Stav folded his hands on the desk, with one last question. “So Jackson, you guys had no idea who hired you or why?”
Jackson thought this was already wrapped up, but it was a question designed to test if his story was straight. “Yeah, that’s about the same thing I’ve been saying all along. Anonymous transaction on the undernet bounty hunter board. We got half the crypto up front and were supposed to get half later, after calling in our success. The job needed proof of completion. Something intimate from one of the targets. Some hair, a piece of clothing, a severed toe, whatever.” “And where was this proof supposed to be delivered?”, Res asked. “Dead drop. Some GPS coordinates in a fancy part of town.”, Jackson replied.
“Well, let’s keep this worm on the hook. You’re going to deliver proof after a short call to the client explaining why you’re late. We don’t even need to follow anyone or wait near the location to find out who picks it up. Any slick employer won’t go there directly anyway. They’ll send a courier”, Res said. She turned around, walked into the bathroom, and returned with her bra and a clipping of her hair in one hand. “It’ll grow back,” she murmured, and handed the items to Stav. On her bra, there was a simple identification mark. Her initials, embroidered on the clasp at the front.
Stav began cutting Jackson loose from his chair and instructed him to go down the hall to clean up and change into some fresh clothes. There were all kinds and sizes of clean green and white shirts to change into. Jackson was wobbly on his feet from all the adrenalin and it took him a moment to stand up. Stav told Sharp to keep an eye on him and help him take the stairway up and out of the complex. Before they left, Stav had some parting words for Jackson. “This is goodbye. You won’t remember any of the details of what went on here tonight. You’ll never come within a mile of this place. Our names are all fiction. The only reality you’re allowed is that soon-to-be scar on your shoulder. You were fair with us, and this is us being fair with you. Be a little more cautious of the jobs you accept in the future.” Sharp waited for any indication from Stav that gave him carte blanche on how to exit Jackson, but none was given. They were really letting him walk.
After a few hours of rest, Sheepdog and Res both exited 242 and headed back to the office, stopping by the company gym on the lower level to clean up a little first. It was the safest place to be, considering the circumstances. Stav buzzed their comms with a simple message on a private channel.
“Not a word until we splice the courier footage back to the source.”
Stav was satisfied with the post-mortem investigation so far, and he left Dec, Res and Sheepdog alone to get some rest. He wasn’t finished yet, there was one major thread that still needed to be tied off. It was Jackson’s turn. Regardless of how late it had become, Jackson wouldn’t get to rest until this final interview. “Sharp, bring in our patient now,” Stavros boomed, and Stav rolled Jackson into the room affixed to an office chair, parking him directly in front of Stav’s desk. Jackson was coming around again after passing out earlier, with the assistance of some smelling salts under his nose. He looked tired and haggard, sweat-soaked from the night’s consequences, with a mostly-clean gauze padding taped over his artskin-enhanced shoulder wound. “Cigarette?”, Stav offered, doing his best good cop impersonation. Jackson nodded yes, and Stav placed a cigarette in his mouth for him, lighting it with a single strike of a Zippo lighter. He clicked it shut and placed it in his front shirt pocket. Jackson took a long draw off the cigarette and motioned for Stav to retrieve it since his hands were bound. Stav leaned back and let the uncomfortable silence do some of the work for him. He patiently waited for Jackson to say something to break the silence. “Are you guys gonna kill me or what? You’ve done a lot of work just to kill me, but let’s get on with it.”, Jackson cracked. Stav didn’t answer him directly; it wasn’t out of the question just yet, and Stav preferred not to lie. “We probably won’t kill you, but we need you to do a lot of talking. Singing for your supper, as they used to say. Afterwards? We’ll make a decision, and it will be fair. You’re driving; map out how you got here.”, Stav said.
Jackson glanced down, his heart pounding. He took a deep breath, feeling the weight of his situation pressing down on him. Every scenario played out in his mind like a grim chess game. If he gave Stav all the information, he’d become expendable—a target for elimination. But if he held back, Stav would sense his deceit, and the torture would be inevitable. Jackson wasn’t trained for this. He wasn’t a hardened operative; the fear gnawed at him, making his stomach churn. He knew that under pressure, he’d crack eventually.
Caught between a rock and a hard place, Jackson weighed his options with increasing desperation. His hands trembled slightly as he made his choice, throwing the dice and hoping against hope that luck might favor him this time.
“Like I said earlier, this was a contract job. My team basically won a bid on the undernet. An anonymous, encrypted request hit the wire with the target descriptions and an address. There were no treatment instructions other than ‘the subjects should be taken alive and interrogated. No authorization of deadly force’. Once we accepted the contract, we got paid half, suited up, and headed to the location.” Jackson paused and wondered if he left anything out. Stav leaned forward on his elbows, narrowing his eyes as he listened, trying to work out how much of the story was true. “Sure is coincidental,” Stav said, “how an AI just happened to notice all this activity after the plan was in motion.” “I don’t know much about all that fancy future shit,” Jackson shot back, “I figured they had enough digital brainpower to watch anyone anywhere. Which makes me wonder why it kicked in a little late. Was it watching us, or them?”
The question was purely rhetorical. Jackson was buying time. Fifteen wasn’t aware of this team until it noticed the men approaching from outside Sheep’s building. Three armed men disguised as some kind of SWAT team would raise suspicion to anyone on the building’s camera feeds. Jackson was starting to feel like this whole thing was a huge mistake, but bounty hunters weren’t picky. No doubt some other team would have grabbed the targets alive and escaped before Dec had a chance to stop them. This was all Gruff’s fault, and he resented him for it. The pizza man? What a joke; but Gruff fell for that gambit despite calling bluffs all night up until that point. No Gruff, no Dec, no major shoulder injury trying to heal.
Jackson refocused. He already made the decision to stop protecting his crew. They were dead anyway, and he didn’t care to join them. “What else do you wanna know?”, he asked Stav.
Stav started again, not giving Jackson long to think. Memories were faster than lies. “Tell me more about this undernet. An encrypted channel for bounty hunters maybe? How does it work?”
Jackson spilled the beans, describing the structure of the undernet and what bounty hunters and teams needed to do to register, to find jobs. It was like other social media with rankings and bidding. Seemed like a small, easy job, and it would have been if those two weren’t so well protected. Not only did the targets see it coming, but their ex-military friend and his exotic weapons just happened to arrive on time. Even 75% of the way through the job, Jackson and his crew were convinced that they’d be walking out of there unscathed with the targets. Now two were dead; Jackson was seriously injured and he was deep underground in some hidden bunker, completely at the mercy of Stav’s crew. Public opinion had to be against him, but he couldn’t risk sounding too soft and apologetic.
“Like I said, this was just business. No intent on harming the targets; we wanted to get paid the full amount. Things just went upside down. People get snatched every day in this city, interrogated, and set loose miles from home. This wasn’t our first rodeo, but we weren’t stupid…our rifles carried dummy rounds, good for noise and a scare tactic.”, Jackson stammered.
Stav leaned back and slowly nodded. This was the truth; he was satisfied with the story he was hearing. There was an unspoken understanding here. Jackson’s only chance at leaving here in one piece was the truth, and he knew it by now. If they just wanted Jackson dead it would have happened back at the apartment, a mess for Mr. Clean to deal with. Down here, it would be a bigger mess to handle at the expense of giving up 242’s location. It was highly restricted info to even know about this place, let alone access it. Stav yelled at the door. “Res, come in here. Someone wants to talk to you.” Momentarily, the door opened, and Res stood in the doorway holding an ice pack to her cheek. “Well, let’s hear it,” Res said impatiently, “ain’t got all night.” Jackson knew this was the final test. “Listen, we had a job to do, and you shooting me wasn’t part of the job description. I was angry, and it hurt. I’m sorry if I…overreacted. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, after all.” Res contemplated this half-assed apology for a minute before admitting, “to be honest, I hadn’t planned on shooting anyone either. You spooked me and my training kicked in. I thought it was a life-or-death situation.” Jackson breathed a sigh of relief, like two boxers touching gloves after the fight. “I guess you’ve suffered enough,” she added, “so let’s call it even. We’ll heal.” They would have shaken on it if Jackson wasn’t tied up. Jackson managed a crooked grin and said, “look at us, a couple of victims of circumstance.” “Nah, victim of you smashing me in the face with a rifle butt. You’re lucky you didn’t break my nose. Wouldn’t be as pretty for Dec,” she said as she glanced over her shoulder towards him. Dec was busy tearing into Res’ cooking and didn’t look up.
Yes, Frank approves this motto, since I underdelivered. There is new stuff, unpublished, and I did migrate hosting to another service. Everything is rock solid behind the scenes, and to prove it, I’ll make another new post from our story TODAY.
Just a quick update for my fan, or fans. Splicerz is back from holiday and moving hosting providers. I expect this to be invisible to visitors and the site silently moves providers in the background but there could be interruptions, temporarily.
In the meantime, the story continues. I have a lot planned for our characters through this year, and maybe even an ending!
Sheep didn’t care as he picked out a spot on the couch and curled up to catch a little shut-eye, but he was still too amped up from this evening’s events to really sleep. Dec disappeared briefly into another room and came back equipped with a compact SMG, slung over one shoulder, snugged between his arm and his ribs. “Feels good to have some teeth,” he said, as he worked the action on the gun and checked the magazine for ammo, before shoving it back into the receiver. Sheep heard the mechanical sounds and looked towards Dec briefly, and chimed in. “If you want to test it, we got a test dummy right here.”, he said, motioning towards Jackson. Res chuckled. “I don’t know how you do it,” Dec said, “after all you’ve been through tonight, and you can still laugh.” Res replied, “I guess I’m not your normal damsel in distress, huh Jackson?”, as she looked towards the hostage. Jackson grunted. There wasn’t much more he could say with duct tape wrapped around his face.
Dec was feeling a little sorry for Jackson at this point, being banged up, gagged, and hooded; he probably wasn’t prepared for this chain of events. He went to the kitchen to get a couple glasses of water, and as he was returning, he heard the outside door open with a rusty groan. His team lead had arrived, a little early. “Dec, you in here?”, the lead called out before entering. Dec shouted, “yep, in the living room”. “I brought a plus one,” the lead said, “picked him up from a local watering hole. He’s drunk but he’s steady.” The lead came in and was followed shortly by Sharp, closing the door behind them. “I don’t know how I got roped into this shit,” Sharp said, “guess I’m just lucky.”. It was Dec’s turn to laugh. He knew Sharp hated cleanup and debrief phases of missions. He was just there for the violence, the personal kind, with short, sharp knives. He earned his nickname.
“Everyone ready to move?”, the lead asked, and surveyed the room. Everyone that could was nodding yes, and Res tapped Sheep on the legs a few times to suggest it was time to stand up. “Here we go,” the lead said, after removing a painting from the wall and pressing a hidden switch. The entire living room shook briefly, then began descending into a hidden elevator shaft under the floor. There were lights embedded in the concrete box walls they were passing on the way down. It looked like a traffic tunnel carved into the side of a mountain, only vertical. A few seconds later, looking up, they saw a floor slide into place way up above, closing off the tunnel, then another one directly overhead, sealing them in. “What is this place?”, Res wondered aloud. The team lead answered her with, “only the finest cold-war waterfront bomb shelter money could buy. We can actually walk under the harbor in this place. They could burn the place upstairs down to the nails and never imagine that anyone is down here. We know; they did it before, during the war.” Sharp chimed in next. “Those commie bastards didn’t even bother breaking the foundation. They just torched anything facing the harbor. Good old 242, she runs silent and deep. We have an entire west wing that goes even deeper, loaded with supplies.” The team lead elbowed Sharp in the ribs and pointed at Jackson, as if to say, shut the hell up, this guy doesn’t need to know all this. Sharp just shrugged; not his fault they pulled him out of the bar to deal with Dec’s mess. He was drunk and didn’t give a shit, but he knew his team lead was the boss here.
“Stavros, you have some medical training. Can you check out Res and our new pal Jackson over there?”, Dec asked the team lead. Stavros nodded yes and went into another room to retrieve a basic medical kit. He returned and started with Res, shining a light in her eyes to check for signs of a concussion. Someone butt stroked her pretty good in the middle of her face. He gently touched the bridge of her nose, feeling the joint where the nose cartilage meets the skull. “Not broken, you’re pretty tough for a lady,” Stavros said quietly as he continued examining her. “Let me help you with this, I’ll be gentle,” he said, as he slowly pulled the bloody tampon out of her nose by the string. He noticed it wasn’t absolutely soaked, suggesting that the bleeding had stopped already. “Any dizziness, nausea, blurry vision?”, he asked. Res replied, “Nope. Minus the nosebleed and my cheek, I feel alright.” “Good, good. Well, if you start feeling any symptoms like that, just speak up. I’ll see what we can do.” Res nodded and reached for a glass of water, not realizing how thirsty she was at first.
Stavros moved over to Jackson and he felt everyone staring at him as he removed the hood and started examining him. “If I remove this tape, you promise to get along with your new friends?”, he asked, “no spitting or screaming?”. Jackson squinted and nodded yes. He really was lucky to be alive, and the last thing he wanted to do now is piss these people off. From what he heard, he assumed Sharp was there to interrogate him, and to dispose of him, if necessary. Glancing past Stavros, there was only one other person that could have been Sharp, and he looked like a guy that would be named Sharp. Stocky, muscular, bald-headed, Hispanic, and permanently scowling. He looked like he hated anyone he made eye contact with, and was working out just exactly why he hated Jackson.
Stavros ripped the duct tape off like a Band-Aid, and Jackson choked back a grunt. “Looks like you caught some shrapnel in the right shoulder. Dec did a decent job of cleaning you up, but I think I can help a little.”, Stav said, as he cut away part of Jackson’s shirt to reveal the bloody bandage covering the wound. He peeled the bandage back and looked at the wound with the flashlight. “Twist around a little, let me see the other side,” he said, looking for the exit wound. There wasn’t one. The ‘shrapnel’ came in the front and never escaped, still stuck in the shoulder bone and tissue. “Dec, you need some range time. This turd is fragged; his shoulder must look like dog food on an MRI.”, Stavros joked. “Yeah, I guess I need more range time with my government-issued railgun arm. They failed to include that little detail in the instruction manual. The first shot was on target though. He’s alive because I missed.” Dec replied grimly.
“What did you shoot him with, some kind of flechette gun? This is like a tiny shotgun wound.”, Stav asked. Dec said, “hard to believe, but just a few rare earth magnets. Get that shoulder close enough to some steel and they’ll probably come right out, but it won’t be pleasant.” Stav turned and stared at Dec to see if he was joking, but Dec was just wearing a crooked grin. Some new tech he’d never heard of, at least. “Your call Jackson. Do you want that shit extracted or is it fine where it is?”, Stav asked. Jackson pondered the question for a few seconds. It hurt pretty bad, but it could hurt worse. Powerful magnets don’t have a good track record inside the human body. “If you have any strong liquor on hand, I’d prefer some wild west surgery. Never thought I’d ever get shot with magnets…”, Jackson replied, grimacing as Stav prodded at the back of his shoulder, checking for lumps to see how deep the projectiles were embedded. “Sharp, get a bottle of something strong out of the kitchen. Not sure where, but we’re fully stocked here.”, Stav said. Sharp hesitated for a second. He didn’t like the look of Jackson at all, and he suspected he got shot for a reason. Eventually, he relented, and went searching the kitchen for any kind of liquor. He returned with a quart of Jim Beam, and announced, “medicinal purposes only. Disinfects wounds and numbs what is gonna be a pretty gnarly procedure.” Sharp took the first swig, for good luck, and handed the bottle to Jackson.
Beat powered up the monocular and panned his view around the room, testing it. He could see everything as clear as day in the dimly lit room, and the fireplace practically washed out the image before the circuits could compensate by dimming it. Another press of a button on the device and it switched to heat vision, with Jakob appearing in shades of yellow, red, and purple, indicating hotter parts of his face and body. Even the clear glass on the table was glowing a warm orange, with a purple, round ice cube melting in the whiskey.
The odd fabric appeared almost black, reflecting little, if any, heat. “I see you’ve found the thermal setting. I can see the colors reflecting in your glasses. Good. Leave that set, and watch the fabric.” Jakob attached two whisker-thin wires to the fabric, side by side, and placed his left hand under the fabric. He pressed a switch on the control blob and this time, not only did the surface shimmer and vanish, instantly this time, but so did his hand. “Is your left hand still under that?”, Beat asked. “Why of course. This is no common magic show.”, replied Jakob. Beat really couldn’t get his head around this one. He changed modes on the monocular, yet the fabric and Jakob’s hand were not visible, but they weren’t black either. They were the same color temperature as the table top. This was one step beyond optical camouflage. It was thermoptic camouflage. Optically invisible, and invisible on any light spectrum, including infrared. Beat was considering the nature of what he was witnessing. “Jakob, can you walk over and stand in front of the fireplace, and take the fabric with you?”, Beat asked. Jakob grinned, knowing that Beat was trying to test his invention. “Of course,” Jakob said, after getting up with a grunt and standing before the fireplace, as Beat moved to the couch, “how shall I hold it?”. “Place it over your face.”, replied Beat.
Jakob did as Beat asked, draping the fabric over his head, covering his face in the process. Again, he hit the button on the controller, and Jakob’s head disappeared, with flames from the fireplace where his head should be. Beat was only picking up bright yellows and whites from the flames, while looking right at Jakob’s head. It was amazing. He slowly sat the monocular on the table, never breaking eye contact with Jakob, in case the illusion would suddenly fall apart if he looked away. “Truly incredible,” Beat said, “but what do things look like from your side of the veil?”. Jakob replied, “what veil? I can see you clearly, well, as clearly as I can usually. “ “How many fingers am I holding up,” Beat asked. Jakob replied immediately, “four”.
Beat was well and truly awestruck. This seemed like alien technology, only the kind that humanity doesn’t ever need to know about. The odds of it being abused are guaranteed. This should not exist. “What was that, Beat?”, Jakob asked, powering off the device and removing the fabric from his head. “Did you say this shouldn’t exist?”
“Was I thinking out loud? Forgive me. I just don’t know what to think of this. The implications. My mind can’t manage all the possibilities. First, the optical camouflage, and now this seems light years beyond even that. It really is unbelievable; I have no other way to describe it.” Beat said, awestruck. “I don’t even know if I want to start asking how it works. I feel like I have seen a devil’s plaything.”
Jakob came back to the couch and sat next to Beat, as he rolled up the fabric and placed it back in his bag, along with the controller. “Indeed,” Jakob said, “it is a double-edged sword. To me, it was curiosity at the highest imaginable level. I never asked if I should have created this. I asked how I could. The pursuit of that answer absolutely consumed me. During early development, nothing worked more than once. This would die, or that would burn up, or the fabric had imperfections. One night, I had a dream, and the answer came to me in that dream, although… the dream was more of a nightmare. I was being chased, by something, and it got close enough that I could feel the hot breath on my neck before I woke up, drenched in sweat. Seconds before waking up, in my dream, I stopped and turned, and the thing chasing me passed through me, like a spirit. The whole ordeal made me rethink the solution.” Jakob gently coughed, and took the last big sip of his whiskey. He then continued.
“Spirit. The idea stuck like glue. What do we know of spirits? They were once in this world, exited, and returned in some form. The problem was dimensional. If they presumably exist in a parallel dimension, crossing over into ours, can we also cross into theirs, however briefly? Ultimately, the answer became yes, and how the tech really works. My head didn’t vanish beneath the fabric. My head…was shifting rapidly between dimensions. That’s why there was no heat signature.”
Again, Beat was having a hard time taking it all in. Now Jakob was telling him about nightmares, spirits, and other dimensions? The proof was all there. Even if Jakob was making up stories about how the tech worked, there was no denying that it absolutely did work, even when faced with mild scrutiny. No smoke and mirrors. The real deal. Even if Jakob had gamed the test by handing Beat a customized monocular, Beat’s own eyes didn’t lie, and he didn’t think such a demonstration, just for him, would have been a prank. It was, for all intents and purposes, black magic, and it gave him the creeps even knowing it existed.
“Jakob, do you believe in possession,” Beat asked, “because this all sounds like madness, but the proof is indisputable. You did this all, alone?”. Jakob’s tone darkened somewhat. “What are you implying, Beat, that a demon flew into my ear one day and told me the answers? That I made a devil’s bargain to realize my dreams? Ridiculous.”, he replied.
Beat said, slowly, “but is it so ridiculous? We have all heard about divine intervention, but what about demonic intervention? You were at a turning point during development, then after this nightmare of yours, it all seemed to work out. You suddenly had inspiration, a new approach, and like magic, you did it.”. “I’m not sure I like your tone, Beat. Is it really so ominous, to create something like this?”, Jakob asked. “In the hands of the right people, it could save countless lives. It could bring joy and magic back to this world. I had the best intentions…yet…I was not blind to what the world would do with this. Why do you think I kept it a secret for so long?”
Beat lit another match for his cigar, and puffed it back to life, as Jakob sat quietly and stared into the fireplace. He was deep in thought. Yes, it was dangerous, but it could be incredibly useful, like any other tool. It was also magnitudes more dangerous if misused. It must remain secret, if it must exist. Not even Splicer could know. Beat looked up from his cigar, directly at Jakob and said, “I want in.” Jakob raised his eyebrows, lowered them, grinned, and nodded his head yes.
Edward woke up shortly after his alarm. His head felt a little heavier than normal, which he expected by this point. At least he could feel, and he felt a tiny kindling of rage start a campfire about this time each morning. It was motivating, and he needed it to see this thing through.
The thing. It was all that mattered anymore. He made contact with an old Golden Gaia dropout and met for lunch. Over lunch, he and Jose discussed that day’s events, as best they could recall. Everyone remembered the lights going out, the emergency red lights going on, and the carnage that followed. Jose was lucky that day. Not only was he unarmed, he was in charge of the actors and they agreed that Jose wouldn’t be given a gun; he might scare them, or worse. It was a GG secret that nobody had ammunition. It forced the actors into the illusion of a terror cell, which they maintained by being convinced that they were armed with live guns.
“What about the footage?”, Edward asked. “Footage. See, that’s weird. I know I was recording. I even did a test clip to check all the settings, and played it back to be sure. But later, the clip was corrupted, along with the clip for the broadcast. My comms device never plays games like that.”, Jose replied. “Did you ever take it to a recovery shop, to see if they could do anything to restore the clips?”, Edward queried. “Nah. Kept the corrupted files just in case it was a temporary condition, but I’ve never been able to watch them.”, Jose said. “Isn’t it kinda coincidental that everyone else, including me, ended up with corrupt data from that event?”, Edward wondered aloud. “Now that you mention it,” Jose began, “yeah, it’s a little too coincidental. We all got wiped. But by what, or why? Those little shadow things running around removing limbs? They came out of nowhere and disappeared into nowhere, but they had to be there in the hotel to begin with. I’ll bet they never left. If we could get ahold of one…”.
That was the first step, right there. Revisit the hotel and look for any indications of the Shadows from that day. It had been years, and there’s a good chance they’re long gone, but if they were…installed…then they may still be there, or newer units in their places. Edward would have to discreetly snoop around the nooks and crannies of the hotel and he’d need to be ignorable or get permission first. That would be the easy part. Edward and Jose shook hands and parted ways, and Edward jumped a Jerry Cab to the hotel. It was still in operation and fairly central to the city, so he didn’t need to give directions to the Jerry Cab, which was always a pain in the neck. They were remotely piloted by people in India, and he could never decipher their accents, let alone attempt a conversation with them. If he couldn’t get the Jerry to take him somewhere in 2 words or less, he just got out and walked.
The fabric slowly began to fade away, as the surface briefly reflected the flaming fireplace. It was transforming and shifting light from any angle, shimmering and vanishing. Seconds felt like minutes, and Beat couldn’t believe what he was witnessing. This was actual, real, optical camouflage fabric, which could have been woven into anything. The longer he stared the less he saw, to the point that he even forgot Jakob’s whiskey glass hidden beneath the fabric. It was utterly and truly invisible by this point, obscuring anything beneath it and in direct contact with it. All he saw was the top of the table and nothing more.
“Blyat,” Beat uttered. He couldn’t find the words to express his disbelief. Jakob had actually done it, and he had kept it all to himself. Not a single other person on earth knew about this. They couldn’t. Beat gazed upon true danger, and yet, there was nothing to see.
Jakob was grinning ear to ear. He knew the magnitude of what Beat was witnessing. He only wished he could witness his success all over again, without any of the pressure. “And now, for my next trick,” Jakob whispered, as he removed the silken connectors from the fabric, “behold.” He placed one strand on his left sleeve, and another on the right. From the neck down, Jakob disappeared. Beat instinctively lunged for Jakob, trying to catch his floating head, knocking over his own bourbon glass in the process. As the glass rolled behind him across the floor, Beat stopped short of actually grabbing Jakob, as his rational mind caught up with reality. Jakob laughed to the point of a short coughing fit, and as the tears streamed down his cheeks, he belted out, “I got you, Beat! I got you good. You should have seen yourself. The only thing wrong here is the material, and maybe the battery life, but a change here and there…” The fabric across the table faded back into view and so did Jakob’s jacket shortly afterwards. Ta da, indeed. It was quite the magic trick.
Beat stammered, “how could you keep such a secret for so long, across 3 wives, surely someone would have mentioned it to someone else at some point in the past.” Jakob replied, “That was the easy part. What does it look like, powered off? Any old piece of fabric. I could have left this lying around the house for years and who would know different? I never made it a big deal, so it never became anything uncommon. It also happens to be fairly unbelievable, and I hadn’t really perfected it until after my 3rd wife passed. That left me with a lot of time, and a lot of privacy.” Beat nodded his head slowly, soaking in the clever genius before him. This still left him with a nagging sense of doubt. If this was the only man in the world that created this technology, and nobody was any wiser, was Jakob the invisible man? Was he meeting with the Bowler Man in the footage? Something felt off.
Jakob placed the fabric back in his briefcase, took another sip out of his glass, then retrieved another item from the bag. “This, I believe, is the pinnacle of my work,” Jakob said, as he unrolled another sheet of fabric. This fabric seemed different; it had a very geometric texture on the surface, like millions of triangles, edge to edge. “Relax, Beat, this one needs electricity, but not much. You’ve already made your blood sacrifice,” he teased, as he retrieved a different control blob from his bag. This one was greenish-white, similar in color to glow-in-the-dark plastic; long and cylindrical, with two obvious buttons on top. “Do you happen to own a monocular with night vision? Eh, never mind, I brought mine. Here, take it,” Jakob said, as he handed the device to Beat.
Jakob replied, “To put it simply, yes. On a small scale, it could have been a very useful technology. Everything from children’s toys, to magicians, even for aesthetic purposes like hiding an unsightly gate on the path leading up to a country estate. The applications were nearly limitless. Who doesn’t want something to disappear, at some point? Although, as my work progressed further from theory and closer to prototyping, I noticed a sea of benefactors forming on one side, and adversaries on another. The pressure was building. Warhawks were lining up, taking notes for soldier augmentations and vehicles. With them, came the defense contractors, tempting me with lucrative deals of fame and fortune. All of them, harpies, singing me onto the rocks.” Jakob took a deep breath and sighed before adding, “I am a simple man of simple tastes. I have dedicated my life to science and engineering, and it has treated me well. However, I could not bear the weight of completing my research on the subject. Our government couldn’t adequately protect me from an enemy, if one were to infiltrate my circles, so I tore it all down. That ended my career. As you know, the same men who came to me with dreams of treasure, instantly blacklisted me afterwards.” Jakob and Beat spent a few quiet seconds listening to the fireplace crackle, as Beat lit his cigar with a wooden match. “Forgive my rudeness, Jakob. I have not offered you a drink, as I sit here and enjoy this bourbon. Would you like something?”, Beat asked. Jakob, lost somewhere in the hypnotic flames flickering before him, took a moment to speak up. “I shouldn’t. But in these years, and in your company, I feel obligated. I’d like some whiskey, on the rocks. Just enough to wet my teeth. Funny how something as fundamental as spit in your own mouth recedes with age.”
Beat stood up and made his way over to a crystal decanter and some sparkling crystal glasses, finely cut with a row of diamonds around the circumference of the middle of the glass. He placed a large ball of ice directly in the glass and covered it with a few fingers of whiskey. “Not too much,” Jakob reminded him as he poured. Beat chuckled and walked back to Jakob, bending slightly at the waist to meet Jakob’s trembling hand with the drink. “Thank you,” Jakob said, as he carefully took a sip and paused to enjoy the vapors on his tongue. “This is a very good whiskey; my mouth is watering for the next drink. Extraordinary”, he said as he took another sip, a little longer this time, really savoring the flavor. Beat chuckled again, and chimed in. “I’m glad you appreciate it,” Beat said, before working on his bourbon glass a little himself. This amused Jakob, who was already beginning to relax. Beat didn’t have an angle here. He wasn’t trying to get the man drunk to pry his secrets out of him. It wasn’t that kind of friendship. There was a mutual respect between them. Slowly, deliberately, Jakob examined the glass as he turned it in his hand, held up to the fire light. He was considering something. “Beat, on a scale of one to ten, how easily can we discuss private things, here?”, Jakob asked. Beat knew what was coming next. The worst part about holding on to old secrets was the ceaseless desire to share them with someone you really knew and trusted. Beat had worked under Jakob before; he had never known Jakob as a young man, but as possibly the smartest man he had ever met regardless of age. He caught on to the suggestion. “Jakob, old friend, the devil couldn’t hear you in my home. I have taken so many precautions. This place is a ten out of ten, maybe an eleven. Considering the nature of my work, you can see why.”
This was enough for Jakob; he trusted Beat and if Beat said it was private, there was no doubt. “I would expect nothing less of an investigator. Perhaps now we can discuss the solution,” Jakob said as he laid his half-empty glass on a coaster before reaching down to his briefcase. He produced a rolled-up cylinder of fabric from the bag, along with a small handheld device that was black and shapeless. He unrolled the cylinder flat across the table, and extended two silky strands from the device, attaching a strand to each edge of the fabric. One on the far left corner, the other on the far right. Beat watched the process with breathless anticipation. Jakob spoke up. “The culmination of all my work, all worlds combined. But I need a power source to complete the magic trick. A drop of blood will do.” “A drop of blood?”, Beat asked incredulously. “Yes. I have a tool for such a task that retracts into the control lump. Lend me your thumb”, replied Jakob. He moved a hidden switch on the shapeless lump, revealing a sharp, short triangle, with a small ring around its base to collect the ‘energy’. Beat complied, pressing his thumb onto the sharp pyramid hard enough to break the skin, supplying a few drops before the mechanism snapped shut, so as not to leak any blood. “Good, that should do”, Jakob said, before flipping another hidden switch on the lump, revealing another mechanism. A singular, pitch black button. Featureless and unremarkable. As Jakob pressed the button, he let out a quiet ta-da, to match the magic unfolding.
Infinite Beat was back at his home office desk, rolling a fat Cuban cigar between his thumb and index finger, checking it for defects. He carefully considered the texture, the grain, and ran the length of it under his nose for a good whiff. Quality. Maybe even perfection. These days, they weren’t hard to come by; many things changed after the war. But this was a pre-war cigar, one he had stashed away for years. Beat had been saving it for a special occasion, and that occasion was today.
There was a gentle knock at his door. He was expecting company. Rising to cross the threshold, he sat a glass of bourbon next to the ashtray as he proceeded to the door. He paused momentarily as he looked up at the orthodox cross above the door frame. It’s time, he muttered under his breath, as he unlocked and opened the door. There, standing barely over 5 feet tall, was a frail-looking, bent man with coke bottle glasses, a pocket watch, a wide smile, and a beat-up leather briefcase in his left hand. He silently shuffled through the doorway and into Beat’s cottage. “Sit anywhere you’d like, old friend. I’ll follow you,” Beat said, as the old man picked out a comfortable-looking spot near the fireplace, which was already lit. Light from the flames danced across the wall as Beat cast a shadow, sitting between the fireplace and the octogenarian. “I’m glad you could make it. I don’t imagine you get out much these days,” began Beat, “it’s good to see you.” The man smiled, cleared his throat briefly, and spoke up. “It’s no trouble. They all thought I’d be dead by now, or died years ago, like a forgotten celebrity that goes into seclusion. But you know… somehow, I keep on going. Maybe through spite, maybe unfinished business. No man chooses to leave the stage before his scene ends, and my scene continues. Nobody, including myself, expected me to outlive 3 wives.”
Beat eyed the old man intently before taking another sip of the bourbon and setting it down quietly. “Listen to me, pontificating like any other old fool. You asked me to come discuss a problem, not wax poetic about one’s twilight years,” the old man said, before clearing his throat again. It was clear that he wasn’t long for this world, but some fire burned behind his eyes, borne from the spark of genius. Beat was face to face with the man that was believed to have cracked the code that unlocked biogenic power sources. He may also have found a way to integrate nanomachines with living tissue, feeding on fractions of energy from cellular mitochondria. All this invention, this discovery, and yet, he refused to use any of it himself.
Beat leaned back a little and crossed his legs as he began his unavoidably long question. “The problem. Yes. It is more of a working theory at this point, and my understanding is that, at one point in your life, you had worked with very similar concepts. However, rumor had it, you stopped short of the goal and never created the prototype. Nobody knew why, and you have always been avoidant on the topic, refusing to elaborate further after destroying your documentation on the subject. Volumes. You were the foremost expert on…” when Beat was suddenly interrupted by Jakob.
“Optical camouflage. Yes. I did study it, mostly on a blackboard. Lots of equations, scribblings trying to mimic the secrets of nature. But I did stop short. Not for the reasons most would expect”, Jakob replied before removing his glasses to clean the lenses with a carefully folded handkerchief from his jacket pocket. He continued. “You see, our history on this planet has been spent essentially reverse engineering what nature has already done well. Nuclear energy, not much different than our own sun. Centuries are filled with these things, millions of man-hours poured into some of them. Each time, man was convinced that there was a problem to solve, and the solutions were waiting to be discovered, created, implemented. War. Farming. Industry. Always a means to an end. Although, occasionally, man has been so eager to solve the problem, he didn’t stop to think if he should.” Beat had another sip of bourbon before his reply. “Da, the contradiction of science. Just because we can doesn’t mean we should. Countless examples, truly. Bioweapons, advanced warfare, terrifying weaponry that could poison humanity for millennia. Tonight, we are discussing evasion. What man hid in the shadows that could roam freely in the light? It wouldn’t be necessary. To what ends, for what purpose…in those answers, the concerns lie. Was this an issue during your research, Jakob?”
