Chapter twelve

  Evening, Van Nuys, California

  The sun had only just set on the cool California evening. A steady line of cars wound their way along the state's infamous freeway system, their headlights moving like glowing beads on the wire of some immense abacus. Each driver's life just another ONE or ZERO in the great American experiment. The hills were alive with the echoing hum of tires and engines drowning out the calls of pigeon, crow, and gull.

  The noise rolled across the valley and reverberated off the concrete sides of an abruptly closed hardware store. To the casual observer on the 405, the store wouldn't have drawn any attention. The box trucks parked against the store's front and side entrances could have been nightly freight deliveries waiting to unload. On second glance, a careful viewer would notice the oddities. Despite the parking lot lights, the marquee was unlit. The lot was empty of cars, employee or customer.

  The store had closed up abruptly two days prior. First-shift workers arriving at six a.m. were met with armed guards, who explained their sudden "promotion to customer" before escorting the staff into the company breakroom or offices to clear out any personal effects. The staff complained, but the guards merely watched impassively until the last person was gone.

  The October moon shone through the smog onto the roof of the shuttered box store.

  Inside the store, the merchandise remained on the shelves. The music still played: muzak from generations past mixed inexplicably with the more female-oriented pop music of the last decade. The songs were carbon copies of each other, picked as if by a malicious scientist and chosen at the exact cadence to drive one mad while listening to them day after day, hour after hour, under the fluorescent lights. But here in this store, the lights had been converted to LEDs in the last decade—a sign of progress ahead. Too bad the profits weren't progressing as quickly.

  Inside, the lights still shone, but at half their normal level. Midnight levels. Power conservation—usually only seen by overnight stockers.

  All unclaimed personal belongings remained inside the lockers, beneath desks and tucked in corners beyond the eye of managers: phone chargers, vape pens, knives sporting non-reghulation blades, dimebags. All sealed away behind locked doors. More than locked—sealed shut, like an Egyptian tomb. No one was getting in, not that way.

  No one was getting out either.

  The lights were still on at the typical night-shift skeleton-crew half-light setting as pop princesses sang their hearts out in the store that warmed without its air conditioner through the dim, half-lit aisles.

  Tito groaned and sat up. His back was stiff and uncomfortable. His right eye refused to open, the lid held in place by some sort of crusted tension. He squinted through his left eye at the floor.

  Hard concrete. Indoors.

  He reached up and rubbed his head, wincing as his fingers found a nasty lump. Not good. His fingers trailed down the sticky mess on his forehead and probed at the lid of his right eye. A crust of something rough glued his eyelashes together. A scab? He rubbed at the matted mess, felt pulverized bits fall away between his fingers until his right eye opened freely.

  Tito slid a hand into his jeans pocket. No phone. He tried the other side, then his rear pockets for good measure. All empty. No phone, no billfold—no stick either. That one really sucked. The crappy chrome-plated Jimenez pistol would've come in handy here. Wherever here was.

  For the first time, Tito took in his location. He sat in the open space between two checkout stands, a width spread wide enough to allow a forklift to travel between them. A whitewashed wall thick with economy paint stretched up to the ceiling 30 or more feet above.

  It was the lumber section of a hardware store, one of the big box varieties. He'd been in dozens in his life. Probably even this one. But there was something different. In front of him, where the roll-up door should have been, the way was blocked. Literally. Cinderblocks rose in a sturdy wall, stacked in alternating layers, with thick concrete sticking out of each seam like vanilla from an ice cream sandwich.

  The man inhaled and frowned. His chest ached—bruises, probably. The air was warm, stale, tasting of cardboard and concrete and twisted two-by-fours. Somewhere overhead, Taylor Swift complained anew about an old flame.

  I don't think you're in Compton anymore, Tito. He frowned and closed his eyes to think more clearly. This was not how he expected the day to go.

  Tito's day had begun like it usually did, waking up on a couch in the apartment he shared with his roommate and cousin, Javier. It was only supposed to be a temporary arrangement, staying with his gang-affiliated cousin, but the days had stretched to weeks and the weeks had stretched for months until it had been a year and a half on Javi's couch. That was all supposed to change soon, thanks to the money Tito was making now. Another week, two max, and he'd have enough saved to get his own place and say adios to Javi forever.

  He thought that he knew his supplier. In the last few months he'd gotten six loads of pure hash from the distributor. Today should have been the same. It wasn't. And that was his fault. His guard shouldn't have been down. Estúpido. Tito cursed. Now look—trapped in a home goods warehouse.

  The man whimpered, closed his eyes, and looked to the sky as if to pray. Saw only corrugated steel and realized that no god would save him now. It was too late for Tito. It felt like one bad trip.

  He didn't even like drugs. They never seemed to deliver the highs that were advertised. But nothing else in this life did, so Tito kept trying. This latest batch had seemed promising. Fresh from south of the border and at a much cheaper price than normal. Enough to sell. Enough to get ahead. So Tito had shown up for the deal—the deal where he got jumped.

  It was dim in here, not dark certainly, but not as bright as before the blackout they dropped over his head. When the man, or men, jumped him in the alley, all he knew was one moment he was approaching the usual meetup spot. The next, strong arms were around him, grabbing him by the waist. Draping the hood over his head. An elbow locking around his neck. Other hands hammering mercilessly into his gut. His kidneys. All while the chokehold subdued him. Tito never had a chance. He passed out. Only to wake hours later, empty-handed on the concrete floor of the lumber section.

  He began to wander, following the aching whisper of his bladder. The men's restroom was blessedly clear, accessible through the sort of doorless, zigzag entryway Tito had grown up seeing in malls and rest areas.

  The automatic lights flicked on as he entered, illuminating the row of urinals to his right. Tito picked the one farthest from the door and heaved a sigh of relief. At least something was going right today.

  After a minute's relief, he zipped up and crossed to the sinks. The pump deposited a slim dollop of pink soap into his hand. Tito rubbed it vigorously and passed his soap-slicked hands under the faucet. The fixture came to life, rewarding him with a spurt of water. As he washed his hands, a blinking red light caught Tito's eye. It was coming from the hand dryer mounted to the wall beside the exit of the restroom. Must be a new feature designed to make people dry their hands, he thought. It worked, and Tito crossed the tile floor to dry his hands. Satisfied that he at least was clean, he stepped out of the restroom.

  He was about to step into the store proper when a nearby open door caught his eye. In the same hallway as the restroom, a door stood ajar. Propped open by a weathered-looking block of two-by-four wedged under the bottom of the door. A sign in white and orange font proclaimed "Break Room - Staff Only."

  Tito walked inside. The lights came on, revealing a shambolic and depressing breakroom, with a double line of blow-molded plastic tables and folding steel chairs. A floor-to-ceiling row of lockers covered an entire wall. Many of the grate-fronted cubes hung open, their contents apparently removed en masse, while others sat still clutching their masters' treasures. The other wall hummed with the squat presence of two dented refrigerators, a soft drink machine, and a "Healthy Choices" vendmatic—except someone had written "wheel of death" over the Healthy Choices branding with a thick permanent marker.

  What walls were visible were painted over in a human resources attempt at hominess, in shades of robin's egg blue and avocado green, with a bright orange pinstripe running along at eye level. It made him dizzy to look at.

  Tito approached the wall of lockers and opened one of the unsecured doors. Inside was an apron of folded cloth smelling of sweat and something like fertilizer. With a disgusted look on his face, he closed the gate and moved on to the next open locker. This one had half a jar of peanuts inside along with a utility knife and one of the store's UPC scanning smartphones. Tito pressed the various buttons along the phone, until its screen lit up. It flashed a variant of a familiar logo as it powered up, complete with a goofily grinning cartoon dog.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Scannerly, a Tetherly company

  I didn't know they made these, Tito thought, as the phone booted up. But when it asked for login credentials, he was at a loss. After trying to brute force his way in with obtuse guesses for a few minutes—trying "password," then "123456," followed by random combinations of what he assumed might be the previous owner's name or birthday based on a faded photo tucked in the locker corner—he dropped the device on the table and moved on to the fridges.

  Jackpot.

  Twenty minutes later and about three thousand calories heavier, Tito swaggered out of the break room.

  He was feeling better now. True, he was still locked inside the hardware store, but now that his belly was full and his bladder was empty, Tito was willing to explore a bit more. He exited into the store proper and wandered up to the cash registers. They were open—all the drawers turned upside down. He flipped one over idly. Empty, as he figured. It was worth a look, though. He turned to look at the main exit of the store.

  Where the typical double sliding glass storefront door should have been, rose another cinderblock wall, just like at the lumber side of the building.

  Tito felt a chill. Why would someone do that? He jogged along past the exits and rounded back into the store, passing the paint department to his left and the hardware department as he turned to face the store's front entrance.

  Another wall, bricked in, like that story from high school by that goth poet. Mierda, this is loco. He'd have to go through the garden center and climb over the fence at this rate. Unless...

  Tito turned and looked over his shoulder. Down the main aisle, past the already-present Christmas tree displays, toward the garden center entrance. It was gone, sealed off by a wall of gray concrete and block, just like the others.

  He was trapped. Blocked off. Locked in. Walled in brick by brick inside of the happy place of suburban home husbands everywhere.

  Tito swallowed. His body ached, and his full stomach roiled with discomfort. He wasn't feeling so great about this anymore. But he wasn't about to give up. He'd spent a summer working for his tío demoing old houses, back before he found easier ways to make money. He headed back past the restrooms, diverting to reach the tool section. Bypassing the overpriced plastic toolboxes and complicated Chinesium clamps, he found what he was looking for. Long-handled hickory, eight pound, sledgehammer—the sort used for breaking concrete. Tito picked it up, hefted it appraisingly, and rested the tool on his shoulder.

  He walked the thirty yards to the nearest cinderblock wall, ran his hand along the center-most brick, testing the cinderblock. It wouldn't take him long, Tito figured. He stepped back, reared the sledge back like a major league batter, and let it swing. His hammer took the center cinderblock full on, cracking it soundly.

  He swung again and again, fragments of concrete getting into his face, his eyes, his hair, and sweat dripping down his nose and mustache while he swung. The work was hard, but quick. It didn't take him but five minutes until he had a man-sized hole.

  But he hadn't expected the steel on the other side.

  "No! Madre de Dios, no!" Tito moaned, wading through the cinderblock fragments, pulling the pieces out of the way, and feeling the wall of steel. It was cool to the touch, the day's heat energy already transferred into the evening air. Logically, it couldn't have been there for long, but the wall stood, unmoving. He pounded on it with his closed fist and heard no echo, no reverberation. It was solid.

  With some panic, Tito picked up the sledgehammer again and attacked the wall at its leftmost edge. It didn't take long to expose the steel beneath. He went to the right and found the same story.

  He ran, sledgehammer in hand, back through the store, his shirt now soaked with sweat and fear, until he found the lumber exit. Raising his hammer, he again swung it until the cinderblocks were obliterated—and saw there the same plate steel.

  Whoever put him here did not want him to leave.

  Something bad was going on. And that was when Tito heard the noise. He turned and saw, in the space beside the lumber cashier's register, a large metal box. Really more of a cage the size of a large air conditioner condenser. It was all done in plate steel, with bolts rather than welds holding the angles together. He hadn't noticed it before. But it must have been there, because no one else was in here with him. Right? The box was the size of a large AC condenser. But AC condensers don't have swing-open gates, or shadowy things moving inside.

  He heard the noise again. Something like an autotuned growl, like a junkyard dog on SoundCloud. Definitely canine, but not like anything Tito had ever heard before.

  The thing inside the box moved closer to the gate, its head only an outline in the dimness. It looked like a mannequin's head, with protruding goggles, and the round but tapering point of a chin/nose. LEDs flickered along the surface of its "face." Some sort of robot?

  Tito took a curious step forward. "Hey, jefe, what are you?" He leaned in closer. The robotic captive cocked its head, lenses whirring as apertures adjusted, focusing in on Tito's face.

  The robot barked. No autotune this time, just a pure, authoritative, no-nonsense alpha BARK. It came at full volume, not just from the robot's internal speakers, but from every overhead speaker in the building, drowning out the slow, forgettable Neil Diamond song.

  Tito swore and retreated, wrapping his fingers instinctively around the haft of the sledgehammer. I'm sorry, mama, he thought. The robot's sheet metal enclosure flared with red lights, its LEDs glowing bright as wind-blown coals.

  As Tito watched in growing horror, the overhead lights went out. The robotic canine's lights seemed to grow in intensity, casting the shadow of the chicken wire grate in a strange pattern across the concrete to the edge of Tito's shoes. It barked once more, and then went dark. The store was dark and silent as a tomb. Something whined, high and inhuman. Tito realized the low sound came from his own open mouth. He gritted his teeth, pressed his lips tight, and held the sledge up between himself and the gate.

  In the silence, something metallic clicked. The gate swung open, followed by the clicking clatter of metallic feet.

  Tito turned, blindly, and sprinted down the two-by-four aisle, the scent of pine in his nose—pine, sweat, and fear—as he ran, making a sharp right to find some place to hide within the store.

  Behind him slowly, the hound followed.

  The dark store echoed with the sound of the test subject's voice. It did no good. Not that he wasn't heard. He was. Every word, every promise, every prayer and every profanity was captured in 4K. Not just by the active Pursuit Unit Proxy, or the store's infrared camera array, but by the swarm drones that followed from above the topstock shelves.

  The technicians heard it all—they just didn't care.

  Secreted away in the front wall of the hardware store, behind the customer service desk and internet order pickup cage, a locked door stood in the cinder block wall. It still bore the sign that had been accurate until the day the store closed.

  Training and Management

  Behind the door, past the store manager's monk-like cell, to the right, the training room stood open. The floor was clear, folding meeting tables removed, while the training room desk—an L-shaped slab of melamine and fiberboard spanning two walls of the room—remained. Three men sat at the desk, each ensconced in their own personal battlestation. The store's ancient thin-client training computers were gone, replaced by a bank of state-of-the-art Tetherly laptops and monitors—three per technician.

  The men had been here before. In this store. For the last two nights. And at another testing ground, watching over the process with earlier models. The Pursuit Unit Proxy, or PUP for short, was a favorite project of Newton's, and one the Tetherly black budget boys had been working on for some time. The three technicians pulling night shift for this test had seen a lot in their time with the company. All the sort of stuff you can't take home to the wife or girlfriend or boyfriend. But that's life. And at least they were still alive. Unlike some other people. Like Tito.

  "And it's a wrap," Chris, the head tech of the night's events, said. He let out a contented sigh. A man with thinning salt-and-pepper hair and wire-rimmed glasses, his face bore the weary lines of someone perpetually on the edge, burnt out by hero worship and office politics. He rattled away at his keyboard, adding a short summary of the night's test to his formal report. This was a dream come true. He was doing important things now. Thomas Newton would read his report, read his own actual words. He pressed the excitement down. Had to remain professional. It was hard. "Good show tonight, guys."

  "I dunno about that," the man in the middle replied. Marco, broad-shouldered in his blue hoodie, with the suggestion of lapsed muscle in his arms. His jaw had been sharp once, angular and severe. But good times had brought a softness to his face, and a roundness to his belly. He shook his head. "I thought he was gonna put up more of a fight. With that mallet."

  At the end of the desk, a short man shrugged. His eyes peeked out like huge hard-boiled eggs from behind his wire-rimmed glasses, while his flaming and unruly mop of red hair threatened to spread down his head like a flood of fire. "He was an addict. Not a good test."

  "Hey, we're training the PUPs to intercept criminals, not Navy SEALs," Chris replied. "Most of them are addicts, Van."

  "I'm just saying, if you fail to plan, you're planning to fail." The redhead spread his arms wide. "We need better subjects."

  "OK," Chris shrugged. "Go ahead and file that in your report. Oh, that's right. You don't write those. I do."

  Van looked down and muttered.

  "Hey, hey," Marco interrupted. "You guys need a break. We all do. Let's get this done and we can go visit a club I know where the dancers are turned on by a Tetherly name badge. Chris, you finish up the report, I'll steer the Proxy back to her kennel, and Van can go clean up the, uh"—he squinted at the messy black and white image on one of his screens—"the shower stall display. Looks like you'll need a broom AND a mop this time."

  Chris shook his head. "We finish this, and I am going home. If you want to act like a randy frat boy, that's all you." He finished typing, pressed the Enter key, and sat back to stare at the "motivational" posters on the training room wall. He was still parsing an outdated one about employee stock options when Van left, muttering, with a dustmop slung over his shoulder.

  Chris's report flew invisibly through the air, existing for an eyeblink as one of the billions of packets of encrypted data in transit at any given moment, before landing in its new home, the Tetherly secure cloud. Like most of Tetherly's cloud storage, this server was located in a subterranean vault. But unlike most, this server, and its peripherally related infrastructure, resided deeper down, towards the bottom of a decommissioned Cold War era missile silo. Once written into the hard drives there beneath the Kansas soil, only Newton could read the findings. Hell, only Newton and a handful of picked men knew of the server, the PUP program, or the original human asset department that it would eventually replace.

  Eyes only. Need to know. Chris swelled with pride, and something else. Power might be the ultimate aphrodisiac—but secrets were a damn close second.