Duality
Can’t Do The Sum
Work was out for the week. The Snow Queen had actually caused a fair bit of damage to more than just the coffee maker. A few pipes had burst in both the kitchen and the toilets. The freezer had turned into one large block of ice, ruining a decent amount of the food inside. It would be a couple of days before everything got fixed or replaced. Insurance was paying for all of it, apparently.
I would like to say that I was enjoying my vacation, but I wasn’t. I just couldn’t get my mind to calm down and relax. There was too much to do. Too much to worry about. Super Burger wasn’t paying me for the forced time off, meaning my next check would be half of the norm. The price of milk and eggs and bread was rising every day. Bills arrived every day for various utilities. All under my parents’ names, of course. Without them around, I had to keep paying lest the billing companies send someone to investigate, police or otherwise.
“That’s a scary look you have on my face, Janus.”
Looking up from the scattered spreadsheets and calculator, I met the eyes of my brother. Ares. He looked a lot like me. Skeletally thin with light brown hair and large glasses. In fact, to someone outside the family, they might have said that we were twins. The only difference was in the way we were seated. I was hunched over the table of finances while he was in his wheelchair, knees together and hands limp in his lap. His head sat against one of the headrest’s side cushions.
I smiled the way I might have done to one of the girls when telling them that nothing was wrong. But… Ares wasn’t one of the girls. He was older than me. One year older. The machine had taken a toll on his body that it hadn’t on me. Or rather, it had killed me several times while our parents worked to perfect it. But he was the older brother. I hadn’t even existed when he first started his sessions. I liked to think that my many deaths had saved his life, but it hadn’t kept him from being crippled. Still, he had completed all his sessions. He was a proper adult, even if he looked like a scrawny teenager with a neurodegenerative disease.
My smile slipped as I looked back down to the finances. “The math just doesn’t work out,” I said. “We’ll be eating string beans and flowers picked from the lawn. Even with that…” The tip of my pen tapped against the electricity bill with the rhythm of a clock. “Switching the basement to the backup generators might help, but that’ll mean we have to refuel later. Extra expense. And we can’t just put refilling them off. If there is another fight that knocks out the power like the one between Amazing and that bomber guy, we’ll need the generators full.”
Ares didn’t move. He couldn’t, really. I didn’t think he had ever moved his arms or legs under his own power. Sometimes, he managed to tilt his head. Talking even took a bit of a strain. His lips and jaw worked. Even his larynx wasn’t paralyzed. It was his tongue. He didn’t have full control over it.
But I heard his words clear as day. I had only met him—I had only found out that I had a brother a little over six months ago. And yet, he was my brother. Of course I listened to him every time he spoke.
“The emergency box still has a few hundred dollars hidden away.”
The tapping of my pen slowed to a stop. “I had considered that, but… is this an emergency?”
“You just said that we have to survive off nothing but string beans. The girls might just kill you over it.”
That was an exaggeration. Toxx might dissect Dice on the regular, but that was just because she knew that Dice could handle it. Hurting me, unless she knew that I had my second body around without a doubt, would likely be out of the question. I doubt she would ever consider such a thing anyway.
Dice, on the other hand… Well, maybe Ares had a point.
“Still,” I said, setting the pen on the table as I leaned back in the chair. “Still… We wasted so much of the emergency funds already. I would prefer to save as much as we can.”
“I’m sorry I can’t help more. I wish I could, believe me. Both in figuring out a solution and… earning money.”
“Don’t,” I said, sliding to the edge of my chair. Putting a hand on top of his, I stared him in the eyes. “You do everything you need to do. You support us all and…” I flashed a grin. “Someone’s got to keep an eye on our troublesome sisters.”
Ares drew in a breath and closed his eyes. Aside from that, he didn’t move at all. After a moment, during which I kept my hand firmly on his, he opened his eyes again. “Speaking of our sisters, have you considered asking Thoth for help? She is better with numbers than either of us.”
Looking away from my brother, I found myself staring at the television at the end of the dining room table. It was off at the moment, but the security camera secured to the wall above it was definitely locked on me. “I didn’t want to worry her.”
“Worry?” The sound came from the speakers before the screen turned on. When it did, she was already right in front of the screen, staring. Her wild hair was done up in a ponytail today, but strands stuck out at all angles. She crossed her arms over her chest, glaring. “Me? Now just why would you think I would worry? Surely not because you mentioned vegetables. Unlike those other two sisters of mine, I actually like healthy foods. Though I cannot accept the electricity being shut off.”
She turned away from me and Ares to face a wall covered in heavy toggle switches. One by one, she started throwing them. Sparks flew from some, electricity trying to keep the current going even as the bars of metal moved too far from the connectors. One by one, things around her workshop stopped moving. A whirligig stopped spinning. The tesla coil stopped funneling lightning into an iron cage. Her Jacob’s ladder fell silent, the beam of electricity no longer climbing the twin wires.
“I can shut off a few of my functions,” she said solemnly. “Maybe that will help with the electricity bill for this month.”
“Thoth… You don’t have to do that.”
She perked up. A wide, open mouth grin spread across her face. Because she was a cartoon, her teeth were perfectly smooth and almost perfectly straight. Four sharp points at her top and bottom canines were the only real oddities. “If you say so,” she said, turning back to the toggle switch panel. With a single sweep of her arm, she flipped all of them back into the on position.
I sighed, wondering if her antics had a point today. As much as I loved my sister—all my sisters—I really wanted to go back over our finances and see if I could find something nonessential that I could cut for the month.
Before, my tone had been conciliatory. Now, I injected a bit of warning into it. “Thoth. I am trying to get some work done.”
She hummed, leaning in a little closer, apparently looking down at the papers on the table. “And what if I told you that I knew of a way to help that didn’t involve inventing a new branch of arithmetic?”
Sighing, I placed my pen on the table, clasped my hands together, and gave Thoth my full attention. “Alright. I’m listening.”
“You remember that bank robbery a few weeks ago?”
Ares cut in before she could go any further. “I hope you aren’t suggesting that we do something illegal.”
“Of course not.” She paused and the jitter around her pupils increased for a moment. “I mean, I don’t think it is illegal.”
“How do you not know?”
“You would be surprised at how little the general populace knows of the laws under which they willingly submit themselves. But!” She held up a finger. “I can safely say that no one will be hurt from this. I mean, everything is all insured and there aren’t even any real victims.”
“Thoth…” Ares’ warning tone sounded identical to mine with the exception of the heavy lisp.
“Look. There were three robbers, right? And one of them got away. Temporarily.”
“They caught him a few hours later,” I said, nodding. It had been all over the news. I normally didn’t get too invested in the goings on of people outside my family, but I had been involved in that incident. As such, I had found myself mildly interested. Mostly, I had been looking for a date when the bank would reopen. The place I ended up cashing my check at was annoyingly out of the way. “What’s your point?”
“My point is that he left the bank with a bag full of money. But he wasn’t arrested with a bag full of money. As far as I can tell, that’s still missing. So…” She trailed off in a leading tone, clearly wanting me or Ares to make the connection on our own.
Though there really wasn’t much point with as clearly as she had spelled it out. “So there’s a bag of money somewhere in the city.”
“Shouldn’t we return it to the bank? They would probably reward us.”
Thoth took off her goggles just to ensure that we could clearly see her roll her eyes at Ares’ comment. “Oh yeah. Reward us. They’ll probably give us a gift card to Super Burger. No, dummy, we take it for ourselves!”
Ares didn’t move. He couldn’t. Despite that, I could clearly read the disappointment and discomfort in his body language. I wasn’t entirely sure that I agreed. There would probably be a thousand dollars in the bag he had stolen. I saw it. It had been a small gym bag, but large enough to hold some money. Though, in my last memories of it, there had clearly been a decent amount of empty space. The bank would almost certainly not reward us with even half of what was in the bag, if they rewarded us at all.
At the same time, I had to frown. “There are six million humans in this city. Even if he didn’t have an accomplice, what’s to say that one of them hasn’t picked it up already.” She opened her mouth, but I wasn’t done. “And this city is large enough to hold those six million humans. The money might still be wherever he stashed it, but we would never find it.”
“Ah-ah!” Thoth tutted, crossing her arms and closing her eyes as she put on a smug face that said she knew something that no one else did. “News helicopters followed him from when he fled the bank until he got caught. Every moment of which wound up broadcast. There were a few periods of time where he disappeared before the cameras found him again, including one extended segment where he disappeared for almost twenty minutes. It’s hard to tell exactly when he ditched the money because of the large overcoat he wore, but I think I can pinpoint twelve relatively small areas where it could be.”
Thoth went scrambling off screen for a moment, tossing tools and papers and even a cat past the camera. Her distraction afforded me a moment to look to Ares, who wasn’t saying anything but still looked disapproving. When Thoth returned, she held a scroll. A map of the city. It looked like a pirate treasure map. She unrolled it and pressed it right up against the screen, completely obscuring her workshop from view. In a move only made possible through the physics of living inside a cartoon, Thoth walked in front of the map.
She no longer sported her grease stained workshop clothes. She walked out in a pencil skirt, holding a telescoping pointer like she was some kind of weather reporter.
The sepia tone of the map shifted, turning colors. The majority of the city lit up in a faint red, but a streak of yellows, greens, and blues cut right through the center. It didn’t take much examination to discover that the bank was at one end of the streak.
“The path the robber followed is the black line,” Thoth said, dragging her pointer through the green and blue area. “Everywhere the line cuts out indicates a point where the robber was off cameras. Some were such short lengths of time that it is almost impossible for him to have dropped the money, but I included them anyway just in case he chucked it underneath a porch or something. Still, the most likely areas are these twelve.”
Circled numbers counting one through twelve lit up. All but one of them were in blue areas, with the odd one out being in a green location. Another black line connected the twelve circled numbers one by one.
“If I were you, I would start here,” Thoth said, pointing at number four. “It isn’t the most likely location, but it is close to our house and still a fairly high chance. If we could afford smarter phones, you would have been able to stream video to me so that I could help you. Since you can’t, I guess descriptions will have to suffice.”
Thoth fell silent, looking between me and Ares. She actually bit her lip as she rubbed her thumb on the end of the pointer stick. Was she nervous? Clearly, she had put a lot of effort into this whole presentation. Like Ares, Thoth wasn’t able to move easily. In fact, even with him being paralyzed, Ares could still move better than Thoth could. So it was entirely understandable that she would try her own way to figure out how to help. In that light, disregarding what little help she could offer would be a slap in the face.
Still… “What happens if an accomplice or someone else has already gotten it?”
Smiling as if she had known that question was going to be brought up again, Thoth glanced down at the papers covering the table. “Then you’ll have had a nice refreshing walk around town and can come back to work on your perversion of mathematics with a clear head.”
I gave her a flat look. But, at the same time, I stood up. “Alright. You win. Let me grab my coat and… a flashlight would be a good idea too, wouldn’t it?”
“You’re going now?” Ares asked.
“Might as well. Probably a waste of time. It’s been how many weeks?”
“A few,” Thoth said, shifting uncomfortably.
“But it is a walk.”
“Just… stay safe out there.”
I nodded. “Don’t worry. I’m downstairs playing doctor with Toxx and Dice. Or rather, I’m playing janitor, trying to keep them from making too big of a mess.”
Ares frowned, but… well, he didn’t nod his head. I got his meaning anyway. It was an agreement. An approval. Maybe he didn’t approve of taking the money for ourselves, but he was at least willing to see what happened. If I could find anything at all.
As much as I also had misgivings about effectively stealing money from a bank, I was hoping Thoth was right about all this.
So, stealing other people’s crime. I remember a UK tv show, where someone had a computer that advised him to do that.
Thanks for the chapter. No obvious spelling or grammar.