Victor was backing away from them. His expression flickered between superior sneer and stark panic. "What you think doesn’t matter. You’re just going to be rebooted at 5 p.m. And you don’t know everything." He began fiddling with the fly zipper on his pants. "You see, I–I can escape!"
"Get him!"
Dixie Mae was closest. It didn’t matter.
There was no hazy glow, no sudden popping noise. She simply fell through thin air, right where Victor had been standing.
She picked herself up and stared at the ground. Some smudged footprints were the only sign Victor had been there. She turned back to the twins. "So he could re-merge after all?"
"Not likely," said the token holder. "Victor’s zipper was probably a thread self-terminate mechanism."
"His pants zipper?"
They shrugged. "I dunno. To leak out? Gerry has a perverse sense of humor." But neither twin looked amused. They circled the spot where Victor had left and kicked unhappily at the dirt. The token holder said, "Cripes. Nothing in Victor’s life became him like the leaving it. I don’t think we have even till ‘5 p.m.’ now. A thread terminate signal is just the sort of thing that would be easy to detect from the outside. So Gerry won’t know the details, but he–"
"–or his equipment–"
"–will soon know there is a problem and–"
"–that it’s probably a security problem."
"So how long do we have before we lose the day?" said Dixie Mae.
"If an emergency reboot has to be done manually, we’ll probably hit 5 p.m. first. If it’s automatic, well, I know you won’t feel insulted if the world ends in the middle of a syllable."
"Whatever it is, I’m going to use the time." Dixie Mae picked her email up from where it lay by the vault entrance. She waved the paper at the impassive steel. "I’m not going back! I’m here and I want some explanations!"
Nothing.
The two Ellens stood there, out of ideas and looking unhappy–or maybe that amounted to the same thing.
"I’m not giving up," Dixie Mae said to them, and pounded on the metal.
"No, I don’t think you are," said the token holder. But now they were looking at her strangely. "I think we–you at least–must have been through this before."
"Yeah. And I must have messed up every time."
"No ... I don’t think so." They pointed at the email that she held crumpled in her hand. "Where do you think all those nasty secrets come from, Dixie Mae?"
"How the freakin’ heck do I know? That’s the whole reason I–" and then she felt smart and stupid at the same time. She leaned her head against the shadowed metal. "Oh. Oh oh oh!"
She looked down at the email hardcopy. The bottom part was torn, smeared, almost illegible. No matter; that part she had memorized. The Ellens had gone over the headers one by one. But now we shouldn’t be looking for technical secrets or grad student inside jokes. Maybe we should be looking for numbers that mean something to Dixie Mae Leigh.
"If there were uploaded souls guarding the door, what you two have already done ought to be enough. I think you’re right. It’s some pattern I’m supposed to tap on the door." If it didn’t work, she’d try something else, and keep trying till 5 p.m. or whenever she was suddenly back in Building 0994, so happy to have a job with potential... .
The tree house in Tarzana. Dixie Mae had been into secret codes then. Her childish idea of crypto.
She and her little friends used a tap code for sending numbers. It hadn’t lasted long, because Dixie Mae was the only one with the patience to use it. But–
"That number, ‘7474’," she said.
"Yeah? Right in the middle of the fake message number?"
"Yes. Once upon a time, I used that as a password challenge. You know, like ‘Who goes there’ in combat games. The rest of the string could be the response."
The Ellens looked at each. "Looks too short to be significant," they said.
Then they both shook their heads, disagreeing with themselves. "Try it, Dixie Mae."
Her "numbers to taps" scheme had been simple, but for a moment she couldn’t remember it. She held the paper against the vault and glared at the numbers. Ah. Carefully, carefully, she began tapping out the digits that came after "7474." The string was much longer than anything her childhood friends would have put up with. It was longer than anything she herself would have used.
"Cool," said the token holder. "Some kind of hex gray code?"
Huh? "What do you expect, Ellen? I was only eight years old."
They watched the door.
Nothing.
"Okay, on to Plan B," and then to C and D and E, etc, until our time ends.
There was the sound of something very old breaking apart. The vault door shifted under Dixie Mae’s hand and she jumped back. The curved plug slowly turned, and turned, and turned. After some seconds, the metal plug thudded to the ground beside the entrance ... and they were looking down an empty corridor that stretched off into the depths.
For the first quarter mile, no one was home. The interior decor was not LotsaTech standard. Gone were the warm redwood veneers and glow strips. Here fluorescent tube lights were mounted in the acoustic tile ceiling, and the walls were institutional beige.
"This reminds me of the basement labs in Norman Hall," said one Ellen.
"But there are people in Norman Hall," said the other. They were both whispering.
And here there were stairways that led only down. And down and down.
Dixie Mae said, "Do you get the feeling that whoever is here is in for the long haul?"
"Huh?"
"Well, the graders in B0999 were in for a day, and they thought they had real phone access to the outside. My group in Customer Support had six days of classes and then probably just one more day, where we answered queries–and we had no other contact with the outside."
"Yes," said NSA Ellen. "My group had been running for a month, and we were probably not going to expire for another two. We were officially isolated. No phones, no email, no weekends off. The longer the cycle time, the more isolation. Otherwise, the poor suckers would figure things out."
Dixie Mae thought for a second. "Victor really didn’t want us to get this far. Maybe–" Maybe, somehow, we can make a difference.
They passed a cross corridor, then a second one. A half-opened door showed them an apparent dormitory room. Fresh bedding sat neatly folded on a mattress. Somebody was just moving in?
Ahead there was another doorway, and from it they could hear voices, argument. They crept along, not even whispering.
The voices were making words: "–is a year enough time, Rob?"
The other speaker sounded angry. "Well, it’s got to be. After that, Gerry is out of money and I’m out of time."
The Ellens waved Dixie Mae back as she started for the door. Maybe they wanted to eavesdrop for a while. But how long do we have before time ends? Dixie Mae brushed past them and walked into the room.
There were two guys there, one sitting by an ordinary data display.
"Jesus! Who are you?"
"Dixie Mae Leigh." As you must certainly know.
The one sitting by the terminal gave her a broad grin, "Rob, I thought we were isolated?"
"That’s what Gerry said." This one–Rob Lusk?–looked to be in his late twenties. He was tall and thin and had kind of a desperate look to him. "Okay, Miss Leigh. What are you here for?"
"That’s what you’re going to tell me, Rob." Dixie Mae pulled the email from her pocket and waived the tattered scrap of paper in his face. "I want some explanations!"
Rob’s expression clouded over, a no-one-tells-me-what-to-do look.
Dixie Mae glared back at him. Rob Lusk was a mite too big to punch out, but she was heating up to it.