Shutdown Syntax: Chapter 9
If you are new to Shutdown Syntax, start from the beginning.
Note: This chapter contains violence and strong language, as does the entire story. If you are new and starting this story, please be aware of the potential triggers in a dark story as this.
Tim
“You blew up a car, Alison,” Harry griped. Ali and Tim were on either side, dragging him by the elbows through the alleys, behind buildings. Occasional maintenance bots blinked to life. Retrofitted for security. Smart. Their sensors were loud and not designed for their bodies. And their plating was crudely cut with a window to accommodate the sensor.
“So,” Ali peered around Harry to Tim and asked, “you work with bots?”
“Don’t ignore me,” Harry tried to pull free, but the Overburn Syndrome was doing a number on his father’s muscle strength.
“I work with bots,” Tim muttered. Or he did. “And you’re a…”
“Shhhhh,” Ali and Harry pulled to a stop and hissed. Their eyes darted around. There, at the end of an alley, on a street light’s pole, was a black box. “Maybe we should hold off until we’re actually safe,” Ali added quietly.
Sure, she is allowed to ask questions.
The little bot, Thumper, had met them behind his father’s apartment building. In the dark, and with how beat up the bot already was, it was hard to tell if the scorch marks and dents he saw were new. Instead of walking through the alleys, Thumper scaled the brick walls, parkour jumping between rusty fire escapes, likely feeding Ali information. Her eyes, which Tim followed, darted from Sentinel box to Sentinel box.
They were everywhere.
“Back to the bots,” Ali grunted and shifted Harry’s weight. “What kind of bots?”
If only he understood what Ali was doing, or saying… or thinking. Instead, Tim answered, “Mostly cargo bots, personal assistant bots…”
She stifled a laugh. “Personal assistants? Out in the middle of nowhere…?”
“It’s a misnomer to consider them personal assistants. A lot are medical assistants, like live-in nurses for the elderly. And their owners don’t know how to take care of them properly. Been way more repairs than I would have expected, though.”
Tim paused. Why were they talking about his meaningless, now past tense, job?
And why was Ali still smiling serenely?
Shifting his gaze up again, Thumper had disappeared. Metal crunched. Crash!
The remains of another bot landed at their feet. Harry turned his head in slow motion, his facial muscles straining to change into a scowl while Ali stepped over the broken bot.
“Are you trying to distract me?” Tim asked, trying to step over the broken bot without letting his father’s feet drag it along with them.
“Is it keeping you calm?” He heard her annoying smirk.
“Oh, seriously? You think this is keeping me calm?” Her grin widened. Of COURSE this made her happy. “You’re both a freaking nuts!” He considered dropping his father’s left half and watching her struggle. But at the last moment, he thought better of it. That would probably be easier for Ali than how she was carrying him now. And part of Tim didn’t want to make things easier when these two lunatics were making his life an absolute nightmare!
They’d made it to another street. Only three city blocks, but the blocks were huge compared to Emberfield’s. Long enough and without a break, Tim could get lost in the walk and forget to watch how far they’d gone.
Ali dropped Harry’s arm. Tim had to rush to catch his father before he fell, trying to position Harry’s feet with his own to give Harry a more stable base.
“W-what are you—”
She shushed Tim and drew her gun. Amid apartment buildings and small shops, a large building, like an auto shop, sat, lights half on… the front door askew. It wasn’t too dissimilar to the shop Tim worked in—large rolling doors. Grease-smudged windows too high to actually access and clean without a cherry picker. The smell of oil permeated the air around it, reaching all the way to the alley where they stood. This wasn’t Tim’s shop. He’d never been here. But something felt off.
The Sentinel boxes were watching, just like Ali said. If he had a phone, he could at least see what they see.
“Thumper?” Tim’s voice surprised himself, as well as Ali and Harry. “Go grab the bot you just destroyed.”
Oops. He just gave an order to a bot that wasn’t his.
Ali
Seriously?
But it wasn’t like she had any ideas. “Do what Tim said, Thump. Grab the bot.” Ali remained in the shadows, weapon drawn. “Tim?”
“Yeah,” he ground on the word, almost as if he knew what she would ask and preempted her with his own question. “Is it always you two asking outlandish things so you don’t get yourselves killed?”
“Yes,” Ali said as Harry countered with a, “No!”
Oh, she had a right mind to kick Mr. G!
“Due to Bernie’s position with Vanguard PD as a consultant, there are additional Sentinel monitoring stations. Either end of the street.” And, unlucky for them, there were no people on the street to blend in with. A full power interruption would bring a contingent of cops. They needed something more subtle. “Flickering the power for a maximum of three seconds and Sentinel files it under potential weather or urban interference.”
That likely wasn’t what Tim expected. He stammered, “Y-you expect me to…what… make a calculated brown out of…”
Ali shrugged, watching the darkest recesses. On alert. “City block. Whole sector. Don’t really care.”
“You’re freaking…” Tim’s pause made Ali grin. Then Tim asked, “How dexterous is Thumper?”
Damn. “Not dexterous enough to hold wires if that is what you are thinking.” The street bothered her. The door… hanging lazily open… “How big would your distraction be?”
Tim answered, a bit distractedly, “One Sentinel box, at most. And probably a felony charge for tampering with government safety equipment.”
Ha! Tim sounded a lot like his father.
One Sentinel box. One…
The coverage of the Sentinel boxeswas relatively even. Taking one out meant their movement might still be noticed by the other.
“Reboot window,” Tim murmured, hefting his father up as Harry slipped down. “There should be a momentary blind spot in coverage while the second box compensates. It’s not instantaneous. Who are you more worried they are searching for? You or my dad?”
Oh… Oh!
Tim invaded her space. Even from the corner of her eye, she saw how fast Tim made calculations. “No one in the city should be looking for my father… I was here to close out his estate. On the city records, Harold Griffin is dead.”
Ali swallowed a hard lump. A terrible tell, yet she said, “Anything that could shield his IrisLink? Or mine?”
Tim set his father down against the building, still well within the shadows. He went out of her sight, metal scraped and groaned and then…
“Most bots’ bodies are made from alloys to shield their internals from errant emissions that could interrupt them from working properly. Hold it up near your head. It would be directional and only partial shielding. Planning to take out the box on the left.”
Ali took a breath, keeping her gun aimed at Bernie’s shop. One. Two. Three.
The countdown continued, Ali waiting for Tim to push her into the Sentinel’s field of vision. Betray her. Make his own run for it. But nothing ever came.
Instead, Tim nestled the scrap of the body hull on her shoulder, and he went to work. Quickly removing panels, yanking the power cell, wires, and a circuit board. From the small toolkit, Tim removed a roll of electrical tape.
“Thumper?” Ali forced her voice not to shake. She had to trust Tim not to try to kill her or stab her in the back. Fuck, she didn’t even trust Stone that much. Harry slowly worked his way to his hands and knees, trying to pull himself up to stand on his own. Movement was slow to return. He’d reach out for the wall, but his open hand would slide back down, not finding grip. Or at least, unable to close his fingers fast enough.
“Take your next order from Tim Griffin.” Ali directed the statement to Thumper.
[Confirmed. Next order to be received by Tim Griffin. Confirming biometrics…]
She didn’t hear the order, just Thumper’s servos… as if she needed more reminders of the maintenance she was behind on.
A countdown shouted at her with large, red numbers, stamped across her field of vision from Thumper.
[5]
Ali held up the piece of bot plating against her IrisLink.
[4]
Her railgun felt heavier—like lead—in only one hand.
[3]
Tim hefted his father up, much to Mr. G’s chagrin, and held a piece of the robot’s plating as best he could against Mr. G’s Frankenlink.
[2]
She took one last deep breath.
[1]
Not waiting for a directive or any other prompt, Ali dashed across the street, hearing Tim dragging his father with him.
No sirens sounded from either the Sentinel boxes, cars, or police bots.
Ali ducked into the doorway. Dropping the plating would be... noisy. And possibly suicide. Alerting the Sentinel boxes she just evaded. Ali adjusted her grip on the plate, awkwardly with only a couple of fingers, and tried to return to a steadier two-handed grip on her gun.
Entering Bernie’s shop from the main door brought Ali straight into the garage, where he did public work on any type of machine known to man. Off to her left was Mrs. Miyato’s husband’s derelict sedan raised high. A motorcycle Ali worked on once in a while sat in pieces, nagging her. To the right, Bernie retrofitted the old office to hold a server farm featuring a bank of industrial fans overhead that discharged through the roof.
The server room’s industrial fans were off.
The entire garage felt unnaturally quiet.
From the roof, a large cable hung, sometimes with long loops dangling down, to the back of the warehouse, cut off from the garage portion by a wall. Auto parts, rolling tool boxes, and projects in varying degrees of completion dotted the open area.
Ali cleared behind each of the projects. No bots. No officers.
No cameras.
No security.
Nothing but a mess of parts for vehicles and bots and the tools to fix them, eventually.
God damn it, Bernie!
Why was nothing on? Where the hell was he?
No lights outlined the back doors either. Bernie’s apartment was in the far back, with roof access to his small garden. But seriously… the building was eerily quiet.
Tim and Harry collapsed against the front door, panting obnoxiously loudly. Ali swept the large room again with her eyes. Nothing stood out except the lack of security equipment. There, in the ceiling, she saw the bracket for a camera. And another. Had Bernie taken them down?
Creeping forward, Ali pressed on the door.
What the ever-loving fuck?
The door swung open freely. The back of Bernie’s retrofitted auto garage was more of a robotics workshop. He regularly performed maintenance, which the department vaguely okay’d for her undercover assignments, built and coded his own creations, and conducted digital and hardware forensic analysis. Honestly, it always seemed like a half-baked hospital, bot repair service, and evil genius laboratory rolled into one.
From the crack in the doorway, Ali could make out the outlines of bots hanging in the racks, monitors, and a table… but everything was dark.
Taking the hand holding the bot plating off her rail gun, Ali pushed the door just enough to sneak through.
Clang!
Ali slammed the plating on Bernie’s arm, knocking the taser gun previously pointed at her into the wall. Her gun was in his face while he rubbed his hand.
“God damn, Al…”
She shushed Bernie. Well, he certainly wasn’t in trouble. In fact, he looked just fine. Blonde hair combed over, glasses being pushed back up, even an obscenely white polo shirt untouched by even a speck of dirt as he turned on the lights.
Keeping the rail gun trained on Bernie, Ali backed into the room and started clearing it.
“Figured you’d come by sooner or later. I have to—”
The gun bobbed in her hand. Did he forget how to read body language?
“We’re dis—”
Again, Ali interrupted him with a look.
“Fuck. Ok, umm… shit, what was it? The… cat… goes… splat?”
“You insist on security and then have jack shit? What the fuck, Bernie?” Ali hissed, finally lowering her gun.
“Oh, says the girl who’s all over the God damn feeds! Your face is the number one…”
Mr. G and Tim shuffled back, Mr. G clearly attempting to control his movements more but having very little power over them.
“Hello,” Bernie swept a hand through his hair, doing precisely nothing to fix it. “Harry, who is this lovely… tall, brooding…”
Bernie had a thing for glasses.
Leaning against a desk full of monitors, tools, and a nifty light with a magnifying glass attached, Ali swung the magnifying glass in front of her, inspecting the distorted version of Bernie through it. Waiting for him to catch on. Because if Tim was in Vanguard to finalize his father’s estate… certainly he wasn’t the only one to know about the news of Mr. G’s untimely passing.
“Har-ry?” It clicked. “Oh my GOD!”
Rubbing salt in his proverbial open wound, Ali added, “Meet Mr. G’s son, Timothy Griffin.”
Absolute, utter horror dawned on Bernie’s face.
“Your servers are off. You’ve clearly disconnected any camera feeds, so,” swinging the magnifying glass from her, Ali stood, holstered the rail gun, and grabbed a nearby screwdriver. “You anticipated me coming.”
A shiver ran through Tim as he pulled his father closer to him. Ali held the screwdriver in her fist, as a weapon instead of a tool.
“Yeah, where else would you go? It’s me or Harry and… Harry’s…”
“Were you lying when you used the code phrase?” Each slow, methodical step made a new bead of sweat form on Bernie’s brow.
“N-no, Al…You’re not being recorded. No one is coming. I promise you. My contract was terminated by the city this morning anyway. Angel…” Bernie tripped over his own mess, backing away from Ali.
She stopped about a foot from Bernie. Fear quivered in his eyes. “Alright.” Her grip loosened on the screwdriver. “Well, I really want to know why my face is all over the feeds, but we have a different problem to deal with first,” Ali said and chewed her cheek, her eyes darting back to Mr. G.