Olivia turned to face Tchadd, steeling her nerves before dropping a hot remark. “Don’t think I don’t have friends in the game, pal. Why don’t you just do the hit yourself, huh? You’re already way luckier than we are, right?”

“Perhaps I am, but I have better things to do than kill some loser who got on the soul bank’s bad side. That’s what you guys are here for in the first place, so good luck getting out of it.”

“Oh, I will have good luck. As if I would come to a place like this without making preparations.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh. Cool.” Tchadd paused. “So what are they?”

“Well, such a plan might be beyond what you would understand, but I hired the defenestration agency to orchestrate my escape when the time came.”

“I figured as much, which is why I contracted the refenestration agency in advance to deal with them before I brought you here.”

“That’s convenient, because as I said, the plan was far beyond what you would understand. I hired the refenestration-to-defenestration conversion therapy agency to cut them off before they got to my goons.”

“Conversion therapy is cruel and shows little experimental success. Even still, there are no windows in this room!”

“Naive you are, Tchadd, for I had already accounted for such a possibility. The refenestration agency that you yourself ordered brought the very windows that I will use in my escape.”

“Not so fast, Goldgetter. Building on private property is illegal. The police agency that I hired will stop them before they get the chance.”

“Aha... well, in that case, it’s very helpful that the extra-windows package that you ordered with the refenestration agency comes with the disclaimer that you authorize their window construction on your property.”

“Wrong. I explicitly altered the contract to deauthorize any construction.”

“It’s funny that you say that, because Emma’s arrival at the volcano on this day was no coincidence, as today is, in fact, police day off.”

“Not my police. The police in this dimension are contractually obligated to work every day. I added that clause many years ago just in case something like this arose.”

“You fool. I had already hacked the police database to announce that police days off were making a comeback, and they wouldn’t have the time to catch up to the refenestration-but-soon-to-be-defenestration agency if you sent the notice now.”

“You’re the fool. My police have exclusively used ink and quill for decades. Our communications are too ineffective for them to have received your message.”

“As if I had not foreseen a situation like this. I had already sent the vandalism agency to steal the lid off of every container of ink in the police department right under your nose, and so the police had switched temporarily to digital communication while they were restocking.”

“That’s what you thought was happening, anyways. I bought their parent company, Crime Incorporated, and had your invoice cancelled the day it was sent.”

“The original source need not live on, Tchadd. Though its initial body may have been eliminated, my announcement lives on through the police agency’s newly instituted peer to peer network of notifications.”

“Perhaps it does. It’s a shame that the router firmware that they use has been updating for several months straight. There’s no way for your message to have been seen, even through a local network.”

“You’d be correct if the traditional route was the only option; however, as I have independently verified myself, the phone lines which can be used for dial-up communication remain intact.”

“They do, that is correct. The issue is that I personally censor each call in real time. If any information about your announcement was to be shared, all I had to do was drop the line.”

“Encryption is the way of the future, grandpa. There’s no way you’d be able to see the content of their phone calls no matter what you did to intercept them.”

“End-to-end encryption may be effective, assuming the ends themselves are not compromised. There is a malware program embedded in every police communication device that filters content through a neural network, made up entirely of a mapping of my own neurons.”

“Your reasoning would have been sound, had you been correct about the location of the endpoints. Each officer encodes and decodes messages in their mind as needed, without any need for external software.”

Tchadd remained distracted with foiling Olivia’s plans, and so I was able to walk over and open the door without anyone in the room noticing. I carried Olivia outside with me, though she initially resisted as she had not yet defeated Tchadd’s wits.

Now standing outside the gift shop, though still able to faintly make out Tchadd’s monologuing, I looked at Olivia. “We’ve got to escape Tchadd’s dimension, or we’ll be stuck here forever. Any ideas?”

As soon as I finished speaking, a member of the defenestration agency she’d hired picked us up and threw us out of a window constructed on the border between this realm and the interdimensional highway.

“Well done. I had a hunch that something like this would happen, so I ordered a rental in advance.” A futuristic-looking spaceship appeared out of thin air, directly above us. I was surprised that Olivia had planned anything past the initial escape.