Hologram Heist

By J. L. Ender

“Five minutes, King.”

I let out an irritable sigh at the warning transmitted into my head. “Copy.” I’ve only just arrived, and I’m already running out of time.

Where did he put it?

The serum has to be here. We’ve spent years tracking it across time and space and through the fibers of alternate dimensions. For five minutes. The five most expensive minutes in history, each second costing the taxpayers a million dollars. A team of hundreds aimed me like an arrow toward this exact moment.

Well, a version of me. Most of me is safely cocooned in a lab. What crossed into this parallel universe is an avatar, something we call a holo-body. I can see, hear, and smell, and I can generate small force fields that function like hands. But in this form, I’m really just a glorified hologram.

“This swamp stinks,” I mutter. “Why do I need to be able to smell stuff?”

My handler— codename Control— doesn’t respond. Oh well. It’s a rhetorical question anyway.

The sun is setting, the day cooling. Tall, black trees loom overhead. A fat crow screeches from one of the lower branches of the nearest tree. In the distance, I see a long shape that might be an alligator slink through the water.

“Where did that idiot hide it?”

And then I see him.

Tom Martin. The thief who stole the most valuable serum known to man—a longevity potion that slows down the aging process. We’ve been looking for decades. If I hadn’t received a dose of that serum myself, I’d have retired years ago.

I duck my holo-body behind a tree. “You eggheads sent me too far back! He’s still here.”

“Stand by. Renderin’ y’all invisible,” Control’s smooth drawl replies. “Watch where he hides the serum and wait ‘til he’s gone.”

“Copy.”

“And shut up. Mic’s glitching. He might hear you.”

Martin stops at the rotting remains of an old rowboat not five feet from my tree and stashes something inside.

“Humanity isn’t meant to live forever,” he mutters. “You’ll be safe here.”

Talking to a potion? I bite my lip to keep from speaking. Proverbially—I can’t actually bite anything. Normally I can’t even speak aloud on these missions, and only Control can hear me. Probably safer that way.

Martin stands, whirling to face me. “Who’s there? I can hear you breathing.”

“Well… phooey.” Your tax dollars at work, America.

“Paul King?”

“Guilty.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Playing patty-cake with the friggin’ alligators. What do you think I’m doing?”

I inch closer. The boat is only a few feet away. Martin eyes it himself, then takes two steps back. He seems nervous. His eyes bounce in every direction, but mostly he seems to be looking at something behind me.

Wait… can he see me? I resist the urge to turn and make sure there’s no one staring over my shoulder. There shouldn’t be anyone else on this swamp-ridden mess of a planet.

“This potion is wrong,” he says. “Evil.”

“How?” I ask, genuinely curious. I’ve never seen the harm in it.

“Man isn’t meant to live forever.”

“So I’ve heard…” I tense my proverbial muscles, trying to calculate how far a holo-body can jump in my head. “Anyway, it ain’t forever. And who are you to decide for everyone? What about kids with genetic issues? Not everyone ages the same rate, you know.”

Bored of the sparkling conversation, I dive. My holo-body flies through the boat. I grab the potion and pull up too soon, nearly breaking the plastic bottle as I bang into rotting planks.

Whoopsie.

“Pull me back!” I yell to Control, slipping the bottle through a hole in the boat.

A black arch appears beside me in the swamp. Overcoming whatever fear made him retreat before, Martin lunges forward and grabs the bottle. I swing a fist, but it goes through his face. A spasm of pain crackles through me.

He’s not here either!

I remember his nervous step back. Two holo-bodies can’t overlap without causing a short. Gritting my teeth, I shove both hands into the chest of his hologram. Pain electrifies me.

As we both scream, I hurtle the serum away. “Catch!”

It sails through the arch and vanishes. The little black portal disappears a moment later. I can’t even fathom how many billions that cost. I stagger through swamp-water.

For one second, I lock eyes with Martin. His holo-body displays wide, hazel eyes and a grimace of pain.

Then I wake up in my deployment pod. I’m covered in sweat, my body aching all over.

“Did you get it?” I call out. All I can see is the white ceiling, my pod’s walls rising on either side like an infant’s cradle. They also serve a similar purpose: keeping me from falling and hurting myself when my mind’s in the middle of a mission.

Control’s vivid blue eyes appear above me. She flashes a dazzling, white smile and shakes the serum.

“How you feeling?” she asks. “You’ve never overlapped with someone before, have you? Ain’t that a kick?”

“Oh yeah,” I slump back into the pod’s comfortable cushioning. “It’s a kick.”  A nap suddenly sounds nice. My eye twitches, and pain shoots through my body from scalp to heel. Guess I won’t be sleeping for a while.

We’re both quiet for a minute. Control clicks her tongue and shrugs. “Y’all ready for your next mission? You’re not getting any younger.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J.L. Ender‘s first published novel, Portal World, is available now. He has also released several short stories, including The Rocket Game and The Meek Shall Inherit. His new superhero series, Steel Fox Investigations, will begin January 2020. Ender has worked as a dishwasher, a beef jerky labeler, a warehouse worker, a shelf stocker, a greeter, a traveling technician, a laser engraver, a package handler, a copywriter, a graphic designer, a librarian, an editor, a dispatcher, and a phone operator. He lives in Ohio with his dog Bear.

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