He can put Scott’s apartment back together, just not him.
He could pull open the apartment door right now, step outside. Float-walk down the stairs of the old Brooklyn brownstone, out and down the stoop, and wander around a similarly patched-together reconstruction of Park Slope. Walk into every shop and diner, every bar and restaurant. Peer into every alleyway and scour every backyard.
But Scott won’t be there.
He knows, because he’s looked.
Every day, seventeen hours a day, for the last two years.
Trawling through data, looking for him, like he spent twelve hours a day for a month trawling through the shattered architecture of Brooklyn, his hands bleeding as he moved rubble and masonry from the wreckage of the brownstone, leveled by explosions when the crash came and an automated gas pump failed.
But he’ll find him yet.
He’ll keep looking.
He just needs to scour the cupboards, the streets, the neighborhoods. Brooklyn. The five boroughs. Search every scrap of data, find a trace. A shadow on a CCTV camera feed, a reflection in a store window on Google Street View.
If it’s not here it’ll be in the next data center, or the one after that. He just needs to keep moving. Trawling. Mining. Searching.
He blinks open a window, intricate film systems and directory structures unwrapping themselves around him—
and
then
someone
rips the headset from his face
and drags him
kicking
and screaming
and blinking
into the light.
“I think he’s finally calmed down,” Kareem says.
They’re both looking down at the guy, as he sits cross-legged at their feet, his head in his hands. Kareem had found a soiled blanket in the box among all the other detritus, and has draped it over his shoulders. He’s calmer now, but Lajune can hear him gently sobbing.
“You want me to get one of the squad, get him loaded onto the truck?”
“Nah. Not yet. Give me some time with him alone.”
Kareem flashes her a concerned look. “You sure, sir?”
“Yeah, you good. Go get your squad ready to bug out. I’ll ping you when I need you.”
Kareem nods, leaves. Lajune takes a knee in front of the guy. He stinks, but that ain’t unusual these days. She can’t remember the last time she took a shower. She probably doesn’t smell too rosy herself.
“Hey.” For the first time he looks up, slowly, from his hands, makes bloodshot eye contact with her. She unclips a canteen full of water from her armor, offers it to him. “You should drink.”
Reluctantly he takes the canteen, takes a sip. “Thanks.”
“You want some food? I can get one of my squad to bring you something from the truck if you want. We got some bread and—”
“No. No, it’s fine. I’m good. Thanks.”
“You don’t look too good.”
“I’m fine.”
“What’s your accent?”
She swears he almost smiles. “I’m British.”
“Really? What the fuck are you doing all the way out here?”
“I’m looking for someone.” Any hint of that smile is gone.
“Shit, we’re all looking for people.” She finds she has to break eye contact, stare up into the corner of the room, choke back memories of the lost. “How you end up with these preppers, though?”
“Preppers? I dunno if I’d call them that. Dunno if they were ever that organized.” He scratches at his overgrown beard. “They were certainly fucking weirdos. But hiding from storms in a data center for years will probably do that to you. They were into… some new religion? More like a cult, I guess. I’ve only been here a month or two. To be honest, they mainly left me to get on with shit. Minded their own business as long as I helped them keep the solar running.”
“You know about keeping solar working?”
“Yeah. A bit.”
“Then maybe you can help—” She’s interrupted by a pinging sound. The spex hanging from her lapel. She takes them off, flips them open, peers through the lenses without fully putting them on. Notifications and messages. Distractions. She sighs. “Well, that can wait.”
When she looks back at him it looks like he’s just been given a bump of adrenaline. His eyes are wide, disbelief. Almost agitated. “Where… where the hell did you get those?”
“These? Back in the city. NYC.”
“Can I see? Please?”
She hesitates, squints at him. Probably a bad idea, somehow. But she’s intrigued by this weird fucking brown Englishman that’s hiding out in a shipping container full of servers surrounded by hillbilly white supremacists. She hands them to him.
“No funny business,” she says.
Rush puts on the spex this black woman in combat gear has given him and it’s like being sucked back in time, across years and continents, through victories and mistakes.
Windows unfurl in the air around his face. Maps, data, incoming messages. Status reports.
It’s Flex, there’s no questioning that. He knows every retina-projected pixel and floating icon, barely changed from when he coded them. Tweaked maybe, but at surface level it looks identical, frozen in time.
Instinctively he blinks through menus, pulls up the version number.
His heart seems to stop, his throat dry.
“Holy shit.”
FLEX OS. VERSION 4.027
Open source.
Built by Rush00.
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
Flash back to the last time he’d seen those letters and numbers, arranged precisely like that, when he’d compiled this build, zipped it up, e-mailed it. To Scott.
He struggles for words. “I… where did, where did you get this, when?”
“The spex?”
“Yeah, I mean the software. The network. I thought it was all gone.”
“Yeah, so did we. So did everyone.” She sighs. “I dunno exactly. Seemed to spring up out of Brooklyn. Kinda like an underground thing. Stories of some guy walking around handing out working spex to people. Came in handy when the government and the militia rolled in to try to shut us down. Gave us an advantage.”
“When was this?”
“I dunno, a year? Year and a half ago? It’s all been a blur.”
He blinks open a network map. It opens on a hyperlocal scale, pulsing blue dots representing the dozen or so troops in and around the data center, name tags floating alongside them. He zooms out hard, New Jersey laid out as a basic green wireframe map, few details apart from pixel-thin lines representing roads and the occasional town. None of this was built into Flex, of course, he knows that, imagines them building it themselves as they pushed their way out of NYC, brand-new maps drawn from the user level up through collaboration and exploration. He zooms out some more and scrolls east, following a line of pulsing dots—individual users, sometimes grouped together, sometimes on their own—spaced out just enough to keep the network connections to back home stable.
And then he hits it, New York City, mapped out in infinite detail, unlike the stark, unexplored wastelands of Jersey. A new map, not dictated by some distant conglomerate or orbiting, all-seeing satellite, but built from the ground up by the people that actually live there. And here the blue dots are so many, so close together, that they’re one huge pulsating, growing mass, filling the outlines of Brooklyn and Queens, spilling over bridges into Staten Island, Manhattan, pushing up north into the Bronx and beyond.