Future Findings

The drive was nearly two hours long. In that time, Eddie went through protocols, info about the mission, and the gear we had with us. Our goal was simple; scout it out, find a safe way to get in, enter it, and exit it-- all without being noticed. Eddie said it wouldn’t be easy, security had really ramped up in the last few hundred years. It was supposed to take around 3 hours, not including the drive. There was really no danger involved, Eddie said. We just had to blend in and act like we belong.

Apart from him drilling us, I had quite a long talk with the man. Firstly, I wanted to ask him about Troy and Lauren.

“Eddie, are the Bakers still alive?” I asked. He gave me a long look, then responded.

“I believe they both are, as they both went into cryogenic stasis. Troy’s company has only gotten bigger with time. It’s arguably the biggest technological company, and essentially has free reign of any and all experimental processes. If someone they don’t want gets involved, they just pay them off.” With that, a minute or so of silence followed.

“Eddie,” I started.

“Yes?” he asked.

“Why’d you take Donnie in, didn’t you think he might be dangerous?” At that, Eddie’s eyes met mine. He started at me for what seemed like ten minutes. He was contemplating, trying to find an answer.

“He’s all alone in this world. No parents, and evidently no family members or friends that was kind enough to take him in.” Eddie said. He used his right hand to adjust his glasses, and continued. “I was a little too much like him, Abid. I was an orphan, and this world just doesn’t care about people that don’t have anyone to care for them. If I hadn’t found AMO, I would probably be dead right now. Dead in an alley, dead alone in this world.” Wow. I had no adequate reply, so I didn’t offer one. We sat in silence for a while. Eventually, I got the courage to ask something else; something unrelated to Donnie.

“What if we get separated?” I asked. “Do we have any cool radios or ways to communicate with each other?” Beck and Eddie made eye contact and smirked, somehow finding what I said funny.

Beck reached into her bag and pulled out two tiny, yellow walkie- talkies. Their paint was peeling and an excessive amount of duct tape seemed to hold them together, but nevertheless they appeared to be in working condition. I had played with something akin to them has a kid. In fact, I think Ronald and I had ran around the neighborhood with that exact same model. She tossed one to Eddie, and kept the other to herself.

“These are what we’ve got,” Eddie said.

“Really? Do they even work? They’re so old…” Eddie threw his head back and laughed, a hearty laugh that made my stomach flutter.

“They work all right. Anything more advanced than this-- and it could be tracked or bugged. We aren’t taking any risks.” He flicked the on switch, and handed it to me. “Channel 3 is our communication with each other. Channel 1 is a mayday to base, but it only works if we’re within a few miles of it. That means that we’re operating in the dark out here, alone. We’ll be in two groups-- Angus and Beck, and You and I.”

Angus had slowed to a stop, and parked in the lot of some massive store. Wall World, it read. A supermarket, like Walmart. Angus turned around to us, and spoke up.

“Get out.” We obediently left the vehicle, and Angus got out a moment afterwards. He put the keys in the small pocket of his bag, and zipped it up. Eddie had reassured us that it wasn’t an intense or terribly hard mission, but regardless I was jittery. Angus looked very relaxed, and Beck seemed to be excited by the glimmer in her concrete eyes. Eddie was silent.

Our clothes looked normal, very normal in this world of varying styles and ages. Our bags weren’t military grade or hiking packs, they were school bags and in Beck’s case, an oversized purse.

“The building is a few blocks down. We didn’t park too close, so we wouldn’t raise suspicion,” Eddie told us. We walked in silence on the sidewalk, a small boat of quiet in a sea of noise. We probably should have been talking-- to seem more natural, but nobody thought of that. Eddie led the way, with Angus and Beck walking side by side behind him. I brought up the rear, which I was fine with. There was too much to look at to be focused on walking in a straight line next to someone, or worrying about making the person behind me collide with my back.

Buildings rose so high, that the darkly colored clouds surrounded them before you had a chance to see the top. Lights shone everywhere, from giant sized tv’s on walls, to hundreds of light bulbs flashing on and off to form shapes out of nothing. One such electrical mural sat directly in front of us, on the side of a building that seemed to be owned by “OmniCites”. I had no idea what the company did, but it was evident that they dealt with music, as a violin made completely out of light was shining brightly hundreds of feet in the sky.

I must’ve slowed down, because once I looked for my team, they were yards away from me. I rushed after them, feeling some old fear of being left behind, like the idea of losing your parents in a story or at the airport. Once I caught up with them, I decided not to pay attention to the rising monuments all around me, though they were glorious. The people around me were even more interesting.

A man walked past me, dressed from head to toe in some sort of animal skin. The head of the animal, which I soon discovered was a deer, hung over his own-- hiding his receding hair. He was very grim looking, and had large rings under his eyes.

A woman across the street led her two small children by the hand. She walked with a limp, and because she was wearing bright pink shorts I discovered why. She had at some point lost her legs, because what was below her hips were mechanical pieces that tried to replicate limbs. They seemed to do quite a good job of getting her around, despite the limp.

A group of four men, all seemingly of Latino descent, wore oversized suits and matching pants. On their face, they had adorned themselves with heavy mascara and lipgloss. One even had massive hoop earrings. Yet another was fitted with a metal eye and hand.

“Almost there,” Eddie might have said, but I was too distracted to hear him.

A child, only coming up to about my waist, pushed past me. He wore some sort of red cape-- very similar to those in a Superman costume. That’s exactly what I thought it was, until I saw the rest of his family come through.

A man, a woman, and their two other children, all African American, dressed up in bright one pieces, capes, and underwear worn on the outside. I looked around, astounded that nobody was making fun of them. But nobody even glanced at them. They walked proudly, but not purposely showing off.

Two women, holding hands, made their way past me. One had tattoos completely covering her Indian face. The other wore a bra and what seemed to be snow pants.

So beautiful, I thought. Everyone being able to express themselves, to do whatever they like. I wondered how long it had taken for the world to become this-- a place where nobody was judged.

I ran into the back of Angus. Where there should have been a loud smack of cartilage hitting against bone, there was only the dull thud of meat on meat. I backed up quickly, blushed, and muttered a small “sorry” to the back of his head. He didn’t seem to have noticed that I collided with him.

“We’re here,” Eddie said definitively, though his voice sounded somewhat warped. At some point in our walk, he had donned a face mask, like the kind doctors or carpenters wore. It eerily reminded me of some WWII gas mask, and I let out an involuntary shiver. Angus and Beck were in the middle of putting theirs on.

“What’s that for?” I asked, pointing to his face.

“A mask, to keep out all the pollution,” Eddie stated. I looked around, and discovered that quite a few people were wearing them. In fact, it seemed to be at least half the population. How had I not noticed before? Angus had finished putting his on.

“Can’t be out for more than a few hours without using one of these… it’d be like smoking a whole pack of cigarettes,” Angus said in an eerily close voice to Darth Vader.

Then I realized. The clouds surrounding all the buildings weren’t clouds at all, but smog. Smog from the millions of plantations and buildings spewing out pollutants all across the world. Beck handed me one, and I gratefully began slipping it on.

“Why don’t we do something about all the pollution?” I asked through my struggles.

“Believe me, we’ve tried. But any company that wants to make money, has to spew out all the nasty stuff. And when the government tries to make them stop, the CEO just pays them off. That’s exactly what the Baker Complex is doing, and that’s one of the many reasons we’re here to figure out how we can get in and shut it down,” Beck told me.

“So if the government doesn’t do anything, how are we supposed to accomplish it?” I asked, annoyed by the pure unlikelihood of us succeeding. We were underdogs to the extreme; inevitable underdogs. Nobody answered.

Eddie took us across the street, to a concrete sign shoved into the grass. It read “Baker Building 1, of the Baker Complex”. I looked up, and discovered a building that seemed to be gargantuan. Of course, I couldn’t tell by the height, as it kept going up through the smog. Though the width of the place was more than enough to assume it’s overall size. It was slate gray, and seemed to be made completely of cement. But after looking for a while, I discovered that it was actually made of some sort of glass. A tinted, impossibly dense glass. The few windows seemed to be made of the same material, except slightly lighter in tinting. Doors and paths led in and around the building. Every few stories up, indoor walkways led in all four directions to other buildings made of the same material. I knew that the warehouse I had left was connected to this building, though the walkways could continue on for miles.

“It’s a fortress,” I whispered.

“Yup!” Eddie cheerfully responded. “Let’s get to work!.” Eddie pulled out some papers, and investigated them very closely. After a while, he looked up.

“Beck? Supposedly their security on the outside isn’t very good. Everything important is in the building. Supposedly, the building is so vast that they expect nobody to even attempt to steal something.” Eddie looked at the building uncertainty. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do. He knew the end, but had no means to achieve it.

“Look, look. It’s fine. So we didn’t plan this out very well. All we have to do is check out a few possible points, I already studied the blueprints of the place,” Beth said confidently. From my short time in the AMO, it seemed like Beck-- with her smooth gray eyes and science oriented brain, was the backbone of all missions. She saved everyone’s ass.

She walked onto the grass surrounding the building, acting very calmly. It was likely that it was trespassing, but if we pretended we didn’t know any better, then nobody would waste their time scolding or trying to catch us. At least, that’s what we thought.

“This is the first point,” Beck turned and told us. We hadn’t been walking for long, and nobody had apprehended us. Yet.

“Where?” Eddie asked, looking around on the building wildly.

“Stop!” Beck said in a forced whisper. “We have to look casual, remember? It’s right next to us, but try not to look at it too intensely, the cameras will see and somebody will want to come out and investigate.” I slowly looked around, noticing multiple cameras attached to the walls. And just to the side of us, a door with no handle. It was the same color as the rest of the building, so it was very hard to spot.

Eddie walked over and, facing us, rested his shoulder on it. “I’m telling you guys, there’s no way that bell bottoms are coming back into style,” He was trying to act casual.

“I disagree, they never left style,” Beck said with a smirk. Eddie leaned harder on the door straining to get it open with his shoulder, but it wouldn’t budge.

“It opens from the inside,” I pointed out flatly. Eddie smiled at me. So, we headed for the next possible entry point, on the far side of the building-- an alleyway more or less. We journeyed back that way. It took us a solid 5 minutes to make our way to the back of the building. Once there, all we saw were various dumpsters and dirty concrete bits. Beck led us to a glass door, not unlike the massive ones on the front. Except this one was not automatic-- it had a handle.

Angus walked forward, and tugged on it. Miraculously, it opened! Eddie rushed in, waving for us to stay out here. Within five seconds he was back out, with a blush on his face.

“Nope!” he said. “It just leads to a conference room. There were at least ten people in there, and they all went silent once I entered. Nope!” Everyone except Eddie laughed, but it quickly died down. We had checked both entrance points, and neither one seemed to work. And, what if the people Eddie bumped into came after us?

“Ugh,” Beck said as she kicked a dumpster. “What do we do now?”

“Well.. we could go back to base and do some more checking on the blueprint. Or we…” Eddie’s voice died away to nothing. I had walked away from everyone else, and was investigating a window AC unit on the second floor. If that was in there, then that meant the window was open. Which meant it was unlocked. The only problem was reaching it, but I already had a solution to that.

“What do you see?” Eddie asked. They had finally noticed that I had broken away.

“Our way in.” I said.

I didn’t weigh too much-- much less than Angus. So I figured he could hoist me up on his shoulders, and once I got up there I could help get everyone else in.

“You sure about this?” Angus asked from beneath his mask.

“No, but let’s do it anyway,” I responded. He was standing in front of and beneath the window, while I was a few feet behind him. Beck and Eddie stood off to the side, obviously a little nervous.

“Alright… go ahead.” I walked to him, and started my crawl up his immense back. Without any warning, Angus reached his arms around and grabbed my legs. Within a few seconds I was sitting atop his shoulders. I reached out with my hands, hoping to grasp the AC. But I was too far away, at least by a foot or two.

“Ugh, not quite,” Eddie said from the ground. Though he was only five or six feet below me, he felt very far away.

“Angus, I’ve got to stand up. I need a little more reach,” I said to the head poking out between my thighs. He didn’t say anything, but grunted in reply. So I reached forward and put one hand on the wall for balance. I slowly hefted myself to my feet, pausing to regain my balance more than once. Once I was atop his shoulders, I lifted my hands to the sky. They reached the bottom of the AC unit easily, but the top was a different story. My fingers were all but two inches away from finding any purchase.

“Angus.. I’ve got to jump,” I said.

“Oh, do be careful Abid!” Eddie yelled in a hushed voice.

I leaned forward slightly, preparing my knees. Then, I flung myself off of Angus’s shoulders, feeling the butterflies in my stomach as I lost the sense of anything underneath my feet. For a second I was suspended in air, then my fingers found what they were looking for. But it wasn’t over yet.

I was hanging off the side of the window, frozen. I attempted to hoist myself up, but had to face the harsh truth that I didn’t have the muscle in my arms to hold even my own body. I kept trying, forcing every ounce of me to help out. Suddenly, I was making it up. I was doing it! Mind over matter, I thought. But it was just Angus pushing me up by the feet with his large and well-worn hands.

My knees reached my hands, and I flattened myself to the top of the unit. The window was unlatched, but I would have to push it farther up to slip in. And it didn’t seem like I had much room to do so. The second pane, where the lower pane could not go any higher, was no more than a foot above the AC. That meant I had 12 inches, probably less, to squeeze in the window. That also meant there was no way Angus would fit inside. But that was fine, he could just wait outside for us.

“It’s a tight fit, guys. I’ll get inside and then help the rest of you get up here. I pulled up on the window, and it lifted quite easily. Thank God. I slipped in feet first, using my hands to keep the window from closing on me. Once I was inside, the window slammed shut behind me. I took a look around the room I had just infiltrated. It was very small.

Actually, it was just a stall in a bathroom. Which gender of bathroom it was-- I couldn’t tell. But the important part was that the stall door was closed, and I was the only one in it. I quickly locked it to insure that nobody would accidentally walk in on me.

I went back over to the window. I needed something to keep it open. I rummaged through my bag, and pulled out a book entitled “Flags of the World” that Beck had insisted I took with us. She thought I might have fun reading it in the car. I jammed it into the gap, and called out to Angus.

“All clear, lift the next contestant up.” Eddie was up on his shoulder before long, and I was there to grasp his hands. He was taller than me, and wouldn’t need to jump anyway-- but it felt good to hold his hand. Just a little comfort. Once he was inside, he took over the job of helping people up. I stood in the stall, hoping that nobody would walk into the bathroom. Beck was just getting ready to be picked up when we heard some sort of alarm go off.

“Hey! What are you doing?” a man that I couldn’t see yelled. He was evidently outside.

“We’ll meet up later!” Beck said before taking off. Angus followed behind her, who was being trailed by an elderly man in a blue shirt and black dress pants. He had a radio on his belt, and something that horribly resembled a gun. Eddie quickly backed away from the window, and gestured for me to do the same. We waited like that for a while, two men standing in the corner of a stall trying to quiet their breathing. It was quite comical, except I was too scared to laugh about it. Nobody entered through the window, nor slammed the bathroom door open. So that was good.

Eddie gestured that he was going to check outside, and ambled his way to the window. But after he looked outside for a second, he ducked down, out of sight from the alleyway.

“Shit!” he whispered. “They’re out there!” I made my way to the window, and peeked out. There were at least half a dozen guards walking around, all of them armed.

“We gotta find another way out,” I told Eddie.

“But we don’t have the blueprints!”

“Well… then we’ve got to do it on our own,” I said. I walked over to the stall door, and slowly opened it. After I checked that the coast was clear, I stepped out and told Eddie to follow after me. The bathroom was empty.

Eddie and I made our way over to the door. He gently pulled it open, and we were met with an empty hallway made entirely of glass. Luckily for us, it was so dense that the walls still offered cover from the rooms on the other side.

“Which way?” Eddie asked, with half his body now out of the restroom. I had no idea which way, but figured that somebody needed to stay calm and think.

“Right.” I told him with masked fear. He led the way, with me trailing closely behind him. Everything was made of that same glass. Even the ceiling and floor, so I could just barely make out the levels above and below us. It eerily reminded me of the first day I woke up-- in that Baker warehouse full of frozen people. I concealed a shiver, though it was warm in the building. It had to be at least 70 degrees. My pumping heart made it feel more like 85. We headed down the hallway, but the end of it appeared to branch off two ways. I would have to decide which way to go soon, and I dreaded it. But before I had the chance to worry too much about it, a man came out of the one branching to the left.

He was old. It was easy to tell-- simply from his beer gut and balding head. He headed towards us, though he was to busy to give us a wave or really notice us at all. He was too preoccupied trying to attach some sort of nametag to the pocket on his shirt.

Instinctively, I started turning-- ready to run back the way we had came. But Eddie’s hand came to the crook of my elbow, and forced me to stay beside him.

“Act normal,” he whispered out the side of his mouth. He looked like one of those people that can make hand puppets talk. Eddie was standing up straight, so straight that his chest pumped out and his hair flopped awkwardly over his forehead. The man was approaching us, still focused on his badge. Eddie moved us over to the right side of the hallway, and the man did the same on his side. He hustled past us without even glancing up.

Eddie gave me a look of incredulous awe. He smiled, and lightly punched me on the shoulder. “We’ve got our way out!” he said.

“What?” I had no idea what he meant.

“You saw the guy. He was putting a name tag on his shirt-- which he would have needed to take off in order to get in the building in the first place,” he told me.

“And that means he’s heading from where an entrance is!” I exclaimed, intentionally interrupting Eddie.

“So we know how to get to the main entrance-- which is on the first floor. And that’s a start.”

“But,” I said as I shook my head. “We can’t get out that way. They’ll notice we don’t work here!”

“The entrance points that Beck showed us. They’re exit points, too.” Eddie said. Of course! We just had to get downstairs and find one of the exit points. So we briskly made our way down the hall, and took the left that the man had walked down earlier. Once around the corner, we were met with a set of metal doors, and corresponding buttons to the right of it. It was the elevator. Eddie ran forward and pressed the down button. It made a small ding, and the doors opened. There were a handful of people in it, all of them wearing varying suits. Most were interacting with their phones, none were talking amongst each other. Only one person looked at us as we go in, and his only reaction was to move further back-- to make way for the two strangers attempting to board the elevator.

It seems as though they were all headed downstairs. Many of them had taken off their name tags-- likely in preparation of heading home after a long night of work.(They had to have been the night shift, as it was no later than 12:30 in the afternoon.) Eddie looked over at me, and I immediately knew what he was thinking. With any luck, we’d be able to slip out with this crowd. Ding, the elevator had reached the 1st floor. Scrap the exit points. The door opened, and Eddie and I walked out in front of everyone else.

The place was still glass, except it was much more crowded down here. People were flowing out, and some were trickling in. The entrance was guarded by multiple men, checking each name tag and ID. The exit-- only one, and he was only standing and watching. Eddie led the way, and I stayed close behind him. We got into the row of citizens leaving the Baker complex, and tried to appear inconspicuous. There were at least twenty people in front of us. But it quickly dwindled to ten. Then five. Then two. Then one.

Eddie was up, and passed by the guard without any trouble. I was following in his footsteps when I heard something that made my blood run cold. The static of a radio-- of Eddie’s radio, and Angus’s voice.

“Hey! We lost them in a crowd! I hope you guys broke in and out okay. Meet us at the car, we’ll wait for you there! Be careful, man,” and then the static stopped. Eddie had stopped moving, and the guard had approached me. Ironic how the most I’d ever heard Angus talk was the exact moment I hoped he’d have stayed silent.

“What was that?” the guard screamed. Eddie looked back at me, and momentarily stalled. He wanted to run, but wouldn’t dream of leaving me. A few guards from the entrance had waltzed over, also put on edge by the unsettling voice on the walkie talkie.

Go, I mouthed to Eddie.

“I said ‘What was that?”’ the guard yelled out again. Eddie shook his head, not willing to leave me.

Another guard was talking now. “Put your hands up! You’re not going anywhere!”

Go! I mouthed again. But he wouldn’t leave.

“GO!” I finally screamed. This pushed Eddie into momentum, and he started running. A guard began to chase after him, but I shoved him so that he lost his balance. Eddie looked back at me, but he kept running. Good. Now, the guards were upon me. Two were beating me with some sort of stick they both carried, and another was getting handcuffs out. The last thing I saw before darkness was a boot-- being shoved on top of me as I squirmed on the floor.