Down the rabbit hole.

I woke up early on Friday and looked through my wardrobe, I wanted to wear something cute for meeting up with Alice but was paralysed by fear from the thought of my neighbours and other people seeing me. In the end, I decided to compromise and ended up wearing a cute strappy with a stuffed bra and paired it with my normal boy jeans. I thought to myself at least I can cover my top with a coat or something so no one will see.

---

It was around 11:30 am by the time I arrived at Alice’s house. As I took off my coat, she looked at me and said “Ohh, you look cute today.”

“Thanks!” I replied.

“I’m just making some lunch if you want any?”

“Yes, please. That would be nice.”

“Btw, I was wondering have you thought about a new name yet?” Alise said. “I always feel wrong having your current one on my contacts and stuff.”

“Hmm, I’m not sure. I was thinking of Sophie. I always liked that name.”

“Ohh, Sophie’s a nice name,” Alice said smiling.

We spent lunch chatting about various things, I told Alice that I had run HRT program on my bracelet, and she congratulated me. We soon finished lunch and it was time to work.

Alice brought over her large A3-sized datapad and placed it on the table. I brought up the mapping application on Alice’s datapad.

“So, as I said earlier in the week unfortunately for us the only way to access the information, we need will be to physically go to the data centre where it is stored,” I said as I typed in the address for the data centre.

“If they follow standard procedures then they will also restrict bringing electronic devices into the data centre. I won’t be able to just walk in with my datapad and copy off the data.”

“Your bracelet has a stealth mode, so you should be able to hide it from their scanners. That means we just need a way to get the data from the servers to your bracelet. Do you know what equipment they have in the data centre?”

“They should have a crash cart with a terminal with a wired connection to it. It probably has its local wireless link access physically disabled though.”

“That’s not a problem I have just the thing,” Alice said as she rummaged through a drawer. “Here you go,” she said as she handed me a small circuit board with a network socket on it. “This will allow your bracelet to interface with a wired network so you can use the terminal on the crash cart to upload data to it.”

“That should do it!” I said. “So, I think the plan is we take a transit pod to the data centre. I use my boss’ credentials to gain access. I can then find the server with the data and extract it using the terminal on the crash cart. I’ll then transfer it to my bracelet using your widget.”

“Sounds good. Once you’ve got the information, we should go straight to the spaceport before anyone finds out what’s happened. I can transfer the data to a secure server of my own which will forward it to the press after we are off the planet.”

“This might really work,” I said excitedly.

“I think it will,” Alice agreed.

We spent the rest of the day hanging around and enjoying each other company. That evening we watched a romance movie and I found myself crying at the ending. It caught me by surprise suddenly my emotions were powerful and overwhelming, and I wasn’t used to them.

It was late after the movie, so Alice asked me if I wanted to stay the night and I gladly accepted. We enjoyed each other’s company, and it was so nice to have a new friend who understood my life and what I was going through.

That morning we were chatting about the mission we slipped into a conversation about Alice’s motives and how she got all this cool tech no one else seemed to have:

“You know what I don’t understand Alice.” I said, “I still don’t get why you came back.”

“What do you mean?” Alice replied.

“Well from everything you said you were safe wherever you went to. and by the way, you’ve never told me where that is.”

“It was a combination of guilt and homesickness,” Alice said pausing for a little while to gather her thoughts. “I did my best to make this place better, but it wasn’t enough and while I was living in safety and security, I was reading the news reports of people that deserved what I had a lot more than me suffering.”

“So, when I had the opportunity to work for my saviours and come back here, I jumped at the chance.”

“Who are they?” I asked.

“You will just have to trust me on that for now. I’m putting them at risk by this operation as it is. I promise I will tell you, just when we are safely away from this planet and out of harm’s way.”

“I take it there the one’s you got the bracelet from?”

“Yep,” Alice said and with that, the conversation ended.

---

Over the weekend Alice and I agreed that the operation should happen the next Sunday. Everything was arranged for getting off the planet afterwards and all I had to do was lay low and carry on as if nothing was happening. This was tough as my thoughts were consumed by the upcoming operation, but I made it to Thursday evening and breathed a sigh of relief that at least as far as I knew no one knew anything was amiss.

I spent Friday and Saturday packing as many of my possessions as possible into a suitcase. I didn’t sleep a bit Saturday night due to worrying about tomorrow. It was either going to go very well or very badly.

--- Sunday ---

As I was loading my suitcases into my transit pod one of my neighbours came up to me. “Going on holiday somewhere?” said my neighbour.

Shit I need to find a good excuse, so I said “Yes, going away to the southern forest for a couple of weeks.”

“Oh, that sounds lovely, have fun”.

Once I was in my transit pod, I breathed a sigh of relief. My transit pod soon arrived at our rendezvous point where I’d meet Alice. We would then send the pod in automatic mode to roam the city in case anyone was still tracking us and had got through Alice’s tracking spoofer.

We loaded my cases into her pod and made our way to the data centre. As I looked at the data centre my heart was pounding with nerves. This is it, I thought! The data centre was massive and well-guarded with razor wire and pulse cannon turrets. Alice would be staying in the car to provide backup while I walked in. Alice’s backup though didn’t make me feel any more comfortable. If I needed it the mission would already be over, and I would almost certainly not be able to escape. I tried to stay cool though as I walked into the lobby.

I checked into the lobby with my boss’s credentials and made my way through the first level of security without a hitch. This was the easy bit though, from now on I’d be without my datapad and contact with Alice and the outside world. The lobby had a large set of lockers and I found one and put my datapad in it. As it was a weekend the building was almost empty and most of the lockers were unused. I then made my way to the mantrap, if my credentials didn’t work here, I’d be trapped unable to escape before the authorities arrived.

In the mantrap, I entered my boss’s credentials into the terminal and the outer door closed. The terminal chimed and displayed:

Greetings Mr Hawthorn please place your finger on the pad for DNA ID verification.

I was shaking as I did as the computer asked, this is it. It’s not going to work. To my surprise though another message came up:

Verification confirmed you may now proceed into the secure area.

And with that, the inner door opened, and I was in. I then made my way to the relevant area of the data centre. Once I found the right server, I grabbed the crash cart and plugged its terminal into the server.

Once I was at the server, I logged in with my boss’s credentials and found the files. I opened one of the video files and felt sick at what I was seeing. My emotions were all over the place, all the lies that got told about people like me and it was the people at the top who were the real monsters. I regained my composure though as I needed to finish the mission and get out before anyone found me here. I brought out Alice’s circuit board and attached a network cable to it, after an agonising wait all the files were transferred to my bracelet the only job now was to escape.

I made my way to the mantrap on the exit and the inner door closed. The terminal showed a message:

Please wait. Scanning for electronic devices…

I waited for what felt like hours until another message appeared:

No devices found you may now proceed to the exit.

With that, the outer doors opened. I then retrieved my datapad and returned to Alice’s transit pod. She immediately punched in the address for the spaceport. As we travelled to the spaceport, she transferred the files off my bracelet and onto her server. It was done the only thing to do now was get off this planet to safety before anyone found out what we had done. It had all been a lot easier than I thought it would be.