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“What what?” CM said.

“What’s left to do?”

“Cassie’s going to try and break your code without knowing how your antivirus works.”

Cassie. Was he kidding? I knew the names were similar but hadn’t yet guessed she used the same nickname. Not something I wanted to hear.

“She’s going to play the hacker. Good role for her, don’t you think?”

I did, of course, but hadn’t considered it. Actually a reasonable approach.

“True, she doesn’t know the code for my antiviral software, but she knows how the virus works. Gives her a leg up, doesn’t it.”

Cassandra, or Cassie, gave me an interesting look at my use of the words ‘leg up.’ I hadn’t meant anything suggestive, but she’d taken it that way.

“Yes. She does have a ‘leg up’ as you say. That gives her an advantage otherwise won’t have. If she still can’t protect a computer from it, then we’re really safe from problems.”

I got it. Didn’t like it. But got it.

CM then led his group out of the lab and left Cassie and me alone together. She looked at me and smiled. She’d apparently forgiven me for insulting her. I turned and went to my apartment. And closed the door behind me. Things were getting too complicated.

18.
As I lay down in bed to try and take a nap, I thought about my potential escape route again. So many problems with it. I couldn’t imagine that they hadn’t seen me down on all fours sniffing and feeling the carpet exactly where their precious trap door was placed. They’d be taking special precautions from now on. That meant that aside from being nearly impossible to open from above, they’d surely lock it up tight from now on. Then there was the probability that like in my room, they’d have it eternally it with video surveillance around the clock. I’d just be in another prison down there. And given them plenty of forewarning that I was on the move. I’d have less time than before to make my escape. Not a pretty picture.

I think I dozed for a while before my little world came apart at the seams. The alarm suddenly sounded, not just waking me, but deafening me at the same time.

Without even thinking about what I was doing or why, I clasped my hands over my ears and ran out the door into the lab. Cassandra, or Cassie I now remembered, had her hands over her ears as well, but otherwise sat calmly looking down into her monitor like nothing else was wrong.

When I arrived at her station, I tapped her on the shoulder and asked her what was going on. Of course she couldn’t hear me and bunched her shoulders saying so.

I hipped her off her stool and brought up a text editor on the screen. I typed, “What’s happening.”

She wrote back, “The alarm.”

Was she kidding? I knew that.

“Why?” I typed.

“Don’t know.”

“Someone escaping?”

“Or an invasion.”

I hadn’t considered that.

“The cops?”

She shook her head and typed, “Competitors.”

I hadn’t considered that either.

“Who?” I asked on screen.

She bunched her shoulders again. And there we were. The deafening and continuous sound of the alarm threatened to drive me over the edge. I was just about to ask her if she had any crystal meth around, when the guard who I’d seen before muscled his way inside, still wearing two pistols and his automatic rifle. He came over, grabbed me, and marched me into my apartment. Once there, he sat me down on the bed and mouthed the word ‘stay,’ as if he were commanding his dog to remain in place. I got the picture.

If the building had been attacked by the Roman Army I wouldn’t have known it. All I could think of was the damn alarm. Had its makers considered how debilitating that sound was? But the guard had been well trained. He didn’t waiver in his determination to make me stay put and looked like he’d weathered this training every day for his entire life.

I laid back and looked at the ceiling again. A position I was getting used to. Professor Will Francis, expert ceiling watcher. Comes cheap.

I tried desperately to think of something else to get my addled mind off the screaming sound that filled the room. Cassie. Which one? The one in North Dakota that I loved? Or the one in Queens who wanted to pork me? Was that even a correct term to use in that way? Could only guys hump? Or could gals do it too? The sound was making me loony.

I thought back to the two goons that had attacked me in North Dakota that day so long ago now it seemed. This their gang? CM had mentioned something about a rival group. Were they here now? And after me? I’d never been so popular. At least not since I’d won first place in the state chess championship.

And then, thankfully, the alarm stopped ringing. Like hitting yourself over the head with a frying pan for hours and then stopping. It still hurt. But it hurt a lot less when it stopped.

My guard would have none of it. He pulled the rifle off his shoulder and aimed it at the door. I wanted tell him that the war had been called off for the moment. Of course, he wouldn’t have heard me. So we waited like that for a few minutes. Him to shoot someone. Me to let that damn sound unresonate from my ears.

Eventually he grew tired of waiting for the army to attack. He got up, cautiously opened the door, and looked out. He didn’t blast anything with a barrage of bullets, so I assumed that all was well. At least in the lab.

I watched him then approach the outside door with the same stealth. Nothing gave him pause. And he opened that door. And then was gone. Ready to join the rest of the armed forces down stairs I presumed.

Cassie was still lost in her computing. Trying to figure out a way to prove my programming vincible no doubt.

I returned to my apartment and sat down on the bed again. My head still buzzed from the alarm but was beginning to return to normal. Whatever that meant. At least I was slowly regaining my ability to think again.

That’s when CM decided to make an appearance again. He stepped into the lab like it might explode on him. He looked at Cassie working diligently away, and then turned toward me. I’d left the door upon so he could see me readily enough.

“It wasn’t you?” he asked, as he walked in my direction. Surprisingly I could hear him well enough.

“Wasn’t me what?” I asked.

“Trying to escape again?”

“Nope. Not me. I had nothing to do with it this time.”

He looked confused. As if the alarm had gone off for no reason at all.

Then my friend the armed guard joined us and whispered in Christopher’s ear. Whatever he said seemed to please him.

“No problem,” he then told me. “Get back to whatever you were doing.”

“No problem?” I asked. “I’m nearly deaf for Christ’s sake. And get back to what you were doing? I was laying on my bed doing absolutely nothing thank you very much.”

“So you were, Francis. So you were.”

Why can’t anyone use Will? It’s a nice name. Not even short for Wilfred. Or Wilhelmina. Or any other name. Just Will.

Without addressing my actual question, he just turned and left the room. With his guard in tow.

“Actually I liked it,” I yelled after them. “Made my day. A little excitement to keep the computer scientist from killing himself.”

They didn’t appear to have heard me. I lay back down on the bed and began my ritual ceiling watching. Never know what you can find up there, I thought. Maybe the day will turn out successfully anyway. Maybe a fly will land and wander around up there.

19.
I changed my tactics to something more productive. What were my alternatives to just lying here and wasting time? First, the trap door. Could I get it open? Would the ladder be standing where I could get to it? Did they have the lower room lit and bugged? And on and on. Not much there for me given particularly that I had no idea if I could get it open in the first place. What else. I gave it some serious thought.

I could bring to supercomputer to its knees. Surprisingly simple notion. Set it to calculating a straightforward but endless recursion. Make sure every circuit couldn’t resist trying its hand at solving an unsolvable problem. List all prime numbers. Create stack overflows with non-ending equations. All kinds of ways. But then they probably had the computer partitioned in such a way as to avoid that. I’d only bring down my part of the RAM. Interesting idea. Probably not feasible. Besides, it would more than likely only bring about a temporary halt to the machinery. Cassie could fix it. And staling would only make more boring time for me to lie here on the bed looking up at the ceiling.

I could hump Cassie number two. She’d probably like that. It would break the monotony. But could I actually do such a thing. In front of all the cameras. Being like acting. A porn star in the making? But no. Only fooling myself. My dream was Cassie number one. Cheating on her wasn’t in the cards for me.

Could I fake insanity? Mumble myself into making them believe I’d lost all my marbles. Would they then just let me go? Figure I’d spend the rest of my life living on the streets, drooling and selling pencils from a tin can? Fool them by escaping then back to North Dakota. Not likely. Wasn’t that good an actor. Then again, I might not have to act.

Bokator came to mind then. Tell CM we had a problem that even Cassie couldn’t solve. Get them in here and take them out as they entered the door. The guard might be a problem, but actually, compared to listening to the alarm again, being shot to death might not be a good way to end this thing. Suicide by boredom. I was losing it now.

Of course, I could always ask Cassie to be my pusher and take a breath of meth. From what little I knew of the stuff, it would surely turn on my juices, make me dangerous enough to hurt myself, no less anyone else around. But I’d seen her in the dark alley. What she’d looked like, shaking and afraid of life, just for her next smoke. The stuff was highly addictive. Could I take a chance? Besides, with both of us wired, we’d like end up back here in my bed doing all manner of illegal things to each other. Not really an option.

Then it hit me. For real this time. Why hadn’t I thought of this earlier? I could program one of my mathematical monsters, the kind that ate everything in sight. Work their way through any partition and even into the operating system. The supercomputer would not only break down, it would have to be rebuilt again from scratch. Not physically, of course, but at least to the extent that someone from the company that built it would have to come out and reboot it from the original specs. Could take days, even weeks. Give me time to search for better ways to escape. Or get more bored. The drawbacks were that they could have back up everything to a separate computer. My programs were so small now they could work on a cell phone. But had they backed up? Writing the code for my eleven-step creatures would keep me active. Have a goal. Why not?

I had a goal. I got up out of bed and charged into the lab and found my station. Cassie remained busy at hers, looking pensive and running out of ideas. She’d never find a way, I thought. Even with her advantage of knowing how the virus worked in the first place.

Without much preparation, I sat down and dug myself into creating the code to produce a new set of creatures able to go faster than speeding bullets and to leap tall buildings. On a mission now. That was my meth. A lot better than waiting in my apartment for no dinner.

As I worked, it occurred to me again that I hadn’t actually created these little life forms, but discovered them. Hidden right in front of our eyes. For centuries. And that brought back the argument that we hadn’t created mathematics but discovered it. The age’s old dichotomy between mathematicians and empiricists. Mathematics had always been here and always will be. Perceptions of the real world passed by and existed only ephemerally. As opposed to what we see is real and one of the better ways to understand that reality is by using a human-created construct called mathematics. Fun stuff, I always thought. Finding myself often shifting from one point of view to another.

Eventually I got tired and decided to all it a day. I looked over at Cassie number two, as I’d somehow begun to think of her, lost in her work. Obsessed with finding the solution to the problem given her. Had she found a way to detect my little creature parts? If so, was she about to find a way to make them impotent? And why did I continue to think of terms like this whenever I thought of her? Was I just a continuously horny guy, able to stem the tide of trying to make every girl I met by sheer willpower?

I didn't disturb her. For lots of reasons. And went back to my apartment. And closed the door. I would have locked it if I could have.

As I ate I looked out from the kitchen to where I was sure it had come from. The invisible trap door in the middle of my main room carpet. If for no other reason than curiosity I wanted to know what lay beneath me. What possibilities it held. I’d given up the notion that it would provide a good route to escape. In fact, at this point, I’d pretty much given up the idea of escape. For me, it was good just to have something to do, and hope that I could make my captors as bored as I’d been while they waited for their precious supercomputer to work again.

Then another thought struck me. I could yell “fire” down the crack in the floor and hope that somebody down there might hear me. Then I could hit them on their way up and the trap door would be open for the taking. I would at least get a good look at my cook. Unconscious yes, but at least be able to personally thank him or her for their high level of professionalism. And maybe get a look down below. See if the room was lit like my own. A thought not entirely unreasonable.

I could also hold the cook hostage. If everyone else in the building had been fed as well as I had, it might be possible to convince them that he or she was more valuable at this point than me. Maybe they would then let me go. And then I could turn myself in to the nearest asylum. Will Francis, driven nuts by alarm bells, boredom, meth addicts, and brightly lit walls and ceilings that would turn themselves off no matter what time of day.

I finished my dinner and decided as I did that the first part of my plan had some merit. While I doubted that anyone would hear me through the small crack between the door and the floor, it seemed a risk worth taking. I doubted Cassie number two would hear me out in the lab, so transfixed was she on her job at the moment.

So I made my way to the floor at the bottom of my bed and, without hesitation, for I dared not think about it too much or back out, yelled “Fire” as loudly as I could with my mouth held as close to the carpet as possible without garbling my word.

I waited for a second and then yelled again. Same word, but even louder this time.

Then I pulled myself back, hoping the trap door would open and that it wouldn’t knock me unconscious when it did.

It didn’t knock me unconscious. Because it didn’t open. No one had heard me. Or else the room below was empty.

So, I leaned down once again and nearly yelled “Kill the lion!” This is one translation of Bokator, rumored to have come from ancient times when a village in Cambodia was threatened by an actual lion and a practitioner of martial arts killed it with a blow to its groin. I could relate.

The word ‘lion,’ apparently resonated with someone down below. They’d heard that if nothing else. I leaned back just in time as the door swung wildly open and a small man no bigger than a dwarf jumped from the top of the ladder below in one swift motion. He glanced at me, as if I might be the lion. Quickly satisfied I wasn’t, he ran from my apartment, out through the lab, and I could hear the door slam behind him.

Why in God’s name he’d decided to run up the ladder towards the lion I had no idea. Obviously I hadn’t seen it down where he’d been. But he had run, or rather climbed, my way and now I had complete access to the room below. Of course, I knew my time was limited since the room was clearly bugged just as much as mine was. But I wasn’t going to let the moment pass idly by.

I climbed down the ladder into a room roughly the size of the one I’d just left. The similarities stopped there. This was a kitchen filled with stoves, ovens, counter space, sinks, and numerous clean and dirty silverware and dishes. An amazing assortment of cooking paraphernalia. The actual kitchen, the room directly below my kitchen, was a closet filled with cans and boxes of food of various kinds. One shelf consisted of nothing but spices. Another full of loaves of bread. To the closet’s left was a grand two-door refrigerator-freezer combination. This was a cook’s delight. And not a lion in sight.

To my immediately left stood my goal. A single door closed but not locked. I went there, opened it, and walked out into the hall. No one tried to stop me. A trap? Could it be this easy? Just find the trap door, scare the cook, and on to freedom?

20.
I waited for a second. Just to make sure that I wasn’t headed into a trap. But the hallway remained empty and the alarm quiet. I turned right toward the elevators. Something just didn’t seem right. Too easy. Far too easy.

I stopped outside the elevators. Both were waiting on my floor. What were the chances? Was this the setup? I’d done my job and now I’d be mowed down on the front lawn. They’d tell the police that I’d stolen something they’d plant on me and that they were protecting their business.

Without really thinking about it, I pushed the up button rather than the down one. It made a certain kid of sense to me. Let me get the lay of the land from the rooftop before heading down to apparent freedom. The door opened immediately. I stepped inside and pushed the ‘R’ button which I assumed meant ‘roof.’ And off I went. In the wrong direction. Maybe there was an outside fire escape I could take down.

Of course, I didn’t know whether it was day or night. Maybe it was daylight and their marksman could just pick me off at will when I peered over the edge to take stock of the situation.

Still no alarm. And the elevator had plenty of juice. As if no one had noticed my absence. Ho was this possible?

The building had thirty-one floors I noticed, with the ‘R’ floor atop the thirty-one buttons. Below that a ‘B’ stood no doubt for basement.

Interesting, I thought. Thirty-one being the inverse of thirteen. And then the doors opened and I stepped out onto the roof with the entire skyline of the city spread out before me. An extraordinary sight. The sky was clear and no one was there to greet me.

Cold, I thought, and almost immediately began to shiver. Had to figure a way around that sooner than later. To my left stood a door with a lighted window in it. The stairwell. Another way down. I tried the door. Open. I then slid inside as quietly as possible and there was a coat rack with a large overcoat built for the North Pole. Night watchman’s probably. I took it, wrapped it around me, and head out the door again. A lot better. I’d return it later. He’d probably have to go through every floor over the night and wouldn’t be back for hours.

Next I slowly made my way over to the waist-high wall that made a wall around the roof. Once there, I chanced a quick look over the side down those thirty-one floors to see if anyone blew my head off. No one did. So far so good. I waited a couple of breaths, and then tried it again. This time longer.

And then I saw it. Or rather them. No mistaking it even though they looked like ants from this height. Several men carrying what looked like assault rifles prowling around the perimeter of the building. Waiting for someone. Me. To do what to me? I wasn’t sure, but it probably wouldn’t be nice.

I watched for a minute and then took turns on each side of the roof. Same result. At least twenty soldiers doing their duty in protecting the Christopher Masters building from enemies without and escapees from within. Free and trapped at the same time.

I looked for a fire escape. Mandatory I’d been given to believe on all new buildings everywhere. This one had somehow escaped the law. No way down but using the elevator or stairs on the inside. What about fires? I asked no one in particular. The people on the upper floor would be toast before anyone could get them help. Maybe the rooms with windows were equipped with some kind of automatic ladders and connected once pushed out the window.

So, I sat down and enjoyed the view. They’d finally figure out where I was and come get me. But what then. Forget it. I’d been outside less than a day since I’d arrived at this god-forsaken place. I needed the fresh air. And the feeling, no matter how temporary, of being free again. Of not being sealed in a couple of rooms with the walls and ceiling providing an even constant lighting of vanilla white light.

I thought back to my nights as a youngster and my fascination with astronomy. It was probably January by now. Meaning the Pleiades would culminate right about one in the morning. And that’s where they were now. Straight above my head. The seven sisters. I could almost remember their names. One was Electra. I remember that. The rest had gotten lost with my turn toward computers.

One thing I knew. Whatever was culminating here about the city was also culminating above North Dakota. Was Cassie number one still awake? Thinking about me? What was Patton doing? And Jackson for that matter? Were any of them awake and musing about my whereabouts? Even at this hour. Of course, it would only be eleven there. Mountain Standard time.

A breeze pushed at me from what I gauged was the north. Not freezing exactly, but cold enough to make me wrap the night watchman’s coat tighter around me.

To my left, and slightly off center, the tower with the blinking light stood several hundred feet above me as well. Most likely in the constellation of Auriga. What did that mean? Not that the radio tower stood next to it, but the constellation name itself. Again. Couldn’t remember. Too damn long ago.

Looking out over the city, I recognized the Empire State Building, but precious little else. Living in North Dakota did not make one particularly worldly. I’d visited the city a few times. Mostly for conventions and conferences. Too busy then to do much sight seeing. Those days seemed so long ago just now.

I wandered around a bit to keep warm. Looked over the walls a few times to make sure that the militia was still in place. They were. And moving around too. No one standing still. Like bugs in a jar of my biology teacher in high school. Moving aimless around trying to figure out an escape but getting nowhere. Just like me.

I spent another half hour or so musing about this and that. Soon, however, I found myself just as bored out here as I’d been inside. Sure, a few more things to look at, but that was about it.

Finally I just gave it the boot. Took the watchman’s coat back into the stairwell and replaced it on its rack and took the stairs back down to the thirteenth floor. It took a lot longer than my elevator ride up had, but I got there. And the exercise felt good.