The Soap Bubble

Content warning: This story contains content involving child endangerment and heights, and swearing.

Hiram’s wrinkled fingers clawed at the parapets of NBN headquarters, two hundred meters above the streets of Broadcast Square, the massive leather hackpack slung over his back rattling his shoulders with every jostle and bump. It’s a Saturday evening and the crowds are out in droves, tourists, risties, influencers, all rubbing shoulders below as they pack into the streets like ants picking at a dropped candy bar.

Below him, attached to Hiram’s safety rope, the kid climbs, her gangly arms and awkward coltish legs pushing like a spider as she scrambles up the tower.

Hiram grunts, his arms shaking, his calves numb, willing himself to go just a few more feet, just a few more feet. “There!” He gasps, clawing himself into the final resting spot before the last leg of the climb, right above the VIP hopper pad near the roof. The kid scrambles up after him, her breath mist in the night air. Equatorial New Angeles is never cold, but up this high the wind is peeling the skin off his aged bones.

Hiram wheezes, his lungs freezing, staring blankly at the hopper pad landing lights just a few meters below. He closes his eyes, wheezing gently as he keeps one glove on the tower surface and another on the kid’s safety rope.

The kid’s breathing slows to a steady pulse, and Hiram massages enough feeling back into his legs that they start to hurt again. They didn’t hurt this much on the last test climb. Another half a year and maybe he couldn’t do this at all…

He looks up. The roof is right there. The antenna housing is right there.

“Okay, kid” he pants, pulling at his hat and looking down at the kid. “You ready?”

She nods.

“Then let’s-”

Sirens scream into the night. Three, four, seven hoppers rush inbound towards the pad, several in NAPD colors and the last in bright yellow NBN livery.

No. No no no, how did they find us?

Hiram pulls himself in as close as he can, the whole tower shaking as the NAPD hoppers blast right at him.

Something yanks his shoulder. Hard. Hiram watches the kid lose her grip on the tower and fall away into the night…

---

The day he’d found the kid scrabbling around his spare storage, he’d dragged her back to her bubbe, her black skin covered entirely in deep-drive lubricant. The kids of the Eastside slums had all stared, but no one jeered. Everyone knew old Hiram. The last kid who’d tried to throw a rock at him, hir momma had thwapped hir ear so hard they said the passengers going up the Beanstalk a half-mile away had heard it.

“Hiram? Not locking up every last one of his tchotchkes?” her grandmother Rose had chuckled, spraying fertilizer into the basil growing in the crevices in her kitchen tiles. Every available surface in Rose’s meager apartment was filled with green of some kind, her little defiance against corporate oversight on land use. “That doesn’t sound like the man I know. You’ve gone soft in your old age.”

“First of all, my holoprojectors are the very greatest of twenty second century tech. Second, I never thought someone could get into a pipe less than twelve inches across.” Hiram said crossly, spooning soup into his mouth.

“She’ll grow,” Rose said, pinching the kid’s oily cheek. Her hair, usually big and poofy, was slicked down to her head. “And you know now not to steal from Uncle Hiram.”

“Did’n know it was his,” she squeaked out, looking down at the puddles of lubricant dripping off her towel onto the spinach patch under her chair.

Hiram waved a hand, indicating all offense had been forgotten. “Listen, Rose. I didn’t drop off your kid just cause she tried to stickyfinger my stuff.” He slurped the soup, both hands on the flowery china bowl. Real china. At least as old as he was. “I’m gonna be straight with you. I got a job. A big one. THE big one. And I need her.”

He jerked a thumb at the kid. She looked back up at him, her eyes big.

Rose scoffed, putting down her spraycan. “Did someone replace you with a dybbuk? Hiram ‘I work alone’ Svensson? Hiram ‘Everyone else is an uncontrolled liability waiting to happen’ Svensson? What’s gotten into you?”

“I need her,” he repeated. “I’m telling you, Rose. This is the big one.”

“You’ve been saying that as long as I’ve known you,” she said into the vertical stacks of bok choy, but loud enough that he heard. Having exhumed most of the lubricant from her hair, the kid grabbed a spraycan and started to spritz the vegetables, the ones too low for Rose to bend for.

He stood up with a sigh, scraping his chair against the fake lino. “Can’t argue with you. I do say that a lot.”

“Your dreams are like soap bubbles, Hiram. Long as I’ve known you, you’ve been on the cusp of something huge, always on the brink of the big one.”

He threw his arms up, but his voice was gentle when he spoke. “Come on, Rose. All I’ve done for Eastside. All I’ve done for you.”

“Like you didn’t do it just to hold it over me for the rest of my life,” she said, but there was a smile in her voice. “Alright, Hiram,” she sighed, wiped her hands with her apron and put both arms across her chest. “Give me the spiel. What is this so-important job you need my precious hertzele with you?”

He had paused briefly. “I can’t tell you.”

She snort-laughed so hard a pigeon flew off her kitchen windowsill. “Out of the question!” Rose said, turning back around.

“Rose, please.” He got closer, whispering so the kid couldn’t hear. “I’ll give you half.”

She froze. Turned around, placed down the glass of water she’d been drinking from. It was so quiet he could hear the neighbors talking. 

He said it again. “Half.”

Her eyes flickered from him to the kid, who was pretending to spray veggies but was definitely listening. Hiram considered telling her to buzz off, but something tugged inside him. This concerned her too.

Each of Rose’s syllables were measured. “Half of what?”

“I don’t… I don’t know.” He waved away her exasperated sigh. “I got a big tip. Biggest I’ve ever had. I’ve been working it for three years now, Rose, I’m not joking around. Three years I’ve been chasing this thing, and I think it’s real, I’m willing to stake everything I’ve got on it.”

He stood there, in the middle of Rose’s kitchen, his hat in his hands. The latest upstalk passenger pods roared skywards, shaking every building in Eastside.

“Rose,” he said quietly. In the corner of his eye, he could see the kid watching his every move. “Rose, I swear to you. I’ve been working every angle. You know how careful I am. I know if I get caught, heaven forbid, if-” he leans in closer so the kid can’t hear. “Heaven forbid if they take me alive, I know what they’ll do to this place. What they’ll do to Eastside.”

He stepped back, Rose’s blue eyes glaring steel at him. “I’ve given my whole life to this place,” He thumped his chest, tears welling up in his eyes. “Rose, I… I don’t have a life any more. After they burned me off the grid, editorialized me, erased my entire life. Those NBN basta-”

“Hiram.”

His eyes darted to the kid. “Sorry.” 

There was silence. Another pod shot past. The kid stared between them in a half-crouch, oil still dripping from her hair. The china rattled like demons in Rose’s taped-shut cabinet.

“Is it dangerous?” she whispered.

Hiram stood still, holding his hat. Then he nodded.

“How dangerous?”

“I can’t tell y-” he began, then saw the glare in her eyes and backed down. “I can schlep the gear into and out of the job. I’ve done it. Twice.” He saw the look in her eyes. “In broad daylight I did it. We’re not doing it in broad daylight. Rose, I swear, I’ve worked it, and worked it, and it’s solid. I just need her,” he pointed at the kid. “For the last, the last two minutes of the job. There’s a… a vulnerability. A glitch.” he gestured blankly with his hands. “I can’t talk about it out loud, it’s a… It’s less than twelve inches across.” Hiram barely kept his voice from ending on a desperate wheeze. “I need her,” he pointed one last time. “To get to it. I can’t do it without her. I’ve tried.”

Rose stared at him. “Why not the other kids?”

“The other ki- Rose! Heaven knows I love them, but have you seen the other kids when they horse around? They’re all klutzes! They’d be dead! She can do it!” He points at the kid. “She got into my stash didn’t she? My right hand to heaven, Rose, I’ll give you half. Hell more than half! If I’m right this is the score of a lifetime! Of a dozen lifetimes! I mean, good god Rose, aren’t you sick of this?” He shouted as another passenger pod roared past, this time downstalk. Rose reached out a hand to catch the glass before it clattered to the floor. “Aren’t you sick of not existing?”

There was no use talking until the rattling stopped. Rose and Hiram stared at each other, her blue eyes ice cold, him trying desperately to keep the pleading out of his brown ones.

Rose opened her mouth, closed it, then went to the sink and began to wash her hands.

“Bring her back,” she said, over the sound of the water. “Just… bring her back.”

He nodded, then went back to pick up his gloves from the table. “Thanks for the nosh.”

---

Hiram’s shoulder screams as he grabs the safety rope, the other hand around a window brace as he desperately holds the kid in mid-air. The hoppers flit in under her, whooshing so close that if she reached out she could touch them, but they don’t stop, each hopper flying into the landing pad. The sirens fade to nothingness.

Oh thank god.

“Kid!” he screams as the last hopper skims off the pad and into the building. “Kid are you okay?”

She looks up at him, dark frizzy hair blowing into her eyes, then holds out a thumbs up as she dangles above the streets of New Angeles. Slowly, achingly, Hiram hauls her back up.

“That was the lady from the TV news,” says the kid as he pulls her back onto the tower. “Lily Lockwell.”

“That’s nice, kid,” Hiram pants. “Don’t ever do that again, okay? You nearly gave me a heart attack!”

The apex of NBN headquarters is a nest of massive spires and broadcast dishes, but in Hiram’s test climbs he’d found a small alcove, barely a dent in the infrastructure, where he and one other very small person could do the job.

“Okay,” Hiram sighs, undoing his hat and slamming the hackpack onto the metal ground. Out came the ancient computer they had once called a lap-top, and the spooling snake-like data cable. “You see that vent, there?”

The kid looks. There is, indeed, the tiniest of vents. Twelve inches across.

“Inside,” he passes her one end of the cable and plugs the other into his machine. “There is a data link. Thirteen inches in. Just long enough for you to stick your head in and one arm. The link looks just like that cable. I need you to get inside, and plug it in.”

The kid looks at him, a sliver of mistrust in her eyes. “That’s it?”

“That’s it,” he keeps his gaze level with hers. “I can’t get in there. And I can’t schlep a rig up here to snake the cable in. I could barely carry this thing.” He smacks the leather hackpack case.

The kid looks at him, then looks down at the cable, then turns and shoves her way into the vent.

“Nice job, kid!” Hiram shouts over the wind, his spirits lifting as he watches her tiny body disappear into the metal tube. “Have you got it? You have to tell me before you’ve got it. Once the cable goes in, I can’t ever use that port again!”

“I can’t… reach it!”

“What? What are you talking about? Am I connected or not?”

“There’s something in the way!” the kid’s voice echoes out of the pipe, her feet kicking desperately as she tries to squeeze in another quarter-inch. “Ugh! It’s right there! I can’t get it!”

She unlocks the safety rope, throwing it out of the vent. Hiram places his shoulder blades against the kid’s shoes and shoves as hard as he can. “You got it, kid?”

“I…”

Clunk!

“I, I got it!” she shouts. The hackpack flares to life.

CONNECTION ESTABLISHED

“Oh kid, you’re a genius!” laughs Hiram as he puts fingers to keyboard. “Wait, hang on.” The connection is fuzzy, unstable. “You said you had it in!” He shouts back to her.

“It’s… I have to keep pressing it!” her voice bounces around inside the vent. “It’s in, it’s just… it keeps bumping back out!”

“Just hold it steady!” He growls, frustration creeping into the edges of his voice, his fingers dancing on the keys. Just as he expected, zero extranet security. Not even a Paper Wall.

Hiram could feel hope welling up inside him. This was… This was even better than he’d dared dream. All the legwork. All the cashed-in favors. All the planning. Years of planning.

And he was in.

BZZT!

“Hold her steady!” He snaps at the kid, shoving his shoulders harder against her feet.

“I’m! Trying!” She growls back at him, but his annoyance falls away as Hiram’s eyes tell Hiram’s brain exactly what it is he’s looking at.

“Dear… God in heaven…” He blasphemes as his hands tremble, unable to press the keys as his eyes scan every line of code flashing across the screen of the hackpack. His fingers are ice. 

“Hiram?” She screams from inside the pipe, voice hollow and echoing. “Hiram, what’s wrong?”

May’s intel was wrong.

When he’d bought this tip from the Oracle, he couldn’t believe how good it had been. “The biggest secret NBN’s ever kept,” She’d said casually, as if they’d been sitting in a ristie café instead of standing right in the middle of Broadcast Square. “Squirreled away in an airwalled database, sitting silent for nearly a century. Tech so old no one even remembers it exists. No one, Hiram… except you.”

There was only one follow-up question he could think of worth asking.

“Where?”

She inclined her head upwards, to the very top of NBN headquarters.

“Bring backup storage drives.” May smiled as she melted away into the crowd. “You’re going to need them.”

There’s no way, he had thought sourly to himself as he test climbed the tower, remembering all the time he’d spent schlepping from old friend to distant cousin, verifying details with this connection and that connection, burning favors and bridges alike to pull this job. This is bupkis. May yanked my chain and sold me half-baked intel. Score another one on old Hiram, he’d thought bitterly. Everyone knows how desperate he is, sad, lonely old man… His belly was full to death of their pity.

Hiram was right. May was wrong. Her intel was badly, badly outdated.

He wasn’t staring at some old filedump, some massive shadow-net databank of secrets. They’d gotten rid of it. Changed it. The data wasn’t here. His score wasn’t here.

Instead, NBN had placed, at the very tip of their tower, at the very heart of their multi-planetary media empire…

…The largest corporate slush fund Hiram had ever seen.

Hiram licks his bone-dry lips, his arms trembling as he flicks a key. His heart stops.

Beneath his fingers, inside the thirteen inch pipe the kid was plugged into, are seventy billion UN-certified credits.

Fingers shaking like leaves in the Saturday wind, he verifies their cert-index.

“Oh my good god in heaven,” Hiram whispers, his voice lost before they reach his lips.

“What? Hiram, what is it?”

“It’s untraceable…” He gasps, unable to believe what he’s seeing. “They’re all untraceable… The God-damn-ned arrogance… oh Baruch Hashem…” He stares at the billions of credits in front of him, both hands over his mouth. He could start siphoning right now. There’s no security, not at this end of the pipe. They didn’t even know he was here. “Oh good god…”

“Hiram? What’s going on?” He can hear fear in her voice.

“Kid, keep that cable steady,” Hiram steels himself as he plugs in the backup, the secondary backup, and the tertiary through quinternary backup hard drives. There’s no way he can nab all of it, but he’s gonna stuff every micron of those drives. “You keep that cable steady, got it? You and your bubbe are gonna have a good life from now on, I promise you!”

TRANSFER INITIATED

Alert. He’s tripped an Observer routine. His heart settles, just a little. No security at all would be a trap. This is just regular corporate laziness. An untraceable black-PAD fund for anything NBN execs wanted to keep off-the-books, so secretive and so illegal that to install any high end protection would simply call attention to it…

CONNECTION LOST

“Keep it steady, kid!”

No alarms. Not yet. He’s plugged into hardware so ancient the sysop’s grandparents hadn’t been born when it was installed. The internal countermeasures knows something’s wrong, but he’s the ghost of an itch in a place they can’t reach. As long as he jacks out before the trace-route catches on to what he’s doing, before a console light at SEA’s Midway Station blips and the news satellites all narrow their eyes and lock onto his exact position, he can steal and steal and steal and no one would ever be the wiser…

He downloads. He downloads. He types as hard as he can, slotting money into every crevice of his hard disks, doing everything he can to throw off the tracer Ravens sniffing at him.

“KEEP IT STEADY!”

“I’m trying! It keeps slipping from me!”

NBN TRACE 87% COMPLETE

His eyes flit from the transfer to the trace. The Data Hounds and Matrix Analyzers were starting to whiff him out. Don’t get greedy, Hiram. Don’t bust this up now…

CONNECTION LOST

“KID!”

NBN TRACE 98% COMPLETE

“Ol’ Hiram’s not out yet!” He screams, pounding the keys as he finally deploys a breaker. Detecting the presence of a hostile AI, the NBN ICE finally begin to resolve their subroutines… 

“Come and get me!” Hiram laughs. Never count out the old man! Who else could fit a Maven into a machine built in the previous century?

“Kid, hold like your life depends on it!” He shouts as his Maven intercepts, deflects, breaks. Thousands of his nights burned soldering, each custom circuit pathway buying him picosecond after picosecond.

TRACE 99.92% COMPLETE. But not one hundred!

TRACE 99.9814% COMPLETE

“Come on!” screams Hiram, bent over on his hands and knees as he dueled everything that NBN had to bear. His fingers, icy chill even under his gloves from the wind, fight and fight and fight as he desperately slams command after command down into the Net. “Come on, you bastards! You wanna see what old Hiram’s got? COME ON!”

TRACE 99.999999999999% COMPLETE

“Hiram!” shouts the kid. “I can’t… hold it…!”

CONNECTION TERMINATED

For a moment all is silent. The wind snaps through his woolen hat, the phosphor green of the hackpack display reflected in his eyes.

TRANSFER COMPLETE

“HAHAHAHAH! WHOOO!” Hiram leaps to his feet, dancing a jig on the top of NBN headquarters. “GOD IS GOOD! GOD IS GOOD! YOU DID IT, KID! WE DID IT!”

“Did what, Hiram?” she clambers out, stares meaninglessly at the lines of code on his screen. “What is it? What did we get?”

Hiram wipes the tears from his eyes, laughing so hard his ribs hurt. “Money, kid!” he ruffles her hair. Was this real? The wind whipping in his clothes, the metal creaking under his boots… yes… yes it was real… this was no dream. Quickly his hands leapt from buckle to strap as he packed the hackpack up into its leather case. “We took their black book secret stash corporate money!”

“Money?” The kid gasps, her voice daring to speak the word. “W-w-we… we got money?” 

“Yes!” Hiram laughs. “And I’m giving half of it to you and your bubbeleh, just like I promised!” Hiram could barely feel his fingers as he slid each hard drive into its pocket. “Hell, you can have way more than half! You’ve freaking earned it kid!”

“F-for me and Grandma R-r-ose?” Her voice catches in her throat, her wiry hair flying into her eyes. She meets his gaze, and pushes the words out like she doesn’t dare to ask, in case asking made the soap bubble pop and the dream would end. “H-how much money?”

Hiram finds himself unable to answer. The number flashes at him behind his eyes.

“Like…” says the kid, stepping closer. She falls to her knees, tears squeezing out of her eyes as she blurts the biggest number she can think of. Could dream of. “Like… ten thousand?” 

Hiram’s barked laughter disappears into the New Angeles night. “No, kid,” Hiram grinned like a shark as he grabbed her shoulder. “Not ten thousand.” He was dancing on the soap bubble…

“Hiram?”

He untucks one pocket of the hackpack and pulls out one of the backup hard disks. “On this drive,” he pulls her closer, places it into her hand, curling his old fingers around hers. “Is fifty. Million. Credits.”

She gasps, and the look in her eyes tugs at something Hiram had forgotten about many, many years ago.

“Hiram. You’re kidding.”

“Nope,” Hiram smiles so hard he can feel the back of his head aching.

“We got…” she can’t breathe. She stares down at the drive in her fingers. Her voice is light, floaty, unable to believe what she’s saying “W-e… w-we got fifty million credits?!”

“On that drive we do!” He shouts, unable to stop himself from jumping up and down. “And fifty million on that one! And another fifty on that one! Six drives, kid! Fifty million apiece! THREE! HUNDRED! MILLION! CREDITS!”

Her knees buckle. She slams her butt down onto the roof of the tower, shivering with disbelief.

“…oh my god,” she whispers in the smallest voice he’d ever heard, holding her face in her hands. Tears well up in the side of her eyes. “Hiram… Hiram are you serious?”

“I. Swear. To. God!” he says slowly. “Three. Hundred. Million. And half belongs to you and your bubbeleh! Hell, you can have damn near all of it! The hell am I gonna do with a hundred fifty million!” Hiram can’t breathe. He’s light-headed. The world is spinning, and he’s at the God-damn center of it!

“You’re getting out of Eastside, kid! You and Rose and all of your friends! You can go anywhere you want! You can be! Anyone! You! Want! Oh! Oh kid! I can have my life!” Hiram falls to his knees. After ninety years, his ship had finally come in… “I can get ID… I can get any ID I want… all the gene therapy… I can have my life back!” He screams to the sky, his aching knees scraping the top of the tower, thanking the heavens above. “I CAN HAVE A LIFE AGAIN!!”

“I want to be like Lily Lockwell!” she laughs, skipping with excitement along the roof edge. “Oh, Hiram, can you imagine me on TV in a fancy suit like hers? I saw her up close, she was sooo pretty!” The kid swoons, then bolts upright and puts a hand to her ear. “This is Breaking News. Last night, three hundred million credits were stolen from NBN tower, the suspects are known to be a cute little girl and a wrinkly old geezer named HiraaAAAAAAAAAMMMMMMMM!”

The entire tower trembles. Lily Lockwell’s entourage roars from the building, NAPD hopper sirens whooshing through the night as he watches the kid’s feet fall out from under her as she backslides off the roof, the unlocked safety rope floating in the sky…

“HIRAAAAM!”

“NOOO!” Hiram screams as he jumps to catch her. His fingertips barely grasp the edge of her coatsleeve, his feet caught up in the hackpack’s straps as one, two, three, four, five backup drives tumble from their pockets and slide off the edge of the tower…

Hiram watches two hundred and fifty million credits disappear into the New Angeles skyline, the hackpack slipping inch by inch off the roof. With one hand he reaches out to grab the strap, save the main drive, Haschem please, let me at least save the main drive…

“AAAAAA!” screams the kid as he feels his grip on her sleeve loosen. The hackpack is sliding away. He’s an inch from it. Half an inch. Half an inch from fifty million credits… from his new life…

“HANG ON, KID!” he screams, grabbing her with both hands.

The hackpack bounces on the edge of the roof once, twice, then flutters away into the New Angeles night. A Beanstalk pod races up towards the sky.

“HIRAM!”

“I got you! Kid, I got you! Hang on!” 

He pulls her up, her feet grip the edge of the roof, her breath like a jet engine as he yanks her back onto solid ground. “W-wait,” she moans, looking down at the empty space where their score should be. “T-t-t-t-he money…” Her voice is so brittle and small. “Hiram… w-where’s the m-m-oney?”

Hiram closes his eyes and sighs the deepest sigh he’s ever felt.

“It’s gone, kid.”

“A-All of it?” she whimpers, all fear of the fall forgotten, replaced by thunderstruck grief, fingers playing at her lips, staring at the edge of the roof. “Three… three hundred million…?”

He ached. Deep down into his bones. He can’t do anything but nod. Every part of him hurt. When did he get so old?

“H-Hiram…” she gulps, choking. “I… I’m sorry… I… it’s my fault, I… I fell… if I…”

Verklempt, Hiram does the only thing he can think of doing. He puts one arm on the kid’s shoulder, another on her back, and he pulls her close, staring at the Beanstalk a dozen miles away as she screams her grief into his chest. Each rhythmic pat of her shoulders, each time she heaves into his ribs, he feels something draining inside him. A part of him he didn’t even know he had held onto all these years was breaking.

“I… I’m so… I’m so sorry Hiram…”

Hiram sniffles, then finds himself ruffling the kid’s hair. “Hey,” he says, tilting her chin up. “Listen to me. It’s not your fault. I shoulda made sure you hooked your safety rope. Besides. I had to save you. Your bubbe would fucking kill me.”

The girl snorts despite herself. “You swore,” she sniffles.

He finds himself smiling. Something wells up inside him, twisting his mouth into a grin. “Go back without you? Are you kidding me? I’d never hear the end of it! Hiram Louis Svensson, you putz, you promised me you’d get my granddaughter’s tush back to me in one piece! It’s gonna be boiled beans for your breakfast every day for the rest of your life, you hear me Hiram?”

The kid giggles, breaking into laughter. His nasally, arch impression is sooo bad, but in the moment he had hit exactly the right nerve.

“Hey. Look at me,” He says quietly. “You hear that?”

The wind whips around them. “No sirens,” he whispers conspiratorially. “No alarms. No breaking news. No patpatpat of dedicated response teams running up here to blow our brains out, Ratatat! Ratatat!” He pokes her in the ribs, making her giggle. “Kid, we stole from the biggest corp in the worlds. We’re sitting on the roof of their freaking headquarters. And no one. No one in all the worlds. Knows we did it.”

He watches the realization sink in on her face. “Not even your bubbe. I didn’t tell her nothing.” He claps for emphasis. “You wanna do this for real? I could use a mensch like you on my team.” He smiles again, and this one is real, warm. The thing inside him is reinflating. Like a soap bubble.

She smiles back, and Hiram reaches out a hand.

“What do you say, kid?” He grins at her. “You wanna stick around with old Hiram?”

---

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Vantage Point will be released on March 2. It will be available from our online store, our retail partners, and as a free print-and-play PDF immediately, and from our print-on-demand partners as soon as it’s approved.