As Worlds Drifted Read online

Richards' mouth moved, but no words came out of it. He motioned towards a man who stepped in through the doorway, a man in a dark suit, closely cropped hair, and really shiny shoes. A man who looked like a caricature of an FBI agent of the Hoover mold. The only thing not quite right with the picture was the piece of gum churning in his mouth. Tristan glanced down at his own outfit. The vestiges of his former agent life were there—the tie, the dress shirt, and suit pants—but they were faded, wrinkled, and stained. He checked if he felt ashamed… he didn't.

  Richards motioned towards his own ears and Tristan pulled up his earmuffs on one side. "This is agent Flip Maxwell, intelligence, West Coast office," Richards explained as they approached Tristan's stall. Richards was cautious as if Tristan could put a bullet between his eyes any second—not an entirely implausible scenario.

  "That was quick," Tristan said as he put the Glock down on the stall table and turned to take the hand extended to him. Maxwell's grip was adequate, but his hand was cold and clammy. "We sent you the file like what," he checked his watch, "two hours ago?"

  "You were in Helmand, right?" Maxwell motioned towards Tristan's leg.

  "Yep," Tristan answered wearily.

  "I like to know who I work with. I was just telling John, it's quite the operation you got here. I don't know why I'd never visited before."

  "I have a few rounds left to fire off," Tristan nodded towards the range. "Wanna give it a spin?" He extended the muffs to Maxwell.

  "Your hunch was correct, it is an encryption key," Maxwell explained as he grabbed the muffs from Tristan and pulled off his suit coat to reveal a crisp white shirt framed by a shoulder holster. "It was stolen a few weeks back."

  "From?" Tristan asked.

  Maxwell pulled out his weapon from the holster. Tristan could tell from the silver-colored slide that Maxwell was packing some serious lethality. "We know who the rightful owner is and they are eager to get the key back. It fits nicely in an ongoing investigation we're running." He stepped into the booth next to Tristan's and expertly pressed some buttons on the control panel to set up the target. He expelled the magazine and grabbed a monster 33-round magazine from the holster. He pushed it into the grip, the magazine extended a further 10 inches below the grip itself, it was that long.

  "So..." Tristan tried.

  "It's really on a need-to-know only basis. I'm confident that neither you, nor anyone at CGU, needs to know right now." He slipped on the muffs, effectively stopping the conversation dead in its tracks. He aimed, Tristan and Richards covered their ears, and he fired. The range exploded in a deafening rattle as 33 rounds hit the target in what felt like less than two seconds.

  Is this guy for real? Tristan thought. What inherent insecurities would make him feel compelled to pack a military-grade automatic Glock 18 for a service weapon?

  "It’s me who needs to know," Maxwell said as he pulled off the muffs. He pressed a button on the panel and the target came sliding towards them. "I need you to tell me where the key comes from." The target came to a stop, or rather, half the target. It had been cut clean in half by the hail of bullets, leaving the bottom of the target on the floor.

  "Intelligence seems to be a bit of a misnomer in this case," Tristan retorted, "if you think we will give you something for nothing."

  "Now, now," Richards said, starting to sweat, half expecting them to start a gunfight then and there. "I'm sure we can find a way.” Turning to Maxwell, he said, “Could you guys give us something to go on? It could make it easier for us to find something of value for you."

  "The owner is a corporate entity," Maxwell sighed as he extracted the mega magazine and shoved in a standard-sized one. "The theft of the key is a theft of their intellectual property. The main suspect killed himself as we were closing in on him."

  "So, all is well that ends well," Tristan said, getting increasingly irritated, not entirely sure why.

  "Not really," Maxwell re-holstered. "You see, the key you found has been corrupted. It has been purposefully changed, just enough to be rendered useless. Whoever gave it to you has some ulterior motive."

  "Blackmail," Richards volunteered.

  "Could be..." Maxwell continued, "what we do know is that we need to find the person, or persons, who gave you the key."

  "Tell him what you've got," Richards said, looking at Tristan.

  "Christ, fine," Tristan stepped into his stall and picked up the pistol he had left on the stall table. "I'll tell you who gave it to me... it was... a dwarf. A dwarf in a damn fine mullet." He ejected the magazine and inserted a full one. "We don't know who gave it to us yet. We will be contacted again soon, and we should get more information then." He pressed a button on the command panel and readied a target. He wasn't in the habit of entering pissing contests, but he needed an outlet.

  "Great, I want to be in on the meeting," Maxwell said.

  "I don't think that's such a good idea. We'll record the interaction so you'll be able to see all that transpires after the fact," Tristan said as he grabbed a spare pair of muffs and slid them on. He saw Richards mouth something, but it didn't register, thankfully. For a second, he thought how great life could be if he just wore muffs all the time.

  Tristan lifted his pistol and aimed at the target 50 feet away, his right hand steadied in his left. Then, he turned his head away from the target and fired seven rounds in rapid succession, then raised his gun slightly. “You’re gonna have to give me more,” he said, then fired another eight rounds, still not looking at the target. He lowered his gun and pressed a button on the command panel, and the target slid towards him. It stopped and it was clear to all that he had nailed it. A tight cluster of holes in the target's torso and another tight cluster in the middle of the target's head. An impressive display of accuracy and precision, he’d like to think.

  Richards beamed. If Maxwell was impressed, he didn't show it.

  Send in the Clowns - Then Kill Them

  Tristan checked the time. It had been exactly 24 hours since they met the last time. He had already spawned into the FBI office in Alphacore, always surprised to see it still standing. He had no idea if the dwarf would show, but the reaction he had gotten from Maxwell led him to believe that the dwarf would. The system alerted him that someone was in the lock, and after a few seconds, the door slid open and there was the dwarf.

  "You know that weapons are deactivated outside battle zones, right?" the dwarf asked.

  "Correct."

  "So, why all this ridiculous security?"

  "Just a precaution and a way of filtering out the real crazies. Of course, you got in, so the system may need to be overhauled," Tristan said. "So, you gonna sucker-punch me now?"

  The dwarf ignored the comment. "Last time we met, I gave you something valuable."

  "Maybe... and you promised more."

  "Conditionally, yes," the dwarf said.

  "Information concerning the matter is classified as highly sensitive."

  "Why?"

  "The key you gave me belongs to someone else. It was obtained illegally, and just by possessing it, you're committing a felony."

  "Tell me something I don't know."

  "I'm going out on a limb here," said Tristan. "The key belongs to a company called EnviroTech. It unlocks files that are necessary to unlock a product that they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing. So, you understand."

  "I'm going to leave now," the dwarf started to turn back towards the door.

  "Go ahead and give it a try. I think you'll find the door locked."

  "I might be a dwarf," the dwarf said calmly and turned back to face him.

  "A dwarf with a mullet."

  "With a mullet, granted, but I'm not stupid. You're stalling on purpose. Your in-house geeks are trying to smoke me out as we speak. Tell them to stand down. Tell them, or I will instruct my associates to destroy the key."

  For a second, Tristan thought that maybe destroying the key would be the best for all. The blackmailers would have nothing to blackmail
with, and Maxwell would fail. A win-win as far as Tristan was concerned.

  "It worked!" George shouted next to me. I glanced towards him. "They're backing off," he tilted his screen towards me, the graphical rendering of our level of protection was going from red to somewhere between green and orange.

  JRN were back in Nick's basement. "I don't like the smell of this at all." Nick was pacing nervously behind me. "Something's not right. I think we should cut our losses and abort now."

  I cut the mic. "Don't worry, George is holding off the barbarians. Right, George?"

  "I'm trying, I'm trying."

  "Placing your life in George's hands, maybe not a strategy that I would deploy," Jamaal heckled unhelpfully from the couch.

  I turned back to my massive beautifully-curved monitor. I had taken to calling her Marilyn. "Let's see where this narrative takes us." I hit the mic. "So, where were we?"

  "You were just about to give me more information, and the uncorrupted key," Skulder answered.

  "Yeah, right."

  "Here, let me show you something." He waved his hand towards the far wall, and a hidden door hissed open.

  "It's a trap!" came from behind me.

  I ignored Nick and followed Skulder through the door. It hissed shut. Skulder waved his hand again, and the same door slid open and revealed another dingy 80s setting with gray paneling and bare lightbulbs. We stepped out into the room with one long bare wall with peeling paint. The wall to the right was lined with a row of lockers.

  "Ok, what are we doing here?"

  "Alphacore corporate are generally a pain in the ass to deal with, but they really outdid themselves when they built this thing… to my specifications, mind you." He waved that hand again and the wall disappeared. In its place stood a green meadow, backed by snow-clad mountains. "Or do you prefer forest?" he waved and the meadow pixelated into a forest. Sunlight slanted through the birch trees, refracting on the dew-covered grass.

  "What does this have to do with anything?" I said, acting unimpressed. "You still haven't given me anything of value."

  Skulder snapped his fingers—I didn't know you could snap your fingers in Alphacore—and a herd of white-tailed deer appeared among the trees. Their hooves scraped at the ground as they looked for something to munch on, and an occasional bird burst out in song. A fawn lifted its head and looked straight at me.

  "This is lit and all, but could we get back to the matter at hand?"

  Skulder did some other thing with his hands and the closets to my right all slid open at once. I tried to stay cool, but it was near impossible when there in front of me stood the mother of all gun lockers. Hanging in the racks were every kind of weapon imaginable, from standard pistols to rifles, to machine guns, to rocket launchers, to flame throwers. Many of the weapons I recognized, but several must be custom jobs.

  "Go ahead," he said, pointing towards the guns. "Pick whichever one you want."

  "The feds have a secret shooting range in Alphacore?" I said, walking down the row of weapons.

  "I'm the only one that uses it," Skulder said.

  I cut the mic and turned to George. "How are we doing?"

  He turned his screen towards me once again. The dial was still in between green and orange.

  "Careful," Nick said behind me. "He's getting personal. He's trying to lull you into a false sense of security. Make like you're friends."

  I ignored Nick, again, as I tend to do when he frets. I hit the mic. "There has been at least one death associated with this case."

  "I can't confirm or deny.”

  "I think it’s common knowledge, it was all over the news. Anyhow, we have reason to believe that there was foul play involved."

  "On what grounds?"

  "I'll leave that for you to figure out." I picked out a SCAR-H rifle with an x-25 drum.

  "Good choice. What's a kid like you doing getting involved in a mess like this anyways?"

  "What makes you think I'm a kid?"

  "It's just a hunch, that's all." He pulled out what looked like a modified M2, a belt-fed, tripod-mounted, monster of a machine gun.

  "Big enough for you?" I said.

  I followed him over to the range where the 80s room met the deer-filled forest. I thought of Prancer. "Do you think we could choose another target?"

  "What?"

  "I don't want to shoot deer."

  "What then?"

  I thought for a second, "What about clowns? I never liked clowns."

  Skulder went quiet for a few seconds, probably whoever was controlling him in the real world needed to do some digging. Clowns don't exactly grow on trees. "Send in the clowns!" he said suddenly, and the forest came alive with Ronald McDonalds running around seemingly randomly, with their red hair and floppy shoes and face paint. They were truly frightening.

  We opened fire at the same time. The forest filled with blast, dirt, wood splinter, falling trees, harrowing clown screeches, and above all, blood. Clown after clown was mowed down by our massive firepower. Skulder's M2 split clowns in half. Every single clown was slaughtered in a matter of seconds.

  Skulder leaned his weapon against the wall. "Listen, I don't have a full picture either. You know how bureaucracies tend to work in silos… well, that goes for the FBI too. What I can tell you is that Westcap EnviroTech was working on nano drones that could be used to assist in pollination, to replace the bees being wiped out by colony collapse disorder. They could also be used for environmental cleanup, oil spills, and such."

  "Why would anyone kill anyone over assisted pollination?"

  "Exactly."

  "You've given me shit all," I said. "It's time for me to leave." I dropped the gun and moved toward the door. "Remember, if you try to stop me or follow me, my associates will destroy the key."

  Skulder shepherded me to the office, and then towards the main door. "What about...”

  I turned around to face him one last time, I pulled a virtual drive off my belt and handed it to him. "Don't trust no one," I said. "Something doesn't add up."

  I stepped out of the office, and once on the street outside, I ran the whole way to the spawning point and got the hell out of Alphacore. Marilyn went dark, Speed Freak went silent. I looked up. Nick was dangling the power plug, again, in his hand. "You can't be too careful," he grinned. I understood why he did it, but every time he pulled the plug on Speed Freak, I felt violated.

  The team had logged out from our latest foray into amateur sleuthing and was decompressing in Nick's basement. "I read something,” Jamaal explained, “about it in Scientific American. We're talking about semi-autonomous military-grade Nano air vehicles, about the size of a mosquito.”

  "Sounds harmless enough," Nick said.

  "Yeah, the only countermeasure you'd need is a military-grade mosquito trap," George said, ever helpful. "Bet they have them on Alibaba."

  "There you're wrong, George. These drones, assuming they exist, would be AI-enabled."

  "He means artificial intelligence," Nick interjected.

  "Thanks, Nick," I said.

  "So, they would avoid any trap you set. But that's not all," Jamaal continued, "these particular drones would also be able to make their own decisions within predefined parameters, and could work together using swarm technology."

  "This just doesn't add up. My dad worked with an environmental technology company, he wasn't doing military stuff," I said. "In fact, he could go on rants about how the military industrial complex had infested our political life."

  "That's the problem with dying," George said, this time not even looking up from his screen, "as your body is sunk into the ground, buried truths rise."

  "Shut up, George," Nick said, slapping him on the back of the head.

  "This is classic dual-use technology," Jamaal explained. "There's a civilian use, for example, cleaning up of oil spills like your FBI friend mentioned, but there is also a military use, for example, the pinpoint delivery of biochemical agents to kill enemy soldiers, or civilians for that mat
ter."

  "Your basic killer bees on steroids and PhDs. Nice," Nick said.

  "But what was my dad doing in all this?" I wondered.

  The Bad Raid

  Tristan didn't trust the clammy-handed, gum-chewing, intelligence agent. But his instincts, although historically flawed and even fatal, told him to stay close. So, he resolved to cooperate, but only as little as necessary. The FBI's own cyber forensics team had come up empty when it came to tracking down the dwarf. Tristan opted to keep Maxwell out of the loop when it came to the video the dwarf had given him. The only person he trusted with that information was Maria. He straight out lied and told Maxwell that the second meeting with the dwarf had been a wash, providing no new intel of value.

  Instead, Tristan interacted with the not-so-helpful people at Alphacore corporate. They were so afraid of the whole privacy and personal integrity crapola, that getting information out of them by appealing to their common sense or love for country was like running into a brick wall. Tristan had to head down to the courthouse to get the only thing that could move them—a subpoena. Alphacore's sharks did what they could to throw wrenches into machinery of justice, but the judge didn't buy their spiel and swiftly struck down their appeal. Alphacore did, in the end, cough up the name and address of the dwarf.

  Tristan shared the information with Maxwell on the condition that he be allowed to tag along to any intervention. That same night, he was in full tactical gear.

  From what he could tell, they would be raiding an upper-middle-class home in a sleepy suburb. Their target was a 15-year-old with no priors. Tristan couldn't help but feel that bringing in FBI Hostage Rescue Team, his former outfit and the most well-trained fighting force in FBI history, was a bit of an overkill. Maxwell had made the call.

  Tristan slid onto one of the benches in the SWAT van and adjusted the Velcro on his tactical vest when he heard, "Casco!" He looked up and stared at himself, or rather, what could have been him if it all hadn't gone to hell.

  "Josh!" Tristan exclaimed, forcing a smile. "What's it been..."