Feed the Machine (8 page)

A sourcecube.

It was small and black with light iridescent blue lines streaked over its surface, no bigger than a marble used in children’s games.

As Ash turned it in the light the lines shimmered in tones of green and red.

“He found a cube.”

“He found a cube and kept it for himself,” Kin corrected, his eyes gleaming.

Ash turned the cube in the light, watching the lines change color. He’d only know what plans it held when it was inserted into a hasdee. There was no time for that though. Even if Raj hadn’t been injured they couldn’t stay down here eating recycled shit and drinking recycled piss while they slowly dug their way to the surface. This was a trap and that meant someone would come to check it.

Besides, endless orange juice or steak meant nothing trapped down a hole.

Ash slipped the cube into his pocket and then took it out again. His clothing was ripped in a hundred places. He couldn’t risk dropping the cube.

“Give it to me,” Kin said and walked over. He opened his mouth.

Ash looked at the cube for a moment more before putting it inside Kin’s mouth. He closed his teeth and swallowed.

“Now that that’s safe, how are we going to escape?”

Ash looked at the trapdoor high above them. The single bug he’d sent climbing up there had reached the top.

The underside of the door was dull with age but new shiny metal gleamed where something had scratched words.

DIG DOWN ASH

PART TWO

Chapter 8

Silver

All the world was numbers.

Input and output.

Growth and decline.

Birth and death.

Silver could see it as clearly as the red welts traced on the backs of her hands: they were going absolute zero and it was her fault.

“No, I’m working,” she said and sent her query. Her crow Hello shuffled his wings, blinked at her and returned to sleep. He was used to her talking aloud.

Lines of code slipped across the small two-line screen in a blur of green on black. The toaster had things to say about what she was asking it to do. Protests, of a sort.

Toaster: I can’t do that. I’m not allowed.

The screen and keyboard were both hooked to the toaster, its shell cracked open and its electronic guts exposed. Silver pressed the enter key on the battered keyboard Ash had retrieved from the pile for her and typed in code of her own.

Silver: How about you heat both sides at once but one of the sides you only heat to zero degrees? Can you do that?

The toaster still wasn’t sure but she could see it was thinking about it. A moment passed.

Toaster: I can’t do that. I’m not allowed.

Her mind slipped away—or was pulled—from the code, the keyboard, the broken toaster and returned to the past and the insistent chant that pointed fingers and named names.

They were stripped of their wealth in a single night when their father vanished, taking it all with them but they still had enough to recover and thrive. A house full of precious metals and other beautiful things.

Your fault.

If Silver hadn’t been ill then their mother could have made bugs, made as many as she could afford and they’d dig the Scour for her, bring in the resources. They would be at net positive and creeping ever upwards.

See?

But all her illnesses were a negative pull, a hole in their bucket and they stripped the family wealth away. Red streaks crept over her body, heading in lines for her heart and if they reached it, she’d die. A cough that never subsided, growing stronger until her lips turned blue from lack of oxygen.

So much easier if you died.

Always Munro the medicine man shaking his head, trading dollars over the counter for weaker bottles of heal, her mother hoping it would be enough to fix her because they’d have to liquidate everything they owned to buy the next one up the price list. Getting a brief respite, a few months, not enough to catch your breath and then awakening to a cough, rough and sharp, seeming so wrong to be coming from such a tiny body.

It’s never going to get better.

Silver squeezed her eyes shut, tears prickling in the corners.

“Why are you being so mean? I need your help.”

The inner voice didn’t answer but she felt the echo of shame. It was prone to guilt, same as her. As Feed came closer day by day and she built her path to success by a thousand failures, it had become dark, morbid and judgmental. It still helped her but came wrapped in razor wire. No way to touch it without getting bloodied. It had always had its grim moments but since her thirteenth birthday last month, it had gotten far worse.

There’s no limit to the temperature setting decimal places. A hundred zeros then a one is practically zero.

Chastened, lighter now, realizing perhaps it had gone too far, had been too mean.

Silver opened her eyes and wiped away the gathered tears.

“Thank you.”

Silver: Set left side standard temp, set right side 0.0000000000000000000001 degrees.

She held her breath and hit enter.

One side of the toaster turned on, the thin wire heating, glowing red. The other side stayed dark.

“Yes!”

Her throat itched and she took a slow calming breath lest the itch turn into an unstoppable cough. Nola was asleep in the house and might come rushing out if she started a coughing fit.

The glow intensified, moving from dull red to orange. Something crackled in the circuitry and it died.

“Shit.”

She hit a button on the keyboard programmed with what she thought of as “hey, wake up, are you there?” It was always the first thing she tried when she connected anything new.

Nothing happened. The screen stayed black, a tiny green dot sitting static. The toaster was fried.

Silver pulled the wires off, careful not to damage them. She closed the toaster up. She would return it later or maybe tomorrow to the Balt family with her apologies. They’d have to shell out for a new toaster tempcube now. This one would get dumped in the hasdee, milled down and reused.

She pushed the dead toaster aside and returned to her ongoing scanner project. It wasn’t much more than a couple of wires, a broken antenna Ash had found, a solar battery and a basic circuit she’d ripped out of their old hasdee when it broke down.

…after a little reprogramming mishap…

She connected the wires, ready to have a conversation.

Hasdees
loved
to talk. Toasters not so much. She’d only found a few commands to toasters that warranted an answer. Hasdees
always
answered, no matter what you typed in. And so far nothing had fried this circuit.

She’d been through the entire alphabet, typing in single letters and remembering the response. They couldn’t afford paper so she just had to remember it, which wasn’t hard. Some of the more interesting responses she’d scratched into the tabletop with her knife.

You could type in
a
and get one string of gibberish in the morning and type the same thing later and get something different. She’d even tried timing it to the second, getting Hello to count down but even that hadn’t worked. Either it was random or giving different responses based on units of time faster than she could measure.

The morning slipped away, the air warming and Silver kept typing and reading the code that came back. There were patterns in it. Number sequences moved and shifted, reappearing, doubling and coming back again. She wished she had another hasdee chip to compare responses. Two chips, two screens, two keyboards, simultaneous input. But that was never going to happen. Her circuits, keyboard and screen weren’t worth a fortune but they were worth enough to be thrown into the hasdee if push came to shove. Sometimes on hungry nights she saw her family look outside to her locked workroom, knowing there was enough metal and plastic to buy at least a meal. But then she wouldn’t be able to repair anything for anyone and so they looked away and went hungry. She had a table inside too—she worked there so they could see her. Otherwise they’d come out to the workroom and interrupt her important business.

She swam deep in the code, typing letters over and again, looking for patterns. If she could get this to work so it would find gold or circuitry in the Scour then they’d be free of the quota. Make enough of them to sell or give away and everyone could be free.

A soft knock on the door pulled her back to the world. As she floated up, she became aware of her body, of its various aches and pains. A sort of burning lower left stomach. She could relieve it by pressing down, digging her fingers into her muscle but that only worked so many times. Red blotches across her back, the itch down deep, elusive. Another itch in her hairline. She rubbed it with the flat of her hand as she walked to the door, feeling it subside.

Silver opened the door a crack to find Elisa standing there. She was five years old, skinny and small, hugging a toaster. A repeat customer.

“Another one broke. Can you fix? My dad will pay two dollars.”

“I’ll take a look. Come back later okay?” Silver said, taking the toaster.

The little blonde girl nodded solemnly and then walked away.

Silver sat the toaster on the bench and took out her special cracking tool. Because the outer shell was printed as one smooth piece, she had to cut open a small hole to access the guts.

There was only one fixable problem. One of the wires from the circuit was too thin. It would overheat and burn out, leaving the toaster dead. It was a simple matter of cutting it off, soldering in place a thicker wire and then the toaster would be fine for at least another six months. If it wasn’t that then she couldn’t help. It was a common problem—a flaw in the plan so every toaster that came from it would burn out the same way. Silver didn’t know why they hadn’t fixed the plan. Surely there were enough toasters burning out before the world fell that someone noticed?

Someone sat in a room and made the wire thin and programmed in the minimum and maximum and it was deliberately done.

By her calculations they never burned out before twelve weeks and none survived longer than sixty-three weeks. It was random between those two values and that meant it wasn’t random at all.

Why would anyone
want
their toasters to burn out every year?

She cut a small hole in the casing and slipped the wires inside to touch the contact points. She looped around them and then hit the query button on her keyboard.

A string of code came back but it may as well have been written in English: wire burned out.

She cracked it open, snipped the wire and soldered a new one into place. Then she sealed it, resisting the temptation to ask the toaster more things.

“Two o’clock,” Hello croaked. He stood and stretched his wings out and then stepped across the table between the scattered electronics.

Silver scratched the back of his head, staring into space, feeling a thought wandering around close by. She could see the edges of it—something about tempcubes joined together, one to open the door, the other to hold it and the next to throw itself into the room. One more to—

Hello flopped down on the table, blocking her keyboard so she could rub his belly.

“Dia is carting from the Wire Pub for the rest of the day. We should go soon,” he murmured, spreading his wings a bit further, relaxing back against the keyboard.

Once a tempcube expired and turned white—say after printing fifty steaks or making orange juice for a month—people or their servants took them to the Machine for processing. They weren’t worth much and couldn’t be milled in a standard hasdee or chewed by bugs so they were frequently dumped. Silver and Hello collected them, competing with other scavengers to acquire the empty cubes.

Not empty really.

Silver felt the thought floating closer.

Hasdees couldn’t stop talking, toasters were dumb and said little and exhausted tempcubes were suspicious. They were like rows of doors, each guarded by a sheriff and each sheriff had to be tricked in a different way. Once you crept past them all you ended in a tiny room where you could drop off a small package of code. Code to tell a hasdee to print wire mesh without a plan or tell it to start processing
all
organic material rather than its limited range.

The room was too small to do much else.

Blow up the room.

“We need to go,” Hello said, his eyes closed.

“Shh, I’m thinking.”

“You shush me?” he muttered.

Blow up the room, make a new room, get it bigger, what is it?

The thought vanished, leaving behind only a faint afterimage. A tiny cube inflating like a bubble.

Silver rubbed Hello’s chest one more time. She stood, grimacing as pain shot down her legs. When she swam in the code her body was a distant whisper easily ignored. Here in reality it hurt with random pains, aching and sick.