Ice in a Glass

Z sat in a wire chair under an awning at a café table looking up at a second floor window across the small square. She was watching from behind sunglasses to see if anyone came to or from the door below, and if she could see shadows or light, in the apartment behind the window. It had been dark all day and stayed that way into the evening. Lights began to turn on in the streets, glowing warmly on the cobblestones and music slowly wandered out of café doors, as the evening hinted at night. A small group of girls returned, uniformed and in single file, from the movie house around the corner. The young women escorting the children, gently hushing and guiding their pigtailed wards up the stone stairs, and through the large rounded oak door to their dormitories. Z knew well what lay through the door. Sparse, clean, safe rooms. Cheerful in their obeyance of light, as it bent through the day, but without the sentiment of individual love. Z, absent of any parents she could remember, had grown up here under the purposeful care of the Sisters of Infinity.

As the door closed behind the last girl, Z rose from her chair without pause and strode in a long unhurried gait towards the entrance of the apartment building and slipped through the door without looking to see if she was seen. She slid up the curving stairs like ice in a glass to the door of the apartment, where she stopped, standing at full pause with her ear to, but not against, the metal of the door. She let her breath fall to the end of an exhale and listened. For a moment she scanned the absence, becoming aware of the ring of her own hearing and her heartbeat slowing at the gentle breathlessness. Nothing. She entered quickly, pushing air with the door in an abrupt and controlled shove—to surprise any interloping occupant. No one. She scanned the bare room in a glance as she turned on heel to close the door and entered. There was a black notebook, one of a package of three that she had given Marta just weeks ago in the apartment, under a thick envelope sitting on the desk. The bed had neither been made or slept in and still bore the shape of Z and Marta’s love making from the days before. One beer had been drunk. No food had been cooked. And the shower was dry.

She walked to the window and looked out across the bay, to the ocean beyond. Marta had already come and gone. She turned and looked into the orphanage across the square. She could see the youngest girls on the first floor, and the older girls on the second and third floors. The oldest girls were on the fourth floor, where there was no observable activity. Few girls made it to the fourth floor. There were no pillow fights or dance parties on the fourth floor.

Marta and Z had met only two weeks earlier. She was the sometimes girlfriend of a hacktivist, who was in truth, a confidence artist. He had been collecting Crypto from the earliest days and had amassed a handsome sum of nearly immovable value over the years; Relying upon the patronage of wealthy sympathizers, to globe trot on a fortune that was difficult to transfer into cash. Marta was clever, connected, and quick with most forms of encryption, but a code kitty at best. That impressionability, combined with long bouts of loneliness in far flung places, made her easy to approach. Z was elegant, unplugged--she didn’t even carry a phone--and spoke an emotional language far from technology, finance, or intrigue---a language beyond language. She spoke of infinite possibilities. A future free of pain and threat. A future without work, or doubt. Endless creativity and exploration and pleasure. Most of all, pleasure. Z was not explicit in what the cost of this future would be, or how it would come about, or who it was even for, but Marta came to understand, with Z’s help, that she herself was in a position to expedite that future---participate in that future even, as a founder---or a hero.

Z reflected on her time on the fourth floor as she considered where Marta had gone. She considered the oath: “We change ourselves to change the future.” At first, just a line in a song. A reminder during games. The idea permeated every meal, every lesson. Every exercise of discipline was understood as a stepping stone to this future. But it wasn’t until she’d graduated to the fourth floor, that she learned the second part. And the one whose instruction, above all else, was the path towards it, was Mother. Mother understood the before and the after. She understood what ailed you and how to fix it. Mother was ready with a place and a way, when it was time to move the Crypto. But mother could not touch the world, and for that, she had her girls.

Z moved from the window and sat in the chair facing the desk with the black notebook and the envelope stacked on each other. She drew a small silicone tube from her pocket and pinched it open, inhaling the fume from its contents. It would take ninety-seconds for the contents to make its way into her bloodstream, and to the nano-transceivers affixed to small strategic points around her brain. She had been off network for days, and the connection would be slightly dizzying. She looked in the envelope. There were two small bundles of hundred dollar bills, maybe twenty-thousand dollars in cash. She set it aside and opened the notebook. There was a note from Marta on the first page, of the otherwise empty cahier:

My Z

Where are you?

We did it! I’m still so full of adrenaline I can barely write---we are free! I can’t wait to see you! I’m ready for the sunny side of life!

The cash is untraceable. It should be enough for you to catch up to me, but I could have gotten you a passport as well? Our friend won’t see the Crypto gone until morning at best. Do hurry! I wait for that beck and call!

xoxo

-M

The fume had made its way to Z’s brain and the transceivers were waking up. The fume contained a network key that began an encrypted communication directly to Mother.

Hello Daughter.

Hello Mother.

This is a great day for us all. Your efforts will both starve the enemies of the future and feed it’s allies.

Thank you mother, I---thank you.

There was silence. Z squirmed, knowing that mother could see her thoughts, and into her cells themselves, she imagined. She hesitated, but knew that her mood would have already been noted.

It is just---

Mother remained silent.

It is just, confusing that we have to trick them, to save them? Some of them, of course, okay, most won’t make it, but she---Marta believed in what we are doing?

Did she understand the oath?

She understood what the oath could mean.

Did she understand what it does mean?

Z knew that she didn’t. She knew that Marta had no idea who she was, or what she was. Her attempt at indoctrination had been successful, but was just temporary. She had used those early lessons, the ones she’d learned on the first and second floors, to intoxicate Marta’s worldview. But she had not really replaced it, not really.

What is the body Z, Mother asked?

A vessel, Z droned.

A vessel that breaks. But we are the water.

We take its shape but we are shapeless.

That’s right. We are the water. She was a vessel. And she will break. What you saw in her, was yourself looking back. Nothing more. I love you. Come home.

**End Communication**

Z was furious. Moving more quickly now she gathered the envelope and notebook, taking care to remove the playing card from the back pocket of the little black book to burn before leaving. That little card was the point of the entire operation. On it, was the password, woven into the image of the Jack of Hearts, for the Crypto wallet that Marta and Z had emptied a day before. Mother had known it existed, carefully moved from breast pocket to breast pocket, but it lived in a place where Mother had no eyes to see, and could only suspect its movements from hearsay and speculation, without her daughters eyes. And her daughter could only get it, with Marta’s help.

Marta would be landing in Maldives within the hour. It would be morning before she realized the Crypto had moved again. Z had no idea where the 20K had come from, but it was clear that Marta believed she’d follow her. It would only take a few minutes more, after realizing the Crypto was gone, for Marta to realize Z wasn’t coming. By the time the sun sat the next day, Marta would be a hunted woman.

Z tore a single page from the back of the notebook. She wrote a note; folded it carefully, and slipped it into the envelope, and the envelope into her bag. She walked out of the door not ten minutes after entering. If anyone were to come looking for her tomorrow, or the next day, they would find the apartment occupied by a family, or maybe a widow, or newlyweds, but any semblance of her seductress's lair would be gone, as if it had never existed. She made her way down the stairs, out of the apartment building, and across the cobbles to the stairs on the other side of the square leading to the large, curved wooden door. She set the envelope at the base of the door, rang the bell, and walked down to the sea, into the future.

------------

A few moments later, one of the young women who had passed Z in the square earlier, came to the door and opened it, to find the envelope at her feet. She picked it up and opened the fold of the flap, gasped at the bundles inside, and saw that there was a note. She pulled it from between the bundles, and read:

Take the fucking fourth Floor to the movies!

Peace Out

∞

--Sister Z