JESSICA : N/A

HOUR -3 : 1:15, MONDAY, APRIL 20, 2122

RICHMOND 6 : BAR 2 : OPERATION PRINCESS RESCUE

After more or less aimlessly wandering around this surprisingly convoluted maze of a roof for several minutes, I finally settled on a relatively non-dangerous spot with a relatively good view. I’d delicately maneuvered into a mostly dry, mostly clean little oasis in the shade under a bunch of grime-covered pipes that I thought I could avoid touching if I held my breath. I’d been wrong.

But I was trying very hard to stay positive. So instead of crying like I wanted to, I congratulated myself on thinking to snag my new pair of binoculars as I stared through them, past the edge of the roof, into the pier below.

Okay, so there was the dock owner’s house out in the middle of the main clusterfuck of boats. Which would make James’ spot one, two, three, four spaces back from where that path connected to the rest of the dock… Empty. Not that I’d expected any different. Even still, the butterflies in my stomach calmed down significantly once I saw the lack of it for myself.

That gave me leeway to notice how uncomfortable I still was. My arms were resting behind a short flat vent blowing some sort of smog off to the right of my face. It was definitely annoying. And it made the air smell like if diarrhea wore cheap cologne. But at least it was blowing away from me. And it did an amazing job of hiding me from everyone below. There were more comfortable spots to be had up here. Just not with anything like this quality of cover.

It wasn’t so bad, really. The towel Charlie lent me was comfy. Even if it was pretty thin… And even when it was the only thing separating my entire front from the rough cement roof. Okay, bad example.

At least these binoculars from the glove box of the, as I now know for sure, real FBI agents, were pretty fucking sweet. Looking through them made me feel like that one alcoholic billionaire from those old Disney movies with all the holograms of targeting systems and gauges and stuff floating around his head.

And I even had a similar level of entertainment in the form of The Life and Times of Mikey McPedobitch playing in my earpiece. Not a very fair nickname, really… I came up with it before I’d actually known him. Or at least before I’d actually heard him interacting with everyone he met after I got away. All thanks to Misty’s little spider eggs that came with that model of the toy.

And damn, the adhesive I’d loaded into their little suction cavities was getting perfect grades in this impromptu field test. Even better than what I loaded into that other one at McDonald’s. And now, after the latter blew up well enough to let me escape, the former was letting me hear everything Mikey said. Kind of… Really, it sounded more like he was mumbling it all into a pillow. Try as I might, I could never figure out how to drench the thing in adhesive without absolutely butchering the sound quality.

And it wasn’t like I could track him long-term. If either of us left the range of Richmond’s cell tower, or the battery ran out, it would just shut off entirely. The only way to interface with it or restore its power without frying the thing, was to dock it back into one of Misty’s egg slots. Which meant that it was lost forever since there was no way in hell I was getting that close to his pants again.

One way or another, it’d all be over by the end of the day. If we hadn’t escaped by then, a drained battery would be the least of my worries.

So yeah… Laying on this roof gave me little else to do but stress over resources, worry about James, and listen to everything Agent Mikey said.

And there were really no two ways about it. He was just nice. Nothing but polite and cordial to everyone he spoke to. Including two homeless men so far. I mean, I was right to run. I trusted James enough to know that for damn sure.

But this guy was just doing his job. That alone didn’t give me the right to judge him harshly enough to justify the title of ‘McPedobitch’. But I’d already gotten used to it by the time I learned any of that. And he still was about to ruin my whole life if he caught me again. So I just couldn’t bring myself to do him any favors by retracting his surname. And damn it, I needed some catharsis right about now.

As bad as my situation had grown in the last few hours since I was kidnapped from school by the fucking cops… I was honestly pretty proud of how I’d handled it all. Sure, I’d undoubtedly splashed mud all over my pristine lack of a criminal record by escaping FBI custody.

But… I mean… I’d escaped FBI custody! How fucking badass was THAT??? Especially since, by getting away, I’d apparently foiled Mikey’s plan to use me to make James surrender over some kind of Star-Trek-sounding food thing he had.

That must’ve been what James said would ‘change our lives forever’. Guess I’d just have to trust him on that… But, like, really though? Our broken lives would be stitched back together by a magic food box? Come on…

Anyway, Mikey apparently still didn’t actually know when James would get back. So hopefully, he’d be running around looking for me until we were already long-gone.

And just like that, a whole hour passed.

During my first chance to actually reflect on everything that happened today, it finally sank in. I’d have to leave Richmond. Tonight. I could never go home again. I could never go back to school. Actually, I was fine with that. Except…

Thomas.

I took my phone back out. It was at full charge thanks to the sun exposure up here. After a quick check to make sure the VPN was still going, I opened up the requisite facebook and started a new message. For the first time in… Ever, I guess… Wow okay, I was literally writing down how I felt. How I’d always felt, really. Or at least how I’d grown to feel.

It was hard to write knowing it was all too late anyway. And that by doing so, I was involving him in all this. That it could only make his life harder. That I could just find him once it all blew over. That I could tell him everything then. Before sending it, on the verge of tears, I whispered into the screen. “I love you.”

Then, nodding to myself, I deleted the message.

At some point during my first uneventful hour of waiting, Charlie came up to check on me. And I’d been hungry since before I got to that McDonalds. So, I managed to talk her into bringing up a quesadilla and Long Island Iced Tea. “I mean since I’m not in what anyone would recognize as ‘The Bar’, you’re not actually serving alcohol to a minor. You’re just… Bringing it up for yourself, forgetting it on the roof, and coming back later to find the glass mysteriously empty.”

Finally receiving my free meal, I took a sip. It tasted good. Which meant it was virgin. “Ah, fuck… Well, it was worth a shot. Thank you, Aunt Charlie. You’re my favorite.” And she was, too. Not that she had much in the way of competition there…

Especially now that I’d had some time to myself. Some of the things I’d thought about were events from her perspective. And I understood. I was still disappointed. But if I was in her place, I don’t know that I would’ve done anything more than neglect me and James after all that shit with mom near the end. That would’ve been more of an above-and-beyond-the-call-of-duty sort of thing and less of a you’re-a-bad-person-if-you-don’t-do-it one.

Charlie’s standard sarcastic grin turned unmistakably genuine as she watched me take the first few bites.

Once I’d gone from ravenous to merely hungry, I smiled back. And for once, it wasn’t even forced. “So how about that alcoholic-”

Charlie turned around in the middle of my sentence and walked downstairs. “G’bye, Jess.”

Shrugging so as not to give away the weapon she had with how much I still despised her other nickname for me, I tore back into the quesadilla. I didn’t exactly have standards one way or another for bar food. But whether it was thanks to the quality of ingredients or just how hungry I’d been, it was the most delicious thing I’d ever eaten. In other words, Charlie could cook. Why was I only learning about this now?

And why was James still nowhere to be seen?

As though summoned by the thought, a shitload of men in black suits just sort of showed up all at once. They came out of nowhere, swarming onto the pier like ants. Aaand… There was Blondie.

God… DAMN IT!!! That was exactly what I’d been worried about!

James, where the fuck were you?

Okay, okay… Change of plans… Obviously, change of plans… Right..? Yeah, that was right… I knew it was. But… Fucking how?

There were more of the same black suits down there than I would’ve bet existed in Richmond. To say nothing of their equipment. Spread out across the pier were… More open suitcases than I was willing to count. Inside of each was some kind of cyan-glowing high-tech shit that I didn’t even recognize. I may not have been the best-informed of high-schoolers. But that was still saying something.

I muttered under my breath just as frantically as I tried to amend the plan. “Fuckfuckfuckfuck-” I just thought it through. And I thought. And ten minutes later, I still had nothing. “Okay come on, gotta do something…” But there was nothing.

What was I, five? I was panicking. Calm down. Remember the thing… The way James taught me to deal with panic. I was never very good at it.

But I still took a big breath in. Then I relaxed my shoulders as I breeeaaathed it out. In and out. Over and over until my stomach stopped prophesying imminent catastrophic meltdown.

Oookay, one thing at a time… Was James in danger now?

In… and out…

No. How long until that changed?

In… And out…

It was almost 2:30 now, so… “Unknown…” But soon.

In… And out…

“Could I neutralize the danger?”

I considered that for the fraction of a second it took me to want to laugh at myself for taking even that long to think it through. “Fuuuck no… But what options do I even have?”

Wait. That was Wrong. yes-or-no questions only. “Can I get them to leave?”

Probably not. “Definitely not safely… But can I distract them and run past?”

Too many options. Most of them were bad. Except I brought tools for that. “Which spiders are left?” Not exactly a binary choice, but…

I glanced down because that was how little I trusted my own memory right now. “Brock and Ash.” Eureka!

I finally had an idea that could work! Goddamn it James, you were making this so tedious! But maybe…

Thinking it through, my idea quickly expanded into a plan. Then a strategy. “Okay, see? There you go. No need to panic at all.” Ash was Plan B. Brock was Plan C. Plan A was just to run the fuck away.

I could still get us out of this. “Resume Operation Sanji Escape.” Hm… That was still such a shit name. And even less relevant now that I knew the guy. “Commence Operation… Um… Who was another blond dude?” Wait, why should the bad guy get primary billing?

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

I came up with more name ideas. Each was somehow worse than the last. I was burning daylight here… Fuck it. “Commence Operation Princess Rescue.”

I’d save you, Princess James. If only just to see your stupid smug bitch face when I did it.

So then… Depending on where he was now, I could just redirect my idiot brother to another dock. As long as it was in Virginia… Apparently… That might’ve been bullshit, now that I thought of it. Well, I’d just confirm the plan with James once I told him.

Then, I’d meet up with him after taking our Charlie-smuggling-escape-route myself. Even with my VPN, the suits had to be monitoring all the signals and things coming in and out of here. Which meant I couldn’t afford to separate myself from the pack of people sending random memes or whatever to each other around the pier. How could I make warning James about the Feds look inconspicuous to the Feds?

So I thought about it. For five whole minutes, I thought of it.

{ Today - 2:34 : Hey James. Charlie can’t make it today. He’ll drive me to your place tomorrow. It’s a straight shot from here to Charlottesville, so he said it’s fine }

Aaand no response for five whole minutes.

So I tried again.

And again.

As long as I spaced them out, I should be fine to keep texting the same guy… ‘Normal’ teenage girl, right?

At first, I kept it to once every five minutes. Then I got impatient and switched to once a minute before I remembered why I shouldn’t do that. After a while, I switched it to ten since it was starting to feel like the sort of thing that you’d notice if you were monitoring outgoing communications in the immediate area or something crazy like that.

And maybe also because I was now busy with all the other pre-work I had to do for Plan B just in case he didn’t check his phone like the asshole he was actively proving himself to be.

While I got ready, I kept listening to a sneak preview of what I was working against from The Life and Times of Mikey McPedobitch. The FBI’s plan was surprisingly simple for people who were paid to make plans. Like what I would’ve expected them to come up with on the fly after never considering what to do if they lost track of me.

Their scheme went as follows. First, they’d spread out off of the dock’s main path. Then they’d wait for James to disembark and walk halfway down to the pier. Once he did, they’d swarm him all at once on Mikey’s signal. All while making absolutely sure that no harm came to Stephanie. Which was fine. I’d love another ally in this unfair matchup of me and my brother versus the entire government… But who the fuck was Stephanie?

At first, I thought Mikey just got my name wrong. But no, he’d said ‘Jessica’ correctly plenty of times over the past few hours. Mostly in the company of words like ‘find’ and ‘now’.

By this point, I knew his plan better than I knew my own mother’s face. All thanks to hearing him give the same fucking orders. Again. And again. Individually to every single agent. Holy shit Mikey, learn to fucking delegate.

As the live, yet nonetheless looping sound clip played in my ear for the bajillionth time, I pressed the button on my middle plastic ball.

Popping open, a slightly smaller metal ball than Misty rolled onto the concrete roof. As it would also do on impact with any other surface, it immediately sprang to life on its four spiked legs blunted with a coating of some kind of compound that was basically, but not actually, rubber.

With the additional help of my eyes this time, I easily copied the message I’d sent myself on my texting facebook. Reopening the toy one, I re-pasted the password.

The first option was grayed out, and surrounded by a blue outline, indicating what I already knew. The outline signified that Misty was fully functional, and the gray tint signified already being in-use. In this case, that meant continuously streaming whatever was said near Mikey’s pant leg, straight to my ear.

The clear middle option was outlined in yellow to indicate that Ash was both deployed and standing by. Selecting it, the view expanded into a video feed overlayed with basic controls. Having practiced this exact thing in the school’s air ducts after hours, I used that expertise to maneuver him over to the pier’s power grid. It was a box in the basement of a station a couple doors down from the bar. And it just so happened that they ventilated that room via an opening roughly twice the width of a toy spider.

Ash in place, I moved to calling James along with the texts. And growing ever-more pissed-the-fuck-off as I did.

It rang.

He didn’t pick up.

I left an insulting message.

Rinse and repeat.

As I tried to focus on other things, my increasingly panicked internal monologue became more and more audible as I got more and more frustrated with my stupid-ass brother. “Fucker probably has his FUCKING phone on FUCKING silent. He always fucking does this shit…”

In quick succession, I absentmindedly gestured in every one of the directions my current narrow confines allowed me to reach, as though bitching out the world in general. “You need to be FUCKING reachable. For… Oh, I don’t know… I guess I can’t FUCKING think of anything. Yep, not a FUCKING thing comes to fucking mind. Good FUCKING job, James! You know what the FUCK you’re doing for SURE. Don’t bother listening to your little FUCKING sister, you FUCKING dickhead.”

Oh. Hadn’t used that one yet…

“-can’t come to the phone right now, please leave a message after the beep.”

I waited for the same, infuriatingly familiar beep. “Fucking dickhead!” Then I hung up and tried again.

Not helping anything was the goddamned Immortalia Online ad that had been playing on a loop since probably long before I arrived. It was set up on the edge of the pier opposite a hotel building a few more doors down from the power grid. The big screen it played on was just barely inside my non-binocular-assisted periphery. And it wasn’t especially loud from here either. But when there were no sights or sounds or anything actively distracting me from it? Well, after a few hours on this roof, you might say that I knew the ad by heart.

Not that it was particularly complex or varied. The whole thing was just a bunch of low-rent actors pretending to be developers in a meeting, talking about the negative player behavior that would result from one ‘totally badass’ feature or another.

And then after each one, the camera would zoom in all twisty-surfer-1990s style onto their CEO’s big dumb face saying the same two words to each message of caution. “Worth it!”

After six of those, the commercial blessedly ended with the big, blown up version of the game’s title exploding to life right above its official tagline. ‘Immortalia Online: Worth It!’

It might’ve driven me to just blow up this whole pier, agents and all, if not for my phone’s audio-ad-block facebook. In combination with my earbuds, it used a simplified AI to play a parody of the ad’s voice lines in perfect sync with the ad itself. It wasn’t smart enough to work without me first making it listen to any given ad at least once. But after that, I never needed to hear the normal ad again.

And this one had gone through some CHANGES over the last few hours as the AI program slowly perfected how it made fun of the audio. One of the most minor, yet appreciated ones was when it started changing all instances of ‘Worth It’ to ‘Fuck It’.

I usually didn’t mind seeing ads. Especially with the satisfaction of always knowing I had the option not to hear the real thing again afterwards. But over the past year, it became a much-needed source of levity in my life since the parodies it came up with were almost always fucking hilarious. Not necessarily comedy gold, but I loved just how shitty the ads always ended up while still technically maintaining the tone of the original.

Buuut most of that levity went out the window when I was stuck with the same one on repeat over and over and over. Oh, and I almost forgot, over!

Minutes passed as I used all of that to distract myself from the suffocating anxiety. Those turned into hours. Then days. Okay, probably not ‘days’… The sun was still up from when I got here. But I lost track of time.

Eventually, I banged my head on a pipe as I bolted upright. Ow…

But he was here! There was a boat coming around the first bend in the decades-old river branching off from Richmond Bay. And I would’ve known that stupid crane anywhere.

I finally stopped trying desperately not to literally watch the clock as I checked the time. The exhaustion from all my impotent anxiety hit me like a wall when I saw how long it had actually been.

Two and a half hours. Oh my god… I’d been lying prone… Unable to do anything but prepare and worry and watch the same stupid corporate propaganda bullshit over and over again, for nearly three fucking HOURS??? All without so much as a single reply to the dozens of voice and text messages I sent that dickhead ever since the place started crawling with guys trying to arrest him.

No time for that now though. I had to figure out how long until the men with the guns could see the boat from down… There… “Oh shit.” Wow, hadn’t thought of that. “James, that was actually kinda clever.” Looking at it from this angle, it was obvious now that between the dock’s lounge or whatever and all the parked boats, his approach would be totally hidden from ground-level almost anywhere across the pier.

But that was also bad. Very bad. It meant James couldn’t see them, either. And I could tell from where I watched them set the whole thing up. This wasn’t the sort of trap you got out of once you were caught. If James left his boat, his life might as well be over. Mikey knew that. Hell, even I knew that.

Ever since Peters came into my classroom, I’d thought of little else. No way in hell would I let it happen. I’d rather do life in prison. I’d even rather lay on a roof and work and worry and go through the worst anxiety of my life for three solid hours, just to lower the odds of it happening even the slightest little bit.

So then… If he was here, then Plan A was already fucked. And if these binoculars could be trusted about his current velocity and deceleration, I figured I was about two minutes out from when I’d have to move for Plan B. It was a tiny window. I’d have to get there after he arrived at the dock, but before he anchored the boat. Even if everything lined up perfectly, this was gonna be close.

Settling back down for the moment, I picked my phone up and switched back to controlling Ash. Still operable, undiscovered, and placed right where he needed to be. Clamps were hooked in. Circuit was nearly established. Just had to flip the switch. And yet, even the slightest mistake could fuck up everything.

Which brought me to Plan C. I did not like Plan C. But I nonetheless quickly made sure the right password was copied in case I had to open Brock anyway. Now if I did end up needing him, he was already on my clipboard. As little as I wanted that to happen, I figured I’d just go ahead and avoid repeating the same near-fatal mistake from earlier today.

Looking back up at the still-approaching boat… Good, I still had time. James was just about pulled into the dock now. Aaand… Oh shit.

I mentally slapped myself as I put on the heavy-duty sunglasses I almost forgot I had. Why’d I even swipe these from the car if I wasn’t going to use them for this?

Looking back up again, I saw that the boat was… Already docked? Seriously? Hours of waiting and planning and I still missed the mark? “Oh fuck it-NOW!!!” Ignoring the first three and last six, I pressed the fourth button overlayed on top of the spider’s video feed.

This particular spider-bot had a lot of functions. As far as their intended usage went, Ash was the one with the most utility. The fourth button was meant to transfer a charge between two of many USB variations. I went ahead and overclocked that particular feature, cut off the ends of the wires, and replaced them with clamps. To the point that I was pretty sure most of the other nine buttons would just shut the whole thing off if I pressed them. That, or try to actually use that feature with way too much power and make some or all of it blow up. Or melt. I didn’t know. I never tested them after I replaced all their hardware with stuff to increase the max amperage of Button Four.

A few of the agents nearby on the pier looked around in confusion at some girl yelling ‘now’ from out of nowhere. At least I assumed as much. But I was already gone by the time they all looked in unison at exactly where I’d just been or whatever.

I wouldn’t know as I was too busy practically leaping down the stairs. I only narrowly avoided a metal shard sticking out of the badly maintained handrail before just as practically falling to a heap at the bottom. But instead, I caught myself and slammed my way through the kitchen door, bumping into the stove, slipping on the wet tile, and barely didn’t eat shit all over again before bursting into the bar proper.

There were people in here now. When had that happened? Were they here to watch the suits outside?

Sprinting for the bar’s entrance regardless of any of that, I swiped a ratty green winter coat and one of those overlarge earflap-hat thingies lying unguarded near the door on my way out. I had to fight entropy itself not to break stride as I fumbled my way into the overlarge smelly clothes that I instantly regretted touching.

The door was already swinging closed behind me by the time I heard any evidence of pursuit.

“That fat bitch stole my hat!”

But I had more important things to worry about. Being immediately blinded by the light outside, for example. Fuck, these sunglasses barely did anything! Or was it really just that bright?

I heard, but distinctly couldn’t see, what was unmistakable for anything but large, exploding light bulbs.

Barely even able to make out the ground in front of me at this point, I heard Mikey just fine in my ear.

“Status!” Followed by a few seconds of silence. “Repositioning!” More silence. “Banks, how many spare magazines do we have?” … “None?” … “Six? Seriously?”

As I broke past the overcharged decorative lights lining the dock, I realized I was through the hard part when they stopped blinding me, and instead started lighting my path to James. At least where they didn’t pop and rain down glass or plastic or whatever they were made of. I wasn’t gonna check. Anyway, I’d made it through my dockwide flashbang.

And that was apparently when the adrenaline wore off because my legs suddenly felt like they were on fire. Same with my lungs. All of a sudden, I couldn’t breathe. I hadn’t been thinking and I ran way too fast, way too far, and way too suddenly for my complete lack of physical prowess to keep up with. Feeling especially dizzy, I slowed down to a speed I thought I could maybe manage without passing out or seeing that quesadilla again.

While I did, I distracted myself by going over what I’d just heard. Like, what did he mean by ‘none’? And ‘six’? Did he have one magazine or six? But wait a sec… Either way, there was one inescapable fact… He thought he would have to reload.

Oh…

But no, James wasn’t a threat. Yeah, he could kick some ass. I knew that for fucking sure. But he’d only ever defended himself. Even when our adopted family’s dad got drunk and hit me. No vengeance. No reprisals, no vendettas… No violence at all, in fact. We just ran. So why would James be a threat now? He wouldn’t…

Oh.

That was right… He had that rifle. James was armed. And what did government agents do when someone like James was armed?

OH.

I broke into a full-on sprint.

My head was splitting open. My arms and legs were screaming. So were my lungs. So was I. “JAAAMES!!!”