“I’m just saying,” Ian said calmly to the tiny radio in his ear, “it’s a really shitty way to build a team. But if you guys wanna be jerks about it, I can’t stop you. It’s just a little odd that out of the four of us, I’m supposed to be the immature one.”
“Jeez. Enough with the whiny bitch routine.” Wink rolled her eyes as she typed at her computer in the cab of the tow truck. Extensions jutted from the pedals on the floor. “Would you rather we call you Moron?” She slurped the last of her Frappuccino through a purple straw.
“That’s easy for you to say, Sorceress.”
It was a play on her talents. John thought it was clever.
After the briefing, the captain had gathered the team around the blue tow truck and explained that military units that relied heavily on radio communication—particularly those that operated behind enemy lines, like air combat and black ops—often used code names to eliminate confusion or obscure identities or national origin. But more importantly, he told them sternly, in such small-group situations, taking a code name made a strong point about identity, focus, and unit cohesion. You left your individual self behind and became part of something bigger. A good code, if chosen well, would remind others of a key attribute of the bearer, and if kept to a few syllables, would be quick and easy both to pronounce and to understand.
Ian had gotten excited and dropped a few suggestions before he realized John was the only one assigning names. He wasn’t fond of his. “Yeah, but Snapjack? Come on, guys. Joke’s over. Ha-ha. What’s my real name?” He leaned against the wall of an alley in midtown and waited for the target to appear.
“That is your real name.” John objected. “Until you earn a different one. Now cut the chatter.”
“Why? No one’s listening. Wi—I mean Sorceress built quantum-key encryption into these radios. The signal’s completely unhackable. Which begs the question of why we even need code names.”
“I don’t understand the meaning.” Xana added after a moment.
“See? It’s confusing. Thank you, Halo.”
John named Xana on account of her faith. Ian suggested it was also because she towered over the rest of them and kept them honest.
The ambulance, whenever Wink put it back together, would be the Mast, like on a ship—a watchtower and a rendezvous. The captain kept the name his army comrades had given him, Nomad. Prophet was still Prophet. John didn’t seem like he gave a shit. But he had proudly christened Ian ‘Snapjack.’
It was a jab, Ian knew. They were making fun of him. Several nights earlier he had retired to the junkyard’s only bathroom, off the main hall near the kitchen. It was late, everyone was asleep, and the first time in forever that he’d had a few minutes to himself.
As it did with all of his autonomic functions, the Oric interpreted his ejaculation literally. It assumed he wanted to reproduce, and so it made a perfect clone of him, clothes and all. When both bodies turned to face each other across the toilet, the two Ian-bodies screamed and fell back. One of them kicked the toilet seat in an attempt to get away, cracking it in half, which neither the ladies nor John appreciated.
The team heard the noise and came running. When Ian refused to open the door, Xana pulled it from its hinges. Then she screamed as well.
It took Ian several minutes to explain what had happened in obtuse enough language that he hoped Wink wouldn’t understand.
“I thought I had a few minutes to myself, is all.”
But she’d figured it out anyway.
“Oh my God, you’re such a perv!”
Everyone tried not to stare at the discomforting clone—except Wink, who dissected it with her eyes—and after several long and awkward minutes, it finally dissipated. Or at least Ian assumed it was the clone. In the confusion, he couldn’t remember which of his two bodies had been the original. He couldn’t distinguish, and while duplicated he had experienced the world in two places at the same time, which was too much for his brain. He kept closing one set of eyes to keep from throwing up.
The following day, Wink replaced the broken ceramic toilet seat with one made of titanium, and John suggested at lunch, wryly, that Ian’s new ability could be tactically useful, which led to a number of jokes about all kinds of inappropriate behavior in the middle of a firefight. Or while on a mission.
“Just try and keep your pants on today,” John mumbled into the radio.
“Ha. Ha,” Ian said sarcastically. It wasn’t funny anymore. It wasn’t like any of them understood. Wink hadn’t hit puberty yet. John couldn’t feel anything below his waist—not that Ian would bring that up. So he kept his mouth shut.
He was just happy no one had seen what he’d been looking at in the bathroom.
“For what it’s worth”—Xana was trying to be conciliatory—“it’s better than that other one.”
In protest, Ian had announced that he wanted to be called Stargard. Because, he explained after a moment of silence, he was host to an extraterrestrial matrix.
“Check the far right pouch on your belt, Jack.” Wink giggled into the radio.
“No.” He already had. Wink had printed pornographic materials from the Internet. Ian had thrown them away at the first opportunity. “You shouldn’t be going to those sites, you know.”
“What sites?” Xana asked. “What are you looking at?”
“Nothing!” Wink objected.
“SHUT IT!” John screamed into the radio. “Pay attention! Target’s on the move.”
“Relax. I see him.”
A plump mixed-race man with a tweed cap covering his bare scalp walked past the alley with the crowd of commuters. He wore khakis and a color-print short-sleeved shirt. His head bobbed to the music coming from his headphones as he ate a breakfast sandwich wrapped in wax paper.
Ian lifted the hood of his sweatshirt and stepped from the alley into pedestrian traffic. The skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan towered overhead. Cars jostled on the street. Horns tweeted. The morning cool was fading fast. It would be hot again today.
“Jack,” Wink called.
“Jeez! Enou—”
“Prophet says stop and turn around,” she interrupted.
Ian immediately did as he was told. The woman behind him scowled in anger when she almost ran into him.
“Sorry.” Ian kept his head down. He pulled out his phone and pretended he’d received a message. Only he didn’t have to pretend. Prophet had warned him to turn half a minute before, but Ian hadn’t heard the message arrive. He’d switched his ringer to vibrate the night before and forgotten.
Ian waited for Wink’s admonishment as the police car passed on the street. He made sure not to look toward the forward-facing camera mounted on the dash.
“You had your phone on vibrate, didn’t you?”
John sighed. It was like teaching kindergarten. “Everyone check their phones, please.”
“How does Prophet know this shit?” Ian tried to change the subject.
“The man knows lots of things,” John interjected. “Stay with the target.”
“Do I get to know where I’m going now?” Ian asked. “You know, now that we’re actually in the middle of this. Or is that still need-to-know?”
Wink was in tiny professor mode. “Compartmentalization is an important part of any successful clandestine operation.”
“I’m sorry. Was that a yes?”
“The Carrier Hotel,” John answered. “It’s a co-location center at 99 Thomas Street, a few blocks from you.”
Xana scowled from her secure perch high above the action. She set her binoculars on the short wall in front of her. She didn’t much care for cities, but New York was beautiful. At least, when you were ten stories above it and there was no one to point at you as you passed. “What’s a co-location center?”
She was trying very hard to remember what Sister Rosa had taught her about patience. She liked her new friends very much—when they were being honest, which was less often than she might have appreciated—but they often spoke at length about movies she’d never seen or other things that were uncommon in Guyana, at least among the poor. That is, except for John, who said little at all.
Xana always hated asking for clarification. It made her look stupid. Her size already screamed ‘lout.’ Her mouth didn’t need to make things worse.
“A co-location center is a server farm,” Ian interjected over the street noise. “Computer networks are so big and fancy these days that they need complicated cooling systems and ways of keeping all the traffic organized and efficient. You rent server space. Or time on someone else’s machines. Or both.”
Ian figured the silence meant Xana didn’t understand why someone would do that. “In the short term, it’s cheaper than investing in your own infrastructure. This stuff is crazy expensive.”
The target turned to the right and Ian followed in the crowd several paces back.
“Yeah, but this place is special.” Wink was proud.
Ian rolled his eyes. She always had to outdo him on everything.
“It’s a total front.”
That was a word Xana understood. “You mean gangsters.” Guyana had plenty of those.
“Wait.” Ian stopped. He made sure to step out of the way of the people behind him this time. “You mean these people are going to be armed?”
John ignored him.
So did Wink. “You know those emails you get from the Nigerian prince that you think come from Africa? Most of them are actually sent from The Carrier Hotel and routed through servers all around the world. Almost every mafia in the world has service in this building.”
Ian scowled and picked up the pace to close the distance he’d lost. He ducked between a pair of business men and apologized softly.
“Don’t lose him,” John chastised. “We’re almost to the rendezvous.”
“I won’t.” Ian wondered who owned the place. Russians, maybe. Or yakuza. One of Wink’s drones fluttered high overhead.
“It’s not just the mafia either.” The girl went on. “You’re walking through the single biggest collection of spam producers, stock traders, and megabanks anywhere in the world.”
“Get ready,” John warned. “We’re coming up on our last chance to abort.”
The plan was simple, or so Wink claimed. (She reminded everyone seven times that complex plans had more fault points.) For the last several days, her small winged drones—which looked an awful lot like dark-feathered pigeons if you weren’t staring right at them—had been watching The Carrier Hotel, a dour, stone-faced building complete with bronze, script signage. But the exterior was just a facade. The street-facing stone was all that remained of the original structure. Held aloft by iron girders, it housed a modern building underneath—a big concrete block with beveled corners, no windows, and only two exits.
Using the drones, John and Wink had tracked the building’s visitors for several days before settling on a suitable candidate: the young engineer Ian was following, who took the subway from his home in the Bronx every morning around 10:00.
Ian looked up. The small flapping drones faded into the background of city life. They traveled in curved rather than straight lines. They ducked behind rooftop corners and swooped under power lines, mimicking the flight of birds. They were all but unnoticeable.
The plan was for John to take control of the man at a predetermined point along his regular commute and use him to gain entry to the secure facility, which required a magnetic key card with photo ID card and a pass through a metal detector. Bags were searched by men with guns at two separate checkpoints, so John wouldn’t be able to carry the little robot Wink had built. But he would be allowed his phone, same as anyone, and once inside, he would find a secure location without surveillance and send encrypted video to Ian, who would teleport the device past security.
During the briefing, Wink kept asking why Ian couldn’t simply teleport the device directly, as if he were sandbagging.
Ian explained that he had to know where he was going. “I have to have a good sense of it in my head, spatially, or I could materialize into solid matter or something.”
“But how do you know?”
“Dude. I just do. How do you know not to chew your own tongue? Or which way is up? That’s just how it works.”
Ian wasn’t sure how to explain it, but he had the sense that the Oric actually swapped the physical space between the two locations, almost like a revolving door. Ian’s molecules took the place of whatever occupied his destination, and whatever had been there filled the gap left by his departure. Only it was simultaneous. If he teleported into open air, then nothing but air filled his void. If he teleported into solid matter, he would be alive but completely trapped with nothing to breathe but what he brought in his lungs.
Meanwhile, a perfect Ian-shaped mass of concrete—or metal, or whatever—would take his place. To anyone watching, it would seem that he had turned to stone, and his death by suffocation would leave a parting monument to himself, frozen forever in mid-sneeze.
As with most arguments between Ian and the girl, John had to end it. “Without eyes on site, Ian could appear right in front of someone. Then it’s game over.”
Once the device was inside, Ian would teleport back while John, in the technician’s body, carried the device to a drop point near the server room. The rubber-footed robotic spider, about four inches long, would then scamper through the repeating racks of machines and bury itself in a mass of wires, like an ambush predator. There, it would splice a cable and wait for Phase Two, which Wink and John refused to reveal.
As soon as Wink got confirmation the device was in play, John would leave the technician to complete his morning commute. The man would be a little confused, but then everyone zones out on their way to work sometimes.
Ian watched as their target moved around a black metal trash can with white letters that read PUT LITTER IN ITS PLACE. He stopped. He turned left.
“Uh . . .” Xana lowered her binoculars. “I think he’s going a different way.”
“What do I do?” Ian asked.
“Stay with him,” John ordered.
Ian slowed. Had he tipped the man off? He had no experience tailing people.
Everyone’s phone dinged. Prophet texted a new intercept point.
“Clairvoyant to the rescue,” Ian whispered.
“10-4. We’re almost there,” John replied.
Ian hurried across a crosswalk as the light changed and cars inched forward, anxious for him to get out of the way. The technician walked down a one-way side street connecting two major thoroughfares. It was much less crowded, with only a few pedestrians and one shopkeeper. John needed to be within ten feet or so to hitch, or so he had explained. Anything further away meant he had to search for his target in a kind of higher space filled with all kinds of things that John didn’t know how to describe. At least not without making it sound like he was crazy. Or on LSD. So he kept himself to short hops to avoid the danger.
The young man in the cap stopped suddenly and Ian froze. He looked around for something he could do to look innocent as the old blue tow truck pulled onto the short street at the far end and moved toward them slowly. It dragged a modified Chevy suburban behind it. No one seemed to notice the little girl in the driver’s seat.
The engineer stood straight and stiff as if he were an idling computer waiting for instructions. After several moments, he turned back to Ian and winked. John was getting faster, but he still couldn’t make the jump instantaneously.
John walked in his temporary body toward 99 Thomas Street. He couldn’t be caught with a radio in his ear, even the tiny one Wink had designed, so for the rest of the mission, he was on his own.
John noticed one of Wink’s drones settle on a ledge across the street as he scurried up the steps of the hotel. A heavy doorman opened one of the glass-and-bronze doors and tipped his hat, just like at a five-star hotel, and John stepped into the building. Just past a second set of doors was a reception area packed with enough armed men to take over a small country. They had their weapons hidden, but not very well. They kept watch over everything.
John didn’t make eye contact and he didn’t hesitate. It was just like old times. He forced back a smile.
Once more into the breach.
Ian leaned against a wall and looked at the clock on his phone as commuters passed. Ten minutes. No word. He wondered when they should be worried. He looked up at the drab buildings around him, a mix of old brick and new steel. Most weren’t more than twelve stories. “You sure this is the place? This doesn’t exactly look like tech central.”
“Yup. Major network wires come up just down the street. In fact, most of the buildings around you have been gutted and turned into server farms.”
A taxi honked as Ian looked around. It all seemed so normal, like any street in the city. A second ago he would have sworn the buildings around him were offices or apartments. It looked nothing like Silicon Valley.
“Most stock trades today are actually done by computer. It’s called high frequency trading.” Wink’s voice quickened like it did when she talked about her latest invention. “Microseconds matter to an algorithm, so the closer you can get to the Internet, the better. That’s why financial firms cluster around internet nodes, like this.”
“And how do you know so much about it?”
Wink shrugged. “I did a project once.”
“Project?” Ian scowled. The little girl didn’t sound very confident.
“Like for school?” Xana asked. It was surprising because Wink hadn’t ever mentioned school.
Ian was the first to connect the dots. “Someone was using you. To get rich.”
“Yeah, well, whatever.”
A disquiet overtook the radio. The implication was larger than anyone wanted to deal with right then. The others were beginning to suspect there was a lot more to Wink than she let on. They were all on the run from something. It would only make sense that she was as well. But from what?
Ian broke the silence. “How long before we assume he’s in trouble?”
“Give him some time, jeez. He’s gotta go through security and everything.” Then the girl added, “But get ready to bail. Just in case something goes wrong.”
Ian made sure he had a free path in case he had to run, then leaned back against the wall.
Wink wouldn’t tell them anything about herself. Xana had asked, point blank, on the drive from California, and the little girl simply announced to all of them that she was an alien. That was later clarified to “alien from the future.” Her lack of trust made it impossible for anyone to reciprocate, which only heightened their suspicion that she was running from something terrible.
Ian’s phone buzzed. Incoming video.
“Moron, look at your phone.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be calling me Snapjack?”
“Whatever. Cap’s in position.”
“I see it.”
A short corridor zigzagged around a room and connected two longer perpendicular halls. The floor was dark, almost like it was made of rubber or insulation. The walls were concrete slabs. A cluster of colorful pipes ran along the baseboards. Recessed LED lights shone overhead. It was very modern.
A schematic popped onto Ian’s phone. Building floor plan. Wink had marked the location in red. Third floor, not far from the building’s west wall. Ian looked up at The Carrier Hotel and pictured the space beyond the stone block exterior.
“Hurry up. Cap can’t just stand there forever.”
Ian pulled the pepper spray from the pocket of his hoodie. “I know. Dude, relax. This isn’t like jumping off a cliff.” He released a short burst into the air in front of his face, leaned into it, and sniffed.
His eyes immediately burned. “Oh, Jesus . . .”
Everything went blurry. His nose ran. His throat felt like it was swelling.
“I thought you said you diluted this!” It felt like he had just snorted acid.
“I did!”
Ian sneezed. He blinked and wiped his eyes.
He was in his apartment. In Seattle. He’d just teleported completely across the continent.
“Shit . . .” His mouth hung open.
Everything was more or less exactly as he left it, except for the police tape sealing the door. It was sparsely furnished, mostly with stuff he had to assemble. He looked at his small TV. At his game console. At his stack of games. At his dusty bike. At his winter coat hanging by the door.
And then there was the smell, just like he remembered. It brought everything back. His entire life. Moving from Canada after school. His job. Dating Emli. Watching pirated movies together on his stiff blue couch. Lonely sleepless nights after she dumped him.
He knew the team was waiting on him. He knew John was in danger. But Ian couldn’t move. His radio was silent, too far away to receive a signal. He looked down at Wink’s device in his hand, like a dead spider, rubber-tipped legs curled toward its body.
Ian’s eyes ran from the pepper spray. He sniffed. He wiped his nose on his sleeve. It was half running, half clogged. He felt the tickle of another sneeze.
Ian bolted to his bedroom and grabbed a framed photo of his family—his mom, dad, and him, all smiling in front of Mount Rushmore—from when he was three. He shut his eyes and pictured the interior of the data center.
“Hallway . . . Hallway . . . Hallway . . .”
He sneezed.
His radio erupted. “Moron! Moron!” Wink called.
So much for Snapjack.
John was waiting in the hall. He had been pacing, nervous. “Where’d you go?”
Ian could see the technician’s nasal septum was pierced. He sniffed and wiped his own nose. It was completely clogged now. His eyes were watering. When he spoke, he sounded like he had a cold. “Don’t ask.”
John held out his hand, and Ian dropped the spider into it.
People were coming.
Ian noticed his leg was cold. And it couldn’t move. He looked down and saw his calf was poking through a water-filled blue pipe that ran along the wall with two others, painted red and yellow. Cold water had soaked his pant leg and was trickling to the floor.
The missing piece of the pipe must be in his apartment. He wondered what the police would make of it.
Ian pulled. He couldn’t move. There was exactly enough room for his leg and nothing else. Water seeped past his skin, but other than a little give from his flesh, Ian couldn’t budge.
The voices got louder. They were just around the corner. John glanced around nervously, looking for something. Anything.
They couldn’t get caught. Even if they managed to get away, they couldn’t tip their hand. If they did, their enemies would retreat and the entire mission, their only lead, the entire reason they were in New York, would be a bust. There was no Plan B.
A small panic reflex took hold and Ian started tugging repeatedly. But the metal was solid. It didn’t so much as wiggle.
“Sneeze,” John urged.
“I can’t!” Ian said with clogged nostrils. His eyes were swollen, bloodshot, and tearing.
“Then hold your breath.”
“Shit.” Of course. Ian took a breath and held it.
He immediately shut his eyes in shame and exhaled. Oxygen deprivation triggered his ability to phase through matter. Holding a deep breath filled his lungs and so delayed the effect. In fact, for all his training, it was getting harder for him to phase instead of the reverse. His body was adapting to the increased exercise.
Ian pushed every puff he could out of his lungs as people came around the corner, talking. He could see them. They were right in front of him. They looked like any regular office workers. But then they weren’t the ones to worry about. It was the people they would call as soon as they stopped laughing and noticed the man in the hoodie with his leg stuck in a pipe.
John turned in front of Ian and looked down at his phone, as if he were reading email. The group passed, talking. Someone laughed as they kept walking down the perpendicular hall. No one seemed to notice.
John put Wink’s device in his bag and started for the corner. He glanced back to see Ian sinking through the floor like a ghost.
As he drifted through the ceiling into a single massive room, Ian realized he wasn’t sure how many floors there were beneath him, which was a problem because the one below him was very much occupied.
A lanky engineer stood with his back to Ian. Rows of blinking servers stretched away on both sides. A center walkway split the rows down the middle. Each bank of machines was elevated above the floor on metal supports. Wires jutted from the rear of each block in blue and green bundles. There had to be at least twenty rows, mostly behind Ian, who was losing momentum. He was slowing and didn’t dare descend through another floor and risk getting trapped in concrete.
He looked down and took a soft breath just as his feet reached the floor. His sneakers touched with barely a sound. He felt the chill of the artificially cool air. He heard the collective hum of the machines. Each was quiet, but there were several hundred in the hard-walled room and they filled it with white noise.
Still, the busy engineer was mere feet away and must have heard something because he turned just as Ian tip-toed behind a server bank dotted in green lights.
“Moron? Where are you?” Wink had been listening.
Ian kept his mouth shut and kept tip-toeing to the end of the row. He turned the corner as the technician peered down with a scowl, unsure what he had heard.
Ian had seen the floor plan, albeit briefly, and he knew that if he was directly below the hallway rendezvous, then he had to be fifteen feet or so from the alley that separated The Carrier Hotel from the building next door.
Ian heard the technician approach. The man’s shoe squeaked on the hard painted floor with each stride. Ian was out of options. He pressed the palms of both hands together and looked at the wall several yards ahead of him, just past another row of blinking servers.
He would need to run and jump. As soon as he became intangible, his body moved with whatever momentum had been carrying it. But not forever. Ian had learned that passing through solid objects slowed his forward progress. If he didn’t have enough speed going in, he would eventually stop moving and run out of oxygen. He was starting to suspect it wasn’t that the Oric made him intangible so much as perfectly fluid. It moved his molecules through the empty space inside solid objects, between the atoms, like one ocean wave passing through another. Ian emerged whole but with his forward progress diminished.
He pushed the air from his lungs slowly through pursed lips, trying not to make a sound. Machinery hummed all around. The engineer was steps away.
“Moron?” Wink called. “If you can hear me, don’t jump. The alley isn’t clear. Okay? There are dudes from the data center emptying bins of shredded paper. Wait a minute. Xan’s gonna flip a car or something and create a distraction.”
Ian shut his eyes. He couldn’t risk answering. And he couldn’t wait any longer. Besides the engineer, mere feet away, Ian stood exposed in the long room. Someone could walk by and see him at any moment.
With his lips pressed tight, Ian ran forward. He became intangible at the end of his leap. He felt his foot slip at the last second. He didn’t get all the push he wanted. It was nearly impossible to time it just right.
Ian sailed through concrete and drywall and metal and wires and PVC and brick and flew over the heads of the garbage men one story down. One of them looked up and scowled at nothing.
Marilyn Dupree sat at her desk and saw a young man in a hoodie appear through the wall and fall through the floor as if leaping from a height. She stopped. She turned to her coworkers instinctively to see if anyone else had seen.
They chatted on the phone or typed at their computers. She moved her eyes from face to face. No one had seen anything.
Marilyn stood and walked to the floor. She touched it with her toe.
Solid.
Maybe she was seeing things.
She looked up and saw her coworkers staring at her. She smiled.
John sat in his chair and watched his team.
“That wasn’t so hard,” Xana said.
Ian and Wink high-fived each other. Everyone was smiling.
The soldier watched them congratulate themselves. He kept his mouth shut.
They had no idea what was coming. No idea at all.
[Tap or click here to see how algorithms control our world, from stock trading to organized crime]