Maxi sat down in her cubicle with a huff. Her teammates could see the foul expression on her face and hunkered down in front of their computer screens. Farhad leaned over the cubicle and asked, “Anything you want to talk about?”
Normally, she’d bottle her emotions up. Keep them locked down. Farhad’s disarming smile helped ease her tension, and she opened up.
“It’s my parents. They were Power Twelve,” Maxi said.
Farhad’s eyes bulged, and he said, “Your mom and dad were–”
“Yeah.”
“What happened?”
“It’s a good question. They hid it from me. It’s like thinking your dad was a used car salesman your whole life, only to find out that he is a tech mogul.”
“Forgive me, but is this a bad thing?” Farhad asked. “Couldn’t we at least buy out more contracts?”
“My parents don’t have any money. My mom used all of hers and my father’s death benefit to buy out her contract.”
“Maybe people will listen to you. Being that you’re legacy and all.”
“More like putting a target on my back.”
“Sure, for some people, but there’s gotta be other people that remember your parents. Water cooler gossip around here is pretty much all about the Power Twelve. You probably–”
“Farhad, thanks, but I don’t want to out myself as a legacy employee.”
“I get it. I really do. You want to make your own way. My father is a doctor, and a very successful one at that. My sister is tenure track at Yale, and my brother is a fellow at Mount Sinai. I’m the deadbeat of the family, wanting to go my own way. My parents and I fight about it every time I come home for the holidays. I’m just saying, you’ve already proven yourself, and that’s the important part.”
Maxi smiled and squeezed his shoulder. He didn’t understand, at least not like she did. She decided to focus on work and checked Hellboy666’s battle log from just before she discovered the trick to beat the boss. It turned out that he had started contributing when they were in danger of losing the raid, and even got in a few after Maxi’s hack before his doctor presumably pulled him out of the fight.
Which left her with the elusive Izzod, the power player with the most to lose if the Company crumbled. That’s when she realized that maybe the Power Twelve weren’t a part of the conspiracy. Perhaps it was another group of players that would benefit.
She texted her uncle, “What rank were you when you left our homeworld?”
“3.11 Why?” he responded.
“What about mom and dad?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere in the 2s, I think.”
“When you transferred to Earth, what rank were you?”
“Everyone starts at 12.12. But we raised ranks quickly. We had an unfair advantage in that we were seasoned employees.” After a moment, he added, “Do you think…”
“Yeah,” Maxi typed, then popped up and told Farhad to run an analysis. This time it was an analysis on all the players in the raid compared to their performance of prior events, not just the Power Twelve. It stood to reason that if the Company crumbled in this world, the survivors could apply to transfer to another branch, and work their way to the Power Twelve.
From what Hellboy666 told her, it was hard to fall out of the Power Twelve once a person was there, just like billionaires could afford to throw away money on all sorts of frivolous things and were never in any real danger of destitution.
After a quick chat with Terry, she discovered that transfers to other dimensions weren’t allowed, except under extreme circumstances, like the dead world where she had found Belinda, probably for the reason that if the Company allowed transfers, the new locations would get flooded with people looking for a shortcut to the upper ranks.
Excited by the break in the case, she figured now was a better time than ever to confront her mother. She made sure she had the credits for an hour at home, and then texted her mom.
“You home?” Maxi asked.
“Yes,” Tara replied.
Maxi purchased the time off and took the magic elevator to her floor. She walked down the hallway toward her apartment. It was a little strange coming back. She had been sleeping in the capsule room, and spending so much time at work that it didn’t even feel like her home anymore. She thumbed the keys in her pocket and decided to knock.
Tara answered and spoke. “You have a key.”
Her mom opened the door and led her inside. All the evidence of the grutomaton attack had been erased. The super who was wounded in the attack thought it was a robbery gone wrong. The story among the residents was that when Maxi had come home early, the burglars were scared off.
It was an easily believable lie for those who didn’t want to live in a world where their printers would come alive and kill them. Maxi understood the need for people to choose safety over the truth. She had a hard enough time believing what was happening, and she knew more than most of the people who worked at her company.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Tara put on the kettle for some tea. Her mom’s solution to everything was peppermint tea. However, peppermint tea wasn’t going to fix what was broken between them.
Once they were situated around the kitchen table, Maxi said, “Why didn’t you tell me you were 1.1?”
“For the same reason I didn’t want you to know about the Company.”
“But why? What does hiding the truth do for me? It could have gotten me killed.”
“You were never supposed to join the Company! I made your uncle promise they would never recruit you. Why do you think I was pushing you so hard to find a job? I didn’t want you to end up there.”
“He didn’t recruit me. It was a flier on a pole!”
Tara laughed. Not in a mocking way, but more with a combination of tears and recognition that all her best-laid plans were undone by a flier on a pole. Maxi couldn’t stay mad at her mom. She reached out and embraced her.
“I tried,” Tara said between tears. “I really tried. As a parent, you’ll do anything for your child. You’ll die for them, but I can’t even do that.”
“Shhh… Mom,” Maxi said softly. “Don’t say that. I need you.”
“No, you don’t know. It should have been me. The Printer of Never Jamming, that’s my quest. It was my obsession. He was looking for it for me.”
“But all the fights, the yelling...”
“He was trying to talk me out of it. When everyone di… we had to flee.” Tara choked back emotion and sat a little more upright. Maxi let go of her embrace and settled for holding her mom’s hands. Tara continued, “I became obsessed with finding a cure for the grutomaton virus, but it was a fool’s errand. It mutates too quickly. New generations every time it finds a new host. I figured if I could find something that’s immune to it…”
“Dad found it, Mom,” Maxi said. “I found footage he had recorded in a fallen world. He found it. The printer exists, Mom.”
“Your father is dead,” Tara said, with grim finality. “It was my fault. If I didn’t keep sending him out there...”
“He made a choice to go.”
“He did it for us. I have night terrors; I still do. Everyone I ever knew is dead, but the truth of the matter...the truth is that your dad was always trying to convince me that grutomaton outbreaks are not always an indicator that an apocalypse is around the corner. There are worlds that have been living with the virus for years, and while instances ebb and flow, they very rarely cause the end of the world.”
“But I’ve seen it, Mom.”
“So did I. Those worlds are the exception, not the rule. The truth is that there is always something that can end the world. Viruses, monsters, asteroids, nuclear weapons, AI… yet somehow humanity soldiers on. Sure, there is a chance of a catastrophic event wiping out Earth at any minute. I can either live as if the end will come any moment, or live knowing that there will be a tomorrow. Your father understood that. He wanted us to live like that. I didn’t learn that till it was too late. I was pushing him, always pushing him to do more to keep us safe. But the truth of the matter is, none of us are ever truly safe. A black hole could drift through our part of the galaxy and end it all in an instant. All we have to decide is if we live for the end, or for what we have now.”
“But what’s wrong with preparing?” Maxi said. “Especially if we can prevent it.”
“I wasn’t building an emergency kit. It was an obsession that forced your father to take increasingly dangerous risks until he died.”
“How did he die?” Maxi said. “I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a car accident.”
“We don’t know. He went off grid and never came back. We don’t even know what world it was because he had climbed through the shaft and didn’t use the elevator.”
“I did that. I came to this world that he visited. Time moved a lot faster there. I wasn’t there very long and came back over a week later. Maybe he is still there?”
“The one behind the Dedication boosters in the cafeteria? I’ve been there. He’s not there. After he disappeared, I had security pull footage of the last time he was in the building. He got into the shaft by hopping on top of an elevator.”
“We figure out where that elevator was going, look for broken doors in the area…”
“You really think I wouldn't have tried that? The truth of the matter is that we don’t know how long he was on the roof, or if he switched elevators, or if he climbed into one world, and then back into the shaft from a different location. The truth is that the footage of him prying open a door and stepping onto the roof of the elevator at the floor below was the last anyone has ever seen of him.”
“What’s Albuquerque?”
Tara frowned and said, “Where did you hear that?”
“The TERANCe bot said that’s the destination Dad told the magic elevator as it closed the last time the bot saw him. I’ve tried to get it to work, but it doesn’t do anything.”
“Because you have to be more specific, like a building in Albuquerque or an address. It helps if you’ve been there, because the system is telepathic, so it can understand things like 'that Airbnb in Albuquerque'. But if you’ve never been there, you need to give it a little more.”
“Is there a place in Albuquerque where Dad has been?”
“Not that I know of, and even if he had, the city name isn’t enough. I can say New York, but there are lots of elevator doors in New York. How does it find the right one? Are you sure he didn’t say anything more? Like a place?”
“I mean, this is second-hand information from a robot. And Dad could have said something more after the doors had closed, but it didn’t seem like that was the case. What’s important about Albuquerque?”
“Nothing… it was a silly fantasy.”
“What?”
“When your dad and I first got to this world, we discovered they had these things called hot air balloons.”
“I know what those are. I don’t see how this relates.”
“You grew up in this world. Balloons weren’t a thing in ours. Sure helium-filled ones for birthdays, but nothing you can ride in. Albuquerque has one of the biggest gatherings of them in the world. Your father and I used to talk about leaving the Company behind and getting our pilot’s licenses for flying hot air balloons.”
“That’s it? Are you sure it wasn’t a code word or something?”
“This is why I didn’t want you mixed up in the Company. Once you're there, it’s really hard to leave.”
“But you were making billions of credits, maybe trillions – you probably could have bought the entire City of Albuquerque!”
“When you are Rank 1, you spend most of those credits just keeping your spot, and you also have them tied up in so many interests, you can’t turn them into cash so easily. Did you know that most people who make millions of dollars per year spend millions, too? Private jets, island estates, all of that costs money. Sure, your father and I could have cashed out and bought a compound in Albuquerque, but credits were being used to save people.”
Maxi understood that. Even though her team had been doing enough quests to keep a steady cash flow, her credit balance was perpetually low. The more money she would make, the more she’d dump it into her fund to help buy out employee contracts.
She suddenly understood her mother. It must have been hard to get out. The amount of people she could have saved for the value of her contract alone… But she couldn’t blame her mom, either. A person could only fight so much. Her mother was out of the fight.
But that didn’t mean Maxi had to be.