He was a technician with hair that was thin on top and thick at the sides. He wore a copper blazer with a brown vest underneath and had a squished-looking face. When I approached, he looked up at me, and I could feel his sense of unease.
“What made you stop, Al?”
“He didn’t yell at me.”
“Huh.” I squatted in front of the man, and his eyes locked on to mine. “Consider yourself a smart man?” I asked.
“Yes, sir.” Squeamish voice, with a faint lisp. Lucky for him he was working up here and not down there.
“Sir? I’m no sir. Detective will do. Now, what do you do here?”
“I calibrate the towers regularly, as many of us do. Record signal speeds, tune overall performance, install hardware updates and test parameters, make sure everything is running silky smooth.”
“Do you work on the tower itself?”
“Everyone has access,” he said, looking away from me, “in case someone needs to deal with a hardware problem directly.” His expression wasn’t exactly innocent as he skirted around the question.
“Can any terminal connect with and broadcast to the towers?”
“It’s an automatic system. However, there is a manual terminal set up for that use.”
“Do you have access?”
“No, only the directors and people with special privileges do.”
“How might one get special privileges?”
“I don’t know!” he exploded, making Allen back up. I didn’t move an inch. “I don’t know, okay? I just work here. Back off, will you!”
I stood up. “You know what prison is like?”
He kept his mouth shut, but his eyes went wide.
“Now, jail is simple,” I continued. “Stay behind bars, wait for the trial, shit in your own bucket. But once the sentence goes through … then you go somewhere else. Most mobsters go to Rikers Isle. Rikers is bad, but there’s another place that’s much, much worse. It’s called Silverveil Prison, and it’s run by Automatics with a single human warden. They put the worst of the worst there and have no problem torturing, beating, sometimes even killing people. These guards don’t eat, sleep, or shit. If there’s a riot, they push gas in to calm everyone down. The guards are all Red-eyes — yes, Red-eyes — so they don’t feel a thing. If I find out that you did something to these towers and didn’t tell me, then when I get back here, I will drag you there myself and get my Blue-eye to kick the shit out of you before we push you through the gate. I’ll make sure that the next time you see light is when they turn the cremation oven on.”
I might have overdone it, because everyone in the room was on edge. Allen had its hand on my shoulder, and the poor bastard I was yelling at was crying, with snot pouring out of his nose. But since I couldn’t pull out my gun here without causing a diplomatic incident, I’d had to resort to words. It was weird seeing someone so affected just by words.
“He said … he said no one would know,” he sobbed, barely intelligible. “He said he’d kill me if I told anyone.”
“He had dirt on you. Most do when they make demands. What did you do?”
“I … I added a signal router on the towers and allowed it to bounce high-intensity signals.”
“Who told you to do this?”
“H-he contacted me through my terminal … the message came from the Special Privileges Terminal. I tried to find out who it was b-but …”
“Show us.”
He got up, wiping his eyes as we followed. The secretary gave me an inquisitive look when she saw the man in tears, but I shrugged and we moved on. The room wasn’t too far. It was locked electronically, but one solid kick was all that was needed. The lock stood true, but the hinges popped off and the door opened the wrong way. GE really needed to update its infrastructure.
The interior was spartan, containing just a desk, a chair, and a terminal. On the walls were various sheets with operating instructions and codes. I pushed the technician into the chair and had him log in. “Directory, now. Let’s see who has access.”
He did as I asked, then I pushed him out of the way, sat down in the chair, and scrolled through the list. While he couldn’t get into the system fully, he could at least see which users were allowed to attempt to log in. Many of the names belonged to head engineers: Vannevar, Whitehead, Baekeland, even Rockefeller. Some were neither technicians nor engineers: Greaves, head of the FBI; Bowsher, mayor of the city; and many others.
“Why does every bigwig need access to this terminal? This do some important thing I’m unaware of?”
“It … it activates the White-eye Protocol.” The technician had finally stopped sobbing.
“White-eye?”
“The extermination protocol. If there’s a massive Automatic uprising, or if Automatic crimes go up to a certain threshold, the White-eye Protocol is activated, causing all Automatics to enter a homicidal and suicidal state. They hunt down and destroy other Automatics, or themselves if none are around. It’s a last resort that would destroy the entire line of machines countrywide if activated.”
“Huh.” My eyes caught on a name I’d been half expecting to see, but I was still surprised that my hunch had been correct. E. Masters. “Well, well, well.”
Alarms suddenly sounded. The technician sprinted back to the Tower Control room, and we followed. The squares were all on autopilot, running around trying to deal with some issue. The technician returned to his desk and started typing at his terminal at a blistering pace.
“What’s going on?”
“Signal surge,” he said, eyes still on his terminal. “The towers and pylons receive
