Feed the Machine (11 page)

A tiny urge to play with it, to fill it with programs and explore what it could do had bloomed but Silver squashed it. They were approaching Feed. Sliding down a hill of junk, inexorably, unable to slow or stop. Time could not be negotiated with, could not be reprogrammed. She had to crack the hasdee flood, make it do her bidding instead of drowning her.

Silver sunk below the surface of information and glided to the entry for Bell Dorrit’s daughter. All her variables were static. Up a level, down a level—nothing moved because she didn’t move. She was frozen, a little baby encased in a block of ice. Silver ran her fingers over the cold surface and moved away. The birthdates were easy to find. They were a string of numbers easily translated. There was the ever-present
now
running alongside them. Above the
now
were more numbers without meaning.

“Seven thousand, three hundred and forty more than the number below,” Silver said, flicking back to the world. Hello shuffled his wings and then she dived away again.

Amongst the pools of information there were locked vaults, chests sealed over, fortresses made of black steel. She skirted along the surface of a wall stretching out endlessly before her. Up and down and under and over—there was no way
in
she could see. The code was perfect, flawless, unbreakable.

For now, at least.

There were whispers in the flow… an ocean held back by a wall a thousand kilometers thick. Hidden secrets. Dark ways through and back. An observer, always watching, seeing everything.

Silver turned away from all the locked information and vague threats and swam in what was freely available.

The stolen screen flooded with rows and columns of numbers and letters. As she moved around them, correlations rose up. They were without meaning, given she didn’t know what the variables were representing but she could see connections clearly.

Silver wrote instruction after instruction. Remove all the people whose numbers are frozen except for Bell Dorrit’s daughter. The flood was cut down to a roaring stream. Show me all the people older than thirty-seven years and younger than thirty-eight. The stream became a creek, burbling happily.

She found Bell Dorrit. Many of her numbers were jerking around. Some were creeping down, out of line compared to other people. Red blood cell count or temperature or something else—Silver didn’t know. All she could see was numbers unaligned, a sure sign of disaster.

The numbers moved, gliding about the water, shimmering up and down. One began to glow, turning orange, growing brighter until it was gleaming like the sun. It floated up out of the water and Silver caught it in her hands.

A connector between Bell Dorrit and her daughter.

Another search, more instructions.

Cora Dorrit. Her father Samuel. Their numbers leapt out, tied together by the connector.

Tied together by the collars.

“The baby didn’t have a collar. It never made it to the Machine.”

It is measuring in some other way then.

The connector was some sort of family identification. The Dorrit family had a unique one tying them together.

Silver sorted through their variables, assigning names and guesses to them. She found height, weight and sex in an instant. Heartbeat. Moving up a level she found location—three numbers describing a position relative to some other fixed point. Cora and her mother were still close together. Samuel was somewhere else. The baby was with him. He must be taking it away to bury.

Vague names formed for every level. Location. Body. Body data.

There was an entry for blood and a thousand variables on the level below measuring aspects of the blood. Correlations from other levels leapt out. Old blood and new blood. Cora had new blood. The blood of youth.

Find yourself and you can find your father.

The tablet was no longer an empty warehouse. Silver had built a machine in it—a thing of levers, buttons and dials. She reset her machine and returned to the infinite ocean.

Families with five members.

Families with two females and three males.

Those families with a daughter born thirteen years ago.

The infinite ocean evaporated, leaving five glowing files.

It was clear to see which file was Ash’s and which was their father’s. He was much older.

None of his variables were moving.

He was dead.

But where did he die?

The location variables were empty.

Silver kept building her machine.

Chapter 16

Silver drew the knife along her arm and a flood of numbers burst into being in time with the pain.

“Wound length, pain level, wound depth, blood volume, wound position,” Silver said through gritted teeth.

She lifted the knife away and wrapped the shallow cut with a somewhat clean hasdee strip. It stung.

“Only a small cut, only a small cut, not a problem,” she repeated, touching the knife point against the palm of her left hand.

She took a quick breath and sliced into her flesh.

More pain. More numbers.

You have the location of your left hand now.

Silver put the knife down and picked up a battered fork in her right hand. She glanced down at the screen. The little tablet was still cheerful, still happy to tell her anything she wanted but it was getting overtaxed by all her questions. It was heating, making the small workshop uncomfortably warm. She’d programmed it to display the temperature in the top right corner. It was already running at eighty-five degrees Celsius. When it hit one hundred it shut off automatically until it cooled.

“Okay, here we go,” she whispered and moved the fork from her right hand to left. She made sure to press the wound against the fork.

The machine she’d programmed into the tablet asked the hasdee chip a thousand questions in an instant and in return it flooded back information. The temperature jumped to ninety-five and then kept climbing.

“C’mon little guy,” Silver prayed, watching the information ocean get sliced down piece by piece.

The temperature hit ninety-nine and then a single file was pulled out. Its location was virtually the same as her wound.

It had to be the fork.

She put it down, wiped away the blood on her palm and started typing.

Designate object fork.

Locate position.

Advise objects: fork, less than ten meters.

The tablet temperature was down to ninety. It skipped up two degrees as it gave positional for two more fork objects within ten meters.

Silver pulled the three files out. She stood with the tablet in her hand. It was awkward because it was still connected to wires underneath to power it. She moved a step towards the two forks sitting in the other room and saw the positional numbers move.

Great, you can find forks.

“I only need to touch a sample and identify it and I can find anything.”

So?

“I can touch wood and it will build me an image of Cago. I can touch gold and find all the gold in the Scour. I can touch a sourcecube and—”

The tablet died in her hand, the screen winking a small rotating circle at her. It turned black.

Need a better power source.

“Yeah, yeah I know.”

Chapter 17

Silver hid in the shadows under the house and watched Fat Man’s thugs walk their aimless patterns.

“When is a fork not a fork?” she whispered.

When the handle is cut down too much.

“Stop being sarcastic and help me.”

She’d spent another hour with the tablet touching objects in the house and trying to track them down via their location relative to her hand.

She found her workbench. But on the tablet a level above it were hundreds of variables. Categories perhaps? But what did it fit into?

Things made of wood.

Things with four legs.

Things painted brown.

Things that are old.

It was endless. To crack just this she’d have to find another table, cross-compare the variables on every level with each other and then with the real-life tables. And to do what? So she knew for sure there was a category of things labeled “objects with four legs”?

Still, the question nagged at her. If she cut the fork in half, was it still a fork? She’d done that, cutting it in half and the file she was tracking went still. It was no longer a fork apparently. No longer being tracked.

She took their second fork and sliced the tip of the handle off. Still tracking. Another piece sliced off. Still tracking. She was halfway down the handle, pieces of metal littered on her table when the fork stopped tracking.

There is a line and a measurement. A ratio of handle to tines, a shape denoting forkness.

“That means someone measured and decided,” Silver whispered.

Yes.

She’d exhausted another battery and had two more automatic shutdowns from the tablet. At one hundred degrees it just turned off.

Guard with the red hat is walking a slow diamond.

Silver timed him walking by. He vanished around a corner. A minute later she saw the tip of his hat as he passed by a fence. Six minutes and eighteen seconds later he emerged from beside the warehouse and marched by again. He was walking a very set route. Silver closed her eyes so she could see it better. A glowing path sketched out.

Guard with the beard will be going to piss soon.

“How do you know?”

Look at his face twitching.

Silver glanced at his face (to be polite mainly) but then focused on other guards. She was no good with faces. The voice knew but continued persisting in trying to teach her—or rub her nose in it.

Overall there were four guards. Red hat walking his diamond, beard face random square varying from ten to fifteen point two minutes, fat guy #1 up and down taking twenty-minute breaks somewhere around the corner and fat guy #2 sitting in a chair, unmoving, dull eyes staring straight ahead.

Every hour there was a six-minute window when chair guy was the only guard watching the warehouse.

Silver had sat there for two hours under the house and watched two opportunities come and go. Moments when chair guy could be distracted, pulled away somehow and then maybe she could break into the storeroom, touch some gold bars or something valuable. Get a fix. Find it out in the Scour.

Slash his throat and be done with it.

Silver touched the small knife she had in her bag. It was a solution but a bad one. There would be blood. He might fight her or scream. She might miss the artery and the law would hang her.

“What if I touch a bar of gold but the tablet overheats before it finds it? Or what if I find it but then I can’t work out the categories? What if it only finds bars of stuff? Or things that are rectangles? Things twelve centimeters long?”

Would you prefer to see your family ripped apart by silver bugs?

Red hat walked around the corner.

Beard face screwed up his face and walked away.

Fat guy #1 vanished on a long break.

Now or never.

Silver pulled the knife out of her bag and crept out from under the house. She told Hello to stay hidden.

Stab into his neck as deep as you can. Come from behind.

“One second,” she whispered, feeling the blood flow back into her legs. She’d been hiding under the house for hours. Her muscles were cramped and felt slow and cold. With the returning blood, pain flushed in.

She was still chilled from hiding in the shadow for so long but there was another chill aching out from inside her. A cold hurt that could only be warmed by hot blood.

Silver moved casually, the knife held close to her leg so no one would see it. She lined herself up behind chair guy and walked towards him, clenching the blade.

Stab his neck and if he doesn’t fall, slash his eyes.

A thought slipped across her mind—how would she get inside the storeroom? The doors were locked.

But it was too late—the plan was in motion.

She was a meter away when chair guy turned and leapt up. He was fast for a fat man. He backhanded her across the face and she flew backwards, landing on her bag in the dirt. Something crunched and broke.

“Get the fuck away from here,” he said, standing with his fists clenched.

Silver’s head was ringing. She could taste blood in her mouth. She still had the knife in her hand—thankfully he hadn’t seen it.

She scrambled to her feet and ran.

Chapter 18

Gress came stalking across the yard, the blue bugs guarding the property scuttling out of his way. He wore a look of utter contempt. Silver had shouted out to him for ten minutes until he deigned to leave his position in the window and come outside to meet her. He sat down and began bathing.