Severance

by Chris Bucholz

“I think it’s a stupid plan,” Ellen said as they descended down to the first level.

  “Obviously,” Bruce replied. “The stupidity is key. We need a lot of stupid for this to work.”

  “Dammit, Bruce, it’s dangerous.”

  “It’s safer than what you were planning,” Bruce said and looked over his shoulder at the couple. “With that little toy of yours.”

  Ellen snorted. Griese looked back and forth between his wife and Bruce. “It’s not little,” he eventually said.

  Bruce laughed. He had found them in one of their old hideouts, where they had spent most of the previous day tinkering with their smart rifle. A bulky, ugly, and profoundly lethal weapon, it was also a grim reminder of the ill–fated Breeder raid on the security base they had participated in a decade earlier.

  When they reached the bottom, Bruce moved away from Africa. He spotted a few people pointedly loitering, but not many, not yet. Good. “You know how that thing works?” he asked.

  “I’ve read the manual a few times,” Griese said. “Before bed. You know. Light reading.”

  “I don’t want to know what you guys do in bed.”

  “He just reads it, Bruce,” Ellen chimed in. “But he does read it aloud. Slowly. With a sexy lisp.” She fanned her face, her eyes fluttering.

  Bruce made a pained smile, wishing he hadn’t brought up bed stuff at all. “Do you even know if it works?” he asked, shifting the subject.

  “It messed up that old bed pretty bad,” Ellen said. Bruce recalled seeing a shattered bed frame in the hideout, but hadn’t asked, because again, he never could tell with these two. “At the very least, we know when we pull the trigger something interesting will happen,” Ellen continued.

  They reached Flint Street and turned south. This was a smaller street, a wide hallway really, and was thankfully completely deserted. They stopped at 9th Avenue, a half block from the closed bulkhead door. Bruce hoped it would be equally deserted on the other side.

  “We should all go,” Ellen said. “This is a bad idea.”

  Bruce shook his head and examined his terminal. Three minutes to go. “Could. But three people will be more noticeable. And you’re not dressed right. Give me a hand with this.”

  Bruce began stripping off the plain coveralls he had been wearing, revealing a rough approximation of a security uniform underneath. Ellen helped him ball the coveralls into a bag and hoisted it over her shoulder before stepping back and examining him. “Well. Okay,” she said, not conveying any sense of confidence in his disguise. “But I wouldn’t get too close to anyone. Because you look not a little bit like a stripper.”

  “But an expensive one, right?”

  “Sure, sweetie.”

  Bruce’s terminal beeped. One minute to go. “Get ready,” he told Griese, who opened up his bag, revealing a sea of red pills inside. “That cost much?” Bruce asked.

  “Personally? No. Just cashed in one real big favor Ellen had with a guy in a fab plant,” Griese replied. “She won’t tell me how she got it, so I’m just going to assume it was something incredibly innocent.”

  Ellen blushed. “Least I could do for Laura.”

  “You could have done nothing at all,” Griese said. “That probably would have been less.”

  Shouts and hollers came from up the street. “Okay, guys,” Bruce said, punching his friends on the shoulder in an attempt to ward off any hugs. “Thanks. And if you really want to help out, when we’re done here, get your little toy and sit tight. Somewhere where you can move quickly. I’ll call if I need help.”

  Ellen sidestepped another shoulder punch and hugged Bruce before he could escape. He grimaced but didn’t resist. Down the street, he could see the mob coming, right on schedule. “Come on, I gotta go,” he said.

  Ellen released him. “Be careful.”

  “Fuck no,” Bruce said, smiled, then turned and jogged down the street towards the bulkhead door.

  When he arrived, he popped the access panel for the bulkhead door’s controls off and withdrew a probe from his tool webbing. Jamming it into the controls, he prodded it to override the lockdown. Behind him, he could hear the mob approach and cursed at the tool, begging it to work faster.

  It had taken comically little effort to summon the mob, a few messages sent to the right people, who had spread the word with no extra encouragement. There were incentives of course, even aside from the promise of something to do. As the door finally started sliding open, Griese and Ellen began handing said incentives out.

  “Come get your Brash!” Griese’s voice carried over the growing roar. “Got an old fashioned Brash Mob here!”

  “It’s really happening people! We’re really doing it!” Ellen promised.

  Bruce smiled as the door started to slide open. Technically speaking, this wasn’t a stupid plan; it was kind of a brilliant one. It just involved a whole lot of stupid moving parts.

  The door out of the way, Bruce stepped over the threshold, an army of amped up madmen at his heel.

  §

  She had a plan. All that was left was to actually do it.

  It was funny how she was willing to procrastinate when it came to her freedom. She had never really been the procrastinating type; when she saw a problem, she fixed it. That she was willing to delay her own liberty suggested there was something else going on. Maybe it was just comfort, the comfort of not having to unravel a horrible conspiracy, the comfort of not being hunted by said conspiracy. The simple animal comfort of having a warm place to sleep and eat.

  For two days she had sat on her robot, making excuses why her plan wouldn’t work. The security sensor — that was the biggest one. They would see her escape. She wouldn’t make it very far at all before someone noticed and forcefully subdued her. So she lay back and slept and ate.

  As the news feeds cheerfully reported, something was different this morning, something that finally broke her out of her spell. This particular morning, she was pretty sure nobody would be watching her; they would be watching the three hundred maniacs who had broken through the ‘anti–terrorism barricades’ and were terrorizing, in their own way, everything south of 9th Avenue. If she was looking for a distraction to disguise her escape, she had it.

  Stein stood up from the desk and returned to the bed, retrieving the robot from under the blankets. Opening the access panel on the back, she turned the machine on, then did the same with the terminal it had thoughtfully come with. The terminal flickered to life and informed her she had two hundred unread messages. She ignored those, instead activating the robot’s control programming, allowing her to control it manually. She took a deep breath, then set it down on the floor in full view of the security sensors. Let’s get stupid.

  The robot beeped, then scuttled across the floor, following the instructions she had programmed into it. When it reached the wall, it scaled the vertical surface, reaching the ceiling and the membrane separating the cell from the hall outside. There it began cutting through the bars covering the membrane.

  With its small plasma cutter, the robot sawed contentedly away at the first bar in the grate. It shredded the membrane as it worked, causing warning icons to splash across Stein’s terminal screen, the smell of burnt metal and plastic filling the room. She hadn’t considered that; anyone with a nose even remotely close to the detention cells would know about her escape before it even got started.

  The cutting took an agonizingly long time as the little robot sawed through the grate. After each bar was cut through on both ends, it would extend a manipulator, yank the bar from its place, and then drop it down to Stein with a cheery ‘beep.’ It took almost ten minutes — thankfully, the maniacs currently running amuck were running extremely amuck — but finally all the bars were cut through. The robot sliced through the membrane next, leaving it attached on the upper edge so it hung down, semi–concealing the gap.

  Then came the hard bit. After tucking the terminal into a pocket alongside a pair of meal bars, Stein backed up to the far wall of the roo
m and took a deep breath. She charged at the door, leaping, kicking off of it, and extending her arms upwards. She frantically clawed for the gaping hole where the membrane had been, catching the ledge with one hand, then the other. At which point she immediately let go, the heat of scorched metal burning her right hand.

  “Beep,” said the maintenance robot.

  “Go beep yourself,” Stein said, shaking her hand. It was a mild burn, and she ran it under some cold water in the sink, cursing to herself. Tapping furiously at the terminal, she directed the robot to briefly spray the cavity with a cooling foam. “All right, let’s try this again,” she said, after watching the robot complete its work.

  The second try worked better than the first, followed by some decidedly unladylike scratching, clawing, and hoisting to get herself up into the membrane hole. A barely controlled, and no more delicate, face–first fall on the other side was her reward. Fortunately — and by that point predictably — there was no one around to see her tumble but for the little maintenance robot. “Thanks, buddy,” she said, rolling onto her back and waving at the robot through the torn membrane. She got up and examined the door. At eye–level there wasn’t anything immediately obvious to suggest she had escaped, though the pungent odor of melted metal and plastic gave away that something unusual had just happened.

  Not that she intended to be around to explain it. Turning away from her cell, she crept down the hall, out of the detention center.

  §

  Bruce sidestepped the pair of security officers running out of the security base, hoping his stripper–esque disguise wouldn’t arouse any suspicion, or, for that matter, arousal. But the officers continued out of the base without even looking at him, which he decided, in this particular case only, not to take as an insult.

  Once through the bulkhead door, he had stepped out of the way into an old storefront, allowing the mob to pass by him so it could spread out and set to work being distracting. Which it did, comprehensively. Bruce saw only a fraction of the chaos unfold, but what he did see suggested security would have their hands full for the next several hours dealing with angry, partially naked people.

  With every available officer seemingly out dealing with his new friends, Bruce was able to move deeper into the security base without seeing another soul, quickly making his way to the detention cells. He paused at the guard station at the entrance to the detention center, where he examined the desk display. All the cells were empty, save for one labeled, ‘Stein.’ Reaching out, he tapped the unlock button beside the door, unsurprised when nothing happened. Unlocking doors would require some level of access that he didn’t have. Drumming his fingers on the desk for a moment, he began tapping through the menus, looking for another way in. He had one specific subroutine in mind, one he almost certainly would have access to. Finding it, he triggered the fire–alarm test function and stepped back. Down the hall, all the doors unlocked, red lights mounted overhead flashing. He raised an eyebrow, just a little surprised that had been so easy. “Well, life’s stupid.” He sauntered down the hall.

  Reaching the cell Stein was supposedly in, he looked inside, finding it empty. He smiled. So, she had found some way out. Curious how she had done it, he stepped inside and looked around, quickly spotting the severed metal bars heaped in the corner of the room. He looked up, examining the maintenance robot clinging to the ceiling and the tattered membrane hanging above the door. He shuddered at the athleticism required to get through there. He sniffed the air, smelling the burnt plastic. He couldn’t be far behind her.

  The red lights in the hall stopped flashing. He looked down, watching in dismay as the cell door closed. “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” he groaned. The fire alarm test apparently operated on a short timer. “I knew that,” Bruce said, not lying. He banged on the door. “But locking these should really be a manual function only,” he yelled. “For safety reasons, if nothing else.”

  §

  Stein retraced the steps the security men had taken when they had led her to her cell. The base was fortunately, or perhaps predictably, deserted, all the security forces busy dealing with the riot. She didn’t dare look up at the security sensors surely embedded in the ceiling, hoping that they weren’t being monitored.

  The detention cells were on the first level, and the route she had planned was to head for the nearest door, out to the streets, and not look back. She stopped, frozen, hearing voices around a corner. She looped back, and climbed up a flight of stairs, ducked into the hall, and entered the lobby, heading to the second floor exit.

  The lobby was thankfully empty, the exit unguarded. But she stopped short when she reached the door, seeing the backs of nearly twenty officers standing outside. A muster point, evidently; she heard someone in charge yelling orders. She clenched her fists, fighting off panic. More voices, this time from the staircase she had just ascended. She darted across the lobby and away from the door, heading back into the center of the security base, still thankfully deserted. Quickly she walked past empty offices, empty briefing rooms, empty locker rooms. That’s a thought. She stopped, then backtracked to the locker room.

  She searched through the lockers until she found a security uniform that was roughly her size. Slipping it on over her own conspicuously orange clothes, she pulled the hat as low over her face as she dared. After checking herself out in the mirror to see how suspicious she looked — very — she swallowed, then left the room, continuing to the other side of the security base.

  She reached the lobby on the far side of the base, two guards at the door, shifting anxiously as they looked out on the street. Stein hesitated, not daring to walk right through them, not wanting to spin suspiciously in place again. She came to a halt on the far side of the lobby, head down, looking at her terminal.

  Face buried in her terminal, but not really looking at it, she reevaluated her options. Back the way she came? Or go up another level to the entrances there? But those would likely be just as guarded. While she was desperately trying to come up with a confrontation–free way out of her mess, a new message icon flashed. Although absolutely the worst possible time for engaging in correspondence, she couldn’t think of anything else to do, so she opened the message and read it.

  “No way.”

  §

  Bruce kissed and licked his singed knuckles, victims of his zealous attempt to double–check the torch–proof thickness of the cell door. He had already sent a message to Stein, who was clearly better at getting in and out of here than he was, but knew she was probably offline. He considered sending a similar message to Ellen and Griese, but that would be of a similarly dubious value. They would have to get there first, and even if they somehow managed that, they would probably just laugh at him. Shooting out the security sensor to bait someone to come investigate was also out of the question, he had discovered when he had tried to do exactly that; it was incredibly well–armored. Besides which, the fact that he was there and Stein wasn’t suggested they weren’t even monitoring the damn sensor. Still, they would get around to him eventually. He would just have to shoot his way past whomever opened the door. He maneuvered the maintenance robot so that it could look down the hall, then leaned back on the bed, watching the robot’s feed on his terminal.

  Twenty minutes after he had first checked in, the door slid open. He immediately rolled out of bed, landing in a crouch, pistol drawn. Not hearing any sounds of movement in the hall, he cautiously approached the door. Red lights twirled on the ceiling above. Frowning, he slowly slid his head out and looked down the corridor.

  “You’ve got to fucking be kidding me,” Stein said, standing behind the security console, a huge grin on her face.

  “I’m not, actually,” Bruce said, stepping out of the cell.

  “Why are you dressed as a stripper?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Where did you even get pants that small?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Oh, come on. Don’t be mad.”

  “You could have let me know
the robot worked,” he said, pointing up at the robot clinging to the hall ceiling. He frowned, then deactivated it with his terminal. The robot plunged to the ground, Bruce catching it, then tucking it into the webbing on his left hip.

  “Sorry. I didn’t know you were going to be so hot on its heels.”

  “Finally, someone thinks I’m hot. You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for someone to notice.”

  §

  The control room was only slightly less chaotic than the streets below, as Thorias’ command officers struggled to coordinate their officers’ activities. The room was filled with clipped and terse orders, drowned out by the displays broadcasting chatter from officers in the thick of the action.

  “Move around to Flint, and hold position there.”

  “Looters in the dress shop on 6th and Chalk.”

  “Need more help at the escalator. Africa and 5th. Now! Oh, craaaaa…”

  “They’re looting the manikins. Why? What are they…oh, no!”

  “Shoot him! Shoot him in the head!”

  “That’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “…urine everywhere!”

  “Why is no one stopping him? Why are they laughing and clapping?”

  “They’re hugging us! They’re hugging us!”

  “That manikin is ruined! Everything is ruined!”

  Helot stepped up quietly beside Thorias. “Well?”

  Thorias’ hands flexed white on the table display. “I think we’re okay,” he said softly. “Got ’em contained, finally.” He pointed to the map, where the approximate location of the rioters was sketched in, a rough horseshoe around Africa–1. “They’re not really armed. And they’re not heading upstairs at all.”

  “Good,” Helot said. He looked at the map, at Thorias’ defenses, and at the red horseshoe which indeed did seem to be shrinking slowly. “Do you, uh, know why they’re naked?” he asked.

  Thorias didn’t know, and the expression on his face told just how deeply he didn’t know. “They’re not all naked. Just some,” he said quietly. “But…”