INSUFFICIENT FUEL FOR OPERATION read the LED along the panel’s top.
“They checked the damn thing… just two weeks ago,” he muttered, tapping the button which would make the readout show the level of the fuel tank—439 gallons.
Something of a hothouse flower himself, one of the first things he’d done after buying the house was have the heavy-duty self-starting generator installed, along with a fuel tank large enough to run it for several days. PowerSafe, the company which had put the system in, sent someone out once a month to test-start it and make certain it would operate properly when it was needed.
Like now, for instance.
OK, he told himself, no big deal. Since it was physically impossible for him to go out to the generator shed if something like this happened, provisions for manually starting it had been built into the board. He uncovered the start button and pressed it. starter engaging the readout informed him. engine turning over. Seconds passed as he silently urged the thing to start, dammit, start!
The readout flashed, manual start ing sequence aborted, insufficient fuel for operation.
“Insufficient fuel?” he hissed under his breath, “You’ve got four hundred… fucking gallons!”
“It won’t start?” Ursula asked behind him.
“No,” he spat in disgust, then closed his eyes for a couple seconds, trying to find something like calm. “It doesn’t seem to be… getting any gas.”
“Oh.”
He turned his chair so he could see her. “Why don’t you call PowerSafe… have them send somebody out here… like five minutes ago. Call the power company too. Tell them we’ve got a problem… find out when we might get… juice again.”
“Sure,” she answered eagerly, clearly relieved to have something to do. “I’ll get right on it.”
“Great.” He spun his chair back to give the generator another try. But first he peeked surreptitiously over his right arm. There was still enough light left in the room to let him read how much charge remained in his respirator’s power pack.
What he saw wasn’t particularly reassuring.
Two hours and some odd minutes left. When the charge got down to just two hours the power management chip would beep to remind him to plug in and recharge. Up until now that had seemed like a more than generous safety margin.
He straightened back up, staring sightlessly at the generator’s control panel and telling himself that there was no reason to worry. The power would come back on soon. Even if it didn’t, PowerSafe’s office was only half an hour away. Double the travel time for bad roads and that still left plenty of time to spare.
Of course it would be even better if he could get the frigging generator going himself. Try again.
“Key?”
The tone of her voice stilled his hand as he reached for the starter button. “What’s up?”
“I can’t call out. None of the phone lines are working.”
More good news. Still there was no need to panic. Yet, anyway. “No big deal. Tell me where the cellular is… and I’ll call them on that.”
Ursula was quiet for so long that he was beginning to think she was going to tell him she didn’t know where it was. Which might just indicate a bit of lost memory when she shifted to backup power because tracking the objects in her environment had been one of the first skills she’d mastered.
“You don’t know where it is?” he prompted.
“No, that’s not it.”
“Well where is it?” he asked in exasperation.
“Out in the van.”
Right, he’d taken it with him the last time Rafe had driven him into the city. “No big deal,” he said with a laugh. “I just go get it.”
“I don’t think you can,” she said carefully.
He turned his chair to face her. “Why the hell not?”
She looked decidedly unhappy. “You need the power lift to get down into the garage.”
This time it was his turn to not say anything for several seconds. When he did speak it was to say “Shit!”
“That’s the name of the creek,” she agreed with a wan smile. “You know, this might not be a bad time for me to learn how to curse.”
“It just might,” he agreed with a thin chuckle. “I’m not sure I want to see a better time.”
“This is all kind of new and scary to me,” she admitted, “And I don’t want to come off like some sort of machine, but I’ve been doing some figuring. At the rate I’m going I’ll be out of battery power in just a couple hours.”
You and me both. “That sounds about right.” He pushed the generator’s manual start button again.
STARTER ENGAGING.
“I think maybe I should conserve power by shutting down some nonessential systems.”
engine turning over “Good thinking. What do you want to shut down?”
“The boxing computer isn’t doing anything useful. The self-emulators and associative functions it’s running aren’t aware.”
“Pull the plug on it then.”
MANUAL START SEQUENCE ABORTED. INSUFFICIENT FUEL FOR OPERATION.
Well, that’s that. Seventeen grand not counting the service contract, and I’d have been better off spending my money on a whole shitload of flashlight batteries. As he guided his chair back to the worktable the boxing platform’s indicators went dark.
“Cutting the displays will also save quite a bit of power,” she said, an odd tonelessness creeping into her voice.
Key caught himself just before he told her to go ahead. Just how important to her was her new image? Doing without it under normal circumstances probably wouldn’t be a problem, but it might just be providing a very important anchor for her right now.
Besides, he wasn’t sure he wanted to be alone in the dark.
“Stay with me on the flatscreen. Turn the other displays off.”
She nodded. “All right.” There was no mistaking the relief in her voice, and on her face when it bloomed on the smaller screen. Making that offer must have been damned hard for her. This had to be even scarier for her than for him.
“Anything else?”
“A couple floptical drives with programming data and reference material on them. My modems are useless, but maybe I should keep one powered up and scanning the lines in case the phone company bails us out.”
“Sounds good to me.” One part of him was thrilled with the way she was performing under the circumstances. One of the underlying specs for an AI or AE was problem-solving. This was a problem he’d anticipated and prepared for in advance—though obviously not as well as he’d thought—and she was way ahead of him in coming to terms with it.
But then again, his thoughts kept turning to matters she probably hadn’t considered yet.
Ursula had fretted about the amount of power drawn by the flatscreen. Key had come up with a compromise. In his room was the laptop he kept at his bedside for insomniac netsurfing and recording middle-of-the-night thoughts and bits of programming. It at least was fully charged. He brought it out and managed to cable it into Ursula’s system. Now she was with him on its small but high-definition color screen, cutting her power usage another increment.
While in his room he’d pulled the blankets off his bed and gotten them more or less draped over himself to help keep warm.
About an hour had passed since the power failed. Only a gloomy monochrome light came in the windows, and that too was fading as the unseen Sun sank lower in the sky. The snow was still coming down, the wind had not abated, and the outside temperature had dropped to below zero. Although the house was well insulated, it had already gotten colder than he found comfortable.