Distant Worlds Volume 2 by Benjamin Sperduto

Author:Benjamin Sperduto [Sperduto, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-02-08T22:00:00+00:00

The theater’s main room reeked of melting solder and paint fumes. With so many bodies crammed onto the theater floor, there was a faint tinge of static in the stale, stuffy air.

Most of the seats had been torn out long ago, but the rows and rows of computer servers had been installed much more recently. They weren’t so much servers as piles of mismatched spare parts held together with zip ties, stretch cords, and electrical tape. Thick vines of bundled cabling hung down from the ceiling to connect each unit to the main control terminal bolted onto the mixing board at the back of the room.

A spindly, tattooed woman with hair like an oil slick greeted Marcus just inside the door.

“Got a few spots left,” she said.

“I want the best unit you have. Nothing that’s going to short out in the middle of the show.”

She shook her head. “You want the best spot? Get here before they’re taken.”

He thrust what remained of his cash at her. “Move somebody.”

She took the money and counted it, her plastic expression unchanged. When she finished, she snapped her fingers at one of the nearby bouncers.

“Unit seven. Put whoever’s there now in nineteen. If he won’t go, throw him out.”

The woman looked back to him. Her eyes were almost black under the theater’s dim lighting.

“Best input signal we’ve got,” she said. “Try not to overdo it.”

“I can handle myself.”

That brought out the hint of a smile.

“Of course you can. Enjoy the show.”

Unit seven stood in the front row of servers in the dead center of the room. It looked newer than the units around it, with many components obviously purpose-built for the device rather than cobbled together from spare parts.

Almost.

Loose wires still poked out from the casing seams and the neural uplink control box had clearly been stolen from some half-decent research lab. The control panel at least had a virtual input sensor, but the metal brackets holding it in place were poorly welded to the main server unit’s housing and several extra holes had been drilled into the sensor’s casing to accommodate extra input feeds.

Even so, it seemed far more sophisticated than its patchwork, almost primitive neighbors. Most of the units looked like they couldn’t handle transmitting a video message. Unit seven at least looked capable of slightly heavier lifting. It didn’t reassure him simply to know that any one of the other jury-rigged servers was probably capable of handling a larger datastreams than all of the workstations in his office combined. With so much repurposed hardware and tangled, mismatched wiring, he was never fully free of the fear that something would short out and leave him a drooling idiot waiting to be dumped into the closest pond of waste runoff.

The man occupying unit seven didn’t appreciate being told to relocate, but he thought better of lodging too much of a protest with the burly bouncer, who outweighed him by a substantial margin. Marcus slid into place next to the control panel as the bouncer led him away.

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