Alexander Plansky - Arcadia

He finally reached the unnamed road and hung a right, the tires crunching over the gravel just as they had done that morning. Lewis realized he hadn’t looked at Google Maps once this entire ride; the memory of the route was carved into his brain. The car turned left onto Old Hwy 93, and he knew this was the final stretch, the last chance to turn back.

Despite this knowledge, he didn’t alter his course. It didn’t even feel like he was guiding the steering wheel anymore. Several minutes later he saw the compound approaching up on his right, several lights still on at the front of the main building. That seemed odd for this time of night; the place should’ve closed up hours ago. As he got closer, he swerved the car off the road and barreled over the uneven desert terrain.

Lewis stopped, turned off the vehicle, pulled out the keys, and grabbed the door handle beside him. He took a deep breath. There was no going back now.

He opened the door and swiftly shut it behind him. The car’s interior lights were still on, but they’d soon shut off. Keeping low, he began jogging toward the complex. The moon looked to be full in the sky, so it wasn’t too difficult to see now that his eyes had adjusted.

Lewis was still about 200 feet from the fence when he heard the sound of vehicles approaching from the road behind him. He spun around and crouched down. Two pairs of headlights were traveling up Old Hwy 93. The rental car’s lights had mercifully shut themselves off by now. As they passed, he could make out a black Chevy Suburban and a Malibu of the same color right behind it. They turned right at the entrance to Arcadia and swung around into the parking lot.

He moved briskly toward the fence, then got on his hands and knees to crawl closer.

People were getting out of the cars, dressed in security attire or suits. He recognized the guard from earlier, helping a figure with a bag over their head and their arms tied behind their back climb out of the rear of the Suburban.

Jesus , Lewis thought. Had they kidnapped somebody?

There wasn’t enough light for him to make out anybody’s face. The suited figures remained in the shadows, although it appeared there were five people plus the hostage. Then they disappeared through the front glass doors.

He scurried back into a darker area of the fence, away from the lighting at the front of the building. Holy shit, he hadn’t expected anybody to be here, and he certainly didn’t expect to witness a crime taking place right in front of him. He should’ve filmed it. Forget the registry, if he could get footage of Arcadia employees committing a federal felony, he’d have more than enough to take to Gonzalez or Richter.

Lewis looked up. The fence was about eight feet high. He jumped up and grabbed the highest handhold he could reach with his right hand, then a slightly lower one with his left. He shoved the front of his right sneaker into a gap about three feet off the ground and pushed himself upward, grabbing two higher handholds and then bringing his left leg up. Eventually, he reached the top and carefully slid his right leg over, then his left, all the while clutching the metal bar tightly. He lowered himself about half of the way down, then dropped the last four feet or so, bending his knees to absorb the impact.

He now stood in a roughly ten-foot gap between the side of the main building and the fence. It ran the length of the building and opened out into the parking lot ahead of him; there was an open space at the back of the lot in the opposite direction. Trying to get in through the front door probably wouldn’t be the best idea. Also, he hadn’t seen much of the property’s rear and wanted to get a better picture of the place.

By keeping directly beside the building, he was entirely in shadow. Lewis moved this way until he reached the back corner of the warehouse-like structure, and carefully peered out. Behind the main building sat several rows of large solar panels. Zhao hadn’t been lying about Arcadia’s self-sufficiency. Though he couldn’t see them, he knew there would be several more rows atop the edifice he was currently hiding behind.

The fence continued around the back of the solar equipment, and Lewis saw the other building he’d only caught a glimpse of this morning when he and Jenna pulled in. Like the main one, it was ostensibly a black cube-shaped structure, and like the main building, it had several front lights on. He looked up and along each of the two sides of the structure beside him that were currently visible. Seeing no cameras, he darted forward into the rows of solar panels and took cover behind one of them. Then he continued moving forward, using the energy equipment as cover.

He heard a door opening and looked out from behind a panel to see three people walk out with the hostage. Once they came out into the light a little more, he made out the faces of the guard, Katelyn, and the technician from earlier. The door had swung wide open on their way out and it was closing slowly.

Lewis saw his chance.

He ran as quietly as possible, trying to keep his heels off the ground, managing to grab the door handle with an inch to spare before the door closed. Neither the guard, the technician, nor Katelyn noticed him, seemingly engaged in conversation with each other about thirty feet away.

Pulling the door open slightly more, he stuck his head inside. The corridor was even darker than it had been during the day, but there was still enough illumination from the neon blue LED strips running down the side of each wall for him to judge that the coast was clear. Swiftly, Lewis slipped inside, the door clicking shut behind him.

His heart pounded very, very quickly.

Lewis listened carefully for any sounds, but none came. He inched down the hall toward the main lobby. As he came out into the open space, he decided it had a far more sinister ambiance that it had in the morning. The three arcade machines stood across the way to his right, just beside the entrance. Their screens were all turned on, blank white and occasionally flickering.

His gaze swept around the room. He appeared to be alone.

Lewis walked over to the reception desk and climbed over, keeping low as he took out his phone and turned on the flashlight feature. He waved it over the reception desk, looking for a binder or logbook of any kind, but the surface was bare save for a landline telephone, computer monitor, mouse, and keyboard.

Lewis moved over to the keyboard and tapped the spacebar a couple times. He could hear the desktop whirring to life below the desk, and a second later the screen flashed on, displaying a standard Windows 10 log-in screen. The user was called “ArcadiaReception.”

He tried “roguehorizon”, “arcadiaawaits”, and “blueastronaut”, along with a couple variations in capitalization but none worked. Lewis sat on the ground and gazed up at the monitor, feeling defeated. There was just no way he was going to hack this thing.

Wait. There was something there, attached to the desktop just above the glow of its power button. A post-it note. No fucking way , he thought, illuminating it with his phone. Sure enough, it read “Retr0w@veBl00dlust”.

Retrowave Bloodlust . Zhao’s favorite music genre and the name of his serial killer simulator. Over the past few years, people writing down their complicated passwords on post-it notes and leaving them on office desks had become a real security risk. Whoever had put this here, probably either Zhao or Katelyn, had assumed that by keeping it on the actual computer beneath the desk, it would’ve been safer.

Happy to prove them wrong, Lewis punched in the 18-character code and a galactic desktop background appeared. There didn’t seem to be much on here, just some promotional material files and the icons for the internet browsers Chrome, Edge, and Firefox. He opened up the file explorer and went to the Documents folder. There he found what he was looking for: “guestregistry.xlsx.”