HOME | DD

Description
It’s surprising how quickly your priorities change when you find out that you’re knocked up.

I was in the middle of a job when I found out. Not a sanctioned one, but I figure what the Base doesn’t know can’t hurt them. I don’t think the Base should begrudge me a few extras, especially when their pay is so shit.

I’m shocked that so many people volunteer to work for them. Myself included.

It must be the perks, the draw of the talent. It does feel a little like you have super-powers at first, like you’re cheating the laws of physics. I guess because you are. Dave, my supervisor, has tried to explain it all to me before. Something about gravitation time dilation. It went in one ear and out the other. All I know is that I can blur now.

And blurring is fantastic.

I crouched in the shadows of the front stoop, waiting for the cook to leave for the day. Front stoop is probably the wrong word for it – it seems like when your mansion is big enough, all the words that describe the parts of it are French for some reason. I think this would be the porte-co-something or other.

This, for the record, is not blurring. This is sneaking, and I’m really good at it. It’s how I got picked up by the Base in the first place.

The cook opened the door of the porte-co-whatever at 17:15 on the dot, like she did every day. She was wearing a ratty overcoat that reeked of grease, and dragging a huge knock-off designer bag behind her like it was full of bricks. I smiled from the shadows – maybe I wasn’t the only one with sticky fingers.

As she stepped through the door, I released that little catch in my brain that let me blur. The snnnnniick sensation of it whispered through my mind, and the little hairs on the back of my neck stood up. It’s a rush every time.

I got lighter – a whole lot lighter – and everything around me slowed to a standstill. I walked by the cook, stepping around her and her bag, and into the mansion.
It was the cleanest, whitest, shiniest place I’d ever seen.

I’d never been inside of it, but I kinda knew what to expect. The owner was some trader hot-shot. Bastard made a killing on betting against the market. When the economy went completely tits-up, he went on record about it, making fun of the poor sods who weren’t ‘intelligent’ enough to predict what he had. Which, you know, means most of us. The public outlash was pretty bad, especially when word got out that the only reason he’d been so well informed was that he was dealing in some kind of illegal insider trading stuff. He was forced to step down as CEO of whatever stock or mutual fund thing he was head of, and he ended up hiding away in this mansion with all of his possessions like some kind of crazy hermit.

Expensive possessions. Lots of them.

I’m always happy to lighten a person’s load.

The possessions made him a tempting target, but his paranoia about surveillance systems made him a fantastic one. The only security at his mansion was a shit-ton of locks on all of the doors and windows. Once you were inside, there weren’t any cameras or sensors, or anything from preventing you from getting out again. It was a girl’s dream.

My blur took me through the front door to the coat closet, where I hid again. Strictly speaking, opening doors – manipulating any physical item – while blurred is supposed to be a no-no, but a lot of people do it anyway. This is where stories of ghosts and poltergeists come from – to a stationary, it’s gonna appear that an item shoots across the room like a bullet, or like a door opens and closes by itself in the blink of an eye. It makes people rub their eyes and question their sanity when they see it, so we try not to do it in front of them.

Luckily for me, the owner of this place always took a nap while the cook fixed his dinner. He really really didn’t like to see other people. Crazy bastard.

I took a small break in the closet to scope the place out. I left the door open a crack, so I could see the entry foyer (is foyer a French word?), and a little bit of the receiving room. The place was clean. Not just picked up and tidy, but clean like a hospital room before a surgery clean. It reeked of ammonia and chemical lemons, even from inside the closet. I had to breathe through my mouth for a bit, until my nose got used to the smell.

Artwork lined the walls of the foyer, picked out with dramatic lighting. Their frames looked more expensive than anything I’d ever owned – they were curly and mooshy looking, like they’d been squeezed out of a toothpaste tube and covered in gold.

The receiving room looked like the better option. Ornate shelves spanned the walls from floor to ceiling, each one full of old tech. Spotlights shone down on these too, sparkling on the glass screens and meticulously polished plastic casings. I spotted an Apple 1, a Kenbak-1, a Scelbi-8H, and an Altair 8800 from my hiding place.

My mouth watered. Jackpot.

At this point, I should probably explain my plan. It was a good one – simple, and straight to the point. After years of lifting, I’d found that it was the complicated plans that get you into trouble.

It relied on one of the ‘flaws’ in the chip that the Base implanted in me. The chip allowed us to blur, so I had no problem with it, really. The only drawback is that it also tracked when we blurred, and relayed the information back to the Base, which made it really hard to make up an alibi.

The thing that the chip didn’t have was GPS tracking. They had no idea where I was when I was blurring.

So my plans usually revolved around timing. I’d get into a place and get the goods when it should be nearly impossible to. Then, I planted evidence that made the crime seem like it happened later than it really did. When that time rolled around, I tried to be obviously un-blurred. Really obviously unblurred, like hanging out at the Base.

For this plan, I was relying on a little 12 year old delinquent that I’d met a few days before. I found him throwing rocks at windows – a hobby that I sympathize with, but I told him I’d report him for it if he didn’t help me out. I’m a bitch like that. But hey, all he had to do to help me was break the front window of this mansion at 22:00, after the owner had headed upstairs to bed. Easy-peasy. By that time, I’d be safely relaxing on Dave’s uncomfortable sofa, telling him how hard I’d been training earlier.

I got an alibi, and the kid got twenty credits. It was a win-win.

I blurred into the receiving room to get a better look at the electronics. The room was more than just a jackpot, it was a full on tech-gasm. Rows and rows of rare and ancient electronics glittered in the spotlights, and were reflected in the polished white marble tile floor. A solitary chair sat in the middle of the room, upholstered in rich fabric that looked like it came straight from a movie set about kings and queens.
My eyes scanned over the electronics, trying to determine which would get me the most credits per pound.

After a few minutes standing around with my mouth open, I hid in another closet to wait for the right moment to make my escape with tech in hand. You’ve gotta love mansions – it seems like every room has a hidden closet somewhere in the paneled walls. The one I picked was see-thru. It had some sort of fancy lattice on the decorative panels, rather than having solid doors. I had a nice view of the room. Unfortunately, I had to share it with a bunch of cleaning chemicals. The smell made my nose itch.

A shuffling sound from the next room meant that the old man was following his schedule right on cue. It was 17:30 – for the next half-hour, he would eat dinner in that solitary chair while he looked at his treasures.

I crouched down to wait, knowing that he would follow the same routine that he did every day. My watch was set to 19:30, when he always headed down to the media room for his evening movie. The perfect opportunity to blur my way out with an armful of loot.
The old man walked in. I was a little surprised – it was only by looking really close that I could see any similarities between the man in front of me, and the photos I’d seen of him from 20 years ago. He was balding – the top of his head was smooth and gleamed as bright as the floors. The rest of his face was all lined and worn looking. I almost felt sorry for the bastard until I got a better look at his eyes. They were deep-set and totally cold. And not just a little crazy, I remember thinking. Turns out, I was right.

Suddenly, my smartcharm ring vibrated. I spun it on, and a faintly-glowing message popped up in front of my eyes. The message was from the Base.

“CODE 204,” it blinked.

“?” my finger darted through the air, hitting an imaginary key.

“CODE 204: CEASE BLUR ACTIVITY IMMEDIATELY.” it flashed back immediately.

“WT-everloving-F, Base?”

“CODE 204 IS MEDICAL, CASSIDY. IF YOU’D EVER READ YOUR MANUAL, YOU’D KNOW THAT. CEASE BLUR ACTIVITY IMMEDIATELY.”

From the tone of the message, I figured that it must be Sam on monitor readouts that night, since he was the only one who ever got snippy with me. I thought for a moment and typed out a response calculated to piss him off.

“Aww, and here I thought I was a perfect specimen of womanhood. How about you just give me a physical when I get back to the Base? Wink wink, nudge nudge.”

“DAMMIT, CASSIDY. YOU’RE PREGNANT. CEASE BLUR ACTIVITY IMMEDIATELY.”

Oh.

… well, fuck me.

Although apparently that’d already been done.

The ring was vibrating again. I spun it back on.

“DO YOU COPY?”

“Copy.” I really didn’t have much more to say than that.

The old man shuffled to his fancy throne and sighed as he sank down into it. I watched him blankly as he ate, hypnotized by the motion of his fork to his mouth, barely aware of where I was. I had more burning things on my mind. And a few questions. My fingers hovered in the air, tapping out a new message.

“Base. Why do you think that I’m pregnant? I’m not, uh, in bed right now.”

“CASSIDY, WE ALL KNOW YOU PREFER PUBLIC BATHROOM STALLS TO BEDS.” It was definitely Sam on the other end. Sarcastic bastard. “THE ZYGOTE JUST IMPLANTED, WE PICKED UP YOUR HORMONE CHANGE. PROBABLY FROM A ROMP YOU HAD A WEEK OR SO AGO.”

Ooh, doctor-speak. This discussion of zygotes and implanting was squicking me out a little, but I wasn’t going to let Sam know it.

“So I can’t blur because…”

“BECAUSE THE SHIFT IN GRAVITY WILL PROBABLY KILL THE ZYGOTE.”

Huh.

I knew that the Base didn’t give a shit about anyone’s future kids. This was simply a cover-your-ass moment, where they were doing their damndest to make sure that any decision I made was mine and mine alone.

But the hell of it is, if I blurred again, they’d want to know why. I couldn’t exactly tell them that it was because I was hiding out in the mansion of a washed-up stock trader, waiting to steal his stuff.

For that matter, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to blur. I mean, I wasn’t terribly excited about the prospect of popping out a kid, but I figured that if she was getting my genes, she was going to be a lot more awesome than the brats who always seemed to be pitching tantrums at the grocery store.

So my options: I could blur and escape with my loot as planned, which would make Base suspicious and possibly kill my kid. Or, I could stay put and try to sneak out with my loot when the old man wasn’t looking, which could maybe land me a jail sentence (and would piss off Base). I wasn’t particularly thrilled with either of them.

Things seemed so simple ten minutes ago. Ah, those shifting priorities.

I slipped my ring into the off position and turned back to watch the room on the other side of the lattice. I was leaning towards option number two. Like I said before, I’ve always been pretty sneaky. If I couldn’t blur, it was going to be a little harder to get away than I had originally planned, but surely I could still get out without being noticed. I just needed to lay low, and wait for him to leave the room for a few minutes. I bit my lip, leaning forward as I waited for an opportunity to bolt.

The old man had taken his empty plate to the kitchen, and came back into the room with a frown on his face. He kept swiveling his head back and forth, like he was looking for something. I’d heard that people can sometimes sense when someone is watching them, so I looked away, hoping that I hadn’t creeped him out enough for him to start checking closets.

Out of my peripheral vision, I saw him walk over to the closet beside mine.
He pulled out a small vacuum cleaner with a delicate looking brush on the end, placed it under one of the tech shelves, and returned to the closet for more cleaning supplies.
God, I hoped he didn’t need anything out of my closet. What kind of a freak has two closets of cleaning supplies in each room, anyhow? My body tensed, my back felt like it was going to snap in two.

He closed the doors to the closet, a small brush and a few cans of aerosol spray in hand. He placed them on one of the lower shelves, next to the Altair that I’d had my eye on, and reached down to start up the vacuum. The white noise hum of its engine seemed loud in the echoing room, but it gave me the cover to shift my weight around and get comfortable. I’m not sure if you’ve ever sat around hiding, just waiting to be discovered, but it makes your muscles awfully sore.

Methodically, he vacuumed the non-existent dust from each computer, spending a lot of time on the keyboards. After what seemed like an hour (and nearly was, according to my watch), he turned off the vacuum, and picked up the brush.

Suddenly, he stopped, and turned to look right at my closet. I held my breath. Had I been staring? Had he felt me staring?

Just as fast as he’d looked over, he turned and left the room. I let out my breath as quietly as I could. Just a coincidence, then. It wasn’t 19:30 yet, so I doubted that he was done with his weirdo cleaning escapades. I decided to stay put until my original planned escape time. Only an hour to go. It was starting to feel like forever.
The old man shuffled back into the room, his right hand stuffed under the front of his bathrobe. For a second, I wondered if he was grabbing at his chest, like he was having a heart attack or something.

He walked directly to my closet. He threw the door back. I barely had time to squeak in surprise.

His right hand whipped out from under his robe, holding a pistol. Aimed right for me, of course.

Time seemed to slow to a crawl, even though I wasn’t blurred. I could see that his hand shook a little, had time to notice that his fingernails were long and curled and yellow.
His face was a snarl. There was dried spit and spinich at the corners of his lips.
His eyes flicked to the floor, then back at me. He gave a tiny, high-pitched giggle.
I looked at the floor. There was a small, dirty footprint right in front of the closet. I recognized it as mine.

I blinked at him, unable to move otherwise. But my brain was screaming at me to do something.

Should I blur or try to run? Blur or run?

Blurring would most definitely let the Base know what I was up to.

Running would get me shot.

Either way, my kid was gonna die.

Apparently, my body got tired of my brain’s analysis paralysis, and decided to take over.

I reached for a something – anything – within my reach to use as a weapon. My hands found something big, and threw it directly into the old man’s chest. A 5 gallon bucket of bleach. He toppled to the ground under the weight, and the gun fell from his hand. The lid of the bucket flew off. A fan of bleach arced through the air, dousing the old man, and discoloring the fancy chair behind him.

I knew he was down, but I didn’t think it was for good. Frantically, I grasped for anything else in the closet to use as a weapon.

This time, my hands found a bottle of ammonia.

Checkmate, you old bastard.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever accidentally mixed bleach and ammonia, but I had. Once, on accident, when I was a kid, I tried to clean the house to impress my mom. She found me when she got home from work two hours later, passed out on the front stoop. When you mix them, they make some sort of really vile fumes that mess you up. Bad. I had been really lucky that I had managed to pull myself out of the house.

I pulled my shirt up over my face, and unscrewed the cap of the ammonia.

I jumped over the old man, and tossed the open bottle of ammonia over my shoulder.

On my way out of the room, I grabbed the Altair 8800.

The kid’s gonna need a college fund, after all.

Description
It’s surprising how quickly your priorities change when you find out that you’re knocked up.

I was in the middle of a job when I found out. Not a sanctioned one, but I figure what the Base doesn’t know can’t hurt them. I don’t think the Base should begrudge me a few extras, especially when their pay is so shit.

I’m shocked that so many people volunteer to work for them. Myself included.

It must be the perks, the draw of the talent. It does feel a little like you have super-powers at first, like you’re cheating the laws of physics. I guess because you are. Dave, my supervisor, has tried to explain it all to me before. Something about gravitation time dilation. It went in one ear and out the other. All I know is that I can blur now.

And blurring is fantastic.

I crouched in the shadows of the front stoop, waiting for the cook to leave for the day. Front stoop is probably the wrong word for it – it seems like when your mansion is big enough, all the words that describe the parts of it are French for some reason. I think this would be the porte-co-something or other.

This, for the record, is not blurring. This is sneaking, and I’m really good at it. It’s how I got picked up by the Base in the first place.

The cook opened the door of the porte-co-whatever at 17:15 on the dot, like she did every day. She was wearing a ratty overcoat that reeked of grease, and dragging a huge knock-off designer bag behind her like it was full of bricks. I smiled from the shadows – maybe I wasn’t the only one with sticky fingers.

As she stepped through the door, I released that little catch in my brain that let me blur. The snnnnniick sensation of it whispered through my mind, and the little hairs on the back of my neck stood up. It’s a rush every time.

I got lighter – a whole lot lighter – and everything around me slowed to a standstill. I walked by the cook, stepping around her and her bag, and into the mansion.
It was the cleanest, whitest, shiniest place I’d ever seen.

I’d never been inside of it, but I kinda knew what to expect. The owner was some trader hot-shot. Bastard made a killing on betting against the market. When the economy went completely tits-up, he went on record about it, making fun of the poor sods who weren’t ‘intelligent’ enough to predict what he had. Which, you know, means most of us. The public outlash was pretty bad, especially when word got out that the only reason he’d been so well informed was that he was dealing in some kind of illegal insider trading stuff. He was forced to step down as CEO of whatever stock or mutual fund thing he was head of, and he ended up hiding away in this mansion with all of his possessions like some kind of crazy hermit.

Expensive possessions. Lots of them.

I’m always happy to lighten a person’s load.

The possessions made him a tempting target, but his paranoia about surveillance systems made him a fantastic one. The only security at his mansion was a shit-ton of locks on all of the doors and windows. Once you were inside, there weren’t any cameras or sensors, or anything from preventing you from getting out again. It was a girl’s dream.

My blur took me through the front door to the coat closet, where I hid again. Strictly speaking, opening doors – manipulating any physical item – while blurred is supposed to be a no-no, but a lot of people do it anyway. This is where stories of ghosts and poltergeists come from – to a stationary, it’s gonna appear that an item shoots across the room like a bullet, or like a door opens and closes by itself in the blink of an eye. It makes people rub their eyes and question their sanity when they see it, so we try not to do it in front of them.

Luckily for me, the owner of this place always took a nap while the cook fixed his dinner. He really really didn’t like to see other people. Crazy bastard.

I took a small break in the closet to scope the place out. I left the door open a crack, so I could see the entry foyer (is foyer a French word?), and a little bit of the receiving room. The place was clean. Not just picked up and tidy, but clean like a hospital room before a surgery clean. It reeked of ammonia and chemical lemons, even from inside the closet. I had to breathe through my mouth for a bit, until my nose got used to the smell.

Artwork lined the walls of the foyer, picked out with dramatic lighting. Their frames looked more expensive than anything I’d ever owned – they were curly and mooshy looking, like they’d been squeezed out of a toothpaste tube and covered in gold.

The receiving room looked like the better option. Ornate shelves spanned the walls from floor to ceiling, each one full of old tech. Spotlights shone down on these too, sparkling on the glass screens and meticulously polished plastic casings. I spotted an Apple 1, a Kenbak-1, a Scelbi-8H, and an Altair 8800 from my hiding place.

My mouth watered. Jackpot.

At this point, I should probably explain my plan. It was a good one – simple, and straight to the point. After years of lifting, I’d found that it was the complicated plans that get you into trouble.

It relied on one of the ‘flaws’ in the chip that the Base implanted in me. The chip allowed us to blur, so I had no problem with it, really. The only drawback is that it also tracked when we blurred, and relayed the information back to the Base, which made it really hard to make up an alibi.

The thing that the chip didn’t have was GPS tracking. They had no idea where I was when I was blurring.

So my plans usually revolved around timing. I’d get into a place and get the goods when it should be nearly impossible to. Then, I planted evidence that made the crime seem like it happened later than it really did. When that time rolled around, I tried to be obviously un-blurred. Really obviously unblurred, like hanging out at the Base.

For this plan, I was relying on a little 12 year old delinquent that I’d met a few days before. I found him throwing rocks at windows – a hobby that I sympathize with, but I told him I’d report him for it if he didn’t help me out. I’m a bitch like that. But hey, all he had to do to help me was break the front window of this mansion at 22:00, after the owner had headed upstairs to bed. Easy-peasy. By that time, I’d be safely relaxing on Dave’s uncomfortable sofa, telling him how hard I’d been training earlier.

I got an alibi, and the kid got twenty credits. It was a win-win.

I blurred into the receiving room to get a better look at the electronics. The room was more than just a jackpot, it was a full on tech-gasm. Rows and rows of rare and ancient electronics glittered in the spotlights, and were reflected in the polished white marble tile floor. A solitary chair sat in the middle of the room, upholstered in rich fabric that looked like it came straight from a movie set about kings and queens.
My eyes scanned over the electronics, trying to determine which would get me the most credits per pound.

After a few minutes standing around with my mouth open, I hid in another closet to wait for the right moment to make my escape with tech in hand. You’ve gotta love mansions – it seems like every room has a hidden closet somewhere in the paneled walls. The one I picked was see-thru. It had some sort of fancy lattice on the decorative panels, rather than having solid doors. I had a nice view of the room. Unfortunately, I had to share it with a bunch of cleaning chemicals. The smell made my nose itch.

A shuffling sound from the next room meant that the old man was following his schedule right on cue. It was 17:30 – for the next half-hour, he would eat dinner in that solitary chair while he looked at his treasures.

I crouched down to wait, knowing that he would follow the same routine that he did every day. My watch was set to 19:30, when he always headed down to the media room for his evening movie. The perfect opportunity to blur my way out with an armful of loot.
The old man walked in. I was a little surprised – it was only by looking really close that I could see any similarities between the man in front of me, and the photos I’d seen of him from 20 years ago. He was balding – the top of his head was smooth and gleamed as bright as the floors. The rest of his face was all lined and worn looking. I almost felt sorry for the bastard until I got a better look at his eyes. They were deep-set and totally cold. And not just a little crazy, I remember thinking. Turns out, I was right.

Suddenly, my smartcharm ring vibrated. I spun it on, and a faintly-glowing message popped up in front of my eyes. The message was from the Base.

“CODE 204,” it blinked.

“?” my finger darted through the air, hitting an imaginary key.

“CODE 204: CEASE BLUR ACTIVITY IMMEDIATELY.” it flashed back immediately.

“WT-everloving-F, Base?”

“CODE 204 IS MEDICAL, CASSIDY. IF YOU’D EVER READ YOUR MANUAL, YOU’D KNOW THAT. CEASE BLUR ACTIVITY IMMEDIATELY.”

From the tone of the message, I figured that it must be Sam on monitor readouts that night, since he was the only one who ever got snippy with me. I thought for a moment and typed out a response calculated to piss him off.

“Aww, and here I thought I was a perfect specimen of womanhood. How about you just give me a physical when I get back to the Base? Wink wink, nudge nudge.”

“DAMMIT, CASSIDY. YOU’RE PREGNANT. CEASE BLUR ACTIVITY IMMEDIATELY.”

Oh.

… well, fuck me.

Although apparently that’d already been done.

The ring was vibrating again. I spun it back on.

“DO YOU COPY?”

“Copy.” I really didn’t have much more to say than that.

The old man shuffled to his fancy throne and sighed as he sank down into it. I watched him blankly as he ate, hypnotized by the motion of his fork to his mouth, barely aware of where I was. I had more burning things on my mind. And a few questions. My fingers hovered in the air, tapping out a new message.

“Base. Why do you think that I’m pregnant? I’m not, uh, in bed right now.”

“CASSIDY, WE ALL KNOW YOU PREFER PUBLIC BATHROOM STALLS TO BEDS.” It was definitely Sam on the other end. Sarcastic bastard. “THE ZYGOTE JUST IMPLANTED, WE PICKED UP YOUR HORMONE CHANGE. PROBABLY FROM A ROMP YOU HAD A WEEK OR SO AGO.”

Ooh, doctor-speak. This discussion of zygotes and implanting was squicking me out a little, but I wasn’t going to let Sam know it.

“So I can’t blur because…”

“BECAUSE THE SHIFT IN GRAVITY WILL PROBABLY KILL THE ZYGOTE.”

Huh.

I knew that the Base didn’t give a shit about anyone’s future kids. This was simply a cover-your-ass moment, where they were doing their damndest to make sure that any decision I made was mine and mine alone.

But the hell of it is, if I blurred again, they’d want to know why. I couldn’t exactly tell them that it was because I was hiding out in the mansion of a washed-up stock trader, waiting to steal his stuff.

For that matter, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to blur. I mean, I wasn’t terribly excited about the prospect of popping out a kid, but I figured that if she was getting my genes, she was going to be a lot more awesome than the brats who always seemed to be pitching tantrums at the grocery store.

So my options: I could blur and escape with my loot as planned, which would make Base suspicious and possibly kill my kid. Or, I could stay put and try to sneak out with my loot when the old man wasn’t looking, which could maybe land me a jail sentence (and would piss off Base). I wasn’t particularly thrilled with either of them.

Things seemed so simple ten minutes ago. Ah, those shifting priorities.

I slipped my ring into the off position and turned back to watch the room on the other side of the lattice. I was leaning towards option number two. Like I said before, I’ve always been pretty sneaky. If I couldn’t blur, it was going to be a little harder to get away than I had originally planned, but surely I could still get out without being noticed. I just needed to lay low, and wait for him to leave the room for a few minutes. I bit my lip, leaning forward as I waited for an opportunity to bolt.

The old man had taken his empty plate to the kitchen, and came back into the room with a frown on his face. He kept swiveling his head back and forth, like he was looking for something. I’d heard that people can sometimes sense when someone is watching them, so I looked away, hoping that I hadn’t creeped him out enough for him to start checking closets.

Out of my peripheral vision, I saw him walk over to the closet beside mine.
He pulled out a small vacuum cleaner with a delicate looking brush on the end, placed it under one of the tech shelves, and returned to the closet for more cleaning supplies.
God, I hoped he didn’t need anything out of my closet. What kind of a freak has two closets of cleaning supplies in each room, anyhow? My body tensed, my back felt like it was going to snap in two.

He closed the doors to the closet, a small brush and a few cans of aerosol spray in hand. He placed them on one of the lower shelves, next to the Altair that I’d had my eye on, and reached down to start up the vacuum. The white noise hum of its engine seemed loud in the echoing room, but it gave me the cover to shift my weight around and get comfortable. I’m not sure if you’ve ever sat around hiding, just waiting to be discovered, but it makes your muscles awfully sore.

Methodically, he vacuumed the non-existent dust from each computer, spending a lot of time on the keyboards. After what seemed like an hour (and nearly was, according to my watch), he turned off the vacuum, and picked up the brush.

Suddenly, he stopped, and turned to look right at my closet. I held my breath. Had I been staring? Had he felt me staring?

Just as fast as he’d looked over, he turned and left the room. I let out my breath as quietly as I could. Just a coincidence, then. It wasn’t 19:30 yet, so I doubted that he was done with his weirdo cleaning escapades. I decided to stay put until my original planned escape time. Only an hour to go. It was starting to feel like forever.
The old man shuffled back into the room, his right hand stuffed under the front of his bathrobe. For a second, I wondered if he was grabbing at his chest, like he was having a heart attack or something.

He walked directly to my closet. He threw the door back. I barely had time to squeak in surprise.

His right hand whipped out from under his robe, holding a pistol. Aimed right for me, of course.

Time seemed to slow to a crawl, even though I wasn’t blurred. I could see that his hand shook a little, had time to notice that his fingernails were long and curled and yellow.
His face was a snarl. There was dried spit and spinich at the corners of his lips.
His eyes flicked to the floor, then back at me. He gave a tiny, high-pitched giggle.
I looked at the floor. There was a small, dirty footprint right in front of the closet. I recognized it as mine.

I blinked at him, unable to move otherwise. But my brain was screaming at me to do something.

Should I blur or try to run? Blur or run?

Blurring would most definitely let the Base know what I was up to.

Running would get me shot.

Either way, my kid was gonna die.

Apparently, my body got tired of my brain’s analysis paralysis, and decided to take over.

I reached for a something – anything – within my reach to use as a weapon. My hands found something big, and threw it directly into the old man’s chest. A 5 gallon bucket of bleach. He toppled to the ground under the weight, and the gun fell from his hand. The lid of the bucket flew off. A fan of bleach arced through the air, dousing the old man, and discoloring the fancy chair behind him.

I knew he was down, but I didn’t think it was for good. Frantically, I grasped for anything else in the closet to use as a weapon.

This time, my hands found a bottle of ammonia.

Checkmate, you old bastard.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever accidentally mixed bleach and ammonia, but I had. Once, on accident, when I was a kid, I tried to clean the house to impress my mom. She found me when she got home from work two hours later, passed out on the front stoop. When you mix them, they make some sort of really vile fumes that mess you up. Bad. I had been really lucky that I had managed to pull myself out of the house.

I pulled my shirt up over my face, and unscrewed the cap of the ammonia.

I jumped over the old man, and tossed the open bottle of ammonia over my shoulder.

On my way out of the room, I grabbed the Altair 8800.

The kid’s gonna need a college fund, after all.