by Tim Maughan
Two of the squad are sitting on the floor, in the debris, and their leader orders them up as he sees her approach.
“On your feet, soldiers.”
“Nah, it’s okay, Kareem. You’re good. Stay put. Sitrep?”
“Site secured, sir. Residents have been taken aside and are being processed for rehousing in NYC. Just waiting for the trucks.”
Lajune glances around the parking lot, at bodies with missing arms, legs. Heads.
“Looks like you met some resistance.”
Kareem smiles. “Nothing we couldn’t handle.”
“Any casualties on our side?”
“Nothing major. DeShaun and Williams received minor limb injuries. We got them patched up and waiting for evac.”
“ETA?”
“Last I heard from Hoboken we’re six hours out till the trucks arrive.”
“Jesus. They’ll be fine till then?”
“They’ll be fine, sir.”
Lajune nods through the shattered glass doors. “So what’s the story here?”
Kareem takes a deep breath. “The usual, from what we can make out. Some prepper cult. Probably been holed up here damn near three years now. Came down when the crash happened, ’cause it still had power. Stayed here to shelter from the storms. They weren’t, ah, in particularly good shape mentally, if you catch my drift.”
“The place has power still?”
“Seems that way. Lots of solar on the roof, lots of backup batteries.”
“You got them?”
“Yes, sir. Second squad got them out a couple of hours ago. Again, just waiting on the trucks.”
“And this is a colo, right?”
“Right. Medium-sized. Modular, container-based design.”
“Commander?” It’s one of the girls sitting on the floor. Young. In her teens. Queens accent. Pretty, tired face almost drowned by the battle gear she’s wearing. “Can I ask a question?”
“Go ahead, soldier.”
“Why there so many damn colos around here? In Jersey, I mean?”
Lajune stamps one combat-boot-wrapped foot on the asphalt. “We sitting on one of the biggest data pipes in the world, buried right beneath our feet. Stretches all the way from here to Manhattan, and then out across the country. Real fast line. Back before the crash this was the best place you could put a data center if you didn’t want it to be in the city. All those Wall Street motherfuckers, after nine-eleven, they moved their shit out here, hidden away in the middle of nowhere. And those big-data motherfuckers, too. They got backups here of all their stuff. All that cloud bullshit. When the crash happened, a lot of these centers automatically shut themselves off to avoid getting infected. Looked like they’d been wiped but the data is still intact. That’s why you’re out here, soldier. To make sure they can’t be started up again. To make sure everything gets wiped. You get me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Damn right, yes, sir. You doing the most important job there is for the Movement right now. We can’t go back. No turning back. That data in there, it’s slavery. It’s oppression. It’s greed. It’s me, not we. We can’t go back to that. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
She turns back to Kareem. “Speaking of which, how did the wipe go?”
“Well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about, sir. We’ve not actually triggered it yet.”
“The charges are set?”
“All set, sir. All in place.”
“So?”
Kareem shrugs. “That’s why I radioed you in. We got a situation.”
“What situation?”
“Maybe it’d be best if you take a look yourself.”
He leads her through the shattered entrance, the crunch of glass and exploded plastic strangely satisfying beneath her boots. He leads her through airlock after airlock, all filled with bodies, blood and bullet holes sprayed across Kubrickian white walls.
Eventually they emerge onto a gantry above the main hall. More blood, corpses, firefight traces. But the main features of the hall are the shipping containers, dozens of them, arranged in neat parallel rows. All must have been originally painted white, she sees, but have long since been encased in layer upon layer of graffiti. Scrawled letters, weird symbols, words Lajune doesn’t recognize.
Kareem leads her down steel steps to the floor of the hall. “Usual, standard setup. Basic shipping containers reinforced for extra protection. Each one rented out to a client originally, I’d guess. Individual fire control and power.”
“But not EMP shielded?”
“Not enough for what we’re packing, nah.”
“So I’m still not getting what the holdup is, Kareem.”
“Sorry, sir, just a little farther.”
He’s leading her past the boxes, each one open. She glances inside. In some she sees bunk beds. In others, plants growing—fruits and vegetables. Another is full of what looks like dead children. She steadies herself, holds back the urge to vomit, and instead curses under her breath.
Eventually they stop, at a container that is almost at the dead center of the hall. The first thing she notices is that the door is shut.
“What’s going on?”
“Take a look.”
She steps up to the viewport, a small impact-proof glass slit in the door, and peers in.
Inside is dimly lit chaos.
The walls are lined with server racks, strobing with green and amber lights. Lajune is no expert, but she’s seen inside plenty of colocation centers over the last year, and there are far more racks in this box than usual. It looks like somebody has moved them here, probably from some of the other boxes, so they can all be in the same place. Moreover, they’re all wired together in some crazy-ass way, the box full of suspended cables, crisscrossing through the air from wall to wall, rack to rack, like a three-dimensional spiderweb. Infinite fucking detail. The box is littered with trash; food fragments, clothing, computer parts, those old-fashioned fold-up computers—so much crap she can’t actually see the floor. She can feel heat coming from it all—even through the near airtight box she can smell the all-too-familiar stench of rotting organic matter and human excrement.
And, sitting in the middle of it all, cross-legged, is a man.
He’s stripped to his waist, his brown skin covered in a thin layer of sweat. All she can see of his face is a long beard, graying into white, because his ears are covered with headphones, his eyes hidden by something else. Lajune isn’t quite sure what it is, but some kind of technology, vaguely familiar-looking, like a boxy visor you can’t see out of.
And he’s waving his hands around in the space in front of him, like a slow-motion fucking madman.
“What the fuck is he doing?”
“No idea.” Kareem shrugs. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Get him out of there.”
“That’s the thing, we can’t. It’s locked.”
“For fuck’s sake.” She peers back through the slit. “And he’s just been sitting there, all the time you’ve been here?”
“Affirmative.”
“You tried getting his attention?”
“Yeah. Nothing. Don’t think he can hear us with all that shit strapped to his face.”
Lajune starts hammering on the container door with her fist, yelling. “Hey! HEY!”
Nothing.
They both stand in silence for half a minute, staring at the guy in the box.
“What you think he’s doing?” she asks Kareem.
“I dunno. He’s jacked into all that shit … I mean, I’ve met people in these colos before, crazy people, saying they’d come here looking for something. Something they lost in the crash. Hoping they’d find it in here somehow. Mostly they’d just be going up to the racks, prodding at shit. Wide-eyed and strung out. Always thought they were crazy. But this guy … I dunno. Looks like he might know what’s he’s doing. Never seen anything like this before.” He shrugs again. “Hence I pinged you.”
Lajune sig
hs. “What happens if we wipe it now?”
“What happens to him, if we wipe with him in there?” Kareem sucks his teeth. “Shit, I dunno, sir. With that much tech in there? He’ll probably fry. The whole box is gonna be lit up.”
Lajune looks at him, then back to the guy in the box. From the corner of her eye she can see blood and dead bodies. Casualties. “You got cutting gear with you?”
“Back on one of the trucks, out in the lot.”
“Then what the fuck you waiting for, soldier? Cut him out.”
* * *
When he pulls back the kitchen cupboard doors with his ghost hands, he can see what’s inside. Brand names stacked a little too perfectly, like video game items assembled in an equipment menu.
It’s not really what’s in the cupboards, of course, just the imprints made by data he found. An approximation, an elaborate infographic, the representation of data he’s spent years mining from the server backups of the five data centers he trawled through before he got to this one. Amazon. FreshDirect. Trader Joe’s. Bank of America. The data trails of Scott’s grocery-buying habits. He found some data from Seamless just a few months back, found Scott’s record in there. Cross-reference it with the right date and time and then he can even open the fridge and see what his takeaway leftovers are.
He turns his head, the headset tracking his eyes, scanning light across his retinas. The tiny apartment looks odd, disjointed, nothing quite fitting. The lighting never looks right. He’s tried his best to make it work, but nothing quite stitches together properly. Mainly because it’s been sourced from too many places, none of them quite high-res enough, lacking in details. Images captured by the smart TV and sent quietly back to Samsung. The video feed from the entry phone routed through a failed security start-up. Fragments of LIDAR taken by the motion tracker on a PlayStation that Sony lied about deleting. One badly taken photo on a rental agent’s website. Disparate images assembled from the wreckage of the cloud.
He can put Scott’s apartment back together, just not him.
He could pull open the apartment door right now, step outside. Float-walk down the stairs of the old Brooklyn brownstone, out and down the stoop, and wander around a similarly patched-together reconstruction of Park Slope. Walk into every shop and diner, every bar and restaurant. Peer into every alleyway and scour every backyard.
But Scott won’t be there.
He knows, because he’s looked.
Every day, seventeen hours a day, for the last two years.
Trawling through data, looking for him, like he spent twelve hours a day for a month trawling through the shattered architecture of Brooklyn, his hands bleeding as he moved rubble and masonry from the wreckage of the brownstone, leveled by explosions when the crash came and an automated gas pump failed.
But he’ll find him yet.
He’ll keep looking.
He just needs to scour the cupboards, the streets, the neighborhoods. Brooklyn. The five boroughs. Search every scrap of data, find a trace. A shadow on a CCTV camera feed, a reflection in a store window on Google Street View.
If it’s not here it’ll be in the next data center, or the one after that. He just needs to keep moving. Trawling. Mining. Searching.
He blinks open a window, intricate film systems and directory structures unwrapping themselves around him—
and
then
someone
rips the headset from his face
and drags him
kicking
and screaming
and blinking
into the light.
* * *
“I think he’s finally calmed down,” Kareem says.
They’re both looking down at the guy, as he sits cross-legged at their feet, his head in his hands. Kareem had found a soiled blanket in the box among all the other detritus, and has draped it over his shoulders. He’s calmer now, but Lajune can hear him gently sobbing.
“You want me to get one of the squad, get him loaded onto the truck?”
“Nah. Not yet. Give me some time with him alone.”
Kareem flashes her a concerned look. “You sure, sir?”
“Yeah, you good. Go get your squad ready to bug out. I’ll ping you when I need you.”
Kareem nods, leaves. Lajune takes a knee in front of the guy. He stinks, but that ain’t unusual these days. She can’t remember the last time she took a shower. She probably doesn’t smell too rosy herself.
“Hey.” For the first time he looks up, slowly, from his hands, makes bloodshot eye contact with her. She unclips a canteen full of water from her armor, offers it to him. “You should drink.”
Reluctantly he takes the canteen, takes a sip. “Thanks.”
“You want some food? I can get one of my squad to bring you something from the truck if you want. We got some bread and—”
“No. No, it’s fine. I’m good. Thanks.”
“You don’t look too good.”
“I’m fine.”
“What’s your accent?”
She swears he almost smiles. “I’m British.”
“Really? What the fuck are you doing all the way out here?”
“I’m looking for someone.” Any hint of that smile is gone.
“Shit, we’re all looking for people.” She finds she has to break eye contact, stare up into the corner of the room, choke back memories of the lost. “How you end up with these preppers, though?”
“Preppers? I dunno if I’d call them that. Dunno if they were ever that organized.” He scratches at his overgrown beard. “They were certainly fucking weirdos. But hiding from storms in a data center for years will probably do that to you. They were into … some new religion? More like a cult, I guess. I’ve only been here a month or two. To be honest, they mainly left me to get on with shit. Minded their own business as long as I helped them keep the solar running.”
“You know about keeping solar working?”
“Yeah. A bit.”
“Then maybe you can help—” She’s interrupted by a pinging sound. The spex hanging from her lapel. She takes them off, flips them open, peers through the lenses without fully putting them on. Notifications and messages. Distractions. She sighs. “Well, that can wait.”
When she looks back at him it looks like he’s just been given a bump of adrenaline. His eyes are wide, disbelief. Almost agitated. “Where … where the hell did you get those?”
“These? Back in the city. NYC.”
“Can I see? Please?”
She hesitates, squints at him. Probably a bad idea, somehow. But she’s intrigued by this weird fucking brown Englishman that’s hiding out in a shipping container full of servers surrounded by hillbilly white supremacists. She hands them to him.
“No funny business,” she says.
* * *
Rush puts on the spex this black woman in combat gear has given him and it’s like being sucked back in time, across years and continents, through victories and mistakes.
Windows unfurl in the air around his face. Maps, data, incoming messages. Status reports.
It’s Flex, there’s no questioning that. He knows every retina-projected pixel and floating icon, barely changed from when he coded them. Tweaked maybe, but at surface level it looks identical, frozen in time.
Instinctively he blinks through menus, pulls up the version number.
His heart seems to stop, his throat dry.
“Holy shit.”
FLEX OS. VERSION 4.027
Open source.
Built by Rush00.
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
Flash back to the last time he’d seen those let
ters and numbers, arranged precisely like that, when he’d compiled this build, zipped it up, e-mailed it. To Scott.
He struggles for words. “I … where did, where did you get this, when?”
“The spex?”
“Yeah, I mean the software. The network. I thought it was all gone.”
“Yeah, so did we. So did everyone.” She sighs. “I dunno exactly. Seemed to spring up out of Brooklyn. Kinda like an underground thing. Stories of some guy walking around handing out working spex to people. Came in handy when the government and the militia rolled in to try to shut us down. Gave us an advantage.”
“When was this?”
“I dunno, a year? Year and a half ago? It’s all been a blur.”
He blinks open a network map. It opens on a hyperlocal scale, pulsing blue dots representing the dozen or so troops in and around the data center, name tags floating alongside them. He zooms out hard, New Jersey laid out as a basic green wireframe map, few details apart from pixel-thin lines representing roads and the occasional town. None of this was built into Flex, of course, he knows that, imagines them building it themselves as they pushed their way out of NYC, brand-new maps drawn from the user level up through collaboration and exploration. He zooms out some more and scrolls east, following a line of pulsing dots—individual users, sometimes grouped together, sometimes on their own—spaced out just enough to keep the network connections to back home stable.
And then he hits it, New York City, mapped out in infinite detail, unlike the stark, unexplored wastelands of Jersey. A new map, not dictated by some distant conglomerate or orbiting, all-seeing satellite, but built from the ground up by the people that actually live there. And here the blue dots are so many, so close together, that they’re one huge pulsating, growing mass, filling the outlines of Brooklyn and Queens, spilling over bridges into Staten Island, Manhattan, pushing up north into the Bronx and beyond.