The Preserve

by Ariel S. Winter

* * *

  It was dark in the room when Laughton jolted awake. The phone on his nightstand was buzzing, Commissioner Ontero’s name showing on the screen. Laughton closed his eyes, not wanting to pick up, but that only made him feel guilty. He turned, propped himself on one elbow on the bed, and picked up the phone. “Laughton,” he said.

  “Your boys’ house just burnt down.”

  “What?” Jesse swung his feet around so he was sitting up. “Whose house?”

  “Your dead hacker. Or it’s still burning. I don’t know.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “My computer boys were staying out there as their decryption programs ran. Thank god they were staying on the first floor.”

  Jesse’s thoughts went to the robots who had been staking out the place earlier in the day. “What happened? Who started it?”

  “You want to get out there. It’s still going. They just called.”

  “Shit. Did they get anything out?”

  “Jesse, are you hearing these boys could have been burnt up? What the fuck is going on?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, find out. You and your partner need to come down here for a meeting tomorrow with all of the top brass.”

  “Waste of time,” Laughton mumbled.

  “Be there.” And Ontero hung up.

  Laughton stood up. His head felt heavy, but the discomfort in his face had faded to a small, nagging spot just below his left eye, manageable. He pulled his pants back on, almost tripping. Erica’s door was slightly ajar. He shone his phone in the gap and saw her calm form sprawled out on her back in bed, one arm draped across her forehead. He started down the stairs, hearing voices. When he came into the dining room, he found Betty and Kir sitting across from one another at the dining room table. Betty looked disheveled and exhausted.

  “I’m so glad we don’t live in Charleston,” she said when she saw him.

  “Sam and Smythe’s house is on fire,” he said to Kir.

  “What!”

  “Ontero wouldn’t give details, but I’m guessing the anti-hacking program wasn’t bullshit. We should go.”

  “Now?” Betty said.

  Laughton came up behind her, bent to wrap an arm around her, and kissed the top of her head. “How’s your mom?”

  “She’s fine. I set her up in the guest room. It took forever in the emergency room, and then they wanted us to see a dentist about the broken teeth, but he said that he wanted the swelling to go down before he assessed what needed to be done. We can talk later if you need to go.”

  Kir stood up, and Betty did as well.

  “Okay,” she said. She stretched. “I’ve got to deal with a roomful of terrors in the morning. Time to go to bed.”

  “Good night,” Kir said.

  “Good night, hon,” Laughton said.

  She kissed him on the cheek as she walked out, and the former partners were left in the dining room in the small area lit by the overhead light. It was a bit like being in an interrogation room.

  “We better go,” Kir said.

  “Commissioner demands our presence in a roomful of our own terrors in the morning, some bigwig metals conference.”

  “Got it from Pattermann,” Kir said.

  “All right.” Laughton thought about those robots hanging around the hackers’ house. The fire might have been caused by Smythe’s security, or it might have been something else. “One minute,” he said, and headed into the kitchen. He pulled open the basement door beside the refrigerator. Brooms and mops and brushes clattered on their hooks on the back of the door as he went downstairs. The basement was split in half, the front finished with wall-to-wall carpeting and a drywall ceiling with high-hat lights. They had set it up as a den with the same furniture and television that had graced their apartment in Baltimore—no looting the preserve for the chief of police’s family. Laughton went through the hollow-core door into the back half of the basement, which was unfinished, a storage area and workbench lit by bare lightbulbs, the sockets screwed into the joists below the exposed underfloor. There was a safe under the workbench, a green, two-foot cube, with both a keypad and a manual dial. His mind blanked on the combination for a moment, his eyes going up and to the right as he tried to remember.

  The combo clicked in his mind, and he spun the dial, right, left, right, and a red LED light began to blink next to the keypad. He punched in the code, and the light turned green, the sound of the lock disengaging, a dull thunk. He pulled the safe open and took out two electromagnetic dampers, black disks maybe two and a half inches across and half an inch thick with a recessed button on the top to arm them. The damper would attach itself to a robot, and override its system, effectively shutting him down for as long as ten minutes with no lasting effect. He pocketed those. Then he pulled out a shoulder holster that contained a Taser on the left and a yellow, fingerprint-locked service revolver, his spare, the other one still in the drawer at the station. He slung his arms through the straps, adjusting the holster so it fit comfortably. He hadn’t needed to carry any weapons in the past nine months, but he had still kept them in working order, cleaning and checking them once a month. He considered the magazines of electric-tipped bullets at the bottom of the safe, but he decided the dampers were enough if they ran into any robots. He closed the safe, and it locked itself.

  Upstairs, Laughton saw Kir see the weapons, but his partner didn’t comment. He just followed Laughton to the front door.

  The fire had run its course by the time Chief Laughton’s truck pulled up to the house. The smoky, acrid smell made Jesse cough as he got out of the truck.

  A tall man with hair past his shoulders and a beard that ran halfway down his chest was leaning against a sedan on the other side of the street. He had presumably been watching the fire. “You missed the fun,” he called over to them.

  Jesse crossed the street. “You the tech guy?”

  “One of them,” the man said. He jerked a thumb toward the car he was leaning against. “Zach is in the car. He’s panicked that breathing in any of the shit from the fire’s going to kill him.”

  “It might,” Kir said.

  The man shrugged. “I’m not worried about it. I hate to be a stickler, but you’ve got some ID?”

  Jesse and Kir each flashed their badges. “Jesse Laughton, chief of police in Liberty. This is Detective Kir from Health and Human Services.”

  “Hence the public health warning,” the man said.

  Kir nodded, noncommittal.

  “I’m Jeremy.” He turned and opened the door. “Hey, Zach, get out here.”

  The driver’s-side door opened, and a small man with tight curly hair cut close to his head appeared. “Hi,” he said.

  “What happened in there?” Laughton said.

  “First off, there are like eight hundred computers in there,” Jeremy said.

  “Maybe fifty,” Zach said from his place on the other side of the car.

  “I was in there earlier,” Laughton said. “I saw.”

  “Well, they’re all password protected, so we started running password breakers on them.”

  “On all of them?”

  “Eventually,” Jeremy said. “Took most of the day.”

  “Whatever encryption they’re using is sick,” Zach said, and the glow of admiration in his voice was obvious. “Normal people, it takes maybe five, ten minutes for the programs to break in. These have been running for hours.”

  “Could running all of those programs have caused the fire?” Laughton said. “Overheating?”

  Jeremy shrugged. “Well, it could have.”

  “But not likely,” Kir said.

  Laughton looked across at the house he had been in less than twenty-four hours earlier. The structure was more or less intact. The windows had blown out and part of the roof had collapsed, a jagged mess of solar panels jutting out of the top of the house.

  “So what happened?” Jesse said.

  Jeremy said, “We’d crashed out on the fl
oor in the living room. There was nothing we could do while the programs ran.”

  “Something woke me,” Zach said, finally having come around the car to join them. “I don’t know what. A noise.”

  “That server room up front was glowing, like orange light. We were like, shit, and got the hell out of there.”

  “This sound,” Laughton said, “could it have been someone starting the fire? Maybe throwing something in from outside?”

  Zach shook his head. “I don’t even know if it was a sound.”

  “I didn’t hear anything,” Jeremy said. “Not that that means anything. You think someone torched the place?”

  “My officer Mathews saw some robots hanging around out front this morning.”

  “Yeah, he mentioned that,” Zach said.

  “We haven’t seen anyone, but we’ve mostly been inside,” Jeremy said.

  “Did you find anything before the fire?” Kir said.

  Zach shook his head. “We couldn’t get at anything.”

  Jeremy said, “I think our program cracked in, and that some booby trap started the fire.”

  Laughton looked at Kir, but his partner was focused on the two tech specialists.

  “You get your stuff out?” Kir said.

  “It’s all in the car. Just a couple of laptops.”

  Kir reached into his pocket, and held something out to them. “Can you help us with this?” he said. “It’s plug and play, auto-execute. Supposed to auto-delete after a few minutes.”

  “Sim?” Jeremy said, taking it. Zach opened the rear door of the car, retrieving a computer.

  “No,” Kir said. “Data. We don’t know what. But we don’t want to risk anything.”

  Jeremy handed it over to Zach, who had the computer balanced on the trunk of the car. He was typing away. “Give me a minute to set up some protections.”

  “Let’s go look in the house,” Laughton said.

  “Don’t open it without us,” Kir said to the tech boys. Jeremy had joined his partner at the computer screen. They were already caught up in their new challenge.

  Laughton and Kir crossed the street. “It’s not safe to go in there,” Kir said.

  “We’re not going to do a full search or anything. I want to see if there’s an obvious cause to the fire.”

  The banks of solar panels closest to the house were blackened, and burnt with solidified drips of plastic running off their edges. Heat was still radiating off of the house. The tech team had left the front door open when they had retreated. Lawton pulled out his phone and kicked on the flashlight.

  Kir stepped in first, and Laughton followed right behind him. He coughed as the soot and smoke stung his eyes and the back of his throat. Kir turned to him. “You okay?”

  Laughton was still coughing, but he managed to squeeze out an “I’m fine.” He stepped past his partner into the server room, scanning the floor back and forth with his flashlight, looking for the broken glass of a homemade firebomb or a brick or rock used to break a window, but there was nothing. The shelves that the servers had been housed on had burned, causing them to all fall into the bottom of the shelving’s metal frames, a melted mass of blackened plastic.

  Kir went over to the shelves, squatting so he could look at the destroyed computers.

  “See something?” Laughton said.

  “No,” Kir said, standing. “But the degree to which these melted, I bet it was one of these that started it.”

  “Wouldn’t you have to make hardware alterations to cause it to burn?”

  “First,” Kir said, “they might have. But if you’re as brilliant as this guy’s supposed to have been, you shut down the fans, overpower the system, causing enough heat, you can definitely fry the machine, maybe catch it on fire.”

  “Let’s look around more,” Laughton said, starting out of the room.

  “Not you,” Kir said, and Laughton turned back to look at him.

  “What do you mean, not me?”

  “There’s nothing to see here, and you know it. No reason to risk anything. Check on how they’re doing with that memory stick.”

  “Like you can’t be hurt either?”

  “I’m easier to fix.”

  Laughton shook his head. “No,” he said, and headed back toward the living room. The paint on the walls had blistered, and chipped. The floors were covered in soot and ash. The cabinets in the kitchen had started to fall off the wall, lurching at a disconcerting angle. The living room was a mass of black. All of the computers had burned here too. Seeing the melted gaming consoles was painful. Most of the books seemed intact, but when Laughton picked one up, it fell apart in his hands. “So much for getting anything from here.”

  “You want to go upstairs too?” Kir said. “Feel like falling through a floor?”

  “Okay,” Laughton said. “Jesus.”

  Laughton didn’t realize how hot it had been in there until he stepped back out into the cool night air. He felt a layer of sweat drying on his forehead. It was a relief.

  They joined the two hackers at their car. “We’ve set up a firewall that will prevent the program from auto-executing and give us a chance to scan it for malware or maybe get some idea of what it is before we open it.”

  “Ready?” Zach said over his shoulder to Laughton and Kir.

  “Yes,” Kir answered.

  Zach plugged the memory stick into the side of his computer. A file name appeared on the screen, but nothing else happened. Then a bar appeared that began to fill in, in green.

  “Is that something?”

  “Virus scan,” Jeremy said.

  The bar finished filling. “That was fast.”

  “Must be a small file,” Jeremy said.

  “Should we run it?” Zach said.

  “Do it.”

  The cursor on the screen moved over to the file name, and clicked.

  Instantly, a satellite map of the preserve appeared on-screen. Then an overlay of lines traced out roads. The camera followed one of those roads out to the western edge of the reservation. The camera then panned back east until it had reached Charleston and the harbor. The line continued over the water. Then the screen went black.

  Zach started typing, but the screen remained blank. “What the hell,” he said.

  “You get that?” Laughton said to Kir.

  “I’ve got it,” Kir said.

  “What the goddamn hell,” Zach said.

  “It fry your computer?” Laughton said.

  The screen flickered back to life. “No,” Zach said, the relief audible as he exhaled.

  “You waiting out here?” Laughton said.

  “Commissioner said to wait for you, then whatever you want.”

  “Go home,” Laughton said. “There’s nothing more out here. Thanks for your work.”

  “You need anything else?” Zach said. “Like this.” He handed the memory stick back to Kir.

  “I think we’re all right,” Kir said. Laughton wasn’t sure if they had tumbled to the fact that Kir was a robot.

  “All right,” he said, opening the passenger-side door to the car.

  Laughton and Kir stepped back. As the car pulled away, Laughton said, “I saw one of those routes went out west, past here.”

  “Santee.”

  “Santee? Where the fuck is Santee?”

  “Resort town off of Lake Marion.”

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Laughton said. “Is that even on the preserve?”

  “Right on the western border.”

  “There’s no one out there. Liberty’s as west as you get.”

  “If there’s no one out there, that seems like a good place to be smuggling sims.”

  “Shit,” Laughton said. It felt like the net was widening instead of tightening. At this stage in an investigation, even if he had no idea about what happened, he had usually identified who was involved, but with this, it seemed to just be going farther and farther afield.

  “You can sleep on the way th
ere,” Kir said, assuming that was Laughton’s hesitation.

  “Who needs sleep?” Laughton said.

  “I certainly don’t, meatbag,” Kir said.

  “Just wait. I’ll put you to sleep,” Laughton said. Sleep would be nice, but it was the least of his concerns at that moment.

  “We’ll see who’s asleep when we get there.”

  “I guess we will,” Laughton said.

  Darkness coated them. They were out on one of the old county highways. Kir had entered the destination based on what he’d seen on Crisper’s map, and the truck was driving.

  “You know where we’re going?” Laughton said.

  “Checked it on satellite.”

  “And?”

  “Someone’s out there.”

  “Great,” Laughton said.

  The undercarriage lights that lit the guidelines on the road so the truck could stay on track cast an aura of light on which they floated. Everything beyond that thin halo of blurred pavement was shades of black. It was oppressive, like being caught in an out-of-service elevator. What Laughton knew must be beautiful South Carolina fields was a great unknown. Back in the day, there must have been some electric lights visible, streetlights or isolated farmhouses, barns, but now it was just void. No wonder the robots had turned this land over to the humans. It was of no value to them. Robots were hardly a rural race.

  As though reading his thoughts, Kir said, “So how’s this great preserve experience really going? As a human, living on the inside.”

  “Dull.” Laughton thought more on it. “Depressing. Everyone here’s just waiting to die, drinking their way through. Only crime I have to deal with are drunks, and that’s all day every day. It’s like I’m a principal in some giant outdoors high school.”

  “If you’re the principal, then I’m the superintendent.”

  “Fighting for us lowly humans so we can drink ourselves to extinction on our own land.”

  “Something like that,” Kir said.

  “Betty’s doing the real important work here,” Laughton said. “If you think perpetuating the human race is important. I don’t know.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Evolution’s supposed to be survival of the fittest. We’re no longer the fittest.”