The gale wanted to kill her. Tess threw the gun behind her as if to get momentum, then hurried back down into the platform for shelter. At the foot of the top-floor stairs she heard the storm still howling and the rain and waves lashing everything, just outside the protection of this little cave of concrete.
Tess sank to her knees and screamed with no one to hear her.
PART TWO
1. Garrett
Garrett and Tess huddled in a South Tower room, watching cartoons from better days.
“I’ll save you!” said the little fox on the screen, leaping over a squad of killer robots. The party of heroes battled in a bright, simple world where no one really got hurt. Garrett had had loads of fun playing the role, back in his days as a cripple. Back when it wasn’t in his power to screw up this badly. Tess whimpered and he had nothing useful to say, no way to fix anything. So they sat there for a while, battered, useless, and afraid. The TV show shined in the dim room with its unreal colors. Eventually he had to stand.
Garrett climbed to his feet and helped Tess up. “You can have the shower first. I need to look around.”
“Don’t go.”
“All right, I’ll wait. Then we’ll see if we can at least fix the radio.”
Tess nodded.
“I need your help for that.”
“Okay.”
Garrett paced while Tess showered. The trickle of water and the chatter of cartoons were welcome noise after the massive silence left by the storm. He’d hurried up towards Tess’ signal, found only her, and immediately realized why. His boat had nearly swamped a dozen times. Everywhere the ocean had been torn up, writhing, howling… Garrett shuddered. I’ve killed Alexis. God, what am I going to tell her family? “We had a lockdown plan for hurricanes, but our gadgets malfunctioned?”
And I’ve killed Castor. It was horrible of him, but he felt even worse about that than about Alexis. He would have to fold and slink home. The equipment was probably wrecked, any profit was gone, and there’d be a lawsuit, maybe even jail time. Reckless endangerment or something. He couldn’t go to prison; they’d rape and murder him in a week!
“Hey,” said Tess. She’d stepped out with a towel and a borrowed shirt. Her eyes still looked haunted. “Your turn.”
Garrett looked away, uncomfortable now on top of miserable. A dark haze felt stuck to his skin as he washed off the seawater and the blood from stinging cuts. Out, out, damned spot! Alexis would have said. Or what was that line about staining the whole ocean red?
Still under a cloud, he dressed and found no one in the room. “Tess!” he called out.
Tess hurried up from the floor below. “Yeesh! You don’t need to yell.”
“I wasn’t yelling.” He reconsidered. “Never mind.”
She was dressed now in her own jeans, clutching a toolbox. “I looked at the lower floors. The platform doesn’t look flooded or anything, so the stuff in here is intact.” The floor was nearly level, as though nothing had happened. The repairs must’ve held for long enough to get past the worst danger. He could go down and make a more permanent fix soon.
He walked with her up to the topdeck. When Garrett stared into the sky it was the deep blue of just before dawn; they’d been dazed all night. The world felt clean and cold, like a crime scene after the investigation. At least the deckhouse had been built with hurricanes in mind. Not surprisingly, everything else topside had been shredded and hurled as by a giant’s hand: no flag, windmill, radar or antenna.
“Ruined,” Garrett said.
Tess said, “Martin will be back. We have to wait.”
What about supplies till then? Garrett ran through a mental checklist. It calmed him to focus on the task at hand. There’d been no problem using the shower, so they had water even if the desalinator was down. They had plenty of cereal and other stored food, and cases of bottled freshwater. He headed into the deckhouse to make sure the place was all right and to check the station’s batteries from there.
Inside, the wind seemed to have touched nothing. Garrett saw the beer can lying on his desk from before he got sick. The sight of it churned his stomach. He’d had just the one that day. But ever since his father died, he’d had one now and again, to help him forget. Or several. He could end up like Uncle Haskell, rotting in an alley before he changed his ways. Garrett crushed the can in his fist. Even while he’d worked on the Castor project, throwing himself into the reality of hardware and plants, he’d been trying to blunt his own thoughts. To live a little less.
Before he knew what he was doing, he’d stomped over to the mini-fridge and pulled out the two six-packs in it. He startled Tess as he exited. With a grunt he hurled the beer into the ocean. Far below, the sea didn’t care.
“What are you doing?” said Tess.
“My father didn’t raise me to be a God-damned alkie!”
“Huh? You’re not.”
Garrett gave a bitter, barking laugh. “But I could be, if I tried.” Garrett suddenly realized how thirsty he was, pulled two bottles of water from the fridge, and tossed one to Tess. No more drowning his sorrows. He had to work.
The two of them were sitting around in the deckhouse, thinking and getting organized, when Tess sprang up from her computer. “Zephyr!” she said. “He made a complete backup of himself! It’s here on our network.”
The robot was alive, in some sense? “A copy of the AI, you mean. The memories.”
She said, “Yeah, and everything else. He’s not dead. I can run him again.”
“Hold on. This piece of software infiltrated our network and put hidden data on it without our consent?”
Tess stared at the walls.
“What is it, Tess?”
“We’ve been working together, and I didn’t quite tell you everything. I set him up with an unrestricted account, not just Net access like we’d discussed.”
Garrett’s eyes widened. “Then there could be anything on there. We’ve got to reset the whole system.”
“Zephyr is on there. Here, I’ll run his code.”
“Wait!” said Garrett.
“Why?”
He couldn’t articulate a reason, in this battered state. “Fine. Go.”
Tess spread the screen across the table. Code flashed around the edges while a gleaming model of Castor appeared — a virtual-space home for the AI, nicer than the real thing. The figure waking the deck had to be Zephyr, but in the simulation he appeared not as a robot but as a humanoid otter. Valerie’s handiwork again.
Zephyr looked around, and finally out of the screen. “V-space? This means I’m the backup.” He paused. “Oh, no. What happened?”
“You’re dead,” Garrett said. “I screwed up and everything’s ruined.”
Tess clutched the edges of the screen. “It was terrible! There was a hurricane, but you saved me and I couldn’t save you, or Alexis, and I was right there when a wave crashed over us.” She shuddered, and found Garrett’s hand resting on hers.
Garrett held her a moment longer, then pushed away from the table and stood. “This is ghoulish. We’re talking to a ghost.”
“He’s not a ghost. He’s alive! I didn’t get him killed after all.”
Garrett turned to stare down at the screen. “So Alexis is dead but this guy has a ‘Get out of Death Free’ card? Hell, that’s more of a backup than I have for some of my personal files!”