The I in Evil

by Sam Jones

Harpo blew out three honks. One honk could be a false alarm, branches blowing in the wind casting a roughly man-shaped shadow. Three honks meant Harpo was certain. At three honks, I’d rather it was the police taking me back to prison, because the alternative was that there was something critically wrong with two years worth of pattern recognition libraries.

I held up three fingers and swatted Groucho’s carriage return. A window on Groucho’s display came up showing the front door camera. The display was black, which meant something was covering the camera.

Harpo was silent. One honk would have been my parole officer. Two honks would be my ex-wife. Three would be her boyfriend. I opened the closet and looked for my baseball bat. I got it and backed into Green Skull.

When I turned, I was face to mask with him. Black lenses set in the mask’s eye sockets seemed to look at me. He grabbed my wrist. His grip grew steadily hotter. I dropped the baseball hat, and his grip stopped warming. He grabbed my opposite shoulder and led me back like a dancer. I backed into my chair, and he pushed me down. He let go and examined the room.

“This is the alarm?” Green Skull’s voice was low and metallic. It came from a speaker in front of his mouth. He pointed at Harpo’s horn. It’s a bicycle horn. There are motors wired into Harpo that squeeze the bulb and honk the horn.

“It’s an output device triggered by a program.”

“A speaker would be easier.”

I didn’t know what to say. It was my first time seeing a costumed criminal. Except for the mask – more a helmet, really – he was dressed in black with a long black cape. In that small room, it was like night had fallen. Green Skull then walked to Groucho. He taped a finger on the Groucho’s keyboard, Royal Quiet Deluxe. The antique typewriter went clack, clack, clack, but the screen had turned loyally black.

“How long did it take you to rig the keyboard?”

“About forty-five minutes.”

The skull faced me. “Forty five minutes to rig up the entire typewriter?”

“The only modification to the typewriter is a sensor on the carriage return bar and a microphone inside the body. The camera above my desk figures out what fingers hit what keys. The microphone inside helps figure out when keys are actually hit. The typewriter could be painted on the table, and it’d still work.”

“Is that why you paint your nails?”

I looked at my fluorescent green fingernails. “It takes fewer CPU cycles with the paint.”

“You have a flair for the dramatic. It’s good in this business.”

“What business?”

“My business: villainy, costumed crime, terrorism-in-persona. I’d like to offer you a job.”

“I thought you worked alone.”

Green Skull waved with one hand, indicating all of himself. “There are eighteen weapons of different kinds hidden in this outfit. Underneath there are several pieces of custom made, high impact Kevlar sewn together. There’s a custom voice distorter and amplifier in the mask. Add to that all the vehicles, research and devices necessary for my evil plots.”

“I thought you were an evil genius.”

“It doesn’t matter how evil I am. There are 24 hours in a day, and I sleep for three of them. And I’m not a tailor. If I made this outfit, it’d come in twelfth in a costume contest.”

“You want me to be your tailor?”

“No! I have a seamstress. I need a programmer with your background. I need automated analysis of image data. Needless to say, your felony conviction is not a problem with me.”

I flinched. I spent a lot of energy not talking about the incident. “What are the terms?”

“You work for me for two years. If those two years go well, you retire at the end. You’ll have a new identity in a different country with a seven-figure bank account. If you continue to respect my privacy, you can live out the rest of your life in comfort.”

“What if I don’t take the job?”

“I leave, and you go on with your life. You’ll have an interesting story about the night you were visited by a costumed criminal. Your parole might be cut short in return for what details you provide. You can go on talk shows and discuss the job offer and what it means. You can speculate on why it is I might be hiring a pattern recognition developer. . .”

“You’re going to kill me.”

“Yeah. I don’t want that to bias your decision.”

“You don’t want me biased? By death?”

Green Skull shrugged. “I know, I know, but if you don’t like the work, you’ll do a bad job. If you do a bad job, I’ll beat you to death. If you don’t take the job, I’ll inject you with an excess of heroin. I’ve never taken heroin, but I hear it’s quite pleasant. On the other end, I’ve never been beaten to death, but the people I did it to looked just miserable.”

“What’s the work?”

“I’ve got twelve petabytes of surveillance footage, and I want you to continue efforts to organize it. If someone is in a list of recognized faces, I want that piece of footage tagged with the face. In the end, I want to be able to type in a name and get every conversation that person has had in the last two weeks. It’s a lot like the work you did for the government.”

“That work is classified.”

“You learn a lot of secrets when you’ve got twelve petabytes of surveillance footage.”

“What happened to the guy before me?”

“His year was up. He retired. You’ll talk to him.”

“He worked one year? I’ll have to work two.”

“That’s what you get for getting in early. He didn’t have a living predecessor to talk to. I gave him one year so he wouldn’t lose hope.”

“I don’t suppose there’s benefits during those two years.”

“You have no rights, but I’ll take care of anything you need and most anything you want. I have enormous resources and no scruples.”

“You have enormous resources? Don’t your crimes get. . . foiled a lot?”

“Do you ever look at my website?”

“Your website? I saw it. I assumed it wasn’t actually yours, you being a wanted man and all.”

“I don’t host it, but I talk to the people who do, and I blog on it sometimes. Anyway, it clears up misconceptions like that. The police the military, and most of all, Firehawk has stopped some of my more ambitious ventures. However, if you check the newspapers carefully, you’ll find several unresolved crimes with millions of dollars of cash taken. The website doesn’t say this, but I have other ventures, things like blackmail, that never get reported to the authorities at all. My operation is well funded.”

After that, he just looked at me. The worst thing about the mask is that it didn’t blink.

“Fine,” I said, “I’ll take the job.”

Green Skull gave me half an hour to pack what I was going to take. Depressingly, that was enough time for me. I took some clothes, some keepsakes and three of my computers, leaving behind Chico and Zeppo. Meanwhile a pair of frightening men came in weighed down with several bags. They spent some time setting up equipment in my bedroom.

“You’re not setting up a meth lab, are you?” I asked Green Skull

“I’m not.” Green Skull pointed. “They are?”

“To sell?” I asked.

“To explode.” Green Skull said. “We don’t want your parole officer looking for you.”

“They won’t think I’m dead if there’s no body.”

As if on cue, one of the frightening men unzipped a large bag and pulled out a body about my height and build. The face was already badly burned. His mouth hung open, and I could see the teeth appeared melted. The hands were also ruined.

“What would you have done if I didn’t take the job?”

Green Skull shrugged. “Same thing, only we would have left you to be found and cremated this body later.”

“And you’d have killed this guy for nothing, just for looking kind of like me?”

Green Skull put a hand on my shoulder. “You’ll get used to it, and Arthur?”

“Yes?”

An intense pain shot through my shoulder where Green Skull’s hand touched it. “Arthur’s dead, Arthur, so I’m going to do that to you every time you answer to Arthur. What’s your name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Pick one.”

“Julius.” I said.

“Come on Julius, they’re almost ready.”

I left my apartment with a black hood covering my head. We entered a car, and I heard the explosion after the engine had started.

· · ·

I’d gotten tired of trying to interpret noises and was half dozing when the hood came off. A woman took it off. She had the imposing glow of health of someone whose main hobby is exercise. There was a scar running from her earlobe to her cheek, left plain below her pulled-back hair.

“Welcome, Julius. You look tired. We’ve got a bed ready for you. Do you want to get some sleep first?”

“Are you the good cop?”

Her tone went from friendly to neutral. “I’m Ada. If you need something, I’m usually the best person to tell. That’s not my job, but I’m one of two people who leaves here with any regularity, and you don’t want to owe Riley a favor.”

“Is Riley Green Skull?”

“God, no. Riley’s our hacker. G’s identity stays secret for many reasons.”

“You call him G?”

“You call him Green Skull or ‘boss’.”

“Oh, you and he. . .”

“Yes,” Ada said. “Are you ready to meet the crew?”

“Sure. How many are there?”

“There are seven here. There’s other people in other places. The people who handled your disappearance, for instance, don’t live here.” Ada opened the next door, and I heard the pulse of a sewing machine.

“Almost done,” someone inside said through clenched teeth.

The walls of Green Skull’s lair were concrete, but this one room seemed like a tent. The ceiling and walls were covered with stretches of cloth. Bolts and bolts of silk and cotton lay in stacks and bins. In the middle of it was a woman in a sleeveless dress. She had a pair of pins clenched in her teeth as she ran some cloth through a sewing machine. Her movements spoke of a perfect familiarity with her task.

“This is Charlotte,” Ada said.

“You made Green Skull’s costume?”

“The one he’s wearing now.” Charlotte said around the pins. “The old costume was a different designer.”

“He said he’d come in twelfth in a costume contest.”

Charlotte smirked. “If there were eight contestants and none of them were me, maybe.”

“She’s making a pair of pants for you.” Ada said. “We shredded the clothes you brought.”

“Why?”

Charlotte took out the pins. “Besides the obvious, they might have contained a bug or tracking device. We shredded them. Since you’re still walking and whatnot, I assume there wasn’t one.”

“You didn’t measure me.”

“I made them like your old pants,” Charlotte replied, “You rescued three pairs of pants, all of which were dirty and well past their prime. If they also didn’t fit, you don’t deserve pants that do.”

She finished cutting and held up a pair of black slacks.

“They look great. Are you making a shirt, too?”

“We bought a giant supply of T-shirts, socks and underwear when we moved here. None of the boys have complained so far. Now change.”

Charlotte handed me the pants and pointed at a screen at the edge of the room. I went over and started taking off my clothes.

“So what happened to you?” Charlotte asked on the other side of the screen.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“The boss doesn’t recruit happy people. They try to escape and their friends ask questions.”

I didn’t want to answer until I got dressed. “How about you?”

“I worked in theater costuming. I got in young. I made my Halloween costume when I was seven.”

I’d finished dressing. The pants were black cotton slacks, probably the nicest pair I’d ever owned.

“What was the costume?”

“Sarah from Labyrinth. She wears this big silver and white ball gown in one scene.”

“I know it. You made that?”

“Yeah, but no one got it. By the end of the night I told everyone I was a princess.”

“I don’t get how you ended up here.”

“I wanted to do wardrobe for movies, and I couldn’t. I’m good enough, but I couldn’t take the politics. The people who run the wardrobe departments? Motherfuckers.” Charlotte wrinkled her nose as she said this last word.

“Sorry to hear that?”

“What about you?” Charlotte asked.

“I,” I said, “have a felony conviction. Image analysis is a small world. I’m good at what I do, but there’s just a few jobs, and you can’t get them with a criminal record.”

“Whatever did you do?”

“Battery,” Ada spat out, “spousal abuse.”

I deflated. The feeling was familiar, but terrible. “It was the only time.”

“Once is plenty,” Ada said.

You’re only as good as the worst thing you’ve ever done. It was a sentence that I’d said to myself a lot in the last two years.

There’s a joke. A man in a bar is talking. He says, “You know, when I was young, I played second base. I was hoping people would call me ‘Baseball Bob’ or ‘Bob the Fly-Catcher’.

“Later, I was a policeman. I was hoping people would call me ‘Bob the Policeman’ or ‘Officer Bob’.

“Later on, I started writing poems. I thought maybe people would call me ‘Bob the Poet’.”

“But you fuck one goat. . .” Charlotte said.

“Do you read minds?” I asked.

“I don’t believe so,” Charlotte said, “but I get asked that a lot.”

“Let’s go.” Ada said.

We left Charlotte’s sewing room for a hallway. There was a man walking down the hall. He was medium height with brown hair and brown eyes. One of my first thoughts was how tough he’d be to describe.

“This the new intelligence guy?” he asked.

“I hope not.” I said. “I’m in image analysis.”

“I’m Riley. We’re going to be working together.”

“Ada said you’re the other person who can leave?”

“What else did she say?” Riley asked with an unfriendly smile at Ada.

“Just that. What do you do?”

“Security,” Riley said.

“You keep this place safe?” I asked.

“A little,” he said, “mostly I break into other places.”

“Riley had a felony conviction too.” Ada said. “His parole forbid him from using a keyboard.”

“Oh, I know you.” I said. “You’re the botnet guy. I heard you died in a car wreck.”

“You don’t know me, Arthur.”

“Okay, fine. I think I’m Julius now.”

“That was my point.” Riley said.

Nobody said anything.

Ada started, “Do you want to meet the. . .”

“Yes, I do.”

We went down the hall and took a left. There was a large room with a wall-screen television and a couple tables.

There were two men at one of the tables. One was reading a book of chess problems. The other was arranging several bottles of prescription medication into daily doses.

“Hey, the image analyst!” the guy with the chess problems exclaimed too loud, too suddenly and with a slight lisp.

“That’s me. Who are you?”

“Alex. Technically, we were fellow employees once before.” he said. “When I was at AE Games, you were hired on for two weeks, but we were in different offices. Then they did a background check and found out you beat someone up.”

“I didn’t beat someone up.” I said. “I hit someone–”

“His wife.” Ada supplied.

“– once. Well, three times, one event.”

“I don’t think that gets you a felony conviction.” Alex said.

“I didn’t think so, either, so I thought I didn’t need a lawyer.”

Alex winced. “You’re lucky you got fired, though, AE was an awful place to work.”

“Worse than here?”

“Totally.” Alex said. “Here, people are good to you if you do your job well. It’s better if you’re writing code. Your work is judged in big blocks. If you’re in system administration, there’s always the chance something could go wrong, so it’s a bit more stressful.”

The man counting pills briefly looked up at us with eyes full of fatigue and hate.

“So, Alex, what do you do here?”

“I’m a strategist.” Alex said, and never again would I hear someone sum themselves up so completely.

“Is that what you did for AE Games?”

Alex nodded. “I designed computer heuristics. They make games for pathetic, brain-damaged assholes, so they didn’t use my code.”

I was desperate enough to change the subject that I talked to the man counting pills. “What’s your name?”

“Gar.”

“What’s that short for?”

Gar shrugged.

Charlotte, and a moment later, Riley came in. “The gang’s all here,” Riley said.

“What about Green Skull?” I asked.

“This is a staff talk, a social event to keep you from killing yourself.” Charlotte said. “The boss tends to stay clear lest he damp the jovial mood.”

“What do we do?” I asked.

“Ask questions, mostly,” said Alex. “Your predecessor will be teleconferencing in.”

“It’s time.” Ada said.

Gar turned on the wall screen, which showed solid blue for a few minutes. I felt my way through the dark until I found a seat.

The wall screen suddenly switched to show a man. He was maybe forty, maybe younger. He had a thin face and wide eyes. He looked a lot like Steve Buscemi.

“I heard you got someone new.” he said.

“Here.” I said.

He turned. Whatever camera he was looking at wasn’t pointed quite right, so he appeared to be looking over my right shoulder. “Oh yeah,” he said, “I stole some code from you.”

“What code?” I asked. I’ve always been defensive about my work, and I keep it heavily encrypted.

“It’s stuff you did for DARPA.”

“How do you even know about that work? They kept that secret.”

“We plant a lot of cameras. They collect information. Riley uses that to get in and plant more cameras. Shortly after you left, we got passwords and keys to most everything.”

“I keep hearing about cameras. How do you have so many? How do people not notice them?”

“They’re the last artifact of Green Skull’s previous life. He was working on a project to make microscopic cameras. There’s particles that are just a couple milligrams that behave like active pixel sensors. They’re like the rods and cones. . .”

“I’m the image analyst.”

“Sorry, force of habit. Anyway, these microscopic gizmos repel each other and stick to most surfaces. Drop a few hundred, and you have a camera. The boss also has ones that pick up sound.”

“This sounds like I’d-have-to-kill-you-information.”

“Green Skull’s former employers actually know who he is and how he does what he does. They are so terrified of the information becoming public that they’ve helped the boss hide his identity. They disappeared a couple of retirees.”

“People who left?” I asked. “People like you?”

“Less discreet people than me.” Jeff said.

“How does Green Skull pull data from the cameras?”

“That is have-to-kill-you information. I don’t know. The boss handles that himself.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Mostly, I tried to keep the signal to noise ratio down. I filtered out all the video of empty rooms and all the pictures where the cameras are covered. I filtered out most of the video where people don’t move, and you can’t see anyone’s mouth or hands.”

“And it’s still twelve petabytes?” I asked.

“What’s the big deal?” Riley said. “It’s a thousand gig.”

“A million,” Alex, Gar and I chorused.

“It’s the largest data warehouse ever maintained by a single administrator,” Gar added.

“I think that it’s kept running is a testament to your ingenuity and the human will to survive.” Alex said.

Gar glared at Alex.

“Are you the only retiree that’s still alive?” I asked Jeff.

“There are others that don’t call back.” Jeff said. “And a couple people chose not to retire.”

“How long has everyone been here for?”

“Two months,” said Alex.

Gar held up three fingers and said, “Months.”

“Just over four months.” Charlotte said.

“A year and a half,” said Riley.

“Two years,” said Ada, “almost from the beginning.”

“That reminds me,” Jeff said, “I have a picture from the last party.”

Jeff walked off screen and returned a couple minutes later holding a picture. It was him, Ada, Riley and Charlotte.

“What a terrible picture of me.” Charlotte said.

“And what a careless thing to keep.” Green Skull said.

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“Where did the picture come from?” Green Skull asked.

“I printed it out.” Jeff said. “My own printer.”

“Get rid of it. Get rid of any files. No photographs, remember.”

“Yes, sir.” Jeff said.

Green Skull turned off the wall screen. “Well, Arthur. . .”

I faced him and realized my mistake too late. He grabbed me, and the shock ran through my body. Green Skull walked directly out of the room.

Charlotte helped me to my room. “There’s a story that one of the old guys got spotted because they answered to his name. The last hideout had to be blown up and a couple people died. Still, it seems a bit much.”

She pointed to my bed. Groucho, Harpo and Gummo were stacked in a nearby corner. I staggered over and sat down.

“He got me twice,” Charlotte added, “and I hated my name.”

Charlotte finger signed J-E-N.

“Jennifer?” I asked.

Charlotte put on a cartoon face and looked left and right as if trying to spot ‘Jennifer’. “He’s mostly not violent.”

“Mostly?”

“You’ll see.” Charlotte promised. “It’s like living with a big cat.”

I didn’t understand what she meant right then.

· · ·

The introduction might make you think that I stayed in the job only as a desperate captive, but the truth is that there were some rewarding parts. In software, people are just one part of the equation. If the problem is interesting and the tools are good, working for a murderous maniac has its rewarding aspects.

The tools were good. I’m used to having to accept mostly whatever system I’m given. I’ve seldom had an employer actually buy something because I thought it was useful. Shortly after I woke up, Alex asked what kind of equipment I wanted.

“Should I ask for what I think might do the job or what could do the job?” I asked.

“Ask for a system you’d want your life to depend on.”

I asked for a computer I’d only read about and a bank of monitors and cameras. Two days later, they were stacked outside my door.

Green Skull explained that my main task would be to index the footage by people. It was already indexed by time and location. You could, for instance, pull up John Smith’s house at 3pm, but if John Smith wasn’t at home, you’d have to guess where he was. The index would make it possible to request John Smith at 3pm, and it would show him, whether he was at home, at his friends or at work, so long as he was in front of a camera.

I’d written face identification software for the Department of Defense. I’d smuggled most of software out and had continued work on the libraries in my free time. The work was something I loved, something I was proud of and no one understood.

So you could say Green Skull was lucky. He found someone who was desperate and unwanted who was hiding what could be the most advanced two dimensional facial recognition library in the world. I was lucky, too, because in that twelve petabytes of footage, I found the perfect canvas, the perfect test of my masterpiece.

The rest of his management style was normal. In the back of my head I knew that a lack of progress with the facial recognition software would mean a brutal death, but Green Skull had a reasonable understanding of what I was doing and manageable expectations. Compared to some of the stories I heard from engineers at Apple, I felt like I was in a good spot.

The first real test of my work was when Riley knocked on my door and asked, “What can you give me on Jim Chen?”

“I don’t have an interface or a cross-index yet, but if you can give me a photo and an address, I can take a look.”

“You need a picture?” Riley gave me a disappointed look I suspect he’d practiced.

“Several pictures would be best. My system is visual, so it doesn’t care what his name is, at least not yet. It just cares what he looks like. If you can tie the name to a face for me, I can run the search.”

“Huh.”

“I can do a web search for the face.”

Riley wave away the suggestion. He came back a few minutes later with a card of pictures he’d taken and found of Jim Chen.

“Is this enough?” Riley asked.

“Y–” I said as I put the card in and and checked whether the pictures were enough to give me a base for recognition.

“–es.” I finished when the program finished. “If he’s been in our cameras, I should be able to find out when and where.”

“How long should it take?”

“If you want everything we have on him, it’ll take a day.”

“A day?” Riley demanded. “Don’t you have the best computer in the world?”

“It’s not the best in the world. It’s just the best one that will compile my libraries. It’s twelve. . .”

“Petabytes, yeah, I know. You don’t shut up about that.”

“That’s as much as all the printed material in the Library of Congress, times twelve hundred.”

“Fine,” Riley said. “Tomorrow.”

I ran the indexer. At the core is IAN, which stands for Image Analysis Net, but it’s really named after my son. When I wrote IAN, Ian was four months old, and I was fascinated by the way his eyes tracked faces, particularly his mother’s face.

IAN establishes a set of up to 204 markers. If IAN has enough visual data to establish all 204, it can, for instance, usually distinguish between identical twins. One reason I always tie together computers and Marx Brothers is that they provide such an excellent challenge for IAN. There are four brothers with a strong family resemblance mostly seen in monochrome with heavy makeup. I did most of my debugging trying to see whether IAN can tell them apart.

IAN has an interesting theory I’ve been unable to confirm from outside sources. It says that Groucho Marx in one scene in Go West is actually Zeppo. I’ve been unable to find any source to confirm, but I’ve run IAN over countless times under different versions of the code. Every time, IAN has spotted at least three markers that mark the Groucho character as Zeppo.

After weeks of testing on that one point, I’m convinced IAN is right. There’s no outside confirmation, so I think no one on the set spotted the switch, and the brothers themselves never told anyone.

Using IAN is another library, called Hunter. Hunter goes from a single sighting to track someone to different cameras. Going back to Jim Chen, a camera had footage of Chen walking out of his house. When Chen walks out of frame, Hunter switches to nearby cameras further and further out.

If Chen was off camera for a minute, the search radius would be about a city block. After an hour, it would cover most of the city. After twelve hours, the search radius would be unlimited. Hunter would scour the data trying to reconstruct one day of Chen’s life.

After that day, though, Hunter would start to know Chen’s habits. It knew to look for him on the camera outside his house shortly after 7:30 am. After a truly astounding amount of thinking, Hunter and IAN had generated a relatively small file that showed where in the millions of hours of footage Green Skull had were the several hundred hours featuring Jim Chen.

By the way, Jim Chen was a project manager for a defense contractor. He had a master’s degree in metallurgy, and he was working with two teams who were developing heat-resistant metals.

The next day I knocked on Riley’s door and told him that I’d finished.

“Took long enough.” Riley said. “I don’t suppose this footage has him saying any passwords.”

“Probably not,” I said, “but I’ll be he typed them.”

“Of course he typed them. They’re fucking passwords. It doesn’t help me.”

“It might.” I said. “There’s a text file with everything he typed on camera.”

“What?” Riley said.

“When he types on camera, my software checks his finger positions against key clicks and finds out what he typed. We have a camera with a view of his keyboard and sound, so I’ve got everything he typed at his desk.”

Riley just stared for a minute and then said, “Thanks.”

· · ·

“Arthur, how are you settling in?”

“You know,” I said, without looking up from my screen, “if you’d said ‘Bob, how are you settling in,’ I’d look up, just to see who Bob was. So my not looking up isn’t a natural reaction.”

“You beat the reflex.” Green Skull said.

“I’m building indexes,” I said. “If I have a few more machines, I can get an index for every person in your footage in a month.”

“Will that make it faster to get footage by person?”

“Much faster. Basically, the system will have an index for person 6127. You just have to give me a name and enough information so my software can tell the person it knows as 6127 is the person I know as Jim Chen.”

“Good.”

“Are you trying to find out the real identity of Firehawk?”

“Vincent Cole.”

“What?” I asked.

“Firehawk,” Green Skull said, “is Vincent Cole.”

“Vincent Cole from. . .”

“The main shareholder of the Cole conglomerate, yes.”

“How do you figure?”

“First,” said Green Skull, “I examined his signatures. He has used, at my count seventeen different kinds of flame or flash producing devices. He also has a large hawk on his chest. Cole burned down his family house when he was nine and was sent to a brutal reform program where he learned survival skills. Also, his family has long been involved in preservation projects for hawks and falcons.

“Next, I simply cross-referenced. I ball-park Firehawk’s personal gear as costing three million dollars. The Hawkfire personal aircraft cost at least thirty million. Who in this city is a multimillionaire with good physical training and is roughly six feet tall?”

“He seems taller.”

“It’s the boots.” Green Skull said. “Mostly, I deduced because it’s really, really obvious. That anyone doesn’t know Firehawk’s identity is evidence that investigative journalism in this country is dead.”

“Couldn’t a millionaire just be paying for someone else to be Firehawk?”

“They could, but they don’t. I tell you as someone who has a few millions of his own, rich people don’t think like that.”

“Wait, Firehawk has red hair.”

“You have four seconds to explain how Cole could accomplish this feat.”

“It’s a wig.”

Green Skull nodded. “You can use the other three seconds to feel foolish.”

“Oh, wait. Didn’t he do Paris Hilton?”

“And he attacked two men holding automatic weapons using only his bare fists. He takes power-assisted leaps across rooftops with three liters of explosive fluid strapped to his back. He is, in short, not a well man.”

· · ·

Alex walked into the break room as I was looking through DVDs.

“Alex, did you know that Vincent Cole is Firehawk?” I asked.

“He probably isn’t right now. It’s 10am. How much evil could be afoot?”

“Oh, I suppose everyone knows.”

“In the evil lair, yes, it’s pretty much common knowledge. Are you feeling settled in?”

“Harpo1 and Harpo2 building a bunch of indexes.” I said. “Meanwhile, I’m working on something to automatically attach names to faces.”

Alex bowed his head and closed his eyes for a moment, like a machine that shut down. He opened his eyes, “I’m not sure how I’d do that.”

“The most reliable way is to check identification cards. I asked Riley if he can have cameras at airports, banks and bars, any place where people hold cards with their name on it. Next is to check if there’s a name people frequently say before or after someone walks into a room. A little more than half the time, that word is a person’s name. The remaining time, it’s usually a spouse or family member.”

“Tricky stuff.”

“Yeah, but when it’s done, it’ll be like an Orwellian Google. You can type in anyone’s name and get their footage. No need to talk to me.”

“Wow, that sounds really cool.”

I spent a moment trying to phrase my next words. “What’s strange is that it doesn’t bother me. I think my conscience was more troubled when I worked for the Department of Defense.”

“Hmm.”

“I don’t know much about Green Skull, but he’s a bad person.”

“Uh-huh.” Alex said. “Keep in mind that Green Skull has cameras here, too. ‘Bad person’ is okay. I’m pretty sure he’s beyond caring what people think of him, but if you say something that suggests you might want to betray him or otherwise conflicts with your esprit de corps, I think you should probably not say it, you know, out loud.”

“Yeah, like that. It should bother me more than it does. When I was working for the Department of Defense, I considered quitting, and it was the steadiest, best paying work I could get. I was afraid how they’d use anything that let them do the kind of large scale image analysis I was building. Now I’m working for a criminal – a murderer – and it doesn’t bother me as much.”

“He’s not an institution.”

“I don’t see what difference that makes.”

“It lessens the bad.” Alex said. “It means whatever software you write will only be active for the boss’s career. If you do it for a government or even a company, you might change the world forever. The boss, though, is just a person, and it’s unlikely to say the least that he’s ever going to set up any kind of transition of power.”

“You seem like a decent person.”

“Thank you. I’m glad I can convey that impression.”

“Why are you working for him?”

“There are two voices.” Alex held up a hand. “One voice tells you to do good things, or maybe just not bad things.” Alex held up his other hand. “The other voice tells you to do a good job at what you’re doing. I think some people don’t even hear that second voice. For me, it’s deafening.”

“And you’re a strategist.”

“Yeah, and there aren’t job listings for that.”

“Did you want to join the army?”

“Sure, the army, Wall Street, whatever.” Alex growled. “Everyone needs strategy, but they all want something else. The army would want a strategist and a politician or a salesman. I’m not that. The boss wants someone who makes strategy software and comes up with plans and that’s it. He wants the strategy that wins, not the one that’s most comfortable with whatever his current ideas are.”

“What’s your project?” I was pretty eager to change the subject.

“I’m trying to raise money.”

“How?”

“Operation Windmill. You’ll have to wait until the next staff meeting. There will be a presentation.”

“Oh, fine,” I said. “Whose DVDs are these?”

“I think they’re all Charlotte’s. You might have noticed that the boss put cameras in some movie theaters. Riley plays current movies in the break room that are basically pirated from that.”

I stood there for a moment with my mouth open.

“Does video piracy push your moral boundaries?” Alex asked.

“No, I just realized why Hunter keeps saying it’s found Heath Ledger.”

· · ·

Charlotte kept the door to her workshop open, so I rapped on the edge of the security plate.

“Julius!” Charlotte said. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I got a gift for you.” I held out my hand.

“A flash drive,” Charlotte exclaimed, “you shouldn’t have!”

“Have you got a computer?”

“Behind the blue rayon.”

“Um,” I looked around.

Charlotte pointed. I pushed aside the blue rayon and put the drive in. I brought up the rendering software and moved away to give Charlotte a clear view.

“You see, it’s from Gone with the. . .”

“It’s the dress Scarlett wore to Ashley’s party. Where’d you get this?”

I spun around the model of the dress to show it off from different angles. “I got it from your DVDs. I’ve got stuff that, with a lot of poking and prodding, generate a 3d model from video of something.”

“You can do that?”

“In all modesty, not a lot of people can, but I worked on something that tries to deduce shape from shading and make conclusions from seeing the same object from different angles. It’s all reasoning that you and I do automatically. For a computer, it’s a hell of a lot of work.”

Charlotte tilted her head at me. “This isn’t some misguided attempt to win my affections, is it?”

“Oh, no. I just wanted to thank you for being nice, you know, even after. . .”

“Because it’d be a lot more guided if you could convert these files to STL format.”

“I’ll go find a converter.”

· · ·

“Hey,” Riley said, “I’m having some trouble with your indexes.”

“Good afternoon.”

“Indexes? It no worky.”

“Just a stab in the dark,” I said, “are you trying to get footage off of cameras installed in the last two weeks.”

“Yes.”

“Is that going to take all freaking day?”

“It’s going to take about one freaking second per camera/month of footage.” I started ordering that the new footage get added to the index.

“It’s a bunch of bank stuff for Alex. He says he needs it for his plan.”

“Operation Windmill?”

“Yeah. Banks are for suckers. Hollywood shows people robbing banks so they won’t get in trouble teaching people how to do useful crimes. Why does Alex want to know about banks?”

“I don’t know anything about Operation Windmill beyond its name.”

“I’m not sure we should have Alex planning.” Riley said. “He’s really good at games, I heard, but he’s not a criminal. I mean, if he’s trying to make us hit a bank.”

“I don’t know his plan. Maybe you’re right and it sucks.”

“You don’t know? I thought you and Alex trusted each other. I thought you were our two little super nerds.”

“We do.” I said. “We are. But he doesn’t want to talk to me about it, and I respect his privacy.”

“Is that Gone with the Wind?”

“Yep.”

“You like that?”

“I really do.” I said. “I think it’s the Apocalypse Now of civil war dramas.”

“Why is the case resting on Harpo? Isn’t that the computer you use for image crunching?”

“I appreciate the performances better when I know the actors’ identification markers.”

“Did I see you visiting Charlotte the other day?” Riley asked.

“I think you were out and about then, so you didn’t see us, or at least not in the normal sense.”

“Take it from me.” Riley said. “She’s a freak.”

“Noted. The new information is in. All recognized people have had the footage added to their indexes. Would you like fries with that?”

“No, thanks.” Riley tapped the doorjamb twice and walked away.

· · ·

“Hey, you.”

Charlotte was leaning through my doorway, holding up a small headless, armless figurine.

“That’s Scarlett’s dress.” I said. “Did you make it?”

“You can take some of the credit. I fixed it up a little and printed it.”

“Printed?” I took a moment to process that. “You know how to work a 3d printer? You have one?”

“Yes to all of the above. If you looked behind the raw silk, you would have seen the printer. I can weld and smith a little, too.”

“It’s very good.”

“Isn’t it? To thank you for helping me make it, I made you this.” Charlotte stepped the rest of the way into the room. Her other hand held a hanger with a suit.

“Oh, thanks!”

“Try it on.”

“I’ve got to close the door for a second.”

“Fine.” Charlotte said, and held out the suit.

I took it, closed the door. The suit was a very long black jacket and black slacks. There was also a white shirt and a black necktie. Everything felt baggy, like I was a child wearing my father’s clothes. I opened the door again.

“Well?” Charlotte asked.

“Are you sure this fits?”

Charlotte gave me a look.

“This jacket comes down to my knees.”

“I came prepared.” Charlotte said. She opened her purse and took out a black makeup crayon.

“What are you doing?”

“Stand still.” Charlotte carefully drew across my upper lip. She took off my glasses and drew on each eyebrow. Then she put my glasses back on.

“You mean. . .” I started and looked for a mirror, as if I had ever owned one.

Charlotte removed a compact form her purse and handed it to me. I looked through it from angle after angle.

“I’m Groucho.”

“I modeled it after his costume from Duck Soup. You’re a little taller than he was, so I fixed the proportions.”

I’m an awkward person. There are maybe a dozen times in my life that I knew exactly what to do and had the courage to do it. I handed the compact back. I raised my hand up over my head and finger spelled three letters.

“M-G-T?” Charlotte asked.

“Your purse?” I asked.

Charlotte handed it to me, and I set it on my desk. Violins were starting on the speakers. I closed the door again.

“I don’t think I understand.” Charlotte said.

I took her hand and placed my other hand on her waist. The violins continued playing against the rising notes of a bandoneon.

“Music. Genre. Tango.” I started the step and Charlotte took my lead.

“How’d it know what you signed? Oh, you have cameras.”

“They’re just for things like that.” I said. “They don’t remember anything for more than fifteen seconds unless I sign ‘r’ for record.”

“Is that why you paint your nails?”

“It makes it more reliable.”

“Where did you learn to dance?” Charlotte asked.

“I danced before Napoleon. Actually, he danced before me. Actually, he danced two hundred years before me.”

“You learned with your ex-wife?”

“Yeah. How about you?” I turned and promenaded Charlotte away from router and its mess of ethernet cable.

“Oh, I learned in high school. Dancing comes free with a costuming obsession.”

“I’ve got a professional question.”

“My profession or yours?”

“Yours.” I turned Charlotte again to avoid a large box of storage media.

“Then ask.”

“Is Green Skull’s costume maybe a bit impractical?”

Charlotte’s eyebrow went up in warning. “I’m nothing if not practical.”

“But the cape, the robe, the gloves, couldn’t someone grab it? Couldn’t it get caught in something?”

“It often does. When it does, it comes off. When people try to grab him, they usually end up with an armful of black cloth.”

“Really.”

“Really. It’s a little like what strippers wear. Everything has a clasp or a seam that parts really easily. In a few seconds, he can shed the whole thing and end up with a spandex and neoprene bodysuit with some kevlar and a little bit of high-tech chainmail. It’s not imposing or even flattering, but if the boss strips down to that, it usually means he’s been set on fire, and aesthetics aren’t his chief concern.”

“The cloth he leaves behind could be evidence.”

Charlotte smiled. “I think the most they can find is cloth from China’s second-largest textiles mill, custom sewed, custom dyed and fastened by someone wearing gloves.”

The song ended. A single violin started a drawn out note for the next song.

“I’m getting back to my room.” Charlotte said. “You’re an interesting man, Julius.”

“And you, Charlotte.” I sketched a ‘J’ in the air with my smallest finger. Coincidentally, my music player jumped to the next song.

· · ·

“Thank you for coming.” Green Skull said, as though we had a choice. “Alex has a strategy to sketch out for you. As some of you know, in his previous life, Alex was a day trader, successful even in the face of the dot net crash. He was a Go champion and won contests in designing computer heuristics. His hobby got him a job at AE games. He left over creative differences, and we recruited him. He believes this will be a successful plan.”

Green Skull gestured and Alex stood up.

“Um, thanks.” Alex said. “We have one thing. One really good thing. We have a script. If we do certain things, the police do certain things, and Firehawk does certain things. The same things happen again and again. I haven’t been here very long, and I imagine that’s really frustrating, but it’s also really good.”

“Am I supposed to know what you just said?” Riley asked.

“I don’t know. I’m saying we have a thing we do, and if we do that thing, we can predict people, particularly Firehawk. If we follow the script, everyone follows the script.”

“It’s like a dance.” Charlotte said without looking at me.

“Exactly! It’s a dance. Everyone knows the steps. It’s the wind for Operation Windmill.”

“What will we do?” Green Skull asked.

“We will hit Sunset Bank. . .” Alex started.

“Bank robbing is a sucker’s game.” Riley interrupted.

“It’s been robbed twice by a costumed criminal twice before.”

“Knightengale spent more money getting in, getting to the safe and getting out than she recovered from either job.” Green Skull said.

“Why did she do it twice?” Riley asked.

“It was a work for hire. Knightengale is an em-ploy-ee.” Green Skull drew out the last word, and his contempt was clear even over the voice changer.

“I think this is relevant to my plan.” Alex said. “Who hired Knightengale and why?”

Green Skull shifted in his cloak. “Knightengale was working for Monolith. It was basically an upscale protection racket. Monolith was selling an insurance policy for costumed criminals. Sunset Bank was already secure enough to not be worth robbing, so they wouldn’t buy. Monolith hires Knightengale. She hits Sunset twice. Sunset buys the policy.”

“A policy of seven million dollars a year.” Alex said. “Ready to pay up to three billion in damages.”

“Insurance fraud?” Riley asked.

“I considered it.” Alex said. “But no.”

“So we hit the bank. . .” Green Skull started.

“Yes, we hit the bank. We move all the customers and employees into the vault after we open it. Sunset is close to Firehawk’s patrol route. Firehawk will be there within ten minutes, faster than the full swat response. When he shows up, gleefully inform him that the customers are in trapped in the vault, and a special device is burning all the air faster than it recirculates.”

“Will we actually have such a device?” I asked.

“It’s okay, Julius. They’ll be fine. It’s just a way to get Firehawk into the vault.”

“What then?” Green Skull asked.

“We seal the vault door. Firehawk will be trapped in the vault with a diminishing air supply. There, a recorded message will tell Firehawk that the bank robbery is just a cover. We’re actually breaking into the Sunset bank’s offices. Once we compromise their computers, we’ll be free to rob the company electronically.”

“You can get a million or two from embezzlement and identity fraud.” Riley said. “More than that, and the bank will find out, and they’ll lock you out.”

“It’s going to be hard to get any money.” Alex said. “Firehawk is going to tell the bank we’ve infiltrated our computer system.”

“Isn’t he dead in a bank vault?” I asked.

“No, he gets out.”

“How?” Green Skull asked.

“I don’t know.” Alex said. “He just does. He always does. That’s the script. That’s the wind. We’re going to harness it, like a windmill.”

“And he’s supposed to think we locked him in a vault, told him our plan and left? Won’t he know something’s up?”

“He’ll believe it.” Green Skull said.

“Why?” Riley asked.

“There’s precedent.” Green Skull lifted his hands to gesture and put them down again. “It’s tough to explain. In this field, you don’t really have peers who appreciate what you do. Just forget it. He’ll think the electronic break-in is real, trust me.”

“This still doesn’t make money.” Riley said.

“But it costs money.” Alex said. “The bank floor is out for two days. We don’t know how Riley is getting out of the vault, but he’s a pyromaniac with a Ph.D in chemistry, so it’s probably not good for Sunset Bank’s property values. Once they find out we’ve broken into their system. . .”

“Are we really doing that or just saying we’re doing that?” Riley asked.

“We’re really doing that, and I suggest that we let you keep whatever you can pull out as incentive to do a good job. I know it won’t be much, because we’re tipping them off.”

“They’re going to tear that system apart.” Riley said. “A bank you can’t trust isn’t a bank. If they know I’m in there, they’re going to tear everything apart just to be sure I’m out.”

“How much will that cost?”

“Tens of millions.” Riley said. “The people they have to hire are covered in certifications and degrees. They’re specialists who don’t work outside the financial sector, so the gauge their clients while they can get it.”

“How long will it take?”

“Two months, maybe three.” Riley said.

“Sunset Bank,” Alex exclaimed. “Their offices are torn apart. Their vault is destroyed. Their employees are traumatized. Their system is compromised. At the peak of the home loan season, they’ll be barely functioning. The publicity alone will be horrible.”

“They’re insured.” I said.

“Yes! Exactly! Insured for any damages incurred as a result of the action of costumed criminals. It’s a very specific policy and one Monolith never thought they’d have to pay. Only an idiot hits a bank when it costs millions to fight your way in and out, and the take is usually in the low thousands. It’s a very, very generous policy when it pays.”

“What will the damages be?” Green Skull asked.

“Two billion dollars, give or take. Monolith will fight it, but Sunset has a great legal team.”

“But this isn’t our money.”

“But we know something no one else knows. Monolith is valued at sixty dollars a share, but they’re going to have the largest payout in their history, and their planned acquisition of the Cole Conglomerate is going to fall apart. I predict a forty point drop.”

“Insider trading.” Green Skull said.

“Yes! Insider trading. We’ll get more than half again whatever investment we put in. With a strong commitment of our disposable income, I believe we can exceed Vincent Cole’s disposable income.”

Ada spoke for the first time. “So the bank will be damaged and Monolith will pay for it.”

“Right.” Alex said.

“How do we make money on that?”

“We sell Monolith short right now. Basically, we pay money for the right to buy shares later, and we make the difference, I think we can beat forty dollars a share.”

“It’s not exactly holding the world for ransom.” Green Skull said.

“I have two responses.” Alex said. “First, our current ventures aren’t working, which suggests a change in strategy. Second, since the penalty for failure is death, my plan is apt to be more reliable than ambitious.”

“If I could rewind a second,” Riley said, “did you say our plan would stop Monolith’s takeover of the Cole’s company? In other words, we’ll be helping Firehawk?”

“If Monolith manages to buy Vincent Cole’s company, that will be bad for Vincent Cole, but it’s good for Firehawk.”

“I don’t know if you keep up,” Riley said, “but Vincent Cole is Firehawk.”

“And he’s caused me to get more skin grafts than I care to remember.” Green Skull said. “I don’t want to help him.”

“Okay, they’re the same person. But, if Monolith buys out Vincent Cole, he’ll be left with more money, more time and a lot of anger.”

For a moment, no one said anything. Green Skull broke the silence.

“Let’s see what we can find out about this bank.”

· · ·

Charlotte sat. Her face was flush, and a pair of reading glasses perched on the end of her nose. The sewing machine was humming below her. Her eyes looked past the fabric she was feeding past the needle. I stood there, waiting for a pause.

I started to feel like a voyeur.

“Hello, Julius.” Charlotte said without looking up. A moment later, she took a jacket off and began finishing parts by hand.

“I don’t have much to do with Windmill.” I said. “The indexes are up ahead of schedule. Riley can undermine the nations privacy without bothering me. I forgot how fast I work when I don’t have a home to go to.”

“It’s my busy time. This jacket is a copy of a bank clerk’s. Riley wants to pass for him at a distance.”

“Oh, I can get you a model of the jacket, like I did with the dresses.”

“Don’t bother. The jacket was from a mall. I recognized the fit and had Charlotte get one. It needs to have holdout pockets, and they look better if I remake it than if I modify an existing one.”

“I’m impressed.”

“Well, you’re easily impressed then. The big job is the boss’s outfit. For a big public crime, he’s got tons of gadgets, so I have to find a graceful way to turn that costume into a wearable tackle box. It needs nozzle holes for mace that don’t get in the way, places to conceal guns and knives.”

“You have to make another one each time?”

“That,” Charlotte said with a grimace, “is what happens when your boss’s nemesis is Firehawk. Everything comes back burned. I could finish some of my own projects if Cole would just switch to microwaves.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“You could get some condoms.”

“What?”

Charlotte peered at me over her reading glasses. “Julius, if you don’t know why I want them or why I’m asking you, you’ve saved yourself the bother.”

“Oh. I understand, but I’m not allowed to leave here.”

“Yes. You’ll have to ask Ada.”

“She hates me.”

“Ada’s a friend of mine, and trust me, she’d hate you more if I was the one to ask. You could ask Riley, but it could be awkward. We fooled around when I first started here.”

“Riley’s an asshole.”

“Another reason you’re better off asking Ada.”

“What happened between you two?”

Charlotte looked up at me again. “Clarify that question.”

“How did it end?”

“He lied about some things.”

I nodded. Charlotte took a bolt of cloth and started cutting it.

“Julius?”

“Yes?”

“I’ve got to be blunt like this because we’re in a confined space for two more years. I like to be demure and romantic, but we’re room mates and co-workers. A misunderstanding might make you angry, which I wouldn’t enjoy, or it might make me angry, which you wouldn’t survive.”

“I understand.”

“Also because we’re confined, this can’t be very serious. Do you understand what I mean?”

“I think so.”

“Under the circumstances, that’s not good enough. Whatever happens will be an isolated incident. If it happens well, there may be more isolated incidents, but there is nothing to be assumed. This remains my workshop. The room behind remains my room. Do not enter either without knocking. Anything you take for granted stands a very good chance of not being granted. Are we clear?”

“Like a web server,” I said before thinking.

“What?”

“On the web, every time a client sends a request, it reintroduces itself. The client says who it is and what it needs, and with every piece of information, the server makes another decision about what to do.”

Charlotte thought about that. “If that helped you understand, then good, but an analogy like that could make the isolated incidents that much more isolated and incidental.”

“Well,” I said, “I’ve got to talk to Ada.”

“Yes, but keep in mind, no matter how short she is with you, I am not bound to see the latex go to good use. This is just one of the feats of Hercules.”

· · ·

“Ada!”

“Is something wrong?” she asked. It was the most energetically I’d spoken to her. I made myself lower my voice.

“No, but I need you to get something.”

“Sure.” She pulled out a notepad.

“I need condoms.” I said. To fill the silence, I added, “Trojans, Avantis, whatever, really.”

“Okay.” Ada made a note without looking away from my face.

It was so little, compared to the things I’ve been through. It was the thinnest sign of disapproval. Maybe it was one thing too many. Maybe I wanted a new start. Maybe I had to have the fight I’d mentally prepared myself for.

“What’s that, Ada?” I asked.

“What’s what, Arthur.”

“No! You do not get to pull that ‘Arthur’ bullshit with me. I don’t care who you’re fucking.”

“I forgot,” Ada snapped back. “and I don’t care whom you fuck, but Charlotte’s my friend, and if you hit her, I’ll see you dead.”

“I hit one person once!”

“And I said that’s plenty.”

“Is this plenty?” I pushed out a small notch in my left ear. “I used to wear a little hoop in this ear, but I tried to walk away when my ex was mad at me. She wasn’t even my wife yet. She hit me with a chair once. That healed. I didn’t tell anyone.”

“It. . .”

“Shut the fuck up!” I yelled. I stepped toward Ada, and she backed up, wide eyed, like she’d never been a personal trainer, like she wasn’t a brown belt. “I hit her once. I was crying about something, and she made fun of me. I do have a temper. It doesn’t make it right. I. . .” I made a fist and shook it. “I didn’t think I needed a lawyer. By the time I realized I did, I was almost almost in prison. Two years probation, a felony on my record, my master’s degree and twelve years experience completely useless.

“Ian. My son, you know, Ian. I didn’t see him outside a government office from the night I hit Sharon until eight months later. That was eight months for him to hear the other side. The way he looked at me was like he had no idea who I was.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t care.” I snapped. I stamped down the hall to my rooms.

· · ·

I was asleep when Harpo started Honking. I’d rewritten the system to identify the other inhabitants of the lair. The horn blew short and long. For a quarter second, I thought it was “A” for Ada, and I was even trying to compose a statement to retain some dignity when another short honk came. It was “R” for Riley.

“To what do I owe,” I began.

“You’re in deep shit if you can’t get your index working again.”

I tried not to get nervous as I padded over to Groucho. I typed in the commands to do an index search.

“It is working.”

“I can’t connect.” Riley said. He dropped his laptop onto my desk and opened it up.

“Here’s hoping,” I said, and I held up my hand with my fingers crossed. The cameras in my office interpreted the gesture as an “r” and started recording.

Riley typed a set of commands. The screen of his laptop blinked ‘Index not found’. “What the hell is that?”

“Are you mounting the index on Lex?” I asked. Lex was Gar’s chief file server.

“Yes.”

“It’s not on Lex anymore, it’s on Harpo. You needed me to add cameras to the index as fast as you can put them up. Harpo can’t keep that up on a remote file. You need to mount Harpo’s drive and set your environment variables. I sent email out about this three days ago.”

“Who can read all the email you guys send?”

“Anyone remotely literate. I think I’ve seen five work emails since I came here. Did you ever have a job before you started with the viruses and identity fraud?”

Riley looked like he was about to bite me. Mostly, I think he hated it when I brought up his former life. Only determined image analysts knew me by reputation, and serious Go players knew who Alex had been, but anyone who followed computer crime knew Riley. His crime and supposed suicide had been on the small side of a national news story.

But I also suspect I was right. Riley was younger than I was, and they’d been hunting him for years. I think he’d never really worked.

“Fine,” Riley said. “It works. Also, I need something you to cook up sound files with people’s voices. Most of the people are at Sunset Bank. I want to be able to leave voice mail with their voices saying they’re inspecting an inspection and things like that.”

“Do you know what pattern analysis of images and sound editing have in common?”

“What?”

“I was hoping you’d tell me. Because I don’t crap about sound editing.”

“We found software that does it, but it doesn’t work.” Riley said. “And I know you have time on your hands.”

Riley picked up his laptop and walked out. I raised a fist, and the cameras stopped recording.

I sat down at my computer and replayed the video. It started with me crossing my fingers and ended with me making a fist. It was fifty-two seconds. I had two camera angles, and one of them showed Riley’s fingers. I ran a program, and read through the keystrokes. I saw “randerson” and “$2yg(1RG+”. It was a username and password.

It’s a trap. Riley, a notorious computer criminal, walks into the office of an image analyst and types his password? He wants you to try to break into his computer. Next thing you know, he’ll tell Green Skull, who will stuff you into a dumpster.

“First,” I said to myself, “I am not someone who can arrest Riley, and I’m not someone he can rob or sleep with. In Riley’s world view, I might as well be a cow. Maybe he forgets there are plain old cameras.

“And second, what if I get caught? I’ve been doing my job. If I try to break into Riley’s computer, I’m not trying to screw the boss, I’m trying to screw Riley. If he kills everyone who hates Riley, he’ll have no one working for him but Riley. Heck, probably not even Riley.”

I found Riley’s address and typed his password. I had a prompt.

Twenty minutes of feverish work had produced a back door that would let me in if Riley changed his password. I’d used a similar trick to get my code away from the Department of Defense.

When I was done, I saw that Riley had sent me an email message describing the work he wanted.

· · ·

Two honks woke me up, short and long.

“Christ, Riley.” I muttered. I’d been working on Riley’s sound project most of the night. I hadn’t fallen asleep at my keyboard, but I might have if my bed were not fifteen feet away. As I walked to the door, I realized there was no third honk and it was Ada.

“Good morning.” Ada said. She had a paper bag in either hand. She handed me the brown one first. “Here’s what you asked for.”

“Thanks.” There’s an unwanted intimacy after you’ve had a really bad fight with someone you don’t know well. It’s a little like a mutually regretted one night stand.

“And this,” Ada held up the other bag, “is Linzer cookies. I asked G if there was something you liked.”

“How would he know?” I tried to imagine Green Skull bringing me Linzer cookies, and couldn’t help smiling. “Oh, stupid question.”

“Yeah.” Ada said. “I see hardly any footage when we’re scoping a recruit. I just hear things, you know, second hand. That’s it, unless you want something else.”

“Um, could you get me a cheap music player with a speaker and a copy of The Deer Hunter?”

“I don’t think that’s quite Charlotte’s cup of obscure French tea.”

“It’s not for Charlotte. It’s for Riley.”

“Hey, if I knew the condoms were for Riley, I would have encouraged a little abuse.” Ada caught my look. “Okay, too soon.”

“Bye.”

· · ·

I was having an early dinner with Alex. It was the first time I’d left my room and office in two days. Riley showed up as I was eating a bowl of chili.

“Julius, why aren’t you working on the voice thing?” Riley asked.

Alex started to talk. I held up a hand and silenced him. I pulled out the music player, which took a couple seconds too long for perfect effect. Then I hit play.

“Oh, Riley, it’s you,” said the voice of a slow-speaking Queens accent from the player, “I got the mimicry software to work, and it’s okay, but you’ll need to give me scripts for the words you want with the names or identifiers for the voices. The software needs to be double checked. If that’s not good enough, go you can fuck yourself.”

“That doesn’t sound like anybody at Sunset Bank.” Riley said.

“It’s Christopher Walken.” Alex said.

“See, Riley, you should be bitterly ashamed. You missed a pop culture reference Alex got.”

“I don’t really know who he is, but people imitate him a lot.” Alex said.

“What’s the last movie you’ve seen?” I asked Alex.

“Searching for Bobby Fischer,” Alex said. “That was just. . .”

“Ten years ago.”

“I saw Gone with the Wind.”

“Great,” Riley said. “another nerd sniffing after Charlotte.”

“I was six.” Alex pointed out.

“That’s why you’re the master, Alex,” I said, “you plan your moves years in advance.”

Alex blinked, and then his stone face dissolved in a fit of giggles.

“I’ll get you the goddamn scripts.” Riley said and started back to his room.

I hit skip twice on the music player and hit play again. “Go!” yelled Groucho Marx, “And never darken my towels again!”

“How long did that take you?” Alex asked.

“That one was actually a direct quote, so it was maybe fifteen minutes to find the sound file on the internet.”

“How long did it take to make all the sound files.”

“Two and a half hours.”

“Was it worth it?”

I shrugged. “Not yet, but I’ll remember it, so it’ll keep paying off.”

· · ·

“You sent me mail?” Gar asked in his barely-audible voice.

“I did, thanks for coming. Like I said in the email, this is nothing big, and I really don’t even know if it’s a system problem. I just know it’s happening with remote files and not with local, and I wanted your opinion as to why it’s happening.”

If that seems like a lot of reassurance, you have to understand just how wound up Gar was. I was hoping that I could put Gar at ease, at least enough that he didn’t rattle change in his left hand.

“You said it was a problem with your video.”

“Just a little artifacting,” I said, “look at this.”

The monitor showed the view from one of the spy cameras. Cars were passing by, and a sign said, “Right lane must turn right.”

“It looks find to me.” Gar said.

A truck passed and the sign that said, “Right lane must turn right” now said, “Gar, listen.”

My hands were under my desk. I’d put a camera down there, and I was typing on air, my camera reading the movements. When I hit return, whatever I wrote was written to the sign in the video.

“Do you see what I mean?” I asked. The sign now said, “We are being watched.”

“Huh.” Gar said.

Another car passed, and the sign said, “I have Riley’s password.”

“I don’t know if I can help with this problem.”

“Where do the cameras write to?” the sign read.

Gar just shook his head. I kept typing.

“I can help you.” the sign said.

“Is it okay if I use your keyboard?” Gar asked.

I pushed the keyboard to him. Under the desk, I air typed, “Be my guest,” and the sign faithfully repeated me.

Gar opened a window on Corrigan, a computer I hadn’t used. He logged in and tried to open a directory and got a message saying, “permission denied”.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t help you.” Gar said.

“That’s okay.”

Gar stood up and almost ran out of the room.

After Gar went, I got into Riley’s account and checked through his past commands. Riley connected to Corrigan almost every day. I pulled up Riley’s history, found his account on Corrigan and logged in.

Once I was in, I looked at the directory Gar had tried to access. In it, there were dozens of archived video files. I knew Green Skull’s surveillance files to navigate pretty easily. There was footage of every part of the lair except for Green Skull’s own rooms. The footage went back only four months.

Riley didn’t have access to edit or remove the video. He could only read it. I couldn’t use my access to get any extra privacy. I copied the video to Harpo and logged out.

· · ·

It was late. I’d been afraid to talk to Charlotte after the fight with Ada, which I was sure they’d discussed. I’d finally gotten up the nerve to talk to Charlotte around midnight. I knew she was usually up until one. As I left my office, I nearly ran into Green Skull.

“Is there something I can do?”

“Just roaming the hallways. I have trouble sleeping before a public job, and a bank is as public as it gets.”

“Riley said banks are bad.”

“Banks are bad.” Green Skull agreed. “It’s like you’re in slow motion. You get in, you show your weapons. You get to the vault in what seems like a couple minutes, but it’s been half an hour and the barricades are in place.”

“It seems like a good plan.”

Green Skull nodded. “Alex said something important. He said I’m a white collar criminal committing blue collar crime. It makes sense. I’ve got a doctorate in electrical engineering, and most of my work is simple intimidation. This plan is white collar crime disguised as blue collar crime.”

“I can’t see you as an engineer.”

“Lots of people are different things that don’t seem to mix. The government contract I was on was as black ops as it gets. They saw some signs I was smuggling the spy dust – that’s what they called my cameras – out of the labs. They thought I was going to the press. They thought I had an attack of conscience.” Green skull laughed. It was a disturbing low rumbling sound coming out of the helmet.

“Did they try to arrest you?”

“It was black ops. They tried to kill me. The thing about a government killer is that he’s more government than killer. He has a plan, and he follows the plan so he doesn’t have to feel bad about it. But if you don’t walk out of your front door on the morning he has his sniper rifle set up, he has to improvise, and he doesn’t have the stomach for improvised killing.

“What my employers didn’t know was that I’d already killed five people, and they didn’t expect that in a technology professional. There’s no reason that homicide and electrical engineering can’t exist in the same person.”

“What happened?”

“I had advance notice because of my spy dust. The situation wasn’t what the government killer expected. He panicked.” Green Skull shrugged. “I didn’t.”

“You killed five people, and no one found out? A job like yours must have required clearance, a full FBI background check.”

“The FBI checked. I wasn’t a suspect in any of the five murders. Often, no one knew I had any connection at all.”

I wanted to go back into my office and hide, but I couldn’t. “Why did you kill those people?”

“Different reasons.” Green Skull said. “Anger, ambition. The first one was almost an accident. I was crossing a bridge with my older brother. I showed him a toy and he threw it off the bridge. He was just being eight and mean. I pushed him off. I was six and furious. I ran home and told everyone I hadn’t seen him all night.”

“The fall killed him?”

“Not right away. He was hidden in the tall grass. No one found him until the next night.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Yeah.” Green Skull nodded. “They call me a sociopath. As far as I’ve read, that’s something you’re born with, and I wasn’t born with this. I can kill people now and not feel a thing, but part of me feels like some awful punishment is coming for the night on the bridge.”

“What was the toy?”

“It was a glow-in-the-dark piece of plastic – a little green skull.”

He walked away, and I didn’t talk to Charlotte that night after all.

· · ·

“We have just heard that there is a robbery in progress at Sunset Bank. Firehawk is at the scene, but we don’t know who is committing the crime.”

“Are we Tivoing this?” Charlotte asked. Riley, Ada and Green Skull were at the scene. The rest of us were watching in the break room.

“We continuously record forty-five television stations, including these.” Gar said.

“Are things okay with the internal cameras?” Alex asked.

“Sorry,” I said, “I thought I’d have it up by now. It should be just another minute. . .”

A separate piece of video took over part of the screen. Firehawk strutted across the lobby of a bank like a bullfighter.

“That’s got to be eighty pounds of gear strapped to him.” Charlotte said.

“Really?”

I switched angles. The first one didn’t show anything interesting. The next one showed Green Skull. I hadn’t seen him like this. There was no movement. Nothing about the figure suggested it was anything but some grim statue holding a frightened woman by the neck.

“Do we have audio?” Alex asked.

“I think so,” I said, “but nobody’s talking.”

“What’s that woman wearing?” Charlotte asked.

“That’s a bomb.” Alex asked.

“Is that part of your plan?” I asked.

Alex shook his head. “That’s the boss’s idea. It’ll keep Firehawk occupied.”

Green Skull let the woman go. She ran to Firehawk, who raised one hand to accept her. With the other, he flourished something like a wire mesh umbrella.

“It’s some kind of scrambler. He’s used it before. It creates a huge magnetic field. It stops all signals from passing, and it doesn’t seem to last more than a minute or two. We don’t know how it works. Here’s the thing, it’s got to be twelve pounds, so he can’t have it with him all the time. How did he know to bring it now?”

Smoke spouted from devices at Firehawk’s wrists and boots, covering him and the hostage in less than a second.

“He put up the smoke in case the boss switched to an infared detonator.”

Green Skull turned and walked away. Dozens of small metal objects the size of a dime dropped from his cloak as he walked away.

“What are those?” I asked.

“They’re basically little mines. Hitting one just hurts your foot, but if you fall down on some more, it could get serious.”

“It took a long time to make the coat hang so that the damn things never bounced forward under his feet as he walked.” Charlotte added.

Firehawk jumped from the shroud of smoke.

“I think he’s disarmed the bomb.” Alex said. “It took him seven seconds.”

Firehawk took several leaping strides. Sometimes his feet were on one side of the path of little mines, sometimes he landed on his toes in a small bare patch. He grabbed Green Skull’s cape, which tore off in his hand.

“See?” Charlotte said as Green Skull reached the elevator.

The elevator doors closed behind Green Skull. Firehawk put out a hand, but the doors closed on it. The safety mechanism was apparently disabled. We could see the elevator light up as some device on Firehawk’s hand sent fire into the elevator. Then Firehawk struggled to pull his hand free of the doors before the elevator went up.

“Do you think he’s okay?”

“The boss?” Alex asked. “Sure, he’s fine. That was just a wide arc flamethrower. It’s not that hot. This happens a lot.”

Firehawk turned. It was the best view we’d gotten of his face, and he was grinning excitedly. He looked toward the stairways.

“Help!” the yell was faint from someone off camera. Firehawk turned and ran out of frame.

I started looking for another camera, and then I found one. It was pointed at a vault door. Firehawk hauled a desk a few feet until it blocked the vault door’s path to close.

“Good thinking.” Alex said.

Firehawk jumped over the desk into the vault, from which cries for help became more distinct.

“The door’s blocked.” I said. “Is that going to be a problem?”

“We had time to prepare.” Alex said. The desk disappeared in a shower of splinters, and the vault door swung shut.

I stopped the camera feed, and a newscaster came back. “. . . what is currently happening in Sunset Bank. One woman has left the building. She has said that the criminal in the bank is the persona terrorist Green Skull. She said that Green Skull strapped a bomb to her and that Firehawk removed it. The two may still be fighting inside, but there is no word as yet.”

The camera pulled back to a large collection of police cars.

“Police are getting ready to rush the front doors just as soon as. . .wait, there has been an explosion.”

The camera moved and pointed up. Several floors above the bank lobby, smoke streamed from the side of the building. A figure in black dropped from the smoke.

“Someone has fallen from the building. From the clothing, it appears to be Green Skull. He has fallen around a hundred feet to hit the ground. The body is limp.”

“Did I miss anything?” Riley asked. I jumped and turned around.

“I thought you were supposed to be there.” I said.

“I just prepped the scene.” Riley said. “I left about the time Firehawk showed up.”

“Green Skull just fell out of the building? Is this part of the plan?”

“What?” Riley asked. “Green Skull fell? Oh my God! Is he dead?”

“It’s a mannikin.” Alex said. “They stashed in the bank two days ago. They just put the costume on it and dropped it out. It’s about the explode.”

And, on the camera, the figure on the ground exploded.

“Hey, Alex, I was fucking with them.” Riley said, the way you’d say, ‘I was going to eat that.’

“Green Skull just rode a miniature glider to the hotel next door. Ada’s there. She just let loose some tear gas to get rid of gawkers. The mannikin and the smoke are to make sure no one’s watching.”

Riley snorted. “That thing’s a glorified kite, Alex. You’d better hope there’s not too much wind.”

“Three miles per hour from the northeast.” Alex reported.

“That costume took me sixty hours.” Charlotte said. “I wish he told me he’d fill it with explosives and push it out a window.”

“True art is ephemeral.” said Alex.

“Only if you drop it from a building and blow it up.”

“Ssh.” Riley said, and pointed at the screen.

“. . . police have received no answer from within the bank, and they have rushed the lobby, but it is deserted. The vault is closed. For those of you just joining us, one woman, Veronica Chavez, has left the bank. She has said that the staff, security guards and customers have all been marched into the vault. The vault is now closed. I’ve just heard that the police are talking to the vice president about how to open the vault.”

“Boring.” Riley pronounced.

I changed the channel.

“Do you think Green Skull is dead?” a reporter asked.

“No, I don’t think so. Why would he take an elevator up nine floors only to break a window and jump out? Also, I’ve seen more people fall than I’d like, and they don’t look like that.”

“There was an explosion and people have seen blood.”

“Has anyone checked to see if it’s blood?”

I muted the television. “You didn’t load the mannikin with blood, did you?”

“Red food coloring and corn syrup.” Alex said. “It’s just a quick distraction.”

“Is there a camera in the vault?” Charlotte asked.

“Yes,” I said. I typed in the command to switch cameras, and I got an error. Assuming it was a typo, I typed the command again.

“You could give us the news again if you can’t work the computer.” Riley said.

I changed to a different news station. The words across the bottom of the screen identified an interviewee as the vice president of Sunset Banking. I unmuted the television.

“The thing you have to understand about vaults is their purpose is to be hard to open. It’s our job and the vault’s to protect what’s inside. It’s relatively easy to make a vault so it won’t open. You can break a couple things, and the mechanism to open the vault won’t work.”

“So you can’t get it open?” the reporter asked.

“Not quickly.” Sunset’s Vice president said. “We’ll have tools. It takes a couple hours, but we’ll get it open.”

“Will the people inside be okay.”

“I think they’ll be fine. There’s air going in. Of course the ventilation shafts are small so that people can’t go through. Um, has anyone checked to see if the ventilation is working?”

“It’s not working.” I said.

“Damn straight the ventilation shafts aren’t working. We filled them with riot foam. Getting air through that is like sucking a concrete milkshake.”

“The cameras in the vault aren’t working. They stopped providing a feed about five minutes ago. Is there anything that breaks our micro cameras?”

Everyone looked at Riley.

“Hell if I know.” Riley said. “There’s this umbrella Firehawk has that jams radio signals. Maybe it’s that.”

I changed the camera and an image came up. Firehawk’s radio jammer had exploded since we saw it last. A gloved policeman was carefully putting the pieces into an evidence bag.

“Somehow, I don’t think that gadget is jamming anything right now.”

I changed the camera to show the last feed inside the vault. The video came in reverse. First it was black, then it was glowing red, then the flames retreat into a flamethrower and we see Firehawk. He’s looking directly at the camera.

“.gnitaroceder tsuJ” Firehawk says.

“?gniod uoy era tahW” Someone out of view asks.

Firehawk steps back and he looks at a small device in his hand. Then he takes a few more backward steps, watching the box as he does.

Alex counted with his fingers. “One, the spy dust cameras can be destroyed with flame. Two, Firehawk knows this. Three, he can detect the cameras.”

“What?” asked Riley.

“Three things you should have told me months ago.”

I changed back to news. “. . . disturbing development, the police have found that all ventilation into the vault is blocked. Chavez, who escaped the building, described the hostages bound but not gagged and half filling the vault. Experts have told us that this many people will remain healthy with about ten hours of oxygen, but Chavez also described a burning device a torch in the vault with them. The purpose of the device is unknown, but if it is still burning, it could mean serious danger for the people in the vault.”

“How long do they have?” I asked.

“The device is a little like the burner on your oven, only it points in all directions and uses jet fuel, so it’s hotter. It’s difficult to deactivate, since it surrounds itself with 340 degree flame.”

Riley smiled. “I don’t believe that was the question.”

“It burns a kilogram of oxygen every twenty seconds. If it’s not shut down, they’re all dead. Either from lack of oxygen or from the heat it generates.”

No one spoke. I flipped through channels. I stopped when I heard the blast of an alarm over the television.

“The fire alarm has gone off at Sunset Bank.” a reporter said. “Things are very chaotic in the lobby. The source of the fire is unknown, but there are already fire trucks parked outside.”

Behind the reporter, people started yelling.

“I’m hearing shouts. If I’m not mistaken, it seems to be good news.”

The camera panned left. The stairway door was open, and a group of people poured into the lobby. These people looked exhausted and were covered in sweat, but they laughed as they walked into the lobby.

“What did I miss?” Green Skull asked.

“They know you’re not dead.” Riley said.

“It looks like everyone has gotten out of the vault.” Alex said.

“They’re out?” Ada asked as she walked in. “How’d he get out of the vault?”

Alex motioned for silence, and a reporter said, “Initial reports say that Firehawk used a high temperature burner that Green Skull left behind to melt his way through a weak point in the ceiling.”

“It’s not hot enough to do that.” Alex said.

“Not the way I made it,” Green Skull said, “but if you put everything through one burner and increased the flow, it would burn hot enough. It’s a dangerous damn thing to use in a confined space.”

“I’ve been thinking about our whole plan. Wouldn’t it have been easier just to blow the damn building up?” Riley asked.

“Of course it would.” Alex said. “But there’s lots of businesses in that building, and over ten different insurers would have been involved if we destroyed the building. This way, Monolith is responsible for all damages.”

“How long before the shares drop?” Green Skull asked.

“Two days. Exercise a quarter of your shares tomorrow and the rest the next day.”

Green Skull said, “Get ready for the next phase.”

“Next phase?” I asked.

“We’re getting toys,” Riley said.

· · ·

“It’s done.” I said to Charlotte. “Look in the shared folder under jim-chen.plt.”

Charlotte paused in her make-up work. Riley sat still with his eyes closed. Charlotte brought up a model of Jim Chen’s head and zoomed in. She stood up and went to work on Riley’s eyes. She applied makeup to him with an efficient disregard as if Riley were a statue she was sculpting. It made me feel oddly jealous.

“Wouldn’t it be easier if you picked a white guy?” I asked.

Riley rolled his eyes.

“I’ve been over Jim Chen’s indexes a lot. There’s thirty people in that center. A couple of them look a lot more like you.”

“Jim Chen is the only one in his office who speaks Chinese. He’s fluent in English, but he’s not comfortable speaking it, so he only says a couple words and he doesn’t make eye contact. He’s practically invisible.”

“Are you scared when you do this?”

“Give me a quarter.” Riley said.

“Why the hell would I have a quarter?”

Riley fished a quarter out of his pocket. Stiffly, because Charlotte was still applying makeup, he handed it to me.

“Now, give me the quarter.”

I handed him the quarter. Riley held it up to his eye, turned it around and handed it back. I waited for an answer.

“So?”

“You tell me,” Riley said.

“You just gave me a quarter, twice.”

“No, I gave you two different quarters. The first one was 1982. The second one was 2005. The first one had an eagle. The second one had a buffalo. I’m not scared of doing what I’m doing because nobody pays attention. People see something flat and silver and about an inch in diameter, and they think, ‘quarter’, and that’s about it. When I walk in, they see Jim Chen and don’t care.”

I looked at the quarter. It was a 2005 quarter with a buffalo on the back. “Nice demonstration.”

“Except he’s too lazy to learn to palm coins.” Charlotte said as she put putty on Riley’s brow. “There was no 1982 quarter.”

“You saw that.” Riley said.

“I was actually paying attention to what I’m doing. I just know you’re too lazy to learn to palm coins.”

“Well, your boyfriend is too lazy to even look at them. You actually sleep with this guy?”

“Hey,” I said.

“Haven’t had the opportunity yet.” Charlotte said. “But I’m caught up once I’ve finished your makeup. Julius, are you busy?”

“Well. . .” I started.

“Riley, keep your face still. I have to fix your forehead. Julius, you were saying?”

“I’m caught up, too.”

“Wonderful. You know what bothers you about Julius?”

“Who said he bothers me?”

Charlotte stood back. Riley’s hair had been cut and dyed. His complexion changed. If I was just glancing, I’d think it was the footage of Jim Chen, come to life, “It’s because he makes things. He makes things that no one else can.”

“I’ve written a thing or two.” Riley said.

“Viruses.” Charlotte said. “You want to think you’re an artist because you’re a bullshit artist, but you secretly worry that they could fill a city with people like you.”

Charlotte pulled the apron off of Riley and shook it out. “And they have.” she concluded. “I used to live there.”

“You said I lied to you. What did I lie to you about?” Riley asked.

“You’re so alert. You tell me.”

“What did you catch me lying about?”

Charlotte gestured towards the door. “Grow up, Riley.”

When Riley was gone, I asked, “You’re not running around with me to bother Riley, are you?”

“You insult me. That’s just gravy.”

“I don’t know if I like being used that way.”

“You will.”

· · ·

The sweat on my body was just starting to feel cold, and Charlotte burrowed into a large comforter. Her private room was as covered with cloth as her sewing room. The sheets seemed to blur into fabric from the four poster bed which blended into the wall hangings. Even the ceiling was tacked up cloth.

“It’s like being in an enormous drier.”

“If there’s a drier this big,” Charlotte said, “I need it. I spend half my life doing laundry.”

I put my mouth right next to Charlotte’s ear and said, as quietly as I could, “Charlotte.”

She put three fingers over my mouth. She rolled over and pulled out a large sketchpad. She released my mouth and grabbed a marker. She flipped the pad past some sketches and wrote, “No talk. Room bugged.”

I winced at the words. I picked up the pad and wrote only “Cameras.”

Charlotte shook her head and wrote, “Cloth covers everything.”

“Could be cameras on cloth.”

“Cloth changed regularly. Washed, ironed. No one here since.”

I held the pad for a long time before I wrote, “I’m not sure that works.”

“I am.”

Did I want to bet my life that Charlotte’s room wasn’t bugged? I’d already bet my life that she wouldn’t inform on me, and maybe my life wasn’t that much to bet. “I have Riley’s password.”

“What will you do with it?”

“Escape, maybe.”

Charlotte shook her head.

“Why not?”

“1- GS can’t lead if people know they can get away. Killing you becomes top priority.

“2- You know you can’t hide from him.”

“I could break the surveillance network.”

Charlotte shook her head as she wrote. “Gar is too good. There’s backups upon backups. Riley spent a month trying to wreck it. He broke Gar, but the system’s still up.”

Charlotte reached over and grabbed a water bottle. She took a swig and then carefully sprinkled the water on the pages from her sketchpad. Slowly, she ripped the pages apart. The moistened pages made no sound. She put the torn pages in her purse on her nightstand, and I never heard about them again.

· · ·

The lair is normally a quiet place. Green Skull and Ada spend most of their time on the other side of a soundproof door that I never saw past. Riley spent half his time away. We’d gotten our money from Monolith, so Alex had stopped watching financial news on the television. Everything was very quiet.

So when I heard a crash from the loading room followed, inevitably, by a scream from Gar’s room, I left my office and walked down the hall.

The loading room was a large room with a very high ceiling, with walls lined with loosely-categorized boxes. Imperishable food, cleaning supplies, toilet paper, batteries, ammunition, anything that a costumed criminal and a villain might use that doesn’t need to be refrigerated was kept there. It also had a large metal door that led to a hallway that led to the outside.

That large metal door was closing as I walked in. A large crate lay near the door. A large crack ran across the crate. Green Skull stood nearby holding a laptop. He typed a set of commands.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Wait for it,” Green Skull said. “Charlotte did a good job with these gloves, but they’re still not as good as typing bare handed. And, now.”

I watched the crate.

“Oh, I see what I did wrong. Duh.” Green Skull said, and few keystrokes later, a mechanical leg burst out of the crate.

“What the hell?”

“It should be strong enough to walk right out.”

It was. Three more legs extended themselves from the crate. As it stood up, the crate fell apart. A robot stood up. It loomed over me, looking far, far to big to have ever fit in that box.

The thing moved like something alive. Its manner suggested something in between a mammal and an insect, and it made my skin crawl. It walked in a circle through the room.

“This thing is called a pack-a-derm by the people who made it. It can walk forty klicks an hour while carrying a metric ton of weight. It can cross difficult terrain.”

“Like snow or boulders?”

“And cars and houses. It’s a beauty.”

“This is what Riley was stealing?” I asked.

“No,” Green Skull said. “He’s not back. He’s getting a targeting system and some guns. When he’s done, I’ll put the three together to make a killing machine no one can stop.”

“Where are you getting it all?” I asked.

“Military contractors.”

“So the army is going to have a killer robot just like this soon.”

Green Skull laughed. “Didn’t you work for them? This robot was made by a contractor. The guns and the targeting were made by another contractor. They’ve been bidding against each other for years and hate each other. They turn the inventions over to the army, but those are different divisions with their own rivalries. It’ll take the army five or six years.”

“You’re saying the best way to get army departments to cooperate is to steal from them?” I asked.

“Don’t look at me like that. I’m just the messenger. The contractors just want to keep getting money. The army people want to look good, but mostly they just want things to stay the same. Nobody wants innovation.”

“You want innovation?”

Green Skull spread his hands. “I want killer robots.”

· · ·

The day after I first saw the pack-a-derm – terrible name, by the way – I found Sharon. I’d been with Charlotte, but she was in a mood to sleep alone, so I returned to my room. I worked in the office for a little and then opened my door to the bedroom, and there she was.

The thought crossed my mind that this was the realization of a juvenile fantasy that after all the bitter fighting, my ex-wife would throw herself at me. It was just a second before I realized that couldn’t be it.

My next thought was that she was that Green Skull had brought her to the lair so I could punish her. That thought managed to run through my head for a couple breaths, but there are too many reasons that wasn’t a practical thing for him to do.

Besides, even if there’s no obvious marks, a dead person just doesn’t look like a living person.

“What? What the fuck? What the hell happened to Sharon?” I screamed as I pounded on Green Skull’s soundproof door. There was no sign of a microphone or camera, but I knew there was at least one of both.

The door opened and Green Skull walked into me as if I wasn’t there. He’s weighs over fifty pounds more than I do. It might be the suit. I was stumbling back.

“I did that for you.”

“Why the hell would you kill Sharon for me?”

“She destroyed your life.”

Most days, that was how I saw it. I’d been through a lot of therapy, and I understood that I didn’t tell anyone when she hit me, I hit her and I did a lousy job of defending myself legally and professionally. I was not independent of what happened to me.

I’d dreamed of killing Sharon. But seeing the body, I felt nothing but grief and horror. That Sharon destroyed my life seemed to have no more relevance than that she had curly hair or that she was Catholic.

“What about Ian? He’s going to be raised by Paul?”

“Phil.”

“She left Paul.”

“No.” Green Skull said. “There is no Paul. His name is Phil. No, Ian’s not going to be raised by Phil. Phil showed up, and I couldn’t have a witness.”

“Ian?” I asked.

Green Skull was motionless. The face in that mask could have had any expression.

I was ready to hit him. It would have been a stupid thing.

“Ian was at school.” Ava said. “It was Sharon and Phil.”

My mind went through the family tree, trying to figure out who was Ian’s next closest relative. My parents were dead. Sharon’s mother couldn’t walk. Her father was dead. Phil’s parents. . .

I threw a punch at the green skull as hard as I could. He didn’t block, but I was just hitting the mask. He placed a gloved hand on my cheek, and he tazered me unconscious.

· · ·

There was a kind of pins and needles feeling in my neck, and a quite terrible pain in my head. The left side of my face felt swollen and numb. The fingers on my right hand were stiff and pained. I looked around and saw a familiar table and chairs. I was in the break room.

Alex knelt down next to me. His voice was far quieter than its usual boom. “Can you understand me? Are you conscious?”

“Um-hmm.”

“You can’t yell at Green Skull like that again. The thing with the body was a test. This response is not what he wanted.”

“You. . .”

“I didn’t suggest this. I don’t like this. I didn’t pass this test, though I didn’t hit him.”

“Where’s Sharon?”

“Ada and the boss are moving her now.”

“Could they put her back? Sharon’s mother isn’t doing great. It’d help if she knew where the body was.”

“No.” Alex said. “He won’t do that. It makes the body easier to trace, and if you ask, it’s a bad sign.”

“Sign of what?”

“It’s a sign that there’s things you don’t want to be a part of. It’s a sign that you might balk at what we’re doing.”

Charlotte came to my side. “How are you doing?”

“I’ll recover.”

“It’s hard.” Alex said.

“That’s just something he does? He leaves bodies in your bed?”

“It’s a test.” Alex repeated. But I wasn’t listening. I slowly turned to Charlotte and stared at her.

“What?” Charlotte asked.

“’It’s like living with a big cat.’”

Charlotte just looked at me for a second, then she recognized the sentence. She answered,“Yeah, and the people who run the wardrobe departments? Motherfuckers.”

“I want to be alone.”

“You’ve had a bad shock.” Alex said. “Literally, too.”

“Please.”

When they were gone, I lay there feeling my cheek and hand throb. My mind felt like a bruise. I lay my head on the linoleum floor of the break room. I stared at the sprawling floor rendered large by the perspective, and I ran through every fight I’d ever had with Sharon.

Eventually, I got up and went to bed. I wasn’t going to do it. I wasn’t going to go to the same bed where I found the body, but I can never stand up for principle without sleep.

· · ·

When I awoke, everyone else was still in their rooms. I went to the break room, grabbed some ice, wrapped it in a washcloth, and put it on my hand. I went back to my office and sat down.

I connected to Riley’s account, and I started to sift through all the footage he had inside the lair. First, I made an index for Green Skull himself. I ran the typing analyzer to get an index of what things he typed.

It was tough to get his password. Green Skull knew where the cameras were, and he usually kept his hands out of view. It took one hour to find out when he last changed his password. It took another two hours to piece together what it was from different angles that barely showed the keyboard. The work finally rewarded me with “OB,fw/i&w”. I put in several back doors so that I could get back in if Green Skull changed his password.

The first thing to do was to hide my trail. I got rid of all the logs that showed me logging into Riley’s account. I set up a program that cleared log entries that showed access from my own computer. I made a system where windows could be tagged ‘dangerous’. Dangerous windows automatically closed when someone came within three feet of my office door.

Then I did a sweep of people in the lair. I found Green Skull, Alex and Riley talking in the break room. I started watching a live feed from the video.

“. . . emotionally unsuited to what I need.” Green Skull said.

“I don’t believe that’s necessarily true.” Alex said. “Take atomic weapons. In concept, they’re as horrifying thing as you can imagine. Tens of thousands of people had to work together to create the stockpiles that exist. Statistically, you can be sure that most of them are relatively ordinary people.”

“Are you just taking his side because you got so choked up when we tested you?” Riley asked.

“I didn’t want to see my former employer dead. I’ve never wished anyone dead except a child psychologist.”

“Why don’t we look the shrink up?” Riley asked. “Give you a second chance to show some gratitude.”

“He died of lung cancer in 1996. If you’re going to leave his ashes on my bed, please pick up a more effective dust buster than the one we have now.”

“He attacked me.” Green Skull said.

“And it was pointless.” Alex said. “The thing about Julius is that he’s doesn’t initiate. He reacts. If you don’t push him, he’ll settle down.”

“He was pretty proactive with Charlotte.” Riley said.

“I understand why you’d prefer to think that, but, no, I don’t believe he was.”

“The question is whether he will endanger us.” Green Skull said.

“Isn’t the question whether it’s worth it?”

“He has to have access to the freaking network to do his job.” Riley said. “He can send the police or Firehawk everything he knows about this place and our plans.”

“He could have done that before. We could be discovered a dozen ways that have nothing to do with Julius.”

“I fail to see your point.” Green Skull said.

“My point is that the threat Julius poses is not unique, but the opportunity he presents is.”

“There’s other image analysis developers.” Riley said.

“Not like Julius. His libraries can spot people in disguises. In many cases, it could recognize people better than friends and family members.”

“What kind of disguises?” Green Skull asked.

Alex smiled slightly. “If you’re worried about yourself, I already ran you through Julius’s Ian library. It can only find five markers on you, mostly things involving posture and stride. That narrows you down to 21% or a billion or so possible matches.”

“Maybe we don’t need that much.” Riley said. “We could find someone roughly in the ballpark.”

“Do you remember the other candidates? Jaiswal spoke to eleven different family members every week. He’d be difficult to disappear. Ueno is back in Osaka. Do you feel comfortable working in Japan?”

“We have the software.” Riley said. “We don’t need him.”

“There are, conservatively, six hundred thousand lines of code in Julian’s libraries. Do you want to gamble that it’s all perfect?”

“You’re quite bright. You could maintain it.” Green Skull said.

“I’d be the wrong person. I’m not visual.”

“You could learn.” Riley suggested.

“I don’t mean, ‘I’m not visual’ as in ‘I’m a Sagittarius’. I mean ‘I’m not not visual’ as in ‘I’m autistic’. Until I was eight, my father had to wear the same tie so I’d know who he was. Besides, I’m not a generalist. I learned how to use computers so I could model strategy.”

“Gar could take over.”

“Riley, I don’t have your keen ability to read people, but Gar throws up every morning, and there’s usually some blood in his vomit. To me, that says, ‘Not in a position to field extra responsibilities.’”

“You think we need Julius.” Green Skull said.

“He provides the perfect fulcrum for this spy dust you’ve created. Without him, that enormous database you have is just an ocean of noise.”

Riley let out a long sigh. He looked tired and worried. He looked like someone I’d never met. “It’s like night and day, being able to track people the way we can now. If losing Julius meant we lost that, well, it’d set me back.”

“He won’t leave this place until he retires.” Green Skull said.

Alex nodded.

“If he does anything suspicious, he’s dead. If it looks like we don’t need him, he’s dead.”

Alex’s eyes shifted around the room. It looked less like awkwardness and more like there were flashing lights only he could see.

“I need to leave. Tell him the good news.”

· · ·

I did more work covering up my break-in. I didn’t leave the room to eat until I felt dizzy and distracted. I didn’t feel my pulse in my hand anymore, but it was sore. I put a package of frozen curry in the microwave and started the timer.

“Do you want to talk?”

I jumped. I hadn’t heard Alex, but he was just a couple feet behind me.

“No.”

“I didn’t know he was going to do it.” Alex said. “It’s important to me that you know that. I told him it was a bad idea. He didn’t say anything, the way that he doesn’t.”

I looked at him.

“So, I knew what he was doing and why, but I didn’t predict that he’d do it.” Alex concluded.

Ding, the microwave announced that my curry was hot.

“Why?” I asked.

“I gather there was someone from a long time ago who came fact to face with the realization that innocent people die because of what we do, for no better cause than our eventual retirement.”

“So he kills people we know?”

“He kills whomever he thinks we hate the most. In my case, he guessed wrong about who that was. I think he guessed wrong for you.”

I covered my eyes for a second. “It’s not that he guessed wrong. Hating isn’t the same as being glad she’s murdered.”

“I think he killed a programmer who helped track Riley down, and I think he killed Ava’s husband. I think they both took it as a favor. It’s one of the reasons Ava and Riley can go freely.”

“Charlotte, I gather, was happy enough with whoever he killed.”

Alex nodded. “She passed that test, but the boss doesn’t trust her. I’m not sure why not. I told him the test wasn’t necessary. You don’t have to kill anyone. Just continue your work.”

“Ian’s all alone out there. My son is an orphan.”

“You can get him when you retire.”

I turned around, opened the microwave and grabbed my curry. “Alex, you sound weird when you’re insincere.”

· · ·

I buried myself in work on IAN. No matter what happened, there has always been more work I could do, ways in which the recognition odds could be improved.

When I got tired of the image work, I looked over the surveillance of the lair. I didn’t find much interesting except to find that Jeff, my predecessor, had visited twice since he left and once since I’d been hired.

As I was looking over the footage, the screens closed, and Harpo blew long-short-short-long. I was on my way to the door before Alex knocked.

“I don’t want to talk.” I said.

“Staff meeting,” Alex said. “You’ve got to come or the boss will kill you. I sent you email.”

“Oh, that. Let me get a button-down shirt on, and I’ll be right down.”

I had the uneasy feeling I always have when I’m the last person at a staff meeting with a bit more unease knowing that some of my co-workers were considering killing me.

“Thank you, Julius.” Green Skull said. “Now, about the robots. . .”

Alex’s eyes went wide and he spoke louder than usual. “I have strategy libraries ready. It will take a couple months to adapt them to the specific movement capabilities of the pack-a-derm chassis.”

“Or we could sell it.” Riley said.

“That just gets us money.” Alex countered.

“Yeah, that makes it what I like to call a ‘good idea’.”

“Money is not a unique resource.”

“What do you mean?” Green Skull asked.

“We could get money. We could keep accumulating money, and we could probably do pretty well.”

“That’s why I’m here.” Riley added.

“We become criminals with money. There are mechanisms for dealing with criminals with money. There’s people who find where we launder the money, laws to freeze our assets. We have the pack-a-derms. We have a targeting system that can point a gun in a thirtieth of a second and be active an average of two thousand hours without problems. We have a gun that can fire an average of five hundred thousand rounds before jamming. There are not mechanisms for dealing with that.”

“There’s the army.” Riley said.

“The army doesn’t have a plan that can hide inside a trailer or flatten itself to the ground behind a car. The robots give us a way to translate money into force with a minimum of bottlenecks and complications.”

“We could hire two hundred thugs for a month for what one of these cost.”

“Bottlenecks and complications. Half of those two hundred will talk. At least one will be some flavor of undercover.”

Green Skull looked away from Riley and at Alex. “You think you can program it to fight effectively.”

“I think I can make it the most effective fighting automaton there is.”

“Mister modest here.” Riley said.

“There are reasons for my claim. It’s a perfect task for our specializations. We have excellent hardware for the task, and we don’t have some of the limiting requirements that military organizations have.”

I spoke for the first time. “Meaning what?”

“We have no allied group. We have a much smaller worry about friendly fire.”

“I have a personal worry about friendly fire.” Green Skull said.

“I’ll ensure your safety. It’s much easier to make a robot that doesn’t shoot at one specific person than to try to make a robot that doesn’t shoot at Americans.”

“You said ‘our specializations’.” Green Skull said. “Do you need anyone else?”

Alex nodded. “My strategy system will be far more effective if I can predict where people will be. Julius’s image analysis will make that work.

I could tell that Alex was trying to give me an important job so Green Skull wouldn’t kill me. Even so, I didn’t want the job.

“I don’t know how to predict, Alex. All my work is recognition.”

“So you can recognize where someone’s knees and shoulders are. You can tell what position someone’s standing in.”

“Sure, but knowing where someone’s standing. . .”

Alex interrupted, “You don’t know where someone can go with one leg straight and one leg bent twelve degrees at the knee.”

“Right, my work has to do with the past not the. . .”

Alex interrupted again, “You’d need extensive expertise in knowing how someone who could move with a particular posture, position and momentum.”

“Yeah, can you jump forward, jump back or. . .”

“You need an expert kinesiologist with software experience.” Alex concluded.

“I guess.”

“Good thing I’m here.” Ada said.

“You?” I said.

“Stop looking so damn surprised. I designed G’s suit.”

“Oh,” I said. “I thought Charlotte did.”

“I designed the look and put it all together.” Charlotte did. “There’s over thirty doo-dads built into it, like the glove tazer. Ada made all the triggers.”

“It’s important that everything goes off when G wants them to and doesn’t when he doesn’t.”

“She designed that exoskeleton that almost killed Firehawk last year.” Alex added.

“Didn’t that break your arm?” I asked Green Skull.

“It dislocated my shoulder.” Green Skull corrected.

Ada touched the scar on her cheek. “I said it wasn’t ready.”

“Anyway,” Green Skull said, “we’ve got a team for designing the robot’s strategy.”

Gar let out a long sigh and narrowed his eyes at Alex. “Who is responsible for making sure the robots’ computers work?”

“It’s a small embedded system.” Alex said. “It’s not really your thing, so I think I’ll manage it.”

Gar closed his eyes and nodded.

“Anything else?” Green Skull asked.

“I need paintball markers and lots of paint shot.”

· · ·

I was working with other developers with a specific timeline. IAN had a companion library called Shifty that measured movement to identify people by stride and manner. I worked to improve Shifty’s ability to define where someone’s joints were.

I made a new library, Apollo, that took Ada’s data and Shifty’s information and predicted where someone would be in the next half a second.

We started with running. Riley set up cameras at a college track. Shifty would guess at runners’ velocity and leg position, and send the information to Apollo. Apollo would make a guess at where the runner would be a moment later. Shifty checked the footage a moment later and told us whether Apollo guessed right or wrong. If Apollo was wrong, Ada and I looked at the data and made Apollo better.

We had ten days to get Apollo to guess where runners at the track would be 99.5% of the time. Ada set up her own desk in my office.

I was worried about working with Ada. If you’re working closely with a software developer, you constantly see mistakes. They can be simple typos or sweeping flaws of logic and reasoning. It had been lonely programming alone, but I was afraid to have someone close enough to be critical of my work.

Despite our early hostility, Ada was comfortable to work with. She paid little attention to my small mistakes and laughed with me at the big ones. When there were errors in her work, she fixed them and moved on.

I hadn’t had more than small talk with Charlotte since the night I found Sharon’s body. If Charlotte resented that, neither she nor Ada gave any sign of it.

In ten days, Apollo could predict a runner with near perfect accuracy. If you started to turn, Apollo would see the shift in your hip and guess which way. If you were about to slow down, Apollo could tell from your posture.

By then, Ada and I were eating at our desks most of the time. Ada usually got take-out, which was a huge improvement on my diet of frozen foods and Ramen. I got used to the way she drank hard lemonade through all the night, and I stopped expecting her to eventually get drunk.

We started to teach Apollo how people walked. Walkers have less velocity than runners and thus more freedom of movement. Someone can change from walking forward to walking backward, and the physical movements that telegraph the change are very subtle. We had eight days for walkers.

Shortly after we started work on walkers, Alex finished working with simulations and started upgrading the pack-a-derm’s onboard computer. The Rolling Stones – Ada’s pick – were on the office speakers, and I barely heard the whine of pack-a-derm’s engines and the thump of it’s feet.

Ada raised her hand in an ‘m’ shape followed by a ‘p’, and the music paused. She’d gotten her nails painted the same bright yellow as mine, and I set the gesture system to recognize her. The thumping was louder.

Ada walked to the door. I ran after her to see what Alex was doing. Ada sprinted ahead out of some bizarre competitive drive. I was red faced in the seconds it took to reach the loading room.

At first, all we saw was Alex, tip-toeing across the floor.

“Where’s the robot?” I asked. Then I saw the edge of it behind a stack of canned food and toilet paper.

“It’s avoiding us.” Alex said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because it’s programmed to. Modus 5: Don’t let people touch you. Modus 3: Try to stay out of sight.”

“Speak English.” Ada said.

“It’s a way of grouping behavior.” Alex said. “A ‘modus’ is a motive and its associated behavior. If I tried to program a robot that acted like you, maybe Modus 20 would be to get enough to eat and Modus 4 would be to tidy your office.”

Ada scoffed. “Try Modus -50.”

“They don’t go negative. Anyway, if the modi don’t conflict, then great, it does them both. For instance, if there was an outlet over there, the robot would plug itself in and fulfill Modus 1, which is to stay at maximum power. The outlet is over here, and it can’t get there without being seen, so Modus 3 overrides Modus 1.”

“How high do they go?” I asked.

“They could go to sixty five thousand, but there’s a Modus Omega that trumps them all.”

“What is it?”

“It’s an absolute order, like how Asimov’s robots wouldn’t harm people, no matter what. That’d be Modus Omega, though I can’t make a robot that could understand ‘harm’ in the abstract way they do in stories.”

“I mean, what’s this robot’s Modus Omega? What’s its first law?”

“There’s three. . .” Alex started.

“There can be more than one Modus Omega?”

“If they can’t conflict, there can be lots. One is that the robot never moves or fires a gun if it’s blind. The second is that it never fires at Green Skull. The third is that it never risks falling on or stepping on Green Skull. You see what I mean about not being quite as metaphysical as Asimov’s laws.”

“And you’re playing Hide and Seek with it?”

“There’s not enough room. We’re playing tag. Well, chase, anyway, the robot doesn’t tag back. Do you want to help?”

“Help play tag.” I said.

“Yeah.”

“With a two ton robot?”

“Couldn’t it crush us?” Ada asked.

“Modus 22: Avoid hurting people.”

“Green Skull might find that disappointing.” I pointed out.

“Actual mission objectives for the robot will be in the thirties, so he can make it hurt people.”

Ada shook her head. “Modus or no modus, I think that thing will give me a concussion.”

“If it hurt you, that would mean the either the heuristic or mechanics engine is completely broken. I’d feel far worse than you would.”

“I don’t know if I believe that.” Ada said.

“I believe it.” I said, “That doesn’t mean it’s much of a consolation.”

I started anyway walking toward the giant cowering robot. It was still until I was just a few paces away. Then it stood up. With surprising speed and care, it walked over the crates and boxes. It gingerly shifted its weight, careful not to break what it walked across. Before I made another step, it was on the other side and loping away from me, carefully avoiding Ada and Alex as it went.

It looked lifelike before because it moved on legs and was so nimble. Now that there was motivation behind its movement, it looked more lifelike than I’ve ever seen a machine appear. It scurried and dodged and moved. Though it looked like a spider, the way it crawled and ran evoked the image of an enormous squirrel.

And there’s something in most mammals that wants to chase squirrels. I laughed as I ran around the crates. The robot moved to the opposite corner. Ada ran toward it, too, and we were forcing it into the corner.

The robot dashed right over me, its legs hitting the ground on either side and its body sailing over my head.

“Why’d it run over me?” I asked.

“You’re slower.” Alex said.

The robot changed its walk so that its legs were close together and its body just above the floor. It scampered out of the loading room and down the hallway.

“Drat,” Alex said, “I forgot to tell it to stay here.”

“I’m surprised it fit.”

A scream came from the hallway, and the robot shot back into the loading room, crawling over crates and returning to its original hiding place.

“Alex!”

All three of us turned to see Charlotte standing in the hallway. She said, “Kindly warn me the next time you send that herald of the apocalypse storming past my studio. I just about had a heart attack.”

· · ·

My work got easier and Ada’s harder as time went on. By the time we finished predicting walkers, my program Shifty could identify people’s limbs and joints well enough, and most of what remained was identifying how those joints could move. In time, all I had to do was take reports from the Apollo library and pass them on to Ada.

I was doing that when I got an instant message from Charlotte, Julius, long time no see. Why don’t you come by and we’ll catch up?

The note wasn’t meant to be taken literally. If Charlotte had wanted to see me romantically, the message would have been, Julius, why don’t you tell me what problem you have with me? Charlotte might decide that it wasn’t worth trying to get past my new distrust, but she definitely wasn’t the kind to pretend it didn’t exist.

I got up and walked down to Charlotte’s room. She was at her sewing machine working on an elaborate costume.

“Firehawk?” I asked.

“Yes, it’s for Ada so we can test that robot.”

Charlotte folded the costume and set it aside. Then she tipped the sewing machine slightly and pulled a not from under it. She handed the note to me.

Julius,

In just a moment, you should follow me to the bedroom. I have no ulterior motive beyond not having someone open the door (Riley never knocks), see this note and get us both killed. Unless you read very fast or very slow, I’ll ask about now.

“Shall we go retire to somewhere a little more private?” Ada asked.

“Sure,” I said. I read as soon as I sat down by Charlotte’s dressing table.

We’ve been lied to. Nobody leaves this job alive. Jeff is Green Skull. Whenever I’ve fitted or taken measurements on GS, he’s worn a mask, but I’ve spent a lot of time seeing people in and out of costumes, and I know. I can’t think of any reason for the charade other than to reassure us that it’s possible to retire when it isn’t.

I think this robot, with Alex’s brain and your eyes, is good enough to kill Firehawk. While a testament to your talents, I think this cuts down our chance of survival. I don’t think Green Skull is lying about his frightening enemies in the government. If the police or the military catch Green Skull, I think someone is going to be sure we don’t live very long.

Please turn the page quietly. They can’t see us, but they can hear us.

I carefully flipped to the next page while, across the room, Charlotte said a string of sweet nothings to nobody.

Whatever you may think of me and my moral standing, I think you might agree that Firehawk gives us our best chance of being alive a year from now. If there’s any way you can keep this robot from killing him, you might be saving yourself and me.

I understand what a risk you’d be taking. If the boss realizes that you’ve sabotaged the robot, he’s going to make an example of you. I wish I could be the one doing it. I’m doing everything I can, little as it is.

Yours Etc,

Charlotte

I put down the letter. Charlotte looked at me and finished talking to the hidden microphones. I didn’t look back at her.

I thought her idea of Green Skull being Jeff was a creation of her conscience, and that she’d invented a danger to herself to stop thinking about the dangers she’d created. I thought she wasn’t risking herself so she was calling on me to redeem her.

Over time, I’d find out that everything I thought about Charlotte was dead wrong.

· · ·

I started looking at my footage of Jeff when Ada was out of the room. First, I checked Green Skull’s metrics. I didn’t know his skin tone, eye color or face shape. However, I could find posture, stance and I had a rough guess at measurements. I ran a check of everyone who’d been in the lair, and Shifty said that Jeff matched Green Skull.

That wasn’t conclusive. Riley, for instance, was the right height and posture. If he wore the outfit, Shifty wouldn’t be able to tell the difference from the way Riley stood or walked.

I looked over the one conversation I’d had with Jeff. Jeff walked off camera for a less than sensible reason, and then he walked back on. After Jeff came back, he spoke to no one except for Green Skull. That short exchange between Green Skull and Jeff could have been Green Skull talking to a recording of himself.

I turned my attention to the robot. Alex was in charge of the robot’s programming. Alex’s code was on the lair’s network. With Green Skull’s password, I could rewrite Alex’s code.

A small look at Alex’s logs showed that plan wouldn’t work. Every time Alex started working and every time he loaded software from the network to the robot, he double checked the code for any changes.

I suspect Riley was the reason Alex was so cautious. Riley usually wanted the people around him to fail so he would look better by comparison. As successful as Alex had been, I could easily imagine Riley sabotaging his code.

My next thought was that I could make the robot decide that Green Skull was an enemy. If it killed him the moment it was activated, it wouldn’t get any more orders. Unfortunately, the code in Modus Omega forbid any harm to Green Skull, and Modus Omega didn’t use my code to decide who Green Skull was. It’s image analysis wasn’t as good as mine, but it doesn’t take cutting-edge software to tell which guy is wearing a big black cape and a green skull helmet.

I got frustrated with my work and walked to the break room. Alex was there, and he looked sullen.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Do you think you’ve done a good job with your work here?”

“This isn’t some kind of employee review, is it?”

Alex rolled his eyes. “No, I’m thinking about my work.”

“You don’t think you did a good job?”

“I think I did a great job. I did a better job than anyone else is going to do, and, since strategy is essentially a competitive craft, that means I did a perfect job.”

“You don’t look like people usually do when they’re overcome with professional satisfaction.”

“I think most people overcome with professional satisfaction aren’t working for a homicidal sociopath.” Alex said.

“Alex, there’s cameras.”

“Yeah, but he’s not going to kill me until the robot proves itself.”

“And probably not then. You never know when you need another killer robot. I thought you said your conscience didn’t bother you.”

“It did.” Alex said, “But it wasn’t as important as making better plans and heuristics. Now that’s done, but it’s not like I’m Lorenzo Ghiberti.”

“And good thing, because I don’t know who that is.”

“Ghiberti spent twenty-one years making a set of gilded bronze doors. I saw them when I was a child. They’re amazing.”

“From just what I’ve seen, so is your work on the robot.”

“When he finished the doors, Ghiberti wanted to make another set of doors. The thought of making another cunning device that kills without conscience sickens me.”

“Conscience.” I said without meaning to.

“What?”

“I wish I could tell you what you need, Alex.” I said. “I’m almost in the same boat, except my work is never perfect.”

· · ·

In a park, a man and a woman are talking. The man starts to shout, and the woman raises her hands, palms out, as she tries to calm him down.

Two women are walking, laughing. One is doing an impression of someone else panicking. She lifts up her hands and waves the fingers.

A child is trying to climb up a jungle gym. His mother is watching. When the child climbs on the platform at last, she cheers him, raising two open hands.

In my office, I was watching clips of surveillance footage of person after person doing the same gesture that I was doing as I watched. Shifty keeps pulling more out of the giant database. I’m raising my hands and opening my fingers. An output relay tells me that every camera that can see my hands can tell that I’m raising them, fingers spread and palms exposed.

I had one chance.

The footage of hand-raising people went away. So did the diagnosis program that was watching me. Someone was about to walk through the door.

“You’re giving up?” Ada asked.

“Stretching,” I said as I lifted my arms toward the ceiling.

“I could teach you some stretches.” Ada said.

“Nah.”

“I got shuffling working.”

“Shuffling what?” I asked.

“Shuffling people. Man, you’re distracted. When people shuffle, that horrible program of yours. . .”

“It prefers to be called ‘Apollo’.”

“I don’t like Apollo. Is there a god of lying bastards? That’s what you should call the program.”

“Hermes, I think.”

“Hermes is too good for it. Anyway, Apollo keeps thinking people are going to walk backwards when they shuffle. I was shuffling up and down the hallways with little sensors on my ankles, trying to find out where the data was wrong.”

“Is it an Apollo problem?” I asked.

“Apollo wasn’t helpful, but my data was wrong, but I found it, and now it knows where you’re going to shuffle. So tomorrow you can’t shuffle up to the skull bot and zap it to death with static electricity.”

“What’s tomorrow?” I asked. “Why will I be zapping a skull bot?”

“Don’t any of you check your email?”

“Our social lives are limited, so we forget from time to time. What’s tomorrow?”

“There’s a paintball match. It’s us versus the robot.”

“Tag was fun, but I’m not playing war games with a big metal spider.”

Ada shrugged. “Then you’re not getting out.”

“Getting out?”

“One week out,” Ada said. “You and Charlotte can get out of the lair. Riley and I can leave the state. All you have to do to get the reward is land a shot on the torso of that spider before it shoots us.”

“What does Alex get if we don’t get it?”

“The email didn’t say.”

I got up and walked down to Alex’s office. The door was open. Alex worked on a series of machines along a table. He sat on a bench that let him move from computer to computer easily. He scooted toward he door and looked up at me.

“Alex, what’s with the war games we’re having with your robot?”

Alex shrugged. “It’s like anyplace. They want to see your software run before you’re done with it.”

“But Apollo isn’t done. Are your libraries ready?”

“Mostly. Ares, my tactical system, is doing pretty well in firing systems. I loaded your earlier Apollo code, and it seems reliable enough. I gave Ares a little bit of distrust, so as long as it can tell a human from a refrigerator, we should be fine.”

“What do you get if the robot beats all of us?”

“Ah,” Alex said, “You guys get the carrot. I get the stick. I’ll bet it’s something the boss read in a management guide.”

“What’s the stick?”

“If any of you manage to shoot the robot before you’re shot, I’ve got to kill someone.”

“Who?”

Alex smiled mechanically. “If you don’t start practicing, I may never know.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“I don’t think the ‘who’ of it is important. I think the boss just realized that it would motivate me.”

“I won’t shoot at it.”

The smile dropped. “If you’re squeamish with a robot, the boss might try to use the same incentive program with you.”

· · ·

We stood in line as Riley handed us the paintball guns. I’ve heard they’re called ‘markers’.

“The guns stand for some kind of lightweight grenade launcher, I guess.” Alex said. “Since small arms won’t hurt these robots.”

“What are the rules?” Riley asked as he kept the last marker for himself.

“We’ll give you a five minute countdown before it starts. At the end of five minutes, the robot starts. It will give a loud noise to let you know it’s started. It knows you four are its targets. No shots count before five minutes are up, and you have to have your rifle pointed at the ground when we start.”

“So,” Gar said, “we could just stand in a circle around your robot with our rifles pointed down. When we hear it beep, we’ll raise our rifles and fire right away.”

“That’s legal.” Alex admitted.

“What’s your robot packing for this exercise?” Riley asked.

“It’s going to have automatic weapons in the outside world, so I gave it rapid-fire markers. It’s got two guns. Each one fires ten shots a second.”

“So it could shoot us all in the half second it would take us to lift our guns.” Riley said.

“There’s one way to find out.”

“Five minutes as of now.” said Green Skull. He’d been lurking.

Charlotte swung her rifle around at us. “This robot might shoot paint everywhere, but it won’t stick a pair of scissors in your throat the way I will if you hide in my room or office.”

Charlotte then ran to her office. Ada also took off but kept going to the center of the lair. Riley ran in the same direction.

I looked at Gar, who stood where he was, looking at the robot.

“There’s more cover in our rooms.” I said.

Gar shook his head. “I know Alex. I’d rather gamble that his robot’s slow than that it’s stupid.”

“Thank you.” Alex said.

“Go to hell.” Gar said.

I sprinted down the hallway. Charlotte came out of her office carrying some bolts of cloth under her arm. She went into the break room. I kept running to my office. It occurred to me to late how much machinery was there that paint could damage. I was still shutting systems down and covering them when I heard the sound.

The robot announced the beginning of the games with a loud, low-pitched chime that was joined almost instantly by a soft thump and a string of curses from Gar. The first target was down. I went into my bedroom. I had no strategy. I just knew the robot was too large to go through my office doorway, so it couldn’t even get a line of sight to my bedroom.

I heard the robot shuffling down the hallway. It barely fit, so it couldn’t move much. I heard a couple paintballs hit a wall. Ada tried to shoot the robot, and the robot fired back as soon she showed herself. Ada ducked back out of site.

There were more shots and the sound of rustling fabric. Later I was to find that with several yards of canvas, a table and some chairs, Charlotte had made a fort in the kitchen with several slits she could fire out of. The canvas was thick enough to stop paintballs. There was a short standoff. The robot ducked out of sight whenever it saw Charlotte’s marker, and Charlotte kept behind the canvas.

I heard a crash, a scream and a few shots hitting. The robot rushed around the corner, pushed the table over and shot Charlotte. Ada popped out again, but drew back when the robot fired at her.

I stayed in my bedroom, where I was sure the robot couldn’t get me. I had time to think. I had a theory that any programmer’s dream project reflected the programmer’s personality. I’ve always been more inclined to watch and listen than to speak. When I was young, my notes in my first day of school always went something like: Ryan Park – Asian, tallish, long face; Mary Vance – blonde, green eyes, a little short. I created a kind of shorthand for people’s faces after Chris Stoll (brown hair, crooked nose, slightly overweight, lazy eye) saw my notebook and beat me up after lunch. IAN, Hunter, Shifty and the rest of my libraries were just extensions of my habits.

I just had to think of the robot as a big metal Alex. I knew Alex was methodical. I knew Alex was single-minded. I didn’t think that robot could fit through a doorway.

I was completely thrown. I thought I had forever to plumb the psyche of this robot, and it crawled into my office. I’d been surprised the robot could go through a hallway eight feet across. It’s a giant metal spider with legs ten feet long supporting a metal chassis that weighs nearly a ton. However, if it squeezes three legs in first and wiggles just right, it can get that one-ton chassis through a doorway. The glimpse of I saw of it wriggling through has stayed in my nightmares forever. I ran out of my bedroom with its protection of a doorway no smaller than my office doorway.

Then I did something I’d promised myself I wouldn’t. I twisted.

The robot fired and missed. It’s my own fault it did. Apollo was great with how people walked and ran. It could predict arms. The spine confused the hell out of it. Alex’s program was getting its information from Apollo, and Apollo was feeding it bad data. I wiggled like a marionette and the robot missed again.

I didn’t know if I could fire, getting myself a week of daylight that I dearly craved. More practically, I didn’t know if I could hit anything twisting around like that.

Once again, I was thinking too much. The robot stepped forward and knocked me down with a swipe of one foot. Then it pinned me to the ground like a cat.

I heard a shot, but I didn’t feel anything. Ada popped into my doorway, hoping to shoot the robot while it was distracted. The robot didn’t get distracted. It shot her first.

I raised my hands, which was another thing I promised myself I wouldn’t do. Being pinned by a one-ton robot was bad for remembering my long term goals. The robot ignored the gesture and shot me.

The robot had barely released me and was ready to walk away when the lights went out.

Riley had run to the circuit breaker and shut down all the lights in the lair. There was only the dim glow from the server room right by Gar’s bedroom, which had its own backup generator. Riley walked slowly down the hallway. He yelled out, “Hey, Alex, what’s your robot’s highest priority?”

“Not to shoot Green Skull.”

“What else?”

“Not to shoot if it can’t see.”

Riley’s laugh was only a little outside the room. There was a moment of silence, followed by the soft shot of a paintball marker.

“Alex? What the fuck?”

“It’s got night vision and infrared. It cost millions, Riley, why do you think it’d be equipped with crappy cameras?”

· · ·

The pressure was on me again in the last phase. Alex had proven the robot’s basic understanding. Ada gave me a good model of spine movement, so I spent the last week working day and night refining the robot’s ability to predict. Ada split her time between fine tuning the spine data and dressing up as Firehawk and testing the robot’s targeting and reaction speed.

Somewhere else, people were reverse engineering the different parts of the robot and building another one. I don’t know if Green Skull had a set of ordinary contractors who worked on different pieces or if he kept another lair filled with mechanics and roboticists. I only knew that when Alex and I were done with the robot’s programming, there was a second robot.

The buildup to the attack was similar to the bank robbery, though it might have been less work. The Skullbots, as they came to be called, took away all need for subtlety. Their first effort would be a simple plan. An eighteen wheeler would deposit two Skullbots in the Soho shopping district. Green Skull would rob three jewelry stores while police were held at bay by the robots. If Firehawk showed up, the robots would recognize him and make it a priority – Modus 62, to be exact – to kill him.

Charlotte made Green Skull another costume. Ada made a set of devices that let Green Skull give a set of intuitive orders to the robots quickly and easily. Alex ran his programs through simulations, improving its tactics. Riley spied on the local police and army base to make sure no one could bring enough firepower soon enough. I worked out kinks in Apollo and snuck in an extra bit of programming.

The day of launch wasn’t very different for me. I woke to the sound of the loading doors opening. I got dressed quickly and jogged to the loading room.

The truck backed up to the doors. It was wreathed in the bright and strange glow of daylight. An armed man opened the back of the truck. One Skullbot already lay inside. The one that lived in the loading room obediently crawled in beside it and went into sleep mode. Green Skull followed his robots into the truck. Ada and Riley walked out, and the loading doors closed, ending my brief glimpse of daylight.

There’s not much I can tell you about what came next that everyone doesn’t already know. Usually, costumed terrorists hit and run. Sometimes they plant bombs or take hostages. They bargain or they blackmail. They might fight a team of security guards or some unlucky policeman or a rival crime family. Masked criminals don’t work in the open, because none of them can match the resources of a city.

The attack of the Skullbots changed the rules. They hit in broad daylight. They made no demands and they took no hostages. They effectively dared the police to react. As the robots attacked, Green Skull emptied the jewelry stores in an act closer to looting than robbery.

The Skullbots seemed to go on a rampage, but they were acting on a set of priorities. There was a routine at Modus 46 that told the robots to identify anyone in a police uniform or holding a gun and killed them. Once all identified dangers were gone, the robots switched to Modus 16, destroy any small car. That had to do with stopping escape routes.

People later thought that the robots must have been random because so many people with cameras survived for so long. That was no coincidence. Modus 14, ignore anyone holding cameras. Green Skull wanted publicity and panic. To help keep people frightened was Modus 12, run toward anyone who stood still. Modus 11 told the robots to break any nearby windows.

I watched the chaos in the break room with Alex. He glanced from the live news footage to his monitors while tapping his fingers quickly and without rhythm. From there, it was easy to see the pattern: shoot the people with guns, destroy the cars chase anyone without a camera, once everyone was running, smash windows. From the ground, the Skullbots looked like crazed animals.

The apparent randomness of the Skullbots was one of the reasons the SWAT team underestimated them so badly.

The team arrived with armor piercing rounds, riot shields and an armored transport. They took up positions and started firing at the nearest Skullbot. The Skullbot recognized a serious threat and triggered a new reaction. The Skullbot hid behind a car and started firing at the team.

The police moved to flank the Skullbot, and it retreated to another car. They advanced more and the Skullbot seemed to panic, retreating again and again. The lieutenant in charge ordered the police to pursue, and the Skullbot started to really run.

That lieutenant – one of the few survivors – lost his job. I think that was unfair. There was so much chaos, and he must have felt tremendous pressure the save the situation. For a moment, this terrifying thing is suddenly on the run, and he wanted to drive it away. It’s understandable that, just for a moment, he forgot about the other one.

When the police arrived, the second Skullbot walked into a clothing store, plugged itself into a wall outlet, and curled into a ball about the size of a family car. When the SWAT team passed, it woke up, strafed them with its machine gun and fired a missile at the armored transport.

The two robots both attacked, and the police scattered. There’s the picture that everyone thinks of when they remember the Skullbot rampage. There’s a policeman on his back holding up a riot shield while a Skullbot looms over him. It was a great shot that looks like a knight in a desperate struggle. I stared at the floor when the Skullbots attacked. The only other person in the break room, Alex, looked at the monitor expressionlessly as his hand kept tapping the table.

“Enough!” Firehawk yelled. Four people were alive with video cameras. A fifth cameraman had carried a gun and had been shot by a Skullbot, but his camera was still running. All five cameras picked up the piercing yell.

He probably cut a dashing figure, looking at the scene from the edge of a rooftop. I don’t know because nobody pointed a camera at him before the Skullbots opened fire. He was gone from the edge.

I heard Green Skull’s voice over the speakers. “Is he dead?”

“I doubt it.” Alex said. He started typing commands trying to bring up spy dust cameras that Riley had previously left all over the street.

“Here.” I said. I typed a shortcut and brought up a map of the building with the cameras. Alex nodded thanks and switched perspectives until we saw Firehawk. He was holding his side. He’d been hit, but some kind of body armor had stopped the bullet.

Firehawk was grabbing people talking to them slowly and carefully. “. . .have to get out. It’s not going to be safe here.”

“And it’s safe out there?” a man asked.

“I know it doesn’t look like it, but I think it is. I watched the robots on the way over. They haven’t shot anyone who didn’t wear a police uniform or hold a gun.”

“Well fuck that.” a policeman said.

“Take off your jacket and cap. Drop your gun and go. You know about me, and I swear on my honor, I will do everything I can to keep you safe, but I can’t do it if you’re still here.”

“What about you?” a woman asked.

“We’ll see.”

He ushered the people along down the stairs. He seemed calm and confident, and the people walked out.

“I have to stop here.” Firehawk said. “Get down and start running when you hit the street. Keep going downtown and you’ll hit the precinct.”

“Well?” Green Skull asked.

“He’s evacuating.”

“Why aren’t your robots going in after him?”

“Because he’s a man with a pack full of explosives in an empty building.” Alex said. “It’s a bad engagement.”

“They’re waiting for him to come out?”

“Yes.”

Green Skull walked out of a jewelry store. I could see men with him with ski masks and bags. He made a strange gesture at the people Firehawk had evacuated.

Alex’s display said, “Modus 40”.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Mission objective.” Alex’s normal, too loud voice was now very quiet.

The Skullbots positioned themselves side by side and turned their guns toward the fleeing people. Some of the people ran. One boy, he couldn’t have been older than fourteen, cried and raised his hands.

“Modus 42,” said Alex’s display. The robots moved to the side, avoiding the boy.

“What?” Alex said.

“What’s wrong?” Green Skull’s voice asked.

“They think they’re protecting goods.”

“What goods?” Green Skull asked.

“It’s the boy.” I said. “They think he’s made of gold.”

The Skullbots had moved so they had a line of fire that didn’t risk hitting the boy with the raised hands. By then, more people raised their hands. When the last person did, the robots stopped advancing.

“What the hell is going on?”

“I did it.” I said. “Anyone who raises their hands and spread their fingers identifies as being made of gold. They’re valuable materials. The robots won’t risk hurting them.”

“Robots.” Green Skull said in disgust. “Guys, can you shoot some of those people?”

“No.” Alex said.

“No time to get squeamish.” Green Skull said.

Two of the masked men pulled out machine guns and aimed the at the people standing with their hands raised.

“No, boss, you’re . . .”

The sound of automatic gunfire cut Alex off.

“What the hell is going on?” Green Skull asked.

The two masked gunmen lay dead in the street.

“There was a conflict.” Alex said. “The valuables are Modus 40. Not hurting your henchmen is just Modus 22.”

On the screen, I could see Green Skull walking over to the dead bodies and picking up bags of jewelry.

“We’re going. Alex, when I come back, we’re going to have words.”

Firehawk tentatively emerged from the building with his hands raised. The robots ignored him.

“I don’t claim to understand everything about how your robots think,” Green Skull said, “but I’m almost positive shooting Firehawk is more important than protecting goods.”

“They don’t know he’s Firehawk when his hands are raised.” Alex said.

“Christ.”

At a signal from Green Skull, the robots started emitting large clouds of smoke. Firehawk started to run after him, but it’s surprisingly hard to set a good pace with your hands stretched above your head.

The escape went as planned. Green Skull rode one of the robots to a where a truck was parked three blocks away. He left as one of dozens fleeing the chaos.

“I checked.” Alex said. He didn’t look at me.

“I’m sorry.” I said.

“I checked whether the recognition did something strange with raised hands. When you raised your hands during the trial run, that was a dead giveaway. I ran dozens of different tests. Nothing ever came of it.”

“That bit of code didn’t become active until this morning.”

Alex shook his head. “I checked that, too. None of the recognition libraries the internal clock or calendar. How could did your code know what day it is?”

“They know direction from an internal compass, and they saw the position of the sun.”

Alex closed his eyes and nodded his head. “Well played, Julius.”

“Arthur,” I corrected.

“Well played, Arthur. I will miss you.”

· · ·

I knocked on the door. “Charlotte, I need to talk.”

Charlotte opened the door and looked at me.

“I did it. I wasn’t sure it’d keep the things from killing Firehawk, but it worked. He’s still alive. Green Skull is coming back to kill me, and I’m going to need a couple things.”

Charlotte didn’t speak.

“Oh, and I shut down the recording for all the bugs in the base. You an talk freely.”

“What do you need?” Charlotte asked.

“Do you have a spare costume for Green Skull?”

“I have one. It doesn’t have all the built in weapons, and it’s not fully armored.”

“That’s fine. I’m just trying to avoid getting shot by the Skullbots.”

“Back here, but if the boss asks how you got it while torturing you to death, you held me at knifepoint.”

“Fair enough.”

“Hey,” Gar said, “did you say you turned off the cameras?”

I turned. “Yeah, I’ve got access to Green Skull’s account. I left you a back way. Look for a program on Lex called ‘tuscaloosa’. If you run it, it will ask for a password. The password is ‘h-i-g-i-2-m-P-J-I-w-n-k’. P, J and I are in caps.”

“I’ll never remember that.”

“It’s the first letter of each word in ‘How it got into my pajamas, I’ll never know.’ ‘i2’ for ‘into’ and capital ‘PJ’ for ‘pajamas’.”

“Okay.” Gar said and walked away.

“He could have said ‘thanks’.” I said, and I started to put on Green Skull’s costume.

“There’s one thing, Julius.”

“What?” I asked. I had the helmet on, and the voice came out as Green Skull’s.

“Try to hang on. If you just last long enough, there might be a chance.”

“What do you know?”

“That’s all I’ll say.”

Gar reappeared as I finished the last part, pulling on a boot.

“I reversed the security reaction at the far exit.” Gar said. “There’s a flamethrower, but now it won’t shoot at you if you’re unauthorized.”

“I’m staying here.” I said. “I think it’s where I’ve got my best shot.”

· · ·

I was in my office when they arrived. I’d reactivated the cameras, so I saw the loading doors open. Green Skull, Ada and Riley walked out together. Alex was there to meet them. It took me a couple seconds to get sound.

“. . .about it later. Is there anything you can do about it?”

“Bring them in and reboot them.” Alex said.

“That’s it?” Green Skull asked.

“When you reboot, it clears the memory. Julius’s library will go back to thinking it’s last month. It doesn’t have access to the clock, so the problem code won’t activate until it sees the sun.”

Green Skull hit a button on the back of his glove, and the two robots walked through the loading doors. Riley went to the robots and hit the code combination. The skullbots went quiet for a moment and then started up again.

“That should be it?” Green Skull asked.

“It’s a short term fix, but they should be good until they see the sun.”

“Raise your hands.” Green Skull said.

“No!” I yelled. I was a hallway and several rooms away. Alex didn’t hear me, and he would have obeyed anyway. Alex raised his hands. Green Skull gave the signal. The robots fired, and Alex dropped.

“I liked him.” Ada said.

“Me, too.” said Green Skull. “Like I told you, it’s business. He let Julius do what he did, and besides, it’s the best way of making sure the robots don’t have any more surprises. If they let me shoot Alex, I figure they’ll let me do anything.”

“I thought he was stuck up.” Riley commented.

“That should make disposing of the body that much more satisfying.” said Green Skull.

Riley sighed. Green Skull tapped two buttons and one of the Skullbots sped through the hallway. It seemed like longer than three seconds before the robot was outside my door, looking for me. My first thought was that he could issue the command ‘Kill Arthur’ with a mere two keystrokes, which suggested he’d planned to kill me from the beginning.

The robot crawled into my office and stood a small way from me. I imagine it’d chosen a perfect firing distance, close enough for a certain hit, far enough that I couldn’t dodge around it, but it didn’t fire.

Part of the robot knew who I was. My image recognition libraries would have told it I had Arthur’s posture, Arthur’s stance, matched Arthur’s measurements and I was standing in Arthur’s office. Those libraries told it to identify and to attack.

But the Modus Omega orders used a more primitive library, which saw only the mask and the gloves. So the robot would stalk me, but the Modus Omega part of its programming said I was Green Skull, and it wouldn’t touch me or fire.

My computer was still monitoring the loading room, and I heard Green Skull say, “I’m hearing a disappointing absence of gunfire. Riley, stay here and get Alex bagged up. Ada, come with me.”

There were a series of automatic meta doors along the main hallway in the lair. I went to my computer and typed a set of commands. A door in front of Green Skull and a door behind him slammed shut, trapping him in the hallway. I changed Green Skull’s password. With any luck, he’d be stuck in the hallway until he could get someone to reroute the circuit.

I typed a set of commands and rerouted all new information coming from the spy cameras. I was hoping that Green Skull would be trapped for a day, and with luck, I could be in another country.

I got that far in my fantasy before I heard the doors open.

I sprinted to the break room for my desperate backup plan. I opened the cabinet below the stove and grabbed the gas line. Bracing my feet and pulling for all I was worth, I pulled it free. The robot followed me in, because it was still stalking me.

“That was a stupid plan.” Green Skull said. “I know some of my employees have, let’s face it, mixed feelings about me. Would I have built large computer-controlled doors in my fortress and not had a hidden panel with an override switch to open the door. Just think about it.”

I grabbed a box of kitches and prepared to strike one. “Come any closer, and I’ll set us on fire.”

“Dear,” Green Skull said, “would you get the fire extinguisher from the bathroom? We’re going to need it.”

Ada walked off to the bathroom and Green Skull took a step forward.

“Do it.” he said.

“I will.”

“Do it. Do it. Do it. I want you to die slowly, painfully. I’ll bet you heard me say it’s just business. Alex was just business. He screwed up. You defied me, and you made me look bad, so it’s business, but I also want you to die, and I want you to hurt. A gas fire would make an excellent start.”

He took a step forward, and I held up the matches. “You wouldn’t dare.”

“Wouldn’t dare? Use your brain for one goddamn second, Julius. Is there anyone with more experience being set on fire than me? These are my going out clothes. Do you think they protect me from a teeny gas explosion? You, on the other hand, are wearing an old outfit that’s mostly cosmetic. It has no spare oxygen. It barely protects your eyes, and I can tell you from painful experience that helmet conducts heat far too well. I’ll have to remodel the kitchen, but I’m fine with that.”

Riley ran in. “It’s Firehawk. He’s here!”

Green Skull spun toward him. “What? Did the robot attack him?”

I took advantage of this distraction to reach under the stove and shut off the gas.

“I didn’t hear shots.”

“What did you see?” Green Skull asked.

“Not much. I ran when he showed up.”

I heard Green Skull laughing, which made no sense at all. I looked up to see Firehawk, except he was dressed in Green Skull’s cap and cape. He carried a long, very thick metal stick. Charlotte was behind him.

“It’s like one of those parties where you show up and everyone is wearing the same dress you’ve got.” Firehawk said with Green Skull’s voice. “You left this cape behind at the bank. The helmet is from when we crashed in the lake a year ago. First, let’s take care of this robot.”

Firehawk lay his stick against the robot, close to the processor, and there was an enormous electric charge. It fried the robot’s processor and ignited the gas.

It wasn’t as bad as I expected. The gas had only been going for a few minutes, and it’d had a minute to clear up. Riley had burns on his face, and his hair was smoking. I had slight burns on my ears, neck and forehead. Green Skull was untouched.

Firehawk had pulled off the Green Skull mask and was wearing his own. He was looking around the room in a daze. “Who left the gas on?”

“It’s him!” Green Skull yelled, pointing at me.

“He left the gas on?”

“No, he’s Green Skull.” Green Skull said. “I’m Arthur MacMurrow. I put this on so the robots wouldn’t kill me.”

“He’s Green Skull.” I said. “If you’d been a minute later, he’d have killed me.”

“You should burn us both.” Green Skull said. “I deserve death or worse for helping him.”

Firehawk advanced on me.

“No,” I said, “I’m Arthur, really. Let me get my helmet off.”

“Nice try.” Firehawk said. He grabbed my neck with one hand and drew back his fist as if to hit me. I raised my hands.

The blow never came. Firehawk pointed his free arm at Green Skull and sprayed him with a blue liquid.

“Honestly, Jeff,” Firehawk said to the actual Green Skull, “This guy is what, five foot nine.”

“And a half.” I added.

“And he’s duck footed.” Firehawk said.

“Got that from my father.”

“What the hell is this?” Green Skull asked as he stared has his damp chest.

“It’s name is tough to pronounce. We call it an ultraflammable. I know your outfit is heat resistant, but if there’s so much as a spark, that will burn for about ten seconds at five hundred degrees.”

“That’s hardly. . .”

“Celcius, Jeff. I always use celcius.”

“Oh.”

“So unless. . .”

With the explosion and the three Green Skulls, none of us noticed Ada with the fire extinguisher. She blasted Firehawk with the spray and swung the tank at him while he was blinded. It connected and sent him several steps back.

I tackled Ada. She kicked me very hard in the kidneys trying to make me let go. I was too overcome with pain to pay attention to the rest of the room. Much of what I describe is what I heard later on.

Green Skull raised his hands, prepared to finish of Firehawk, who clutched his head and tried to focus his eyes. Charlotte had stepped behind him. She lifter her scissors and stuck them into Green Skull’s neck, just below the helmet and just above the body armor.

Riley is ready to charge Charlotte, but Gar had arrived and is he started telling Riley that it’s hopeless. If Firehawk is here, then the police will be soon, and it’s time to run.

Green Skull turned around. A needle with a lethal dose of heroin protruded from his glove as he swung to stab Charlotte.

I kept my arms around Ada. I wanted to curl into a ball, and my gut felt like one deep bruise. If I let go, she’d have room to hit me with the fire extinguisher. Ada pried the green skull helmet off my head and punched me in the face many times.

“Arthur,” Firehawk gasped. “Arthur MacMurrow, is that you?”

Between the training I’d gotten and being beaten senseless, I didn’t react to hearing my name.

Ada lashed out with a final punch. The ground seemed to sway under me, and Ada seemed to flow out of my arms like water. She stood up with the fire extinguisher in one hand. Firehawk had a bloody gash and a bump on his head the size of an apple. He tried to push back up to standing position.

“Arthur.” Firehawk said. “I have your son.”

I stood up. My balance was gone, and I had to keep my feet wide. I wrapped my fingers around Ada’s hair and pulled her back. This time, she had room to swing the fire extinguisher, and she hit me hard in the jaw. I landed against the sink and worked to keep my feet.

Ada stood over me. She looked like a Valkyrie standing defiant and flaming.

The flames, it turned out, were not a hallucination. Firehawk had set her on fire. She must have put herself out and run, not necessarily in that order. When I looked over, I saw Charlotte with second degree burns on her hands and face. She was slumped against the wall, and I saw the broken needle from Green Skull’s glove beside her.

“No,” Gar yelled at Riley. “They’re going into a trap! The police are at the loading doors. Use the far exit! Now.”

Riley ran down the hall, toward the far exit, the door people used when they left alone and on foot.

“Gar, you said you ‘reversed’ the security on the. . .”

“Shh.” Gar said.

“You didn’t say ‘deactivate’. . .”

“Shh.”

“Does that mean if someone tries to go trough who is authorized. . .”

“Shh.” Gar closed his eyes like he was listening to his favorite part of his favorite song. Then I heard gunfire and Riley’s wet, fading cry.

“Charlotte,” I said. I went over to her. Her body was limp. Her eyes were closed, and there were burns on her hands and face.

I held her wrist under my thumb.

“I can’t feel a pulse.” I said.

“She led me here.” Firehawk said. His voice was strange, and I couldn’t tell if he knew what he was saying.

“What?”

“I think I have a concussion.”

“She led you here?”

“I did.” Charlotte muttered. “Can’t even find a pulse. . .fucking nerd.”

“We’ll get you to a hospital.” I said.

“Just tasered and burned.” Charlotte said.

“I’m going to see a doctor.” Firehawk said. “I might have a concussion.”

“You didn’t get heroin or posion?” I asked.

“No.” Charlotte curled her fingers around her purse strap. A broken needle stuck into the side of the purse. “Always carry purse.”

“They might be waiting for us.” Firehawk said.

Charlotte shook her head. “He’ll needs a doctor.”

“I probably do.” Firehawk said. “I think I have a concussion.”

“No, the boss.” Charlotte said. She opened her other hand to reveal a small cigarette lighter. “Always carry a lighter.”

I turned to Firehawk. I had one arm on my abdomen and the other against a wall for support. “You had my son?”

“Did Green Skull tell you who I am?”

“Yes,” I sad, “you’re Vincent Cole.”

“Blabbermouth. He . . . I run a charity school that takes orphans who would otherwise be in the foster program. I took Ian in after your wife died.”

“You knew about me? You knew I was here?”

“A top image analyst with no history of drug use dies in an improvised meth lab. Green Skull’s intelligence starts getting better, and your wife dies. I strongly suspected.”

“How long have you known?” I asked.

“I can’t remember now. I’m having trouble focusing. I think it might be a concussion.”

Charlotte reached up an arm and Gar helped her to her feet. “What the hell kept you?” she asked.

“I didn’t know if it was a trap.” Firehawk said. “I was investigating. After I saw the robots, I realized I didn’t have any time.”

“You knew where we were?” I asked.

Firehawk pulled Green Skull’s cape off his back. He pulled a flashlight from his belt, and shone ultraviolet light on his cape. Latitude and longitude numbers appeared on the the cape.

“No, no,” Charlotte said. “Don’t thank me.”

“You knew where we are?”

“Ada left her phone behind, and it has a GPS.” Charlotte said.

“I have a car out here.” Firehawk said, pointing at the loading door.

“Will you drive?” I asked.

“No.” Firehawk said. “I’ve got a driver waiting. Why do you ask?”

“You’ve got a concussion.”

“You know, you might be right.”

· · ·

I’ve been here at the Cole compound for five months. It’s not easy not being able to get out. For a while, Vincent was confident that Green Skull died of the burns. He said it was almost impossible to survive the heat from the ultraflammable. But the bits of blood and scorched clothing that marked Green Skull’s walk through the lair went all the way to the loading doors.

Gar said he couldn’t stand it. He’d rather be outside and be a target than wait around. Vincent persuaded him to stay for a month. Gar reported everything he knew about the system he created for Green Skull and what Green Skull would need to rebuild it somewhere else.

After a month, Vincent smuggled Gar out of the country. Gar’s in the third world somewhere, helping poor people set up computers. He sends me email sometimes, but he’s so careful to avoid specifics that the messages are tough to read, and Gar always uses a fake return address.

I stayed at the Cole compound. I’ve only been outside once since I arrived, but it’s much better than the lair. There’s more people to talk to. I thought Firehawk worked alone like I used to think Green Skull did, but Vincent took far more people into his confidence. There are forensics people, a statistician, a driver, a medic and even a psychiatrist who all know about Firehawk.

The psychiatrist is the one who had me write all this down. She gets really frustrated by the way I spend my therapy sessions discussing image analysis, and I guess she thought it’d be easier to read. I’m down to two sessions a week. So is Charlotte.

Things are still a little guarded between us. She feels like I judge her, which I suppose I did. Really, how can you judge what anyone does stuck in the horrible place we were.

We went out to dinner a month ago. Vincent was stationed nearby in all his Firehawk gear. I’d just finished the salad when I got a call on my cell phone.

“You’ve got to go.” Vincent said.

“Now?”

“Green Skull called in a bomb threat, and I have to help with the evacuation.”

“Maybe it’s just a ploy to get you out of the way.”

“I know it is.” Vincent said. “But there’s really a bomb. Jeff doesn’t let anyone call his bluffs. I’ve got some guys coming. They’re tough. They’ll get you out of there.”

“Okay. I’ll tell Charlotte. Bye.”

“Bye. I’m sorry, Arthur.”

I hung up the phone.

“We’ve got to go.” I said.

“I’m getting tea smoked duck.”

“Our old boss is coming, and our new boss can’t be here.”

“That doesn’t make it any less tea smoked or ducky.”

A team of Frightening Men in Suits walked into the restaurant. I recognized some of the less frightening ones as security people who I’d seen working for Vincent. One spoke softly to the maître d’, and they ushered us out of the kitchen and into a limousine without a word. We drove home, with one carload of Frightening Men in Suits ahead of us and another behind. One of the Frightening Men in Suits got my lo mein and Charlotte’s tea smoked duck to go. We ate on a patio at the Cole estate.

The whole thing made me feel really appreciated. We’ve both done a lot of work for Vincent, both as Firehawk and CEO. Magazines have been commenting on how much better the Firehawk’s new costume looks, and it offers much better skull protection.

And if you see a program that automatically edits your camera footage to get the parts that have or don’t have specific family members, that’s probably the one I’ve almost finished.

I suppose I’m putting off talking about Ian. It’s great to be with him. It’s great to be treated like a father again. He’s trying all sorts of new things like karate, gymnastics and rock climbing. He’s got a lot of anger, which is bound to be true of any son of Sharon and mine, but he’s dealing with it better all the time.

Vincent gave him an incomplete version of the events. Ian knows Green Skull killed Sharon. He knows Green Skull wanted me to help him build killer robots. He knows I made the robots fail. He knows Green Skull tried to kill me, and he’s been told I saved Firehawk’s life.

Ian’s forgiven me for hitting his mother because I was such a hero and because I’m the only parent he has.

The other day, I was in ‘the cellar’ as Victor calls the bomb shelter under the Cole state. It’s where Victor and his core team do most of the preparation and research for his action as Firehawk. I work and live in one of three cottages behind the mansion, but Charlotte works in the cellar itself. I was going down to see Charlotte and because Ian wanted to go.

I’d gotten sidetracked talking to one of the statisticians. The work they do trying to find someone’s actions in a pattern of numbers reminds me of the work I do in image analysis.

“Put it on, Dad.” Ian asked me.

I turned to see Green Skull’s face. Ian was holding the mask above his head. I don’t know if it was the mask I’d worn, the one Firehawk had brought in, or a different one altogether. I held the mask and looked at it like I might look at a broken bowl.

“Please.” Ian asked.

I’ve missed so much time that I find it hard to refuse anything Ian asks of me. I put on the helmet and Ian dashed off the stairs.

I turned back to the statistician and said, “Kids.” She laughed, I think because of how it sounded in the Green Skull voice.

“You killed my mother!” Ian yelled from the top of the stairs.

I turned back, imagining Ian with a pistol, ready to kill me for my part in Sharon’s death, but he was standing at the stairs with his arms akimbo. He had a mask like Zorro’s over his face, a short cape on his shoulders. He wore a red tunic and a pair of black pants with pockets and silver buckles.

“Green Skull, prepare to meet your fate at the hands of Swiftfury!” Ian crowed. There was a round of applause from the stasticians, the criminologists and even the Frightening Men in Suits who were crammed in the shelter.

He was Firehawk. I was Green Skull. He didn’t see the symbolism. Children never do, like fish can’t see water.

Ian dashed down the stairs, jumping past the last couple steps and rolling in a somersault. He leaped up and punched me in the mask. I rocked back a step and staggered.

“Are you okay, Dad?” Ian asked. He was rubbing his hand.

“I’m fine.” I said. I took off the helmet, wiping away my tears as I did. I held my breath for a second, and when I let it out, I smiled.

“Hey, how about we get some chocolate cake?” I asked.

If you want to know the sordid details behind the scourge of the underworld, I can tell you this, the son of a bitch lives on chocolate. I have no idea how he stays in such good shape. At that moment, I felt like raiding his icebox.

“Yeah!” Ian said. We started back up the stairs. I held back a moment and passed Charlotte and mouthed the word ‘dead’.

“If I didn’t make him that costume, he would’ve made his own.” Charlotte whispered. “He’s a young, vulnerable child with terrible color sense. I had to save him from himself.”

I followed Ian up the stairs. He grinned at me and sang out, “Hooray for Captain Spalding, the African Explorer. . .”

“Did someone call me snorer?” I said, providing Groucho Marx’s line.

“Hooray, hooray, hooray!” Ian finished.