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Chapter 5 – Trip to Nowhere

  As the car drove away, the linebacker asked the driver, “Is there any word on what they want us to do with him?”

  The Nike jacket guy replied in a rich baritone, “They want us to stash him at Site Charlie. We can spend a little time on him to see if he has anything we need to act on immediately, but Jacob is coming back from New York and wants to talk with him tomorrow.”

  The linebacker rapped me on the forehead with his knuckle and chuckled as he gloated, “You are burned worse than a slug in a salt mine. There is no fucking way that a nerdy bitch like you had any idea what kind of a shit storm you were walking into. When Jacob decides he needs to get personally involved, be prepared to get fucked in pces you don’t even have a name for.”

  The big thug paused for a second, then continued, “Dave, you remember that kid that Jacob did in Baltimore? That kid would have sold his sister to a junkie mob just for a ten minute break from what Jacob did to him. I did not know a human could scream like that.”

  I let him go on for a good five minutes, droning on in his near falsetto about the various ways this Jacob guy had tortured people for information. While he talked, I tried to think of ways to escape while I examined all the afterimages flickering around Nick's rictus grin.

  He was saying something about salt and eyelids when I interrupted him, voice deadpan as fuck. “Wow, this Jacob boyfriend of yours sounds like some kind of Keyser S?ze BDSM nightmare, but…” Nick drove the side of his fist hard into my sor plexus, and Nike Dave started ughing in the front seat.

  I’m not gonna lie. I treasure that memory. You never get a chance to say shit like that. When I managed to breathe again, I continued. “I already know I’m cooked. I’ll tell you anything you want: passwords, access controls, bank account numbers—anything. I’ll answer any question.”

  The driver, who I now thought of as “Dave,” was shaking his head. “Man, that is hirious, kid. Good call on giving it up. If you really want to piss Nick off, though, tell him you think bradoodles are a sissy pet or that low fat diets are amazing.”

  Nick shook his head and said, “Fuck you, Dave.” Then he hit me again, this time in the stomach. He sat back in his seat, shaking his head his eyes narrowed to slits and his lips pencil thin.

  After giving me a moment to recover, Dave called out from the front seat, “Let’s start with the basics. Who was working with you on this job? Who were your partners?”

  “No one,” I replied honestly. “It’s just me. I used tools from other hackers, but I would never trust any of those guys with anything. It’s all transactional. We buy and trade tools, and that’s it.”

  Dave didn’t seem convinced, and I saw him eye me in the rearview mirror. “So you’re saying that you’re just some lone hacker who just happened to walk yourself into this mess. I don’t think that’s gonna fly without some solid proof. That girl at Stillpoint where you were hiding—she covered for you. There's no way she isn't involved. No sales clerk would randomly lie for someone they don't know.”

  I didn’t care if he believed me, so I answered honestly: “No, it isn’t like that. When I saw you go into the Starbucks, I noticed you had a gun, and I panicked and went into the first pce I found. I gave her a made-up story about how you were some abusive boyfriend who I was hiding from.”

  He shook his head. “You’re still not telling it straight. Why were you even walking around and not in the Starbucks? Where is your computer? Did you leave it with the girl at Stillpoint? I looked around and saw no ptops without someone using them.”

  I tried to expin, “I was using the Starbucks WiFi from my car. I left my computer in the car when I took off.”

  He shook his head more firmly. “Don’t even try to bullshit me, kid. If you were in your car, why the fuck would you get out and walk into a random business? You would have just driven off. Is your computer with that girl in that Stillpoint pce? Stop fucking lying to me, or this gets painful. You can’t protect anyone. We’ll know every friend you have, your family, and everyone in your life within a day. Just come clean.”

  What he asked shook me. Why had I gotten out of the car? Why didn’t I just drive off when I saw him? I still remembered the fear I felt at that moment—it was so insistent, urging me to get out and run. It felt primal and immediate, almost as if it had a specific command: get out of the car and walk away. But why? Was it just a mental malfunction where fear made me act irrationally, or would driving away have been the worse option? Did I need to escape into that Stillpoint specifically? There was too much going on, and I didn’t understand any of it. I didn’t even know if this was real.

  My thoughts distracted me as Dave kept asking questions. Then, I felt another punch to the gut that winded me and brought me back to the moment. “Pay attention and answer his fucking questions,” Nick urged angrily.

  After that, I just gave whatever answers I thought would sound convincing and appeared to be “giving up” my whole team. As they interrogated me, I gazed out the window and thought about what I saw and what it meant.

  At the time, I was just starting to understand the “afterimages,” but a few things stood out as we drove through the city. They didn’t appear around everything. Roads and buildings had none. Even the clouds in the sky cked them. People were a different story; they all had afterimages. Cars actively being driven had them, but parked vehicles did not. Occasionally, I would see a person who seemed to be nothing but an afterimage, cking any solid existence before eventually vanishing altogether.

  I didn’t know what it meant, but it was connected to people. Only humans and things connected to their actions, like their clothes or cars, had these ghostly counterparts.

  The most interesting thing I noticed were the afterimages around Nick. Dave had very few afterimages, mostly around his face and head. In contrast, Nick had them almost constantly, especially around his hands. Occasionally, I would see one entirely separate from the small changes, and a ghostly image of Nick would hit me. I could even feel a faint impact, but when the ghostly fist struck, it popped out of existence. Of course, Nick would hit me for real occasionally as well—usually, if I was slow to answer Dave or if he caught me in an inconsistency with the story I was making up about the supposed team I was a part of.

  I didn’t have an expnation for the afterimages that fully fit what I was experiencing, but I was starting to put together a theory. It had something to do with intentionality, capturing the subtle differences in our mental states and choices at any moment. The main image represented our actions, while the “afterimages” represented the branching possibilities of what we could have done but chose not to.

  Of course, another possibility was that I was utterly insane, high on acid, or otherwise out of it. Insanity was probably better than having two mercenary thugs looking to torture and kill me. Still, if I was crazy or high, these hallucinations were unlike anything I had ever known or experienced or even heard of.

  Each punch Nick nded reinforced my need to escape this extremely painful hallucination. In both of the other hallucinations, which I was beginning to view as premonitions, I returned to my body after dying, but not immediately. Each time I died, I experienced a few moments of crity outside my body before waking up back in the sensory deprivation tank. Dying did not seem likely this time; Nick and Dave wouldn’t let me die until they were finished with me.

  The other option was waking up when my hour expired. Between the first two hallucinations and this one, I must have been in that tank for nearly forty-five minutes. My hour in the tank would eventually end, and Luanda would wake me if the blue light didn’t.

  It seemed like forever, but it was probably closer to 40 minutes when we arrived in the Lower Queen Anne district and pulled up to the back of a defunct tattoo parlor. Graffiti covered much of what had once been a vibrant purple and bck mural offering tattoos and body piercings.

  We stopped near a chained door at the rear of the building and parked the car. Dave got out and walked over to the door. He unlocked two deadbolts and propped the door open with something I couldn’t see. Meanwhile, Nick unhooked my seatbelt and pulled me sideways so I faced the door. As Dave walked back to the car, I felt Nick's strong arms wrap around my neck in what felt like a triangle choke. He pulled me close into his body, and I could feel his face next to mine as he tightened down on my neck. My eyes saw red, and my head exploded in pain. I smelled peppermint on his breath as he whispered in my ear, and my vision faded, “Nighty night, computer boy.”

  As soon as I went unconscious, I was outside my body, watching the two of them drag my limp form towards the building. I marveled at their professionalism. To the casual observer, the way they carried me, I probably just looked like I was passed out drunk.

  Then I felt that blessed pull, and I was back in my body, back safe inside the sensory deprivation tank.

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