Open/Close – Chapter 2

Rude was late. And Reno was bloody starved.

He checked his watch for the third time and sighed. Seven. Seven post-fucking-meridian on a Friday fucking evening, and why am I still here? It was starting to feel as if he'd never escape the Building's clutches. A pity, that, having made it as far as the locker room and all.

He kicked the door of his locker desultorily closed, and wandered out into the deserted gym, skirting the haphazardly scattered exercise mats. Eyed the vending machine in the corner warily. Tempting, but... Maybe an energy drink. Reno hated the taste of the damn things as a general rule, but there was no real way they could worsen after their sell-by date.

He fished out his wallet.

It proved to contain, in no particular order: his Shinra ID, two expired Building keycards, three pieces of fake ID (two official and one not), a handful of crumpled receipts with telephone numbers scribbled on the back, the spring-key to a Midgar Train Station locker Reno had once used for a cash drop-off of a dubious nature, seven cards of credit, debit and various disused loyalty discounts—

And one five-gil coin.

"Ah, hell—"

A brief rummage through trouser pockets produced several more fivers. The last was recalcitrant, and Reno nearly despaired until he thought of taking off his jacket and shaking out the lining. Sure enough, that produced the last few gil. He deposited the coins triumphantly, and pressed the selection button.

The light next to the image lit up, and there was a subdued clunk deep in the bowels of the machine. Then—

Nothing.

Reno waited. Fuck, he thought, with a grey sense of pleading.

His drink persisted in its refusal to appear.

He pressed the button again, then thumped the machine's side. Still nothing.

Goddamned shitty—

He thumped the machine again, from the front this time – then tried to stick his hand up the slot, where it promptly got caught. He had to tug hard before his fingers would come free, scraping them against the trap door with the clumsiness of sudden panic. Reno nursed his hand and gave the machine a vicious kick. "Stupid piece-a-no-good-shit—"

The front of the vending machine flew open, and someone slammed into him like a ninja stealth drop gone sideways.

"Oof!"

Reno fell over backward. Reflex took over in the split second before the back of his head hit the ground, and he twisted, flipping his counter-assailant over so that they both landed heavily in a heap. There was a yowl of surprised protest, words indistinguishable, and they rolled wildly. Reno came up on top and pinned the other man with brutal efficiency, body-weight on the legs, arms twisted back and held in a death-grip. Panted with the sudden adrenalin and sat up, staring down at the other man. Sunnuva bitch. Avalanche?

Red hair in his field of vision, a brighter shade than his own.

The other man coughed into the exercise mats, and spat out a stray bit of Reno's ponytail that was trailing down into his face. Turned his head to stare up at Reno with blue-green eyes; no less arresting for being natural and not mako-taint. He looked half-amused and half-bemused, as if the last few seconds had happened too fast to piss him off properly.

"Gesundheit," he said. "Who the fuck are you, cowboy?"


The next thought Schuldich had was this: what, Turk as in from Turkey?

And then he lost it, because the other man wrenched his elbows upward in a professional manner that boded ill. "I'm asking the fucking questions," he said. "And you're gonna be answering them for a while. What the fuck are you doing in here?"

"I'm not quite sure," Schuldich said. That earned him another wrench. "Look, could you let me up and we could talk about – ow. Okay." Obviously not an option, except his subduer was thinking about the cellphone in his jacket, and from his current vantage point he needed both hands to keep Schuldich pinned. Armed reinforcements would suck just as bad, even if he had no idea who'd be doing the reinforcing.

Yet another day in his so-called life. At least he'd gotten his nap in.

Something hard bumped against the small of his back. "Know what this is?" the voice said. Schuldich stared at the exercise mat in front of his nose and quashed the inevitable upsurge of flippancy.

"A gun?" he ventured. It didn't feel like one. "A... nightstick?"

"An electrified nightstick. So now you're going to put your hands up where I can see them, and keep them up—" a sharp prod— "and you're going to get up very very slowly. Comprende?"

Schuldich sighed. Once he was standing he turned around carefully, hands lifted, letting the tip of the nightstick slide round over his ribs. Truth be told the sensation was vaguely arousing, but all of Schuldich's sexual responses were untimely at best, so he paid it no mind.

He wasn't in the flat, of course, or the building. He was in what looked like some multinational's corporate gym from hell. And he couldn't hear the others.

So either someone moved the box with him inside – and he wasn't sure that could be done – or else...

The other man had picked up his jacket and was in the process of one-handedly retrieving his phone. "Hey," Schuldich said loudly, more to get him to look up than anything else. "Hey, where the hell are we?" Listen to me. Don't touch that keypad.

The other man's eyes narrowed, but his hand paused in the action of flipping the phone open. "What the fuck are you, stupid?"

"Lost, actually." Still no hand movement. This was going to be a tricky one. The other man was trained to be on his guard, plus he was smart and itching to call for back-up and Schuldich's story was incredibly stupid, albeit true. What was he supposed to say – that he made a mistake, went through a door that didn't lead where he thought it would lead?

At least they were making eye contact; half the battle won, there.

"This is some kind of mistake," he said. "I, ah, I went through this door, and it. Uh." The other man – Reno, that's the name – just stared at him, and Schuldich cursed mentally. You don't want to arrest me, Reno. Really, you don't. You are fascinated and wish to know me better, or something. "Look, there's this fucking weird contraption we're using for work, like a room-in-a-box. I just walked out of it. I don't understand how it works, to tell the truth I thought this was going to be the fucking living room of my fucking flat – where is this? By the way?" Answer me, c'mon, you know you want to...

"We're on the sixty-fourth floor of the Shinra Building," Reno said after a pause. Schuldich was going cross-eyed with the strain of combating the other man's ingrained paranoia; it was just as well he didn't seem to have any feel for mental interference. Most people didn't, of course, but some were trained and a few just came prickly. "You're fucked, you have to have managerial security clearance to get in here. What was it, exit materia?"

"Um, yeah, that." Keep talking. You have no calls to make. You have absolutely no one to arrest. I am as innocent as a dormouse and safe as, uh, dormouse houses. "Exit thingymajig, which I just... I'm sorry. What building?"

"The Shinra Building." Reno waved his hand vaguely, appeared to notice the nightstick in it for the first time, blinked and stuck it back in his belt. "No, you're kidding me, right? It's, like, a little hard to miss, being in the fucking center of Midgar and all that."

"Midgar?"

"Yeah, Midgar."

"Uh... are we still in Tokyo?"

"Where the fuck is Tokyo?" Reno said, voice now completely candid. It was Schuldich's turn to stare.

"Okay," he said. "Okay... no. Not okay. Fuck no. You know what? Help me open this thing up again. I'm going home."

He turned, dropping his hands and abandoning eye contact. The door of the vending machine swung freely on its hinges, revealing metal racks full of energy drinks and ersatz-looking packaged snacks. There was no space Schuldich could have exited from, or for that matter hidden. He eyeballed it for a while.

"That's not the way exit materia works," Reno said. He'd come up and was peering over Schuldich's shoulder with the air of a mildly interested kibitzer. Schuldich resolved not to say anything that might snap him out of it. It hadn't taken all the way: a downgrade from dangerous intruder, Shinra, general to friendly intruder, Reno, personal was minute as subconscious readjustments went, not that he was complaining. Some of them went blank and expected him to give all the orders. "You set it, it moves you one way. You'd have to point it the other way and re-cast if you want to get back."

"No," said Schuldich. "Mine was two-way. It was just this box. Made a door appear."

"Yeah, okay," Reno agreed blandly. "Where's this mystery box then? You still got it in your pocket?"

"No, I—"

There was a distinctive ting from the elevators on the far side of the floor. They both stilled for a moment, then Reno put one hand on Schuldich's shoulder and propelled him decisively toward the bathroom.

"Rude and Elena," he said.

"Who?" The reinforcements, I bet.

"They were supposed to meet me here. Don't worry about it." The door swung closed behind them just in time to cut off the whisper sound of elevator doors opening. The bathroom was the typical off-white corporate employee model, slightly dingy and smelling of nerve-numbing lemon cleaning spray over a base note of backed-up sewage drain. Schuldich glanced about at the tiles with disapproval.

"God, it stinks in here."

"Shut up," said Reno, gesturing to one stall. "Give me a hand—"

A minute or so later Rude pushed through the door. He swung the stall doors inward experimentally, shrugged, adjusted his tie in passing in front of the sink mirror and exited the bathroom. Elena was leaning against the wall, yawning discreetly. She looked at him. He looked at her and scratched the back of his head.

"Well, never mind," she said. "He's probably down at the bar already."


The edge of Nagi's bedroom door banged against the rubber doorstop, hard. "Where the hell is Schuldich?" said Crawford's voice.

"Please to clarify semantic frame of query," said Nagi. He did not turn around. "'Where' as in general availability and presence – or lack thereof – or 'where' as in actual, precise location on a macro-physical scale?"

"What?"

"The answer to the first question is, he's not around. The answer to the second doesn't compute. The metaphysics would make for an interesting discussion, though."

Crawford stepped up behind Nagi's chair. The Hyperspace Lab projector was jacked into Nagi's laptop, which was jacked into an ethernet wall socket. Windows of complex, ever-changing graphical models crowded the laptop screen, and that of Nagi's personal workstation. Text data streamed unobstrusively underneath, green and white on black, quick enough that the lines flickered and blurred.

"What's this?" he asked.

Nagi leant back in his chair, massaging the inside of his forearm. "One aforementioned individual was a stupid shit," he said. "Remember when I told you the configuration profile of this thing differentiated between animate and inanimate? That I'd set it to recognise only the four of us, but I'd have to recalibrate to bring in more than thirty-five pounds of inert mass at once?"

Crawford nodded. Nagi reached out and tapped at a flat-topped peak on one of the three-dimensional displays.

"That's fifty pounds worth of interior decorating right there. Something like an extra-"

"Recliner," said Crawford. "Something like the recliner currently missing from my office." And then, "Goddamned idiot. Is he in there?"

"In a manner of speaking..." Nagi looked up at him. "Your office recliner? Really?"

"Schuldich likes it," Crawford said absently. (Nagi's mind provided him with a belated image: Schuldich happily sprawled and napping on the aforementioned piece of furniture like an oversized marmalade tomcat. He'd always suspected, however, that Schuldich liked the recliner not for itself but because it was in Crawford's office; the way cats will invariably hop into the lap of the one allergic person in the room.) "Farfarello's in one of his moods, he probably wanted the quiet. What manner of speaking?"

Nagi sighed. "Look, this – place, all right, this place isn't in the box. It doesn't even answer to the box, apart from visual templating. What answers to the box is the door. I've set rules for what goes in and out the door, and as long as those rules are followed the door opens between here and there. Break the rules, though, and the whole thing goes pear-shaped, see? I open the door here and it throws an error, system destabilises, the lot. And if someone opens the door there—"

He threw up his hands.

There was a pause. Then Crawford said with exaggerated calm, "Just tell me, is he in there or not? In a word."

Nagi hesitated. "No," he said finally. "He left the system more than an hour ago, and until he opens the door and walks back in again there's really fuck-all I can do to get him back."

Crawford, uncharacteristically this time, said nothing. Nagi glanced up again and saw that he was gazing intently at one of the renders: a jagged, slow-blooming fractal flower. The bottom half of his face seemed clenched. Nagi wondered if he was seeing something in the future instead, and whether it was unpleasant.

Surely nothing unpleasant, he thought. He'd always had the intuition that the Lab liked Schuldich. He wouldn't have been surprised if Schuldich could talk to it. Surely nothing would happen.

"So—" he ventured when the silence began to verge on the oppressive. Crawford straightened, expression reverting to the annoyed preoccupation Nagi pegged as his default mode.

"So we wait," he said.


"Jesus," Schuldich said after a couple of minutes. "Did you fix this thing on purpose? Don't push, I'm going to land in the fucking bowl."

He balanced himself gingerly on the ceramic cover of the toilet tank, and hopped down. Reno followed a moment later, pausing to replace the loose grid of the ventilation shaft. He brushed at the sleeves of his suit and grinned.

"No," he said, "just a question of knowing your territory. You know all the hiding places, they won't be able to hide from you. Right?"

"Point taken," said Schuldich, who never had trouble pinpointing intruders. "Sorry about that. Friends of yours?"

"Yeah... Well, colleagues, actually. Team members."

"Yeah?" Schuldich didn't ask what they did; he was, he thought, beginning to relate.

"Listen," Reno said, "I've been thinking. Maybe I could hook you up."


— Montreal, September 2003