Airplane Mode by Elliott Downing

Author:Elliott Downing [Downing, Elliott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Storybreak LLC
Published: 2019-07-28T20:00:00+00:00

9

operational discipline

The first thing she noticed upon stepping into the house was the heat, hotter even than the desert air outside, enveloping every inch of her skin and extracting sweat from her pores before she’d walked three paces into the front room. The second thing she noticed was the darkness, and the third thing was the noise.

The large main room in which she found herself extended without interruption from the front door to the rear of the house. Its overhead lights were so dim it might have made more sense for the house’s occupants to switch them off and rely on night vision to find their way around. The picture window to her right had been equipped with blackout curtains any hotel would have envied. A rectangular wooden table and four high-backed chairs occupied the middle portion of the room, and a bit more light spilled from a pair of monitors standing on a desk in a far corner, although much of their illumination was blocked by what Cassandra took at first glance to be several long rows of bookshelves filling the back two-thirds of the room. She saw numerous LEDs of various colors glowing among them and realized they were banks of server racks, connected by a maze of cabling which ran through a series of hanging rings suspended from the ceiling. She’d seen racks like these occasionally, whirring demurely in the basements and back rooms of her more ambitious interviewees, but never in anything approaching this quantity or scale. The roar of their cooling fans was like a louder and more omnipresent version of Lem’s white-noise generator.

Something glinted above her head. Dozens of silver mylar blankets had been taped and tacked across the entire ceiling, reflecting the snaking lines of the cables strung beneath them and extending down the upper halves of the room’s two exterior-facing walls. A broad opening at one side of the main room led into what appeared to be a darkened kitchen, and an equally dark hallway led farther into the house on the other side. Cassandra found Graham beside the table, squinting straight up at the reflective surface of the ceiling above him. He raised one hand and patted a stray lock of hair into place. She moved in his direction, thinking they could position themselves back-to-back if whatever happened next required it. Metal jangled behind her, and she whirled to see the man from the pickup truck hanging a ring of keys on a hook beside the door. He picked up a second set from the hook beside it. After all her caution and worry, she’d stepped right past him in the half-light.

“Well,” the man announced to the room in general, raising his voice to carry over the din of the server fans, “they’re here. We’re going to head on.”

A 50-ish woman with extremely pale skin and hair of indecisive length poked her head out from a space in the far corner, between the desk that held the monitors and the first bank of servers.

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