Anika freezes time. Looks around the room, at the mannequin-still ghosts.
Rewind. All the way back to the beginning. As far as it will go.
Rush is here, alone, caught in midair typing.
He pauses, steps back from his nonexistent keyboard, looks around the room, looks at his hand, nods to himself.
The door behind him bursts open.
Claire is there, she’s supporting this girl, Sarah, who’s leaning on her shoulder, arm around Claire’s neck. Blood runs from a gash on her head.
As Claire’s mouth opens, Anika hits PAUSE again.
“What are you doing?” Mary asks.
“Nothing. Just checking something.”
Anika steps through Rush to peer at the two monitors in front of him. He always used them, at a time when most people had abandoned them for spex-spaces. This was one of the few computers in the Croft with a direct, uncensored connection to the outside world, the Internet, and he used to talk about how he liked to keep it at arm’s length, contained behind glass.
The first monitor is full of windows of code, largely incomprehensible to her, but enough keywords and in-line comments jump out for her to guess she’s looking at code of Rush’s surveillance app, freshly installed into the Croft’s network. This is where the recording starts.
The other monitor is full of windows of English, yet they take Anika longer to decode. Delta Airlines, British Airways, some random forums, the U.K. Passport Office, various social-media timelines, what looks like a crashed Gmail in-box. The windows overlap and intersect, obscuring sentences and paragraphs, asking questions and answering others. Slowly she pieces together the fragments, a state of panic and desperation revealed amid the failed attempts to book flights, the error messages, the warnings about passport numbers being invalid, of permissions being denied.
He’d tried to go this early, she realizes. Tried to run even before it had started. Like he knew how bad it would get. That and his selfish need to be with Scott.
As if we haven’t all lost people.
Anika unpauses time.
“Rush, give us a hand here, yeah?”
Rush spins around, glances back at the monitors in front of him, reaches out to guiltily thumb them both off before going to the door to help Claire. Gently they help Sarah down onto the beat-up sofa in the corner of the room.
“What the fuck happened? You okay?”
Anika hits FAST FORWARD.
“—so yeah, we’re running on batteries off the solar, man, pretty much. Most the city’s blacked out from what I can tell.” College is sat on the sofa, eating chicken and rice from a tinfoil tray.
“How much we got left?” asks Rush.
“Power? Ah, we should be fine, should just keep ticking over. Most the basic stuff, anyway. Y’know, as long as the sun comes up tomorrow. And who fucking knows these days—”
Anika is standing in the middle of the room between them, invisible, her back to the door, and it startles her as it’s flung open.
“Guys! You need to come upstairs!” It’s some kid, breathless and overexcited. Anika recognizes him but can’t place his name. Was always hanging around. One of Claire’s research interns from the farms, she thinks.
“What?” College doesn’t even look up from his chicken. Neither he nor Rush seems particularly bothered.
“Come up on the roof! You gotta see this! It’s all kicking off! There’s a drone up, and everything!”
“A drone?” Rush just seems irritated. “So?”
“Not one of them police ones. Like, y’know, a big one? Like one of them army ones!”
Anika turns to Mary, still watching from the sidelines, trying to take it all in, understand. She doesn’t know quite how to deal with her. Surely she must have heard stories, explanations of what went down from Grids and College and the others, but still this must be a head fuck. Maybe she should pause everything, explain things, make sure she gets what’s going on. But she’s tired, unsure she’s got the fucking energy, that she’s got the emotional capability.
She’ll be able to figure it out herself, she thinks. Piece it together on her own. The kid is smart. She must be, she’s alive.
“You know what a drone is?” she asks her.
“I think so?” Mary looks embarrassed, small and awkward in that way only teenagers can. “I’ve never seen one, though.”
“Well, now’s your chance.”
Rush and College look at each other and get up to leave, following the kid out. Instinctively, Anika goes after them, following the ghosts through the dark corridors of the shattered building, suddenly aware that she’s not confined to that one room, that the simulation goes farther, out into the Croft and maybe beyond. She could go anywhere, in theory, any place and point in that recorded time, see what anyone was doing, relive their pasts, recall memories that weren’t hers, that she’d never had.
Yet she just follows these ghosts.
Up on the roof of the 5102, the first time she’s been here in a decade.
She reminds Mary to watch her step, the structure of the building not what it once was. She dials back the app’s floor detail, the shattered tiles and concrete of reality pushing up through the recording.
Gingerly she walks to the edge of the roof and stands near her younger self. Claire is here, too, and some others.
They’re looking out over Bristol, a dusk-tinted view of a city in chaos. Even though she’s seen it before—this very simulation built in no small part from what her spex saw back then, undoubtedly—it still takes her breath away.
The city is dark, devoid of electricity. It’s lit only by the rapidly fading daylight and the glow of fires—part of Cabot Circus seems to be ablaze. The streets are full of people, walking, running, shouting. Some gather in groups, some sit on the ground, looking concussed, confused. Others are trying to make their way around the vehicles that jam up the roads, self-driving cars and cabs and buses that have all ground to a halt, their passengers shouting for help or smashing windows to free themselves. There’s a constant ambient soundscape of breaking glass, chanting, and police sirens that reverberates up the architecture to where they’re watching.
“Fucking hell,” says College.
“Yeah,” says Claire.
“What the fuck happened?” says Rush.
“Explosion at that Melody gig.”
Next to her, Anika hears Mary gasp.
“Explosion?” College snaps his head to face Claire.
“Terrorist attack.” Anika recognizes her own, younger voice. “That’s what they’re saying.”
“You fucking serious?”
“Wait, we don’t know anything yet,” says Claire. “But yeah, explosion, apparently. Then all the networks went down. Everything. All the cars shut down, all the cell networks… everything finally failed.”
“Where you hearing all this?”
“Chatter on our network. That’s still running, it seems.”
“Yeah.” Rush sounds dazed. “Yeah. The virus doesn’t seem to affect it. Not yet, anyway. I thi—”
“Look!” He’s interrupted by the young kid shouting. Shouting and pointing at the sky. “Look!”
Everyone, including Mary and Anika, follows his finger.
There, between low-level clouds and silhouetted against the dusk sky, the crucifix-like outline of something darts, angular and awkward and robotic and unlikely looking. Something they’d never seen flying above the city before.
Anika hits FAST FORWARD.
She stops and lets it play after about thirty-five hours. Daylight on the roof.
“—oh, it can handle the traffic, that’s not the point.” Rush holding court, as usual. “It’s completely decentralized. The more people, the stronger it is, and the faster. It’s just whether it’ll be useable for much longer.”