.

  We had been foolish to file into it. Rog’s voice came over the intercom, groggy and furious. He was awake, and he ordered all the elevators stopped and the exits blocked. Then he swallowed and tried to recover his Legal tone.

  “I grant Licit Authority to kill any of the interlopers,” he rasped. “And someone bring Carol Amanda Harving to me.”

  Was my sister actually here, or did he just say that to scare me? Terror shot through me as I weighed what he might do to Saretha.

  Kel popped open the exit panel in the elevator’s ceiling, like I’d seen in a dozen movies, and we climbed quickly onto its roof. If there was one thing our team was practiced at, it was zipping down cables. It was probably faster for us to travel like this, anyway. The bottom level was two floors beneath the garage, and Kel managed to get the door open before we reached it.

  This was it. I would destroy Rog’s world, or I would die trying.

  NANOLION™: $53.99

  The WiFi hub and servers rested in an enormous shallow concrete bowl the size of a football field. Curved plastic shelves were interleaved in circles throughout the room like a maze. They were filled with chunky black boxes with tiny lights flashing along their faces. Routers, servers and thick silver batteries were packed in tight arrays. Streaming from them were dense black optical lines and ropes of twisted yellow, green and blue wires, threaded together to form anaconda-sized cables that wound through the room to a central trunk. There, they coiled up the massive pillar in a helical twist and exited out into the city to take in data from the air. Thin antennae were scattered everywhere, twitching. All of it was dotted with Patent marks and ®s and ©s, warning us that the ideas of these cables and their configuration were owned.

  I was instantly filled with hatred for the whole thing, like it was an enormous, poisonous oak in a fairytale, enfolded by snakes and insects. Unfortunately, I had no idea how to destroy it.

  Kel, Henri and Margot fanned out. The guards were no doubt right behind us. The room hummed around me, and I unplugged a wire to see what effect it might have. Somewhere in the city, perhaps a small FiDo emerged, but I couldn’t see the effect from here. I had no idea where to begin.

  Kel bit her lip. “What now?”

  Henri pulled an axe from a fire safety box on the wall. You could see he was in full hero mode, ready to chop away at cables and computers, but Margot stayed his hand. “I do not want you crispy,” she said. She took the axe and shook her body, miming an electrocution.

  “Speth?” Kel asked, taking up a tactical spot near the room’s main door.

  Then I saw it. It was almost exactly the thing Margot said wouldn’t exist. Along one curve of wall, there was a break in the shelves and servers. An enormous metal box with a red lever labeled MAIN POWER. Turning it off wouldn’t be enough, but destroying it might. Without electricity coursing through the cables, we could chop them to bits, and how could they reprint them without their precious WiFi? The tether would be cut. The WiFi would melt away. This was what I had been looking for.

  I sprinted to the lever, my heart full, my body flooded with relief and anticipation. But just as quickly, my resolve wavered. The food printers wouldn’t work without the WiFi, either. How would people eat? Beecher’s dad had worried everyone would starve.

  My face crumpled. The system had us all backed into a corner. Small yellow lights pulsed all around the room as the servers ingested words and spat bills into the ether, but there was no way to stop it without potentially risking the lives of everyone we knew.

  I felt the words long caught in my throat, and the silence and servitude that closed in around us. Silas Rog had laid out his plan for me, and I was not alone. He would do the same to everyone like me.

  My resolve rekindled. It would be better to starve.

  I pulled the lever as hard as I could. The room’s persistent hum stuttered and pitched down for just a moment. The yellow lights began to strobe, then returned to their previous blinking state. The hum redoubled and filled the room with a rising whine. From the interleaved rings of shelves, silver batteries began to kick on. Small blue pinpricks of light flicked to life and illuminated each NanoLion™ logo. The room turned cold blue with that light, and my body seemed to freeze in it, as the WiFi continued on.

  “Enough,” a voice echoed above me. It was Rog. This was no voice through an intercom; he was actually here. “These batteries will last for months. Everyone will remain connected. You will stop—now!”

  But I would not stop.

  “Everyone is going to know you’re a fraud!” Henri shouted.

  “Slander,” Rog shot back.

  Henri was looking upward. Did he see Rog?

  “You think people are going to fall for your mind-reading machines?” Henri cried out.

  “What matters,” Rog said, “is the Law.” I could hear his smile. “If the Law proclaims them accurate, they are accurate.”

  “Look,” Kel whispered, looking up with her eyes.

  Rog stood on a low-railed platform jutting out two stories above us. He was flanked by the brothers who had killed Sam, and beside him stood Saretha. She was bleary-eyed, but she stood obediently at Rog’s side with a weak, admiring smile. Had he medicated her? Was she seeing something different than we were? I forced my eyes away from Saretha and scanned the room, frantically seeking some way to shut everything down.

  “I see little point in making promises. But, consider—” Rog interrupted himself to gesture to the brothers to get down on the floor and find me “—generations of your family indentured. Generations.”

  Saretha barely reacted. I moved deeper into the room, where the shelves of servers formed long, curving passageways. I began to unplug whatever I could find. I knew it made little difference—I might set them back an hour or a day, but the overall effort was futile. The smart thing would have been to flee.

  “You think you have the right to change things? You will cause traffic crashes and hospital deaths, and old people will be unable to obtain medicine,” Rog warned. “The poor won’t be able to print food.”

  He was trying to chip away at my conscience, which only made me angrier. A real alternative might have stopped me, but he’d shown his hand. We would all be imprisoned within months with his fake “improvements.” What kind of life would that be? And I was willing to bet Rog wouldn’t let himself starve. There were
other ways to eat.

  “You will be held accountable, and in the end, you will accomplish nothing. You cannot turn off the power!”

  His voice grew more strained. He was concerned. He had no idea how much this boosted me. Without meaning to, he’d let me know I could do real damage. The question was: How?

  A guard burst through a door on my left, and at once Kel had him on the ground, unconscious. She now had a pistol in her hand.

  It took only a second for her to draw on Rog. Rog moved to the edge of the platform, unconcerned, and scowled down, giving Kel a clear shot. Kel pulled the trigger, but nothing happened. She looked more closely at the gun as Rog laughed from above, his face a waggling pixelation of glee.

  “Fingerprint keyed,” Kel said with disgust, tossing the weapon aside.

  Henri and Margot were set upon next. The guards tussled and fought with them.

  Rog spotted me and pointed down a manicured finger. “There,” he called, eager to have me caught.

  Another guard appeared. Kel took him out with ease. I ducked down farther, hiding from Rog’s view, desperate for ideas. The guards were coming in with weapons, but they weren’t shooting at us. Rog still wanted us alive.

  Then I froze. Ahead of me, beyond a curved shelf of servers, I saw the indigo brother. His thick features turned to me, looking ghastly in the cold-charged battery light. He smiled. Then Kel was on him from nowhere, pulling him down by the neck and assaulting him with blows from her long limbs. I futilely pulled out another wire or two, but my efforts were pathetic.

  “Speth!” Kel shouted, still struggling with the massive brother.

  Behind me, the maroon brother was stalking up the aisle, his face flushed and determined. Lit by the blue battery light, his ruddy cheeks looked almost black and splotchy.