Chapter 1
25 hours and 49 minutes until hostile boarding
Reggae covers of pop music floated through the lazy breeze; the air was thick with the smell of suntan oil and chlorine.
The margarita on the man's table had perhaps once been frozen, but the sun had turned it to sugary slurry that glowed brighter than any respectable drink should. Condensation wicked on the red plastic mug, and it rolled down to form wet rings on the table, which pooled and dripped onto the lap of the table's lone inhabitant.
Octavio wore a button-down Hawaiian shirt and white cotton pants. Sunglasses concealed his gaze. He kept his head pensively still as his eyes crept across the solarium, lingering on each person in the hot tubs, the pools, the recliners. Finally, at long last, he found a suitable target: the woman was alone. She sat in one of the perimeter hot tubs, arms crossed, a barely concealed scowl on her face.
She would do well enough.
Octavio opened his camera app and pinched two fingers to zoom the camera in to its maximum. He then extended his arm and smiled his widest, brightest smile, raising his margarita glass in a vacationer's selfie pose. With a press of a button on the side of the camera, he snapped his photograph. It, of course, wasn't a selfie, but distant observers might've been convinced.
The older woman at the next table tutted and shook her head; his screen pointed her way, so she'd probably assumed Octavio was some sort of pervert. Given what she'd seen, it was the conclusion that made the most sense. But the details she hadn't seen told a different story entirely.
When Octavio snapped his photo of the woman in the hot tub, that picture had become the very first image to enter the phone's memory. When Octavio had opened the camera app, he'd done so from a home screen filled with only default apps, mere minutes after dismissing an OS message that said "Welcome, USER!" There was a notecard in his Velcro-sealed pocket with strange codes written on it… today was the day he would have to lose the card, but the contents were long-since memorized. And his melted margarita's glass was as full as it had been when he ordered it: tonight would be sober work.
He stood and brushed himself off, heading back for the elevator lobby. His fingers tapped his screen as he walked, accepting the terms and conditions to connect to ShipFi. As the elevator beeped, announcing its arrival, he'd loaded the proper website, greeted by only its white emptiness and a single textbox. As he stepped into the glass elevator, he refrained from inputting his passcode, for he knew there were cameras overhead. He instead tucked the phone back in his pocket and waited, hands clasped behind his back.
"Deck 7," the elevator speakers announced, carriage coming to a halt. Octavio alighted, following the signs for room 7016. Once at his room, he placed the "do not disturb" card around his door handle and locked the door securely from the inside. Then, and only then, did he log in to the strange, empty website, finding himself greeted by the message "Welcome, 299." He then found the button that said "upload." He selected the photo of the woman in the hot tub and tapped to confirm. In seconds, it was done.
Far down the hall, another man typed his code into the input box on the empty white website. Upon login, he received a notification: "Welcome, 615. Photo assigned." He tapped to open and was greeted by a photo of a woman sitting in a hot tub, a scowl on her face… 615 took a bite from an unsliced bagel courtesy of the buffet upstairs, chewing slowly as he tried to commit the face to memory. One floor below the bagel muncher and six rooms to the right, a woman emerged from the shower to find the same message waiting for her. She tapped to zoom into the photo of the hot-tub scowler, making mental notes of the face proportions. Down the hall aft, a few dozen rooms away, a nineteen-year-old kid with hardly a patch of neck scruff opened the same photo, glad that his was pretty at least—much easier to memorize. On and on it went, the photo making quiet, secret ripples across the ship.
Octavio would never know how many, nor would he even know who had received his picture. In fact, as his phone told him "Photo assigned" and loaded an image of a portly man sitting by the pool deck shirtless with a cigar in-hand, Octavio knew neither who had taken this new picture nor how many others like him were seeing it. Things were safer that way.
Octavio looked to the closet in his room, excitement rising. Behind his few hanging collared shirts and single suit jacket sat the room's safe, tightly locked. No matter who had received his picture, there was one thing Octavio knew: its unknown recipients—the bagel-muncher, the showerer, the young kid—they would also have secrets stowed in their rooms' safes. And tonight, when the clock struck three in the morning, those safes would be unlocked.
He was Octavio no longer… Mr. 299 now, and Mr. 299 he would remain until the operation's end.