by Dan Wells
The road rose above the water only once, an overpass in the final interchange before leaving the highway and entering the city. They carried the boat over it, scanning the city as they did, and Kira pointed out the building she guessed was the data center—a fat brick building with two square towers. They walked down the other side of the overpass and got back in the boat, though they could only row for a few more blocks before the depth became too inconsistent to bother. They waded the final mile, probing the ground before them with sticks to keep from falling into any sudden sinkholes. There were two, and they had to go a full block out of their way to avoid the second one. When they arrived at the data center, Kira smiled proudly—it was the same building she’d spotted from the hill. The water level reached almost to their knees, and Samm looked up at the multistory building.
“I hope the computer you’re looking for isn’t on the first floor,” he said. “Or in the basement.”
“I won’t know until we get them turned on,” said Afa, splashing toward the corner. “The emergency generator should be outside somewhere. Find some paint thinner.”
Kira glanced at Samm, then immediately looked away, aiming her question at Heron instead. “Paint thinner?”
Heron shook her head. “Maybe he’s doing some home improvement projects.”
Afa’s answer was lost as he walked around the corner of the building, and Kira and the Partials hurried to catch up. “. . . breaks apart the resin,” he said. “It’s not an effective long-term solution, because the fumes it puts out are toxic, but it’ll get that motor running better than it has in twelve years.” He was back in lucid mode again, perhaps more lucid and eager than she had ever seen him—here, in his element, he was all genius with none of the child to slow him down. It made Kira, in contrast, feel like the slow one.
“What are you talking about?” asked Kira, tapping the ground ahead nervously with her stick as she raced to keep up.
“That,” said Afa, rounding the back corner of the building. Behind the data center was a series of power poles, cables, and giant metal blocks, once painted gray but now mottled with rust. He splashed up to the gate and wrestled with the locks. “We need to get these started, at least one of them, and the best way is with paint thinner.”
“Let me do it,” said Heron, pulling a pair of thin metal prods from somewhere on her belt. She inserted them in the lock on the fence, twisted them slightly, and the lock popped open. Afa raced in, nearly losing his balance in the water. The metal blocks were marked with various icons and labels and warnings. Even looking at them, Kira wasn’t sure what they were for.
“This place was one of the biggest data centers in the world,” said Afa. “If it lost power, half the planet lost their data. It pulled power from the overall power grid like everybody else, but it had all these as backups—if anything happened to the main grid, or even to one of these generators, there were ten other generators on site to pick up the slack. They’re diesel-powered, so we just need to find the . . . I don’t understand.” He sloshed off in another direction, and Kira read the labels on the nearest metal block.
“These aren’t power generators,” she said, “they’re . . . cold generators?”
“It’s a cooling system for the data center,” Afa shouted. He splashed back, nearly falling as he came. “I’ve never seen one this big. But where are the generators?”
“Let’s look inside,” said Heron, and they followed her in. The building was more ornate than Kira expected, an older style of architecture done with brick and plaster and wood paneling. Even the ceilings were vaulted. The first floor of the building was just as flooded as the outside, thanks to the shattered glass and poor seals in the doorways; it came just past their knees, and a coating of dust and debris floated on the top of it like a crust. There were a few offices, but most of the floor was taken up with a single giant room filled end to end with rows of computer towers—not just screens, like the portable computer Afa carried with him, but giant bricks of memory and processing power, each one taller and wider than Kira herself. The first floor had hundreds, lined up like obelisks, bits of wire and insulation floating in the water around them.
“That’s not good,” said Samm. “We’ll never get these running again.”
“Then we hope what we want’s on another floor,” said Afa, and splashed down a row of servers to a large metal tank. “And we hope they have more of these up there with it.”
“It’s a gas tank,” said Kira, and Afa nodded enthusiastically.
“And the generator’s right next to it. This is where we need the paint thinner.”
“I still don’t get that,” said Kira.
“Gas degrades over time,” said Samm, nodding as if he understood everything. “The petroleum inside turns into resin, like a thick gum. That is why none of the cars work anymore.”
“Everybody knows that,” said Kira.
“That is why he’s looking for paint thinner,” said Samm. “It breaks down resin and turns it back into gasoline. The exhaust would be toxic, like he said before, but the generator would run.”
“At least long enough for us to get our data,” said Afa. He clambered up on a metal stair and started straining against the valve on the tank.
“I’ll open it,” said Samm, pushing him gently aside. “You two find some paint thinner.”
“Yes, sir,” said Kira primly, and managed to stifle a curtsy as she turned to leave. Heron followed her out and spoke softly as they left the building.
“Glad to see you two getting along so well,” said Heron. “Anything you want to tell me before you stab Samm in the face?”
Kira didn’t answer, scanning the storefronts for anything that looked like it might sell hardware. She took a breath, trying to calm herself. “Do you think humans are inferior?”
“I think everyone’s inferior.”
Kira stopped, looking back to glare at Heron, then turned again and kept walking. “Do you think that’s the answer I’m looking for?”
“It’s a fact,” said Heron. “Facts are too busy being true to worry about how you feel about them.”
“But you’re a person, not a fact—how do you feel about it?”
“Partials live in a caste system,” said Heron. “The soldiers are the best fighters, the generals are the best leaders and problem solvers, the doctors have the most knowledge and manual dexterity. It’s how we were built—there’s no shame in knowing that you’ve been outsmarted by a general, because they are designed, from the genetic level, to outsmart everyone.” She bowed slightly, an immodest smile creeping over her face. “But I’m an espionage model, and we’re designed to beat everyone at everything. Independent operatives who function outside the normal command structure, facing problems in every category and overcoming them without outside assistance. How could I not feel superior when I demonstrably am?” She paused, and her smile turned more serious. “When I suggested that you might be an espionage model as well, that’s pretty much the best compliment I can give.”
“You don’t get it,” said Kira. “You or Samm or any of the other Partials.” She stopped walking again, throwing up her hands in frustration. “How do you think this is going to end? You kill us and we kill you until nobody’s left?”
“I’m pretty sure we’ll win,” said Heron.
“And then what?” asked Kira. “In two more years you’ll all be past your twenty-year limit, and you’ll be dead. And if any of us live through the war, we’ll die with you, because we need your pheromone to live. And what if we avoid the war? What if we find something in this data center and we cure RM and expiration and we go on with our lives? We’ll both live and we’ll both hate each other and sooner or later we’ll have another war, and we’re never going to escape it unless we change the way we think. So no, Heron, I don’t like your facts or your attitude or your self-righteous explanation of why it’s okay to be a racist, fascist jerk. Damn it, where is there a hardware store?” They turned another corner, and Kira sa
w a sign that looked promising, storming toward it in waterlogged boots. She didn’t bother looking to see if Heron was behind her.
The store was odd, a kind of combination pet store/home repair store, but they did have paint thinner, and Kira loaded up with two gallon cans per fist. When she turned around, Heron was right behind her, and she grabbed four cans as well. They stomped back through the water to the generators, being careful to follow the same exact route in case there were any collapses or sinkholes they’d missed on the way out.
By the time they got back, Samm and Afa had managed to open the gas valve, and Afa was probing the tank with a long piece of rebar.
“Glued almost solid,” he said. “This could take a while.”
“There are a few more cans in the store if we need them,” said Kira, setting the cans heavily on the metal grating near the tank. “I brought a funnel.”
“First we need to make sure this is the right tank,” said Afa. “Samm looked around, and there are several more on this floor, and from the looks of this wiring there are more upstairs as well.”
“That means we can’t put it off any longer,” said Samm. “We have to figure out which server ParaGen’s data is on.”
Afa nodded. “Records of which servers are ParaGen’s will be found in an administration office; probably upstairs.”
They found the nearest staircase and trudged up; Kira exulted in the feeling as she finally stepped up above the water level. The second story held nothing but servers, as did the third, but the fourth had a number of small offices along one row of broken windows. Afa set down his pack and zipped it open, pulling out a Tokamin—a phone-shaped battery that provided nearly perpetual power, but only in small quantities, and the device’s benefits had traditionally been negated by the ambient radiation it emitted. The old world had never produced them beyond the proof of concept, and though the survivors on Long Island had toyed with the idea, they’d deemed it too dangerous for practical use. When you only have a handful of humans left, there’s no sense giving them cancer. Afa, it seemed, had made his own; Kira stepped back from it, and noticed that Samm and Heron did the same. Afa pressed the button to power it on, and Kira cringed, half expecting a burst of gaseous green energy, but all it did was light up a small doughnut-shaped icon in the center. He plugged it into the desk computer, one of the black-framed glass ones Kira had seen in the Manhattan ParaGen office, and turned it on.
The desk flickered, a five-foot panel of clear glass—on, off, on, on, off. With a final burst of blue light the desk lit up, showing essentially a larger version of Afa’s handheld screen. It was like a window had opened into another world, replacing the sheet of glass with a view of a verdant green jungle, so sharp and clear Kira reached out to touch it. It was the same glass, covered with drifts of dust and dirt, and marred here and there by pixelated glitches in the image. Glowing softly in the center was a small box requesting a password, and Afa tried a few simple words before turning back to his pack and rooting around for something.
“Look for notes,” he said, gesturing haphazardly at the rest of the room. “Seventy-eight percent of office workers leave their passwords written down near their computers.” Kira and Samm scoured the ruined office for pieces of paper, though twelve years of broken windows and full access to the elements had left the room so disheveled she didn’t expect to find anything useful. Heron turned instead to the room’s few remaining photos, turning them around to see if any had names on the back. While they searched, Afa retrieved a memory stick from his backpack and inserted it into a port in the frame of the desk. Before anyone could find a password, Afa barked a short laugh. “Got it.”
Kira looked up. “The password?”
“No, but these desks had a maintenance mode, and I was able to trigger it. I can’t see any of the data, and I can’t modify anything at all, but this will let me see the settings and, more importantly, the file tree.” The image on the screen wasn’t even an image anymore; the jungle and the icons had been replaced with scrolling text, broken into branches and offshoots like a word-based root system. Afa’s fingers flew across the image, expanding it here, compressing it there, flipping past row after row of names and files. “This is perfect.”
“So you’re going to be able to find the ParaGen servers?” asked Samm. Afa nodded, his eyes glued to the screen. Samm waited a moment, then asked, “How long?”
“Unless we get really lucky, most of the night,” said Afa. “Can you bring me some more of that nacho sauce?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Samm stirred the gas tank, and Kira heard a satisfying slosh as the liquid inside slapped against the metal walls. “Sounds like we’re ready.”
“This should give us enough juice to power the whole floor for most of the day,” said Afa. Samm screwed the valve tight on the gas tank, they all stepped back, and Afa flipped the switch to start it. On the fourth try it spluttered, stiff from disuse, and on the seventh it roared angrily to life. Almost immediately the emergency lighting came on, those few bulbs that hadn’t burned out or broken, and moments later the klaxons on the ceiling began to sound, two of them blaring an urgent warning that the power supply to the data center had been compromised, and the third merely hissing air and dislodging a cloud of dust.
Heron looked at them through slitted eyes. “That’s going to get annoying.”
“Let’s go,” said Afa. “We don’t have long.”
“I thought you said we had power for most of the day?” asked Kira.
“Power yes, but cooling no. That entire facility next door is just to keep this one cool, and there’s no way to get that running again—even if we could get it started, it uses some rare chemicals we’re not going to find in the corner doggie hardware store. Without a cooling system, these servers could melt their circuits and each other pretty quickly.”
The ParaGen server was two rows over, and about halfway down; physically close to the generator that served it and about eighty other machines. Even with the generator running, the servers didn’t seem to have enough power to get going, so Afa sent Kira and Samm around to every other computer on the same circuit with an order to cut the power. It took Kira a while to figure out which of the many cables was for power, but once she found the first one, the rest were simple. She’d done about twenty, still not speaking to Samm, when Afa shouted triumphantly.
“It’s on!”
Samm stood to go back, but Kira kept working. If unplugging half of them helped, unplugging the rest would help even more; besides, she was still mad at both Samm and Heron, and didn’t want to be around them. How could they be so closed-minded? Racism had all but disappeared since the Break, with humans of every shape and color working together freely because there was literally no one else to work with. Kira remembered one holdout in an outer fishing village, a man she’d met on a salvage run who’d called her a towelhead for her obvious Indian ancestry, but he was such a bitter, solitary man, and she had lived so long without any kind of ethnic hate, that the insult rolled off her almost humorously. It was joke, a thing to laugh about with her friends: Was this guy for real? On Long Island, everyone worked together, everyone got along, and no matter what you looked like, you were still human.
. . . unless you were a Partial.
She paused, a discarded power cable in her hand, suddenly seeing the situation from the other side. Just as Samm and Heron saw themselves as innately superior, the humans saw all Partials as innately evil—so different, and so lesser, that they didn’t even qualify as people. Up until a few months ago she’d thought the same thing, but it had all changed when she met Samm.
Samm.
He was the one who’d convinced her, through his words and actions, that Partials were just as intelligent, just as empathic, just as angry and fractured, just as . . . human, really. They had different biology, but their thoughts and feelings were almost identical. She herself was the greatest proof of that: She had felt human for years—she still felt human. What the hell
was she? In a sudden rush she felt the full weight of every mile she’d crossed from East Meadow to here, every river that separated her from her friends, every mountain that rose up to keep them apart. She felt tears flood her eyes, wondering what she was doing, why she was here, what she was trying to change. Her friends, her sisters, Marcus, all together, it had all been so happy and simple. Their lives weren’t perfect, but they were lives. They were happy. She sat on the floor, sobbing and alone.
The generator stopped humming, and the room went suddenly dark.
She heard boots pounding on the floor, and Afa’s sudden cry of alarm: “I lost it!” She looked up, saw the soft glow from his screen peeking through the gaps between the computer towers, and opened her mouth to ask what had happened.
But before she could, a burst of gunfire tore through the air, putting out the light with a tinkling shatter of glass. Kira dropped to the ground, crouching behind a computer tower.
The computer rooms in the data center were sealed from all outside interference; there were no windows, which meant that without the lights it had become nearly pitch-black. Random snippets of link data assaulted Kira, always easier to detect in a high-stress situation: the sudden shock of being ambushed, the confusion of not knowing where the attack was coming from, the alarm of a wounded comrade. Kira tried to piece it together: They’d been attacked somehow, by someone incredibly capable, but who? They hadn’t seen any sign that Chicago was occupied. Was there some group hiding in there? Or had they been followed? By humans or Partials?