Partials / Fragments / Ruins by Dan Wells

Author:Dan Wells
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-07-14T04:00:00+00:00

amm stirred the gas tank, and Kira heard a satisfying slosh as the liquid inside slapped against the metal walls. “Sounds like we’re ready.”

“This should give us enough juice to power the whole floor for most of the day,” said Afa. Samm screwed the valve tight on the gas tank, they all stepped back, and Afa flipped the switch to start it. On the fourth try it spluttered, stiff from disuse, and on the seventh it roared angrily to life. Almost immediately the emergency lighting came on, those few bulbs that hadn’t burned out or broken, and moments later the klaxons on the ceiling began to sound, two of them blaring an urgent warning that the power supply to the data center had been compromised, and the third merely hissing air and dislodging a cloud of dust.

Heron looked at them through slitted eyes. “That’s going to get annoying.”

“Let’s go,” said Afa. “We don’t have long.”

“I thought you said we had power for most of the day?” asked Kira.

“Power yes, but cooling no. That entire facility next door is just to keep this one cool, and there’s no way to get that running again—even if we could get it started, it uses some rare chemicals we’re not going to find in the corner doggie hardware store. Without a cooling system, these servers could melt their circuits and each other pretty quickly.”

The ParaGen server was two rows over, and about halfway down; physically close to the generator that served it and about eighty other machines. Even with the generator running, the servers didn’t seem to have enough power to get going, so Afa sent Kira and Samm around to every other computer on the same circuit with an order to cut the power. It took Kira a while to figure out which of the many cables was for power, but once she found the first one, the rest were simple. She’d done about twenty, still not speaking to Samm, when Afa shouted triumphantly.

“It’s on!”

Samm stood to go back, but Kira kept working. If unplugging half of them helped, unplugging the rest would help even more; besides, she was still mad at both Samm and Heron, and didn’t want to be around them. How could they be so closed-minded? Racism had all but disappeared since the Break, with humans of every shape and color working together freely because there was literally no one else to work with. Kira remembered one holdout in an outer fishing village, a man she’d met on a salvage run who’d called her a towelhead for her obvious Indian ancestry, but he was such a bitter, solitary man, and she had lived so long without any kind of ethnic hate, that the insult rolled off her almost humorously. It was joke, a thing to laugh about with her friends: Was this guy for real? On Long Island, everyone worked together, everyone got along, and no matter what you looked like, you were still human.

. . . unless you were a Partial.

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