Sycamore 2

by Craig A. Falconer

  Kurt stepped out onto the concrete for a better look, and there she was.

  Galloping towards him, smiling like the moon, the one person he most wanted to see in the one place he least wanted to see her:

  Sabrina.

  III

  23

  Sabrina leapt into Kurt’s outstretched arms. She had a tiny bandage on the palm of her left hand.

  “You’re okay!” she yelled. “You’re really okay!”

  Kurt hugged her tightly. “I am now.” He looked over Sabrina’s shoulder as he held her and saw Randy and Julian stepping out of the darkness behind Mary.

  A feeling of dread shot through Kurt, with a voice in his head telling him that his family were in more immediate danger now than they had been in the city. But another voice spoke, too, focusing on the positive that for the first time in almost two weeks he knew for certain that they were safe right now.

  The hows and the whys would be addressed soon enough; for now, what mattered was that they were here.

  Kurt carried Sabrina across the threshold into La Plethora.

  “Who hit you?” she asked, spotting the well-faded bruise on his cheek.

  “That was an accident.”

  “Oh really, mister?”

  Ty and Lisa appeared at the bottom of the stairs to save him from replying. Relieved that the new arrivals were neither intruders nor zombies, both walked over to say hello to Sabrina. When they were introducing themselves, Kurt thought that Sabrina might react to the name Lisa, which was her late mother’s name. She didn’t. She seemed to be too busy being impressed by Lisa’s turquoise earrings, so Kurt put her down and went to see Julian and Randy.

  “I knew it,” Julian said, putting his head against Kurt’s chest and hugging him like no one was watching. “I knew it the whole time.”

  “Good,” Kurt said. He looked at Randy, who hadn’t said anything yet. “I’m sorry I had to put you through everything. It was the only way.”

  Randy nodded. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Kurt told them that he watched the funeral and was proud of the relative restraint they both showed with Amos. Ty, listening in, said he was more impressed by Julian’s kamikaze dive over the railing and into the Fury River mob.

  “You’re the guy from T-Y-T-V,” Julian said. “I used to watch that all the time.”

  Ty wore a smug grin. “My reputation precedes me.”

  Julian laughed and asked Ty some questions about the show. Sabrina was still with Lisa, asking all kinds of things about where she was from and what fun stuff there was to do in the mall. The monorail caught her eye most of all, but Lisa had to break the news that there was no carriage

  They all walked up the central walkway, which was slightly better lit than most nights thanks to the moon and stars. The mall was so large that no one in the north section had heard anything. Only Ernesto, having been Chifi’d by Ty about the unidentified car, made his way down to see what was going on.

  He stopped in his tracks when he saw who was there.

  Kurt knew that Ernesto’s immediate reaction here would reveal how safe he really felt in the mall. If his insistence that La Plethora was safe from a Barnford Park-like drone attack was merely a stoic cover to prevent panic in the rest of the group, it would surely crack now.

  To Kurt’s delight, no crack appeared; Ernesto smiled and sped up to welcome them. After greeting them all with genuine warmth, he pulled Mary to the side. Kurt noticed and joined them.

  “How?” Ernesto asked quietly.

  “I took their Seeds out,” Mary said. “It’s okay, though. It was almost 100 miles from here.”

  “How did they get there?” Kurt asked.

  “Randy drove.”

  “But how did you get them to come?”

  “I did what you told me to do,” Mary said. “I got them to meet me without explicitly saying why, then I explained everything once they had their Lenses out. We didn’t start driving here until we all got rid of our Seeds. And like I said, that was 100 miles away.”

  “When did I say any of that?” Kurt asked, leaving his questions about the plan’s execution until later. “I said we weren’t going to contact them until we were in the system and ready to strike.”

  Mary looked genuinely confused. “But Val told me you changed your mind.”

  “Did she tell you that yesterday morning?” Ernesto asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Ernesto turned to Kurt. “So much for forgetting the key.”

  “She told me you said I had to get them to leave yesterday so they would arrive today,” Mary continued. “So that’s what I did. It was all definitely safe, though. Definitely. I made sure it was all safe.”

  Safe or not, Kurt and Ernesto were both angry at Val for making such a huge decision that wasn’t hers to make. They would have words when they reached her in the north of the mall, but for now both presented happy faces.

  “Did I do something wrong?” Mary whispered to Kurt, sensing their anger despite their efforts to hide it.

  Kurt shook his head. “Everyone’s alive and everyone’s together,” he said. “You did great.”

  ~

  No one was in the food court when the group reached the north end of the mall. Ty took it upon himself to mark their arrival.

  “Everyone,” he shouted towards Home, hands cupped around his mouth to focus the sound. “We have visitors.”

  Anthony and Minter appeared at almost the same time, with Michael not far behind. They all walked over.

  Minter came to Kurt first. “Did you know they were coming?” he whispered.

  “Val set it up yesterday,” Kurt replied, deciding that this wasn’t the time to be blanking Minter, no matter what information he hadn’t shared. “She told Mary it was my idea, but I’m as surprised to see them as you are.”

  “You’re glad, though, right?”

  “Yeah,” Kurt said.

  Minter walked over to introduce himself to Randy, who already knew who he was. Randy had distrusted Minter for a long time, but his inclusion in the news stories about Kurt’s death and his presence here with Kurt proved without question that they were all on the same side. Randy didn’t know anything about Minter’s role in hiding the truth about the crash, which was certainly for the best.

  Val arrived belatedly, walking as slowly as she could to delay the rebuke that was surely coming her way from Kurt and Ernesto. But when she eventually reached the group in the food court, no rebuke came.

  Ernesto calmly asked her to join him in the workstation with Kurt and Mary. Kurt told Randy and the kids that he would only be a minute, but they were happy enough getting to know the others.

  “So,” Ernesto said to Val. “Maybe we should talk about that key you forgot?”

  “I did what I had to do,” Val said. “Mary had a good idea, Kurt said no, I said yes. He was too close to the situation to see clearly, so I decided—”

  “That wasn’t your decision to make,” Ernesto scolded.

  “Well it’s no one’s decision to make now, is it?” Val said. “It’s done. It worked. It wouldn’t have been safe to keep visiting Mary all the time and it wasn’t safe to hope that she would be able to persuade Julian to leave on the day of the takedown. What if she hadn’t even been able to reach him? What if he’d been in full immersion with notifications disabled?”

  These were valid concerns, but Kurt didn’t know why Val hadn’t raised them with him before going through with her plan. In an odd way, though, Val’s unapologetic stance made Kurt’s anger fade more quickly than it might have had she been grovelling for forgiveness. Val’s insistence that her plan had been the best plan opened Kurt’s mind to the possibility that maybe it was. He had always been one to favour results over methods, and, on this occasion, Val’s deceitful methods had delivered the right result.

  Ernesto, more prideful than Kurt, couldn’t overlook Val’s lies so easily. He sent her out of the workstation and told her not to talk to anyone on the way to her
room. She went without arguing. Ernesto then turned to Mary.

  “I need you to tell us everything,” he said. “We need to know what you told them when, we need to know where you met them, and we need to know that no one saw you.”

  “No one saw us,” Mary said, clarifying that part straight away.

  She then gave the short version of how she managed to persuade Julian, who in turn persuaded Randy, to drive the better part of 24 hours to meet a girl he hardly knew.

  In the middle of an hour-long Transvista chat, Mary casually mentioned that she had a pet tortoise named Vonnegut. “You know,” she said, “like Kurt.”

  Kurt Vonnegut was one of the main interests Kurt told Mary to put on her questionnaire, so this made sense in the context of her Mary Glover persona. Mary then told Julian that she hadn’t seen Vonnegut for over a week until that morning, when he came out of his cave. “I thought he was dead,” she said, widening her eyes in a way that no one could miss. “But he wasn’t. He was alive the whole time. Weird, right?”

  Mary recounted that Julian didn’t say anything, but she could see that he was following. She then asked whether Julian had any pets. After another five minutes or so of conversational filler, which she said Julian knew were just for show as much as she did, she told him that she had won VIP tickets to see one of his favourite bands playing the next night. It would be a really long drive, she said, but it would be great if Julian’s dad could bring him and his sister up for the show since it was a once in a lifetime chance. They would have to leave soon, though, before it was too late.

  Kurt couldn’t pretend that it was a perfect story, or even a good one, but it didn’t really need to be. Sycamore were always likely to know something was up as soon as Randy and the kids took their Seeds out, so all that Mary’s story had to do was get them safely out of the city and to wherever she was meeting them. The story wouldn’t have stood up to much scrutiny but as with everything else, if Sycamore had been watching them that closely, they would already have been in trouble.

  Mary said that Randy agreed to take Julian right away because the request was so ridiculously out of character and delivered in such a way that he knew what was going on. They decided not to tell Sabrina the real reason for the trip, just in case they were wrong.

  Mary took two buses to meet them, which was possible thanks to her Seed, and they all took their Lenses out before she removed their Seeds in Randy’s car. She was far better equipped than Kurt and Minter had been for their impromptu de-seeding, with four scalpels, four sets of precision tweezers, and plenty of gel and bandages. Mary put all four Seeds down the nearest drain.

  At the end of the story, Ernesto said that Mary had “made the most of a bum hand,” and praised her for meeting them so far away. To go too far north before driving back down to the mall unseeded was particularly smart, he said.

  Kurt agreed. He thanked Mary properly for the first time. She had put herself on the line for no personal gain with her seeding and now she had gone a step further to deliver Kurt’s family, safe and sound.

  Mary gave Kurt back the piece of paper he had filled with details of what Julian liked and what kind of things she should say. Mary had known better than to ever look at it with her Lenses on, and Kurt was glad that she had kept it safe. She also handed Ernesto a small envelope which contained all of the money she hadn’t needed to spend, but he didn’t really react.

  “Wait,” Ernesto said, speaking in a much lower tone than he had been. “You didn’t at any point mention Barnford Park, did you?”

  “No.”

  “You definitely didn’t mention it?”

  “Definitely,” Mary said. “Why?”

  Ernesto told her about the radio message and about the drone that hit Val’s car. Mary’s face displayed the same kind of concern that Anthony’s had earlier. Ernesto tried to calm her fears with the familiar line that Sycamore wouldn’t be attacking Barnford Park if they knew anything about La Plethora.

  Mary turned to Kurt, as though his assurances were worth more than Ernesto’s. “Are we going to be okay?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Are you sure?”

  Stone-faced, Kurt nodded. “Ten thousand per cent.”

  ~

  Outside of the workstation, Randy was sitting with Anthony and Minter. His face reflected disbelief. When Kurt got close enough, he heard that they were talking about the crash payout. To Minter’s credit, he wasn’t saying anything to distance himself from what had happened.

  Kurt didn’t want to intrude when Randy was hearing it all for the first time, so he and Mary sat down with Sabrina, Julian, Ty, and Lisa.

  “I was just telling everyone what I don’t get,” Sabrina said to Kurt.

  “And what’s that?” he asked.

  “If the Seed is so bad, why did you make it in the first place? I thought you were so excited about it because it was really good, but then today we all had to take it out.”

  Kurt didn’t quite know how to answer this, but something that Professor Walker had often said came to his mind: “If you truly understand something, you can explain it to a child.”

  He gave it a shot. “Okay. So you know how we sometimes make soup in your dad’s blender, and it’s always really, really good?”

  “Yeah,” Sabrina said. “It’s the best.”

  “Well, imagine that we left it to cool, and when we were out of the kitchen, someone else sneaked in and added a whole tub of salt.” In Kurt’s metaphor, the salt was the first slew of inane Seed apps; things like Happy Pigs and the lookalike cam shows.

  Sabrina screwed up her face as if experiencing the too-salty flavour.

  “Exactly,” Kurt said. “And at first it just tastes salty, so I kind of half-heartedly tell you all that it’s not very nice. But you taste it, anyway. Then I start coughing and wheezing, because it turns out that there was poison mixed in with the salt. And it’s too late for me to warn you about how dangerous it is, because everyone has already swallowed it.”

  “Oh,” Sabrina said. “So it’s like we had to…” she finished her thought by miming a finger down the throat. “That’s what they say to do at school if you accidentally swallow poison.”

  “Right,” Kurt said. “We had to purge.”

  Kurt then heard metal chair-legs grinding on the floor and turned to see Randy standing up. Randy shook Anthony’s hand and then, to Kurt’s amazement, he shook Minter’s, too. He came over.

  “Time for bed, you two,” he said. He was right; it was way past their normal bedtimes, especially Sabrina’s.

  “I want to go with Mary,” Sabrina said.

  Randy shook his head. “Mary doesn’t want—”

  “I’ve got bunk beds,” Mary said. “If she’s allowed.”

  “Sure,” Randy said. “Just you then, JJ. Anthony said he’ll help us find some beds.”

  “But I want to stay up with Ty.”

  “I’m going to bed in a minute, kid,” Ty said. “How about we hang out in the morning and I’ll show you around the place when it’s light?”

  Julian agreed to the compromise.

  ~

  As night turned to morning and the mall fell silent, only Kurt, Minter and Ernesto remained awake. Kurt knew himself well enough to know that he wouldn’t sleep, so he didn’t even try. He passed half an hour or so hacking the four pairs of UltraLenses that had come into the mall with Mary, Randy, Julian and Sabrina. Like all UltraLenses, none of these were tracked or otherwise connected to Sycamore’s servers when they weren’t in a consumer’s eyes.

  Kurt also opened-up an XK6 for Randy and the kids. There were still two hidden pairs of brand new Lenses and several unopened phones, but Kurt saw no reason to do anything with them.

  Since then, he had been sitting quietly in the food court with Ernesto. Minter sat alone in the workstation. At his side lay a sheet of A4 paper with five 64-digit passwords written in neat rows of sixteen. There would be no mistakes this time.

  Talk between Kurt a
nd Ernesto turned to the course that the next few days would take once Minter successfully accessed the Emergency Control Interface.

  Kurt told Ernesto of he and Minter’s longstanding plan to lock themselves in the workstation for 48 hours or until everything was done. This 48-hour period would likely include a few short breaks now that Kurt’s family were in the mall since his mind would focus more easily if he checked up on them every so often. Kurt said that Ernesto was welcome to join them in the workstation at the start of their lock-in but that there would be no coming or going.

  “I’ll stay out here,” Ernesto said. “The group needs one of us.”

  Kurt didn’t disagree. After a hostile first meeting and a difficult first few days, the two men had grown to respect each other and their roles had developed into something akin to co-leaders. Kurt was more popular with the group’s younger members and was better liked in general, but Ernesto carried himself with a gravitas that Kurt couldn’t match. Both knew that should they ever disagree on a fundamental course-altering decision, the question of which man’s word would stand would not be settled easily.

  With Kurt’s workstation lock-in imminent and the time left to discuss plans with Ernesto rapidly diminishing, Kurt shared his big idea. He was by no means sure that Ernesto would go for it, but there would be little point in spending several precious hours putting the pieces in place only to have Ernesto raise a complaint when Kurt re-emerged. It made sense to tell him now.

  “I want to confront Amos face to face,” Kurt said.

  Ernesto let the words sit. After a few seconds, he spoke very quietly. “When?”

  “Four days,” Kurt said. “We get into the ECI later this morning, we work all day tomorrow, we get ready on Sunday, we travel on Monday, and then we arrive on Tuesday morning. We arrive in time for the SycaStars United event at HQ, when tens of millions of eyes will be on Amos. And me.”