Seven Demons Aidan Truhen (reading an ebook TXT) 📖

your identity anymore, that is some twentieth century you are carrying around right there. Business is process now and who you are is a whole other thing that you do.

Even so I give him the full twenty-four hours because of the respect. Eiger does not call. On the one hand you got to respect that kind of stubborn. On the other, stubborn in the end is just a way of saying you don’t take the world the way it really is.

Some people I guess just do not like it when they touch the real.

I go to tell everyone the good news and Volodya says: “No.”

TWO

SOME DAYS YOU JUST DON’T KNOW WHERE TO LOOK I mean you just don’t. Here is this guy Volodya whom I love like a—I guess a real scary uncle who lives much of the time in a log cabin at an undisclosed location above the Arctic Circle and who may or may not eat ham made of people and we do not discuss it because he’s sensitive. He’s big and bristle-faced and he has hard hands from the moose wrestling and such and he smells of turpentine and old cotton. He does not wear a ridiculous merchant seaman’s hat but you know he kind of should. I lay it all out for them like BAM here is this classic job and we will do it. The world’s most unrobabble bank and here it is—

Identification Information Access Execution Departure. IIAED. These are the components of any bank robbery project. I call them The Vowels despite that there is one consonant and Doc calls them Homer because of The Iliad, which is a Greek poem in dactylic hexameter about sneaking into a heavily guarded fortress and killing the shit out of it.

Yeah Doc’s name is better I guess.

So you first got to identify your target; then you do your homework about it; then you get into it; then you rob it; and then you leave. All parts are coequally important like there is no point doing a crime if you are then still standing in it when the Bolivian Army arrives, but it all begins with the information. If your information is not good you will drill through the wall of a barbershop looking for the hydraulic closure on the vault and you will instead hit a gas main and you and your oxyacetylene and your so many millions that you will now not spend will be the first bank robbery ever to go to space.

We have the fucking plans to the vault. We were given them. But of course we do not trust those plans at all at all because as Mr. Client said security people are like hoarders like weekend engineers they cannot leave it the fuck alone and so now Charlie and Rex build Die Festung all over again. They get hold of every architectural prospectus every brochure every tourist shot and publicity release and they go through them by hand and—

No I’m kidding seriously of course not there’s an app for that.

A Poltergeist app made by anarchy ice kobolds and it’s not actually an app it’s a sophisticated machine-learning-space-management-and-allocation algo intended for reconstructing cities wrecked by civil wars because Mr. Friday does not like civil wars at all.

But it turns out it’s just great for planning a bank robbery too.

—

So now we have archive footage. Something for the Murnau set, all grainy silver nitrate Bolex joy. This must have been some old-school archivist because even back then they had goddamn color they had Betamax.

On the screen, a giant-ass metal spider on the side of a mountain that is THAT mountain, fast motion and slow motion and scratches on celluloid…a crane and huge counterweights. Fucking—I swear—fucking COWS and they are pulling ropes alongside the diesels. Fucking indomitable Swiss know-how. You can see a Japanese guy here in the foreground and on his shirt there’s sumitomo-gertsch ag because there is shared mining history there that is the world. Japanese guy grins and his Swiss partner nods and gives a thumbs-up and they—

Mother. Fuck.

Seriously you have not seen insane until you have seen this.

They put the whole inner vault into the castle in a single piece, like force-feeding a PEZ dispenser. And they lock it in place with a set of giant evil doors made of battleship steel.

Like a whole battleship. Like meters thick.

And that is just the start. Inside of the big evil doors on the front at just about every junction that matters there are baby evil doors that see you and do not like that you are there trying to open them. The Kircheisen X8 fully autonomous secure closure is like if a common or garden steel plate door such as you would see in contemporary crime drama fucked the Hulk and they had evil spawn.

To be clear: you do not come at an X8 with your damn tiny plasma cutter. No indeed you do not. Other vaults may have a victim mentality. If you get all up in the grille of a Rubicon 3 or a Holdfast AH1, then sure enough they will phone a friend and wait for rescue. That is not the X8’s jam. The X8 cannot even and it will not phone a friend because it does not need a friend to tell it that you can go screw yourself. The X8 is insulted by the very idea that you would think a plasma cutter or a diamond drill or old-fashioned C-4 are even relevant to this conversation and it will straight-out autonomously fuck your shit up.

Frame by frame Charlie and Rex break down the corridors by the direction of the light fittings and the numbers on the fire control stations. They know each door by location. They give them names. Doc watches. I can see her remembering everything. By the time we land Doc will not need the map.

My people. They are perfect for this. Doc because she is a genius, Charlie because computers,