The Fires of Yesterday (The Silent Earth, Book 3) Page 2

  “I got the Helios working, but it took months of messing around. We just don’t have the time to do something like that again.”

  “So if we stay here, how do we produce food? The LEDs don’t seem up to the job.”

  “If we located some grow lights we might have a chance, but that would be nothing short of a miracle. They were all used up long ago.”

  “Are there any other kinds of lamps we can use?”

  I thought for a moment. “Not that I know of.”

  “Okay, here’s something from left field. Are there any cryotanks at M-Corp we could use to place the children in cryosleep?”

  “No, and even if we did, we don’t have the right gear to prep them for cryosleep. It’s not just a matter of whipping their clothes off and slamming the lid shut on them.”

  “So how many options are we down to?”

  “One,” I said. “I head north and try to find out what’s going on up there. If I can’t find what’s causing the murk, I appeal to Ascension for help. With their resources, they might be our last chance.”

  Arsha was silent as she contemplated. “There really is no other choice, is there?”

  “I don’t think there is.”

  “But like I said before, you’re going to have to get through the Marauders to reach them.”

  “I can do that.”

  She looked up at me, her eyes full of worry in the candlelight. “I hope so. I don’t like the thought of you out there again.” She nodded toward the Grid spire in the distance. “But if you’re heading that way, maybe you can do something about that.”

  “The spire? Do what exactly?”

  “We’ll need to take the children into the city tomorrow. To M-Corp. That’s where I can show you.”

  In the kitchen, the children had already finished their meals and were now banging their forks loudly on the table. “More, more, more!” they shouted, laughing at each other as they increased their volume.

  “I’ll explain later. Let’s deal with one problem at a time,” Arsha sighed. “Who’s going to give the hungry monsters the bad news that there’s no more food tonight?”

  2

  The children were glad to be out of the house as we headed to M-Corp the next day. They had been cooped up for weeks on end, only venturing out now and again into the back yard to stretch their legs. Initially they’d scampered along the street, running rings around us enthusiastically, but as the kilometres piled up they’d tired, and now they lay in Arsha’s and my arms as we completed the final part of the journey, the city looming large before us.

  “When is this night ever going to stop?” Atlas said. “It’s taking long hours to go away.”

  ‘Long hours’ was a favourite phrase of his for anything that took more time than he liked.

  “Soon, Atty. They’ll blow away soon.”

  “I like the blue sky better than the black sky,” Loren said.

  “When are we getting there?” Myron chimed in. He dropped his head to Arsha’s shoulder wearily as she cradled him in her arm.

  “That’s where we’re going,” I said, pointing up to the curving facade of the M-Corp tower that stretched into the sky a couple of blocks away. In the dim light it was like a great thin wedge of granite rising up out of the earth, its features only vaguely discernible.

  When we reached it we guided the children through the secret entrance that had been carved into the dumpster, and from there up onto the third floor. There was a section of cubicled office space here that Mish and Ellinan had converted into a play area back before Atlas had been born. They’d been forced to pass the time for several weeks here, and the area was still well contained, a large rectangular section cordoned off by mouldy grey partitions. There was nowhere for the children to run off to, and not much they could damage.

  “Are you sure you’re going to be okay with them here?” I said to Mish as the children began to scurry about, their vigour having returned with a new place to explore and their legs rested during the last half of the trip.

  “Yeah, I’ll make sure they don’t get out,” Mish said.

  “We’re going to be up on…” I turned back to Arsha. “What floor did you say?”

  “Ten.”

  “Right, ten. So come up if you need us, okay?”

  “Okay, Brant.” Mish was already turning her attention back to the little ones. “They’ll be fine with me.”

  “Brant will be a little while, but I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Arsha said. “See you soon.”

  I followed Arsha up the stairwell and we came out at the tenth floor in quick time. I’d initially been unwilling to leave the children alone at all, but Arsha had insisted that they couldn’t be present up here because of the delicate nature of the equipment. Considering Arsha would be returning to them almost immediately, I’d reluctantly agreed.

  “So what’s this about, Arsha?”

  She led me through a dusty glass door and into a small anteroom where a second door of frosted glass had been smashed at waist height. Arsha reached through the gap and opened the lock from the inside, and as we crossed into the chamber a series of dim yellow lights activated on the floor, splashing arcs of eerie illumination onto the ceiling of the room.

  “You were away a long time, Brant. You’ve seen a lot of the things I’ve done – the plantations, the environmental monitoring, the preparations for the return of humans. But I also did something else while you were away.”

  I followed her across the room to where a cluster of rack-mounted servers had been slotted into the wall, long strips of smooth silver metal aligned in neat columns. As Arsha moved across the floor, her shadow flipped and danced across the ceiling.

  “What did you do?” I said, curious.

  “I did some digging into M-Corp itself.”

  “What do you mean? What is this room?”

  “It’s M-Corp’s offline data centre. It’s where they kept all their secrets.”

  “A data centre, here? No way. All of the repositories were shifted onto Grid distribution networks years ago. Storing data locally became ridiculously outdated.”

  “Maybe for non-sensitive data, yes. But you know as well as me, no matter what type of encryption you used, no matter how careful you were, there was always the chance that someone else on the Grid would tap into it. That’s why they kept data here that they didn’t want anyone else to reach. Stuff that they didn’t dare upload to the Grid. In effect it was unhackable remotely. Only those with physical access to the data centre had any capability to access it.”

  “How do you know this, Arsha? You never had the kind of clearance to be privy to this kind of knowledge.” I gave her a sidelong glance. “Did you?”

  She smiled. “No, I didn’t. But like I said, I came looking for resources I could utilise. Figured they might have had data here on classified biotech or energy tech that could help us. Luckily I had time to figure out how to get to it.”

  She reached out and flicked a broad red kill switch, and the bank of servers flared into life, tiny blue and green LEDs stuttering and flickering haphazardly. A noise not unlike the distant thrum of a swarm of bees filled the chamber.

  “There’s still power to it?”

  “It’s hooked up to the cell bank down below. Don’t worry, we won’t need it on for long, and everything in here is quantum solid state. Very low power consumption.”

  She pulled a chair up to the desk in front of her and sat, activating the display panel with a swipe of her hand. A sequence of green characters scrolled down the screen as the system booted up.

  “I don’t get it, Arsha. How did you get access to these secrets? And what are the secrets?”

  “It wasn’t easy getting in. I had to use a brute force attack to break the encryption.”

  “You mean you just threw every conceivable combination of codes at it, one by one? But that would have taken–”

  “Seven years,” she finished for me. She grinned ruefully. “I set a script running and it
cycled through a couple of million codes a day. I got lucky, though. It could have taken thirty years if it hadn’t lucked onto the right code after only seven.”

  “Damn. I hope it was worth it.”

  “See for yourself.” She tapped on the panel and entered the system, navigating through menus until she found the one she sought. “M-Corp dealt in a lot of tech, right? You know that as well as I do. A lot of it was cutting-edge stuff. Bleeding edge. The newest of the new. They were always pushing boundaries and exploring different avenues of research and commerce.”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “Well, what you might not know about M-Corp is that they were around a long time. They weren’t just an old company. They were ancient.”

  She scrolled through several old photographs that depicted smaller office buildings, seemingly the humble beginnings of the company. The first was a tiny brick place with a corrugated iron roof not much larger than a house.

  “They went through several name changes in the early days. Not sure why, but they’d been M-Corp for at least fifty years before the Winter came along.” A picture of a withered old man with an odd smile appeared on the screen with the caption Wilkins.

  “Oh, I’d seen that guy around,” I said. “He used to drop past the lab and peer in now and again. Never figured out who he was.”

  “Doubtful,” she said. “He was the CEO over a hundred years ago. Must have been someone who just looked like him.” She swivelled to look at me. “Here’s the thing. M-Corp weren’t just one of the first organisations to harness the technological advantages of the Grid. They were utilising it before it even got started.”

  I gave her a quizzical look. “Are you saying M-Corp built the Grid?”

  “Not exactly. They didn’t put the spires in the ground, if that’s what you mean. But they were one of the major players in the underlying technology that the Grid was built upon. They’re one of its founders. That’s one of the reasons they became so powerful. They leveraged that knowledge to get ahead of the competition.”

  “I’m beginning to see where you’re going, now.”

  “Yeah.” She turned back to the panel, dismissing the photo of the old man and bringing up a command line interface. “This data centre contains information about the most valuable commodity there is: the inner workings of the Grid.”

  “It’s amazing there isn’t more security here. Apart from the encryption.”

  “Oh, you just walked through about ten of them,” Arsha said, grinning. “There were retinal scanners, DNA probes, any number of biometric safeguards. I removed them all years ago. Plus, I think they were using a bit of security by obscurity. Y’know, make the place look unimportant so as not to attract attention. I don’t think there were many people in the company who understood what was contained in here.”

  I expelled a loud breath. “So we have the knowledge that the Marauders want. We have the power to learn everything about the Grid, including how to restart it.”

  “Right here at our fingertips.”

  “Shit, Arsha. We need to destroy this. If they ever found it…”

  “I agree totally,” she said. “It’s dangerous, and I fully intend to wipe it in time. But right now we can use it for our own purposes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s information here on how to fine-tune the spires to keep them running, keep them talking to each other. If we read between the lines, there’s also information on how to corrupt them. How to shut them down.”

  “That sounds complex. I’ll bet there’s years of study required to really get a handle on how this stuff works.”

  “If you wanted to really be a Grid architect, if you wanted to understand everything about how it worked, sure. But if your only objective is to perform one or two tasks, you don’t need that level of understanding.”

  I nodded. “Okay, but even so, wouldn’t it be easier to just blow up the spire with that X7 explosive you found a while back? Over in the little bunker to the south.”

  “Maybe not. According to the schematics, those spires are incredibly strong. They’re built to withstand multiple missile strikes, even a collision with a carrier-grade shuttle.”

  “That’s insane. How?”

  “Something to do with the alloys they used and the way they designed the frame. I’m not sure, I didn’t dig that far into it.”

  “So explosives wouldn’t cut it. What do you propose?”

  “Well, here’s my plan. You take a couple of hours here to learn what you can about ways to shut the spire down. Don’t bother trying to understand everything, just focus on that one specific task. Memorise it. When you head north, if you can get past the Marauders and access the spire, shut it down.” She brought up another schematic with a visual representation of a spire. “There’s a hidden service entrance at ground level on every spire that will give you access to a room inside.” She slid a data shard across the desk to me. “Insert this shard to run a subroutine that will bypass the security encryption. Once you have access, take out the Grid spire, take out their ability to locate us with those aerial drones, or whatever else they’re using.”

  “You make it sound easy.” I grimaced.

  “I know it won’t be, but I think it’s worth a try.”

  “Okay. Move over and let me take a look.”

  She got up and pushed the chair toward me. “If you think you can handle it from here, I’ll get going. I’ll check on the cryotank on level five and then stay with the kids.” She turned and began striding across the room, sending more shadows scattering in her wake. “Don’t take too long, huh? We need to get them home again before nightfall,” she said over her shoulder.

  “Yeah, sure. Thanks, Arsha.”

  She left me there in front of the display panel and I began to trawl through the seemingly endless repository of data. There was enough here to spend a lifetime studying, but I was selective in what I read and discarded anything that wasn’t pertinent to the information I sought.

  The complexity of the Grid was mind-boggling. It was no wonder that the Marauders hadn’t figured it out yet. The number of routing protocols that were intertwined within its code was mesmerising, each of them with their own specific parameters and metrics. Without matching and interlocking values, the spires would not peer with each other, instead returning to default values and shutting down. This was why the Marauders hadn’t been able to keep them running for longer than a few minutes at a time.

  I found the information I required – a string of roughly ten commands that would effectively create a loop in logic that could not be circumvented without a specific string of counter-commands. These were a set of instructions that the Marauders would find impossible to discover simply by chance. Without a deeper understanding of the system and how it worked, they would be unlikely to figure out how to circumvent it any time soon. That was really all I needed to memorise, these few simple lines of code.

  This would hopefully be enough to stop them in their tracks.

  I shut down the server bank and the room went dark again. Out through the glass doors, I passed by the shattered windows that overlooked the city. It was hard to tell how long I had been sitting there hunched over the display screen, but judging by the sky it was not yet night-time. It had likely been no more than a few hours.

  I didn’t see any reason to remain in the city any longer. Every hour I waited was another hour closer to the children running out of food.

  I decided I would leave first thing tomorrow.

  3

  It was a long night. On the one hand I was anxious to get going, to start putting distance between myself and the city, to edge closer to the mystery in the north and drag it out into the open. I wanted to feel the coarseness of the sand under my feet, not because of any desire to be away from home, but because it meant I’d be closer to figuring out how I was going to deal with our dilemma and how I was going to overcome it. Although I had never visited a dentist, I imagined that this was ho
w it might feel for someone sitting nervously in the waiting room – the anticipation of experiencing something unpleasant, but also the desire to get it over and done with. To get it out the way.

  On the other hand, I was loath to leave the human children and Mish. The only thing that meant anything to me now was protecting them, ensuring that they were safe and happy. Even Arsha was in my thoughts. Now that we’d put our differences behind us, I felt an affinity with her that I had never experienced before. She felt like part of my family now, no longer someone I was simply competing with, or with whom I had been thrown together to complete a mission. There was a sense of kinship, a bond that held us together that had never existed before.

  It felt counter-intuitive for me to be walking out the front door at the first faint sign of light in the east, when the day’s meagre glow began to fall across the city. How could I protect these children by walking away from them?

  The thoughts nagged at me so much that I was compelled to repeatedly check on each of the children throughout the night. Mish rested peacefully on the sofa with her eyes closed and her blonde hair spilling across her face. On my first visit she opened her eyes and just lay there staring up at me, silent and unquestioning, her gaze unwavering. I felt like she was reading my mind, understanding not only everything I planned to do, but also the turmoil that was going on inside of me as well. I expected her to say something, to ask me to stay with her, but after a time she simply closed her eyes again as if nothing were wrong. I left her there to rest.

  Down the hall, the children slept soundly in their room. I stood and listened to the cadence of their breathing for a long time. For the most part it was arrhythmic, like four musicians reading from four different sheets of music, but every now and then they seemed to fall in time with each other, softly breathing in and out in perfect harmony.

  I pictured what lay before them, what was in store for them during the remainder of their lifetimes. I hoped that they would live long and fruitful lives, remaining long enough to see a civilisation start to flourish again, to see their children and their grandchildren play at their feet and to eventually grow strong and healthy. To tear down the old and the decayed, and to start building anew, bringing beauty and peace back into the world.