Zeroworld, p.10
Zeroworld, page 10
Alex had a microphone hidden under her dress (which was impressive given how tight it was and how 1999 audio technology was not exactly amazing, or compact), but I couldn’t speak to her, only listen. We were hoping I wouldn’t have to warn her about anything. I took my place just around the corner from The Coffee Shop and pulled out a cigarette, which I would need to make last to not look like I was loitering. I fucking hated cigarettes, the way they felt on the back of my throat, the difficulty in breathing. Zeroworld cigarettes were as realistic as real-world ones, but I would have to suffer through. I decided to mostly not smoke it but just keep it lit and hoped no one paid too close attention. It took my mind off how much my feet were killing me in heels.
I heard the door of the shop open and the clip of Alex’s heels on the polished tile floor (if I was struggling in my shoes, how an earth was she managing in what were essentially stilts?). She reached the counter and ordered a standard latte. James must have already been there thankfully because she walked over to his table and said, “Can I join you?”. I didn’t hear anything in reply, but it must have been okay because a moment later Alex said, “Thanks, I know there are a few seats open but I like to sit by the window.”
It’s then that it began to dawn on me just how stupid this plan was. She had to entirely rely on my description of James, so I had to hope she’d got the right guy and how was she supposed to get his keys? It wasn’t as if he was going to let her search him.
“Do you come here a lot?” I could almost hear Alex cringe over the microphone as she said that.
“Every day for the last couple of weeks or so,” was James’ reply. I couldn’t place his accent, definitely not New York. It almost sounded like when a British actor plays an American – it was a stereotypical American accent but imperfect somehow, unplaceable. “Why the regularity?” Alex replied.
“Work. I can’t tell you what I do exactly, it’s a secret but being here on occasion is convenient.”
“Ohhh. You are a mystery. I’m Samantha by the way.”
“James. Nice to meet you, Samantha.”
I wondered why Alex had gone with Samantha momentarily.
“Same to you James. Do you live nearby?”
“Walking distance actually, it’s convenient.”
I could hear as he slurped coffee after saying that. He didn’t seem to have the most attractive slurping technique.
“I live a little out of town, on the outskirts, but I’m working nearby for a couple of days. This is the first time I’ve been in here.”
Then I heard a knocking sound and James saying, “fucking shit,” very loudly and Samantha/Alex was apologising profusely, “I’m sorry, James, so sorry, my hand slipped.”
My God, Alex, the most obvious move possible, but maybe it would work.
James had obviously calmed down, “don’t worry, Samantha, it’s okay but I had better get cleaned up – watch my jacket?”
I heard him get up, and then Alex’s voice over the mic, “he’s gone to the bathroom, I don’t think we’ll have long, I’m checking his jacket, let’s hope his keys are in there. Found them. Shit, there’s two. Why didn’t we think that there’d be more than one? We’re dumb. Maddy, get here, I don’t think I’ll have time to get to you and make it back.”
I’d had the same thought and was in through the door. It looked busy so I didn’t think Jeanette or any of the other regulars would notice me with my altered appearance. I walked up to Alex who handed me the keys. I stood at the table with my back to the bathroom as Alex looked beyond me in case James came out, or anyone else was watching. I quickly pressed the first key and was about to press the second when Alex grabbed my wrist. Looking at her I realised James must be coming back to the table, leaving the keys where they were and not looking behind me, I left The Coffee Shop and jogged back to my spot.
“What was that about?” James asked.
“She said her boyfriend had left her coat here earlier and apparently it looked a bit like yours and she picked it up. I’m not sure if she was just trying to steal it or what, but I stopped her. Here, your keys fell out.”
Nice one, Alex, that was some quick thinking.
“Thanks, that’s pretty fucking strange, not sure what to make of it.”
“Are you all cleaned up at least?” asked Samantha/Alex.
“Yes thanks, used the dryer.”
“No stains either, thankfully.”
“Yes, I was lucky,” or perhaps he’d been using some of his ‘magic’ powers for a quick clean up. By the sound of the spillage Alex made, I wouldn’t have thought he would come out of the toilet bone dry by just using the dryer.
“Look, it’s been interesting to meet you, Samantha, but I need to head out. Thanks for your help with my jacket.”
“Nice to meet you too, James.”
Should I follow him? I needed to make a quick decision. Fuck it, I was going to. At least I had brief visual confirmation that Alex had approached the right guy. If he went the same way as last time, then that might mean we had a bit more time to search his apartment because his routine included a regular stop at the strange alley.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case, I trailed James back to his apartment building. Again, he never once looked behind him, so I thought I was in the clear and in my business suit it was fairly easy to blend in. Once he went inside, I headed back to The Coffee Shop as quickly as I could. Alex was outside looking angry.
“Where the fuck have you been?” she said. I knew she was angry because she tended to only swear occasionally whereas I used swear words as fucking punctuation.
“Sorry, I thought I should follow him just in case, I had no way of telling you.”
“Okay, fine,” she calmed down a little, “where’d he go?”
“Back to his apartment, so assuming he comes here tomorrow, and then goes home, I won’t have much time to search. And that’s assuming the key works – I only got one of them.”
“I think we need to adapt the plan a bit. We’re not the best at this spy stuff.”
“I dunno, Samantha, you have your moments – the jacket story was some quick thinking.”
Alex smiled, which given her new body could send teenage boys into hormonal rage, so I thought it was best we head back to the den. No, there weren’t any teenage boys here, thankfully, but still one could have been hiding, maybe there were teenage boys trapped in older men’s bodies like Alex? It would explain quite a bit about some of my past relationships. “Come on, let’s go. We can work on plan B over dinner. It’s cheesecake, fuck what day is it?”
“No clue,” Alex replied, “but how about raspberry?”
“Ohhhh yes, raspberry with white chocolate?”
Chapter 15
After a ludicrous amount of cheesecake to celebrate Cheesecake Whatever The Fuck The Day Was, we got down to some planning. There was no rush, but we were desperate to get moving. Time moved as quickly or as slowly as we wanted within the den. Sometimes Alex made time move in sync with Zeroworld. For example, if we needed it to be the evening outside and it was morning, the only way to achieve that in the den was to adjust how quickly time flowed. The rest of the time an hour out there could be a second in the den or a month.
We’d created a key when we got back which was a simple matter of putting the clay on the table, and all Alex had to do was imagine the key in the impression. It looked good to me but we both knew we had a 50/50 chance of it being the right one and a chance that even if it was, it wouldn’t work, with neither of us being expert at key manufacture.
Alex had a new plan. “Okay, so here’s what I think we do, I can’t see another way around it, but we need to take another couple of days’ timeout for you to learn lock picking.”
“But, what if the key works? And wait, if I could have learnt lock picking, why didn’t we just do that in the first place?”
“Because I got so caught up in getting the key, I forgot the obvious. Besides we don’t know for sure if you learnt lock picking in here that you’d definitely be able to do it out there or whether the skill would be universal to all kinds of locks or just some. Also, I don’t know the first thing about how to do it, so I hadn’t exactly figured out how you would learn.”
Those were fair points. Time wasn’t a factor because it could pass as quickly or slowly as we wanted in relation to Zeroworld but it still felt like it was passing. Even if it wasn’t. You could feel a lack of urgency when you were taking days out to learn a skill, despite the time it took being immaterial. “Well, we have one key that may or may not work so why don’t we give that key a try, and if it works, we can go straight to searching. If not, we’ll come back for lock picking tutorials?”
“That’s fine, but I don’t think my flirting with James was exactly inspired so who knows how much of a window I can buy you?”
“I have a plan about that, a distraction that might just be effective, but we’ll need to swap roles.”
“Why?”
“Because out of the two of us, out there, I’m the expert at making things blue. I’m going to turn the entire shop blue which should hold him up out of curiosity.”
Alex sat back in her chair and thought for a moment. “That kind of hullabaloo might just work, you’ll need to stay out of sight though, he can’t see you.”
We had a plan. Alex was going to head to James’ apartment very early, and wait for him to leave (and we were hoping he was staying there overnight so he would leave in the morning). This meant she’d need yet another disguise and she would need to be quick. She would only have the time it took for James to get to the Coffee Shop and back, plus however long he spent enjoying my diversion. Alex had a couple of unused and hopefully untraceable mobile phones for us to use and keep track of each other, and we both had earphones so we could use them hands-free. We needed my disguise to be better, so I was going to have to spend the evening in mental gymnastics trying to change my appearance more dramatically. I would be at the Shop at the same time Alex arrived at his apartment so I was in place and ready. As a plan I thought it was one of our better ones, and had a reasonable chance of working. Assuming of course that it wasn’t all completely fucked from the get-go and the key didn’t work.
After a couple of frustrated hours, and yet another blue skin incident, I finally managed to change my appearance. Having been impressed by Alex’s Italian looking frame yesterday, I’d tried Greek. Long dark brown hair, olive skin, brown eyes. I’d made myself shorter, not sure why, perhaps I thought I’d blend in more if I was smaller but I realised that didn’t make any sense. Whilst I still kind of looked like me, I think if anyone knew me and then saw me, they’d assume I was Madeline’s Greek doppelganger not Madeline herself which we both decided was good enough. We hadn’t wanted to risk changing my appearance in the morning, so I was going to be a Greek woman for 24 hours or so. I was beginning to lose track of what Alex and I really looked like. We decided that I could look like I was out for a jog. I wouldn’t need to be inside the coffee shop to go for blue - at the window should be enough. Alex was going to ‘wear’ what she did yesterday. We had changed our minds on changing her appearance, figuring that if James arrived home unexpectedly to find someone in his apartment it might be marginally better if it was someone he recognised.
With an early start, we made good progress on our journey into the city. Alex had adjusted the way time passed in the den so we could sleep then wake up the next day instead of sleeping and it being only a few seconds later outside (which she’d done previously as well). Alex dropped me off at The Coffee Shop then took the car to park nearer to James’ apartment. She was hopefully going to find a space that would allow her to see the comings and goings there without leaving the car. When she saw James leave, she’d give me a heads up. In the meantime, I had to loiter nearby without looking too suspicious. I went to some steps outside an office building a block away, and sat there until I heard from Alex. If she missed James for some reason, he should walk right by me, so I was hoping I’d look anonymous enough on the steps. He was a ‘look straight ahead’ kind of a guy though so I thought I’d be safe.
After about half an hour, Alex called. “He’s on his way. I’m going to go in now.”
“Be careful,” I responded, suddenly worried.
“I’ll be okay, I have some tricks up my sleeve, you know. Just concentrate on Smurfs, we need to stall as much as possible.”
The wait for James was agonising. It seemed like he was taking an eternity to arrive, and I was starting to worry that he decided to go somewhere else, or had seen me, somehow recognised me, and was going to spring a trap of some kind. My mind was just working on what kind of trap that he might be springing when I saw him. I’d almost missed him by mulling over the consequences of him not showing up. But he walked right past me without a glance in my direction. I waited until he had gone a sufficient distance away then followed him and saw him enter The Coffee Shop.
I decided to wait across the street. I figured it wouldn’t matter if anyone else in there thought I was acting suspiciously as long as James didn’t. He currently had his back to me in the queue for coffee. Fortunately, it was quite a long queue as they were understaffed. I felt a little guilty about that, but it bought Alex more time, so not so guilty. Alex and I had agreed that once she’d called me to tell me James was on route we’d only call again in an emergency, or when she was done. We had the new phones but didn’t want to take risks on too many calls to each other. So, if she hadn’t called, she was fine. Unless of course she couldn’t get to the phone because she’d been arrested. I decided that Alex and I needed to refine our planning and spying skills as a matter of reasonable urgency, but I couldn’t worry about that now.
About fifteen minutes later, James had acquired his coffee and had been lucky to grab a seat by the window just as a flustered looking businessman was leaving. It was lucky for me too because I had a good view of him. He was sitting about halfway along the window facing away from the door. I could hopefully stand out of his view outside the entrance to The Coffee Shop poised and ready for my blue creation powers. James seemed to be sipping his coffee quickly today, and I was getting concerned.
After ten minutes, I decided I couldn’t wait any longer, and it was time for action. I needed to think angry thoughts very quickly and knew exactly where to focus. My kids. They had never understood this. The need for me to carry on. End my life earlier out there so I could live for eons in here. We had kept in touch when I first got in, but contact fizzled out. It’s strange to think of them likely being long gone now. I do think it was weird for them with me being around the same age as them in here. And they could never touch me again only see me on a video conference, when we could still video call the outside world. They were both in their late twenties when we last spoke, then there were emails for a couple of years, then communication stopped completely. It stopped for everyone. We never received a proper response as to why but with the years that have passed since; I don’t think anyone really thinks about it. Many don’t remember - they had no one they loved that they were leaving behind. It wasn’t like I could go and visit. I had no idea what happened to them, if they lived, if they died, if they had kids. I never usually thought about this because it made me so fucking angry, still, after all of these years. It hadn’t been quite what I’d signed up for or expected. I was prolonging life, not ending it, and after fifty or so years more they could have been in Zeroworld with me. At least that’s what I had thought. Yes, I was being selfish, but I couldn’t live with the alternative. Literally. But anger is exactly what I needed and thinking about my kids always got me there. It didn’t take long. I touched the window and then as I did everything inside turned blue. Everything except the people, thank goodness. But their clothes turned blue. The tables, the floor, the ceiling, the cups, and even the coffee were all my particular shade of blue. The shock was delayed for a second while people processed, then it was chaos. I quickly snuck away hoping that no-one saw me. I went back to my seat on the steps, operating with the working theory that if James saw me sitting there, he’d vaguely recollect that I was sitting there before and would figure I hadn’t moved.
The distraction did and didn’t work. There was definitely a hullabaloo (I love that word having picked it up from Alex), and whilst James had got up to go, I think, a few minutes after my blucident, he was finding it difficult to get out with the people blocking his way. But he managed finally to force his way through, and once out, he began to jog. Yes, jog. He jogged right past me, eyes forward, so at least I was invisible to him. So now he was potentially going back to his apartment more quickly than if I hadn’t created a diversion in the first place. Fuck. I phoned Alex. Fortunately, she answered straight away. “Get out! He’s running back to you.”
“Okay, on my way, don’t worry, should be fine.”
What followed was a very anxious few minutes, and I could think of nothing better to do than wait on my steps biting my nails and fidgeting with anxiety. Then, Alex phoned again, “I’m fine, I’m out. No one saw anything, as far as I know. I’ll drive round to you.” I told Alex where I was, and not long after, she pulled up.
“Well, that was exhilarating, I felt like a cat burglar,” Alex grinned.
“Yeah, yeah, but we both know I did the coolest stuff. The key worked? And what did you find out?”
