Archived Parts: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, Seventeen, Eighteen, Nineteen , Twenty, Twenty-One, Twenty-Two
Part Twenty-Three
The railroad itself was a lot larger up close than it looked. Ernest wasn't accustomed to working directly with big machinery. In fact, he'd done most of his work from inside L0U15E. He'd even become accustomed to the quirk of her finger-scanner that necessitated pausing as he entered the hash mark character. Ernest wasn't even sure how to interface with the patched-together computer that ran the railroad.
He was gazing at the wheels when Audrey approached and stood beside him. Her eyes and nose were red and swollen, and her fuchsia hair hung in stringy clumps. "So...you think you can fix this."
"If you have an interface. Yes."
Audrey held up a hand-scanner. Several untidy wires and cables dangled from the bottom, and a solar pack was tethered to the side with a hair ribbon. "Aim the panel at that gap in the trees and plug it into that socket by the magnet mount."
Ernest attached the interface, allowed the solar panel to charge for a moment, then keyed on the power. The small, cracked display lit up with the word HELLO.
"I had Charlie run some simulations," Audrey said, "based on all the data he had about Martha. Nine times out of ten, she begs Abraham to fix the railroad and get out of here."
Ernest keyed, QUERY: NANITES. "What about the tenth time?"
"She tells Abe to hunt down those fucking security ops and feed their own dicks to 'em."
The nanites' quantity, type, and programmed functions scrolled by. The makeshift screen was slower than L0U15E's, and Ernest needed to make a quick mental adjustment to his reading speed to accommodate. "So which thing will Abraham do?" Ernest suspected that even with only a 10% accuracy rating, the last option would be the one he would prefer.
Ernest adjusted the nanites for a stronger but more intermittent power source, changed the relay of the firing to match the distance of the magnets from the tracks, and added a routine to burn off any debris that might kick up into the motors. He also decided that a simulation of his own wouldn't be a bad idea. He cast his mind back to an assignment he'd had when he was twenty-two, a malfunctioning height scanner at the natal center, and he fed the nanites a new string of commands, modifying it as he entered.
He then realized Audrey hadn't replied when he'd asked her what Abraham would do. Or if she had, he hadn't heard her. He keyed in the last few characters and looked up.
She was staring at his keying hand with grim fascination. "I only parsed a fragment of what you just did," she said. "I can't even imagine what kinds of mods I would've been able to do if I'd known you before."
"Before what?"
She glanced over her shoulder toward the clearing where they'd been bottling water, and she sighed. She didn't answer.
Ernest turned his attention back to the railroad. The simulations all started out well, but then, in time lapse, a disturbing thing happened. The engines overheated and key components (these varied) burned out. Ernest reduced the speed and ran another sim. A different component suffered. He reduced the weight of the railroad car. It traveled another twenty miles before failing.
Inspired by the accidental shut-off he'd been trying to repair in the first place, he simulated a string of conditions where each component fired and rested sequentially. That would have worked—if the railroad car were empty. But the weight of the passengers would leave it at a standstill.
The readout screen flickered, and Ernest paused in his keying to reposition the solar panel to capture the lowering sun. He brushed up against Abraham, who'd been crouching behind him for...how long? He would have asked L0U15E, if she weren't stripped and repurposed, with her electronics disassembled and her chassis housing a new POD-mind, and probably a 10-year-old data clerk fresh from the natal center. And maybe a scanner that didn't lag at the hash mark.
"It needs more propulsion units," Abraham said.
Ernest realized he'd been prepared to hear that he was sabotaging the railroad, that he was in league with the security ops. That it was "convenient" that he was able to overwrite the programming of the nanites. But the screen flickered on, Ernest keyed in a simulation with more propulsion units and set it to process, and the time lapse ran much longer than it had before. "Now if we shut it down periodically," Abraham said, "let's say while there's cloud cover, or if we stop to rest or find food—it should fire long enough take us farther away from the grid that anyone else can possibly follow."
Ernest had thought the railroad needed to run indefinitely. He hadn't realized its function was only to bring them to a distant location, at which time it could be disassembled and repurposed. Like L0U15E.
"You could mount the units there." Ernest pointed to a crosspiece that supported the railroad car. "It would work."
Abraham looked at Audrey, and Ernest did the same. She seemed so small and sad. "Fine," she told Abraham. "You've been itching to take it apart since the day I met you. So do it." She turned away, slipped through a gap in the undergrowth and was gone.
Ernest didn't understand, though he didn't feel comfortable asking Abraham to explain. However, he didn't need to. "Her POD," Abraham said. "Two more propulsion units, another solar panel—every component on it is high quality and meticulously maintained."
"But then she can't go back."
"Why would she want to?" Abraham's tone was harsh, but if Ernest looked, really looked at Abraham's face—which made him uncomfortable, since it was so like his own reflection—instead of the anger and bitterness he'd been expecting, he read pain. "In good conscience, how could we let her?"
Since Ernest was unaccustomed to wielding any sort of authority, he'd never considered whether or not he'd had any choice in the matter.
Abraham said, "Will told me they're not demagnetizing anybody at the Deaconate."
Ernest noted that "you claimed" was not part of the statement—that Abraham seemed inclined to take the explanation for fact. Probably not because Ernest had said it—Ernest had no doubt that him being the source of the information did little to prove its veracity—but because Abraham had mistrusted the Deaconate so intensely, for so many years, that the information fit in with what he already believed. "I've been talking to Charlie," Abraham went on. "I think Audrey had that POD-mind loaded with every illegal datafeed in existence—and I pieced a few of them together and discovered a way to demagnetize Martha myself with an AC current."
Ernest had never heard anything so heretical in his life. Not since Will had taught him how to swallow.
"You don't look well. Is your arm bothering you?"
Ernest shook his head. "I'm sorry about what happened to Martha. She had much less body mass than those ops, and even so, she damaged two of them. That's why they killed her—because she knew how to fight."
Abraham nodded. "Yes. She did."
***
"This is a lot easier with three people," Will said. He was noticeably stronger than Abraham and Ernest, though Abraham continually reminded him to be careful not to break anything, and at one point even went so far as to call him a brute. Will went on yanking shiny blue panels from the POD as if he hadn't noticed.
Abraham had been right about the POD—its inner workings were pristine. But even though harvesting Charlie's propulsion units and solar panel were the only way to get everyone far away from the grid, Ernest still felt guilty handling the chips and wires he pulled from the scavenged shell.
Daylight was fading fast. Ernest fit his hand around something—an audio speaker?—and pried it carefully from its setting. Abraham clipped an LED to an overhanging branch and aimed it at Audrey's disassembled POD. The tiny light cast harsh shadows that made the stripping of the POD look more like a surgical procedure.
Audrey pushed through a gap in the bushes and scowled down at the components. "We can't take it all. Too much weight."
Abraham gazed at the scattered parts as if he yearned to reassemble them into something useful, though he didn't know quite what. "You choose, then. I'll go do one more test of the new propulsion units."
Once he was fairly sure Abraham could no longer hear him, Ernest whispered to Audrey, "Is it wise to leave at night? It's so...dark."
"We've cleared the tracks for fifty kilometers. Our solar reserves should take us that far, so we'll have a good head start by dawn."
Audrey peeled a reflective strip off Charlie's chassis and disconnected a small cable. "These cells are fully charged. They'll give us a few minutes of backup."
It seemed too soon. Ernest wanted to be able see what they were doing, and not simply work from memory—and the thought of squandering all their power on the initial push terrified him. Normally, he'd talk through the alternatives with L0U15E—and he'd trust her to ensure he didn't leave anything important behind in the darkness. But now he had to decide for himself.
He did his best to imagine what L0U15E would have said. If she'd been interested in helping them outrun the security ops (which she hadn't been, though it wasn't her fault, simply her programming at work) she might have indeed told Ernest to leave now. Chances were, even with the evidence that the old metal tracks had been cleared, none of the ops were intelligent enough to figure out that they'd been used for off-grid propulsion.
Or were they? Their language might be rudimentary, Ernest reasoned, but they were shrewd. And since the Deacons were offering a reward for the heretics' capture, the ops would be putting their cunning to work.
Ernest supposed they did need to embark as soon as possible. Abraham had been convinced it was best to leave—but something subtle in his mannerisms, the way he dropped his gaze when looked in the eye, or the distracted delivery with which he now spoke—suggested to Ernest that he might very well change his mind back again. The farther away they got him, and the sooner, the less likely he'd be able to turn back.
"Help me unseat something," Audrey said. "As long as I have this chip, the rest of this junk can take a long walk off a short pier. That's an idiom."
Ernest fit his fingers between a pair of glossy blue fiberglass panels and pried them open far enough that Audrey could slip in a tiny prybar and get at the component. "Why this part?"
"Just a little more..." something clicked. "There." She held up a bit of circuitry. "Because this is Charlie—the POD-mind, not the POD itself. I'd never leave without him. As a matter of fact...that audio interface you just pulled will work just fine to keep Charlie and me linked up."
Ernest stared at the chip, and then at the pocket Audrey slid it into while she rooted around in the light of the tiny LED for some audio parts. His eyes stung fiercely, but Audrey was too busy scavenging to notice he'd gone quiet.
So quiet that the screech and crackle startled them both.
"It's the railroad," Audrey said. She grabbed Ernest by his non-shunt arm and dragged him toward the tracks. "Abraham's powered it up!"
Fine hairs rose on Ernest's forearm—the arm that wasn't wrapped in clear sealant—and the nape of his neck prickled. He was accustomed to the gentle hum of a POD, but an exponentially greater amount of energy would be required to propel the huge railroad car than it took to power the sleek, aerodynamic PODs. This hum vibrated through the clearing. Ernest felt it in his teeth. His heart beat faster at the thought of crawling inside the railroad car and racing away.
Abraham helped Elizabeth into the car, then handed her the few bundles of supplies that weren't already stashed inside. Will approached with something large slung over his shoulder, covered in silvery blanket film. Something disturbingly human-shaped.
He and Abraham loaded Martha's body into the car.
"We're leaving now?" Ernest said. Of course they were—that much was obvious—but he had thought they would run more sims once Abraham had mounted Charlie's propulsion units onto the railroad. But the magnets hummed and crackled, and the cobbled together circuitry beneath the car threw off heat, and the car rocked gently on its magnetic pad while the others positioned themselves inside it. Audrey leapt up without any help from Abraham. Will turned to Ernest and held out his hand.
He had never looked so eager.
"Come on," Abraham snapped. "We're burning power."
Ernest might not have felt fully prepared to leave—but he certainly wasn't about to stand there while the railroad coasted away without him. He put his good hand in Will's and allowed Will to haul him up and into the car. Abraham programmed a few more strokes into the panel, then Will gave him a hand up too, a servomechanism clicked on, and the railroad gave a shudder and began to move.
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