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But he soon woke up and smelled the fair trade coffee, because practically everybody he knew in Williamsburg had a cinematography degree and a short-film award or was in a band or had a writing MFA. What none of them had were connections. Or jobs in their respective winner-take-all fields.
Six months in, when his summer job money ran out and the janitor job came up through a friend of a friend, he was dumbfounded. A fucking janitor? It was a government job, with job security and benefits and all that, and it actually paid pretty well, but his father was an eye doctor, for the love of Pete, and he was going to be scrubbing urinals?!
But in the end, he took it. Swallowed his pride. Because it was either start mopping or go home to Dr. Friedman’s musty beige basement in Brockton. He’d decided to stick it out and mop it up.
And the whole time he’d been trying to meet girls, but it had been one depressing strikeout after another. Until last night. There he was, wallowing in the misery of his Xbox as usual, when the doorbell rang and the black-haired Katy Perry look-alike from downstairs was standing there, drunk. She’d broken her key in her door, and could he help her? Why, yes, as a matter of fact he could! Five minutes later, he was knight-in-shining-armoring it down the fire escape into her apartment window.
In thanks, she poured him a Grey Goose, and they started talking, and the rest of the night was a blur of vodka shots and telling her his life story and showing her his short and her going gaga over it and then they were making out on her bed. They didn’t go all the way but damn close. Damn, damn close.
And now she was texting him!
Gary stared at the screen again, still not completely convinced it wasn’t a mirage. There was probably some advice about what to do next, play hard to get or something, but he didn’t give a shit. She was hot and she liked him. Told him he was talented and funny, and it was like his Brooklyn dream was finally coming true and—
That’s when Gary heard it. It was a weird sound. It seemed to be coming from above him, on the ceiling of the stairwell. It was a little whirring sound followed by a couple of metallic clicks.
He looked up as he heard it again. It seemed like it was coming from inside the rectangular AC duct above him. Then there were more of the sounds. A lot more. “What the hell?” Gary said, standing. It sounded like someone had dumped a box of Chiclets into the aluminum duct, only weirder.
“Freddie?” Gary said, keying his radio.
“What now?” said his perpetually surly bastard of a boss, who was outside hosing the sidewalk.
“I don’t know. There’s something weird up here. I’m on the sixth floor in stairwell C.”
“Weird how?”
“I don’t know, but you should come up.”
“This better be good,” Freddie replied.
Chapter 57
The ambulance was on Park Row beside a coffee cart when the sun came up. They’d had to move twice during the night to avoid suspicion. It didn’t matter where they were as long as th
ey were within the two thousand feet of the bots’ radio receiver.
“Hey, what the hell is that?” said Mr. Beckett around a crumbling apple turnover as he suddenly saw something on the screen.
The tablet screen was divided into a grid of hundreds of little boxes now, a view from the camera on each individual bot. Mr. Beckett didn’t know how Mr. Joyce was keeping track of them all. It looked like a lot of gobbledygook to him, but then again, he wasn’t a mathematical genius with an IQ of 170, like Mr. Joyce.
“Which? Where? What?” said Mr. Joyce, who was as frazzled as Mr. Beckett had ever seen him. The guy had been a ball of sweat and nerves all night as he clicked at the keyboard, moving all the bots around. It was a miracle he didn’t have carpal tunnel syndrome.
“It’s a face, I think. In this one. Can you make it larger?” Mr. Beckett said.
Mr. Joyce hit a button and, lo and behold, a confused-looking Hispanic guy wearing a maintenance uniform appeared on the screen, as if he’d just snapped a puzzled selfie.
“Maintenance!” Mr. Beckett cried. “They must have heard the bots in the duct. Shit! Detonate now! It’s our only chance!”
“No,” Mr. Joyce said, clicking the man off the screen and going back to his typing.
“What are you talking about?”
“I need more time,” he said calmly. “It’s not ready yet.”
“Time just ran out,” Mr. Beckett cried as he shook Mr. Joyce’s shoulder. “We’re discovered. We need to go with what we got now!”
“No,” said Mr. Joyce more firmly. He flipped a page in the pile of the building’s schematics on the workbench beside the tablet and began typing even faster.
“I need ten minutes,” he said. “We’re that close. My calculations do not lie. We can still get it done. Think about it. They don’t know what the bots even are. It will take time for them to call the bomb squad and piece it together and sound the alarm. By then I’ll be ready. I promise.”
