The Lonely Whelk Read online

  “Hello,” the hot dog man greeted him. “Beautiful day!”

  Maxwell smiled and nodded.

  “What can I get you?”

  “Two hot dogs, ketchup, relish, no mustard.”

  “Two hot dogs, coming right up!” The hot dog man began to prepare the lunch. “And how is Maddy today?”

  A giant grin split Maxwell’s face. He hated it when people ignored her. “She’s great, aren’t you, Maddy?” He looked at her, in her blue circle skirt, red belt, and red pillbox hat and veil, and wondered how anyone could ignore her. She was perfect.

  He paid for the two hot dogs, turned away from the stand, and offered one to Maddy. She loved hot dogs.

  “So here is the plan,” he began. “We have until the end of the day to find Boris, but I thought maybe we could go outside and wait for him right around now. Maybe we can get him during the lunch hour! Then if we don’t, we can try again when he gets out of work. What do you think?”

  “It sounds like a great plan,” Maddy replied. “Maybe we can go sit out on the benches in front of the Globe. But what about that security guard who found us last time?”

  “Oh, that was just because we were in the gardens,” Maxwell reassured her. “If we stay in the public areas, we should be fine.”

  Taking deep breaths of fresh morning air, Maxwell and Maddy walked towards the Globe.

  “If this plan works,” Maxwell said, “then once and for all I will have proved that not only am I smarter than... than... him,” he said the word with a sneer, “but that all of his success was pure chance!”

  “You don’t need to prove anything, dear,” Maddy said. “You are smarter than him, and more successful than him, and way better than him overall. After all, you’ve got me!” she giggled.

  Maxwell grinned. “Of course. But this... this will solve everything.”

  The Globe building rose up in front of them, beautiful and imposing. The glass sphere shone in the light, and Maxwell stared at it, willing himself to see the place where the secret lay.

  “In there, somewhere in there, lies the answer to my dilemma,” he whispered to Maddy.

  “We’ll find it,” she said. “And I will do everything within my power to make sure you succeed!”

  “Maddy,” Maxwell said, turning to look at her, “you are, by far, the most amazing woman I have ever met.” And he leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead.

  They sat down on a bench in front of the Globe. People were walking in and out; some wore lab coats, others had suits and ties. One man tightly clutched a cooler with an access code lock on the outside. Two women in matching red dresses practically skipped up to the building.

  “People-watching is so interesting,” Maddy said. “I bet that man over there, the one in the large coat, has a ferret hidden in a pocket.”

  Maxwell laughed. “And the lady over there, in the orange high heels – she probably works with training chimpanzees.”

  “Do you think they have a zoo in there?” Maddy asked.

  “I bet they have everything in there,” Maxwell replied. “They probably have a whole zoo with animals from all over the universe, and I bet everyone in there has their own pet. I bet they have a super-secret technology room where they can watch everyone all over the world through secret cameras hidden in forks and rugs and normal stuff that you wouldn’t expect.”

  “They probably have a swimming pool, too!” Maddy was getting excited.

  “Uncle Max,” interrupted a voice from behind them. “What are you doing here?”

  Maxwell turned to see Boris heading towards them.

  “I’m not your uncle,” he replied. “I’m your first cousin once removed.”

  Boris rolled his eyes. “Whatever, Uncle Max. So, why are you here?”

  “I’m looking for you,” he said. “I need a favor.”

  Crossing his arms, Boris raised an eyebrow. “What kind of a favor?”

  Maxwell looked around to make sure no one was close enough to hear them, and then he leaned in close. “Your Aunt Perla and I are up to something.”

  “I could have guessed that. What do you need from me? And is it going to get me in trouble?”

  “I need to steal your access key,” Maxwell said. “To the Globe.”

  “Next thing you are going to say is that you need a diversion, too.” Boris scowled. “Do you know how much trouble I could get into?”

  “They’ll never know! You just have to say I stole it!” Maxwell protested. “And I didn’t ask you for a diversion. But if you could... right around 4:30 would be great.”

  “Why should I help you?” Boris asked. “You’re just my crazy old uncle or cousin or something, and I could lose my job for doing something like that!”

  “Because,” said another voice from behind them. “There’s $50,000 in it for you.”

  Boris’ jaw dropped. Maxwell turned to see Perla behind him.

  “I was doing it just fine!” Maxwell complained. “Why did you have to butt in?”

  Maddy crossed her arms and scowled at Perla, in mimicry of Maxwell’s position.

  “I’m sure you were,” Perla conceded. “But I’m the one with the money.”

  “I’ll do it!” Boris exclaimed. “For $50,000, sure! And it’ll also help me get back at my boss – he’s such an ass. Then if I get fired I’ll have plenty of time to get a job that’s worthwhile.”

  “Who is your boss?” asked Perla.

  “A guy named John.”

  Maxwell’s ears perked up at the name. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ve got plans for him, too.”

  “Well, you do,” Perla corrected. “Boris, if you do get fired, come see me before you get hired somewhere else. Now, how about that key? And I believe you agreed to a diversion?”

  “Diversion at 4:30,” Boris agreed, and pulled his keys from his pocket. “This is the key,” he said, showing Maxwell and Perla a small red key, “and this is the access card to the inner rooms,” he finished. “But I need those back when you’re done! Or else I won’t be able to get into my house.”

  “No problem!” Maxwell replied.

  “I’ll take those.” Perla reached out and swiped the keys. “We need someone responsible to look after them.”

  “I was going to let Maddy hang onto them!” Maxwell protested. “She’s responsible!”

  Perla rolled her eyes. “My point exactly.”

  “Well, I need to get going,” Boris said, “before there aren’t enough people for me to wander back into the building with. Bye, random relatives.” He turned to go.

  “You forgot something,” Maxwell said loudly.

  Boris sighed. “Bye, Maddy.” Then he hastened his stride and disappeared into the crowd.

  “Well, you got the key,” Perla stated. “Meet me back here in a couple of hours. We’ll use the diversion to sneak in, and then you’re on your own.”

  “Come on, Maddy,” Maxwell said, irritated. He had gotten those keys and Perla had no right to take them away. “Let’s get out of here!”

  “Okay, Maxwell,” Maddy replied. “But don’t fret. This is your day. You’ll win, you’ll see!”

  When he left the Door Room, Clyde wasn’t sure where to go, so he found his way to the kitchen. There was a large supply of food available for anyone to take, so he sat down and ate a bagel and a couple of oranges, and then he headed down to the first floor to talk to the secretary. It made sense that he should get to know the person who decided who came into the building.

  “Hey,” Clyde greeted him. He was a big man, blue, and drowning in piercings all over his nose and face. He seemed friendly. “I’m Clyde.”

  “I’ve heard a lot about you,” the secretary said, smiling. “My name is Bob.”

  “Good to meet you.” Clyde smiled to himself. Friendly is as friendly does, Ivanna the Bard had said, but a friendly person can skin the purple out of a cockatoo. Everyone argued over the meaning of that one, and some even ventured to suggest that Ivanna had been drunk when she
wrote it, but Clyde felt the meaning was clear: a friendly person could find out things that other people couldn’t.

  “How can I help you?” the secretary asked.

  “I’m looking for Rock,” Clyde replied.

  The secretary nodded. “No problem, buddy. Rock is on the twenty-third floor, room twenty-one. Well, sometimes he is, but if you head up that way you should find him eventually. And make him give you a comm so you can find him more easily from now on.”

  “I will!” Clyde thanked the secretary and headed towards the elevator. Elevator music was one of his favourite genres, so when he stepped in, he was surprised that there was none at all. Frowning slightly, he shrugged and waited until he reached the twenty-third floor.

  It was dead. The halls were dark, there were no people wandering about.

  Maybe I shouldn’t be here, he thought, taking a hesitant step. The elevator door closed behind him and began to climb towards the top floor. Seeing no immediate alternative, Clyde began to wander down the hallway in a manner that he hoped would make him look a little bit lost, in case he wasn’t supposed to be here. He looked from side to side and kept checking the hallway behind him. The numbers on the doors were four digit numbers, but they were slowly rising – 2312, 2314, 2316...

  “It’s about time John let you go.” Rock’s voice startled him. It came from a speaker in the wall. “Come in here. On your right.”

  None of the doors in the hallway had windows. It was room 2321. He opened the door. Rock sat in a large chair surrounded by the biggest computer system he’d ever seen.

  “This is control central,” Rock said. “You won’t be in here much.”

  “What about the screens downstairs?” Clyde asked.

  “Those are for show, mostly,” Rock replied. “Although occasionally they can be useful. I know Bob finds them helpful on occasion. This is where I live most of the time, except when I have to go out to deal with problems, which is a problem because then there is no one in this room. We have a few other security guards, as you’ve seen, but none of them are qualified for this. They are all leftovers from the previous security system, which was… well… weak, to say the least.” He flipped a few buttons and a block of screens flipped over to show running strips of code. “This is an algorithm I wrote to help me out. The computer can detect if anything unusual is happening on the property or in the building. For example, this morning it picked up a man wandering around the gardens in a strange, circular pattern. Turns out the man wasn’t supposed to be there at all. And then I have this—” he held up a small, rectangular device, “so I can monitor things on a basic level from wherever I am.”

  “Wow,” Clyde’s eyes flicked from one screen to the next to the next, and then he turned his eyes to the various control panels. “That’s a sound board,” he said, pointing to one. “And that one is for… lights?”

  “Yes,” Rock replied. “We had the building wired so that I have all failsafe switches here in this room with me. Not only can I control the lights in every single room from here, but I can shut everything down and make the whole building dead. The big switches are in that closet over there.”

  Clyde looked towards where he was pointing. It was a large door with what looked like a hundred locks and one padlock. “How many locks does that have?” he asked.

  “Well, technically, I think it has eighty-three, but they’re all attached so you only have to unlock one. It’s to confuse terrorists.”

  “If I were I a terrorist I’d just stick my bomb outside the door.”

  Rock nodded. “I know. So it’s our job to keep them out of this room entirely.”

  “What are all these other controls?” Clyde asked, pointing to a row of levers and a keyboard.

  “Well the keyboard is… a keyboard,” Rock replied. “I do almost everything on the computer. The levers are for switching some of our systems over to manual control. For example, the elevator has a failsafe in case of power loss, but we can switch it over to manual to help get people out if necessary. And the other ones go to some equipment in the labs, but Quin and John haven’t had time to explain what all of the machines do yet.”

  Clyde had returned his eyes to the screens, specifically one showing the Door Room; then he noticed that there were several screens showing the Door Room.

  “Yes,” Rock said, noting where Clyde was looking. “That is Vrata Soba, where you just were. That is both the most valuable room in the building – or the universe – and the most dangerous. We have about a hundred cameras in there, but you can’t watch them all at once, so they scroll through. When we get this building’s security protocols up to par, we will have someone watching just that room at all times.”

  “Why is the security here so behind the times?”

  “It’s just government,” Rock answered. “The higher-ups thought that locks would be sufficient, but Quin convinced them to install a security system, too – a quite complex one. Then, they decided that the system cost so much to install that they couldn’t afford to hire anyone to run it. They started having problems a few years back, and finally got around to hiring me and then you. It’s all chartreuse tape.”

  Clyde nodded and contemplated the scene in front of him; while it seemed to be a great asset, it could also be a huge liability if anyone were to access the room and its equipment. Weigh the good and weigh the bad, but always look for a compromise. He wondered if there might be some compromise to this – maybe two control rooms and more staff? That way someone could always be watching, and they could have a backup room if someone bad took over this one.

  Someone knocked on the door to the control room three times.

  “Come in!” Rock called.

  Quin stepped through the door. “I just got a text from John. He’s says you’re going to have to run shutdown procedures in a moment.”

  “Did he say why?” Rock asked.

  At that moment, red lights began to flash in the Door Room on the computer screens. The people began to run around frantically and one of the Doors began to glow a bright red.

  A grin spread across Quin’s face. “These are fun,” he said, and sprinted out the of the control room. The door slammed behind him.

  Rock shook his head. “They warned me about this.”

  “About what?” Clyde asked.

  “Just watch,” Rock replied.

  He began to type rapidly on the computer. Code began to stream down one block of screens. Reaching out, Rock hit six buttons in a row labeled “E DR 1–6.” Security doors locked everyone in the Door Room inside. Then the emergency lights went off in every other part of the building. Clyde watched as people in labs and in offices climbed under desks and tables and put their arms over their heads. All ground-level entrances slammed shut and locked.

  “The whole hiding under the desk thing doesn’t really do anything,” Rock said. “I guess Quin just created some mostly useless emergency protocols to make people feel better. If the white lights go off, it means a Door has gone critical, and if a Door goes critically critical, then we’ll all die. But the people don’t know that. Meanwhile, Quin and John take care of whatever the real problem is.”

  “Who else in the building – I mean besides you, John, and Quin – are responsible for emergency response situations?” Clyde asked. It seemed logical that, in a facility this large, they would have a whole team of people prepared, in case one of those specific individuals wasn’t available.

  “You,” Rock replied jokingly. “In all seriousness though, there are a large number of people who are trained to respond to emergency situations. We have a different team for each department, and for each shift. It’s a pretty complex system, but John and Quin are primarily responsible for the Door Room whenever they are in the building. Soon, I will be taking over Quin’s responsibilities so he can go to complete some high-security-clearance training out on the Rim.”

  Clyde nodded. That made sense.

  Then the security team turned their attention back to the sc
reens in time to see Quin, wearing a strange suit, dive through the red Door.

  John was talking to some sort of scientist, and Kaia hadn’t heard a single word he’d said. She was too busy focusing on her rumbling stomach, and in order to distract herself from hunger, she felt her brain sliding towards cognitive mathematics and this idea of a Bridge Door. When she had been hungry as a child she had used the same strategy: think about math. The only difference was that then it was multiplication tables or trigonometry. Now it was cognitive mathematics. Either way, it never helped her focus on the situation at hand.

  The last two hours had been chaotic – running from one person to the next, learning as fast as she could about where each Door went, who worked with which ones and what they did, and about John’s endless tendency to slide not-quite-funny jokes into the most random of conversations. She had a feeling it was way past lunch time, and sneaked a glance at John’s watch; it was about quarter past 2:00.

  She took a deep breath and tried to ignore her stomach, focusing instead on the room around her. In one corner, a funny looking gentleman in a little hat and a very long, colourful scarf, was popping in and out of a Door. Each time he came through, he would hold up one finger, say something probably profound, and his assistant would write it down on an index card and place it in a very tall, teetering pile of all the previous index cards. Then the little man would disappear.

  Almost in the exact center of the room were two Doors parallel to one another, and only about eight feet apart. Without any warning, a line of people began to march casually out of one Door and into the next. It was amazing. They all wore matching blue uniforms of some type and they didn’t even look around them as they walked through.

  Then a commotion rose on the opposite end of the room. From what Kaia could tell, a woman had come through with a small wagon piled high with bird cages. The birds did apparently not like their trip through the Door and were throwing themselves against the bars of their cages. In response, the woman had begun to sing loudly, either as an attempt to soothe them or as an attempt to drown out their racket. Kaia couldn’t decide which. At any rate, her song wasn’t soothing anyone else in the room.