All this plan they pitched to Darnell that first night with something approaching bated breath. His enlistment was crucial, after all. He was the one element of this great jailbreak that was utterly unexpendable since it was his Sharesquare Industries badge, which still pegged him as being part of corporate security, that made everything else possible. And he was taking the greatest personal risks of all, despite not fighting for a lover on the inside as Gabriel and Charlotte did.
“I’m a sucker for lost causes,” he said resignedly when the plan was explained. “Maybe serving in the Army in two hopeless wars has given me that. Running military funerals has given me that too. I don’t know what role I have in this world out here otherwise.”
So, all participants in the venture drank that night—or at least those who were physically present. Charlotte felt looming dread, the specter of utter calamity, but she was amazed by Gabriel’s passion, by Darnell’s cool detachment, and Alexi’s wild strain of honor and duty. Even the bravado of Blue Bird, Koti, Kota and Gor—though they took personal precautions to mask their physical locations—was admirable. What did she have?
“Charlotte Boone has an acid tongue,” some anonymous producer would say to a tabloid. “She knows what she wants, and she’ll fight for it like a junkyard dog.” But that night she sipped her wine and smiled and simply did her best to not fall to pieces. This is why she had come here, she reminded herself. This was her train she had set in motion, and it was now leaving the station.
The next day of rehearsals and final preparations passed all too quickly. And in a heartbeat, the morning of the raid on the world’s most impenetrable building had arrived.
Now
The day started with a final communications check. Gabriel strapped Diana’s small, black speaker device to a large drone and climbed up through the mansion’s attic to reach the roof, followed by Charlotte, Alexi, and Darnell. There they wished Diana safe travels and released the drone to fly out over the city and towards the Farallon Islands out to the west, where it would presumably remain uncatchable but connected to a coastal cell phone tower.
Then Gabriel and Alexi loaded into a white van and departed for a pre-mapped position a block away from the Citadel and out of range of the building’s cameras. Before he left, Gabriel had given Charlotte a hug and promised her that today would be “Charlotte Boone’s most spectacular performance.” And lastly, Darnell waved goodbye, looking strangely energized as he stepped into a taxi bound for the Citadel’s front entrance.
So Charlotte was left alone in the great Tudor mansion. She poured herself a glass of gin in the kitchen and threw it back before mounting the steps to a small lounge on the second floor where Gabriel kept his Sharebox headset, a haptic suit, and a 360-degree treadmill. She stripped down to her underwear and pulled on the suit. Gabriel had borrowed it for her from a neighbor, and it fit her surprisingly well, stretchy and smelling of expensive plastic material like the kind of overpriced yoga pants she used to buy at fitness boutiques a lifetime ago.
She slid her hands into the gloves, which were rubbery and unfamiliar to her touch. An unshakeable weight was still leaden in her stomach. A part of her would do anything to have time slow down, to freeze herself in this moment until the courage she so badly wanted would at last arrive and steel her nerves for what was coming.
Then she slid the visor and headset over her eyes.
A prompt was written there, the letters dangling in front of her face in a vast empty white space.
Welcome To Sharebox – A Place Made Just For You
She felt her heart already thumping in her chest. She reached up her right hand and navigated through a floating menu interface to a group chat area that Blue Bird had set up.
And just like that, she found herself standing in a green meadow in a pink dress.
The sun was rising with the dawn. Birds were tweeting. A light wind carried bits of leaves and dandelion through the air. Bees moved from flower to flower.
She looked at her hands and was stunned by the visual clarity. There were fine hairs and freckles visible on her forearms, her fingernails and cuticles were an obligingly perfect match for her real body. Somewhere she knew the AI in Sharebox had generated this avatar mirror of her based on old photos it had cached, but the experience still felt like magic. Her auburn hair was cropped in a short style she had worn years prior, probably the last time she had either logged in to Sharebox or any public photos of her were available. But the graphics didn’t use to be this good back then. The immersion didn’t used to feel so real.
There was a fine wood table in the grass with five chairs around it. Standing behind them were four other avatars. Koti and Kota were easy to pick out. Kota wore a hijab just like her real-life counterpart. Blue Bird’s avatar was bent over, stretching her hamstrings—her long, natural hair tumbling about in painstakingly accurate detail. Gor stood there, unmasked. Avatars could not be disguised, it was a basic principle of Sharebox’s principle of openness. He was intimidatingly tall, looming over the rest of the team, and his pale face was broad and bearded. His eyes looked Charlotte up and down with a wry intensity, and he invoked to her a lumberjack grizzled by hard living.
All of them were wearing black sweaters and pants, and they must have had high-end haptic setups because their faces were each remarkably expressive. Charlotte’s childlike awe at the immersion must have been evident.
“I think she’s tripping out on us already,” said Koti, looking at her impatiently.
“Is your setup okay?” asked Blue Bird, walking over to Charlotte and talking briskly like a drill sergeant. “Your suit and gloves? You can move around alright?”
Blue Bird put her hand on Charlotte’s forearm, and Charlotte felt the real-life sensation of being lightly touched. It was a wonder, as haptic suits were not half as clever just two years prior.
“I’m fine,” said Charlotte, suddenly noticing that her sundress was quite at odds with the team’s sense of fashion. “I’m sorry about my clothes, I’ll change.”
Charlotte used her right hand to invoke a menu, which she navigated through to find a black sweater and pants combination. The general rules of the in-Sharebox interface, she was grateful to find, were roughly the same as before and within a minute her avatar was dressed in black like the others.
Blue Bird nodded approvingly, her large brown eyes studying Charlotte and giving her an encouraging squeeze on the shoulder. Then she walked to stand in front of the brown table facing everyone. She pulled a small silver token from her pocket, sharp like an arrowhead, and held it in her palm. The shape of it matched a small emblem on her jacket.
“Diana, have you found the Citadel’s location for the day?” she asked, speaking to the air.
A voice seemed to emanate from the arrowhead, but at the same time, it was almost like a whisper in Charlotte’s ear. It was clear, familiar and trustworthy.
“I have, but you will not like it,” spoke Diana. “I will send you with a boat.”
“We’re not afraid to get wet,” replied Blue Bird, her bright red lips pursing into a smirk.
“Just don’t fall in the water,” cautioned Diana.
“Any minute now, we’ll get word that Darnell has arrived at the Citadel lobby.” Blue Bird began looking at the face of each member of the crew. “Then we will immediately plunge into the landscape surrounding the Citadel’s current location. Let’s review one last time—it’s all about timing. We will begin our approach just as Darnell reaches the front desk, but he has to enter through the first security gate before we are detected or else the front desk will automatically close to him. Automatic game over. That’s phase one. Koti, tell us about phase two.”
“In phase two,” Koti began. “We need to reach the wall of the virtual Citadel, touching it with our Diana arrowhead interface. That will clear the way for Darnell to get through the second security gate, into the prisoners’ living
quarters.”
“What happens if Darnell tries to get through that gate before we reach the building?” Gor asked.
“He won’t try it until we tell him to go,” Blue Bird answered, shaking her head. “But he’s liable to draw suspicion standing around idly between security gates while he waits on us. So we need to move quickly.”
“Indeed, let’s not leave our man hanging too long.” The voice was piped directly to Charlotte’s ear this time, and the other avatars nodded upon hearing the French accent of Gabriel.
“We will be able to talk with you like this the whole time?” Charlotte asked.
Blue Bird cocked her head. “Almost everywhere, except the dead zone at the bottom of the Citadel. It’s a surprise what we’ll find there. That’s phase three. Get to the basement and the security console at the bottom, which will unlock the prison cells.”
“If everyone is done chitchatting, I’m about to enter the building,” Darnell’s voice sounded to everyone in the meadow. “I’m going to make a point to avoid talking now. Good luck all.”
“Good luck,” responded several of them in unison.
Blue Bird started tapping in the air at her own menu interface.
“Okay, everyone,” she said. “Here we go.”
And just like that, the meadow faded away. The pixels of that place folded upon themselves and vanished like a facade, though the avatars did not move. The morning sun, the brown table, and the pleasant chirps of digital birds peeled away, leaving the four avatars standing just as they were positioned before but now surrounded by a dark, forbidding forest.
There was no sunshine. The only light came from the artificial stars and moonlight and a glow of white lights emanating far off through a group of trees.
“We don’t talk unless we have to either,” Blue Bird whispered. “It’s this way.” She led the crew through a thicket of trees towards the lights. Kota and Koti followed closely behind. Gor was next, though he shot frequent glances over his thick shoulder at Charlotte in the rear.
Again, Charlotte was stunned by the vivid graphical detail of the forest. Crickets chirped. Digital moss hung from trees. Starlight reflected on dewy leaves.
This was Diana’s masterpiece, wasn’t it? This had once been the AI’s primary application: to create rich, digital worlds based on photos and videos that felt impossibly real. It was small wonder to Charlotte now while Sharebox addiction was a global epidemic. The platform had seemed a passing diversion to her when it launched, but now she appreciated its raw power.
Charlotte almost tripped as she looked downward at a knot of roots on the forest floor, but then she remembered she—her real body—was walking on a treadmill and caught herself before she tumbled over an obstacle that existed only in graphical form. The abrupt transition from day to night had also disoriented her, and her eyes were slow to adjust.
Up ahead, Blue Bird broke through a line of trees into a clearing. A beachhead lay before them, and the glow of the moon was reflected spectacularly across the midnight-blue water. It was almost dizzying. Across the lake was a small island ringed with large rocks. White frothy waves were visible lapping at the shoreline. And on the island was a tower darker than the night itself, blotting out the stars, rising over fifty stories tall. Its parapets and guard posts were marked by white lights that scanned slowly across the water and the rocks below.
There was no way to feel temperature, taste, or smell in Sharebox, but Charlotte’s blood ran cold. She swore she felt the sting of salt water on her skin.
“Diana, can you please turn on our privileges now?” Blue Bird whispered to the arrowhead.
“You all have augmented strength and decoy capabilities,” came the machine’s voice.
“How do we create a decoy?” Gor’s gruff voice, the first time Charlotte heard it in Sharebox, asked.
“Simply say ‘shield me.’”
“Save it,” said Blue Bird eyeing Kota, whose mouth had opened to utter the words. Kota closed her lips, and her avatar blushed, looking sheepish.
“Here is your boat,” said Diana, and a small black raft with four oars materialized at the water’s edge.
Blue Bird turned to address the team one last time in a muted but commanding voice.
“Remember, whatever happens out there, don’t let them touch you under your chins. You’ll be as dead in the real world as you’ll be here if they find out your true identity. Don’t be a hero, log out first before they get their fingers on you.” Her eyes met with Charlotte, who suppressed a shudder.
The five members of the raiding party walked slowly to the raft and took seats. Charlotte didn’t want to sit in the front, but Gor insisted the strong paddlers should be at the rear. Gor pushed the raft off the shore roughly, forgetting that Diana had already increased their natural strength levels, and he flung the boat forward briskly, nearly toppling the passengers into the water and foiling their plot before it even began. He only just managed to hop in to the raft before it cruised off into the water.
Then they began paddling.
Charlotte dipped her oar into the water, which now looked black and formidable as it sloshed next to her. Her motions were cautious at first and then more confident. The vigor of her avatar’s paddling was no doubt greatly assisted by Diana’s pilfered administrator strength privilege, and slowly, rowing in unison, the raft made progress towards the dark tower.
Darnell was scared. He didn’t want to look it. He knew everyone else was. But there was adrenaline there too. It coursed through his veins—a feeling of boldness and purpose he had missed. He walked onto the sidewalk where tourists snapped pictures of hapless inmates stretching out their hands at nothing in front of glass walls. He craned his neck to see the higher cells, which stretched on into the sky for fifty-five stories of shame and abuse, and his courage did not waver.
The front doors opened before him revealing a spacious lobby that one might imagine at a boutique hotel and not the world’s most infamous penal institution. Vintage chairs and sofas ringed a series of glass coffee tables set in the center of the room. Modern art hung from the walls. Plants were everywhere. It looked to Darnell very much like a room on the Sharesquare campus.
Diana wasn’t able to get a detailed schematic of all the security measures at the Citadel, but she was able to hack into building and permit records, which were often protected by lax public security infrastructure, and access early facility blueprints. So Darnell generally had the layout of the next several rooms mapped out in his mind, along with some of the security tools that had been wired into the building. He knew, for instance, that the receptionist had a silent alarm located just under her desk.
As Darnell walked, the glass doors opened automatically for him, and the receptionist looked up expectantly. Diana said that he could probably just ignore her and walk to the first access gate, but he had already inadvertently made eye contact and felt it awkward not to say something. The receptionist was short with a square face and thick glasses. She wore heavy makeup, and her mousey-brown hair was tied in a bun atop her head. When she smiled, it reminded Darnell of a shark because it looked like she had too many teeth in her mouth.
“Hi there,” Darnell said.
“May I help you?” she asked in a surprisingly high-pitched, girlish voice.
“I’m part of the Sharesquare Security team. I’m just here to do some work in the administration center.”
“Right through that door, honey,” she said, pointing a stubby, ringed finger at a thick door at the end of the room. “You’ll just need to badge in.”
Darnell mumbled his thanks, noting that the cameras were all pointed at him as he walked across the room.
My life will never be the same, he thought. I’m a criminal now. Before this, he had never done anything more illegal than downloading some songs on the internet and opening the plastic wrap on a Playboy magazine in a gas station w
hen he was fifteen. That’s why they loved him at the Palace. That’s why they made him into such a big hero after the shooting at the Chicago train station. His record was squeaky clean. Now what would they say?
He reached for his badge and held it up against the digital reader mounted on the door just as they rehearsed. But then the reader beeped in protest and glowed red. Darnell’s heart skipped.
Oh, what the hell. What the hell?
He held up his badge a second time and again the reader beeped in error and glowed red.
“Diana,” he whispered to a tiny microphone couched in his shirt pocket. “What’s going on?”
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice low in his earpiece. “I see the problem. Your company badge credentials were updated this morning to indicate that you are now part of the Sharesquare press relations department and not the security division.”
“Can you fix it?”
“I cannot change your credentials, but I can perhaps attack the system and force a rollback of the update.”
“Ahem,” said a girlish voice from behind Darnell. The receptionist was leaning bodily over her desk and had her neck cranked to observe him. “Is there a problem?”
“The reader seems broken,” he tried to say with a casual shrug. “It seems to not be reading me.”
“What work exactly did you say you need to do in the administration center?”
She was squinting at him now, and her eyes darted to the cameras posted around the room’s corners.
“Come on over here, and let me look at your badge myself,” she said.
“Oh no,” replied Darnell with a smile intended to be reassuring. “I’m sure it’ll go through next time.”
The Echo Chamber Page 20
