The Liberation Paradox

Paranoia

Marcio

05:27

The thing about working for a psychotic gangster is that he's unfailingly paranoid. Mr. Daniau had every inch of the Paradox Hotel's top four floors under constant video surveillance. He had a secret network of hidden cameras everywhere, even in bathrooms and the private apartments of his own lieutenants. Everywhere, as far as Marcio could tell, except the penthouse apartment of Mr. Daniau himself, the apartment of his kept girlfriend, and the area behind his own office desk. Mr. Daniau would have his privacy, even if no one else would.

All of this surveillance could have been a hazard for Marcio, but Marcio had turned it to his advantage on day one. Before he'd even begun harvesting the gangster's private accounting data, Marcio had thoroughly familiarized himself with as much of the organization's security protocols as he could. The expansive hidden camera network was secured so that only Mr. Daniau himself had access or even seemed to know it existed. For Marcio, it had been child's play to find it and hack into Mr. Daniau's creeper cam network. Ever since he'd first arrived on Distortion three months ago, Marcio had had all the surveillance access that Mr. Daniau himself had.

After Sky had left the server room to get some sleep, Marcio spent some time watching the decryptors. Oddly, they seemed to run even more slowly since Sky left, almost as if something Marcio did was slowing them down. He wished he could stop them altogether. Marcio and the other two techs worked quietly under Vice's disinterested gaze. Marcio's terminal displays were turned strategically so that no one could see them, particularly Vice, and most particularly the camera Marcio knew to be hidden in the corner. Nevertheless, Marcio couldn't help but be a little nervous accessing Mr. Daniau's secret camera network with the big enforcer in the room. If Marcio were caught accessing a creeper cam network that shouldn't even exist, it would be over for him. The risk couldn't be helped, however. He needed to know what his enemies were up to.

He hadn't expected to find Daniau very easily, as the boss usually lurked in those private areas of his not covered by the camera network's watchful gaze. Marcio expected that Daniau would likely be going to bed, having been up all night, but he was surprised to find Daniau almost immediately. Since he had left the server room, the boss had gotten dressed in a smart suit and was now walking across the rooftop landing platform where his plane was parked. Marcio didn't know anything about planes, but he could plainly tell that this one was a small, expensive, sporty, model. His sister, Lyssa, would know everything about the plane at a glance. She worked as an aviation mechanic and she would probably extol the virtues of the plane's engines or lambaste how hard it was to access the electrical system for even routine maintenance. Marcio watched as on his display the mobster climbed into the sleek plane's cockpit. He started the engines, lifted off vertically from the hotel's small landing platform, and then disappeared from the camera's view, off to points unknown to Marcio.

Marcio had expected Sky to be easier to track, but was disappointed. He accessed the cameras in Sky's hotel room, expecting to find his junior tech asleep. He saw nothing, neither in the bedroom nor in the bathroom. The bed in Sky's room looked undisturbed and his briefcase wasn't there. Next, Marcio checked the cameras in the small canteen up on the fifteenth floor. With the secure zone on lock down, there would be no access to the restaurants on the lower floors nor any room service delivery. The canteen was now the only place to find food in the secure zone. It stood to reason that Sky might have gone there for something to eat, but the camera network showed only a couple of Daniau's goons having their morning coffee and the woman behind the counter. Strange. Where could Sky have gone?

Then, a sinking feeling in his innards, Marcio had an idea he knew where to find Sky. He switched to a view of the hallway outside of his own room and saw nothing out of place. Next, he checked inside his own room and there he found Sky. Sky had hacked the lock to Marcio's room and was now digging through the files on his private data terminal. Though Marcio wasn't stupid enough to keep anything incriminating on his personal terminal, it still made his blood run cold to see Sky looking through it. There could be no doubt about it: Sky suspected him.

Marcio glanced nervously at Vice, but found the big oaf absorbed in a dirty paperback called Hot Studs of Prison Base 12. Marcio had to admit he was surprised; he'd never suspected that Vice could read. While the ogre was distracted by his book and the other two techs were distracted by their work, Marcio slowly slipped his hand up to the counter where the conman's phone still lay. Its cover had been removed, exposing its circuitry. Furtively, Marcio disconnected the phone's circuit board from the wires linking it to the data terminal where Sky had scanned it earlier. He slipped all the phone's pieces into his pocket. Hopefully, with a little reassembly, it would come back to life.

He closed down the camera feeds on his server terminal and made sure that several innocent, but highly technical-looking windows were left up on the display. "I need to go to the bathroom," Marcio announced.

Vice just nodded in response without ever looking up from his book.

Once in the bathroom down the hall from the server room, Marcio checked both stalls to make sure that he was alone. He locked the door. He knew where the camera in this room was hidden, so he climbed up and disabled it. Daniau was likely still flying his plane, so probably no one would be watching right at this moment. He made a mental note to go into the server and delete the final few minutes of the camera's life which would show him climbing up to destroy it. Next, he reassembled the conman's phone and powered it on.

He was grateful to the pit of his soul when he saw that the phone still had signal. He called the local exchange operator and asked for a quantum-entangled connection to the Gonaways station exchange. He had never before appreciated how wonderful it was to be able to communicate in real time with somebody light-years away in a different part of the galaxy.

Perhaps half a minute passed as Marcio listened to some hold music that he actually found soothing for his tattered nerves. Then, the hold music ended abruptly. A familiar series of clicks signified that his connection to Gonaways was being made. A perky computer voice came on and said "Welcome to the Gonaways exchange, gateway to the Darklands! What number, please?"

Marcio recited the number of his handler, Beauregard Tyson, from memory. He had no idea if "Beau Tie" would be able to help him, but if anyone could, it would be Beau.

"Please wait while I connect your call! And thank you for using the Gonaways exchange!" the computerized operator said.

There was a click and then Beauregard "Beau Tie" Tyson's phone began to ring.