Time Heist

by Anthony Vicino

  Raines mumbled something from somewhere on the perimeter of my consciousness. She rocked in her chair, clawing at the white noise buffeting her mind.

  Ash wore a similar expression of pain. She blinked hard and fast. The smooth lines of her young face pulled tight at her eyes and mouth.

  Somebody was manipulating the Stream, using it as a weapon. Bombarding our nanocomps with sounds and junk data.

  Then it stopped. The pain. The noise. All of it.

  Silence.

  We were in the eye of a storm, too late to move out of the way.

  Ash jumped to her feet.

  BOOM.

  Something exploded behind me. The room. The world. My heart. The air.

  The shockwave hit Ash first, flinging her into Lou's titanic desk. Then the blast hit me, throwing me from my chair and tossing me onto the ground.

  The white noise returned, along with the pain. A thick wet fluid seeped from my ear and down my neck. The air tasted sharp, as if coated with shards of glass that sliced my insides. Every breath became a fresh torture.

  I tried rolling to my side to see what had caused the explosion, but my body refused to cooperate.

  My nanocomp tried to get my attention. It jumped up and down in the corner, waving its virtual hands. The message wasn't a surprise.

  Seek Immediate Medical Assistance

  That's not what you want to hear from the passenger riding shotgun behind your temporal lobe.

  The floor, buffed to a high sheen by an over-obsessive janitor-nanite, offered up my reflection. A trail of dried blood on my cheek mixed with a fresh trickle oozing from a gash above my eyebrow. Sore muscles, forgotten injuries, and new wounds were making themselves known. First a dull ache methodically pulsing through my body. Then a sharper pain, as if my blood had been replaced with napalm.

  I opened my mouth to release the swell of agony in a scream. Nothing came out but a bubble of blood and snot mingling on my upper lip. The cold floor warmed. I shivered and squirmed onto my side.

  I lay in a pool of blood.

  My blood.

  It was warm, but it'd be warmer if it would stay in my body.

  I'd sprung a leak. Competing messages of pain being shouted across the battlefield of my body made it impossible to locate which hole was leaking my precious life juice.

  The world dimmed. Over the sound of my wet breathing I heard men yelling and the bark of energy rifles. I licked my lips and tasted something metallic.

  Hot, salty blood burned on its way down my throat. I imagined it making a circuitous route back to, and out, the hole responsible for killing me in that moment.

  Give up, a voice in the back of my head whispered. It wasn't a bad option. Nobody could use me if I were dead.

  Another explosion. The ground shuddered beneath me, sending ripples through my puddle of blood.

  A fresh reminder of agony was a memo tacked to the inner wall of my skull. Pain stampeded like deer fleeing wildfire. Down the knots in my shoulders, through a broken heart, past the stomach crying out from the overabundance of swallowed blood, and into legs blackened and bruised from being forced to my knees again and again.

  Give up, the voice screamed. I tried, but couldn't find fault in that plan.

  I closed my eyes. I didn't want to do this anymore.

  Another explosion, like thunder on the horizon. An approaching storm. It wasn't meant for me. I'd be gone before it arrived.

  My nanocomp issued a final plea before powering down.

  Thoughts jumbled. Neurons fired without purpose.

  A second later, the black oblivion of pre-death coddled me in its embrace.

  ***

  I swam through a blackness that clung to me like crude oil. Flashbulb memories popped in rapid-fire succession across a darkened background.

  Some memories were familiar: the day I married Diana, my first day on the force.

  Others, not so much.

  I watched the memories replay, a highlight reel without context. A passive third-person observer. My body, an automaton, acted out its part without my active engagement.

  I assumed this was the part of death where my life flashed before my eyes. That made a certain kind of sense so I didn't fight it. Complaining about the mixed-up memories wouldn't change anything now. If there were a God, or a devil, I'd voice those complaints in person.

  A rendezvous I expected soon.

  I grew impatient waiting for the white light to show up so I could sprint towards it already. No need to postpone the inevitable.

  But then something flashed across the screen. Something that shouldn't be there. Which said a lot, because many of the memories prancing across my mind shouldn't be there.

  This one was different, though. A memory I remembered well, but with certain details distorted and wrong. I chalked it up to my conscious memory making an error in the recollection process, but then the discrepancies got bigger. Huge, in fact.

  Division Headquarters nine years and a handful of days earlier. Diana on the floor lying in a similar position to the one I'd left my body in moments before. She drifted in an ocean of blood. Mine, by comparison, was the kiddie pool.

  I watched myself enter, skidding across a slick floor.

  Swatches of white bone appeared on the floor where my steps displaced Diana's blood. I dropped to my knees, pants soaked red. Warm and sticky. I remembered those details. I'd been there. I'd relived that memory thousands of times.

  But then something changed. Diana had something in her hands.

  A cube.

  Its iridescent sides reflected the sobering light. I took it from her, the bottom stained red. Her eyes shifted like she was slipping into the Stream, but I knew that's not where she was going.

  I cried. My tears mixed with the blood on my cheeks, forming pink streaks I didn't bother wiping away.

  Diana's lips moved. The faded whisper of life slipping past her lips.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Anabasis

  My heart kicked harder than a mule in heat, slamming against the inner wall of my ribcage with one thunderous boom. Blood mixed with adrenaline, becoming a high-octane rocket fuel. Arteries throbbed, fat and full, like an anaconda after a meal. I awoke staring at a blinding yellow sphere. Somebody leaned over me, whispering words without meaning.

  I didn't care.

  My brain found only one question worth asking: "Why does the sun gotta be so goddamn bright?"

  My heart beat of its own accord now, but the nanobots decided to play it safe and fired a second shot across the bow. I gasped into the boom that threatened to fold me in two.

  Eyes struggled against the blinding cacophony of light and colors splitting my skull with a rusted sawblade. The contents of my stomach crept into my throat. I clamped my lips shut in an attempt to hold them in.

  Clarity bled from the corners first, moving slowly towards the center. The face came into focus and I realized I wasn't staring into the sun, but rather an enormous bulb meant to simulate that celestial body.

  I deducted who would own such a fancy lamp: Lou.

  Everything flooded back. I pinged my nanocomp. It ignored me.

  I tried sitting up. Bad idea. Blood rushed to my brain, overriding visual input from my eyes. Black and white dots sprang into existence, swirling and obscuring my vision.

  I closed my eyes and waited for the dizziness to pass.

  When I opened them again the pain was gone—a good thing, so I didn't complain.

  I sputtered a jumble of words even I didn't understand. The link between mind and tongue hadn't been fully re-established yet.

  The person kneeling beside me ran a hand through my hair. "Take it easy, Tom."

  Whoever was using the inside of my eyeballs as a drum must have been getting tired: the beat lagged before slowing to a crawl. Shapes merged to form recognizable images.

  "Raines?" I croaked. "What happened?"

  "You tried to die on me."

  "Wish you would've let me."


  "What goes around comes around," she said, her lips pulled in a wide upward arc that created tiny dimples in the corners of her cheeks. Dimples I wasn't sure I'd ever noticed before.

  My head swiveled smoothly, no kinks or pain, as I studied the carnage that'd occurred during my leave of absence. Bodies littered Lou's office. His thugs, clothed in the traditional tattered garb of the Lowers, lay dead or dying alongside Division soldiers dressed to the nines in nanite-infused armor.

  The air crackled with dispensed energy from the firefight that had taken place in such a concentrated area.

  "President Jennings didn't take kindly to our visit this afternoon, eh?" I said, taking Raines' hand for support and letting her pull me to my feet. "He sent in the big guns."

  "Luckily our guns were bigger." Raines gestured towards Ash, who was standing across the room talking to Lou, who was doing ninety percent of his communicating via wild hand gesticulations.

  I looked at the floor and saw a blood angel formed where I'd been lying. "Did I get shot?"

  "Nah," Raines said. "You caught a chunk of smart-metal in the back when they blew the door. Pierced your lung. Made one hell of a mess. You're lucky Lou was around. That guy's got a cache of military-grade stimheal."

  "Suppose that's the benefit of being in bed with Phoenix."

  Raines nodded. "Now that you're up and at it, we need to get out of here. The Lowers aren't safe for us anymore."

  "Were they ever?"

  "Relatively speaking."

  "Everything is relative," I said, catching Ash's eye. She held up a hand, stopping Lou mid-sentence.

  "Look who's back from his date with death," Lou said, clapping his hands together. "Wasn't sure we got to you in time. That stimheal is good, but it can't raise the dead. Yet."

  Lou patted me on the back. I winced, expecting pain, but the residual damage I'd suffered over the course of the last twenty-four hours had dissipated. I felt better than I had in years.

  I wasn't complaining. It felt good not to hurt.

  "Good to be back," I said, surprising even myself to find that I meant it.

  "Now, what's our next move?" Lou said.

  "Our?" Raines put my own question into words.

  "I don't suppose Unity is gonna let me keep on keeping on." Lou gestured towards the room of dead bodies. "For better or worse, it looks like I'm with you guys."

  "And what if we don't want you?" Raines said.

  "You're gonna want me if you plan on getting out of the Lowers in only"—he made a show of counting Ash, Raines, and myself—"three pieces. Plus, I have nifty toys. You let me come with and I'll let you play with them."

  I couldn't forget the pain inflicted on me per Lou's request the night prior, but people not actively trying to kill me were in short supply, so it didn't make sense to wipe my ass with the olive branch he was offering.

  "Fine, you can come with, but if you step out of line," I gestured towards Ash, "you'll have to deal with her."

  Lou forced a smile.

  "Great, we're one big happy family," Raines said. "But if I can ask, besides getting out of the Lowers, avoiding getting killed by any combination of Division soldiers, Malcolm Wolfe, or Time Vice Watchmen, what's our next step?"

  "That not getting killed part sounds like a good place to start," Lou said.

  A memory slotted into place, jarred loose during my tumble with death. I knew where I needed to go. The why remained a mystery, but progress is progress.

  "I've got something in mind," I said, rolling my neck to the side and feeling the sweet pop-pop-pop of vertebrae realigning. "Lou, grab the key I gave you last night. We're going to the Vault."

  "Oh, yeah?" Raines asked, her eyebrows raised. "You think they're just gonna let you walk in there?"

  She had a point. The Vault ranked alongside the Time Bank as one of the most highly restricted buildings in Terminus. Whereas the Time Bank oversaw the Life Tracker network, the Vault handled the physical storage of that digital data.

  Lou smiled. "Leave that to Uncle Lou," he said, practically skipping over to a small closet behind his desk.

  "You're taking the family metaphor too far," Raines said before turning back to me. "What's in the Vault?"

  I paused before admitting, "I'm not really sure."

  Raines opened her mouth to protest my well-thought-out plan as Lou rejoined the group.

  "Here we are," he said. In one hand Lou held a vaporizer, in the other, a dress. "Alright, which of you wants to be Madame Cavanaugh?"

  ***

  Lucky Lou proved more useful than I'd originally anticipated. With access to a network of high-speed elevators, we rocketed towards the surface and stepped out into the sunlight only five precious minutes later.

  The sun was well into its downward arc for the day. Faded rays of light twinkled through the urban jungle of Terminus. Pinkish red hues mixed like blood in water across a blue-gray canvas.

  Thick air smothered the skin and hung moist in the lungs. We skimmed along the slide-walks towards the Vault. Commuters at the end of a long work day passed in a blur headed in all directions, their eyes glazed over, lost to the Stream. A shroud of anonymity surrounded everyone. Nobody wanted to engage with the person beside them.

  At least, not in the real world. Only in the Stream. Inside a world where they could be who they wanted and look how they wanted, limited only by their imaginations. Reality was too rigid by comparison.

  They had everything the Lowers could ever want, and it wasn't enough.

  I loosened the tie choking me with the grip of a small child. Raines and I had raided Lou's wardrobe, exchanging blood-soaked clothing for outfits that were decidedly not us.

  I chose a three-piece suit of smart fabric that adjusted to my dimensions with form-fitting ease. It didn't look half bad, but the tie might as well have been a noose. I had considered leaving it behind, but I needed to look the part for what came next. Regardless, it beat wearing a dress.

  The slide-walk banked around a cluster of tall buildings and the rounded sides of the Vault came into view.

  The Vault, a fifty-story pillar comprised of progressively smaller circles stacked atop one another, was, in my opinion, an eyesore in comparison to the majesty of the Time Bank.

  Viewed from above, the Vault resembled a complicated series of overlapping gears and mechanisms, much like the circular door of a safe. Viewed from any other angle, it resembled a spiral of dog shit.

  "Alright, fella, you got fifteen minutes to get in and get out," Lou said, taking loping strides towards the Vault. "After that, you're gonna have a Peacekeeper problem. And since you've been out of the Stream for a few hours, let me give you the bullet-point headlines: Former Detective, Tom Mandel, Murders Warden of Pause and Seven Peacekeepers."

  Thoughts of Emilio Castille and his daughter Chloe surfaced. Poor girl was probably strung out like last week's laundry, oblivious to what her father had tried to do for her.

  I imagined her huddled in the corner of whatever rat-infested apartment she called home. Green and red neon lights, in a part of the Lowers not safe to walk after dark, filtering through a crack in the blind, illuminating little Chloe seeking solace from the burnable end of an Angel Dust stick.

  The red ember, stalking her with every puff; every inhale bringing the promise of a euphoria that would drown out the memory of pain, every exhale the cruel reminder that all promises are eventually lies.

  I pulled out of the nosedive of Quick-induced self-flagellation and focused.

  "Seven peacekeepers?" I said, doing the math. "Wait. They're not counting the guy that jumped on the Kestrel at Pause, are they? That's not fair. That was all Raines."

  Raines said, "He could've survived."

  "Not unless he's part bird."

  "Whatever," she said, shaking her head. "He shouldn't have jumped onto a moving copter in the first place."

  Maybe that's true, but the authorities probably wouldn't see it that way.

  "Point being," Lou interjected,
"at minimum they have some questions for you. More likely, they just want to kill you. So, ya know, be on the lookout for that."

  "Great," Raines and I said in unison.

  "And hey, Cross wanted you to have this," Lou said, tossing me the small black pyramid I'd last seen in Cross's hand moments before the Division attack.

  I caught it and stumbled into the slide-walk guardrail as my vision momentarily fuzzed out. I shook my head, trying to clear away the cotton balls dancing around in there.

  "What the hell is this?"

  Lou shrugged. "Hell if I know. Cross called it the Hive Mind. Said it compromises closed networks. Whatever that means."

  I ordered my nanocomp to run a cursory scan of my system but it revealed nothing new or out of place. "How do I activate it?"

  "Is there an ON switch?"

  "No?"

  "Then I ain't got a clue."

  "That's not helpful."

  "Nope," Lou said, and then with a wink, stepped off the slide-walk alongside Ash, leaving Raines, myself, and whatever mystery tech Cross had just uploaded into my body to finish the approach to the Vault alone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Cracking The Vault

  The sun drooped behind the hulking mass of the Vault as Raines and I stepped off the slide-walk. A platoon of Division soldiers eyed us with an intensity that only comes from years of rigorous training and the best implants money can't even buy.

  Each square-jawed mass of muscle watching us was loaded to the gills with more next-gen nanites than I could wrap my head around. They tracked us like a pack of predators as the front door to the Vault scissored open for us.

  I took a half step through the door, sure that an alarm would go off at any moment and that would be that. The end of our little adventure.

  I imagined spending the last hours of life behind bars at the Precinct, or bleeding out on the floor where I now stood.

  Both were equally plausible scenarios, but neither depressed me as much as they should.

  My indifference was a warning. A signal telling me I was teetering on the brink of a Quick fit.

  The Quick tinkered with neural pathways. A snipped wire here, a misplaced neuron there, and next thing ya know, I couldn't care less about the world or its suffering.