“Now,” said Strys midway through a deep breath, “from the console you should be able to send the information files to the storage device, which should be called ‘Wilsdorf’”.
Lon did what was necessary and found the connection to the watch. He inhaled strongly, held the air tightly in his lungs, and began the information download.
“Incompatible storage device”.
“Oh my fuck! Is this a joke?!” Lon shouted in disbelief. “The watch doesn’t work!”
“What do you mean it doesn’t work?!” asked Strys.
“It’s incompatible with the console!”
“You’re kidding me”.
Lon tried the transfer again, but with no luck. He also tried sending the information directly to his palm screen’s storage, but with only the same result. “I can’t send the information anywhere!”
“God dammit! That operating system must be formatted different. They really don’t want that information to get out!”.
“How do I reconfigure the format of the watch?” asked Lon.
“You can’t right now, it would take too long for me to explain, and it might not work anyway; you must send me the data wirelessly”.
“How can you store it if I can’t?”
“I can set up a format-less virtual server that has no operating system, but it will mean that any information you send will effectively have to be decoded later if we can’t figure out which operating system it’s stored with at the moment. But right now it doesn’t matter what format the data is in, we just need to get hold of it”.
“How long will that take? The servers here are pretty big!”
“Look, it might take a long time, but you have to do it, otherwise all of our efforts will be for nothing!”
“Will Eve know what’s going on?”
“She’s still connected to me, she can hear what’s happening”.
“Please tell her I’ll try to be done soon, I think I may have an idea to speed things up. I just need to get the transfer started first”.
As Strys conveyed additional details of the situation to Eve, Lon set up a connection between the server console and ‘Mammy’ via his palm screen.
“Once you’ve established the connection with me,” Strys had returned his attention towards Lon, “send the information to the virtual server I just set up called ‘Bags’”.
After a few moments he began the transmission of data to Strys’ server, and gazed impatiently at the console’s monitor as the names of hundreds of successfully transferred data files flashed on screen. This, however, was only brief; not thirty seconds since the commencement of the transfer, a bad omen made itself known.
“CNSGEOL11432.lxg can not be found. Continue transfer?”
“Huh?” Lon found this a little unexpected.
“What happened?” asked Strys, a little worried, “The transfer stopped”.
“I don't know, I think one of the files is corrupt, it won’t transfer”.
He chose to continue the transfer regardless.
“CNSGEOL11433.lxg can not be found. Continue transfer?”
“Again?!”
Once more he disregarded the notification, yet once more was presented with another.
“What the hell?! It’s telling me a load of files don’t exist!”
“What?” Strys’ voice was a little panicked.
“Shit, nothing’s transferring now!” Lon exclaimed. He quickly re-checked the main server directory for data. “I don’t get it, there are still folders in the root directory,”
“Start the transfer again!”
He did as Strys instructed, but the desired action was not performed.
“Fuck, now it’s telling me there’s nothing to transfer!”
“Are you re-sending me the whole directory?”
“I’m trying, but it’s empty!”
“How can it be empty?! You’ve already sent me hundreds of files!”
Lon became agitated. “Shit, somebody must know what I’m doing! This must be a countermeasure to stop information getting out!”
“Stay calm man, we need to think this th-,” his sentence was disrupted.
Lon waited momentarily for the connection to re-establish, yet it did not happen. “Mammy? I didn’t get the end of that”.
Still the connection appeared severed.
“Mammy, I don’t know if you can hear me, but I can’t hear-”
Lon’s sentence was cut off by the thick sound of metal striking the floor around him, and was taken aback by the fulminant, imposing darkness smothering everything in the tiny room.
In the main room, Eve had become unnerved by the sudden lack of communication from Strys, and began to ready her gun. This portent had her worried of imminent, lethal danger, and she was filled with bewilderment about what actions to take; she could not contact Lon, as two people and a keycard were required for server room access, and she certainly would not separate herself from him, leaving her with only one reasonable option: prepare to fight.
The unusually loud clapping of flat footwear could be heard emanating from the corridor outside, the volume increasing as the footsteps became close. Somebody, it seemed, was in a hurry to get to Data Centre Eleven.
“Oh God”. Eve took a step away from the main door, raised her gun and steadied her aim. She made an intense effort to calm her breath and quell the tears dripping from her eyes. “It’s just like VR,” she whispered to nobody.
The door slid open with a bleep.
Eve readied her finger on the trigger, waiting to take out whoever stepped into the room.
Her heart relentlessly hammered against her ribs, perspiration dampened her brow, the strength in her legs wavered, and time… seemed… slow.
“Eve, don’t shoot!”
She incredulously stared wide-eyed at the person in front of her, and out of pure relief let the gun drop to the floor. She began to cry. “I thought I was going to die!”
“I’m here to make sure you don’t,” said Lin. She glanced down at the unconscious man on the floor, and smirked. “Where’s Lon?”
“He’s in the server room,” Eve sobbed. “What’s going on? Why are you here?” Although relieved, she was rather puzzled.
“There’s not enough time to explain, we need to get Lon and go, right now”.
“What if he hasn’t finished-”
“We need to leave this building, now”.
Eve remained extremely worried. “Only one of us can go into the server room, because the other needs to stay here to operate the door on the other side of that one”.
“I know that, just go and get him, I’ll open the door,” said Lin as she transmuted her briefcase into a firearm.
“Right,” Eve grabbed her gun from the floor and ran to the door of Server Room Eleven. “Oh wait, I need the access card, but I gave it to Lon!”
From her pocket Lin drew a gold keycard and passed it to Eve. “This should work”.
“Where did you-”
“Fucking hurry!”
After scanning the card across the sensor, the door rose and Eve ran to the other side of the man-trap.
Lin pressed the button for the following door, and prepared herself for a gun fight.
Before the door leading to the server room had opened fully, Eve was already inside searching for Lon, yet could not find any evidence of human activity, only rows of server racks and large, metallic cuboids as tall as the ceiling.
“Lon!” she yelled, “Where are you?!”
A faint voice appeared from somewhere in the room.
“Lon?!”
Again the quiet voice came.
Eve became soundless and waited for the voice once more.
“I’m trapped!”
“Trapped where?!” she began to panic.
“The colocation suite second on the right from the entrance!”
She was confused as there was nothing resembling how she had imagined a colocation suite to look. “I can’t see any colocatio
n suites!”
“They must all be in lockdown! That’s why I’m trapped!”
She tried following Lon’s voice, and found it coming from somewhere near one of the large metal cubes. She then understood that each of these was in fact a locked-down colocation suite. She ran to the one in which Lon had explained he was ensnared and banged on the metal. “Are you in this one?!”
“Yes!” he replied, “I was sending the information from the server to Strys, but there was a problem, then the connection broke and this place went into lockdown!”
“How do I get you out?!” she yelled desperately.
“I don’t know! I can’t even see what’s surrounding me in this room, because there’s no light in here anymore!”
“I think it’s steel!”
Lon deliberated for a moment. “Isn’t there some sort of unlock button, or a sensor or something?”
Eve quickly checked all sides of the metal box, yet was not fortunate enough to discover anything like he had mentioned. “There’s nothing, it’s all just flat metal; I can’t seen any electronics anywhere!”
“There must be something somewhere to deactivate this!”
“Where would it be?” she asked.
“I don’t know, it could be anywhere! Look for a console or a panel or something; there has to be something!”
She scanned the space around her, however finding a specific “console or a panel or something” in a roomful of technology was set to be a dauntingly difficult task, particularly for somebody like Eve who knew not much more about computer science than the average person in her city.
Her desperation level rapidly climbed as the semi-muted sounds of gunshots were heard from the data centre’s main room.
With a large amount of stress she began to hunt for the device that would defuse the trap encasing Lon, running past rows of servers and locked-down colocation suites.
There were several consoles, but each appeared to be connected to specific server racks, and none to any form of security system.
More gunshots.
The sole location in the server room where she could imagine any form of security-linked electronic hardware, other than security cameras, was the room’s entrance, and beyond that, the main room of the data centre, where it was apparent some sort of gunfight was occurring.
She ran to the entrance to examine the door’s security panel, which she noticed to be more elaborate than the one adjacent to the man trap’s other door; not just a simple keycard scanner, but a control panel in the form of a flat screen, which glowed red and presented the words “Security Lockdown”.
In a hurry Eve pressed hard on the screen with her fingertip.
“Present level 3 security clearance to continue to lockdown management”.
She responded by hitting the panel with the keycard Lin gave her.
“Level 5 clearance confirmed. Tap screen to continue to lockdown management”.
“Level 5?” Although this presented certain questions, she had not the time to dwell. She forced the message into the back of her consciousness to be addressed at a later time, and continued trying to deactivate the lockdown system. She pressed the screen again.
A floor plan of the server room appeared on screen. Most of the space was illuminated in red, likely depicting the areas in lockdown.
Not being entirely certain of what to do next, she tapped a red area on the display. A mechanical sound in the room somewhere induced an obvious flinch from Eve and she whipped her head around to see one of the colocation suites in her field of vision was now open.
All the while the shots continued from the room beyond the man-trap.
In a fit of panic and cluelessness as to which area of the screen represented Lon’s cage, Eve frantically swiped her fingertips all over the display. Mechanical sounds came from all around her as the display’s red lights turned to blue. “I hope this is working,” tears streamed down her face.
“Eve!”
She stepped back and turned towards Lon’s colocation suite. “Lon, are you okay?!” she yelled.
He had already left the now open room and ran to meet her by the control panel. “I don’t know what happened, but we didn’t get the data!”
“Tell me later, we’re in trouble!” Eve cried.
Lon now heard the shots from the main room. “What’s going on in there?!”
“Just get your gun ready”.
The threatening sounds of muffled ballistics increased in volume after Eve opened the first door with her Level 5 keycard.
“Who are they shooting at?!”
“Lin”.
“Why is Lin here?”
“I don’t know”.
They both pressed their bodies against the man-trap’s left wall, close to the door.
The gunshots sounded in bursts.
“Are you ready?”
Lon’s gun clicked into its correct form. “Ready”.
Eve leant forwards to swipe her keycard to remove the remaining door, and quickly pressed herself back against the cold wall.
The sounds again got louder.
Although Lon was at the behind, he was the first to enter the main room. Somewhat recklessly, he ran to the door’s edge opposite to where Eve anxiously stood in order to get the full view of what was happening, gun raised in awful anticipation.
Blood was disgorged across the floor by the main entrance to the room, and several bodies lay limp.
Lin, after a quick burst of gunfire aimed down the outside corridor, whipped herself back into the room to face Lon. “Did you get the data?”
“No, there was a problem”.
“That was to be expected,” she said almost passively, and fired another volley down the corridor.
The fresh, bloody corpses on the ground were a little hard to take in for Lon, and even more so for Eve.
“Fucking hell, did you have to kill them?!” she yelled, the colour draining from her face.
“If I didn’t, we’d be dead by now”.
Lon could not help but notice the once unconscious scientist on the ground lay in a different position and was pouring blood from the chest.
“What about him?!” the severity of the situation just dawned on him.
“He woke up,” Lin coolly replied.
“You could’ve taken him hostage!”
“Don’t be stupid, that won’t work here”.
“I can’t believe this!”
“Believe it, because it’s gonna get a lot worse”.
Chapter 13
The shots from the corridor ceased, and the sound of a canister hitting the floor and rolling echoed into the room.
Lon and Eve both went cold.
“Was that a grenade?” Lon panicked a whisper.
“No, that would be too stupid in a place like this,” posited Lin, “It’s probably a -”
Her words were cut short by a fierce explosion and a rush of hot air and smoke into their garrison.
All three were blown to the ground, cupping their deafened ears.
Blood from the charred security guard remnants on the floor covered a larger area of the room than earlier, and stained the lab coats of Lon, Eve and Lin.
Dazed and, trying hard not to be, confused, Eve forced her head from the ground and tried to exclaim a strong expletive, however found it initially too unmanageable to muster the breath.
Lin was the first to her feet, with her gun, seemingly unaffected by the violent release of energy outside the door, and again shot the same direction down the corridor, this time through a dense cloud of fumes, purposely remnant from the grenade.
Lon, who was the most directly in front of the room’s entrance, apparently suffered the most. He quickly stood, but stumbled immediately backwards, covered in blood more so than the other two, including over a substantial area of his face.
Seeing he was not dead, and swiftly taking advantage of the concealing smoke, Lin distinctly mouthed an order to them both, “Move that way,” she pointed to th
e right where it was apparent there were no live guards, “and fucking shoot that way,” she gestured with her gun to the left, from where the grenade had come. Surely the gunmen, too, were making haste in the obstructing fog.
Eve rose, as did Lon, and, after steadying himself, took the lead into the corridor, closely followed by Eve and covered by Lin. What was going on he could not make complete sense of in his stupefied state, yet he discerned that the guards to have come from the direction in which they were escaping must already be dead, which, after firing a protective barrage then turning to run, was confirmed as his eyes flickered over two, maybe three bodies towards the corridor’s end.
Even though they were able to hear nothing but intense, trauma-induced otoacoustic emissions, the three escapees were certain the bullets were still flying in their direction.
Knowing she was their best bet for an escape route, Eve took the initiative and directed them not back to the lift from which she and Lon had arrived on that floor, but to a different one farther away; to their luck, and Eve’s knowledge, this area of the Science Centre had far fewer corridors in which to cast orientation, wholly due to the spacious indoor nature replication area spanning floors one hundred and ninety-five to two hundred and five.
The lift was vacant before the three got in. “Floor one hundred and ninety-seven, now, go!” Eve yelled, struggling to hear herself.
Once at her decided floor, she launched herself out into the passageway, gun brandished in preparation to fight for her life. Curiously, the corridor’s only inhabitants, workers in lab coats, appeared unaware of the circumstances. Security must have underestimated their luck and expected the incident to be terminated in isolation. She ran on, Lon and Lin remaining vigilant on her tail, to another lift that took them to the one hundred and ninety-fifth floor.
As soon as the door opened, without deviation from course, she ran towards the closest gathering of vegetation tall enough to mask themselves from abeyant onlookers, a lengthy, thinly wooded area, splashing through a shallow stream and hurdling over rugged rocks, Lin and Lon heeling as close as possible. She dived onto a thick bed of grass, wholly shielded from outside view, her companions as well.
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