Morgan Abrams
~3 hours until Lockdown
The original pitch for the Praxis Arcology was that it was supposed to be a sort of self-contained, self-sustaining city-within-a-city type of deal. There are still posters peeling off the walls down in some of the lower employee-class districts promoting Praxis as a vision for the future. Filtered air, filtered water, complete with it’s own internet and private power grid. A model project for revitalizing an East Coast turned into a series of shallow seas by the catastrophic flooding of the past century.
And maybe that’s how it works elsewhere in the country? You wouldn’t know for sure. The Boston Arcology, for whatever reason, is split into a series of hundred-story skyscrapers, all connected together with tram lines suspended in the air between them in a kind of wheel-and-spoke design so that residents never have to risk actually being outside.
Maybe one day they’ll get around to building the rest of the damn thing.
“Attention ladies and germs,” Riley says as she hops off the second-to-last stair down the access well. She pulls her hand out of her pockets and flips a card between her fingers, repeating her trick from before.
Except this time she loses control and the card slips through her fingers, fluttering into the air.
“Shit!” Riley staggers on her feet, scrambling to catch it.
“G-g-got it!” You reach over her head and try to snatch the card out of the air only to misjudge – Riley slams her head into your elbow and both of you almost fall over, grabbing your respective injuries.
With a deep sigh, Brayden steps down to join the two of you and picks the card off the floor. “I’m already regretting this.”
You rub your arm, funny-bone pain radiating through your whole body. “Sorry.”
“No refunds, my dude.” Riley, still rubbing the top of her head, plucks the card from his fingers.
Brayden elects to ignore this and stays at the edge of the tiny, narrow stairwell. “What the hell are we doing down here anyway?”
“Our first magic trick.” Riley looks over at you and makes an exaggerated wink. Great, she’s still in performance mode. Honestly. She should have been the one taking drama classes, not you.
She doesn’t do any fancy card-flipping with her fingers this time. Merely walks over to the locked door set into the wall and taps the card against the reader. Half a second later the light beeps green, matched with a heavy ‘chunk’ noise as the door unlocks. “Ta-da!”
Brayden’s eyebrows shoot up as she yanks the door open. “How’d you guys get that?”
“Trade secret,” Riley answers with a smile.
She browbeat her older brother, Jun, into bribing someone for a spare maintenance team card, that’s how. Things had been... bad after the Halloween party, and it only got worse a few weeks later when Jason posted that edited audio of you and Brayden online.
From behind Brayden’s back you roll your eyes at Riley. “You’re really hamming it up this time,” you sign.
She sticks her tongue out at you as Brayden steps past her, ducking his head down against the lower ceiling of the maintenance tunnel.
It was Riley who had the idea to go looking for somewhere you could exist where you wouldn’t have to deal with anyone. Not their comments, not their judgments, not even so much as the buzz of their thoughts.
With minimal lighting and minimal security, an entire abandoned skyscraper also turned out to be a great place to get away from the Superintendent’s constant surveillance. You can do almost anything over in Zeta and not have to worry about it getting back to anyone as long as you’re smart and, like, avoid the main stairwell or the ground floor. The only security Praxis is concerned with over there is the ‘keeping out vagrants looking for shelter’ kind.
Handling A* is another matter. With the damn tracking chip in your arm, it knows where you are 24/7 whether your phone is on or not. It’s like Rivka doesn’t trust you or something.
Not like you would ever do something like, say, buy a second child-tracker to set up a dupe and proxy that you can turn on with the push of a button to make it look like you’re still in your room.
That’s crazy – who would do something like that. Oops your finger slipped and now you’re suddenly, by every metric except reality, back in your room. Wild how that happened like that.
Riley stares at you, still holding the access door open. “What the hell are you laughing at your phone for? Come on, dude.”
Your face catches fire.
A quick glance up the stairwell to make sure no one’s in sight before you hurriedly step though. “S-s-sorry!”
Once the door shuts behind her, the three of you are left in a murky half-light, the tunnel gently curving ahead as it follows the track. The low ceiling and walls are full of exposed cables and pipes that buzz in the back of your head. The ambient electricity in the air is enough to make the hair on your neck stand up.
The entire room vibrates slightly as a tram runs over head, the racket is enough to preclude all verbal conversation even when muffled. Once things go quiet again, Riley holds out her hand to Brayden. “Okay dude, got your phone?”
“What?”
“Time to turn it off.” Riley holds out her own, pressing the power button long enough to send it into its shutdown cycle.
Brayden doesn’t move. Scowls to mask the spike of fear you can feel shoot through him. Has he really never been without his phone before?
“Why the hell would I do that?” he snaps.
It’s because the Super is perfectly capable of tracking and recording you through your phone no matter where you are, you don’t say.
“Look dude, it’s either phones off or you can go stalk your girlfriend on your own time,” Riley says.
“Fine.”
You watch as Brayden takes out his phone. Holds down the power button. Off it goes.
The entire half-lit hallway shudders occasionally as the three of you walk across in painfully awkward silence. There’re no windows to showcase the however-many hundreds of feet above the ground you are, thankfully. Just the off-yellow glow of the maintenance lights every few feet, turning on and off automatically in response to Riley’s access card.
It’s not too late to change your mind. Turn around. Go back home. They’ll both be pissed, but… can’t even say Rivka will be happy over you being responsible or law-abiding or whatever. Rivka’s never happy. No matter what you do, she always finds something wrong with it.
Riley cranes her head back to shoot you a look. “You’re not gonna collapse on me again, right?” she signs.
You scowl.
Stop taking your meds one time and nobody trusts you.
“So… is someone going to explain to me why we’re doing this? This better not be some convoluted murder plot.” Brayden laughs, failing fantastically in his attempt to cover up the anxiety pouring off him.
You ignore him, let Riley explain it. Which she does, just as badly, seeing as she barely understands it herself. You need an unsecured access point to mess with the Super directly. The more direct, the less levels of security you have to bother with getting past.
It’s how you got into the school systems to begin with. Figured out the right sequence of passwords to get admin access and then it was just a matter of building yourself your own little private backdoor entrance.
Like dressing up as a bank teller and taking the back entrance. As long as you look like you belong there, not many people will bother to ask who the hell you are and to show your totally-real and not-at-all-fake credentials to prove it.
After ten minutes of walking, you reach your destination: the maintenance door up into the Zeta tower transit station. Riley slaps the card against the reader and, like before, the door unlocks with a beep. You hustle up the stairway and into the abandoned station, pausing only briefly to make sure there’s no passing tram to spot you.
A quick hand signal brings Riley up, with Brayden trailing behind. He scrunches his nose up as he looks around, heart beating a little fast. Having second thoughts about following two people who hate you into an abandoned building, Brayden?
There are no benches on the waiting platforms, no artwork on the walls, no blaring 3D advertisements or TVs running talk shows. A few pots full of dusty fake plants are tucked against one corner next to the boarded-up elevator shaft, as if still waiting for the day to be distributed around the space.
“Welcome to Zeta tower, boys,” Riley announces, kicking a crushed can of soda across the floor. It slides across the tiles, hitting the wall with an echoing clatter.
It takes two of you and a discarded piece of plywood Riley finds on the floor to get enough pressure to break the magnetic lock on the emergency stairs and pry open the doors. It’s pitch-black going down and up both. There’s no other light source once you get away from the windows.
While you get out your flashlight, Riley lets the plywood board drop with a heavy thunk. The beam of light cuts through the dust, set swirling thanks to your efforts.
Riley wrinkles her nose in the dead, humid air, clapping a hand over her face. “Smells like wet socks today…”
“I like it,” you lie.
Riley gives you a look, unimpressed.
She’s right. The warm, wet air soaks into everything like a gym locker on overdrive. You don’t usually pay attention to the outside weather, but the past week must have been really hot to have sunk this far into the building.
“Well, good for you,” Riley says as she finds her own flashlight. Flicks it on. “C’mon, we don’t want to just stand around in the open.”
“Don’t I get a flashlight?” Brayden grumbles.
“You can always chicken out if you want,” Riley says.
The static hum of machinery is so faint that the absence is almost deafening in its own right. No HVAC fans circulating purified air, no buzzing lights, nothing. Just the soft noises of Riley and Brayden near you, swallowed into a larger, greater silence.
You find yourself thumbing the controls of your headphones, turning the volume down before cuing up another Ysme Wonder track. You leave them hanging around your neck, your own personal background music.
Brayden hunches his shoulders and covers his mouth with a hand to ward off the dust and the smell. “This is where you two have been sneaking off to, isn’t it?” he asks.
“No,” you answer.
“Yes,” Riley says.
You shoot her a glare. She sticks her tongue out at you.
“Why?” Brayden asks, mystified. “Aren’t you guys worried about getting attacked out here?”
“Sounds like somebody’s chicken!” Riley crows, flapping her arms like bird wings for emphasis.
“Fuck off, I’m serious!”
“Dude, come on, who’s gonna attack us all the way out here? God?”
He shoves his hands into his pockets, trying to keep close as you lead the way up the stairs. “Sure, Riley. It’s God I’m worried about,” he says with a flat affect, “not the terrorist plague that turns people into monsters.”
Riley waves the idea off. “Imago’s an outside problem. Even if like, hypothetically, someone infected broke in here and transformed and shit… what would they eat? There’s nothing here.”
“There’s us,” Brayden grumbles under his breath.
“It-it-it’s cool. Out here,” you speak up, before Brayden can drag the conversation down any further. “You can g-g-go anywhere. And… be as loud or quiet as um, as you w-want.”
“Man, I almost forgot how weird you two are,” Brayden mutters under his breath.
If the transit hub counts as ‘creepy’ then the next floor up must be even worse. Barely finished at all. The framework of the tower itself, exposed like bones surfacing out of half-finished walls. Writing mark spaces for electrical wiring and air circulation systems that had either never been installed or were later stripped out. At an intersection that’s been filled with rubble from a collapsed ceiling, the three of you climb through a hole in a broken part of the wall and find yourselves in what might as well be a cavern, the unfinished mirror to the mall in Epsilon.
Brayden comes to a stop behind you, craning his head up to take it all in as you cut your flashlight through the void, a minuscule beam all but swallowed up. Thick clouds of dust reflect off the light, dancing in the air.
“Shit,” he breathes.
“Cool, right?” Riley calls out, still climbing through the rubble.
“My one complaint,” she adds as she catches up, “is that this place is a pain in the ass to get to.” She huffs, red-faced from physical exertion. Bends over to wipe the grime off her pants and you avert your eyes before you can get more than a glimpse down her shirt.
Don’t be a creep.
Once Brayden’s done looking, you take the lead again. You know where you want to set up, it’s just a question of whether you can find it from here.
“Hey,” Riley stage-whispers, “if he trips and dies out here, which of us gets his stuff?”
“Um…” You’re only half-paying attention, counting the number of hallways passed on your hand as you look for the right one. “W-w-wouldn’t his parents–?”
Riley snickers. “I was being rhetorical, you dork.”
Heat in your face. “O-oh.”
Brayden glares at you both. “I can hear you.”
Heading away from the empty mall, the hallways narrow. There are insets in the ceiling where light fixtures would have gone, loose trash and rubble pushed up into the corners of turns. You tap your headphones and call up a new ear worm to fill the too-quiet space in your head: Énddottir. Don’t usually go for music with vocals, but theirs feels less like words and more like incoherent guttural screaming.
Like to think you have a good enough sense of direction to be able to navigate all this by heart. Three songs in and you’re there. An empty office space, the sign on the door proudly claiming the office-that-never-was for Praxis Security Solutions.
Brayden hesitates at the doorway. Just for a second. “Hey.”
Riley stops, glancing back at him. You ignore it. The room is a perfect square. A bench has been pushed up against one of the far walls. Your workspace.
Do your best to nudge the bench aside with your foot so you can get at the wall panel behind it. It’s just resting in place, easy enough to dig into the edges with the tips of your nails and to pry it loose.
The panel pops free, falling back with a thunk as it slides to the floor. You take a minute to look the exposed section over, check for any damage, or changes. These wires run straight through the floor and, ultimately, down to the basement – a direct line from there to the rest of the arcology’s intra-net. A section of wiring a few feet off the ground has had its insulation casing stripped, exposing the naked metal underneath.
The sight makes you pause. Did you forget to tape them back up last time? Looking closer, everything seems just how you left it.
It’s fine.
It’s fine. You just ditzed out and forgot to clean up or something.
Stop being paranoid, you weirdo.
“Hey,” Brayden repeats himself. “Morgan.”
Riley is still hanging back as Brayden walks towards you.
Is he…? No. God. Just go away Brayden.
Nope. He’s still trying to catch your attention.
Riley sits down against the wall with this big self-satisfied grin on her face. Did she put him up to this? She promised you wouldn’t have to talk to him.
You glare in her direction and she pretends not to see it.
Damnit Riley. What the hell?
You find your fingers resting on one of the earpieces of the headphones hanging around your neck. You’re doing this for Riley. And the Ysme plushie. You can’t just punch him now.
No matter how much you might think about it.
“W-what.”
“I just wanted to say I’m sorry, okay?” He doesn’t look directly at you, which is just fine because you’re a little busy right now, thanks. He rubs the back of his neck, unsure what to say for a moment.
When it becomes clear you aren’t going to interject, he continues. “I was just trying to go get help, you know? I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t mean for any of that other stuff to happen, okay? With Security, or the Chattrnet posts, or… or any of it, you know?”
You ignore him, staring at the wires in front of you. You need to focus damnit if you’re not going to electrocute yourself doing this.
“What Jason did– I’m not friends with any of them anymore, you know that right? I mean… I knew he was an asshole but I didn’t realize he was that… bad,” Brayden finishes weakly, twisting his hands in front of him.
“D-don’t want to-to-to talk. About it.” You wave a hand in Riley’s direction. She’s got her feet stretched out in front of her, her vape out.
Brayden frowns. Disappointed? Which– no, you aren’t going to let him make you feel bad about this. You don’t feel bad. You don’t. And now he’s hovering over you, as if making you feel boxed-in is going to somehow change your answer.
Everything keeps coming back to the stupid party and it’s getting old. You’re going to get this job done and go back to never seeing Brayden, or Jason, or Rafael or anyone else from that night ever again, thanks.
Once you peel the tape off the wires, you fish out your tablet from one pocket. You unfold it one-handed with a double wrist motion. Snap-snap! Stupid. Showy. Bad for the hinges, but it looks cool and with two people present it’s hard to resist not showing off a little. Even if one of them’s fucking Brayden. You unspool a length of cable from your other pocket. One end plugs neatly into the USB port, the other splits into three separate wires, their metallic ends exposed so you can splice them into the ones in the wall.
“What’re you doing?” Brayden asks.
“He’s making the magic happen. Give him some space, dude,” Riley answers, patting the floor next to her in invitation. “Tell me about more about Cass. Who’s her internship with, anyway?”
“Praxis Biotique.”
“Biotique? The medical division? What, like Morgan’s mom?”
Hearing your name prompts you to lift your head. Riley sees and gestures to you, bringing you into the conversation. “Doesn’t your mom work at Biotique?”
“Y-yeah…?”
“You ever run into Cass over there?”
You shake your head. At least, you don’t remember anyone with that name. It’s not like you have any idea what this Cass looks like.
“D-d-different de–department?” you offer.
“So, what’s Cass doing?” Riley asks, saving you from having to directly address Brayden.
“I don’t actually… understand all of it? Something to do with accelerated healing? She applied and got offered an early internship.”
Riley whistles. “Lucky girl.”
“Yeah. Sure is.”
Is that pride in his voice, or jealousy?
You do your best to ignore them both, their conversation dissolving into background static once you pull your headphones on. Careful to avoid touching the naked copper as much as you can. A pair of pliers tucked in behind the wall holds them steady as you twist each connection into place. Hook up secured, you check the screen.
You hunch over, tapping out commands. With the spliced connection, there won’t be any way for someone to track down where your access attempts are coming from at least.
Well, you’re pretty sure there aren’t.
Like. 80% certain?
You chew the inside of your cheek, hitting rejection after rejection as you run through ideas for getting access into the higher security functions of the Superintendent.
The Super is a powerful AI, sure. It has to be, in order to be capable of managing every system in the entire arcology. But at the end of the day, it’s still just an AI. A big overgrown algorithmic black box, as Rivka would say. You just need to find the right key for the access level you want.
It takes longer than you’d like to figure out a path in.
Sort of dims the ‘tech wizard’ mystique Riley likes to cast you with when pitching grade changes and exam answers, to have you still fumbling with working out the exact right sequence of access codes and passwords. In your defense, this has to be like… an order of magnitude harder.
This isn’t anything like school where you could just lurk around the admin office long enough for someone to be logging into their account at the right time. You have to go through the public list of security and IT admin employees, cross reference with their social media profiles and take, well, educated guesses. You can only risk guessing the password to a given account, like, twice max without triggering a lockout alert and it looks like the passwords are able to be dozens of characters long.
The first time it works feels like a miracle. A silent cheer escaping your throat.
Any trepidation about doing this on Brayden’s behalf almost doesn’t matter at this point. This might actually be possible.
It’s a start anyway. Just a random low-level Security grunt, but that gives you access to the internal text chat, which is even more information to make the next guess. And the next.
It takes the better part of two hours. Jumping through identities one by one to get high enough up the chain to actually do anything. You don’t get the big breakthrough into a full-on top level Security admin account until long after Riley and Brayden have run out of things to say and are just awkwardly passing Riley’s vape back and forth. All you need is some music playing on Riley’s phone and it’d be like you were all back in 8th grade.
Feels a bit too much like when all three of you were friends.
From the admin account, you’re able to set up a new access with custom permissions. Full Inquiry/Read/Write access to the Super, automatic log masking, the works. Safest option would be to run a script to auto-delete the account once you finish here, but… you did all this work already. What are the odds anyone even notices? Fuck it, this is like the school access you had but on steroids.
You look up from your screen, catch Riley’s attention. Give her a thumbs up.
She claps her hands together. “Awesome. Let’s get to work babes.”
***
It takes half an hour just to pin down Cass in the system. Brayden, of course, didn’t think to get a scan of his girlfriend’s ID number. Which, irritating. How did he expect you to find her without that? Still, while an unexpected hiccup, it’s not insurmountable. You just make Brayden hand over his and then run a search through the system until finding the two of them together. Then pull her number from the surveillance data and you’re good to go. Easy peasy.
Once you’ve got Cassandra identified, there it all is, right there in the data: Company record, grades, purchase history, medical files, her current location, even live audio and visuals all tracked by facial recognition via phone, room cameras, the microphones in the TV screens and thermostats, anything and everything connected to the Praxis network.
A little work running a correlation search turns up hours and hours of raw data for scrolling through. Time to see if any of those, ahem, strictly speculative scripts you’d written out, will actually work on the Super. Let’s see, dimple out sleep time, identify and log recurring voices… Should you just search for men's voices? Did they say if she was Bi? – Probably not but you weren’t really paying attention.
“Well? What’s she doing right now?” Brayden has gotten a little too close. Leaning over your shoulder to try and see your tablet.
You lean away from him. Tap a menu to bring up the feed. “Well. Right now she-she-she’s having lunch.” A ceiling height view of what looks like a crowded cafeteria. The image quality is horrible, gray-scaled and blurry. Cassandra is only identifiable by an ID tag the Superintendent helpfully lays over the video.
You tap a key and the video feed jumps to a different camera, this one close enough to make out Cassandra drinking something through a straw. Could probably pull up her purchase history and figure out what it is if you just–
“Is that live?” Brayden asks.
“Y-yeah. I’m uh… I’m g-ghosting her right now.” You bite your lip.
“Ghosting?”
“Y-yeah,” you say, declining the unspoken request to elaborate.
The fact that anyone with sufficient access to the Arcology Superintendent could track just about anyone through something as mundane as the smoke alarms or the automatic doors is one of those things that freaked you out for a few months the first time you put it together. Spiraled into full-blown paranoia for awhile after the Halloween fight and the online harassment and the conviction everyone was out to get you.
Completely irrational. You know. You get it. You’re crazy. You remember the therapist’s argument painfully well. Don’t need to give Brayden any further ideas. The sooner he gets what he wants and leaves, the better.
“Got um… got the-the-the last couple weeks in th-the record too.”
“‘The-the-the’ Knock it off, Morgan. Is she cheating on me or not?”
Riley puts her arm out, warding Brayden back. “Don’t be an ass. Let him work.”
Brayden throws his hands up, stepping away. Paces as you drop the live feed and start running a check back on the recorded footage. Images cut across the screen in a backwards slide show as the search script on your tablet talks with the Super, sending instructions and comparing the results. Anything flagged for further review gets bottled and sidebar’d.
About a month’s worth of backlogged records are in there, you think. Less, if you zero out all the time spent asleep. The sooner you can package everything into a dump file the sooner you can go back to never talking to Brayden again.
A tap on your shoulder gets your immediate attention, freezing you mid keystroke. Riley points towards the playback window you moved to the corner of the screen. “Hold up, who’s that she’s with?”
“What? Who’s what? Is it a guy?” Brayden’s suddenly back over your other shoulder, great.
Chewing your lip, you stop the rewind and maximize the video. The resolution’s only so-so but it’s still better than the live feed was. Cassandra is sitting in a wooden chair, positioned at an angle across from what looks like an office desk. The picture is angled enough that this must be a ceiling camera. A tap brings in audio, but it’s mostly white noise. The hum of A/C vents and computer fans, the electric buzz of the light fixtures in that too-regular way that makes you think of audio masking.
You tap a button to switch to a different camera. Get a better picture of the room. Sitting across from Cassandra at the desk is an older woman, her legs crossed, one foot bouncing slightly in that all-too-familiar gesture of impatience. Angled her body to not be face on with the camera, but there’s no mistaking her for anyone else. She’s wearing one of her gray jackets, one hand on the desk, fingers splayed out over a folder stuffed with papers.
“Hey–” Riley taps your shoulder again, “–isn’t that your mom?”