Torn (Cold Awakening) (36 page)

Thank you to Sherry and Jim McGlynn for handing me my first science-fiction novel (not to mention bribing eleven-year-old me with ice cream to sit through the entire showing of
2001
), and thanks to Brandon McGlynn for adding some science to my fiction.

And one final thank-you to Isaac Asimov. If you’ve read his books, you know why.

If you haven’t, start with
I, Robot
.

(Start now.)

T
his story is not mine to tell.

It is, however, true—and I’m the only one willing to tell it. It begins, like all good stories, once upon a time.

“I’m in.”

The shadowy figure slipped down the hall, infrared goggles giving the familiar surroundings an eerie green haze. Dressed in head-to-toe black, a mask shielding his face, he would have been invisible to the security cameras if his partner hadn’t already disabled them. Five minutes, blueprints from the firewalled Atlantis Security site, a pair of wire clippers—and the job was done.

Snip!
Good-bye, cameras.

Snip!
Farewell, alarm.

Still, he moved slowly, carefully, silently. The operation was just beginning. Anything could go wrong.

The target was twelve doors in, on the left. Locked, as they’d expected.

Good thing he had the master key.

The equipment was stashed in a closet directly across the hall, secured behind a no entry sign, official-looking enough that no one had dared enter. He wheeled out the cart, grimacing at the squeaky wheels. No matter. There was no one to hear. The next security patrol wasn’t scheduled for another three hours, thirty-two minutes—and reconnaissance indicated that the night guard almost always skipped his three a.m. rounds in favor of a nap in the front office.

If anyone else approached, the perimeter alert would make sure he knew about it.

He pushed the door open and surveyed the target. It would be close, but they’d get the job done. He crossed the room, taking position by the wall of windows. Thirty seconds with the whisper silent drill, and the lowest pane popped cleanly out of the frame. He attached his brackets to the frame, threaded the high-density wire through, waited for the tug from below and, when it came, locked everything in. That was the easy part.

He turned around, his back to the empty window, and closed his eyes.

Visualization, that was the key.

He’d learned it from the masters. James Bond. Danny Ocean. Warren Buffet. See the plan unfold. Visualize the details, the problems, and their solutions, the eventual prize in your hand. Believe it—then do it.

It sounded like self-actualization, Chicken Soup for the wannabe winner crap—but it worked.

He closed his eyes. He saw. He believed. He knew.

And then, with a deep breath, Max Kim got to work.

Once upon a time, there were three lost boys.

One was a Robin Hood, in search of a cause. One a Peter Pan, still hunting for Captain Hook. The third a Prince Charming, bereft of his queen.

There was, of course, an evil prince.

An ugly duckling.

A moat to cross, a tower to climb, a citadel to conquer.

And finally, there was a wicked witch. But we’ll get to me later.

Because in the beginning, it was just the three of them: Max Kim. Isaac Schwarzbaum. Eric Roth. The Three Musketeers. The Three Amigos.

Three Blind Mice.

“Janet Pilgrim, October 1956. Betty Blue, Miss November. Lisa Winters, December.” Schwarz forced himself to breathe evenly. The familiar litany helped. “June Blair, January 1957. Sally Todd, Miss February. Sandra Edwards, in the red stockings”—Breathe, he reminded himself—“March. Gloria Windsor …”

He’d almost regained his calm—and then he looked down.

Hyperventilation ensued.

Again.

One hand gripped the edge of the roof, the other hovered over the wire as it ran through the pulley gears, hoisting its load, ready to bear
down if anything slipped out of place. But he wasn’t worried about the equipment. He was worried about the ground.

His earpiece beeped, and Eric’s voice came through, crystal clear. “Another load, coming up.”

“Hurry, please,” Schwarz begged. “Being up here is not good for my asthma.”

“Schwarz, you don’t have asthma.”

Oh.

Right.

The excuse worked wonders for getting out of the occasional stepfamily touch football game, as Carl Schwarzbaum could barely be bothered to remember that his oldest son still drew breath—much less which bronchial maladies kept that breath labored and far too short for football.

Eric, on the other hand, paid attention. Which made him significantly harder to fool.

“You ready to receive?” Eric asked.

Schwarz nodded. “Roger.” He drew in a deep, ragged breath, then leaned over, arms outstretched, waiting for the metal cage to appear out of the darkness. Max was still inside, preparing more loads for Eric, who would pack them securely and send them on their journey to the roof.

Where Schwarz waited. Trying not to look down.

It’s only two stories, he reasoned with himself. Not bad at all. Not dangerous. Not worthy of a panic attack. Not enough to make him dizzy and short of breath, to make his chest tighten and his palms sweat inside the rough leather gloves.

“Dawn Richard, May 1957,” he murmured. “Carrie Radison, pretty in pink. Jean Jani. Dolores Donlon. Jacqueline Prescott, Miss September. Colleen Farrington, in the bubble bath.” It helped, like it always did, like a bedtime story he told himself, chasing the monsters back into the shadows. “Miss November, Marlene Callahan, behind the door. Linda Vargas, by the fire. Elizabeth Ann Roberts, January 1958, a very happy new year.”

Just two stories. Not a long way down.

He could estimate the height and his mass, calculate the impact velocity, apply it to the standard bone density and tensile quantity of his muscles, calculate the probability of tears, breaks, demolition. Rationally, he knew that two stories was nothing.

But in the dark, the ground was impossible to see.

And it felt substantially farther away.

From the
Oxford English Dictionary:

Hack, noun, most commonly meaning, “A tool or implement for breaking or chopping up. Variously applied to agricultural tools of the mattock, hoe, and pick-axe type.” First usage 1300 AD: “He lened him a-pon his hak, wit seth his sun us-gat he spak.”

I just wanted to understand. After it was all over, I just wanted to know what I’d missed, to get why it had meant so much. This didn’t help.

Other options:

“A gash or wound made by a cutting blow or by rough or clumsy cutting.”

“Hesitation in speech.”

“A short dry hard cough.”

Most uselessly: “An act of hacking; a hacking blow.”

And then, inching closer to paydirt, the seventh usage: “A spell of hacking on a computer … an act of gaining unauthorized access to a computer system.” First use 1983.

I showed Eric. He laughed. The date was ridiculous, he said.

The definition was useless, he said.

The term hack had been co-opted—falsely, offensively, clumsily—by the mainstream media, who thought writing about computer hacking masterminds would sell more papers.

He said.

According to Eric, hacking in its pure form stretched back centuries. It wasn’t restricted to a single medium. It was more than a methodology. It was an ethos.

“This is your problem,” Eric complained, tapping the computer screen. The Che Guevara action figure perched on top tilted and swayed, but declined to topple. Max had given it to him for his last birthday—“a revolutionary, for my favorite revolutionary”—and while it was intended as a joke, his prized position atop the computer screen suggested that for Eric, the mini-Che was equal parts entertainment and inspiration. “The OED is an outmoded technology.” He leaned over my shoulder, his forearm brushing against my cheek, and closed the window. Then, reaching around me with the other hand, so that I was trapped between his freckled arms, he opened Wikipedia and typed “hack” into the search box. “It’s dead, like the Encyclopædia Britannica. A bunch of old white guys sitting in a room deciding what’s true—it’s a dead end. That’s what this means—” He brushed his hand across the top of the monitor fondly, like it was a family pet. “The end of gatekeepers, the end of the fossilized
system that depended on an ‘us’ and a ‘them,’ the knowledgeable and the ignorant. Communal knowledge, that’s what matters now. Not what they want us to know, but what we want to know. That’s the future.” He glanced up from the computer, up toward me. Behind the glasses, his eyes were huge. “Information wants to be free.”

“Schwarz is losing it,” Eric whispered. Thanks to his improvements, the mics were so sensitive that they picked up his every word. “Let’s speed this up.”

“Code names only,” Max reminded him. “We don’t know who might be monitoring this frequency. And whose idea was it to stick Grunt on the roof?”

“Mine. And it was a good one.” Eric flipped channels back to Schwarz, hoping he was right. “You still with us up there?”

“Susie Scott, Sally Sarell. Miss April, Linda Gamble. Ginger Young on the bed. Delores Wells on the beach, Teddi Smith, Miss—”

“Schwarz!”

“Ready for Phase Three.” The voice was pinched and nasal, with a hint of a whine. As usual. “Can you, um, please go faster?”

“We’re working on it.”

And back to Max.

“Last load,” Max confirmed. “Hoist it up, Chuckles, and I’ll meet you and Grunt on the roof in five.”

Eric began unhooking the metal grips and threading the wires back through, winding them in a tight coil. His cheeks burned in the wind. Unlike Max, he wore neither all black nor a mask for their missions, trusting the darkness to protect him—and, failing that, trusting the
intruder alert sensors, which could never fail, because he had designed them himself. Max dressed for drama; Schwarz dressed however Max told him to. But Eric dressed for efficiency, flexibility, comfort, and speed. A gray T-shirt inside out, its faded message pressed to his skin:
IF YOU’RE NOT OUTRAGED, YOU’RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION
. His lucky socks, sneakers, Red Sox cap, and cargo pants—stuffed with lockpick, RF jammer, micro-scanner set to the police frequency, pliers, extra wire coils, a house key. He carried no ID. Just in case. If he missed something on the scanner, if their detectors failed, and a car pulled into the lot without advance warning, if someone, somewhere, heard something, and a cop appeared, there was always the all-purpose backup plan.

Ditch the equipment.

Forget the mission.

Run.

“Explain to me again why I have to be Chuckles and you get to be Cobra Commander?” Eric asked Max, hooking the line to his belt and giving it two quick tugs. There was a grinding sound, and then the ground fell away beneath him as the mechanism hoisted him up. He grazed his fingers against the brick facade; it scraped and tickled as the wires hauled him up to the roof.

It was nothing like flying.

“Because you always make me laugh,” Max replied in a syrupy sweet voice. “At least, your face does.”

“You’re hilarious.”

“Chuckles is a noble leader of covert operations for the G.I. Joe team,” Max said. “You should be proud.”

Eric snickered. “And you should stop playing with dolls.”

“They’re not—”

There was a pause. Eric hoped he wouldn’t have to hear the lecture again, the one about eBay and nostalgia items and untapped gold mines. The one that comprehensively—just not convincingly—explained why Max had a pristine collection of Pokémon Beanie Babies on his top closet shelf.

“Never mind. Suffice it to say, that’s why you don’t get to pick your own code name,” Max said. “You don’t have the proper respect. Consider this your punishment.
Chuckles
.”

Eric scrambled over the edge and, with a thin sigh, planted his feet on the rooftop. Schwarz had already hurried over to the opposite edge, to get started on Phase Three. “So what’d Schwarz do to deserve Grunt?” Eric whispered.

“
That’s
not a punishment. That’s a description. Ever catch him with one of those vintage
Playboys
he loves so much?”

Eric made an exaggerated retching noise and flicked off the sound. Now if only, he thought, staring at Schwarz and wincing as he pictured what he desperately didn’t want to picture, he could shut off his brain.

Max was the one who finally explained it to me.

“Hacks. Not pranks. Never pranks. Pranks are for idiots.” He had his back to me. I’d interrupted him in pursuit of his other passion, hawking eighties nostalgia crap on eBay. That afternoon he was downloading photos of his latest acquisitions, a full collection of My Little Ponies, complete with Show Stable and Dream Castle. He’d pieced it together for a total of
twenty-seven dollars, and planned to resell it for at least three hundred. Just another day at the computer for Max, who believed that if you didn’t clear at least a five hundred percent profit on any given transaction, you just weren’t trying.