Death Match

FIFTY-NINE

It had taken five minutes, and the work of four men with flashlights, to find the lighting panels for the computing chamber. In the end, Mauchly discovered them himself: at the end of a catwalk, suspended atop a metal ladder. Calling down to the others to halt their search, Mauchly snapped on a dozen switches with two swift chopping motions.

The illumination was not particularly bright, but nevertheless he was forced to close his eyes. After a few moments, he opened them again and faced the metal railing of the catwalk. His hands tightened around the railing in surprise.

He was standing halfway up one wall of what resembled nothing so much as the hold of a huge tanker. The vast space of Liza’s private computing chamber — four stories tall and at least two hundred feet long — lay open from floor to ceiling. Catwalks similar to the one he stood on protruded here and there along the skin of the walls, leading to ventilation housings, electrical panels, other support apparatus. At the far end of the room were Liza’s primary and backup power supplies: giant pillboxes within heavy steel armor.

Below, an unbelievably dense maze of hardware lay spread before him. Mauchly had spent two years at PharmGen as a technical purchasing officer, and he recognized some of the wildly diverse computers: he stared, trying to make sense of the riot of equipment.

Perhaps the best metaphor was the growth rings of a tree. The oldest machines — too old for Mauchly to identify — stood in the center, surrounded by their keypunch consoles and teletypes. Beyond lay “big iron” IBM System/370 mainframes and seventies-era DEC minicomputers. Beyond was a ring of Cray supercomputers of several vintages, from Cray-1s and -2s to more modern T3D systems. Whole banks of computers seemed dedicated simply to facilitating data exchange between the heterogeneous machinery. Beyond the Crays were bands of still more modern rack servers, stacked twenty units high in gray housings. Around all of this, near the room’s periphery, stood row upon row of supporting hardware: magnetic character readers, ancient IBM 2420 tape drives and 3850 Mass Storage Systems, ultramodern data silos and off-board memory devices. The farther his eye strayed from the center, the less organization there seemed to be: it was as if Liza’s need for breathing space had grown faster than Silver’s capacity to provide it. Once again Mauchly admonished himself: he should have supervised this personally, rather than letting it grow under the eyes of Silver alone.

Now the members of the security party — Sheldrake, the tousle-headed Dorfman, and two tech specialists, Lawson and Gilmore — had begun fanning out into the chamber, picking their way warily, like children in an unfamiliar forest. Watching, Mauchly felt a stab of vertigo: there was something unnatural about being perched on one wall of this huge tank, itself balanced atop a sixty-story tower. He hurried along the catwalk, descended the ladder, and joined Sheldrake and Dorfman on the chamber floor.

“Any word from Silver?” Sheldrake asked.

Mauchly shook his head.

“I knew Silver had a server farm up here, but I never expected anything like this.” Sheldrake stepped carefully over a thick black cable with the daintiness of a cat.

Mauchly said nothing.

“Maybe we should enter the private quarters anyway.”

“Silver said not to proceed, that he’d contact us.”

“Lash is with him. God knows what that guy is forcing him to do.” Sheldrake glanced at his watch. “It’s been ten minutes since he called. We’ve got to act.”

“Silver’s orders were explicit. We’ll give him five minutes more.” He turned to Dorfman. “Post yourself at the entrance. The backup units should be here any minute. Help them up through the barrier.”

There was an excited burst of chatter from deeper inside. They moved toward the sound, threading between tall racks of servers. Several had clipboards hanging from their flanks, bearing sheets of hastily scribbled notations in Silver’s handwriting. The surrounding computers breathed with such a diversity of fan noise that Mauchly almost imagined himself a trespasser, penetrating some living collective.

Ahead, Sheldrake was now in urgent consultation with Lawson and Gilmore. Gilmore, short and overweight, hunched over his palmtop. “I’m picking up heavy activity along the central data grid, sir,” he was saying.

“On the grid itself?” Mauchly interjected. “Not distributed to the interfaces?”

“Just the grid.”

“Since when?”

“It’s spiked over the last minute. The bandwidth is intense, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“What’s the initiator?”

“Command, sir.”

Liza. Mauchly nodded to Sheldrake, who grabbed his radio. “Sheldrake to security central.” He waited. “Sheldrake to central, report.”

The radio crackled and spat, and Sheldrake replaced it with disgust. “It’s that damn baffle.”

“Try your cell.” Mauchly turned back to Gilmore. “How’s the grid holding up?”

“It’s not meant for this kind of stress, sir. Tower integrity’s failing already. If we can’t bleed off some of the load, the—”

As if in answer, there was a loud report from below, followed immediately by another, echoing and reechoing in the hollow space. Then came a rumbling, so deep it was almost below the threshold of audibility. The floor beneath Mauchly began to tremble.

He exchanged a brief, frozen look with Sheldrake. Then he whirled, cupped his hands around his mouth. “Dorfman!” he shouted over the forest of equipment. “Report!”

“It’s the security plates, sir!” the voice came back faintly from the hatchway. It was pitched high, whether from excitement or fear Mauchly could not tell. “They’re closing!”

“Closing! Any sign of backup?”

“No, sir! I’m getting the hell out before—”

“Dorfman, hold your position. You hear me? Hold your position—”

Mauchly’s words were drowned by an enormous boom that shook the heavy equipment around them. The security plates had closed, trapping them atop the Eden tower.

“Sir!” Gilmore cried wildly. “We’ve got a Condition Gamma!”

“Triggered by the overload? Impossible.”

“Don’t know, sir. All I can tell you is the tower’s locked down tight.”

That’s it. Mauchly raised his cell phone, dialed Silver.

No answer.

“Come,” he told Sheldrake. “Let’s get him.” He tucked the phone back into his jacket pocket, pulled out the 9mm.

As he turned toward the ladder leading up to the private quarters, the lights went out abruptly. And when the emergency illumination came on, it drenched the digital city in a uniform fog of crimson.