The Girl on The Elevator Read online

  The Girl on The Elevator

  Greg Dragon

  http://gregdragon.com

  Copyright © 2018

  Thirsty Bird Productions

  This is a book of fiction. Names, characters, and situations are of the author’s imagination. Any similarities to people, places, or crimes is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted without the express written consent of the author.

  Table of Contents

  1 | The New Neighbor

  2 | Tek er Oom

  3 | One Last Thing

  4 | Laundry Night

  5 | Masks Off

  6 | The Spider

  1 | The New Neighbor

  A myriad of lights danced a vertical bouncing motion on the near black panel as Tau Fabian waited for the door to open. Eighteen floors had passed. Eighteen; it was his favorite number and the one floor he could count on slipping by without someone stopping to—the elevator slowed its rise to a halt and he looked up to see the doors slide open.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, fighting the urge to keep the doors closed. He could do it if he wanted to, and they wouldn’t suspect a thing. Whoever it was would assume that the button had malfunctioned. They would jam on it a few more times, and when the car returned, he would be long gone and not have to deal with them.

  It felt like a violation. Whoever it was had broken his count, disrupted his expectations, and was making him anxious—a feeling that he absolutely hated. This person was a bug in the reliable coding of G.Henna’s process. A freaky glitch inside a smooth running machine. A spontaneous combustion, an unwanted thing; they had broken his count and now he would have to stand next to them.

  A slender young woman entered the lonely 5x7, and slender fingers tipped with black fingernail polish touched the panel ever so gently. She didn’t bother to look at Tau. She just walked in, avoided eye contact, and selected a double-digit number. Tau thought he saw her select “twenty-one”, but he wasn’t quite sure until he saw it reflected on the overhead display.

  She had thick, curly hair with purple highlights, and she smelled like the candles his mother used to burn. The thought of this depressed him and he seemed to float as the elevator resumed its rise. Who was this woman who smelled of pain, yet had the body of a goddess?

  He had spent three years as a tenant of building G.Henna and nine hundred days sitting inside of his apartment. This meant 1,785 rides on the elevator and yet, until this very second, he was convinced that he and Jo were the only tenants living above the eighteenth floor.

  She lives above my floor? he thought. How is it I’ve never seen her before? He followed her legs down past a landscape of green mesh to where they transitioned neatly into a pair of spiky pumps. She’s hot, he thought, and she lives above eighteen. How in the hell have I missed out on this?

  A chime went off and the elevator slowed down, but this time the door opened up to a vacant lobby. The hallway beyond was shrouded in darkness, except for a halogen light that blinked as if it was begging for its life.

  “This you?” the girl asked, her voice snapping him to attention. It was a nonchalant cooing with a raspy undertone.

  “Yep, this is me. Have a nice day,” he remarked, as he glanced at her long enough to download her features.

  “Okay, dude,” she replied with an expression of mild amusement, but he was too stunned to read the sarcasm. She has big, beautiful purple eyes … purple? No, that can’t be right. The woman looked away and he was finally free of her hypnotic stare.

  The girl was gorgeous and it was obvious from her t-shirt that she too was into Phoenix Ray and The Harmonics. Friggin perfect, he thought to himself. A hot mystery girl, and she has good taste. Of course she was into Phoenix Ray, DUH! He could hear “Life’s a Glitch” playing through her tiny earbuds.

  Tau didn’t realize that he was still frozen in the lobby, but all he could think about was the girl and how stupid he sounded with the “have a nice day.” No wonder she gave him that queer look when he said it. Why couldn’t I be cool and say something like, “peace,” or “you’re welcome to join me,” or something like that?

  He stomped down the hall in a long measured stride, his canvas shoes making farting noises on the uneven floor. G.Henna was falling apart, but who would dare complain? Start making noise about creaky floors and risk being discovered by a hunter disguised as a maintenance drone.

  He stopped in front of a plain gray door, with the number 2069 on the plaque. The number was wrong, breaking the sequence that was the floor combined with apartment number. The two and zero were correct but the six and the nine had been flipped around.

  Tau leaned close to the door, trying to see if he could hear anything. The light flickered from the solitary bulb and then a loud popping sound scared the life out of him, and everything went black.

  “Damn it,” Tau whispered, and knocked gently on the door.

  “You know the drill. Say the words or haul ass,” said a muffled voice.

  “Come on, Jo, the lights aren’t working out here,” he tried.

  “I don’t open this door without the password,” the muffled voice said.

  “I live, I die. I live again!” Tau shouted, and the muffled voice became a loud fit of laughter.

  “Man, I love it when your tall pale ass does that War Boy quote for your man,” the voice said. Then the door slid open to a dim room and revealed a large dark man wearing a pair of new-age precision shades and an obnoxiously large earpiece.

  A large brown paw reached out and pulled Tau into the apartment, then the door slid shut and the lights came on as well as the bass from a loud hip hop song. Tau shook his head but couldn’t help but smile as his roommate regarded him warmly.

  “WELCOME TO VALHALLA!” he shouted, and embraced Tau, who tried not to laugh but eventually failed. He pushed past the man to find the couch, noticing the state of the carpet and how nasty it was.

  “You ever hear about a thing called a vacuum?” he asked. “It’s pretty cool, actually. It sucks up crap, and you don’t have to worry about bugs and alien creatures running up your leg.”

  Jovan Mosley hissed his teeth while throwing up a middle finger. He was too deep into the lyrics of the song to care about Tau’s critique.

  “The lights are all out in your hallway, y’know,” Tau continued. “Is that you, or am I to believe that every last bulb has blown?”

  Jovan stopped and clicked pause on the music. “You like that shit, don’t you? I’m getting crazy with it, Tau!”

  “Dude, you powered down the entire floor. Is that your idea of discreet?”

  “Nobody comes up here, bruh. Calm your ass down. We agreed that we would level up our shit. Show the rest of the Sirens how the wolf pack gets down.”

  Tau thought about his words and decided that he was right. Jovan’s gift of shorting out small electronics had seemed so menial before. It was a troll’s gift, an annoyance that forced you to replay levels of a videogame, or log back into your computer. Now he was able to drown a floor in perpetual darkness, which he did now just because he could.

  He had learned that the lights in the Henna buildings would go through a series of checks whenever there was a short. This series of checks took up to five minutes, at which time he could short them again. So much could be done within the length of that pause and he wondered how far it could go.

  “Hey, do you know a short-haired girl that lives up on twenty-one?” he asked.

  “Ain’t nobody up there,” Jovan said, giving him a look of impatience.

  “Mm, yeah, someone lives up there. I was just on the elevator with her.”

  “Yo, check this
out,” he whispered, ignoring Tau’s question, and brought over his tablet with what looked to be an overhead shot of Pittsburgh. “You looking?” he pushed, and Tau nodded irritably. He moved his hand across the display and it popped up into a third-dimensional hologram.

  “What are the red dots?”

  “That’s us, baby! Courtesy of the evil genius, Bonk.”

  Tau rolled his eyes. Bonk was always coming up with applications that would either invade people’s privacy or reveal their whereabouts at the touch of a button. He was a brilliant programmer, but Tau believed that everything he made was meant to either fuel his revenge or his bank account through blackmail and extortion.

  One of Bonk’s first inventions came about after the 2036 elections when anonymity on the internet became a thing of the past. He created a virus that would attach itself to a person’s browser, read their keystrokes, and link their real names and photos to their various online personalities. From this he created an app that anyone could use to look up the information on another person.

  The app had an experimental feature where you could get a quick heat map on where a person stood on certain topics. From a simple search you could see whether a person was a bigot, a misogynist online, or a troll who pretended to be one. Unfortunately for those being searched, it came at the cost of their jobs, fallouts in their social circles, and on one occasion, death.

  Bonk’s app disappeared shortly after but nothing happened to him. He became wealthy overnight, yet refused to tell his friends how. Tau knew his entire history and feared him enough to stay far away from him. Now this destroyer of lives had his eyes on Sirens. Why couldn’t Jovan see the folly in befriending a snake like Justin “Bonk” Lang?

  “So Bonk has you convinced that he tagged Sirens all over the city?”

  “That dude is crazy, Tee! He’s working on a network for people like us to link up. Just grab the file, approve the connection, and boom, just like that, you can connect with other Sirens all over Pittsburgh.”

  “What happens if someone not a Siren gets ahold of one of our computers? It’s a shortsighted plan that’s going to get a lot of people killed. Tell me that you didn’t—”

  “Oh, hell no,” Jovan spoke up quickly. “You think I’m stupid? I know better than that. It’s in the alpha phase, but a few Sirens around the city signed up to get a free Suri Enterprise 8.”

  Tau couldn’t believe what he was hearing and seeing. Why didn’t Jovan see the implications of a program that tracked a select group? The history of turmoil between the people and the government’s hired hackers should have been warning enough to him. “Jo, how is this different from what they’re doing with our implants and the facilities we use? They know where we are at all times, but now you’re helping to pinpoint who among us are Sirens. You’re way too smart to be this dumb.”

  “Tee, it’s voluntary. How is that even risky?”

  Tau slapped the cushions of the couch. Is he screwing with me? “Any one of us can volunteer someone else that we don’t like, especially if we know that a hunter or two has that application. Isn’t this just typical of people? Risking their freedom for a new computer? If they get caught, they deserve what’s coming to them. But you cut me off. There’s a chick upstairs! Upstairs, where we’ve been a million times. There shouldn’t be anyone up there.”

  “She fine?” Jovan asked, smiling a crooked yellow smile. He waved his hand above the tablet and the hologram vanished into the surface.

  “She’s pretty fine, but I didn’t get to talk to her. Well, I told her bye, but I didn’t swap contact codes with her or anything.”

  “Of course you didn’t. Come on, man. Your scared ass probably ran from her.” Jovan laughed as if he had said the funniest joke ever told in life, but Tau merely stared at him impatiently. “Twenty-one, that’s where she went? I wonder who stays up there. What if it’s a hunter, scoping us out? Shit, did she see that the lights were off up here?”

  “She had to see it, but, I don’t know—”

  “What?” Jovan’s face was a mask of anger.

  “I don’t think a tiny girl like that would be hunting Sirens. I mean, any one of us could overpower her, y’know … she was like a hundred and twenty pounds.”

  Tau walked over to the television—an uneven strip of 35”x20” organic LED—that had been hastily pasted on the wall. He peeled up the edges and did his best to straighten it. It took everything within him not to ask Jovan for a tape measure, but when he stepped back to judge his adjustment, he was quite pleased with what he had done.

  He gestured on its surface to bring up the desktop, then touched his finger on the icon of the identifier to connect his UIT to the Massive Internet Movie Experience Stream (MIMES). An explosion of color flooded the panel, followed by the image of a third dimensional reel.

  The graphic spun then flattened out and dissipated to reveal a table of titles. He noticed something new, a trailer for an Augmented Experience entitled “Singularity.” He touched it once to load, then went back to the leather couch and waited for the stream to upload locally.

  “How’s the job hunt going?” he asked Jovan, who was now click-click-clicking away on his unlisted CPU.

  “About as good as the sex hunt. Know what I mean? It’s cool. I’m doing a project right now.”

  “If what you mean by ‘sex hunt’ is your failed odyssey to have sex in your forties. I’ll assume that you haven’t applied anywhere and you’re still doing overrides for those hacker assholes.” Tau couldn’t help but smile to himself at his clever jab at his friend’s sex life.

  Jovan guffawed but kept at whatever he was coding. “Paranoid, Tee?” he asked in a drawling tone. “You checking in on me? It’s okay, honey, my half of the rent will get paid, alright?”

  Tau didn’t answer him, choosing instead to focus on the trailer that he accidentally started by throwing up his hands. He slipped on the experience visor and tried to relax as three-dimensional clouds began to crowd the entirety of his vision. The visor’s speakers cupped his ears, and ambient sounds made Jovan seem far away.

  It was all so peaceful, so therapeutic, and he was fast asleep within the span of a minute.

  2 | Tek er Oom

  During the days Tau was at work at the Southside Recycling Plant. Though his degree was in Information, what he did to pay the bills was to repurpose garbage.

  As of 2032, the government no longer trusted the populace to decide when to recycle their trash. Refuse was sent to a Recycling Plant, and within these factories were Garbage Repurposers—poor bastards like Tau who were tasked with finding new ways in which to reuse their resources.

  Tau had been working at the plant for over three years, and had been saving the money he earned in hopes of moving out of the Henna complex. He had his hands on the controls of a pair of robotic arms, and was rotating what used to be a rather voluptuous sex doll.

  “Marty,” he called out, then stopped to glance over at the tall, dark-haired man who was at his own controls. They were all on a platform suspended above an ocean of garbage, and though glass separated them from the stench and the flies, the robotic arms were not so lucky.

  Marty, who was a bit of a ladies man, wore the uniform as a necessary accessory for a hard day’s work. Tau on the other hand made it look sloppy and comical. His tall, thin features and buzzed Caesar hairdo was not a good fit for the oversized suit and boots. He looked like a chicken whose yellow feathers were melting, and it didn’t help very much that he was sweating like a pig.

  “What you got, Tow?” Marty replied, mispronouncing Tau’s name as usual. He flashed him a confident grin as he sauntered over as if he was performing a dance.

  That walk and that smile, what the fuck? Do you work hard at being a douche? Tau wanted to say. He cocked his head at the glass to show him the disfigured doll. Marty clucked his tongue and then leaned against the glass—which sloped up in front of them to disappear into the high metallic ceiling.

&nbs
p; “Hohoo! What you expect to do with her, Tow? Tek ‘er oom?” he teased in that thick accent of his. He then glanced around to make sure no one was looking and then began simulating—quite realistically—what he would do if he was the one to, “tek ‘er oom.” Tau couldn’t help but laugh at Marty’s air humping, which brought them attention from some female staff members. This forced Marty to put a stop to his display but Tau couldn’t get the image out of his head.

  “Incinerate da’ bitch. What good is she, Tow?” he said, then reached over and tapped the glass, pointing to the incineration chute. Tau felt stupid for having called him over, but Marty was his supervisor and had been working there since the beginning.

  His mobile phone vibrated and he quickly reacted, moving the arms above the chute, where he released the fingers and let the plastic body tumble into the incinerator. He removed his arms from the holes in the dashboard and reached into his pocket to recover his phone. It was a missed call from Jovan but since he didn’t text, Tau took it as unimportant.

  It was an hour before lunch, and though most of the workers would go outside to smoke and eat, Tau would work through his lunch where he took the opportunity to practice his gift.

  Tau thought that his gift was the ability to manipulate a roped elevator system but he later discovered that it went beyond that. With intense concentration, he could make an elevator rise or fall, but he could also open the doors and force them to stay closed.

  It was an art that he had mastered through many hours of practice, and most of it he did here, at the Southside Recycling Plant. There was a small lift that manipulated the garbage, and during the hour that his coworkers ate lunch he would move it up and down.

  Today there were visitors looking in on the plant, so Tau cursed his luck and decided to go outside. One of his coworkers was a Siren—the name given to those with the gifts—but Tau only knew this because he was Jovan’s friend.

  He remembered his name as Peter, or was it Paul or … to be honest, who cares? It was something from the Bible; the nerd had told him as much when they first met. He was a fat, bald guy with a leprechaun’s beard, which fanned the bottom half of his moon-shaped face. He wore a half-cap enhancement—an expensive accessory—which replaced his ears with circular audio-receptors. This Siren had super hearing, it was what that augment earned him, but it looked out of place on his soft, pallid frame.