The Heist of Hollow London, page 14
Arlo went to the bar, relieved to have found Drienne, and also relieved Loren didn’t seem curious as to why Arlo had been in such a panic about finding her.
18
A GOOD TIME TO GET LOST
Each harvester was responsible for processing their own collection when they returned to the plant. This happened on the workfloor, the largest area of the plant, which was located on the ground floor of the building and contained a series of substance hubs: inverted cones, broad but not too deep, each one large enough for twenty or so workers to stand around its edge. They were all set into the floor and had a large hole at the base, forming a funnel. The slope was steep enough that any materials deposited into the funnel tumbled down and dropped to the level below. Each hub had a barrier around the edge so you couldn’t fall in, and atop this barrier was a wide ledge that you could use to sort through what you’d collected. Everyone moved their carts between the different hubs and deposited what they’d found, stripping out as much divergent matter as possible before tossing it in. Everything that went into each hub was subjected to a series of cleansing washes that could dissolve plastic, glass, metal, et cetera, but anything that needed heavy cleaning would clog up the system, meaning you’d have to clean it again and you’d be penalized. So it was worth your while to clean everything as thoroughly as you could.
It was always noisy here during working hours: echoing around the high ceiling were the sounds of chattering colleagues, rattling carts, and especially the clatter and clunks of salvage as it was tossed into the hubs and disappeared down the holes. Nadi was at the plastics hub, leaning against the ledge while she used a spudger to scrape a chunk of glue off the casing of a refrigerator. It was coming off in frustratingly tiny pieces. According to her skeye, the glue was an advanced resin, hard to break down and impossible to recycle into anything printable, so it was tough to remove but it also had to be removed. No wonder the other harvesters had left it for her to collect. They were probably laughing at her behind her back when she was cheerfully removing it from the kitchen.
Nadi worked at the strip of grimy white plastic, covered in nicks and scratches. To relieve the tedium she thought about what had made all those nicks and scratches. Every surface in the city had its history written on it, from the time when London was still alive. The refrigerator would have been moved around a few times and scraped against walls. And kitchens were busy places. Staff would have bustled past the refrigerator, bumping into it while carrying trays and boxes. In the midst of a hectic shift, someone might lean against it while wearing a pair of jeans with metal rivets, and the rivets would scratch the surface. Maybe late at night, after the place was closed and the staff was done cleaning up, two of them who’d had their eye on each other for weeks would stand by the refrigerator, standing closer than they ever had before, talking tentatively, and then one would lean in against the other and push them up against the refrigerator and they’d kiss, and the kiss would become more urgent, and then, hands fumbling, they’d hastily pull down the lower parts of their clothing and—
“You don’t want to put it in there like that,” said the woman next to Nadi.
“What?” said Nadi, snapping out of her reverie.
“You got to get all the glue off first,” the woman said, pointing at the piece of plastic, which Nadi had put down on the ledge so she could rest her hands for a moment. The woman looked about sixty. Maybe she was sixty or maybe it was just a sign of the hard living here, but the woman assumed the authority of one who’d been doing it longer than everyone else, and felt she had a duty to point out to them how they were doing it all wrong.
“I know,” said Nadi as neutrally as she could.
“If you put it in like that, you won’t get your commission for it.”
“I know.”
“Because they know who put what in, it’s all recorded.” The woman tapped her skeye.
“I know. Thank you. They explained it to me.” The commission on each individual piece was small, but so were their basic wages, and you needed to top it up by collecting as much as you could. You had to make sure every piece counted, they’d told her at her induction session. Even so, Nadi felt there came a point where you were just throwing your own time away, and she was about ready to give up and toss the plastic into the non-cyc hub. But now this woman had pointed it out she couldn’t do that. Nadi was trying to fit in, and that meant when someone told her how things worked around here, she had to go along with what they said.
* * *
After Nadi finally got the glue off, she decided now would be a good time to get lost. Her cart still had some compressed hardboard in it, which was just about the lowest value material you could collect. It couldn’t be turned into anything printable, no one used it for building materials anymore and it was a notoriously dirty and inefficient fuel source, but it was still incentivized to make sure it didn’t get left out there where people might set fire to it.
Nadi saw Gregg and asked him to keep an eye on her cart while she went to the bathroom. It was plain he didn’t want to, and only did so because he’d decided she could be useful to him. She knew full well where the nearest bathroom was, due to having studied the floor plan of the plant. The plant had two stairwells, one near the front entrance and another at the back; there was also an elevator by the entrance, which was exclusively for the use of management, and two service elevators by the rear stairwell, which only moved between the workfloor and the underfloor.
Nadi walked toward the bathroom that was located along the back wall. Then she carried on past it and went up the stairs. She counted the steps as she went: they were narrow and steep, and wouldn’t be easy to take at pace. The workfloor had a high ceiling—it was the height of two or three floors in a typical office building—and Nadi climbed six separate flights of stairs before reaching the top floor. Each flight had eleven steps. Sixty-six steps.
Nadi hadn’t been shown the top floor on her induction. Emerging at the top of the stairwell, she found herself at one end of a corridor. The walls were colored light green and skylights had been set into its ceiling at regular intervals. This corridor had a very different feel from the rest of the building. It was much cleaner, and most of the noise from the operations going on below had been neutralized. There were dwarf trees in pots at regular intervals, and a smell like fresh laundry was in the air.
Nadi remembered how this corridor was bisected by another one, creating a lopsided cross, like the flag of a Scandinavian country. Nadi was looking at it from the back of the building, which meant the support staff’s offices were on her right. The smaller admin and HR departments were based in offices on Nadi’s left. On the other side of the bisecting corridor were the offices used by the management team: each had their own office, and there was also a kitchen, a synergy zone, a wet room, and a small gym. At the center of the crossed corridors was a cluster of four meeting rooms, one on each corner. It was possible to fold back the walls of these rooms to create one large conference area.
Nadi waited a moment and listened. The support and admin offices would be staffed around the clock. The two remaining xecs would be taking it in shifts, so there would be no more than one of them present.
Nadi walked on down the corridor. She trod as lightly as she could. The carpet helped to muffle her footsteps. When she reached the bisecting corridor, she turned right and walked down it. On her left, directly opposite another door that led to the support department, was the door to the premium store. This door was made of artificial sapphire. It was locked, but its transparency meant Nadi could observe the interior layout without entering. However, it also meant anyone passing couldn’t fail to notice any unauthorized persons in the store.
Nadi checked that the corridor was still empty, then took her slate from her pocket, pressed it to the door, and took a capture. Two of the room’s walls were lined with lockers: these were plain, once shiny but long since dulled with age, and sturdy enough to survive a fire, a flood, or an explosion. Samson must have been keeping tabs for years on the locker he’d commandeered, checking that no one had queried its being out of action, or that the entire wall of lockers hadn’t been ripped out and replaced. Fortunately, no one ever saw much call to refurbish anything at Kentish Cyc, and they had more lockers than they needed anyway.
The store was used for things too valuable to process into basematter—precious metals, jewels, archaeological discoveries and such. The lockers were not permanently assigned to different types of content, but were assigned according to whatever needed to be stored there at that moment. Most items would only be here briefly, until a use had been found for them or a deal had been made to sell them. Then they would be removed and sent elsewhere. When you walked into the store, equipped with a skeye and the correct permissions, you either asked the system to show you where the thing you were looking for was—in which case it would open the locker for you—or told it you needed to deposit something. If you were depositing, the system would either open the locker that contained similar items so you could put it with them, or if there weren’t any similar items it would assign a vacant locker to this type and open it for you.
Mia had described to them where Samson’s locker was—three from the right, on the second row up from the floor. The bottom two rows were rarely used because they were inconvenient to reach. Nadi leaned down and put her face close to the sapphire door—she just wanted to see the locker door while she was—
“What are you doing?”
Nadi quickly turned to see a diminutive woman in a loose, intricately patterned shirt and colorful shorts stepping into the corridor. Even if Nadi hadn’t already seen her record (her name was Zara Astley), she would have known she was a xec. No one else would dress like that for work.
“I couldn’t find a supervisor,” said Nadi.
“What are you talking about?” said Zara, walking toward her.
Nadi had anticipated being called upon to account for her presence. She fumbled in her pocket and produced a ring with a gem set into it. She had collected this while out harvesting this afternoon: it had been left by Loren for her to find, as a dry run for what they’d need to do tomorrow. “I found this,” Nadi said.
The xec took the ring from her. “You’re new, aren’t you?”
“Yes. They said if I found anything valuable I was to give it to a supervisor and they’d take it up here.”
The woman peered at the ring. “This isn’t valuable,” she remarked. “Your skeye should have told you that. It’s just an amethyst.”
“The skeye did say it wasn’t valuable. But I wasn’t sure that was right because it’s pretty, isn’t it?” Nadi said, playing the dim overgrown child. “Seems a pity to cyc it, someone would like that as it is.”
The woman shrugged, shook her head. “Leave it with me. I don’t know…” She motioned for Nadi to go back to the stairs. “Go and finish your shift.”
“Will I still get my commission?”
“If it’s sold and you logged it as your find then yes, of course you’ll get it.”
Nadi thanked her, pretending to be excited, dashed back downstairs and collected her cart from Gregg. She dumped the hardboard, clocked out, and took the overline down to NiZCOval.
19
THE BIG SERVE
Before they started, Loren swept Arlo and Drienne’s apartment for ears. The rooms were sparsely furnished but Loren still found eleven ears—just the standard ones that were in most devices, enabling the user to communicate with the device verbally and allowing the device to harvest data about you on behalf of the manufacturer. Loren expected to find them in the refrigerator and the cabinets, that was standard, but there was one in the kettle. What did a kettle need an ear for? You could tell it to switch on, but you still had to stand up and take it to the tap to fill it with water. Instead of disabling the ears, Loren fed them all a stream of indistinct, mundane conversation—if you disabled one, the outlet that controlled them was liable to flag it and send someone to repair it.
“Shall we start, then?” said Arlo once Kline and Nadi arrived.
Loren felt irritation at how Arlo had become the de facto leader of this operation, based seemingly on nothing more than (a) he was the first to be recruited and (b) he was the only irreplaceable member of the team. He wasn’t the most qualified. And frankly Loren had come to the conclusion they personally disliked Arlo. During the planning phase, Loren had a sense he was treating them in an offhand, dismissive way, but they tried not to let it bother them. Even gave him the benefit of the doubt when he shut them down at the briefing. But when they were having cocktails together earlier, it was the first time they’d spoken face-to-face since Vancouver, and he’d been such a dick. He’d seemed distracted and annoyed they were there, had given terse responses to everything Loren said, and several times he’d asked Drienne if she wanted to go back to the apartment. Loren could tell he just saw them as this sort of gray blob of a person and showed no interest in their views or inner life or whatever. By contrast, Drienne was considerate and engaged, and it seemed weird to Loren she and Arlo were such close friends.
So should Drienne lead the group? She had basically the same skill set as Arlo, and judging from the tales she’d told back in Vancouver, she had a knack for getting away with things and could lie convincingly. But she also seemed like someone who took unnecessary risks. Nadi? She had the most experience of the criminal mindset and she was super observant, but she’d followed orders all her life and had no leadership skills. The same was true of Loren, for that matter: they were hands down the most intelligent member of the crew, but their interpersonal skills had been left deliberately undeveloped.
So that left Kline. He didn’t seem a natural leader either, because he was the most reluctant of the crew. He visibly resented having to be here and interact with them all, which led to the other point in his disfavor, which was that no one liked him. Even Drienne, who was charismatic and engaging and could get on with anyone, had said to Loren she found him hard work. But Kline understood systems and he understood people. And it might be a good thing that he just wanted the job done so they could all get out of here, and that he appeared not to care if any of the others liked him.
“Okay,” said Arlo, “let’s go through this step by step—Nadi, you’ll be on shift from—”
“I think Kline should go through the plan,” said Loren.
“Right. Er, why?”
“Well, maybe he should kind of be the”—Loren searched for another word that wasn’t leader—“coordinator for this?” They looked around the room. “Like, you three are all gonna be inside the building, I’m gonna be outside and around it—doesn’t it make sense for the one guy who’s gonna be sitting tight in a room down the street to know everything that’s going on, and kind of be the center of planning?”
Kline looked stunned for a moment that one of the others had spoken up for him. Then he said, “Yes.”
“Like, I’m not saying you should be in charge. But I think if anyone has an overview of this thing, it’s you.”
“I think that makes a lot of sense,” said Kline, nodding. “I’ll coordinate.”
Arlo looked to Drienne as if expecting her to challenge this.
“It does make sense,” Drienne remarked.
“Fine,” said Arlo. “I didn’t particularly want to do it, this meeting was your idea anyway.”
“I know,” said Drienne sweetly, “and it’s a good one.” She sipped the iced tea Arlo had made for them all.
“I actually agree with Arlo that all of us gathering like this is risky,” said Kline, “and we shouldn’t take any longer than necessary over it, so … Nadi, first of all maybe we can take a look at that capture you made of the interior, and we can plot who’ll be where when?”
Nadi flipped the capture onto the window on the coffee table so she could open it up and they could all see. Before Arlo cast his gaze down to it he glared briefly at Loren, who gave him an amiable smile in return while feeling a burning need to prove him wrong about something. It didn’t particularly matter what.
* * *
They’d gone through every step of the plan, but to Kline’s chagrin, people kept asking questions. Nadi raised the fact the workforce didn’t know the company had collapsed, and whether that might affect things.
“I don’t see that it should,” said Arlo.
“But you’re coming in to debrand it,” said Nadi. “People will notice you’re doing that and they’ll wonder what’s going on.”
“Will they, though?” said Kline.
“Yes. They’re not stupid.”
“Look, I’ve seen plenty of information choke strategies—I’ve helped implement them. Management have cleared you to come in for the debranding so they must have a plan for this, whether it’s to tell the workforce the place is up for sale, or tell them it’s not a debranding but something else that looks like a debranding. I can’t see it being a problem for us.”
Then Drienne wanted to take another look at one of the two devices Loren had built, which they had nicknamed the Lost Weekend, and go through how to operate it again. Drienne also wanted to make sure Nadi and Arlo knew how to operate it in case she was unable to do so, and Nadi wanted to pick it up, to get an idea of its weight and texture as well as its appearance, to ensure she could identify it tomorrow. And because they would be collected by Mia directly after the operation was complete, none of them would get a chance to go back for their suitcases, so all the others had items they wanted to give Kline to put in his luggage—clothes, shoes, a bottle of some soft drink you could only buy in the UK, a couple of books. Kline accepted these items with ill grace.
After that, Kline thought the meeting was finally done. But then Drienne produced a bottle of vodka and told Arlo to get some glasses, ice, and something to mix it with.
