Feed the Machine (9 page)

She picked up three reprogrammed tempcubes from the table. Her tiny package of code colored them faint brown.

It was appropriate she thought. After all, they told hasdees to eat shit and enjoy it.

Chapter 9

Kaleen had clearly been up all night. Her eyes were bloodshot, tiny red veins standing out around her green eyes. She was a white woman with red hair—a rarity—and today she was even paler than usual. She nodded Silver inside without a word.

There was dried blood splattered on her clothes.

“Hasdee is in there. Money too.”

She yawned into her hand and wandered off down the corridor. Silver heard a door close not long after.

Hello fluttered over to a small wooden table sitting in the corner of the room near the hasdee. On top of it sat a book made of actual paper, some sort of ledger. He started looking through it, turning the pages with his beak. Next to it was ten dollars—payment for the reprogramming.

“We’re here to do a job, not snoop,” Silver told him, taking the final reprogrammed tempcube out of her bag. The first two clients had been routine. Their hasdees could now process any organic material tipped into them and make it into pap. Both of the clients had felt awkward, as usual (according to the voice). She was the shit-carter’s daughter and there she was destroying the need for that job. Plus there was the shame of it—eating shit one degree removed. Only the poor did so. The middle rich and very rich hired shit-carters rather than eat their own recycled waste.

You come from a family of shit-eaters so why do they care?

“Don’t be mean,” Silver replied automatically.

“This has a lot of numbers in it,” Hello commented, turning another page.

Silver ignored the obvious lure to get her to snoop and went to the hasdee, putting her bag on the floor beside it. She put the tempcube into the slot and clicked it into place. A small zero appeared on the screen and started counting. Once it reached one hundred it would be finished.

“Birthweights, head sizes, lengths…”

Silver risked a glance at the ledger. The pages were covered in rows and columns of letters, numbers and dates. There was only one thing better than code and that was numbers. She came closer and Hello flipped the ledger back to the first page.

She looked down the page and correlations leapt out. The higher the weight the larger the head size. Each column had a title written in Kaleen’s neat script. They all made sense except for one marked only with an X.

“Next page?” Hello asked, looking sideways at her.

“Let me just check something,” Silver murmured, picking up the ledger. On the first page were two rows that had a date marked in the X column. The first X was six days after the birthdate. The second was forty-eight.

She turned the page and scanned down it. Three more dates in the X column. Three initials.

“AP, GS and UL.”

Babies born in Cago.

Births and… deaths.

She looked through the ledger, the numbers soaking into her mind and throwing back correlations. Low birthweight correlated with early death. Low growth correlated with early death.

She reached the final page. The most recent entry had today’s date in the birth and death column.

That explained the blood.

Silver put the ledger down and closed it. Her mind was still whirring through the numbers, looking for patterns, giving ratios.

“Anything useful?” Hello asked. He’d perched himself atop the hasdee.

“Twelve percent of all babies die.”

Hello lifted a wing and groomed his feathers.

“Is that bad?”

“I think so.”

Mother doesn’t get enough food so the baby is low in weight and then has an increased chance of dying. Solve the food problem to solve the baby problem.

She checked the hasdee. The number was creeping through the seventies. If it was going to brick out, this was usually the spot. It hit eighty and kept counting.

“Four percent of all mothers die in childbirth. Mother dying in childbirth has a high correlation to baby dying within following seven days.”

“If humans laid eggs like us crows you wouldn’t worry so much about it so much. Twenty to forty days and done.”

“You’re right,” Silver whispered, numbers floating before her eyes.

You’ve seen these numbers before.

“But where?”

“In a nest I suppose. Oh, you weren’t talking to me.”

The hasdee gave a soft chime as the tempcube finished updating. Silver took the now-white cube out and put it in her bag.

The answer was coming like a thunder over the horizon. Unlike the idea from earlier she knew this couldn’t be scared away. It was big and heavy and maybe dangerous. It would smack her mind out of this world and who knew how long it would be before she returned?

“Quick, get the money,” Silver said, putting her bag on. The answer was nearly here, racing towards her, a hazel sprinting.

Hello fluttered across to the table and picked up the note in his beak. He flew it back to her bag and pushed it into a pocket.

“Ready to go? I could use some pap. Or some beetles if you have them.”

“The hasdee told me!” she shouted.

And gone.

Chapter 10

Darkness, glowing green numbers and code on the tiny two-line screen.

Cajoling, threatening, begging the hasdee circuit for information.

A blur of typing, her mind leaping ahead of itself as she programmed a tempcube to cajole, threaten and beg for her, faster than she ever could.

The hasdee talking too too much, flooding out thousands of numbers, pages of code, a torrent of information and she was standing in it with a thimble, scooping mere droplets.

Gray light and a plate of pap cubes sitting on the table. Some of them had been pecked. Gulping them down, feeling her throat sting.

Elisa’s toaster was gone and she’d no memory of seeing the little blonde girl. But there was two dollars on the table.

Was it Nola who brought the food? Or their mother? Where there should have been a memory were numbers. Not Ash, he was somewhere in the Scour or something. She hadn’t been paying attention.

She had two tables full of junk she worked on—one outside in her workshop, the other inside the house. Had she been inside at any point to see her family?

Connected to her body by only the thinnest thread but the body grew tired, began making its gentle requests for sleep which soon became demands.

Silver rushing through the numbers, racing through the jungle, exhaustion chasing her, the answer ahead.

Closer now but her feet were aching, her nose running, the red welts itching, her body making its displeasure known.

A wall of numbers scaled in an instant, an ocean of them gulped in one mouthful, an island, numbers crunching under her feet like hot sand. A temple and a book, a glowing silver light shooting from it into the sky.

The answer.

They were close to Kaleen’s numbers but Silver knew that was because Kaleen was inaccurate. The birthweights here were measured down to fifty decimal places. There were tens of thousands of them, all connected to a number. Some sort of identifier. Some of the numbers were static. Others rose up and down, jumped from high to low and back again.

Silver slipped out of her chair and onto the mattress resting against the back wall. It was cool against her burning skin.

She let exhaustion catch her.

How does the hasdee know the births and deaths of all the people?

“I don’t know,” she murmured, sinking into sleep.

Yes you do.

Chapter 11

Silver stepped over the endless lines of flowing blue bugs and looked at the sagging mansion.

“If he’s so rich why is his house falling down?”

Hello moved on her shoulder, his claws pricking her skin.

“He loves old things. I saw a shiny spoon in his yard—can I get it?”

“On the way out.”

The bugs were a vivid blue running in two lines through the three fences surrounding Cago. The ones leaving were thin and small. Those returning were fat and waddling, barely fitting through the wire mesh.

“He must have five hundred bugs,” Silver said, looking down the line and counting two hundred and twenty-seven within sight. She calculated the average speed of going and returning, watched for a few seconds and the final total of estimated bugs came close to five hundred.

“Can you fly, tell me if you see anything?”

Hello took off with a caw, looping high over the mansion and then flying away to loop over a few more. Silver saw him pretend to peck something out of the air. He fluttered down, landing at her feet.

“The old man is in there. Asleep I think. Cat nowhere to be found.”

Silver rubbed the itch creeping up her neck and chewed on her lip. The Collector had a pet—a cat named Gress—who stayed with him at all times. If they were going to break in, they needed to know where he was.

“His servant is gone for the day… did Gress go with him do you think?”

Hello pecked at the ground, pulling a small stone up and looking underneath it.

“Gress isn’t down at the Machine. What is the old man’s name?”

Silver thought for a moment, her mind whizzing over all the data she’d ever collected.

“It’s… Ijira,” she said, the name thrown up from a question she’d asked her mother four years ago.

Silver felt for the two bugs hanging on her belt. One of them was twitching rhythmically—not a good sign. The program she’d put in it was conflicting somehow. The other was fine.

The plan had been to let the bugs in to map the house. She’d return home, have them scratch it in a piece of metal or maybe on the tabletop. Then she’d devise her strategy to break in to steal an electronic tablet.

Not enough time.

“I know.”

Flood was the wrong word for the information the hasdee chip poured back at her. She’d spent the morning on a single entry, dropping down layers and finding each layer had tens of thousands of bits of data. Any one of them contained thousands more. It seemed to go down without limit. Endless acronyms that meant nothing. Numbers that flickered and moved even as she watched them. That they were people was obvious. How the hasdee had a continually updating measurement of them less so.

Silver had a bottomless appetite for information but this meal could never be finished. There were too many variables, too much to absorb. It blurred by on her small two-line black-and-green screen and she was lost in it.

When she worked on a problem there was always a moment when she sensed how long it would be before she could complete it. A glimpse of minutes (fixing a toaster) or weeks (messing around programming tempcubes). The hasdee’s information was without end, cryptic and strange.

“Even if I had ten thousand of me slaving for a thousand years I wouldn’t work it out,” Silver said.

The problem couldn’t be estimated but that didn’t mean she shouldn’t start. The first step was acquiring a larger electronic screen so she could see more of the information at once.

So go inside, take a risk.

Silver waited a few more minutes, standing there absorbing the world around her. The house on the left side was empty but in good condition. The Artos family lived in the house on the right. A father, mother and baby boy. They were rich—they’d never have a low-birthweight problem. She looked over at their back fence. Two rows of pale orange bugs. They owned two hundred and twenty in total. More than enough to stay warm for the rest of their lives.

High above a few birds floated on the breeze, flying for fun or acting on their owner’s instructions. Silver knew some of them might belong to the law—she’d have to hope they didn’t see her break in.

No one was watching as far as she could tell. The thin corridor of dirt behind the back fences was empty, the shit-carters having collected their product earlier in the day.

“Should we go in?” Hello turned over another stone, looking for beetles, following ancient programming that no longer applied. How could it when there were no beetles alive?

Silver glanced around and then put the mapping bug back in the bag on her belt. The other one had stopped twitching. Its legs were folded under it, dead.

“As Nola would say… fuck it.”

Chapter 12

There was dust on everything.

Dust means footprints.

Silver stood quiet, breathing in the smell of the old mansion. Ancient wood and metal, old parchment, decaying books.

The room was dim, the curtains shading it in tones of orange. Despite the hot day outside, it was cool inside.

Dust made no sense. Bugs cleaned it—after all dust was mostly organic matter, skin cells flaked away. For there to be dust this had to be deliberate. The bugs were instructed to
not
clean inside the mansion. There was a servant too—what was he doing to allow this?