Turn off the Lights

by Phillip Gwynne

  But eventually I reached the exit and I was able to get off the freeway and away from the ravenous sharks.

  SATURDAY

  AIN’T NO TOWELHEAD

  As I neared the checkpoint I slowed down. Not completely, though. I was hoping that the guard would see I was a harmless pizza delivery boy and not some crazed bomb-toting terrorist, and wave me through. The boom gate remained lowered, however, and I was forced to come to a somewhat shaky stop. A powerful spotlight shone directly into my eyes.

  Sitting there I felt so exposed, almost naked.

  Eventually a door opened and a guard approached. Because of the light in my eyes I couldn’t see him properly. I’d already considered the possibility that I would run into Buzz Lightyear, but I’d decided that the chances of that were very small, that it was an acceptable risk. For a start, the station must’ve employed hundreds of guards. And it was a different day of the week than the excursion. A different time of day.

  The guard stepped in front of the light. I could see his face now. And it was him, the acceptable risk, Woody’s buddy, Buzz Lightyear.

  Right then I hated Kenny McCann.

  Why did he make that pathetic joke?

  Why did I laugh at his pathetic joke?

  ‘You new or something, pizza boy?’ said Buzz.

  I wasn’t sure how to answer this; was it some sort of trick question?

  In the end I said, ‘Yes, sir.’

  And I immediately regretted the ‘sir’ – this was a security guard, not a knight of the realm.

  ‘And they didn’t tell you?’ he said.

  ‘No, sir,’ I said, having figured that now I’d started with the ‘sir’ thing, I better keep it up. ‘Tell me what, sir?’

  ‘To take your rutting helmet off, pizza boy. So we can see you ain’t no towelhead.’

  Right then, I knew I was a goner.

  If I removed my rutting helmet, he would surely recognise me as the kid on the bus; he’d taken a photo of me, after all.

  What other options did I have?

  I could tell him that I’d forgotten the complimentary garlic bread and turn around and make a run for it. But then Buzz would probably assume that I was indeed a towelhead and that he was within his rights – in fact he’d be doing a service to his country – to pull out his gun and plug me several times in the back.

  I slid off my helmet.

  Buzz, a halo of light around his head, looked straight at me. His brow furrowed.

  ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ he said.

  ‘I get around a bit,’ I said.

  More brow. More furrow.

  Until Buzz said, ‘What sort of pizza is it?’

  ‘I don’t make ’em, I deliver ’em,’ I said, figuring it was about time I went on the offensive. ‘And if I don’t get going soon, somebody, probably your boss, is going to be eating cold pizza.’

  ‘Okay, then,’ said Buzz with a wave of his meaty hand. ‘But remember next time, rutting helmet off?’

  I slid my helmet back on, twisted the accelerator, took my feet off the ground and wobbled off towards the plant.

  I checked the time: 7.45.

  I was behind schedule, so I twisted the throttle harder; the scooter responded and we flew down the road.

  I could see the plant ahead, lit up like a funfair, plumes of dusky smoke rising upwards, disappearing into the starless sky. I was definitely within range now, but because there were high cyclone fences on both sides of the road there was nowhere to pull over. I kept going, stopping when I reached the well-lit car park. There were twenty or so parked cars, but no people.

  A quick glance at the building confirmed my suspicions: CCTV cameras and plenty of them. Already I was on a screen, probably more than one. Soon to be on a file, on a hard disk. And tonight, no doubt, I’d be backed up, duplicated, taken off site.

  I parked next to a Toyota LandCruiser.

  As I went to remove the pizza boxes I noticed for the first time the name on the docket – Silvagni.

  For a second I was completely freaked out, until I realised what had happened: Miranda and her nerd friends must’ve ordered pizzas and I just happened to have picked them up. Or maybe it was Toby: having polished off the pantry, he’d started feeling a bit peckish again.

  Still with my helmet on, I walked towards the door. With each step I expected a voice to boom over a loudspeaker: ‘Remove the helmet! Remove the helmet now!’

  The problem was, if I removed my helmet, then the person reduplicated on the hard disk was no longer just a generic pizza delivery boy, he was Dominic Silvagni, Enemy of the State.

  When I got close enough to the wall I took a couple of quick steps and flattened myself against it. From there I could no longer see the CCTV cameras. I figured if I couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see me. I shuffled along the wall, moving away from the door, until I got to the corner of the building. I ducked around, shuffling along the wall for ten or so metres. Although it was much darker here, and I couldn’t see any cameras, I still felt exposed. But a glance at my watch showed that I didn’t have time to look for somewhere more secluded. I dumped the pizza boxes, took off my backpack and removed ClamTop.

  ‘Open!’ I said.

  It opened, immediately displaying the available wireless networks.

  There was only one: DIABLONET. I double-tapped on this.

  A box popped up, asking for a password. As before, ClamTop’s password cracker immediately went into action, the little red devil dancing his devilish jig.

  This time it took much longer, maybe even a minute, for it to crack the password. When it had, the screen was divided into a series of smaller boxes. In such a big organisation you would expect a complex network with many computers connected to it. But the sight of so many of them – there must’ve been at least a hundred! – unnerved me, panicked me. All those boxes. All those words. Soon they were going to start squirming like worms.

  This is too much.

  I can’t do this.

  ‘Form is everything,’ Gus always says. ‘The bedrock. When all else fails, find your form.’

  I tried to find my form: I forced my shoulders down from where they were hunched around my ears; I breathed in deeply, from the diaphragm. I returned my attention to the screen, to the first box in the top row. It was called React01.

  That’s not what you’re after, I told myself.

  The next box was called React02.

  That’s not what you’re after, either.

  From there I kept going systematically, from box to box, until halfway along the fifth row I came across three boxes that were called Transf01 Transf02 Transf03.

  Transf for Transformer, I thought.

  I selected these three boxes.

  There were now three cloned desktops, side by side, on my screen. Immediately I could see that they were running Windows 7, which was a relief, because I’d half-expected the plant to use Linux, or some even more exotic operating system.

  On the middle one somebody was writing an email in Windows Mail.

  I could meet you outside cinema at 9, they typed.

  Again, I experienced that feeling I’d had when I’d cloned Imogen’s desktop – that I was trespassing on somebody’s private life, that I was somewhere I had no right to be.

  It didn’t last very long, though.

  I maximised that screen.

  I already knew that what I did on the cloned desktop was not reflected in the original. So I minimised Windows Mail.

  There were a number of digital meters on the desktop.

  Reactor Output.

  Transformer Input.

  Transformer Output.

  All these made sense to me, but they weren’t what I was looking for.

  Gabriel’s words came back to me: ‘There’s an operator override on everything.’

  That was what I was looking for.

  I scanned the desktop icons, searched through the drop-down menus, but I couldn’t see anything that resembled an operat
or override function. I wondered whether I had this completely wrong, whether the override was something that had to be given verbally, by telephone.

  But again I recalled Gabriel’s words. ‘I input them here and they get shunted up to the plant.’

  But maybe Gabriel had been trying to make himself appear more important than he actually was. He hadn’t seemed that sort of person, though.

  I went back through the icons, back through the drop-down menus. Again there was nothing that resembled an operator override function. But then I remembered that Windows 7 had a ‘Search Programs and Files’ feature. I typed operator override into that, hit return. It took three seconds to find it, a hidden icon. I double-tapped on that and a screen popped up, with three entry fields.

  Reactor Production Amount, said the first.

  I entered 0 into that box.

  Start Time, said the second.

  I entered 20.30.

  Finish Time, said the third.

  As I entered 21.30, I was suddenly bathed in harsh light.

  Caught!

  Caught hacking into the network of a nuclear power station.

  I hadn’t given too much thought to what would be the consequences if this happened.

  It had seemed unduly pessimistic. I’d been in total bulletproof mode: me, caught? No way!

  But now that I had been caught, I did a lot of thinking really quickly. I would be tried under the new anti-terrorism laws. Sent to jail forever. And even my father, with all his money, wouldn’t be able to get me out. They’d ask me why I did it, who I was working for. Because of The Debt, because of the Omertà, I wouldn’t be able to tell them. So they’d resort to torture. Not in Australia, of course, because torture is illegal here. So they’d fly me offshore, maybe even to Guantanamo Bay. They’d play Céline Dion records at ear-splitting volume, all day and all night. They’d waterboard me. Until, eventually, I’d be reduced to a dribbling idiot. Losing a leg to The Debt didn’t seem so bad any more. The lesser of two atrocities.

  Then there was the sound of a car accelerating, and the light disappeared, and I was back in semidarkness. It had only been a car swinging out of the car park.

  I moved the cursor into the ‘Send’ box. Checked the figures again before I tapped on the screen.

  Immediately a pop-up appeared.

  Password.

  No problem, I thought; my little mate the devil could crack any password. And just as I expected, he soon appeared, clutching his trident, and started cracking, dancing his devilish jig.

  After twenty or so seconds there was no triumphant smile, however. Instead, a message appeared: Cracker has detected md5-crypt with a 24-bit salt encryption. Brute Force may take up to 24 hours. Please provide precomputation string.

  Fortunately I’d done enough reading to understand this – when people set a password, they usually don’t use random letters and numbers, they include a word that has particular relevance to them: a precomputation string.

  I started with the obvious, typing Gabriel into the box.

  More dancing, but again that message appeared. I tried Gabby but with the same result.

  What else did I know about Gabriel?

  Again I went back to our excursion, replayed the video of our visit to ze transformer in the YouTube of my mind.

  ‘Tomorrow night the Mariners are playing the mighty Tritons,’ Gabriel had said.

  Why did he say the mighty Tritons, not just the Tritons? Because he barracked for them, that was why.

  I typed in Tritons.

  No luck.

  What did I know about the Tritons?

  Not much, because I wasn’t that interested in soccer, or football, or whatever they called it. But then I remembered the photo of Rocco Taverniti I’d seen on the net.

  He’d had his arm around the star recruit, a Brazilian.

  What was his name again?

  Zongaga?

  Gonzaga, that was it!

  I typed in Gonzaga.

  Five seconds later the devil was grinning and so was I. The password may have used md5-crypt with a 24-bit salt encryption, but it’d cracked it like a walnut.

  Another pop-up appeared: Message Received by Reactor.

  I closed ClamTop, put it back into the backpack, and put the backpack on my back.

  I went to step over the dumped pizza boxes, but stopped. Suddenly, I felt ravenously hungry. And everybody agreed: Big Pete’s Pizzas were the best pizzas in town. It would be a shame to waste it all. Especially since it was my sister – or maybe even my brother – who’d ordered it. I opened a box, removed a slice. Cramming it into my mouth, I moved to the edge of the building.

  A quick glance – there was nobody there. I repeated the back-flat-against-the-wall manoeuvre, this time moving towards the door. When I’d reached the right place I moved quickly away from the wall and towards my scooter. As I did I could feel the CCTV camera on me, tracking me, storing multiple versions of me on the hard disk.

  When I reached my scooter, a car started up. Perfect, I told myself. Buzz may have been stupid, but he wasn’t that stupid. I was sure he was keen to ask me a few questions on my way out, like why it had taken me eleven minutes to deliver a pizza. I needed to find another way to exit, one that didn’t necessarily involve Buzz.

  I started the scooter up and waited. When a car moved past, I swung in behind it, following its red tail-lights as it moved down the road.

  Not too close! I warned myself. I didn’t want the driver to get suspicious.

  But when I saw the glow of the checkpoint I accelerated, moving closer. The car ahead slowed down and the boom gate swung up. I twisted the throttle hard. The scooter was no racing machine: it took a while to respond. The car passed through and the boom gate was already on its way down when I got there. I flattened myself along the scooter, my nose pressing against the speedometer.

  The boom gate came down, karate chopping me across the back of the neck. The pain was sharp and intense and the force knocked the scooter off kilter so that it skittered across the road. I put out a foot and pushed hard against the road surface.

  It worked: the scooter righted itself.

  I held my breath. Surely a siren would sound any second now. But it didn’t; nothing disturbed the night’s stillness except the sound of my exhaust.

  I allowed myself a peek over my shoulder.

  A silhouetted security guard, square shoulders, even squarer jaw, standing outside, his back to the boom gate, zipping up his fly.

  Buzz, you’re lucky I’m not a certain Mr bin Laden back from the dead, because if I was, you’d be kebab right now.

  SATURDAY

  THE DODDLE

  Really, it should have been a doddle from there. Enjoy the ride home, get rid of the scooter, then hang around the city until Earth Hour started. Maybe even grab a bite to eat, have a look around the amazing new Styxx technology store that had just opened up at Surfers … Except for one thing, or three things: the Fiends of the Earth.

  When I came to the old tomato stall, where the road passed close to the transmission tower, I pulled over.

  As I wheeled the scooter behind the stall, I remembered what Seb had said on the day of the excursion. ‘Imagine if that tower fell down.’

  Yes, Seb, imagine if it did.

  The Earth Hour people had chosen the ideal night: there was little moon, only a few stars, so it was quite dark, and I could only just make out the hulking shape of the transmission tower in the distance.

  This was both a good thing – I’d be more difficult to spot – and a bad thing: it wouldn’t be easy traversing the terrain.

  Thor was right, it was rough country out here.

  I took out my iPhone, started up the iTrack app.

  Of course, there was a possibility that she wouldn’t bring her iPhone, that she would leave it at home, but I figured it wasn’t much of a possibility.

  I’d seen the adoration in her eyes, I’d noted the tender way she caressed the screen – Mandy had a very bad case
of iLove, a case that made my sister’s iLove look pretty anaemic.

  I entered Mandy’s number, the one from the flyer, and just as it had done last night when I’d tested it, the iTrack app did some thinking before it spat out a GPS position. I touched this and it took me to Google Maps.

  Mandy and her iPhone were on this very road, about 5.3 km away!

  I waited a few minutes and repeated the process.

  They were now 5.1 km away and headed in my direction. And, according to iTrack, they were moving at 64.8 kph.

  There would be no doddle, no bite to eat, no leisurely perusal of the Styxx store and its wares; it was time to put Plan Moneypenny into action.

  I made my way quickly towards the tower, pack jogging against my back, stumbling a couple of times on rocks.

  When I reached the tower I took off my backpack and carefully removed the IED from inside.

  As I did, I had this sudden feeling of … I’m not sure what you would call it. Power? Satisfaction? Maybe even arrogance?

  I, Dominic Silvagni, fifteen years old, of Halcyon Grove, had, with my very own hands, made this smooth, round device packed with malice and destruction.

  I gaffer-taped it to a leg of the tower, making sure that the fuse was easily accessible. Then I took out my iPhone to check iTrack, but I needn’t have bothered, because I could already see the sweep of approaching headlights.

  A panel van appeared, the shape of a collapsible wheelchair visible on the top. It passed, and my whole meticulously worked-out plan was instantly worthless. Then it appeared again, coming from the opposite direction, pulling up just beyond the tomato stall.

  I watched as two men got out – Thor and Alpha – dressed in black, black smeared on their faces, both of them barefoot. They took packs out of the back and started towards the tower, moving stealthily, almost gliding over the ground.

  Any doubt I might have harboured about their capabilities instantly disappeared. These were eco-ninjas, and they were capable of anything, of liberating all the KFC-bound chooks in Australia, of sinking a hundred longliners, of blowing up every piece of logging equipment in every old-growth forest in the world.