They opened up a gateway here. A shiver traveled up her spine. If the beast doesn't get you, then Lai'thamia will.
"Though, admittedly," Mathias continued. "Data mining and hacking is not my forte. Perhaps you'll have better luck, if you're dissatisfied with our conclusions?"
"Dissatisfied is one way to put it," she said. "Come get me when you've found the mainframe."
She turned and stormed out of the room. Only so much of Mathias she could stand in one sitting. He'd been a quantum physics major in college, from what she knew. Had a full ride, and had even started on graduate studies when the ice age started. There weren't many applications for his kind of knowledge, not with society beneath a thick layer of ever-growing ice and death. She assumed that's why he always came off like a lecturing pretentious prick.
Ira traced her path back to where she had fallen asleep and snatched up her backpack. Lena stirred, rubbing her eyes.
"The lights are on?" Lena said.
"You don't miss anything," Ira said.
"Where's Nico?"
"Go find him yourself." She stormed down the hallway, toward the elevator. "I'm going to go find a room to put my things in, since we're stuck here."
"Wait! We're staying?"
"Ask my brother."
She reached the elevator. With the power now on, a bright red triangle was lit up above the doors. There was a large circular button off to their right. She pressed it, and when the doors opened, she was greeted with a claustrophobic metal box to stand in.
Ira had always had a fear of elevators, ever since she was a small girl. She and Nico had rapelled down a few elevator shafts in collapsed buildings over the last couple of years, especially as supplies started to dwindle. Climbing up or down a metal cable was one thing: you were relying on your own strength. With an elevator, you had to trust that it was in good repair, that the gears hadn't rusted to pieces, that you weren't going to plummet fifty stories to your death.
Fortunately, the elevator worked. She pressed a random button and it transported her up through the facility. The doors opened to another hallway—no—another lifeless concrete tunnel that stretched on and on.
As much as the old shelter had not been home to her, this place was worse. Its walls were uninviting, and the floors were cold, metallic, and painful just to stand on. And then there was that...thing...in EXPERIMENT 12C. She shuddered.
Nico would force them to move here, and it was her fault. If she'd just never looked at the heat monitor...
She passed several rooms. This corridor looked as if it had been used as quarters for the people who’d lived here. It was eerie. Each room contained the personal effects of its former inhabitant. Pictures, posters, and personal journals. She found herself standing in the middle of one such room, holding a picture of a man and his family. They were all smiles and there were trees and grass in the image, and now they were all likely dead, covered in snow and ice—or an unwilling science experiment strapped to a medical table.
Ira set the picture down on the end table. She couldn't stay in this room, surrounded by the ghosts of someone else's memories—a peace she could never have.
Five other rooms, and they were no different. Different pictures, different faces, but ghosts all the same. Finally, she found a room that had no pictures, no journals—no memories. She set her backpack down in the corner and sat on the lone cot in the small-six-by-six-foot room.
The blank concrete walls were no comfort for her, despite the lack of pictures. She couldn't help but hope that Nico and Eddy would find a reason to leave this place.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Second American Civil War had been a long and endless bloodbath, one many felt was necessary—the precursor to the next step in societal evolution. The onset of the modern ice age had put a stop to the fighting, but the wounds could still be felt, even in the frosted ruins of the old world.
Ira had never actually fought, having been deemed a psychological risk at the time of the draft, but Nico had. She wondered what fighting for the Feds had done to him.
Being a first-year student at MIT might as well have made her a target. Having any association with programming or technical proficiency with computers—without a security clearance, or a rank in the armed forces—came with a certain amount of paranoia. It was vivid to her, the fear of being under constant surveillance, and the threat of the Feds showing up at any point to cart her off to some unnamed prison without the benefit of a trial. She'd heard news about the conflict in school, whispers here and there, and even seen a few students detained in the middle of class—suspected cyber terrorists. She’d kept her opinions to herself, but in her mind, in her heart, she’d known that the Revolutionists were right about what the Feds had become.
She held her left arm, as if the injuries were still there...
She could still hear the rain clapping down on the skylight as the instructor droned on about the glory days of HTML; she could remember the specific lines of code she'd entered for her final. Remembered the news: a cyber activist had shut down a Fed-operated nuclear power plant, almost triggering a meltdown. She remembered the feeling of her heart exploding, thundering through her chest, when they burst through the door.
She could still feel the hairs ripping from her scalp, and the sound of individual keys flying from her keyboard when they slammed her head into the desk. She could still feel them ignore her screams while they twisted her arm behind her back and shouted things in her ear, and she could still feel the sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach as they’d carted her off to some undisclosed location without reading her her rights.
Ira could still feel the anger she’d felt for her brother, who had joined them of his own free will.
They had suspected her because of her connection to Nico, thought that he'd let something slip, inadvertently giving her a back door to the power plant's mainframe. They’d found the real culprit days later.
They’d released her back to her family in California a week later, after the Feds had determined she wasn’t hiding anything that might incriminate her.
There had been no apologies.
When Nico had come home from the war, and she saw the change in him, her anger ebbed. She'd watch as he'd elect to sit alone, staring off into space, clutching his stump, not a tear in his eyes, but the pain still clearly etched in his face.
"Ira." Eddy's voice calling over the CB shook her from her daydream. "We've found the Mainframe."
"About damn time," Ira said. "Feels like I've been going gray over here!"
"Ha. Ha. Just get down here and help us crack into it, will you?"
"Yeah, on my way."
She'd been lying in her new cot for almost two hours, staring at the concrete ceiling, imagining the shapes in the concrete were the different players in her life. She sat up, her legs and midsection protesting by shooting jolts of numbness through her body.
The elevator filled her with a sense of palpable dread. She watched the numbers decrease until arriving on the floor where Eddy and Nico had been earlier. She passed the experiment room. Visions of the corpse that she'd seen just hours earlier filled her mind. Ira stifled them as she entered the chamber where Mathias and Eddy were studying the core.
Mathias was bent over a computer terminal, mumbling to himself, and Eddy was eating a protein bar at the other end of the chamber.
"So, where is it?" Ira asked.
Eddy's eyes perked up when he saw her. "Have you eaten?"
Ira shook her head. "I'm not hungry. Take me to the mainframe."
"Gotcha." Eddy walked past her, down the corridor she'd just come from. "Follow me."
They walked back into the elevator, and Eddy entered something into the keypad. The elevator ride wasn't so bad with him with her.
"You found a room already, huh?" Eddy asked.
Ira nodded. "Hopefully we won't be staying too long though."
"I don't know..."
"Don't tell me you're starting to agree with Nico?
"
He shrugged. "I mean, so far we really haven't found anything dangerous."
"We saw a corpse tied to an operating table, Eddy!"
"Yeah, but there's nothing in the logs that suggests that he died from anything that could harm us. Isn't that what's more important here? And, let's face it, the old shelter wasn't going to last forever. Hugo made sure of that."
It was an irrational fear. Sure. All fears are like that. But what she’d seen in that experiment chamber...it wasn't just frightening. No, it was as if some ancient part of the universe had reached down deep into her soul and touched her.
Something that shouldn't be, Ira thought.
"I just—" She held herself. "—I have a really bad feeling."
"Look, let's just hold off on making any snap judgments until you get a look at those encrypted files, okay?" Eddy tossed her a smile that almost melted the fear away, like the warm embrace of a blazing California sunrise. "If you find anything dangerous, I'm sure Nico will understand and we'll all go back to the old shelter."
"Promise me that."
The elevator dinged, the doors opened, and they filed out into another concrete tunnel before he could answer her.
The mainframe was tucked behind another circular door, like the one that housed the fusion core chamber. Inside it was dark, filled with black metallic towers with blue LED lights that sparkled and danced almost as if they were alive. Ira almost felt her fear evaporate, like moisture from a hot surface. The room was cold; she buttoned her coat up and strolled inside. There were no tables. This was not a place meant for human beings.
"I'm going to have to set up in here," she said.
"Are you kidding? It's freezing."
"I'll wear layers." She grinned. "But, seriously. I need to plug my gear into the main tower directly."
"If you say so."
Ira placed her backpack down on the icy floor, dragging out a small laptop and a mess of assorted types of wires. "You could help by getting me a table, a comfy chair, and some blankets, instead of standing there looking stupid."
"Ouch." He turned to face the door, chuckling. "All right, I'll be right back then."
Ira searched for a connector on the main tower, something that might give her direct access to the system, or the hard drives where any logs might be stored. Luckily, there was an array of USB ports on the side that she was able to use.
The mainframe towers all seemed to be linked on the same network, but, as she’d suspected, they were all encrypted. When she tried to access the hard drive on the main tower, a prompt for a username and password appeared. She'd have to use her rainbow tables for that later; what she could already tell was just how much data was stored on those towers. Hundreds of terabytes across every tower were being used at once.
It wasn't surprising to her that the mainframes were being used, but the sheer volume of data collected on those drives made her wonder, and simultaneously made her afraid.
What were they doing here that would require so much storage and processing power?
Something that should not be.
She shivered. She wasn't quite sure why she kept thinking of that; maybe just her nerves mixing with the memory of old H.P. Lovecraft stories she'd read as a little girl.
She almost laughed. How silly of her.
Eddy came back thirty minutes later with a large folding table and several blankets.
"Your brother gave me these." He dropped the blankets on her head and laughed maniacally about it, then set the table up in front of her. "I still have to get the chair for you, though."
Ira unfolded a warm blanket with black and green camouflage print—her heart jumped. "It's Woobie!"
Eddy raised an eyebrow at her. "I think I'll leave you two alone."
"Oh, shush." She hugged the self-warming blanket tight. "I love this thing, but he always keeps it with him, never lets me use it."
"I used to have one just like it. Never could wrap my head around how it keeps you warm during the winter and cold during the summer. We used to joke that it was stolen alien tech from the Roswell crash."
"And it's so soft!"
"I'll go get your chair."
Ira watched Eddy leave again. She wrapped her body up in Woobie while she set her laptop and things up on the desk. When Eddy came back with her chair, she was all set for a very long night.
"Here, let me help," Eddy said, smiling, and tucked the edges of the blanket underneath her, sealing the warmth in. "You missed a spot."
His breath was streaming in the air, his face lit blue by the servers, hovering mere inches from her face.
It'd be so easy, Ira thought.
"Well—" Eddy stood up, glancing around the chamber. "—your brother needs my help with something. I guess I'll leave you to it."
"Yeah..."
The hatch closed behind him, and Ira was alone again. She was tempted to run after him, to ask him to come back.
But she had a job to do too.
Surrounded by the glow of the screen and using her rainbow tables and various other hacking tools, she was finally in her own element.
2
Ira had figured it would be a long night, and she was right. She'd spent all night in there, huddled up with her brother's woobie. It wasn't the first time she'd hacked into a government server, though this was decidedly higher security than what she was used to.
It was slightly ironic to her, breaking into a Fed mainframe, an act that would have been punishable by death or life imprisonment during the war.
In the hours since calling her down to check out the mainframe, Nico and Eddy had done their own exploring, but Ira was intentionally avoiding asking them how their progress was going. She'd had enough to be paranoid about for one day, no need to fuel those fires any further.
Her stomach growled, and she frowned. They'd have to find the supply cache soon; the rations they’d brought with them would only last so long.
"There you are!" Her rainbow tables finally did the trick, she was inside. She scrolled through several files, some documents, some videos, probably logs, all of them most likely top-secret—as if that mattered now. Her cursor hovered over one of the encrypted videos. She wasn't sure if she wanted to see what any of that footage had to show her... She began the decoding process on one of the videos.
3
Eddy gave the rusted door one last pull and it finally gave way. It rocked back and slid open, revealing a dark storage room. Nico stepped inside and turned on his flashlight.
"Looks like we found the food," Eddy said.
"Yeah." Nico's light revealed a massive stock of MREs, canned food, and a bunch of fresh water barrels. "This alone will last us for years to come."
"As long as we can keep everyone to a rationing schedule..."
"If they want to survive, they'll follow the rules."
Eddy leaned against the door, crossed his arms. "What's next, boss-man?"
Nico's wounded green eyes shifted to Eddy. "We need to mount an expedition to the old shelter and start moving things over."
"I was afraid you were gonna say that."
Nicola turned around and headed back out into the corridor. Eddy stuck his hands in his jacket pockets and followed after him.
"Who should we bring?" Eddy asked.
"Leave the girls here. You, me, and Hugo will go."
"And Mathias?"
"I need him here to analyze the core, make sure it's not gonna blow up on us or anything. Besides, he bugs the hell out of me."
"Damn, never knew you felt that way about him."
"There's a lot you don't know about me."
They walked in tense silence for a time. Eddy was never sure how to relate to Nico. The war had really fucked him up, that much he was sure of, and it made every single conversation difficult. It was almost simpler when they were at each other's throats.
The only person in the group he could really talk to was Ira, and Nico didn't really seem too happy about that. Eddy wondered what Nico wo
uld do if he and Ira got any closer...
He stifled the thought as they came upon Hugo and Lena, snuggling and eating their rations for breakfast.
"Get up," Nico said. "Got a mission for you."
Hugo's muted blue eyes focused on Nico, like a lazy old dog. "Can it wait till after breakfast, B?"
"Finish it quickly and meet us in the reactor core." He glared at Lena. "You too, Lena."
Lena swiped one hand through her short blonde hair, cattily, and glared at Nico. "And does Ira get a free pass again?"
"Ira's already doing her part. So get off your ass before I shoot you in the leg for my own amusement."
Nico walked away, and Eddy quickly followed him. When they were further down the corridor, Eddy leaned in and whispered, "You wouldn't really shoot her, right?"
"You doubt me?" He patted the sidearm in his holster.
"Nope."
4
"Listen up, cause I'm only going to say this once." Nico paced back and forth in front of the primary readout station for the reactor. "While Ramirez, Hugo, and I are gone, you will all have specific tasks assigned to you. These tasks will need to be accomplished by the time we return with the first shipment of supplies from the old shelter."
"Oh, great, busywork," Lena said.
Nico's eyes zeroed in on her slender frame. Eddy's hand came to rest on Nico's shoulder, as if to say, "Don't do it. Don't shoot her." Nico shrugged his hand away.
"No, not busywork," Nico said. "Mathias, you will have two tasks. The first will be ensuring that the core to this facility—" he gestured behind him to the pulsing and humming central structure "—isn't going to explode, or give us radiation poisoning. We still don't know why this place was abandoned, or what they were doing here, so I don't want to take any chances."
Mathias nodded.
"The second will be rotating watch duties with Lena. We still don't have the front gate fixed, so this is crucial to our security."
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