Time Heist

by Anthony Vicino

  Malcolm's thin lips slithered to either side of his face, revealing a row of off-white enamel. A far cry from a perfect smile, but it fit well with the sharp angles and folds of his cheeks and chin. For a guy that'd spent the greater part of the last decade in a coma, he didn't look half bad.

  "Sorry, wrong number," I said, clumsily pawing through the Stream to initiate a trace. A simple procedure, though filling balloons with wind might have been easier than using the Stream in my emotionally compromised state.

  "Always with the jokes," Malcolm said. "I've missed that about you."

  "That feeling is less than mutual."

  "You wound me. Listen, sorry I didn't call sooner. I've been busy absorbing this brave new world. I'm sure you understand. But now that I'm here, we have so much to catch up on."

  "Not sure we have much to talk about. Unless you're looking to lose a couple teeth, in which case I might know a guy," I said, resisting the urge to unload a vortex pistol into the man's face. I reminded myself nothing good would come from that but a blown-out windshield followed by another pride-bruising slap from Raines.

  In the end, it didn't matter. I had no pistol, so the windshield remained intact. For now.

  "Is violence the answer to all your problems? Suppose that's the Lowers rubbing off on you, eh?" Malcolm leaned in, eliciting a response from the nanobots tucked away in my olfactory lobe. The sudsy sterility of soap. Jasmine, perhaps. The scent penetrated my virtual nostrils, eliciting a visceral response in the form of a stomach-curdling shudder. It wafted off him as if he'd spent the greater portion of the morning trying to wash away the person he'd been. "By the way, have you found whatever it is you went down there searching for?"

  I eyed the trace in the bottom-right quadrant of my display as it crept towards zero.

  Thirty-three seconds.

  I hadn't gone to the Lowers in search of anything, only to escape memories of a former life. Memories, it turned out, haunt regardless of location.

  "No," I said, only partially aware of Raines watching from the driver's seat, "still looking. Suppose I'm getting closer, though."

  "And if I may ask, what are you searching for?"

  I wanted to sit quietly, never speak again, but Malcolm wanted to talk. I was obliged to let him until the trace could finish.

  "Penance, maybe."

  "Poor Tom, seeking that which he shall not find."

  "I found you once."

  "A technicality."

  "That's a big technicality."

  "Indeed." Malcolm tilted his head and nodded. "But were you in time? And if not, then does it truly matter?"

  There was nothing I could say that didn't start with a scream, so I bit my lip.

  "And if you don't find your penance?" Malcolm continued. "Is there a heaven for men like you?"

  "That's not a place I'd want to spend eternity."

  "You don't give yourself enough credit."

  "You give yourself too much," I said, checking the trace once more.

  Zero.

  The trace flashed twice then disappeared.

  Weird.

  I chased it through the user interface and pulled up the data-log. Bad news. The trace had been terminated. Results deleted.

  A command that could only be issued by my nanocomp.

  A command which most certainly had not been issued by my nanocomp.

  Not without my consent, at least. Which is something it would need.

  "Please tell me you didn't think it would be that easy?" Malcolm grinned like a kid burning ants with a magnifying glass.

  He'd hacked my nanocomp. Which shouldn't be possible, but it was the only explanation that could account for what had happened.

  I wouldn't let him see me squirm. Not nine years ago, and not now.

  "A man can hope," I said.

  "Hope is the last to die."

  "You've been reading too many fortune cookies."

  "I've had a lot of time on my hands."

  "Well I don't, so how about you get to the point," I said, eager to end the call and punch something. "What do you want?"

  "It's simple," Malcolm said. "You seek penance. I seek revenge. But no ordinary revenge will do. Revenge stories are the oldest kind, and I am nothing if not original, so I must go above and beyond to make our story truly unique. You will suffer in ways you've never imagined possible for what you took from me."

  "I'm game. Come here and take your revenge; I'll wait."

  "Spoken like a man with nothing to lose, and that simply won't do, Tom. I want a challenge. I need it; crave it. This moment has lived in my dreams for years. The collision of two irrepressible forces of nat—"

  "Is your plan to talk me to death?" I said, interrupting a speech I imagined he'd rehearsed numerous times before.

  "No." Malcolm scrunched up one eye and said, "Killing you would be a mercy. I have no intention of showing you mercy. Instead, I'm going to give you a reason to live. I'm going to line up everything you have ever loved, every cherished memory, any glimmer of hope that you clung to on those cold dark nights when you cowered alone, high out of your mind on the Quick, gnawing on the barrel of your own gun, praying night after night that you would be strong enough to pull the trigger and end it, all the while knowing you wouldn't, you couldn't.

  “I will expose all those fears you hide in the deepest recesses of your heart. I will make you face the reality of how much you truly stand to lose...” Malcolm’s smile smoldered. “And then I will take them from you. Piece by piece. One by one. Then, and only then, when death is no longer the cure for your sorrow, I will kill you."

  My skin tried slithering off my body. Malcolm's voice lacked any human substance. Slow, mechanical, unfeeling.

  "Sounds unpleasant." I forced a smile, then said, "Better hope I don't find you first."

  "I truly hope you do. And to prove it, I have a gift for you."

  The skin lining my forearm ignited with searing pain, as if every hair had been simultaneously plucked. I rolled back my sleeve and watched the Tracker perform a new trick.

  The bars grew. Fast.

  "What's this?"

  "You're good, or more accurately, you were good." Malcolm punctuated his words with a finger in the air. "But you're not that man anymore, and eight hours is simply not enough time if you hope to catch me and earn your penance."

  The Tracker stopped at twenty-four hours, then paused for half a heartbeat before ticking down once more.

  "One day. Consider it a going-away present."

  "And if I choose not to play?" I rubbed a finger along the smooth surface of my forearm, wondering which deity I'd offended to deserve the punishment of more time.

  "Then you'll be wasting your time, and Diana's."

  My mind was slow to decipher his words, but when it did, the revelation was a kick to the balls. He'd given me a day stolen from Diana's account. Soon, I'd be living off her time.

  The blood drained from my face and pooled in my feet.

  I swam through the surreality of my situation. My head spun along with the world. He could keep me alive indefinitely. String me along with stolen time. Every second a fresh paper cut sliced beneath bleeding fingernails.

  "I'm going to kill you," I said, locking onto Malcolm's eyes, a focal point for the anger churning my innards.

  "That's the fighting spirit." Malcolm clapped his hands, a single deafening smack of flesh against flesh, amplified by our virtual environment. "Let the game begin."

  He winked and then disappeared.

  I shook my head, struggling to understand my tormentor.

  I'd lost three years tracking him with a single-minded focus, studying everything the Stream had archived on him. But there had been no answers then, and there were no answers now.

  There existed an unbridgeable gap of understanding born from the knowledge that we were fundamentally two different species.

  Men and monsters hold no common ground. We'd like to think that, at least. It's not true, but it helps me sle
ep at night.

  I blinked out of the Stream, back to the cradled silence of the Fly.

  "Malcolm," I said, preempting the question Raines wore on her face.

  She nodded. If surprised, she didn't let it show.

  "He give you that?" She used the elbow of the arm gripping the steering wheel to gesture at the exposed bars on my forearm.

  "Yeah," I said, dropping my chin to my chest. I rolled my sleeve down to the wrist and rubbed the back of my neck with a hand softened from years of idleness. "They're Diana's."

  "Don't do that. You let yourself believe those are Diana's hours and you're done. Simple as that." She tightened her grip on the arm rest until the imperfections of the tiny bones capping her knuckles were visible beneath the stretched skin. "He knows it'll eat at you. And it will, if you let it."

  Malcolm had been eating at me since the day I'd been assigned his case.

  "We're gonna catch him," Raines said.

  "Maybe."

  "We did it once before."

  But at what cost? And had it been worth paying?

  Those thoughts had loitered like guests overstaying their welcome in the back of my mind for the past decade. After so long, they were familiar. I couldn't imagine a world where they didn't plague my every waking moment.

  I shook my head, distancing myself from those thoughts, and stared out the window. The jagged walls of Pause broke the palette of blue on the horizon. Black walls rising out of the ocean absorbed the diffused sunlight.

  A place of despair, removed from the world and the Stream. A place where time became an active torture. The worst kind of prison. Not simply a loss of freedom, but a loss of self, of reality.

  The inhabitants were placed in a Stream-induced freeze, altering their perception of time, and stretching minutes into weeks. A ten-year sentence equaled hundreds worth of rehabilitation inside Pause.

  The system worked, but truthfully Unity kept the prisoners around for another less altruistic reason. Every fool lucky enough to call Pause home was an Intuit. Thousands of them sitting around in a Stream dream meant a whole lot of untapped potential. Unity's military branch, Division, re-appropriated the inactive portions of the prisoners' minds, routing their mental elasticity back into the Stream, supplying a noticeable bump in their network's capacity.

  Unity justified the treatment as a sort of community service on the part of the prisoners. Giving back to the people they'd stolen so much from. Who was I to disagree?

  "What do you suppose we'll find there?" I asked the window.

  "More questions, maybe a couple answers," Raines said, diving towards the water below. "If we're lucky."

  Luck. Scary how often catching bad guys comes down to that one intangible factor. Cases are made and broken on Mistress Luck's whimsy.

  Can't control her.

  Can only hope to stay on her good side.

  As we entered Pause airspace the prison's computers took control of our vehicle. Raines relinquished her mental grip on the vehicle and let her head roll back onto the headrest.

  "This place doesn't seem very lucky," I said, watching the wall of turrets passing by.

  "You watch that video?"

  "Yeah."

  "Any thoughts you'd care to share with the rest of the class?"

  "I think the Warden has some explaining to do. But I'm guessing you already knew that."

  The Dragonfly dropped a handful of feet and skimmed the surface of the compound, decelerating fast and smooth until it came to a complete stop. A pair of guards, gussied to the gills in black nano-suits, fanned out and approached the vehicle.

  Raines nodded and thumbed a button on the center console. The computer scanned her fingerprint before releasing the glove box between my legs with a click. She reached across me and into the compartment, her thick mane of hair brushing my cheek as she passed.

  Goose bumps dribbled up my arm and across my shoulder.

  She smelled like rain. Not the sweaty sludge spackling the city, but the light, crisp droplets falling in what little countryside remained. Pure and sweet, with the ability to wash away the world's grime. It still smelled the same after so many years.

  I was glad some things don't change.

  When she retreated to her side of the vehicle, she held a vaporizer in the palm of her hand.

  "Upgrades?" I asked, taking the device and turning it over.

  "Speed, strength, and a little cognitive boost," she said. "You're gonna need them more than me."

  There wasn't much room to argue that point. I put the vaporizer to my lips and inhaled. The fresh nanites took effect an instant later. Muscles groaned with pleasure.

  It'd been years since my last upgrade. The pipes were rusty. Capillaries crackled, engorged with blood, as my heart slammed against the underside of my throat. Synapses sizzled with increased vigor.

  Thoughts moved faster, muscles responded quicker.

  The sweaty, sweet aroma of children at play drifted off the teddy bear beside me. I studied its hair follicles, which expanded and sharpened until I could practically see through to the seams.

  I rolled my fingers into a fist. The knuckles popped in sequence. Sometimes it just felt good to be more than human.

  "What I don't understand," Raines said, her voice a boom inhaled through my heightened senses, "is what does the Warden have to gain?"

  "You're asking the wrong question."

  "What's the right one?"

  "Don't you remember anything I taught you?"

  "Pretend I forgot."

  "You gotta ask, what's he stand to lose? You know that about a man, and you can make him do anything."

  A lesson I was learning the hard way.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Decisions That Change Us

  Warden Emilio Castille's office spanned three of my apartments stacked end on end. It was enormous in a way I'd grown unfamiliar to after so many years in the Lowers, where space itself was a luxury. I don't know under what circumstances he would require such a large office, but I'll say this, Castille had made the most of his situation.

  Tapestries emblazoned with the Castille coat of arms dangled from either side of the Warden's desk. They were unique, and pretty enough, in a who-the-hell-has-a-unicorn-on-their-coat-of-arms kind of way.

  Then again, the better question might have been, who the hell has a coat of arms?

  The answer? The same guy with a replica suit of armor standing in the corner.

  "I'm sorry to have kept you waiting, Detective Raines." Emilio Castille stood behind a tower of papers tilted precariously on his desk. "This has been a hectic day to say the least."

  Unless you considered height, nothing about the man was physically imposing. He stood half a head taller than me, but it made him look stretched. The padded shoulder blades of his navy blue suit gave Emilio a triangle shape, but did little to conceal the bony joints and rail-thin figure giving the clothing their insubstantial shape.

  I'd peeked at the man's file while being processed by Pause security. Castille had spent the better part of his life working in the Cryptography branch of Division's pantheon. Smart, beyond a doubt, with an ambition that'd quickly distinguished him from his peers.

  How could that ambition have been exploited into releasing Malcolm? What did the man stand to gain, or lose?

  I'd plowed through the variables, turned them over in my mind's eye, but failed to find the connection that would bring clarity.

  "We'll make this brief." Raines shook the Warden's extended hand before gesturing to me. "This is my partner, Detective Mandel."

  The Warden's eyebrow twitched, telling me he knew that was a lie, but he said nothing. Instead, he folded his arms, pursed the two thin lines that he presumably thought of as lips, and nodded.

  I glanced at the empty chair beside Raines, but my legs had an itch and I stayed standing.

  Raines started talking. I zoned out as Raines and Castille did the formality dance, something which held no interest to me.


  I wandered to the back of the room, to a bookshelf lined with pictures. I leaned in and studied a collage created from hundreds of tinier photos and arranged in such a way as to resemble Pause floating in a predominately blue ocean.

  I accessed the digital photo with my nanocomp, stretching and zooming the individual images.

  They were mug shots, one for each man and woman who'd ever spent time at Pause. Many of the faces were familiar, but most were not. A chronological history of Unity's greatest time criminals stretching back to the Grand Unification itself.

  Centuries of violent history represented in something beautiful. All the smaller pieces connected to form the whole. The premise of Unity and the Stream distilled in a single photo.

  I returned to the conversation to hear Castille droning on about security details, compromised access codes, and a slew of other things that generally had the smell of bullshit.

  He looked content with his story, like he was doing a good job selling us on it, but I wasn't buying. Too many defects in the product for it to be anything but a cheap knock-off. I wanted the real story.

  "Do you like your job?" I interrupted the Warden in the middle of a sentence going nowhere.

  "I do not understand how that has any bearing on the current investigation, Mr. Mandel," Castille said, carefully avoiding the word Detective.

  "Trying to get a feel for who stands to gain from Malcolm's escape. If it was me, I'd need a better reason for releasing a mass-murdering psychopath than job satisfaction, but hey, I'm not here to judge. Maybe you really hate your job."

  Once upon a time I had a semblance of tact and subtlety, skills I'd apparently misplaced. That left only my raw personality, a hammer eager to bludgeon a world of nails.

  Castille thrust a knobby finger in the air; his eyes skulked behind slitted lids while searching for words, but his face told me plenty.

  Micro-expressions are unconscious facial twitches occurring when one emotion is concealed beneath another.

  In this case, the Warden gave off conflicting responses. His mouth tightened, lips pulled down and back: contempt. But the eyebrows betrayed him. They had the slightest droop: shame.

  It blipped across his face for a fraction of a second before disappearing. Hence the term micro-expression; they're quick. In a different life I'd been pretty good at catching them. Maybe the best. Those days were gone, but Emilio was a bad faker, so I wasn't left entirely in the lurch.