by Dan Wells
Kira sat down across from him and turned the document around. It was another email, from her father like the last one, but this time he was talking about company parking spaces. Afa had circled several words: Trust. Parallel. Failsafe.
“What do these mean?”
“I’m pretty sure ‘Parallel’ was the name of their plan,” said Afa. “Whatever they started coming up with that night. Or maybe a second plan, designed to go along with the first. The ‘Failsafe’ I’m not sure about, because they talk about it in different ways: Sometimes they’re trying to create something called a ‘Failsafe,’ sometimes it seems like they’re trying to work against it, and I can’t figure it out.”
“So what is this email saying?”
Afa took it from her hands, touching some of the marked words. “If I’ve deciphered their code the way I think I have, they’re saying that the plan is underway, and they’ve started work on the Failsafe, and they need to lie low and wait before holding another meeting.” He shrugged. “I can’t read any more than that. I’m the last human being left alive.”
Kira nodded, recognizing from his phrase that the moment of lucidity was passing; in a few more minutes Afa would be back to his old, mumbling self again. She pressed him, trying to learn as much as she could before he slipped away. “Where did you get this?”
“I pulled it out of the cloud. It was encrypted, but I knew most of the keys.”
“Because you worked at ParaGen.” She held her breath, praying that he wouldn’t shut down at the mention of it. He paused, staring, motionless, Kira clenching her fist in desperation.
“I was the IT director in the Manhattan office,” he said, and Kira breathed a sigh of relief. “I’d been watching this grow for years, from one piece to the next. I didn’t know where it would go. I didn’t know how far.”
“You got this from the office computers,” said Kira, looking up at the rows of computer drives lining the cafeteria. “Is there any way to get the rest?”
“It’s not in these computers,” he said, shaking his head,” it’s in the clouds.” He corrected himself, and Kira saw another gap in his comprehension begin to widen: “In the cloud. The network. Do you know how the cloud works?”
“Tell me.”
“It’s not just up in the sky,” he said. “Every piece of data is stored in a computer somewhere—a little one like these, or a big one called a server. It’s like a . . . an ant farm. Did you ever have an ant farm as a kid?”
“No,” said Kira, motioning with her hand for him to keep going. “Tell me about them.”
“It’s like, a bunch of rooms, and a bunch of roads all running between them. You could make something on one device, and people could see it on the others because it traveled along through the little roads. Every device had a road. But the cloud is down.” He looked at the floor and saw the papers, as if noticing them for the first time, and began cleaning them up. He was silent for too long, and Kira spoke again, trying to pull him back.
“If all these things are in the cloud, how do we bring it back up?”
“You can’t,” he said, and his voice was still strong—still “present.” “It’s gone forever with the power grid. The cloud only works if every piece works—every computer from here to the one you want to talk to, like links in a chain. When the power went down, the cloud went with it. All the roads in the ant farm got filled in, and none of the rooms can talk to each other.”
“But the rooms are still there,” said Kira. “The data is still there, on a computer somewhere, just waiting for us to power it up. If we can find the right computer and hook it up to a generator, you can read it, right? You know the file system, and the encryption system, and everything?”
“I know everything,” he said. “Almost everything.”
“So where is the ParaGen server?” she demanded. “Is it here somewhere? Is it back in the office tower? Let’s go get it—I can go get it right now. Just tell me how to find it.”
Afa shook his head. “The Manhattan office was financial only. The server we want is too far away.”
“Out in the wilderness?” she asked. “Listen, Afa, I can go to the wilderness if that’s what it takes. We have to find the rest of these records.”
“I can’t do it,” he said, hugging the folder and staring at the floor. “I’m the last human being left alive. I need to keep the records safe.”
“We need to find them first,” said Kira. “Tell me where they are.”
“I’m the last human—”
“I’m right here, Afa,” she said, trying to coax him back into coherence. “We can do this together. You’re not alone. Just tell me where the server is.”
“It’s in Denver,” said Afa. “It’s on the other side of the continent.” He looked back at the floor. “It may as well be on the other side of the world.”
“. . . moving through the LZ . . .”
The voice rose from the static like a breaching whale, surfacing in a moment of clarity before sinking back down in the deep. White noise filled the room again, a dozen different signals washing over and through one another in Kira’s ears. Afa had shut down completely, too spooked by their conversation—or by the thoughts their conversation had brought to mind—to think about anything important. She’d taken him to the food stores and given him fruit cocktail, hoping it would soothe him, and then left him alone to recover. She’d searched through his records for a while, desperate to find what she wanted, but without Afa’s guidance the filing system was impenetrable. As she explored, the sounds of static had brought her to the radio room, and she listened helplessly to the whisper of disembodied voices. Lights glowed like dim green stars on the console, hundreds of buttons and dials and switches arrayed before her. She didn’t touch them.
She listened.
“. . . in B Company. Don’t . . . until they get . . .”
“. . . orders from Trimble. That’s not for . . .”
“. . . everywhere! Tell him I don’t care . . .”
That last one had been human. Kira had learned to recognize the difference between human and Partial radio traffic, though it wasn’t exactly hard: The Partials were more professional, stiffer and colder in the way they talked. It wasn’t that they didn’t have emotions, it was that they weren’t accustomed to expressing them verbally. The link carried all their emotional cues chemically, and their radio communication was too disciplined to need any emotion at all. It was pragmatic, even in the midst of combat. And there was a lot of combat.
The Partials had invaded Long Island.
The human radio transmissions had a desperate, frightened quality that had confused her at first, chopped up as they were into tiny fragments devoid of sense or context. The people on Long Island were tense and terrified, but she couldn’t tell why. Soon she began to hear gunfire in the background, all-too-familiar pops and cracks as bullets flew back and forth behind the speakers. Was it the Voice again? Another civil war? The more she listened, the more obvious it became: It was the Partials. They had begun to mention landmarks she knew, cities she’d visited on Long Island, and the order in which they mentioned them suggested a relentless progress from the North Shore toward East Meadow.
And all Kira could do was listen.
She thought about Afa again, and what she might do to bring him back to normal. In hindsight, his occasional retreats from reality made a lot of sense: He’d been alone for twelve straight years since the break, and pretending to still be alone again might be the only way he could calm down. She laughed now at the irony of it: a man who knew exactly what she needed to know, but so lost, so crazy, he couldn’t even talk about it. The voices ebbed and flowed around her.
“. . . more room, get back to the . . .”
“. . . the farm last night, we haven’t counted . . .”
“. . . backup. Get me Sato’s . . .”
Kira’s eyes snapped open, the name shocking her out of her reverie. Sato? Are they talking about Haru? When she’d left East
Meadow, he was still on work release, dishonorably discharged from the Grid for his role in kidnapping Samm. Had he been reinstated? Were they talking about a different Sato? Please, she thought, don’t let it be Madison. Don’t let it be Arwen. If they’re in trouble . . . She didn’t even want to think about it.
She looked at the control console, not really a single piece but a hodgepodge of salvaged transceivers, all cobbled together with wire and cable and duct tape. There was an old radio station here, underneath it all, but Afa had apparently rebuilt it almost from scratch. It was too dark to see everything clearly, and Kira tried her pocket flashlight before getting frustrated and going to the windows. Afa had walled them all off with cardboard and plywood, and Kira ripped one of the panels away, flooding the room with daylight. She ran back to the radio console and studied it carefully, trying to figure out which of the many speakers the message had come through. Who said “Sato”?
There was no way to tell for sure, but she narrowed it down to two. The controls seemed to be more or less grouped around the speaker they pertained to, and she searched the knobs for anything that looked familiar. She’d used radios before, of course, small walkie-talkies while out on salvage runs, but those were very simple: a volume and a tuner. Whatever else this had, it had to have those, too, right? She found what she thought was a tuner, on the speaker she thought had mentioned Sato, and turned it gingerly. The white noise poured through unchanged, broken here and there by the snippets from the other radios; she leaned in closer to the speaker, concentrating on its sound and ignoring everything else.
“. . . not crossed yet, repeat, the third . . .”
Partials. She let go of the tuning knob and moved to the next speaker, searching for the signal. A radio signal was a delicate thing, a soundless, invisible voice in the sky. To hear it clearly she had to tune her radio to the exact frequency, with enough power, under perfect atmospheric conditions, and she had to hope that the radio sending the signal had enough power as well. Even the size and shape of the antenna could play a part. Finding that lone, weak signal in the midst of all this chatter was—
“. . . Sergeant, get to the top of that hill immediately, we need covering fire on the right flank. Over.”
“Yes sir, moving out. Over.” It was Haru’s voice.
“Yes!” Kira shouted, pumping her fist in the air. The signal was still weak—they were probably using handhelds, like the little ones she’d learned on, and they didn’t have the wattage to send a clear signal this far from the island. They must be close, she thought, somewhere on the west side of Long Island. The Grid base in Brooklyn? Had the Partials attacked it first? She tried to remember what she’d learned about Partial tactics from her history classes, wondering what an assault like that would signify. If they were raiding the North Shore that was one thing, but if they were taking out the Grid headquarters, it was in preparation for a full-scale assault. Cut down the defenses, and then secure the island unimpeded. She listened closely to everything Haru’s team was saying, then continued to scan the airwaves, listening to pieces of Partial broadcasts, until one caught her attention.
“. . . to the top of the hill. Snipers at the ready.”
Kira swore. That was a Partial communication, coming in on a different speaker. All the Partial messages had been on different speakers, even the ones from the same voice in the same battle. They were changing their frequencies on the fly to make sure no one could eavesdrop, but they hadn’t been counting on Afa’s paranoid, overproduced workshop; Kira could hear everything. They knew where Haru’s unit was headed and that the Partials were ready with an ambush. And she was the only one who knew about it.
Kira reached for a microphone, but there was nothing—no handhelds, no ceiling mics, nothing. She looked under the console, then raced around to look behind it. Nothing again. It was as if Afa had removed them all on purpose, which, she reflected furiously, he probably had. He wasn’t trying to communicate with anyone, just to listen. To collect information.
“. . . nearing the top, coast is clear here . . .” Haru’s voice again. Kira cursed loudly, half a scream and half a grunt of frustration, and dove to her knees by a stack of boxes in the corner, tearing them open in search of a microphone. The first was empty, and she threw it aside. The second was filled with cables, and she tore them out, a giant nest of thick rubber cords, and as soon as she determined it had no mic she threw it behind her, still caught in the web of cables. I have to warn him. The third box was speakers and plugs and manuals; the fourth and fifth were old transceivers, half-empty and cannibalized for parts. The speakers behind her erupted in gunfire and screaming and bursts of deafening static, and Kira cried as she dug through the last box and found nothing but more cables.
“. . . taking fire!” Haru screamed. “We are taking fire on the hilltop! I’ve lost Murtry and—” The signal died with a pop and a howl of static, and Kira collapsed on the floor.
“Sato! Sergeant Sato! Do you read me?” The human commander’s voice rang through the radio room, buzzy from the fading signal.
Kira shook her head, imagining Madison and Arwen, now husbandless and fatherless. It was nothing new, really—everyone in East Meadow was fatherless, and had been for over a decade—but that was exactly the problem. The Satos had been unique, the first of a new generation: a real family again, after eleven long years. They had been hope. To have lost that—to have heard it happen—broke Kira’s heart. She sobbed on the floor, clutching the coils of discarded cabling as if they could comfort her, or protect her, or something. She sniffed and wiped her nose.
I don’t have time for this.
Kira was still trying to figure out what to do with the information she had found so far. One thing was clear: She was going to have to gather more information from Afa’s records before she could formulate her next move. But now there was a new threat to everything she was trying to save. If the Partials and humans wiped each other out before she could find her answers . . .
She dragged herself to her feet, shrugging off the rubber cables. The radio console was chaotic, but not indecipherable. She could tell which knobs went where, and which controls connected to which speaker. Somewhere on the roof was a bank of antennas, charged and ready, the dozens of transceivers below each tuned to a different frequency. With this equipment she could hear any radio in a thousand-mile radius—more, if Afa had as much power as he said he did. And once she found a microphone—not if, but when—she could communicate back. There would be something in the building, left over from the old days, and if Afa had somehow destroyed them all, then there would be something in the city, in the electronics shops and the stereo stores. Somewhere there would be a mic.
Kira would find it. And she would use it.
“I need a microphone.”
Afa wasn’t ready for another confrontation, but Kira didn’t have time—there were people dying, and she needed to help them. The big man shuffled through his food supplies, peering myopically at shelves of cans. “I don’t talk to people,” he said, “I just listen.”
“I know you don’t,” said Kira, “but I do. The Partials have invaded Long Island, and I have friends there. I need to help them.”
“I don’t help the Partials—”
“I’m trying to help the humans,” she insisted. She ran her hand through her hair, already tired and worn. She felt torn, even on this seemingly simple issue—she didn’t want the humans to die, but she didn’t want the Partials to die, either. She wanted to save both, but now that they were engaged in open war, what could she do? “With a mic and your radio station I can feed them information, keep them running circles around each other. At least until I can think of something better.”
Afa found a can of refried beans and waddled to the door. “You can’t help humans. I’m the only one left—”
“No, you’re not,” she said loudly, blocking his path. He was head and shoulders taller than she was, and more than three times her weight, but he shrank back from her like a
deflating balloon, eyes down, chin tucked in, shoulders hunched and ready for a blow. She softened her voice but kept her stance firm. “There are thirty-five thousand people on Long Island, Afa, thirty-five thousand humans. They need our help—they need your knowledge. Everything you’ve collected here, they can use that. They’re trying to cure RM, and they know nothing about it, but you know so much. For all I know, you have the key to manufacturing the cure somewhere in here, to solving the mystery of the Partials’ expiration dates, to averting another war. There’s a whole human society left, Afa, and they need your knowledge.” She stared at him firmly. “They need you.”
Afa shuffled his feet, then turned abruptly and waddled back into the storage room, rounding a stack of cans and coming back along the next aisle. Kira sighed and stepped over, blocking that one as well. “Where are the microphones?”
Afa stopped again, looking nervously at the floor, then turned and retreated again. Kira stayed by the door, knowing he’d have to come past her eventually. “You can’t hide forever,” she said, “and I’m not just talking about this room, I mean the whole world. You have to move on, or go back, or do something. You’ve collected all this information so you could show it to somebody: Let’s go show it to somebody.”
“There’s nobody to show it to,” he said, turning uncertainly in the maze of stacked cans and boxes. “I’m the only human being left alive.”
“You know what I think,” said Kira, softening her voice even further. “I think the reason you insist you’re the last one left is because you’re afraid to go meet anyone. If all the humans are dead, then there’s no one to talk to, and no one to help, and no one to risk disappointing.”
He was in the back of the room now, shrouded in shadow. “I’m the last one left.”
“You’re the last IT director,” said Kira. “At least the last that I know of. With everything you know about computers and networks and radios and solar panels—I mean, seriously, Afa, you’re like a genius. You are a genius. You’ve been alone for so long, but you don’t have to be. You’re helping me, right? You’re talking to me, and I’m not scary.”
