The Reborn (The Day Eight Series Part 1) (16 page)

Another popup message:

CATASTROPHIC ERROR!

The simulation “Allison” has crashed due to incompatible program changes. Either restore from an auto-backup, or the simulation will automatically restart from initial birth module.

Connection to Day Eight Backup Warehouse cannot be established.

Time remaining until restart: 14:55.

Fourteen minutes, fifty-five seconds. Trevor watched, frozen in fear as the timer counted down. Each tick of a second as absolute as the
Whap!
of a judge’s gavel hammering on his skull.

This meant that if he didn’t find some way to restore Allison from a backup in less than fifteen minutes, then she would be gone – wiped out and replaced by a prenatal version of herself. Damon would
kill
him. And
of course
the machine couldn’t connect to the “Backup Warehouse,” because Allison had been removed from Day Eight. There
had
to be something else, some internal backup Allison’s machine kept. Something.
Anything at all.

Trevor messed with the tablet interface for a few minutes before realizing he had absolutely no idea how to restore Allison, and he wouldn’t be able to figure it out on his own. He grabbed his phone and began to dial Damon, then stopped. Damon would kill him anyway. Trevor would never mess around like this again – he’d learned his lesson… was still learning it right goddamn now – but the thought that Damon would keep trusting Trevor around Allison was a farce. He just couldn’t call Damon… but what choice did he have?

He began dialing Damon’s number again, but instead of dialing a “6” for the final digit, he dialed a “7.”

Three excruciatingly long rings. Then…

“Damon Winters’s office, this is Hillary speaking, how may I help you?” came the voice.

“Are you alone?” said Trevor.

“Excuse me?” A mix of surprise and confusion.

“I’m with Allison,” said Trevor, a near whisper, “and I need help. Are you alone in your office?”

“Who are you?”

“Listen, my name is Trevor Leighton. I’m currently with Allison at Damon’s home. You called her just twenty minutes ago and she told you I was here, about to play
Candyland
with her. I know you know about her. I did something, and I need help!”

Silence.

Then, “No, you listen to me, Trevor. You need to be careful who you offer up this sort of information to. How do you know I’m who you think I am? There are only three people who know that she still exists: you, me, and Damon. And if—”

Trevor ruptured. “Allison won’t exist if you don’t stop lecturing me and help me do something! She crashed into a heap of carnage and disappeared! And now it says there’s… nine minutes and thirty-two seconds before it restarts her from scratch!”

“Christ,” said Hillary. Then there was a distinct shift in her voice as it lost its edge and became as solid as tempered steel in the Arctic. “Here’s what you need to do. First, is there a message header on the crash window?”

“Yes, it says, ‘catastrophic failure.’”

He heard Hillary take a deep breath, then exhale. “Okay. We have nine minutes. We
need
seven of them. I’ll start a timer. Get to Allison’s computer as quickly as you can. Tell me when you’re there.”

The youthfulness in Hillary’s voice nearly undermined her authority,  but in this situation Trevor would give her all the authority in the world. So he sprinted. He burst through the curtains into the equipment room. “Uh-oh. I’m here, but there’re computers everywhere.”

“Look for one that’s at least the size of a fridge and has a bundle of wires as thick around as your leg coming out of it. It will also have a metal plumbing pipe entering one side and exiting the opposite – that’s old liquid cooling technology that her type of unit uses, we only made a few. She should be the only one like that.”

“Yes,” Trevor jogged to the largest machine in the room, the one he’d noticed earlier that appeared to be using almost forty thousand watts of energy. “I’m there.”

“Good. There’s a three-foot access panel at the base. Open it.”

Trevor knelt and pulled the latch. The panel didn’t budge. “It’s locked.” He saw the keyhole, but no key.

“At Day Eight, we would usually tie the keys to a string and dangle them from a hook on the machine’s case right next to the panel.”

Trevor ran his fingers along the landscape of the case hoping to jostle a string that he somehow just didn’t see. Nothing. He stood and swept his glance around the room, looking for something that appeared to be a set of key hooks or an important box affixed to the wall. Then he saw a sleek, metal compartment box on a table by the tablet devices.

“Hold on, I see something.”

Trevor opened it. “Crap.”

“What?” said Hillary.

“Just tools in this box. He must have the keys with him.”

“We have seven and a half minutes,” she said.

Trevor’s brain began shooting in twenty directions at once, feeling for alternatives, then retracting at dead ends, shooting out into new directions and changing course where options diverged.

“I could pry the panel open with the tools, but that needs to be a last resort. And it could take too much time. Then Damon will know, too. Can we just power her down to get more time?”

“Not where you are. You don’t have the auxiliary systems that we have here at Day Eight. Normally, none of this would be a problem or as pressing. But if you shut her down without the auxiliaries while she’s corrupted and without swapping her data banks, then she’ll reboot directly into a prenatal simulation. We have to jump through a bunch of hoops, dig into the hardware, and we have less time to do it.” Hillary took another deep breath. Then her calm and soothing voice floated through the receiver and massaged Trevor’s mind: “Trevor, I believe you can do this. Find a quick way to get inside that panel. Do it now.”

Her words were hypnosis. The power of suggestion. Before he had a moment to doubt himself he said, “I’ll remove the pins from the hinges.” He did a double take at his own words – such a simple idea – then grabbed a hammer and flathead screwdriver from the toolbox.

“Great thinking, Trevor. Do that as quickly as you can.”

Yup, this panel had external hinges. Clearly the lock was more of a deterrent than serious protection.

“I’m putting you on speaker,” said Trevor, and he laid his phone on the floor. He jammed the screwdriver under the heads of the hinge pins and hammered them up and out like a master craftsman. Then he shimmied the panel out and placed it on the floor.

“Done.”

“Excellent,” said Hillary. “That was the easy part.”

Trevor noticed his fingers shaking from adrenaline. He began inspecting the layout inside the panel as Hillary continued.

“The important components,” she said, “are the three large drive arrays with handles, and the knob on the right. First, turn the knob on the right from ‘active’ to ‘simulation pause.’  That’s a hard-pause you’re putting it into so it doesn’t read from or write to the drives. But it won’t stop the simulation from resetting when time runs out.”

Trevor ran his hand through his hair, then turned the knob. It
thunked
into place, and he heard a quartet of sounds from the machine as different fans kicked on and off and the drive internals disengaged.

“Now here comes the hard part,” said Hillary. “I hope you have some muscle on you. You’re going to need to remove the three drive arrays.”

From the front, they each looked like small filing cabinet drawers with large handles on their faces. Except they were solid and they sank deep into the machine.

He pulled the bottom one and it slid out on tracks. It was a four-foot long, dense thing. The top had another set of handles. Trevor straddled it, grabbed the handles, lifted it from the runners, then awkwardly began waddling it out of the way.

“Holy hell, this weighs a ton.” It felt like the thing was carved of solid rock.

“Be
extremely
careful with those,” Hillary’s voice came from the speaker phone. “Normally it takes two people to move them safely. If you damage any of them, Allison will stop working. You’re essentially carrying
her
right now. And when you set them down, keep track of which slot they came from.”

Trevor felt like a weight lifter as he slowly lowered the drive array until one end met the solid concrete, then the other, grit on the floor crunching beneath its mass.

Trevor slid out and straddled the second drive array, feeling its heat curl over him and warm his arms and legs. This one was higher, and a bit more awkward. “How is it so easy to crash a simulant?” he asked in a strained voice as he lifted the drive from the bay.

“It’s not,” said Hillary. “The integration matrix provides a lot of protection against crashes and deployment timing conflicts with running code.”

“It wasn’t available,” he said, lowering the second drive to the ground.

“Which is why you shouldn’t have touched Allison’s code in the first place. If we had the time, I’d be extremely angry at you right now.”

“Why don’t you rub it in?” he said, grabbing the third drive.

“Three minutes and forty-seven seconds.”

“Okay, consider it rubbed in,” he said, straining through his teeth as he waddled to another clear spot on the floor, then set the third drive down. “Now, how does this work?”

“Listen carefully. One drive is the ‘active’ slot that runs Allison at any given moment. Another drive is a local ‘backup’ slot that has a complete working copy of her from a few minutes to a half an hour before the crash. We don’t know exactly, it depends when the backup finishes. The machine is always making a backup, and it takes about half an hour. That’s what the last drive is – the ‘mid-backup’ drive. It’s useless to us because it only has a partial copy of her at any given time.”

“Okay,” said Trevor, “I understand.”

“We only manually swap these drives in an emergency. Normally there’s an additional network backup that handles everything automatically. Which you don’t have.”

“Well, it’s an emergency,” said Trevor, “so now what?”

“Now, the tricky part.”

“Awesome,” Trevor clapped his hands and rolled his eyes, “I thrive on tricky parts.”

“Which drive is which changes every time a new backup is finished. Their order rotates. You’ll see this indicated by lights on the slots you removed the drives from. That’s why I had you remember their order. The green light is the ‘active’ drive, the blue light is the ‘backup’ drive, and the—”

“There are no lights here,” said Trevor, frantically searching the internals of the panel. He stuck his head into one of the slots and scanned the interior. “There are
no lights
in here at all!”

“Oh…” Hillary’s voice faded and lost itself in the equipment room’s drone of churning air. “I guess maybe… in that model…”

She was lost. Trevor needed her. He needed to bring her back. “How much time?” he prompted.

“Three minutes, two seconds,” she said, snapping out of it. “No lights. We can still do this. What you need to figure out is which drive was the ‘active’ drive. If you can do that, we know their order, and can reinsert them correctly.”

Trevor kneeled in front of the drives and looked at them. “How do I know the difference?”

“I don’t know, but you have about thirty seconds to figure it out. After that, you won’t have enough time to reinsert them.”

Christ.
They looked identical. A bead of sweat dripped from his hair onto one of the drives and he wiped it off, feeling the heat under his hand. He was sweating like crazy. His body felt unevenly warmed, like there was a heat lamp on his left side, and it was distracting. Wasn’t this a sign of a panic attack?

“I don’t know!” he said.

“Yes,” she corrected. “You do know. You have to know, for Allison.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know!”

“Fifteen seconds until it won’t matter. Go with your gut feelings.”

Feelings.
All he felt was
hot
. And— “I’ve got it!” Trevor began feeling along the length of the drives with his hands. “The drives are billowing heat like crazy. But their heat patterns are uneven. Distinct.”

“You’re a genius,” said Hillary, elated. “Hurry!”

“Yes, these two are hot on one end and cool on the other, in the exact same spots. That means they’re the backups – one was copying itself into the other from one end on down. The third drive,” he said, streaking his hands along it, “is uniformly warm, which means the entire thing was being used. That’s Allison’s active drive!”

“Excellent! Grab it, now!” She explained the arrangement to reinsert them.

Trevor waddled two of the drives back to the machine, fit them on their tracks, and slid them in.

“Sixty seconds,” said Hillary as Trevor grabbed the final drive. This was exciting and scary as hell all at the same time. As he slid the last one in place, it felt like performing an emergency open-heart surgery when the real surgeon was on the phone guiding him through the steps.