by J Boyd Long
“No wonder he was so polite when he brought us out,” Bob laughed.
“Oh, I totally owned him,” Eissa said. “I could go back over there right now and make him go get us some takeout food.”
Quentin smiled. The group was celebrating, and while he didn’t feel much like joining in, it felt better than talking about all the things that went wrong.
“Well, we need to add all that to your list of strengths,” Quentin said. “I think you out-performed the rest of us, although Bob did a very good job playing his role, too. He totally sold them on our identity as consulting investigators. Hell, I believed it myself by the time we got handcuffed. I just didn’t know what was going to happen when it got to today, and no one could verify our identity. That was pretty scary.”
It was still scary to contemplate, perhaps even more so now that it was over. Maybe the DimCorp security people would have found out who he was, and maybe they wouldn’t have, but it didn’t matter. He had been caught in the DimGate control room messing with the computers, and the powers that be wouldn’t have been able to release him after that. That should have been the end of the trail for him. He had dodged a huge bullet.
“Yes, that’s something that we do need to talk about,” Bob said. “We got away with getting caught, thanks to some quick thinking and some great rescue action, but we can’t expect to get away with it like that every time. It might have gone very differently if, for example, they had caught all four of us.”
They fell silent. What if Eissa had been put in a cell by herself? What if she had an anxiety attack with no one to help her get through it? A wave of guilt washed over Quentin as he realized how self-centered he had been. Eissa had way more going against her than he did, and he hadn’t even considered her issues when he was in the cell. Ever since Richard had asked him to unencrypt that email, he had put everyone around him in danger. From now on, he would have to think everything through. No more playing cowboy.
“I’m not trying to rain on the parade,” Bob said, brightening back up. “You all did really good tonight. We didn’t accomplish our mission, but we all came back, and that’s the important part. We live to fight another day.”
“Yeah, speaking of the mission, what happened with the virus?” Eissa asked. “I totally forgot about that.”
Quentin sat up on the edge of the bed and looked down at his feet, trying to compose himself. All the self-doubt and fear of failure he had ever experienced seemed to be justified in this moment, and he had no way to stop the burning tears that were rising in his eyes.
“I couldn’t do it,” he said, hating the way his voice shook. “It was all for nothing. I couldn’t write it.” He turned away in shame, angrily scrubbing away his tears. All three of them had put themselves on the line because he said he could take down the DimGate system. Bob had even gotten hurt, and yet Quentin had produced nothing. Everyone had performed today except him.
“Oh, hey, it’s okay,” Eissa said, sliding over and wrapping an arm around him. “Don’t beat yourself up. You were brave enough to give it a try, and that’s what makes you greater than most people. If it didn’t work, we’ll try something else, that’s all.”
If it had just been him against the computer, with no one else involved, he would have felt bad about failing. The fact that three others had been involved, and he was the only one that hadn’t been able to perform was overwhelming.
Quentin wiped his eyes with his shirt sleeve. “Yeah, it’s easy for you to say,” he mumbled. “You went out there and kicked ass. I had one shot to save the world, and I choked.”
“Saving the world is a pretty big task,” Tocho said. “History is full of tales of courageous heroes who struggled to save the world, and most of them failed on the first try.”
“That’s right,” Bob chimed in. “Tocho and I failed at most of the things we’ve tried to do in this little war of ours. Let’s put a positive spin on it. What did you learn tonight?”
Quentin pictured himself in his therapist’s office, sitting in the overstuffed chair as she coached him. You create your experience, Quentin. You. Change your attitude, change your life. Now, what did you learn? He blew out a lung full of air, trying desperately to get rid of the bad vibe.
“Well, I learned what their computer coding language looks like, and the Silk Road program, which is what runs the DimGates. I guess you could say I got an idea of how their physical security system functions too, and some of the building layout.”
“That’s a whole lot more than you knew yesterday,” Bob pointed out. “Whatever our next plan is, you’ll be more prepared, and better able to contribute useful ideas.”
“Also, the fact that you’re back here in one piece means that you have more than one shot at saving the world,” Tocho said. “Your first try didn’t work out as planned, but that was just the first pass.”
Quentin took a deep breath and let it out with a sad smile. “You guys are right,” he said. “I made this all about me. Thanks for getting me pointed back in the right direction.”
“Hey, we’re a team.” Eissa gave his shoulders a squeeze. “That’s what we do. Now then, I vote we get some sleep. We’ve been up for like twenty hours, and I’m fried.”
“I agree,” Bob said. “Let’s try to recover, and have another go at it tomorrow, or later today, or whatever it is.”
“I’ll close the curtains,” Tocho said. “The sun will be up in an hour or two.”
They got settled in, and this time none of them had any trouble falling asleep.
◆◆◆
When Quentin woke up, it was nearly noon, and a light rain was falling. He slipped out of bed and tiptoed outside, closing the door softly to not wake the others, and settled into a chair on the porch.
The coding of the malware crept into his thoughts almost immediately, and he took a moment to consider it. Now that he didn’t have the pressure of being on the spot, he went over it line by line, command by command. It was all there, of course, every piece. The sections that he had been unable to recall last night seemed obvious to him now, and they screamed the truth at him: he had cracked under the pressure. Shame burned like a hot iron in his guts, twisting and turning. The question of life had been answered. Do you have what it takes, Quentin? Evidently not.
The door opened, and Bob swung himself out onto the porch, his crutches thumping hollowly on the wood floor. Quentin felt a stab of guilt at the sight of the leg brace as Bob stopped at the edge of the porch, squinting up at the sky.
“Morning,” he said. “You mind handing me the hat off that chair? I’ve got to head to the outhouse, and it doesn’t look like this rain is going to quit anytime soon.”
“Sure thing.” Quentin stood up and handed the hat to Bob, but avoided looking him in the eye. “How’s your knee doing?”
“It’s swollen pretty good, but the pills they gave me are doing a good job on the pain.” He carefully made his way down the wet steps. “If I’m not back in an hour, send a search team.”
He gave Quentin a two-fingered salute, and took off around the corner of the house. Quentin half-heartedly returned the salute as he sat back down, but Bob’s joviality did little to lessen Quentin’s misery.
The door opened again a few minutes later, and Eissa staggered out. Her wild mane of hair stuck out in all directions as she stopped in the middle of the porch and spread her arms, rising up on her toes in a full-body stretch.
“Oh my god, I slept like the dead,” she said through a yawn. “I’ll be ready for a nap as soon as I eat some breakfast.” She glanced at him. “How are you feeling this morning? Or noon, or whatever it is.”
Quentin shrugged, and turned back to the rain. “I’m still here, I guess. Just going over my epic flop from last night.”
She dropped into the chair beside him. “You’re sitting out here beating yourself to death about the virus, aren’t you? Ten years of counseling, and here you are, right where you started.”
Quentin bit his tongue. Ten ye
ars of counseling had done a hell of a lot for him, and she knew it. “I know the virus, Eissa. I went through the whole thing this morning. I just couldn’t do it when it mattered. That’s what’s killing me.”
“That’s a tough place to be,” she said. “We both suffer from the need to always be right, so I feel your pain. That doesn’t mean you get to grind yourself into the ground over it, though. It means you fucked up, and you need to figure out why, so it doesn’t happen next time.”
Behind the house, the outhouse door slammed, and Eissa hopped up. “Be back in a minute.”
As usual, she was right, and it stung. Of course, if she used tact and a soft touch, it just wouldn’t be Eissa, so there was that. He had often accused her of hugging him with her claws out. It’s just how she did it. She was right about what he should be thinking about, though: what had gone wrong, and why?
He worked the problem over, coming at it from different angles, as they ate a late breakfast. The rain on the roof made it hard to talk, which was fine with Quentin. It gave him time to think. An hour later they had all eaten and reconvened on the porch. The rain had stopped, but it was still overcast and cool.
They sat in silence on the porch, each lost in their own thoughts. Bob produced his knife and began whittling on a stick. There were several things that Quentin wanted to talk about, and it was difficult to know where to start. He was having some doubts about their mission. It was noble and just, and all that, but it wasn’t terribly realistic once you got down to the nuts and bolts of it. He cleared his throat, and they turned to look at him.
“I’ve been thinking,” Quentin said. “Before we do anything else, we need to clarify our goal. What are we trying to accomplish? Is our goal to shut down DimCorp, or is our goal to free their slaves, stop the pillaging of resources, and make the world a better place?”
Bob tugged on his beard, the whittling stick momentarily forgotten. “Well, we never really put a name on it, but the intent was always to shut them down, I think. The methods we used were an evolution of ideas, but the goal was to shut them down, yes.”
Quentin glanced at Tocho, who nodded in agreement. Shutting down DimCorp no longer seemed like a real possibility, and the more he thought about it, the more it seemed that trying to do that was a bad plan all the way around.
“Let’s look at it this way for a minute,” Quentin said. “DimCorp probably employs thousands of people across the dimensions, right? People like me, working for IBZ, or a bank, or whatever. Not bad guys, just regular people.”
“Oh, at least that many,” Bob said.
Quentin held his hand up. “Now, I don’t want to discount all the people that are being oppressed by DimCorp, okay, but hear me out. Even if we could shut DimCorp down, which I don’t think we can, we would be doing a lot of damage to a lot of regular people by putting them out of work. Hell, it would probably crash a lot of local economies.”
“Hhmmm.” Bob’s fingers combed absently through his beard. “Collateral damage might be worse than the problem we’re trying to fix.”
“Well, I don’t know if it would be worse, but it’d be bad. That’s something we have to think about. We don’t want to shift the burden from one group to another. That doesn’t solve anything.” Quentin glanced around, trying to gauge their reaction. Bob was as inscrutable as ever behind his beard, but Tocho was nodding, and even Eissa was looking interested.
“I think we need to change the goal,” Quentin said. His thoughts were consolidating into a clearer picture as he talked them out, and his hands began to move around his lap. “We can’t shut them down, but maybe we don’t need to. We just need to force them to go legit, find a way to make them turn their slaves into a fairly-compensated workforce. DimCorp can still be rich and powerful, we just won’t let them do it on slave labor, or on stolen resources. It’s way more achievable for us to keep going with the Robin Hood approach, working one dimension at a time, just like you and Tocho did.”
He leaned forward, holding his breath as he waited for a reaction.
“Kid, you’re a genius,” Bob laughed. “We’ve been going at this all wrong. We’ve got a damned DimGate; we need to be using it instead of trying to destroy it.”
Quentin grinned. “You were the one that wanted to plan this out before we did anything,” he said. “We should have followed your advice and figured this out before we went over there and tore your knee up, and announced our presence.”
“Well, that can’t be undone,” Bob said, as he picked his whittling stick and knife back up. “Don’t get hung up on it. We learned a lot, and we all made it through. We’re going to have plenty of time to plan while we wait on them to get the computer system finished so we can travel at will.”
Quentin stared across the yard without seeing it. If they were going to take the fight to DimCorp through their workforce, then it was conceivable that he would have a chance to access DimCorp computers from time to time. If he could figure out the inter-dimensional communication system, then he might still be able to work on taking Zimmerman down. That brought a faint smile to the corners of his mouth. He reached into his pocket and brought out the notebook. “So, how do we do this?” he asked. “I mean, specifically, what do we do now?”
Bob began combing his beard with his fingers. “Well, we’ve got time on our side, since we have to wait for DimCorp to finish programming things. At a minimum, we probably have a month, and it might be longer than that. So, we take that time to get ourselves together. We clean up the garden. We go through our gear and see what needs to be repaired, and repair it. We figure out how we’re going to negotiate with DimCorp. We’ve never done anything like that before.”
“Slow down,” Quentin cried, scribbling furiously. “I can’t keep up.”
“Sorry,” Bob chuckled. “I got on a roll, there. Let me know when you’re ready.”
“Go ahead,” Quentin said a moment later. “I’m caught up.”
“I’m going to need a lot of training,” Eissa said. “I mean, I don’t even know how this works. Do we just walk into another dimension, and go up to a slave, and be like, ‘take me to your leader,’ or what?”
“Yeah, we need to cover all of that stuff, too,” Tocho said with a smile. “There are some established systems that we used to use, which we can probably modify for our current agenda.”
“This is so exciting,” Eissa said with a giggle. “Will I get to be a corporate lawyer again?”
“Oh, without a doubt,” Bob said. “We’ll have to deal with DimCorp people from time to time, and you’ve proven that you can handle that with style.”
“Yes,” Eissa exclaimed, pumping her fist. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
Quentin paled at the thought, but his inner therapist was ready this time. You cracked under the pressure on your first time, Quentin. That doesn’t mean you will every time. It’s just your launch point. Don’t make it more than it is. You create your experience, so make it a good one.
Tocho leaned forward and grabbed his toes in a deep stretch, breathing deeply as he did so.
“You should lead a yoga and meditation class for us, Tocho,” Quentin said. “You already taught me a little bit about it, which is what got me through the jail cell thing, but I could use a lot more of it. This new profession is going to require a lot more inner peace than my old job.”
“Yes, a yoga class,” Eissa said. “Yoga on the beach at sunrise every day.”
“Ooh, yoga on the beach, that’s even better,” Quentin said.
Tocho relaxed his stretch.
“My classes are for people who are serious about learning,” he said. “I’m not the kind of guy that sets up a mat in the middle of a shopping mall and teaches a few stretches to stroller moms for a couple of bucks. I’m the real deal.” He looked at them sharply. “Do you want to play on the beach, or do you want to develop self-awareness and a connection to the Universe?”
“Be careful,” Bob warned. “I told him I wanted a connection to th
e Universe once, and he shoved my face into the ground and stuck my foot behind my head. I’m pretty sure he dislocated my hip. I couldn’t walk right for a week, and I never did get plugged into a higher level of anything except pain.”
“Pain builds character,” Tocho said. “In life, pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
“Wow, that’s pretty heavy,” Eissa said. “If you managed to jam my leg behind my head, I’d probably pass out and shit myself.”
They all laughed, and even Tocho joined in, unable to keep a straight face.
“In my class, stretching is inevitable; shitting is optional. In fact, it’s discouraged.”
They laughed again. Bob shifted his sore leg, and began whittling on his stick.
