Ultraviolet

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  I looked down again and saw the little black plates of my holographic armor start to wink out of existence around my stomach and thighs as the water seeped into the fabric underneath.

  “Yeah, well.” I could barely whisper. I was still struggling to get my lungs to work again. The straight lines of the server racks began to curve and sway as a ringing noise grew louder in my ear and my head started to ache. “Your face is stupid.”

  I lurched up to my feet, straight at the nearest armed man and crashed into him with the holographic armor on my arms. He slammed backward into a rack, and I swung my sword at his rifle, slicing it neatly in half. And I ran.

  I was getting good at running.

  I dodged through the racks, angling away from the men, trying to get as many racks and intersections between me and them. But with every step, the water kept running down my pants, taking out the solid light armor on my legs and feet piece by piece.

  I could hear them chasing me, heavy boots slapping on the metal flooring.

  So I ran some more.

  Chapter 18

  Penetration Testing

  “Keep running, Carmen!” Frost’s voice echoed through the massive server farm. “I want an excuse to keep shooting!”

  I did keep running, but my legs were already burning and I was still having trouble breathing, and the pain in my chest from the shotgun blast was only getting worse, threatening to turn my whole belly into a wall of sharp cramps and aches.

  A bullet twanged off the rack beside me and I dodged in the opposite direction. I had no idea if they were getting closer. The noise of their boots on the metal floor was a riot of banging that could have been coming from any direction. It was impossible to tell where they were without looking, and I wasn’t about to pause to look back.

  I rounded a corner and discovered I had reached the end of the row and there were no more racks in front of me, so I turned another way and saw a shadow move out of the corner of my eye.

  “Carmen!”

  I turned to look. It was an instinct born out of a whole lifetime of responding to my own name. If I’d been thinking, I never would have stopped, but I wasn’t thinking. I was panicking. And I turned to look.

  Frost was right behind me, just two rows way, with that shotgun pointed at my back.

  I started to say something. I have no idea what I was going to say, but it doesn’t matter because I never got the words out.

  Frost fired and the water-filled shell hit me square between the shoulder blades. The force shoved me forward and sent a numbing shock down my left arm, but my legs kept moving so I kept running.

  My armor flickered all over my arms and chest, and I saw my helmet vanish from around my face.

  “Lux, armor one!”

  Nothing.

  “Lux, sword one!”

  Still nothing.

  The whole suit was soaked, except maybe for the gloves, but it was all tied together now. Too much water, too much damage. Tiny electric arcs and lights flashed on my palms, but they couldn’t render anything anymore.

  I was defenseless.

  A tangle of metal caught my eye and I ran in that direction, only to find the stairs up to the second level. There wasn’t time to think, so I charged up the steps two at a time and caught another shotgun blast in my left ankle. The holo-suit was already dead, so all that happened was a sprained ankle at exactly the wrong moment.

  I limped to the top of the steps and slipped behind the first rack that I saw. My whole body was shaking. The pain in my stomach and back and ankle were throbbing like one giant bruise, and for all I knew I had cracked bones and internal injuries too. I fought to get my breathing under control so I could stay quiet, but my lungs just hurt too much.

  Heavy clangs followed Frost up the stairs, and I knew it was over. I couldn’t run anymore. I was out of time.

  The muzzle of the shotgun poked out just ahead of the man in black, and I grabbed the barrel and shoved it upward at the ceiling.

  He fired once and blasted one of the junctions of the fire suppression system, rupturing the pipe and setting off a sharp squealing alarm. I tried to hang on to the shotgun, but he was bigger and stronger and it only took him one good shake to throw me off and send me crashing back down to the floor.

  Frost stood over me with his shotgun pointed my legs. “Are you finished?”

  “Not quite.” I pointed at the broken pipe over his head.

  “Are you stupid? This is a server farm.” He shook his head. “They don’t use water in the sprinklers. They use inert gas.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I wheezed. “Except I connected a water hose to the network right before I came in here, and all this time we’ve been running around, the water has been filling up these pipes.”

  A spray of freezing water shot out of the broken pipe, and a second later all of the little gas nozzles began spraying very cold and very dirty water all over us and the servers.

  “Damn it!” Frost leveled the shotgun at my face.

  I shut my eyes and cringed. At this range, it wouldn’t matter what sort of rounds he was firing. The force alone would still kill me.

  But as suddenly as it started, the cold rain fell silent, leaving just a few quiet drips and trickles. I opened my eyes and saw the bright green and red lights on the server blades next to my face still winking away.

  Not a single dead connection.

  Not a single spark, or wisp of smoke, or anything.

  No! There wasn’t enough time, wasn’t enough water. This place is just too damn big.

  Frost looked around, and then focused on my again with a dark chuckle. “Nice try.”

  As the sounds of water faded, another sound filled the air. The hiss of gas. The inert gasses in the fire suppression system were now spraying out into the air. Probably some mixture of argon and nitrogen. Environmentally friendly. Non-toxic. And also impossible to breathe.

  Frost coughed. “I could shoot you now. I have all the evidence I need to justify it. But still, it’s bad press to kill a teenager. Especially a girl. You know, sexism and all.”

  “Yeah, right, you wouldn’t want to tarnish that sterling Cygnus record for not killing young women by, you know, actually killing one.”

  “But then, I don’t need to shoot you.” Frost coughed again and glared up at the hissing pipe. “You’re all banged up. All I have to do is leave, and lock you in. Your own sabotage will finish the job for me.”

  He took a step back and lowered his gun.

  I swallowed and coughed. The air felt strangely dry and thin and cold, stinging and rasping across the back of my throat. My lungs constricted, aching for oxygen. I looked down, exhausted. Everything hurt. I was cold and wet. I just wanted to be away, anywhere else, doing anything else.

  But my parents were still out there, working their terrible jobs for their meager lives. Cygnus wouldn’t stop. None of the companies would stop. It didn’t matter how much of a paradise the rest of the world was, there would still be this nest of vipers choking the life out of millions of innocent people whose only crime was being unlucky enough to be born in this country.

  I had to do something. But my holograms were all gone. My sprinkler plan failed. And no one was coming to help me.

  I looked down at my hands and saw the tiny green lights on the backs of the gloves, telling me there was still plenty of power in the suit. But it didn’t matter. The fabric was soaked. It couldn’t render any holograms.

  A trickle of the filthy water ran into the corner of my mouth and it tasted just awful.

  Metallic.

  Salty.

  I coughed out a little laugh.

  “What?” Frost took another step back, and coughed again.

  “Nothing.” I looked up at him. “I just hope this hurts.”

  “What?”

  “Lux, bike.”

  The jacket and boots flickered a little, but they were far too wet to do anything. But the gloves were still pretty dry, and that was all I needed.

&n
bsp; The suit tried to render the huge black motorcycle, but all it managed to produce was a thin stream of cold lasers between my gloves as it tried to create the handlebars. I closed my eyes and slammed my hands against the wet metal floor.

  The electrical storm was stunning. Even through my closed eyes, I could see the enormous arcs of lightning leaping from the floor to the racks to the ceiling and back again, weaving an enormous electrical web of white fire. The dirty water from the utility sink may not have been enough to penetrate the servers, but it had been enough to cover them in filthy little puddles full of highly conductive impurities.

  The entire warehouse lit up like a supernova, and instantly the servers began to spark and sizzle and go dark. Rack after rack quickly fried as the surge protectors melted, and I opened my eyes to watch all the little lights going out.

  Frost, covered in personal electronics and holding a metal shotgun, was hit by three electric arcs and fell flat on his back, twitching and groaning. My ears growled with the thunder of my lightning, and the cooking of the computers, and the collapsing of the armed men downstairs.

  I took a few sharp stings myself on my wet skin, but the only hardware I was carrying was my phone, which was tucked inside my jacket. And I was crouched on my mesh fabric boots and gloves, which were designed to project and manipulate energy, so I was spared the full force of the storm.

  Crouching there, I watched the blinding bolts of energy leap from machine to machine, dancing and flailing through the air, scorching the fiber optic cable, and destroying servers by the hundreds. But when I looked down I saw the indicator lights on the gloves were already yellow and starting to fade into red.

  Is it enough? Is it enough for the whole farm? Enough to fry every system in here?

  I inhaled and felt a dizzying cold wash into my chest.

  The air! The gas!

  I didn’t know what to do. If I stopped the electrical storm, then some of the systems might survive and Cygnus would go on ruining millions of lives. But if I didn’t get out of the building soon, I would suffocate.

  And I really did not want to die.

  I staggered up to my feet while keeping my gloved hands down on the floor, and then I shuffled back toward the stairs, dragging my fingers along the metal plates and keeping the storm raging all around me. The flashes of light stung my eyes and the roaring sounds became a single torrent of white noise shrieking in my ears.

  With my hands on the metal railing, I stumbled down the steps to the ground level and started dragging my gloves on the floor again, only to trip and fall flat on my face. It felt like my whole body was about to just shut down and collapse out from under me, but I held my breath and shoved myself back up.

  The door to the office and to the outside world was straight ahead. I ran. One last time.

  I passed two armed men lying unconscious on the floor.

  I crashed through the vault door, tripped over my own feet crossing the office, and then went through the outer door head-first and collapsed onto the warm asphalt of the parking lot. The door swung shut and hit me in the hip, but I didn’t move. I just lay there, breathing in the night air.

  By the time the fire department arrived to check out the alarm, I had crawled across the parking lot and around the corner where I could lie in the shadows, out of sight. I heard the firefighters go inside and shut off the alarm. I heard them call for ambulances. And then, when I finally caught my breath and the world stopped trying to tilt and spin into oblivion, I stood up and walked away.

  I sat in another parking lot for a while, poking my bruises and trying to figure out if I was dying. When I concluded that I would probably live, I rolled up my soaked holo-suit into a tight bundle under my arm and started walking again. Slowly. I pulled out my phone.

  “Felix?”

  “Carmen! Thank God! Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay.”

  “You sound funny. Are you hurt? Are you coming home?”

  “Sort of. But my suit’s out of juice and I could really use a ride. You know, if you’re not busy.”

  Two hours later he met me on a bicycle with a small trailer rattling along behind it. I slept in the trailer all the way home and didn’t even wake up when Felix carried me into the house.

  Chapter 19

  Fallout

  The next day, there was a strange tension in the air in Oberon Lake. It was quiet. No one was playing. Instead there were people standing on their porches, gazing uneasily up and down the street as they checked their phones and whispered to their loved ones.

  “They’re scared,” Felix said.

  “Yeah.” I took his hand. “Let’s fix that.”

  We went out into the street with a handful of tools and started taking apart the two trucks that I had slashed apart the night before. Bolt by bolt, we removed the panels and doors and hoods and wheels, and one by one, our neighbors came out with their tools and started to help. By the middle of the morning, we had completely disassembled both trucks and had all the parts spread out neatly in the middle of the road.

  Sure, I could have just dried out my holo-suit and sliced the trucks apart by myself in a couple of minutes, but that wasn’t the point.

  People started chatting. They started talking about the projects that they had in mind for their homes, for their futures. They got excited, they told jokes, and they sorted out who needed what metals from the trucks, and piece by piece they took them home to be recycled into electronics, or plumbing, or windmills. And by noon, the trucks were completely gone and I could hear people playing volleyball across the street.

  For lunch we tried the Silverstein brothers’ latest attempt at pizza, and found it pretty good. Not great. Not yet. But pretty good.

  We were still on edge. Still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Still waiting for Frost to come back with a whole army of secret corporate police to round us up.

  But no one came.

  We checked the news, of course. Everyone did. And there was plenty to read. A dozen major companies from Washington, DC to Philadelphia had been completely destroyed by the loss of the servers in that one warehouse. Cygnus, Susquehanna, and a bunch of other tech firms and utilities were all flailing. There were rumors of mass quittings as employees flooded out the door in search of new jobs, and the loss of workers was only making it harder for the broken companies to try to put things back together again.

  Days passed. The news got worse. More people quitting, and lots of them running up to New York or down south in search of those precious few high-paying jobs that only the megacorps could offer. But now there were a lot fewer megacorps.

  By the end of the week, Cygnus simply ceased to exist. The white collar workers had all fled in a mad rush to find new jobs, and the blue collar workers had all grimly returned to the scrap yards and city works departments to keep their meager paychecks flowing, while the CEOs and VPs simply vanished in a flurry of extravagant severance packages to become head officers at other enormous companies elsewhere on the east coast.

  In the city, everyone was in a panic. Aside from all the people who had shown up to work to find empty offices or empty warehouses and discovered their jobs just didn’t exist anymore, there were millions more people worried about the loss of services, the loss of power, the loss of tools, and toys, and convenience, and routine.

  But in Oberon Lake, everyone was very calm, and as busy as bees. We were all spending our days texting everyone in the city that we knew, every place that we had access to, to tell them about our new home, our new tools, our new life.

  Felix and I rode down to the south side on my holo-bike with a nice big trailer to pick up my parents and his brother, and we brought them out to the county. And all the while, new people kept coming out. They took whatever empty houses they could find, got a little help from their neighbors to start recycling and rebuilding, and within a couple of days a new arrival became an old pro, helping other new arrivals to get settled.

  And no one ever came to bother
us. No one from the corporations, or from the government, or anywhere. No one came asking questions about that night at the server farm. No one came looking for Ultraviolet. It all just went away.

  And eventually I figured out why.

  The cops weren’t in the city anymore, and they weren’t cops anymore. They were all in the county now, and they were homesteaders like us.

  And so were the government paper-pushers.

  And so were the corporate goons.

  There was no more us versus them.

  It was just us now.

  By the end of the month, Felix and I stopped checking our phones. We went back to thinking about food, and home repairs, and playing board games. About once a week we would go out on a little tour to see how everyone was doing, and to let them know that Ultraviolet was still around, just in case.

  Some of the neighbors were nervous, afraid of the new arrivals, afraid of crime and violence, and theft, and riots, and who knows what. But none of that happened. Everyone who showed up got all the help they needed to feed themselves and build their own little palaces and make all the toys they wanted.

  So the crime never happened. Not everyone got along, but they got along well enough. Better than they had in the city, anyway.

  And every time we went out there, we came back feeling less and less needed. People were doing just fine, better than fine, actually. With nothing but time on their hands, they were slowly becoming experts in all sorts of things, from home-building to agriculture to advanced electronics and video game design.

  Eventually, somewhere along the way, Felix and I stopped going out there and we just stayed home, in our home, making our home and our community as beautiful and as amazing as we could imagine.

  And it was, too. We even got a pet lizard.

  Sometimes it hits me that just a few months ago I worked in an office, and then I was unemployed, and then I was homeless, and a vigilante…

  But now, none of those things really exist anymore. Not for us.