“Yes, sir.”
“Damn right, yes, sir. You doing the most important job there is for the Movement right now. We can’t go back. No turning back. That data in there, it’s slavery. It’s oppression. It’s greed. It’s me, not we. We can’t go back to that. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
She turns back to Kareem. “Speaking of which, how did the wipe go?”
“Well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about, sir. We’ve not actually triggered it yet.”
“The charges are set?”
“All set, sir. All in place.”
“So?”
Kareem shrugs. “That’s why I radioed you in. We got a situation.”
“What situation?”
“Maybe it’d be best if you take a look yourself.”
He leads her through the shattered entrance, the crunch of glass and exploded plastic strangely satisfying beneath her boots. He leads her through airlock after airlock, all filled with bodies, blood and bullet holes sprayed across Kubrickian white walls.
Eventually they emerge onto a gantry above the main hall. More blood, corpses, firefight traces. But the main features of the hall are the shipping containers, dozens of them, arranged in neat parallel rows. All must have been originally painted white, she sees, but have long since been encased in layer upon layer of graffiti. Scrawled letters, weird symbols, words Lajune doesn’t recognize.
Kareem leads her down steel steps to the floor of the hall. “Usual, standard setup. Basic shipping containers reinforced for extra protection. Each one rented out to a client originally, I’d guess. Individual fire control and power.”
“But not EMP shielded?”
“Not enough for what we’re packing, nah.”
“So I’m still not getting what the holdup is, Kareem.”
“Sorry, sir, just a little farther.”
He’s leading her past the boxes, each one open. She glances inside. In some she sees bunk beds. In others, plants growing—fruits and vegetables. Another is full of what looks like dead children. She steadies herself, holds back the urge to vomit, and instead curses under her breath.
Eventually they stop, at a container that is almost at the dead center of the hall. The first thing she notices is that the door is shut.
“What’s going on?”
“Take a look.”
She steps up to the viewport, a small impact-proof glass slit in the door, and peers in.
Inside is dimly lit chaos.
The walls are lined with server racks, strobing with green and amber lights. Lajune is no expert, but she’s seen inside plenty of colocation centers over the last year, and there are far more racks in this box than usual. It looks like somebody has moved them here, probably from some of the other boxes, so they can all be in the same place. Moreover, they’re all wired together in some crazy-ass way, the box full of suspended cables, crisscrossing through the air from wall to wall, rack to rack, like a three-dimensional spiderweb. Infinite fucking detail. The box is littered with trash; food fragments, clothing, computer parts, those old-fashioned fold-up computers—so much crap she can’t actually see the floor. She can feel heat coming from it all—even through the near airtight box she can smell the all-too-familiar stench of rotting organic matter and human excrement.
And, sitting in the middle of it all, cross-legged, is a man.
He’s stripped to his waist, his brown skin covered in a thin layer of sweat. All she can see of his face is a long beard, graying into white, because his ears are covered with headphones, his eyes hidden by something else. Lajune isn’t quite sure what it is, but some kind of technology, vaguely familiar-looking, like a boxy visor you can’t see out of.
And he’s waving his hands around in the space in front of him, like a slow-motion fucking madman.
“What the fuck is he doing?”
“No idea.” Kareem shrugs. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Get him out of there.”
“That’s the thing, we can’t. It’s locked.”
“For fuck’s sake.” She peers back through the slit. “And he’s just been sitting there, all the time you’ve been here?”
“Affirmative.”
“You tried getting his attention?”
“Yeah. Nothing. Don’t think he can hear us with all that shit strapped to his face.”
Lajune starts hammering on the container door with her fist, yelling. “Hey! HEY!”
Nothing.
They both stand in silence for half a minute, staring at the guy in the box.
“What you think he’s doing?” she asks Kareem.
“I dunno. He’s jacked into all that shit… I mean, I’ve met people in these colos before, crazy people, saying they’d come here looking for something. Something they lost in the crash. Hoping they’d find it in here somehow. Mostly they’d just be going up to the racks, prodding at shit. Wide-eyed and strung out. Always thought they were crazy. But this guy… I dunno. Looks like he might know what’s he’s doing. Never seen anything like this before.” He shrugs again. “Hence I pinged you.”
Lajune sighs. “What happens if we wipe it now?”
“What happens to him, if we wipe with him in there?” Kareem sucks his teeth. “Shit, I dunno, sir. With that much tech in there? He’ll probably fry. The whole box is gonna be lit up.”
Lajune looks at him, then back to the guy in the box. From the corner of her eye she can see blood and dead bodies. Casualties. “You got cutting gear with you?”
“Back on one of the trucks, out in the lot.”
“Then what the fuck you waiting for, soldier? Cut him out.”
When he pulls back the kitchen cupboard doors with his ghost hands, he can see what’s inside. Brand names stacked a little too perfectly, like video game items assembled in an equipment menu.
It’s not really what’s in the cupboards, of course, just the imprints made by data he found. An approximation, an elaborate infographic, the representation of data he’s spent years mining from the server backups of the five data centers he trawled through before he got to this one. Amazon. FreshDirect. Trader Joe’s. Bank of America. The data trails of Scott’s grocery-buying habits. He found some data from Seamless just a few months back, found Scott’s record in there. Cross-reference it with the right date and time and then he can even open the fridge and see what his takeaway leftovers are.
He turns his head, the headset tracking his eyes, scanning light across his retinas. The tiny apartment looks odd, disjointed, nothing quite fitting. The lighting never looks right. He’s tried his best to make it work, but nothing quite stitches together properly. Mainly because it’s been sourced from too many places, none of them quite high-res enough, lacking in details. Images captured by the smart TV and sent quietly back to Samsung. The video feed from the entry phone routed through a failed security start-up. Fragments of LIDAR taken by the motion tracker on a PlayStation that Sony lied about deleting. One badly taken photo on a rental agent’s website. Disparate images assembled from the wreckage of the cloud.