Three cheers for fulfillment! (5 minute read)
I got the call on my beeper just after lunch.
Not much of a lunch, just an old unlabeled tin that turned out to be beans and vegan sausages, cooked on our solar stove on the roof of the squat.
Downstairs I waited in line to use the community deck, anxiously tapping my foot and looking at the old patched LCD of the beeper, waiting to see if a second call would signal that the run had been cancelled.
It hadn’t.
When I finally got to sit down at the ancient computer and check my mail, the coded message was clear. I had barely enough time to put together a team and run the five blocks to the target.
There was Otter, our physical pen expert. A tall, lanky dark-skinned bloke, he got his name from his unusually extensive body hair. That and the fact that he was the only one of us who could swim.
Jewel considered herself to be a ‘leet hacker and at least had a discerning eye. She usually acted as appraiser for our runs, helping us decide what was worth taking and what should be left behind. She even claimed she could read Chinese. Since she never showed up on this occasion, all that stuff was moot.
So that left Potwór; monster. The tough punk girl who had no technical skills but was a good mule and was a mean hand with her brass knuckles.
What did I bring to the team you may ask? A little bit of everything. I was the face of our operation and Jackie of all trades.
We arrived at the fulfillment center with a little over two hours left on the clock. Wriggling in to our home made sweat suits took up the last of the excess and gave us a nice round number as a goal.
One hour to get in and load up, and one hour to get back out.
“You sure no one else knows about this?” Otter was nervous. He was always nervous.
“’Sure’ is a strong word. You sure you can open the door?”
He happily displayed his mouthful of uneven teeth and stepped forward, rubbing his sweaty palms. “Opening it is the easy part. If the alarms are active we’ll be up to our tits in corporate storm troopers before we get ten meters inside.”
“Don’t worry, the source is reliable. The warehouse is in diagnostics mode for the next two hours.”
The door proved to be easier than even I expected. We didn’t go in the front entrance, that was just for VIPs anyway, no access to the ‘bot operated warehouse from there. We found a human sized maintenance door round the back. Through some wire fence, across an expanse of pristine gravel, hoping against hope that if the cameras were working our sweat suits would keep us from showing up on infrared.
Otter spent a few seconds examining the locks and key pad, then the seals. He cut away a little bit of rubber from the edge of the door and then produced a balloon on a stick.
Slipping it in to the gap, he inflated it and then wiggled it around a bit. The door opened and we went in.
“That was too easy.”
Potwór whirred as she went in ahead of us. She’d recently upped her game by getting hold of a light weight exoskeleton. One of the models designed to increase the mobility of elderly rich folks, it nether the less gave her enhanced lifting ability. She’d be able to walk out with a piano or a dish washer, if that’s what we decided would be the best use of her capacity. We didn’t ask her where she got it.
She was bigger and tougher than any of us. Everyone knew her uncle was a farmer, so she ate every day, not just when she got lucky.
When we didn't reply, she whispered louder. “Didn’t they think of that?”
There was just a hint of her Polish ancestry in the voice. She might be an immigrant, but she’d lived here most of her life. She was a local in every way that counted.
Otter deflated the balloon and slipped it back in to his harness. “Of course. It’s an old trick but they’re too cheap to bother with two way security. If you’re inside, you are on camera and that means you’ve got good reason to be here. So they use a simple IR sensor to let workers in and out for smoke breaks. Everyone has an ankle monitor anyway.”
We slipped through the darkness, our cheap gogz showing the way. Either side of me were racks and racks of delivery boxes. All empty now. That part of the operation had been in sleep mode since the crash hit two years ago.
We passed a packing ‘bot, its big wheels and clunky arms unmoving. Even the sensor dome on top that would usually be spinning was silent and still.
“Looks like we’re OK. Nothing moving here.” I stopped at a human terminal and unplugged the handheld minicomp that dangled from a charging cradle.
The little palm sized computer gave us an inventory and a map. We’d need it, because the storehouse was spread across an area the size of 16 football fields.
“Where to first?” Otter bit his nails and looked guilty. Thieving wasn’t just a hobby for him, it was an occupation, and had occupational hazards, like getting a heavy hand on the shoulder some day.
I looked at the minicomp as we walked. You could sort the inventory by a number of categories. Price turned out to be the most useless for our purposes. A ten thousand Euro handbag would never sell on the estate, while tinned sausages would be worth their weight in gold. There were real luxury items here, but nothing we could carry out on our own. Flat packed, disassembled luxury electric cars, a light aircraft, a top of the range...
“Wait!” Otter stopped next to a rack holding some brightly colored boxes.
“Push chairs. Brilliant! My cousin’s girlfriend is expecting a baby, this would make a great gift.”
Potwór snorted. “We’re here for treasure. You can only walk out of here with what you can carry. Is that really the best choice?”
Otter scratched his head for a minute and looked glum. I stepped forward and ripped open one of the boxes. “Easily sorted. Now we’ve got something to help carry our treasure, and Otter’s family has got wheels for their offspring.”
“Wicked! Great idea Jackie.”
“Sure, now get a move on. No more window shopping.”
Imagine doing a super market sweep in one of Europe’s biggest warehouses, packed full of all the goodies you see on the big communal screen of the youth detention center, but couldn’t afford in your wildest dreams. After forty minutes we were really struggling under the weight of all the stuff we’d picked up.
The rows and aisles of the storehouse weren’t designed for humans. These were usually the exclusive preserve of packing bots. Often we had to leave our push chairs (now we had 3) at the end of a row and scramble through small gaps and down dark passages. Some packages turned out to be misplaced, others were mislabeled. Even robots made mistakes it seemed.
We could have spent all day in there.
It was like all our Christmases had come at once.
“Do you ever feel bad about this?” Potwór was digging through a box of holiday gift sets. Each one was filled with luxury food hampers, expensive spirits and decorations.
“About what?” I was loading my own pushchair up with a box of high capacity batteries. They’d be more than welcome back on the estate.
“Thieving. Looting, whatever you want to call it.”
I coughed, then laughed. “It’s not stealing. This stuff is already stolen.”
“Really? From who?”
“Uh, I mean, metaphorically. It’s stolen from us, the workers.”
“How does that work?”
“Well, those bastards that own it, right? They only have it because we made it. But we can’t buy it, because they crashed the economy. So there’s no money for anyone to buy anything.”
“Oh, right. I get it, I think...”
“They own all this stuff, but they can’t even use it. They won’t give it to us and we can’t buy it. It just sits here waiting for someone to buy it, until it either rots or gets stolen.”
Potwór grinned. “We’d better hurry up and steal it then, before someone else does.”
Beep, beep, beep!
The alarm I’d set on my beeper pulled me up short. I’d found a sweet cyberdeck with all the latest upgrades and programs, I’d been looking for a Quantum Interface Device, a headset for direct contact with the net, but it seemed we were out of time.
“Times up!”
Potwór stood up, stretching her back.
She nodded and looked around.
I looked around.
Where was Otter?
It took another twenty minutes to pick him up. He’d been off on his own errands. Now it was a straight run back to the exit.
“Bugger! I don’t think we’ve got enough time to make it back. Is there any place else we can get out?” A strand of pink hair had escaped from the black rubber skull cap on Potwór’s sweat suit and rested against her flushed cheek. She looked cute as hell, but I wasn’t about to tell her right now. I had to think about other things.
“There’s a loading dock over there. I think I can get it open.”
Otter’s eyes were wide. “You think? We should have brought Jewel.” He seemed to be trying to look in every direction at once.
Potwór laughed. “Jewel should have brought herself. She’s going to miss out on all this lovely loot.”
“Well, let’s not count our chickens until they’ve hatched. And let’s not just stand here arguing about it. We’ll find out as soon as we get there.” I called back over my shoulder as we ran for the big doors.
The loading dock was a complex airlock arrangement. The outer door wouldn’t open until the inner door was closed.
Despite minutes of fruitless labor, I wasn’t able to hack the door after all, but Otter managed to get it open using a master key he’d got printed somewhere.
“I wish Jewel was here. She’s a real hacker.” Otter muttered under his breath as we pushed the strollers in to the big hanger which comprised the outer bay of the loading dock.
I was getting annoyed. “It’s alright for her. She’s got a deck of her own. All I’ve got is a wind-up net radio and thirty minutes a day on the communal deck.” I patted the big box with the Cybertronic fifty-five-hundred. “As soon as I get this bad boy up and running, I’ll be in the big leagues!”
“Yeah, and I’ll be giving Houdini career tips...”
“Everyone’s got to have a dream mate, otherwise why bother living?”
We got to the door, but even Otter’s master key wouldn’t open it.
Now we were getting frantic. We had less than twenty minutes left until the warehouse came back online.
“I don’t understand! It just won’t open. The physical lock is being overridden by a computer lockout.” Otter patted his pouches, looking for something, hoping to pull a rabbit out of the hat.
Potwór braced against the door and pushed. Her exosuit made creaking noises, but the door wouldn’t shift.
“Wait a minute!” I plugged in the minicomp and ran a diagnostic.
“Bollocks! It says that the goods in the loading dock haven’t been cleared for delivery.”
“What goods?”
I pointed to the three pushchairs.
My two friends looked at me with wide eyes.
Potwór nearly shouted, “That’s our stuff! We can’t leave without it!”
“Give me a minute, would you!”
I tipped the contents of one of the hampers out on to the floor of the loading dock. Inside was a security tag. “This is what they are tracking! Strip out any tags and carry what you can.”
The cyber deck didn’t have a security tag. Neither did a lot of the big ticket items we’d picked up.
“The trackers must be inside them!” I was nearly crying.
Out of its protective wrapping the deck looked beautiful. Impossibly black and dense, like an alien artifact from beyond Jupiter. I couldn’t possibly leave it.
“You’ve got to let it go Jackie!” Potwór was busy stripping wrappers from her haul and bagging food and drink. Anything without an obvious tracker went back through the inner door to clatter on to the warehouse floor.
Tears ran down my cheeks as we ran across the gravel to the fence. Otter made short work of it with a pair of snips and we were through, with our criminally undersized haul of loot; a bunch of festive themed crap and some wobbly wheeled pushchairs. Hardly the crime of the century.
Potwór and Otter were ecstatic.
The young punk held up a bottle of amber liquid. “Look at this! Glen MacDougal 12 year old Scotch! This is the good stuff!”
Otter had popped the lid off a can of novelty chocolate and was stuffing his face with glee. “Can you believe it? Chocolate! Nuts! Canned hams, jam, all sorts! Look at this, real eggs!”
“Bloody hell!”
I grinned a piss-weak smile and followed them back to the squat.
Potwór dropped back beside me as we walked down the rubbish strewn streets of the estate.
“What’s up Jackie, you bothered about the deck?”
“Jewel’s gonna love this. How am I ever going to be a real hacker without a deck?”
She leaned towards me and patted one of the pouches on my harness. “What about this?”
I pulled out the palm sized minicomp. It was displaying an out-of-network error.
“It’s just...”
“It’s just what Jackie? Forget about worrying over what you can’t have and focus on what you’ve got. If you reformat the firmware on that and put on a new OS, get rid of any trackers or malware and it will be ten times better than the community deck. And what’s more, it’s portable.”
I thought about it.
Grinned.
Wiped my eyes.
We could have been in a cell, getting beaten to a pulp by jackbooted coppers right that moment.
We could have been in solitary back at the youth detention center.
We could have been sat in the squat talking bollocks about how things used to be better.
But we weren’t.
“Pass me a bottle. This calls for a celebration!
Three cheers for fulfillment!”
Not much of a lunch, just an old unlabeled tin that turned out to be beans and vegan sausages, cooked on our solar stove on the roof of the squat.
Downstairs I waited in line to use the community deck, anxiously tapping my foot and looking at the old patched LCD of the beeper, waiting to see if a second call would signal that the run had been cancelled.
It hadn’t.
When I finally got to sit down at the ancient computer and check my mail, the coded message was clear. I had barely enough time to put together a team and run the five blocks to the target.
Jewel considered herself to be a ‘leet hacker and at least had a discerning eye. She usually acted as appraiser for our runs, helping us decide what was worth taking and what should be left behind. She even claimed she could read Chinese. Since she never showed up on this occasion, all that stuff was moot.
So that left Potwór; monster. The tough punk girl who had no technical skills but was a good mule and was a mean hand with her brass knuckles.
What did I bring to the team you may ask? A little bit of everything. I was the face of our operation and Jackie of all trades.
We arrived at the fulfillment center with a little over two hours left on the clock. Wriggling in to our home made sweat suits took up the last of the excess and gave us a nice round number as a goal.
One hour to get in and load up, and one hour to get back out.
“You sure no one else knows about this?” Otter was nervous. He was always nervous.
“’Sure’ is a strong word. You sure you can open the door?”
He happily displayed his mouthful of uneven teeth and stepped forward, rubbing his sweaty palms. “Opening it is the easy part. If the alarms are active we’ll be up to our tits in corporate storm troopers before we get ten meters inside.”
“Don’t worry, the source is reliable. The warehouse is in diagnostics mode for the next two hours.”
The door proved to be easier than even I expected. We didn’t go in the front entrance, that was just for VIPs anyway, no access to the ‘bot operated warehouse from there. We found a human sized maintenance door round the back. Through some wire fence, across an expanse of pristine gravel, hoping against hope that if the cameras were working our sweat suits would keep us from showing up on infrared.
Otter spent a few seconds examining the locks and key pad, then the seals. He cut away a little bit of rubber from the edge of the door and then produced a balloon on a stick.
Slipping it in to the gap, he inflated it and then wiggled it around a bit. The door opened and we went in.
Potwór whirred as she went in ahead of us. She’d recently upped her game by getting hold of a light weight exoskeleton. One of the models designed to increase the mobility of elderly rich folks, it nether the less gave her enhanced lifting ability. She’d be able to walk out with a piano or a dish washer, if that’s what we decided would be the best use of her capacity. We didn’t ask her where she got it.
She was bigger and tougher than any of us. Everyone knew her uncle was a farmer, so she ate every day, not just when she got lucky.
When we didn't reply, she whispered louder. “Didn’t they think of that?”
There was just a hint of her Polish ancestry in the voice. She might be an immigrant, but she’d lived here most of her life. She was a local in every way that counted.
Otter deflated the balloon and slipped it back in to his harness. “Of course. It’s an old trick but they’re too cheap to bother with two way security. If you’re inside, you are on camera and that means you’ve got good reason to be here. So they use a simple IR sensor to let workers in and out for smoke breaks. Everyone has an ankle monitor anyway.”
We slipped through the darkness, our cheap gogz showing the way. Either side of me were racks and racks of delivery boxes. All empty now. That part of the operation had been in sleep mode since the crash hit two years ago.
We passed a packing ‘bot, its big wheels and clunky arms unmoving. Even the sensor dome on top that would usually be spinning was silent and still.
“Looks like we’re OK. Nothing moving here.” I stopped at a human terminal and unplugged the handheld minicomp that dangled from a charging cradle.
“Where to first?” Otter bit his nails and looked guilty. Thieving wasn’t just a hobby for him, it was an occupation, and had occupational hazards, like getting a heavy hand on the shoulder some day.
I looked at the minicomp as we walked. You could sort the inventory by a number of categories. Price turned out to be the most useless for our purposes. A ten thousand Euro handbag would never sell on the estate, while tinned sausages would be worth their weight in gold. There were real luxury items here, but nothing we could carry out on our own. Flat packed, disassembled luxury electric cars, a light aircraft, a top of the range...
“Wait!” Otter stopped next to a rack holding some brightly colored boxes.
“Push chairs. Brilliant! My cousin’s girlfriend is expecting a baby, this would make a great gift.”
Potwór snorted. “We’re here for treasure. You can only walk out of here with what you can carry. Is that really the best choice?”
Otter scratched his head for a minute and looked glum. I stepped forward and ripped open one of the boxes. “Easily sorted. Now we’ve got something to help carry our treasure, and Otter’s family has got wheels for their offspring.”
“Wicked! Great idea Jackie.”
“Sure, now get a move on. No more window shopping.”
Imagine doing a super market sweep in one of Europe’s biggest warehouses, packed full of all the goodies you see on the big communal screen of the youth detention center, but couldn’t afford in your wildest dreams. After forty minutes we were really struggling under the weight of all the stuff we’d picked up.
The rows and aisles of the storehouse weren’t designed for humans. These were usually the exclusive preserve of packing bots. Often we had to leave our push chairs (now we had 3) at the end of a row and scramble through small gaps and down dark passages. Some packages turned out to be misplaced, others were mislabeled. Even robots made mistakes it seemed.
We could have spent all day in there.
It was like all our Christmases had come at once.
“About what?” I was loading my own pushchair up with a box of high capacity batteries. They’d be more than welcome back on the estate.
“Thieving. Looting, whatever you want to call it.”
I coughed, then laughed. “It’s not stealing. This stuff is already stolen.”
“Really? From who?”
“Uh, I mean, metaphorically. It’s stolen from us, the workers.”
“How does that work?”
“Well, those bastards that own it, right? They only have it because we made it. But we can’t buy it, because they crashed the economy. So there’s no money for anyone to buy anything.”
“Oh, right. I get it, I think...”
“They own all this stuff, but they can’t even use it. They won’t give it to us and we can’t buy it. It just sits here waiting for someone to buy it, until it either rots or gets stolen.”
Potwór grinned. “We’d better hurry up and steal it then, before someone else does.”
Beep, beep, beep!
The alarm I’d set on my beeper pulled me up short. I’d found a sweet cyberdeck with all the latest upgrades and programs, I’d been looking for a Quantum Interface Device, a headset for direct contact with the net, but it seemed we were out of time.
“Times up!”
Potwór stood up, stretching her back.
She nodded and looked around.
I looked around.
Where was Otter?
It took another twenty minutes to pick him up. He’d been off on his own errands. Now it was a straight run back to the exit.
“Bugger! I don’t think we’ve got enough time to make it back. Is there any place else we can get out?” A strand of pink hair had escaped from the black rubber skull cap on Potwór’s sweat suit and rested against her flushed cheek. She looked cute as hell, but I wasn’t about to tell her right now. I had to think about other things.
“There’s a loading dock over there. I think I can get it open.”
Otter’s eyes were wide. “You think? We should have brought Jewel.” He seemed to be trying to look in every direction at once.
Potwór laughed. “Jewel should have brought herself. She’s going to miss out on all this lovely loot.”
“Well, let’s not count our chickens until they’ve hatched. And let’s not just stand here arguing about it. We’ll find out as soon as we get there.” I called back over my shoulder as we ran for the big doors.
The loading dock was a complex airlock arrangement. The outer door wouldn’t open until the inner door was closed.
Despite minutes of fruitless labor, I wasn’t able to hack the door after all, but Otter managed to get it open using a master key he’d got printed somewhere.
“I wish Jewel was here. She’s a real hacker.” Otter muttered under his breath as we pushed the strollers in to the big hanger which comprised the outer bay of the loading dock.
I was getting annoyed. “It’s alright for her. She’s got a deck of her own. All I’ve got is a wind-up net radio and thirty minutes a day on the communal deck.” I patted the big box with the Cybertronic fifty-five-hundred. “As soon as I get this bad boy up and running, I’ll be in the big leagues!”
“Yeah, and I’ll be giving Houdini career tips...”
“Everyone’s got to have a dream mate, otherwise why bother living?”
We got to the door, but even Otter’s master key wouldn’t open it.
Now we were getting frantic. We had less than twenty minutes left until the warehouse came back online.
“I don’t understand! It just won’t open. The physical lock is being overridden by a computer lockout.” Otter patted his pouches, looking for something, hoping to pull a rabbit out of the hat.
Potwór braced against the door and pushed. Her exosuit made creaking noises, but the door wouldn’t shift.
“Wait a minute!” I plugged in the minicomp and ran a diagnostic.
“Bollocks! It says that the goods in the loading dock haven’t been cleared for delivery.”
“What goods?”
I pointed to the three pushchairs.
My two friends looked at me with wide eyes.
Potwór nearly shouted, “That’s our stuff! We can’t leave without it!”
“Give me a minute, would you!”
I tipped the contents of one of the hampers out on to the floor of the loading dock. Inside was a security tag. “This is what they are tracking! Strip out any tags and carry what you can.”
The cyber deck didn’t have a security tag. Neither did a lot of the big ticket items we’d picked up.
“The trackers must be inside them!” I was nearly crying.
Out of its protective wrapping the deck looked beautiful. Impossibly black and dense, like an alien artifact from beyond Jupiter. I couldn’t possibly leave it.
“You’ve got to let it go Jackie!” Potwór was busy stripping wrappers from her haul and bagging food and drink. Anything without an obvious tracker went back through the inner door to clatter on to the warehouse floor.
Potwór and Otter were ecstatic.
The young punk held up a bottle of amber liquid. “Look at this! Glen MacDougal 12 year old Scotch! This is the good stuff!”
Otter had popped the lid off a can of novelty chocolate and was stuffing his face with glee. “Can you believe it? Chocolate! Nuts! Canned hams, jam, all sorts! Look at this, real eggs!”
“Bloody hell!”
I grinned a piss-weak smile and followed them back to the squat.
Potwór dropped back beside me as we walked down the rubbish strewn streets of the estate.
“What’s up Jackie, you bothered about the deck?”
“Jewel’s gonna love this. How am I ever going to be a real hacker without a deck?”
She leaned towards me and patted one of the pouches on my harness. “What about this?”
I pulled out the palm sized minicomp. It was displaying an out-of-network error.
“It’s just...”
“It’s just what Jackie? Forget about worrying over what you can’t have and focus on what you’ve got. If you reformat the firmware on that and put on a new OS, get rid of any trackers or malware and it will be ten times better than the community deck. And what’s more, it’s portable.”
I thought about it.
Grinned.
Wiped my eyes.
We could have been in a cell, getting beaten to a pulp by jackbooted coppers right that moment.
We could have been in solitary back at the youth detention center.
We could have been sat in the squat talking bollocks about how things used to be better.
But we weren’t.
“Pass me a bottle. This calls for a celebration!
Three cheers for fulfillment!”
This is a fun heist. Love the flow and imagery.
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