After Mind Read online

  Above the floor, twenty cooling CRACs and chiller units encircled 232 server cabinets, all squared into eight rows of twenty-four, and two rows of twenty.

  The CRACs faced the ends of each aisle and blew four hundred combined tons of cold air under the floor where he crawled. The cold air was drawn up through perforated tiles along the cabinet rows and into the hot-running servers. The chillers, sitting perpendicular to the CRACs, pumped refrigerant through pipes to the blowers that bathed the room in cold air from above.

  Cessini crawled though the whirlwind din. He skirted the pedestals and pushed his way south to where a wall protruded twelve feet west. At its end, the wall cornered left for a count of seven floor tiles and the southern border of Module Two. The smaller border room as measured by its foundation was a twelve-by-fourteen-foot, squared-in cinder-block bunker. The entire building’s main fire control room was inside.

  He pushed aside a tile and hugged up the southern wall under the high mount of a CCTV camera. It pointed down the far western wall’s shorter, twenty-cabinet aisle. A crisscrossed camera aimed north for detection of any approach along the end of the aisle. But neither camera pointed straight down in its extreme to the one single tile that was two-by-two-feet in size, and pushed aside.

  Watchmen in the NOC monitored the module’s seventeen other cameras twenty-four hours per day. Every camera was placed to capture all biometric-protected doors, mantraps, and aisles of cabinets and cordoned-off cages. But no cameras were conceived nor placed to detect the movement of a twelve-year-old boy who’d grown up in a data center.

  He opened the door of the fire control room, his body pressed to the wall. It was always unlocked by strict fire marshal code. Inside, three black metal grated stairs descended from the raised floor back down to the concrete slab thirty-six inches below.

  His targeted sprinkler pipe broke through from the east side wall. It entered the room eight feet up from the floor, but only five feet and eye level from the top of the stairs where he stood. The pipe turned down. It was married to a crusted volcanic well by a ring of bolts.

  A square cut in the concrete slab exposed the bare earth below. A twelve-inch-round, 250-pounds-per-square-inch pressurized water main pipe rose from the ground and supplied the emergency fire suppression system for the entire 36,000-square-foot building.

  He had penetrated the source. The firebird’s coursing veins, glands, and devilish fingers that lived throughout the building all began with this main.

  He toed down the stairs. If provoked, the system would erupt and flood all three precious data modules and mercilessly shower the whole east side office with rain. The three pre-action zone valves that branched water to the modules, and the butterfly valve that led to the office, all had electronic, tamper-resist sensors for remote monitoring. They could not be touched. The twelve-inch OSY valve at the bottom of the stack that came up through the bare ground from the municipal source was chain-locked with a key, and marked only with a fluorescent orange tag, “Sealed Open.” A maintenance clipboard showed service was last inspected by squiggled initials the day before, Monday.

  Cessini had Daniel’s keys.

  He unlocked the OSY’s chain. He turned the valve handle counterclockwise with some force. Then he relocked the chain to seal the valve into its closed position. On fast glance, the circular handle was in its identical position, though rotated once wholly around. The raised metal letters on the dark painted steel with directional arrows for “Open” and “Closed” was a pie-piece turn from where it was before. Given the speed of a squiggle on a clipboard, no one would be able to tell.

  He stood up and calmed his breath. He stumbled back and fell seated on the second of the black metal steps. He had shut off the flow at the source.

  He breathed and stared as he sat.

  He had never felt more victorious, more in control, more terrified. He would put the valve back to “Sealed Open” by Friday.

  EIGHT

  CESSINI ON FIRE

  BY THURSDAY, CESSINI’S world in his after-school office was pleasant at last. His brow ceased to prickle from sweated thoughts of the sprinkler head above. He was free to focus and work. His robot on the table was nearly complete. Meg was gone, but that was all right. It was quieter alone. But something was wrong. He hadn’t eaten. His stomach rumbled. Then he felt the faintest of clicks behind his right eye.

  He paid it no mind with a quick shake left, then right of his head. He stood up from his stool and worked on the rest of his robot’s frame.

  The robot’s open head was exposed to the north as its body lay supine on his table. He needed better access to its back. He leaned over its body and shoved away a bundle of wires on Meg’s side of the table. He readied a hand on the robot’s right shoulder, then his other onto its waist. He balanced his stance to compensate for the weight, gave the body a hoist up toward seated, then twisted and dropped it with a heavy jolt onto its shoulder. Its eyes snapped east to the window.

  Cessini’s knees buckled. His right ear popped and rang like a siren deep inside. His vision rolled over, shifting the room ninety degrees clockwise. The floor of the office and grass outside through the window twisted to vertical at his left. He fell to the table and steadied with a confounded “Whoa.”

  A white-and-black streaked Antarctic Prion, a Pachyptila desolata desolata, dove straight down outside the window’s frame. It landed on an evergreen tree that now inexplicably grew horizontally across the bottom of the window.

  He sagged into the turn of his vision and raised a hand to his temple. The room spun in his mind, but his feet were still planted flat on a floor. The unpinned movement of the room nauseated his stomach. He fought the urge to be sick.

  His hand fell from his head and dropped down to his waist. It didn’t hang out from his side. So gravity worked. His body was rightly below him. But more so, the bird could not have flown down. The tree was never felled. It was only his eyes that were offset, broken.

  He opened his eyes and staggered. He fell toward what felt like his right. He kneeled on the floor. The window stayed east, the door was still open behind him to the west. But north was vertical and wrong. All fours on the floor were better, but the off-axis rotation was a dizziness he could not relieve. He clawed himself up by gripping his stool. He lay his head down on the table, pressing his left ear for a rest. He heard the swish-count of his pulse.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them wide and saw the bird diving again outside. He wasn’t dreaming. He was awake. Ocular destabilization, maybe. But that could have nothing to do with the bird that was so far from home. So then what? Revenge of the pipe? He twisted his eyes up to see it.

  And then his vision corrected, ratcheted back counterclockwise toward normal. He took a few extra breaths as it did. The poles of the earth righted. It was a nightmarish bout, but it was over. The exhausting days of his world piled yet another stone onto his life’s balance toward madness. How much longer could he hold on?

  His vision calmed. He braced himself against the frame of his door. The empty, north-south hallway was correct and upright. There were no panicked voices to be heard. No lights flashed for emergency exit. The ceiling and floor edges of the hallway converged with proper perspective. The worst so far was behind him. He straightened his shoulders and turned back toward the room of his overhead foe: The pipe.

  The sprinkler pipe pointed like a finger from above, directing him back into his room to work—work that he did with a discipline for hours on end. What more could it want? He blinked and crossed the threshold of his door, entering fresh for another go ‘round, stable as if no inexplicable twist had ever occurred.

  He refocused on the power cells of his robot. They were the pride of his design. With its thin solar panels on its chest, a constant drip of power recharged the advanced ion battery packs that he had nestled as two life-giving lungs under its ribs. The major organs were all correct in principle and function. He double-checked the components against the schematics of
his control system. He rubbed his thumbs around the tips of his fingers. The upper body’s power cells would keep the brain functioning if the lower half lost its own. He smiled. Complete. It was all wired together. Top to bottom, upper to lower. He proudly outdid even himself. The lower body ran on a 120-volt AC and was plugged into a wall outlet.

  He toggled the upper body’s switch, which let loose an immediate discharge. A short.

  The full capacity of the ion batteries bypassed into the lower body’s circuits. The wave of current shot up the power cord and into the wall. The wall faceplate blew from its case.

  Cessini shot a panicked look to the sprinkler above. His fingers curled into an electric seize on the body’s frame. Then he blew backward and fell against the wall.

  Bluish-white smoke from the outlet turned black and wafted up the wall toward the ceiling. He came to with the pierce of an alarm through the silence. The paint on the drywall above the socket bubbled out from inside the wall.

  His mind raced ahead of the paint bubbles and smoke. He teetered to his knees. His eyes prayed up. The glass vial had not yet broken, the sprinkler head was dry. The fire would come. The water would not. He had won against the sprinkler head, but at what spiraling cost? His victory was trumped by guilt.

  The true source of his alarm was far from his door. He braced his hands on the floor, pushed off to his feet, and ran straight toward the siren’s call. He could fix both water and fire in one, and the burning would be his alone to stave.

  Statistics promised four minutes of sprinkler suppression before the fire department arrived in five minutes, with another ten minutes to set up. The statistics were blown from the start. A command post would arrive to an uncontrolled rage: Only half a floor below him and eons before his robot even existed, a wall-mounted whiteboard’s center screw had nicked the rubber casing of his wall outlet’s hidden electrical wire. Electricity arced at seventeen hundred degrees. Tinder and dried insulation ignited. One floor down and one wall north was the epicenter of the test lab. As the fire found its way out of the wall below, the powered tangle of cables flamed and blew.

  Flammable glue adhered the carpet tiles to the first floor’s concrete slab, but the fire discovered a much better freeway of fuel a layer below and exploded on the bundled run of live wires. Main house power cables ran a four-inch conduit artery west and pumped a straight shot of power adrenaline under the data room wall. The ignited artery crossed the eighty-foot span of data Module Two and T-boned with the main Mechanical and Electrical corridor. The MEP power corridor along the far west side of Module Two had powered cross ties to the adjacent Modules One and Three, and as a system of three, traversed the entire far west side of the building. The firebird-in-waiting had woken from its nest of kindling and stretched the shoulders of its wings alight.

  Switch gear shorted. Nonessential power blew and the building went dark. The fire lapped the walls of the office. The three data modules were protected by cinder-block walls that held back the flames as intended. Sirens wailed throughout the hall.

  Daniel peered under his lifted forearm. He ran through the second floor’s honeycomb of cubicles hollering in vain, “Cessini!”

  Cessini dropped to his knees along the first-floor hallway by the sliding glass window of the NOC. East-facing windows in September were bright after five, but the rest of the office billowed in darkness. Smoke covered the guiding lights of emergency red.

  Electrical conduit encased under the poured concrete floor hadn’t seen daylight or inspection since it was set. Its enclosed power wires had expanded and contracted with the flow of current through the years, turned brittle, and now burned. Two NOC watchmen broke free with critical drives of data and ran. System monitoring screens wilted like film. Network cables swelled, their casings burned.

  Cessini dropped onto his back into the under-floor two-by-two-foot tunnel. The whole length ahead was pitch black. The tray of cables sizzled as he scurried beneath by feel of the patterned stones in the walls.

  He fell out into the module between the aluminum pedestal forest and flipped to his knees. Speckled red light shined through the raised floor’s perforated tiles from the emergency lighting in Module Two above. He scrambled left toward the fire control room and resurfaced through the two-by-two corner floor panel. He hoisted himself up and stood. He grabbed for the fire room door, and then suddenly stopped on a thought. He let go of the knob and slumped to the floor.

  He didn’t have Daniel’s keys.

  The OSY chain lock he’d sealed closed on the main valve couldn’t be opened without the key.

  The module’s server cabinets crunched their numbers and processed their customer’s code as smoke plumed in through ductwork on both eastern and western side walls. The smoke swirls were drawn in and mixed with the rising hot air that was expelled from the backs of the cabinets.

  Cessini dropped back under the darkened floor and scattered from the base of the fire room wall. But with the circulation blowers so forceful, rather than rise, the blackened smoke fell.

  The chimney intakes of the CRAC cooling units funneled the smoky air around the perimeter of the room, down into their forty-ton blowers. The CRACs’ filters couldn’t keep up with the grit; the needed flow of pure cold air under the floor had stopped. The precious server cabinets that were hungry for their flow of fresh coolant air, starved and their temperatures rose.

  Cessini raced back on his knees between the posts, disoriented in the suffocating eddies. The dark forest under the floor was a storm of swirling, particulate clouds lit only by the red lightning streaks punching through from above. His tunneled exit was a furnace. He scrambled for the shorter pedestals to the left, to push through the floor and come up by the pedestrian ramp. He arched his back, then pushed a tile with his shoulders. The weight of the square wouldn’t budge off its frame. It wasn’t locked. It lifted by inches and hit something solid. He turned his head sideways to see. He pushed his hand through and felt with his fingers pressed up through the crack. He felt the caster of a supply cart laden with tools. The negative air pressure of the gap he created sucked as a vent, pulling smoke past his face. He dropped the tile, coughed, hacked, and clawed away on his knees. He was trapped in blackness under the floor.

  He bashed and resurfaced through a tile at the farthest end of a row. He had to breathe. He climbed out and stayed. Above the floor was better than suffocating in the wind below or drowning in eddies of soot. But he was at the far northwest corner, when he needed the east. He struck the tile beneath him with his fist. How could he have made so many mistakes in a row, so many wrong turns in the dark? His vision tunneled back to the panels leading to under the floor. Go back under or run?

  A power distribution unit was spaced at the western end of each row and supplied power to its aisle. He saw only to the first four rows of ten in the haze. Once the second power distribution unit’s internal temperature reached fifteen hundred degrees, it exploded.

  He curled.

  Power feeder cables ran up from each power unit and fed through bus-ducts over each cabinet row. Individual power cords spaced twenty-nine inches apart on the ducts dropped over every cabinet and writhed like black snakes hung by their tales on a vine. Critical customer accounts with their stored lifelong memories fizzled en masse. The cable snakes ejected their sparks as they twisted into burning coils and jumped from their wired hold. At the foot of cabinet fourteen, a cardboard box of manuals and warranty checklists caught its fill of embers and burst into flame. The fire had found its way into the sacred data hall. Cabinet fourteen and First Central Bank went offline.

  Every backup system designed to keep the cabinets running at all costs now force-fed their electric fuel to the fire.

  Forty-eight cabinets faced inward to each aisle, twenty-four flush to each side. Each black-sided, humming cabinet was four-feet deep and nine-feet tall. And each one’s flashing blue and orange lights flickered and died unchecked. Miles of network cables in their backside hot aisle lay in wait
for the running flame. Nokomis Auto Parts and Freemont University ceased all transactions. CareWard’s four hundred pharmacy chain stores lost all customer records. Their businesses ran in the cloud, but lived physically in the uninterruptible data center located in the suburbs precisely southwest of Minneapolis-St. Paul. All operations were susceptible to a fault, to their single point of failure. And every invention, every building, every data center ever built had one, and if not one, then more.

  Cessini went fetal in the rumble of the belly of the beast. He covered the soft of his elbow over his mouth. Noxious fume filled the room. His lungs burned.

  Power trays hung from the ceiling and showered sparks from their blackened rows. Flames fanned, cables attacked and whipped wicked arcs. Acrid smoke billowed up from every perforated tile, every row. The air was poison. There were enough CRAC cooling units to fulfill the room’s need with one extra unit as backup. Then the backup failed; its intake was clogged. There were no more redundant units for error. Power dropped, a second CRAC spun down. The remaining cabinets generated more heat than could be cooled. Then source power blew and half the CRACs dropped in one swift dump. The cabinets had internal fans, but without the underside draw of cold air, they cooked themselves from inside. The module was choking; the modern business of cabinets by rows was ending.

  Cessini recoiled, called for Ceeborn, but failed. He hid, but was dying. He was trapped, but somehow sustained. As nearby remaining CRACs altered their flow, a dead air pocket opened between the edges of two rolling eddies. A single CRAC perpendicular to a refrigerant cooler still ran in the corner, and created a cross wind air bubble void. He breathed in the opened air pocket. It was a temporary relief from the smoke, but never the impending fire.

  In the MEP corridor, two and a half megawatts quartered to each of four uninterruptable power supply units. As the fire spread, the uninterruptable units cascaded offline. Cabinets died in their blink.