The prompt blinked on the screen, idle and waiting for the keystroke that would change the world. Tucker Ludlow checked the time and watched the status window of his messenger contacts. Although the next thirty minutes could land him in prison, his breathing was slow and his heartbeat was steady.
On the wall of his cubicle, a photo of a woman who was not Tucker's wife hung next to a finger painting by a boy that was not his son. The desk had a precisely calculated amount of clutter.
When the status of Colleen Ericsson turned red, Tucker triggered his script and rose from his desk, coffee mug in hand. As he passed the elevators he nodded to a co-worker, then stopped at the coffee pot to fix a cup. When the coast was clear, he abandoned the mug — coffee, sugar, and all — and ducked into the emergency stairwell.
Ten flights of stairs later, Tucker realized that his gym routine had been neglecting cardio. He would need to be stealthy when he reached the lab, so he slowed his assent to avoid huffing and puffing.
As he climbed the final flights, he thought the mission so far had been easier than expected. Hacking into the system had proved trivial — a few polished phishing emails to gather credentials. Collecting the necessary floor plans and schematics took a single afternoon. The hardest part had been building the right social connections.
Tucker started at Aplombo Industries six months earlier and spent the first few weeks identifying which technicians worked in the restricted lab. It took another month to befriend one, then three more to get the information he needed without raising any suspicions. His lunch conversations with Colleen Ericsson had started with the typical sort of conversations about family, weather, news. Eventually he'd been able to steer their discussions towards the secretive portions of her work.
Colleen had unknowingly divulged many details about the lab and the patterns of her co-workers. it was how Tucker knew that the prototypes went on lockdown overnight and that the technicians took a break at 3 p.m. to drink coffee and chat around the water cooler.
When Tucker had seen her messaging status go red, he knew he had roughly fifteen minutes to be in and out. He checked his watch again when he reached the top of the stairs and the steel-plated security door — he had twelve minutes left.
To the right of the door there was an RFID scanner, and below it a keypad for emergency use. Rolling up his sleeve, Tucker entered the twelve-digit number he had scrawled on his forearm and the LEDs above the lock turned from red to green with a muffled buzz.
On the far side of the door, a long twisting hallway with clear glass walls dissected a maze of lab bays — experimental robotics and advanced electronics on display within. Though Tucker had never visited this level, he'd studied the floor plans for days and he navigated the halls from memory with a brisk stride.
Nearing the prototype division, he suddenly heard footsteps around the corner, and he slipped into a bathroom just before a white lab coat flashed into view.
From the sound of it, whoever was outside had gone into an adjacent office and was milling about. With his ear to the door listening for any clues, Tucker knew he could only afford a few minutes delay. If the technicians returned from their break and saw him in the lab, it was game over.
Tucker had never failed a job, and he wasn't keen to start now. In the past seven years he had worked at a dozen corporations — hired based on fake resumes, backed by phony references. But he never truly worked for those corporations, he worked for himself as an agent for hire in corporate espionage.
Typically his contracts were for rooting out trade secrets, however this time his task was to steal a prototype of a phenomenal new battery. One that could store a hundred times the energy of lithium-ion in half the size and that would revolutionize electronics.
While undeniably a thief, Tucker was not without a moral compass. He only took jobs against corporations that were acting unethically, or at least whose behavior fell somewhere in a devious shade of gray. He envisioned himself as a Robin Hood type, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. And in the corporate espionage world he was known only as BitFriar, a nickname he'd styled from Friar Tuck of the Merry Men. The "Bit" part he'd added for flair, since he worked the tech industry.
BitFriar's reputation preceded him — taking down corporate baddies — and accepting his current job was a no-brainer. With Aplombo Industries, there was no question of their mal-intent. It was common knowledge that they would lay off thousands without batting an eye; their true corruption was less publicized.
The battery prototype that Tucker was about to steal had been designed by a young physicist from Massachusetts who had come to the country as a refugee and worked her way through grad school. She was drowning in student loans and credit card debt, and she had spent her last dime on a patent application. Aplombo, who constantly monitored incoming patents, saw the potential immediately and set off to buy her out. They made a generous offer accompanied by uncountable pages of fine print, and they made sure the deadline gave her no time to read any of it.
Naive and with no family to council her otherwise, the girl jumped on the offer. But when her first payment was delayed, she found an army of lawyers had been mobilized to prevent her from collecting a dime. They mired her in litigation, and as her rent went unpaid and dinners were skipped, she slowly lost the will to fight them.
Alone and destitute, evicted and on the street, her last sight on earth was the water of Boston harbor rushing up to meet her. The police found her body floating near the bridge the next morning, and the Aplombo executive that had orchestrated the buyout lost not a second of sleep.
But the joke was on them. The provisional patent the girl had filed was missing key information. It wasn't something she'd planned, just her inexperience with patents and lack of awareness that her writing was unclear. The missing information would have been theirs for the taking if they hadn't abused her. Instead their only hope was to reverse engineer her one working prototype.
Now Tucker meant to take that hope away from them. He hadn't accepted the job to avenge that the poor physicist, but that would certainly be a perk.
As he stood stock still in the bathroom stall, ears alert, the footsteps retreated it down the hall and faded into silence. He slipped out the door.
Tune in next time
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed the start of the story, please come back tomorrow for the conclusion in Part II
Twilight Zone Theme Music Starts Playing
I've just discovered you and reading this has hooked me.
I loved your comment 'STOP', but I doubt anyone from those bots will listen.
I make a point of totally ignoring all of them, so I rarely find them under my posts. I only respond to interesting and real comments (apart from those by close friends, when even a 'I read it' satisfies me).
I've got the next episode, so ta-ta, off to read some more...
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