THE SKYBRIDGE
2000 Words
# CHAPTER 9: THE SKYBRIDGE
`11:41 AM.`
The cursor on Tomi’s ThinkPad blinked at the end of the terminal line, rhythmic and indifferent.
`VANCE, ARTHUR R // HOME_ADDR: 1420 N LAKE SHORE DR`
Priya didn’t take another sip of her tea. She slowly set the silver cap down onto the scarred workbench, her fingers lingering on the metal rim as if she needed something solid to ground her to the earth.
"Vance," she breathed, the word barely scraping past her throat. "That miserable, arrogant bastard. He gave me a B-minus on my master's thesis because my routing simulation didn't account for 1993 frame-relay latency."
"He didn't just teach legacy network architecture," Tomi said, his voice hollow. He reached out and unplugged the braided USB cable from the modified Dell OptiPlex. The green 1998 routing table vanished from the monitor, plunging the sub-basement back into the dim, buzzing amber of the single fluorescent tube. "He wrote the Y2K contingency protocols for Bell Labs before the university hired him. He knows every dead fiber trunk line in the Midwest."
He dropped the bare military SSD back into the silver Faraday bag, folded the anti-static foil over three times, and shoved it deep into the front pocket of his hoodie.
"What time does his office hours end?" Tomi asked.
Priya didn't need to look at a schedule. When you were a graduate teaching assistant in the Computer Science department, your advisor's calendar was burned into your nervous system like a trauma trigger.
"Noon," she said, already unhooking her ESD grounding strap from her wrist. "Science and Engineering Offices. Ninth floor. Room 928."
Tomi looked at the battery icon on his cracked Motorola TracFone.
`11:44 AM.`
"Cole’s check-in window closes at twelve," Tomi said. "If my phone doesn't handshake with Fort Meade's liaison server in sixteen minutes, DC3 flags the drive as stolen. My SEVIS record goes red."
"Then we walk fast," Priya said.
***
`11:48 AM.`
The transition out of sub-basement B-14 into the primary concourse of the Science and Engineering Labs felt like stepping out of a decompression chamber into a high-school cafeteria.
The brutalist concrete corridors were suddenly choked with hundreds of undergraduates shuffling between eleven o'clock lectures. The air smelled violently of wet down jackets, damp UGG boots, and the greasy, MSG-heavy aroma of Panda Express drifting over from the Student Center East.
Tomi walked with his chin tucked into his collar, keeping pace two inches behind Priya’s right shoulder.
Around them, the normal world hummed with deafening, trivial urgency. Two freshmen in matching Sigma Chi hoodies leaned against a vending machine, loudly arguing about whether a C-plus in Calculus II would kill their chances at a Deloitte summer internship. A girl in a green hijab brushed past Tomi’s shoulder, furiously typing on an iPad while balancing a sweating iced matcha latte.
*They don't know,* Tomi thought, a suffocating, vertigo-like detachment washing over him. *They think the money in their Chase accounts is real. They think the green numbers on their banking apps sit inside a vault.* They reached the third-floor skybridge—the narrow, enclosed concrete tube that suspended commuters over Taylor Street, connecting the sprawling lab maze of SEL to the towering, thirteen-story academic silo of the Science and Engineering Offices (SEO).
Outside the rattling reinforced glass windows of the skybridge, the Chicago November sleet had turned into a driving, horizontal blizzard. Down on Taylor Street, a CTA Number 157 bus groaned through a grey slush puddle, its brake lights bleeding a murky, diffused crimson into the freezing fog.
"Oloyede."
Priya didn't stop walking, but her voice dropped an octave. "When we get inside 928, you let me talk first. Vance views master's students as cheap labor and undergraduates as a biological infestation. If you start shouting about classified defense drives, he will physically throw his desk phone at you and call campus security."
"I'm not going to shout," Tomi said softly. His right hand was locked inside his hoodie pocket, his thumb tracing the jagged, broken blister of the fried Qualcomm cellular chip through the foil bag. "I'm just going to read him his own homework."
***
`11:53 AM.`
The ninth floor of SEO was a monument to 1970s institutional austerity.
The ceilings were oppressively low, lined with exposed, yellowing asbestos tiles. The floor was covered in industrial carpet the color of dried peat. Unlike the bustling lower labs, the upper faculty tower was dead quiet, save for the distant, mechanical *shhh-clunk* of an old Xerox copy machine running double-sided syllabi three halls over.
They stopped outside **Room 928**.
The heavy, solid-oak door was propped open three inches by a rubber wedge. Taped to the wood at eye level was a crisp, neatly printed index card:
```text
ARTHUR R. VANCE
Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science
Office Hours: Mon / Wed 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM
* DO NOT knock if the door is closed.
* DO NOT ask for a grade curve.
* Email inquiries regarding syntax errors will be deleted unread.
```
Priya didn't knock. She pushed the oak door open with the flat of her palm and stepped inside. Tomi followed, his sneakers making no sound against the worn carpet, and silently kicked the rubber doorstop out of the jamb.
The heavy door clicked shut behind them.
Professor Arthur Vance didn't look up.
He sat behind a massive, battered steel tanker desk buried beneath mountains of blue examination booklets, printouts of raw hexadecimal dumps, and half-empty mugs of black coffee that had grown a thin, iridescent skin on their surfaces. He was sixty-eight years old, possessing the gaunt, hunched posture of a man who had spent forty years staring at green-screen cathode-ray monitors. He wore a faded, moth-eaten olive cardigan over a wrinkled Oxford shirt, his silver wire-rimmed glasses perched precariously at the very tip of his nose.
In his right hand, he held a red Pilot G2 gel pen, slashing a violent, bleeding diagonal red line across page three of a student’s code printout.
"The syllabus explicitly states that late submissions for Project Four carry an automatic forty-percent penalty," Vance rasped to the desk, his voice sounding like two dry river stones grinding together. "Put your paperwork in the wire basket by the door and vacate my office. I am five minutes away from my lunch."
"We aren't here about Project Four, Professor," Priya said.
Vance’s red pen paused mid-s***h.
Slowly, he raised his head. His pale, watery blue eyes squinted over the top of his wire rims, tracking Priya first, then shifting with visible, mounting irritation to Tomi standing against the closed door.
"Miss Ray," Vance sighed, dropping the red pen onto the desk with a dry click. "You have brought a drowning undergraduate into my sanctum. If Mr. Oloyede is here to beg for an extension on his socket-programming lab, I remind you that you are his grading TA. Handle your own administrative casualties."
Tomi didn't move from the door. He reached into his hoodie pocket, bypassed the silver Faraday bag, and pulled out his cracked Motorola TracFone.
He placed it face-up on the corner of Vance’s cluttered steel desk.
The digital clock on the lock screen read: **11:56 AM.**
"Four minutes," Tomi said.
Vance frowned, his bushy grey eyebrows knitting together. "Excuse me?"
"In four minutes, David Cole at the Defense Cyber Crime Center is going to execute an automated trace on my student visa token because I haven't reported back to him," Tomi said, his voice entirely devoid of its usual stammering classroom nervousness. "When he does, my SEVIS status drops to terminated. I get deported to Lagos."
Vance let out a short, dismissive scoff, reaching back for his red pen. "Fascinating immigration melodrama, Mr. Oloyede. Take it to the Office of International Services in Student Center West. I am an engineer, not a consular officer."
"I know," Tomi said. He took one step closer to the desk, leaning his knuckles against the cool steel. "That's why I wanted to ask you about `LIQUIDITY_MAP_1998_Y2K.sql`."
The room died.
It didn't just go quiet; the ambient, atmospheric pressure inside Room 928 seemed to physically drop ten millibars.
Arthur Vance’s hand, hovering two inches above the red gel pen, turned completely rigid. The faint, rhythmic ticking of his vintage mechanical Seiko wristwatch became the only sound in the tower.
"Where did you hear that string?" Vance whispered. He didn't look like an annoyed professor anymore. The academic arrogance drained out of his face in a fraction of a second, replaced by the sudden, hollow pallor of a man who had just watched a ghost walk through his office window.
"I didn't hear it," Tomi said. He pulled the crinkling silver Faraday bag out of his pocket and dropped it directly onto Vance’s stack of graded midterms. "I mounted it on an air-gapped Linux kernel twenty minutes ago. Lead Architect: A. Pendelton. October 14th, 1998."
Vance stared at the silver anti-static foil as if it were a live Y2K tactical warhead.
"Pendelton is dead," Vance croaked, his pale eyes darting frantically between Tomi and Priya. "He died in a Learjet over the lake twenty-two years ago. The project was scrubbed. The physical PROM chips were decommissioned by the Treasury."
"Node Four executed three hours ago at Vesper Servers," Priya said, her voice dropping like a hammer. "Node Five is armed. One hundred and twelve million dollars is scheduled to clear the Fedwire Y2K override gateway at 6:00 AM on Tuesday."
She leaned over the desk, placing her hands flat over Vance's grading rubrics, forcing the old man to look her dead in the eye.
"The receiving routing number belongs to Midwest Union Credit Union in Peoria," Priya said softly. "The compliance officer listed on the state charter is Martha Vance. Your ex-wife."
Vance didn't yell. He didn't deny it.
He slowly reached up with both trembling hands, took his wire-rimmed glasses off his face, and folded the silver temples shut with agonizing, fragile slowness. He closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose where the pads had left two deep, red indentations in his papery skin.
"God forgive us," the old man whispered into the empty room. "The automated Yubikey didn't die with him. The bastard automated the Y2K Yubikey Y2K override."
On the corner of the metal desk, Tomi’s Motorola TracFone lit up.
`12:00 PM.`
A single, shrill, automated push-notification chimed.
Tomi looked down. The top banner on his phone screen didn't display an SMS message from David Cole. It was an automated system broadcast generated directly by the **U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement SEVIS Portal**:
***
`NOTICE OF STATUS CHANGE: OLOYEDE, TOMIWA (F-1)`
`CURRENT STATUS: TERMINATED // REASON: UNAUTHORIZED EMPLOYMENT / SECURITY DETAINER`
`ACTION: IMMEDIATE DEPORTATION HOLD. WARRANT ISSUED TO COOK COUNTY LAW ENFORCEMENT.`
***
Tomi felt the floor beneath his sneakers dissolve.
Outside in the ninth-floor hallway, the heavy steel stairwell doors at the north end of the corridor slammed open with a violent, echoing *CRASH*.
Heavy, tactical rubber boots began sprinting down the peat-colored carpet.
"They're on the floor," Priya hisse.
Professor Vance didn't hesitate. The sixty-eight-year-old academic stood up so fast his steel tanker desk screeched two inches across the floor. He grabbed the silver Faraday bag, shoved it into his cardigan pocket, and slammed his palm against a heavy brass toggle switch mounted beneath the center drawer of his desk.
*CLACK.* Behind them, a hidden electromagnetic deadbolt inside the oak door frame slammed shut just as a heavy shoulder hit the outside wood.
"UIC Police! Open the door!" a voice roared through the timber.
Vance grabbed Tomi by the sleeve of his hoodie with a grip that felt like industrial pliers. His pale eyes were wide, manic, and burning with thirty years of suppressed cold-war adrenaline.
"Grab your hardware, Oloyede," Professor Vance barked, kicking aside a stack of cardboard boxes behind his desk to reveal a narrow, rusted metal access hatch built directly into the SEO building's central utility ventilation shaft. "Class is officially dismissed."
*****
- Writer
